“13-00000 SECRET in. Like me. I'd never testified before Congress. INTERVIEWER: It was your first time. MR. HALPERN: Yeah. First.time. And so far my only time thank the Lord. But I don't care about going before them again. They walk on water, they don't walk on water any m”
“13-00000 SECRET MR. HALPERN: No. No. The one next to the — it's on the corner. Big building, before they built the Hart Building. Well, I forget. It was the guy who came up with that — from Indiana, I think it was, or Illinois -- but anyway, they had taken over the auditor”
“alone. And we all went out at the same time. INTERVIEWER: You served Tom Karamessines until February of '73? MR. HALPERN: That's right. And then Bill Colby after that. INTERVIEWER: Then Colby after that? MR. HALPERN: Until about May of '73. INTERVIEWER: Until May of '73. An”
“first. officer to testify in his own right under oath, etc. And then his testimony was declassified almost immediately and published. INTERVIEWER: And the Director was present? MR. HALPERN: I don't remember whether he was present or not. INTERVIEWER: So this was a. . MR. HA”
“I didn't know. I'd never heard of it until after the thing hit in '75. But I had seen the original paper, so by the time the Church Committee had announced it all, yeah, I was aware of it. INTERVIEWER: And LASH. You got involved in that one? MR. HALPERN: Oh yeah. I remember t”
“13-00000 SECRET do what they were doing at the time. What they did and why some of these things took place. Where that's not true of many of my colleagues and friends who even in a kidding way would say to me things like, "What the hell did you do that for, Sam?" And I po”
“13-00000. SECRET confession everyday is the other side to that same question. And the Congressman, I think, was just full of delusions. That's about all I can say. INTERVIEWER: How about your reflections on media coverage of the Congressional investigations? Do you feel t”
“something happened to him but he knew what he was letting himself in for. INTERVIEWER: But you had heard nothing about it until the case broke? MR. HALPERN: No. This was one of those things that everybody assumed because I was in the job I held for seven years that I knew eve”
“guys, I mean, verbally attacked, for some of the things, in terms of, you know, if you guys hadn't done all those nasty things, we wouldn't be under fire now. INTERVIEWER: And these were Agency officers? MR. HALPERN: Agency officers. Serving officers at the time. 149”
“13-00000 SECRET forces, the people who are down there. I can't be out of action. I don't know what's going to happen. Maybe nothing will happen. But I can't take a chance." INTERVIEWER: And he was talking about you taking the drug at work then? MR. HALPERN: He didn't say.”
“then. This was '75 now. But the Agency made it very clear in their memoranda and the Notices, the Headquarters Notices they issue to all employees that you are on your own, you get your own lawyers, etc., etc. You got no help from the Agency. Which was not true in the old days”
“13-00000 SECRET their secrecy oaths in terms of testifying to Congress. Well, hell, first of all I think that was a silly thing to do because when you, even the oath itself that you sign, the secrecy oath, look at the one you signed. It doesn't say anyting about withholdin”
“13-00000 SECRET Committee, I remember, for example, Senator Huddleston, who was on the Church Committtee and later was on the Intelligence Committee. During the days of the Church Committee he was talking about, "You can't just have CIA or the intelligence people talk to a”
“13-00000 SECRET MR. HALPERN: Oh yeah, I left at the end of '61 -- well, not the end because I arrived back in Washington. Well, even after that. Bill Colby made me in effect the third man down in the station because he and his Deputy, Ed Barbier who is now dead, were just ”
“13-00000 SECRET information in the PDB only and he would be able to tell by a certain phrase we used. And nobody else except those several people in the room knew it. So that even the other people that got copies of the PDB didn't know exactly what the hell that phrase me”
“13-00000 SECRET particularly on the Senate side, not the House side, which was a mess — and the Senators themselves understood that these were three men of integrity and honesty. And who were trying to explain things to them. And who literally had no axes to grind. They w”
“13-00000 . SECRET again, I don't know who his staff officer was or who was briefing him beforehand. INTERVIEWER: When you say worst, you mean; informed or not informed? MR. HALPERN: It seemed to me ill informed. INTERVIEWER: Ill informed. MR. HALPERN: Ill informed. And ”
“13-00000 SECRET anything about it. INTERVIEWER: I'm glad to get it on the record. MR. HALPERN: It's on the record. I've had it on the record so many times with people. I've told this to Seymour Hersh. But he didn't believe me until he did his own homework. He didn't even”
“13-00000 SECRET MR. HALPERN: Straight jacket. He looked at me and he knew me well enough and I knew him and he says, "Okay, Sam, what do you want to send?" "I want to send back we got 18,000. You know, and tell them how we got it. And give them the facts. I'm not trying to”
“13-00000 SECRET And that's quite clear. Read Harris Greene's book. Inference of Guilt. And if you read that you get a feeling for what some of the insiders felt about us former insiders. I think his last job was Deputy IG before he retired. He'd been around for a long tim”
“13-00000 SECRET anything. I was in no position to do that. But I was loud and vociferous in my statements to the people who were willing to listen among my colleagues. Some of them said, "Bill had no choice. He had to do that." And I kept saying, "Not that way." He may ha”
“those seminars that he started in '78 and '79 and so. INTERVIEWER: Were they local? MR. HALPERN: They were all here, but he brought in people from all over and they had a good foundation. 129”
“13-00000 SECRET MR. HALPERN: It was exactly the same way as when the Soviets got into the Tsarist's files and exposed all the secret treaties and everything else. It's exactly the same thing. I have no objection to their coming in and looking at the stuff. I have great ob”
“that's what I was doing. And then when I retired, I retired as Deputy Chief of DCS. INTERVIEWER: Good, I didn't have that gap. As you look to the past, how was counterintelligence affected by the Hearings? MR. HALPERN: I think that were affected, I'm just guessing again, bec”
“town. INTERVIEWER: And you didn't know that you were going to do that before? Oh my. MR. HALPERN: I had no chance to talk to a lawyer or anything like that. Not that I cared. It didn't bother me. But it was a lousy way to do business, and it wasn't according to the rules at”
“them to do it but not all right for me to do it. INTERVIEWER: It fit in their pattern. MR. HALPERN: Yea, and so, you know, what do you do? INTERVIEWER: Were these recruits coming in in the early '70's and so on — MR. HALPERN: The early '70's.• INTERVIEWER: Are they more’ qu”
“13-00000 SECRET not lead you to my name, even though it says that you should find it there. ■ It's not the only time I have had trouble with The New York Times index. So when you talk about the biggest problem, the biggest problem is security and leaks. That is the biggest”
“tandem with the Watergate. But I don't think that , the Watergate problem itself was what these guys were interested in but I wish I could identify them better. They were targeting against intelligence as such and they succeeded. INTERVIEWER: And some of it was disillusionment”
“13-00000 SECRET INTERVIEWER: It didn't go down?' MR. HALPERN: No way. No way. You know it was frightening then and I guess it is even more frightening now. I don't know what the situation is now but its a bad show. I don't know. Maybe we were brought up in a totally diffe”
“13-00000 SECRET INTERVIEWER: I think so. Okay. How about moving towards the Hearings. One writer said about Mr. Colby that Mr. Colby believed salvation for the Agency lay in cooperation with the investigations, while other intelligence professionals thought intelligence se”
“13-00000 SECRET out. Sid's example of American diplomats being disoriented when they were in Moscow coming out and not knowing what the hell hit them. And I think that what we were trying to do, or what they were trying to do rather, was to find out what the hell it was al”
“13-00000 SECRET And as I point out in my review of his book, I said, "You don't take an artillery officer and make a submarine captain out of him. Or vice versa. Sure, you can do it over a period of training, but if a guy wants to be a sub captain, he goes into the sub ser”
“13-00000 SECRET wasn't witting there under oath, in the first place. And when I got under oath, yeah I told them the truth. They didn't like to hear it. I got into a big shouting contest with a guy called Gary Hart. He was sitting in the background. He wasn't even — he was”
“recently? MR. HALPERN: Yeah. And over the last ten years. It's quite clear. You just, you know, you do this with a sixth sense and a gut feeling. You can tell what's right and what's wrong and what's true and what's false. More or less. You can't be totally right but you get ”
“Some of the others that I hadn't known about, yeah sure, it wasn't in my area. So I wasn't involved and I didn't know. The one I was involved in was the one, I guess the (I'm forgetting the crypts for these), the one against Castro. One of the ones against Castro. I did not k”
“the line and I don't even know his name. And I'm shooting at him and he is shooting at me. I mean, that's ridiculous. I mean, what the hell, you are going out there the kill somebody. I don't care what you call it. INTERVIEWER: They keep looking for a declaration of war. MR.”
“INTERVIEWER: Brutal in the context of? MR. HALPERN: No sense of personalities. No sense of humanity. No sense of the dealing with individual problems. We used to be a Band of Brothers. INTERVIEWER: Right. MR. HALPERN: I think I said that before. 43 SECRET”
“13-00000 SECRET bulletin board out in front of the White House. That's up to him. That's his job. He's got the legal power to declassify every piece of paper in the government. Fine, go ahead and do it. You are the boss. I think you are crazy, but go ahead and do it. And ”
“13-00000 SECRET INTERVIEWER: Okay, what about this one, Sam, and you've really been very, very patient. I really appreciate it. What are the lessons that you think are to be learned from the Church and Pike investigations? Either institutional lessons, that is the Agency ”
“13-00000 SECRET who was hurt by the fact that the mail was opened. Either physically, or legally, financially or any other way. And in most cases, we didn't even know it happened until years afterwards. And in some cases I think they had perfectly good justification to go ”
“INTERVIEWER: Sure. MR. HALPERN: I mean, an academic. We're not forcing people to do these things. No point in forcing anybody. If you get an agent that you are forcing to do something, I'd question the 107 SECRET”
“13-00000 SECRET correction to the press, a notice saying, "Hey fellas, please put even a little half-inch box in somewhere on page 55." CIA didn't do a thing. And I hold Bill responsible for that and I'm sorry to be so strong about it. But that is Bill's fault. He brought”
“say, you know, it wasn't me. I wasn't around. So that was the general attitude. And as I say, a lot of people responded like good soldiers and wrote all kinds of tomes about things they thought were wrong. and not all of them were accepted. I mean that 690 whatever thing.. IN”
“use, or cooperation with the Congress, saved the Agency from real damage, I don't know what the hell damage is then. Sorry Ralph, you asked. INTERVIEWER: I asked, you bet. MR. HALPERN: I think people like that have got rocks in their head. I don't know what the hell they are”
“at that time? By '76? INTERVIEWER: By '76, he would have been. MR. HALPERN: Yes, he would have been in Europe by that time. So I don't remember hearing of Al very much. 183 SECRET”
“13-00000• SECRET kibitzing. After you've seen a piece of paper if you want to give it to me to staff out I'll do whatever you want me to do with it. Fine. But they've got to be able to talk to you privately." And he looked at me and he said, "Yeah, yeah." And he never said”
“Goldwater was there. INTERVIEWER: Tower? MR. HALPERN: Yes, Tower was there. He didn't say much. INTERVIEWER: No. MR. HALPERN: It was mostly Church and, of course, F.A.O. Schwarz as the Staff Director. Yeah, that was a funny one too. I'd been called to talk to Schwarz on th”
“13-00000 SECRET Breckinridge and, I guess, Walt Elder were involved, too. INTERVIEWER: Yeah. MR. HALPERN: And just to listen to the kinds of — well, the Representatives themselves were bad enough but on top of that they hired, I think Seymour used the phrase something lik”
“13-00000 SECRET overruling Seymour most of the time or some of the time. I don't know. But I can't imagine Bolton, knowing Seymour very well indeed, that Seymour would want to go rushing foward with this thing because if nothing else, Bolton was a political animal. He had”
“13-00000 SECRET compartmented. This is the way it should be. Yeah, so talking about Congressional Oversight, yes, if it's oversight. Not management. INTERVIEWER: Bob Woodward in his last book, Veil says the Church investigation plus the Carter Administration crushed the ”