Welcome back to CODEWORD.
Life is good. THE MISSION is #3 on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list this week. LEGACY OF ASHES will be #3 on the paperback list next week. This is, suffice it to say, a miracle.
I’m mid-way through a deep dive into the chaos ruling American intelligence. These things take time. Bear with me.
Meantime, you got questions, I got answers. A reader asks: “So…how did you get interested in covering the CIA in the first place?”
The march against the war, November 15, 1969.
In 1969, Richard Nixon took office and escalated the covert war in Vietnam, began bombing Cambodia, wiretapped his staff trying to plug leaks, and used the CIA to spy on Americans. All that was a secret, but not for long.
I was 13, a regular reader of The New York Times and the Village Voice, and I asked my father to take me to the big demonstration against the Vietnam war (and against Nixon). Dad was not a rad. But he said yes.
We drove five hours to the nation’s capital, parked the alongside the Justice Department, and walked to the Washington Monument. We were two among 300,000 or more that November afternoon. The leading peaceniks of the day spoke and sang. As twilight gathered, David Hilliard, the chief of staff of the Black Panther Party, gave a rip-roaring speech. I recall its closing line as: “And we gon’ take the Washington Monument, and we gon’ ram it up Richard Nixon’s ass!” The crowd cheered, and my father said, “We’re leaving.”
We walked back to the Justice Department, where Attorney General John Mitchell stood on his balustrade. My dad swore he looked like Mussolini, with his juttingjaw. About fifty feet from the family station wagon, we saw a guy writing down license plate numbers. My dad thought he was going to get a ticket. He didn’t get a ticket. He got audited by the IRS for the next three years, because that’s how Richard Nixon rolled.
I have read everything ever written about the Trickster that I could get my hands on ever since. His battles with the CIA were bloody, especially after he hired a crew of CIA veterans and Bay of Pigs washouts to break into the Democratic party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. And it was Watergate that sold me on the idea that covering the dark side of the American government could be great fun.
So I guess you could say I owe it all to Richard Nixon.
Nixon visits CIA headquarters, with Richard Helms over his shoulder, March 7, 1969
Another reader question: “How did you start out covering the CIA?”
Richard Helms had been the CIA’s director for seven years when Nixon fired him in 1973. The reason? Helms refused to cover up the Watergate break-in on the spurious grounds on national security.
As a reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, after I had written a few stories about what the CIA was up to in the last years of the cold war, I thought it would be a good idea to get to know Helms. I first sat down with him in 1988. He was an eloquent raconteur, enjoyed a beer at lunch, and he schooled me. The history of the CIA flowed out of him.
The mission at the outset in 1947 was to know the enemy. Spies would divine the secrets of the Kremlin, scholarly analysts would assay them, and directors would report to the president of the United States. That was the idea, in any case.
“In the beginning, we knew nothing,” Helms told me. “Our knowledge of what the other side was up to, their intentions, their capabilities, was nil, or next to it. If you came up with a telephone book, or a map of an airfield, that was pretty hot stuff. We were in the dark about a lot of the world.”
In the beginning, I too knew next to nothing. But by the time The New York Times hired me to cover the CIA in 1993, I had spent many an hour learning from Helms. And I felt – like Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon – as if somebody had taken the lid off life and let me look at the works.
Covering the CIA was like covering another country. You had to learn the language, the culture, the history. And you had to have sources whom you trusted, and who trusted you.
Walker Evans, “Hitching a Ride,” 1936.
“So,” another reader asks, “how do you get all these CIA guys to talk on the record?”
I used to hitchhike cross-country when I was a teenager in the 1970s. People picked me up because they wanted someone to talk with on the long ride ahead. Of course, they wanted to talk about the most fascinating thing in the world, which was themselves. So I had to ask them questions, to draw them out. I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s how I learned to do an interview.
What I’ve learned over the years is that nearly everyone wants to talk. Sometimes all you have to do is ask.
But why do people steeped in secrecy talk to a reporter? Perhaps, when they come to a certain age, they want their stories to be told, lest they stamped Top Secret, cached in a safe, and lost forever. My job is to try to tell those stories truthfully. We work in the dark and we do what we can.
Stand by for the next CODEWORD, coming soon. Subscribe – it’s free, for now! And keep those cards and letters coming in.