DRAGONS HAVE TO BE KILLED

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000202250001-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 22, 2010
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: September 1, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/22 : CIA-RDP90-00552R000202250001-1
September 1985
William Colby, the Colorless CIA Director. Was Tired of
Battling James Angleton, the Agency's Mysterious Counterspy.
But How Does a Bureaucrat Get Rid of a Legend?
w on ntelli
-
gence, Senator Patrick Leahy, whistled
in the media to announce his intention to
launch an immediate inquiry. Despite
the law's requirement and the Reagan
administration's statements that at least
the chairmen and vice chairmen of both
the Senate and House intelligence com-
mittees must be adequately informed of
all covert activities, the Vermont Demo-
crat was clearly worked up at the extent
to which "things have fallen between the
cracks. "
The detonation the previous week of a
car bomb in Beirut that killed more than
80 people was the direct consequence,
according to the Washington Post, of a
late-1984 administration directive to the
ne weekend this May, strug-
gling to maintain some poise
but betraying the discomfi-
ture of an assistant headmas-
ter whose chair had been
slipped out from under him
one time too many, the vice chairman of
the Senate Select Committ I
Burton Hersh has been working on a book about
the CIA for two years. He has written for The
Washingtonian about diplomat-lawyer Sol Linow-
itz and Senator Edward Kennedy; his previous
books include The Mellon Family and The Educa-
tion of Edward Kennedy.
By Burton Hersh
Central Intelligence Agency to put to-
gether native teams for "pre-emptive
strikes" against suspected local terror-
ists. Of this initiative-promptly denied
by the administration itself-virtually
nothing had reached the ears of Leahy
and his fellow Democrats because none
of them had enough of an inkling of the
administration's covert intentions to
frame the right questions during intelli-
gence-committee hearings. As for that
car bombing? Under attack from report-
ers, the magisterial Leahy had pressed
for answers and "found out about it on
my own. " To preclude subsequent bush-
whacking, Leahy announced, "We're
going to review six or seven operations.
I do not want my side to get caught on a
Nicaraguan-mining type problem. "
It's been a decade since cataclysm came
close to obliterating the Central Intelli-
gence Agency; Senator Leahy's public
desperation was itself a measure of how
far Agency leadership had vitiated the
oversight-and-disclosure process and re-
turned the clandestine establishment to
business as usual.
Ten years ago, responding to the pub-
lic's outrage at reports of broad-scale
domestic mail-opening programs, drug
travesties, and decades of bungled assas-
sination plots, the post-Watergate Con-
gress set up its first sweeping investiga-
tion of the CIA since authorizing the
Agency in 1947. Down bureaucratic rat
holes, like so many fire-hose nozzles,
the Pike and Church Committees sec-
onded by the Rockefeller Commission
let loose a torrent of investigators and
depositions and conscience-stricken case
officers and subpoenas and discovery
documents and unfriendly witnesses un-
til month by month the deepest cata-
combs of the intelligence community
were swamped to the rafters. Out into
the publicity of the hour there streamed
an incredible proliferation of espionage
mavens and subversion impresarios,
species rarely identified before, many
bobtailed and indignant at such a historic
interruption.
Least unhappy-looking, friends of the
intelligence community kept noticing,
was the Agency's tidy little director. It
was William Colby, after all, whose
slips to newsmen had all but sounded
the alarms; now he seemed blithe
enough, and forthcoming at all times
before the swarming investigative
bodies. "Bill, do you really have to
present all this material to us?" a heavy-
Continued
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/22 : CIA-RDP90-00552R000202250001-1