Thirty-nine days, 7 February to 19 March 1975: the story surfaces, the Director of Central Intelligence carries his own secret from newsroom to newsroom, and the author's lifelong trade is practiced at national scale and fails. The reader should not hurry past the last paragraph. —Ed.
The story came up on the seventh of February, 1975, in the Los Angeles Times, and I have kept the clipping, because a man should keep the notice of his own profession's death even when the facts are wrong, and the facts were beautifully wrong. The Times had the burglary, and it had Hughes, and it had the Agency, and it had a sunken Soviet submarine, and it had them arranged into a story the way a burglar's flashlight has a room: one hot patch at a time, everything else invented from the edges.1 The ocean was wrong. The purpose was wrong. And the name was wrong, gorgeously wrong: somewhere in the plumbing a source had handed them the word Jennifer, which was not the project and never had been, it was the fence around the project, and for the next thirty-five years the world would call the thing by the name of its own security compartment, which is exactly as if history remembered Troy as the Horse.2
Guthrie's people had me on the dawn flight south, but the real business, it was clear by noon, was not in Los Angeles, where the Times could still be reasoned with, and was reasoned with; it was in Washington, where the wire had gone out to every shop that had ever held a corner of the story that the corner was now warm. I was east by the tenth, and on the twelfth I was walked into a small borrowed office, not at Langley, and given twenty minutes with the Director of Central Intelligence, and the reader may now watch my religion get promoted over my head.
William Colby was a spare, mild, grey-eyed man with rimless glasses and the manner of a parish priest who has heard everything and mislaid the capacity for surprise, and he was, that month, personally, on the telephone, doing my life's work: killing stories. He did not waste the twenty minutes. "You'll forgive the office," he said. "Mine is having its telephones sworn at. Mr. Klipspringer, I'm told your trade is arranging for things not to appear, and that you've been at it since before this Agency existed. I want your opinion of my method, and I'll describe it, because you of all people won't be quoting me. I have no law to point at. Prior restraint is dead, the Pentagon Papers killed it, and I wouldn't use it if it breathed; you do not cure a leak with a writ, you advertise the water. What I have is arithmetic and manners. As of this morning there are perhaps a dozen news organizations holding pieces of this story, and the count rises by about one a week. Now: a man holding a corner of a story publishes, every time, because a corner is all appetite and no responsibility. A man holding the whole story can be asked to weigh the whole story. So I am delivering the whole story, personally, to each editor as he acquires his corner, and then asking him, as a citizen holding what he now holds, for time. They have all said yes. Mr. Hersh at the Times has been saying yes, with increasing difficulty, for the better part of a year. Every yes is rented, none is owned, and I am renting from more landlords every week. Your trade's opinion of mine, please."
I gave it to him straight, which the reader may score as professional courtesy or as the vanity of being consulted by the one client in the Republic bigger than the Republic's fear; both entries are made. "Director," I said, "your method is the best possible management of a dead position. You've already confirmed the story to a dozen shops; each briefing mints a new man who owns the whole of it; and the whole of it is the one form in which it is safe to publish, because you yourself have certified it true. You are not buying silence, you're renting it against a rising market, and the first landlord who smells the others' leases will foreclose inside a news cycle, and the rest will follow him in an afternoon, out of nothing but fear of being last. It holds until one man decides it doesn't. My counsel is the counsel I've sold for thirty years: the government should confirm nothing, deny nothing, and say nothing, in one shape, from every mouth it owns, forever. You'll say we're past that. We are. You asked what I had."
"That's the doctrine I'd write on the wall," Colby said, courteous to the end of the sentence, "for the next one." And he shook my hand and picked up the telephone, and I was in the corridor, and I record that I liked him, that he was the finest professional mourner I ever watched work, and that we were both, from the twelfth of February, simply waiting to learn which landlord it would be.3
Harv Poole told me which, eleven days before it happened. The Madison bar, the first week of March, two whiskies in, talking to the mirror per doctrine: "It holds till it doesn't, Jay, and it doesn't by April. Count the shops. The Times is chained to its own held story, that's the beauty of Colby's scheme, the paper of record can't run it without printing that it sat on it, and editors would rather lose a war than print that. The networks won't go first, they never go first, television needs a headline to read out loud. So it's a free agent. It's a man with a mimeograph and a microphone and no landlord, and there's exactly one of those, and Colby's got nothing he wants. Anderson goes first. The rest is weather." He was drinking my whiskey the whole time, and I paid for the forecast the way I have paid for every accurate sentence I ever heard in Washington, gladly, and in cash. He gave me one more line unbilled, into the mirror, on the house: that Colby, alone in that whole building across the river, believed the Republic was owed the truth about itself eventually, and that the town would have him for it, not this year but soon. The town had him within the year, and I have never worked out whether Harv was reading the file or writing it.
And it was Anderson, and here I make the entry against my own account before the Editor makes it for me: it would be a Mormon. Four years I had run the quietest cover in America on the confidential grapevine of that confidence-keeping tribe, and the man who spent the secret was Jack Anderson, a Mormon issued, by some clerical error at the depot, a radio audience instead of a filing cabinet. On the evening of the eighteenth of March he read the thing out whole on the air, boondoggle angle first, having told the Director to his face, I am reliably informed, that the government had no right to cover up a three-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar failure by calling it security. I heard it in a hotel room on Sixteenth Street with a drink I never finished. Four minutes of air time took five years of work; he was on to the next item before the ice had shifted in the glass.4
The Times ran Hersh the next morning, the nineteenth, the full story, a year's ordnance detonating in one edition, with a five-paragraph note confessing the year it had sat, which for that paper is sackcloth, ashes, and a barefoot walk to Canossa. Then the pack came, all of them at once, and by the twenty-first there was nothing left in the position to defend: the ship, the claw, the boat, the burial, some of it right, most of it embroidered, all of it loose. The calls reached Woodside by the twentieth, trade press first, then the Chronicle, then a boy from a wire desk I had quietly fed for a decade, and to each of them the mining consultant said one sentence and no more: that he advised on minerals and had nothing to add to the company's statement. One shape, one mouth, every time, and it held; and it was somewhere around the fortieth repetition, standing in my own hall with the garden going dark, that I understood I was not defending anything anymore. I was rehearsing. On the same wires, in the same type sizes, Saigon was going, city by city, an army folding up the peninsula like a man clearing out of a furnished room, and the two stories ran side by side down the front pages, the Republic's biggest secret and its longest war, dying in the same editions. Whether Kitty Marsh got out of Saigon I never learned from her, which was her way with an exit.
Summa circled its wagons that week, and the circling swept Fay out with a pension, a lawyer's letter about obligations that survive employment, and, I noticed at our last dinner and mentioned never, a new ring, a plain, sensible, security-man's ring, worn on the correct finger without comment. She was buoyant to the last course, as she had been buoyant through three governments' interrogations, and at the curb, with the valet holding the door, she put out her hand like a man and said, "You were the easiest part of my job, Jay." I took it for a compliment, and said so, and she laughed all the way into the car, and that laugh is the last I have of her, and I invite the reader to notice that in four years and some hundreds of hours of company, the woman never asked me one question, and I never asked her that one.
Bunny asked hers on the morning of the nineteenth, at breakfast at Woodside, with the newspaper folded to the story and the toast unbuttered. "Isn't this your mining, darling?" she said, in the voice she uses for the gutters, and I said the coverage was wildly exaggerated and the venture was sound, and she said, "Of course," and buttered the toast, and never asked again, not that week, not that year, not in the quarter century since, and the reader who has followed this memoir through nine bundles may join me in declining, one more time, to open that particular door, behind which there is either nothing at all or the finest intelligence officer of the century.5
Which left, in the ashes of my profession, one letter. It came at the end of the spring, through counsel, on the stationery of counsel, and it said, in the manner of such letters, that a journalist had made formal request under the Freedom of Information Act, not for the operation's files, but for the Agency's records of its dealings with the press concerning the operation: the killings of the story. The stories I had helped smother were now themselves the subject. The suppression had become the record. And the Agency, wrote counsel, dryly, having consulted its statutes and found no exit, wished to engage my views, on a consulting basis, fee to be discussed, as to what a government in receipt of such a request could possibly say.
They asked me, of all men living, what to write.
The Los Angeles Times story of 7 February 1975, under the byline of Cohen and Farr, connected the Romaine Street burglary, the Hughes organization, the Central Intelligence Agency, and a sunken Soviet submarine, and was garbled in the details, including, in early accounts, the ocean itself. Director Colby's efforts that same day to have the story held or trimmed are described in his own memoir. —Ed.
The name was indeed wrong. JENNIFER was the security compartment controlling access to the project's information; AZORIAN was the project. The press's error hardened into thirty-five years of usage, and was corrected only by the declassification of February 2010, by which time the wrong name had appeared in the titles of books. The author's simile of the Horse is, the Editor concedes, fair. —Ed.
The containment campaign is unusually well documented for a secret proceeding: Colby's memoir, the accounts of the editors called upon, and the Agency's own released papers, which include the running "game plan" memoranda, agree on its shape: personal appeals, full or near-full disclosure to senior editors, and requests for time while a second recovery attempt remained live. The consultation the author describes is not among the documented calls, which proves, as usual, nothing in either direction. —Ed.
Jack Anderson broadcast the story on the evening of 18 March 1975, having refused the Director's request on the stated ground that the government has no right to cover up a boondoggle; the New York Times published Seymour Hersh's full account the following morning, 19 March, together with an editors' note of five paragraphs acknowledging that the story had been held at the government's request while the operation was live. The pack followed within the day. —Ed.
The author's billing records for February and March 1975 are, as ever, not in evidence, and neither is the author: no memoir, deposition, or released paper of the containment names him. The letter with which this number closes, however, has a documentary echo the reader will meet in the final number, where the Editor will also have something of his own to add. —Ed.