UFOs were a dead issue in 1970. The national security apparatus, which had intersected with the phenomenon for thirty years, now pretended, and perhaps hoped, that UFOs really
America’s premier covert action agency was busy. From 1970 to 1973, urged by the White House, the agency tried to thwart Chile’s Marxist presidential candidate—then president—Salvador Allende. Kissinger expressed the prevailing sentiment in June 1970: “I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible.” Nixon agreed. The CIA soon bugged the Chilean embassy and began planning a military coup. 1
The CIA also controlled an army of thirty-six thousand men in Laos, which cost perhaps $300 million annually. Although Congress never authorized this activity, there was little to fear, considering the agency’s classified budget and its many private sources of income.2
The HTLingual program remained aggressive. By the early 1970s, the New York City component examined over 2 million mail items per year, photographed over thirty thousand envelopes, and opened eight thousand to nine thousand letters. In 1971, CIA Director Richard Helms gave a rare public address, in which he insisted that the CIA did not surveil domestic targets. “The nation must to a degree take it on faith,” he said, “that we who lead the CIA are honorable men, devoted to the nation’s service.”3
Meanwhile, CIA mind-control guru Sid Gottlieb had developed a strong interest in electronic stimulation of the brain (ESB), which he persuaded Helms to support. The idea was to program a human being to attack and kill upon command, to be done through the CIA’s Operation Often.4
By now, the NSA was examining over 150,000 telegrams per month, as part of Operation Shamrock. According to Victor Marchetti, it was still unable to break the high-grade cipher systems and codes of the USSR and China, although third-world nations and American allies provided easier targets.
Hoover, increasingly paranoid about exposure of the enormity of FBI activities, severed all relations with the CIA in the spring of 1970, and soon thereafter with all other intelligence agencies. The consensus around Nixon was that Hoover had lost his guts and had to go. But Nixon was not the first president who had trouble firing J. Edgar Hoover.5
One of Nixon’s most persistent goals was the reorganization of the intelligence community, an immense undertaking. The most famous result of his efforts was the Huston Plan, named after Tom Huston, his point man on the project. At the June 1970 meeting in the Oval Office, all the main players attended: Haldeman, Ehrlichmann, Huston, and intelligence chiefs Hoover (FBI), Helms (CIA), Adm. Noel Gaylor (NSA), and Lt. Gen. Donald Bennett (DIA). Nixon made it clear he wanted a major effort against domestic dissidents. The group was chaired by Hoover and named the Inter Agency Committee on Intelligence (ICI). Even the formidable presence of the now-cautious Hoover, however, could not prevent its far-reaching recommendations: expanded mail openings, resumption of illegal entries and “black bag” jobs, electronic surveillance of Americans and foreigners within the U.S., an increase in the number of “campus sources,” and expansion of the army’s counterintelligence mission.
Nixon endorsed the plan in mid-July but would not sign it, nor would Haldeman and Ehrlichmann. Who, then, at the White House, put his name to this dramatic authorization? Why, Nixon’s young staffer, Tom Huston. Hoover easily torpedoed the plan on July 23, when he announced that he would certainly go along, just as soon as he received written authorization from the president for all these break-ins and wiretaps. Thus, the plan to “institutionalize burglary as presidential policy” (the words are those of David Wise) failed. In practice, it made little difference, as these agencies were already engaging in many of the practices for which they sought approval. They did not cease simply because official sanction was not forthcoming. In some cases, they even expanded their activities.6
