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INSIDE THE COMPANY: CIA DIARY |
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Part Four Washington DC 15 September 1966 My assignment in headquarters is to the Mexico branch as officer in charge of support for operations against the Soviets in Mexico City,. This first week, however, I'm making visits to arrange cover and other details. I'm keeping State Department cover, incidentally, and will ostensibly be assigned to the Research Assignments Office of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Central Cover Division still has that telephone system for cover calls and they gave me the usual two names that I'll use as my immediate superiors. The telephone number starts with DU-3, as all State Department numbers, but it rings in central cover in Langley. I asked Jake Esterline, ‡ the Deputy Division Chief, what the possibilities are that I'll be sent to Vietnam since all the divisions are being forced to meet a quota every three months for Vietnam officers. Jake said not to worry about it and he confirmed indirectly the general belief that most divisions are sending 'expendables' to Vietnam. I wonder if I'd go if asked. With the special allowances most officers can save practically all their salary, and when the tour is up in eighteen months I'd have a little bundle to last until I find a new job. No, I've had all the counter-insurgency I want. The Clandestine Services Career Panel also called me in for an interview. They told me I've been accepted in the Agency's new retirement programme -- meaning I can retire at age fifty with a handsome annuity. At thirty-one that seems like a long way off but it's nice to know you're in the most generous programme. Yet not even this retirement programme can keep me doing this same work for nineteen more years. The officer I'm replacing on the Mexico branch is the same person who replaced me when I left Quito. He's being allowed to resign under a cloud because on the polygraph he wasn't able to resolve certain questions about finances in Quito. It's pretty sad because he's in his forties with a family to support and no job to enter. It makes me realize I'd better be careful about whom I discuss my doubts with -- and I'd better get another job lined up before I start talking about anything. Washington DC 4 October 1966 The headquarters organization of WH Division hasn't changed much from six years ago. In the executive offices, in addition to Bill Broe, ‡ the Division Chief, and Jake Esterline, there are support officers for personnel, training, security and records. We have a Foreign Intelligence staff consisting of five officers, headed by Tom Polgar, ‡ and a Covert-Action staff of four officers, headed by Jerry Droller, the famous 'Mr. Bender' of the Bay of Pigs invasion. These staffs review projects and other documents from field stations that require division approval for funds and operational decisions. They also coordinate such matters with other headquarters offices outside WH Division. The regional branches consist of the large Cuban branch with about thirty officers headed by Tom Flores, and smaller branches for Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, the Bolivarian countries, Brazil, and the cono sur (Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina and Chile). Altogether we have about 100 officers of the division at headquarters as opposed to a little over 200 officers at the stations. The division budget is about 37 million dollars for the financial year 1967 -- 5.5 million dollars being spent in Mexico. In the Mexico branch (WH/1) we are responsible for headquarters support to the vast and complicated operations of the Mexico City station. Our Chief, Walter J. Kaufman, ‡ and our Deputy Chief, Joe Fisher, ‡ head a team of about ten officers, each with responsibility for a different operational function at the station. Because of certain DDP office shifts in headquarters, our branch and the Cuban branch are temporarily being housed in the Ames building, one of several of the new high-rise office buildings in Rosslyn occupied by the Agency. Working just across the Potomac from Washington in many ways is more convenient than out in Langley, but the traffic coming and going is a disaster. Joe Fisher, gave me a briefing on the operations of the Mexico City station and I can understand why this station has the dubious reputation of too much bone and too little muscle. Operations are heavily weighted towards liaison (which rests on the unusually close relationship between Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, ‡ the President of Mexico and Winston Scott, ‡ the Chief of Station) and operational support (surveillance, observation posts, travel control, postal intercepts, telephone tapping). Badly lacking are good agent penetrations of the station's main targets: the Soviets, Cubans, local revolutionary organizations, and the Mexican government and political structure. The operations are dull because there are almost no political operations such as those we have in Ecuador and most Latin American countries. The reason is that the Mexican security services are so effective in stamping out the extreme left that we don't have to worry. If the government were less effective we would, of course, get going to promote repression. My duties in support of the station Soviet/satellite section are to coordinate and process cases, which comes down to just keeping the paper moving. In some cases I have the action responsibility which I coordinate with the Soviet Bloc Division, and in others the SB Division has action responsibility and they coordinate with me. The operations leading into the target missions, but not dealing with an actual penetration or recruitment of target personnel, are generally my responsibility, whereas recruitments, provocations and more sensitive operations get SB Division action. In all cases we coordinate with each other. Telephone tapping, observation posts, surveillance teams, travel control, access agents and double-agent cases are my responsibility, but any operations to recruit or defect a Soviet would be handled by the Operations Branch, Western Hemisphere Office of Soviet Bloc Division (SB/O/WH). Satellite branches, e.g. SB/Poland, SB/Czechoslovakia, are the action or coordinating SB office for their particular countries. Happily for me, the SB Division people are responsible for compilation and updating of the SPR's (Soviet Personality Records) which is the very detailed analysis maintained on every Soviet of interest. Usually the information for the SPR is obtained over long periods of observation while the Soviet is assigned to a foreign mission. It includes his work habits, leisure activities, friends, personality, likes and dislikes, wife and family, health, vulnerabilities. In the Mexico branch all the liaison and most of the support operations are under Charlotte Bustos ‡ who has been in the branch for ten years and knows every detail of these complicated activities. Thus I only have to have a peripheral interest in these operations, even though they are targeted against the Soviets and satellites, because they are often used against many other targets. Nevertheless I look after the requirements related to the three observation posts overlooking the Soviet Embassy, together with the five or six houses we own on property next to it. There are also fifteen or twenty access agents, Mexicans and foreigners living in Mexico, who maintain personal relationships with the Soviets under one or another pretext, for whom I process operational approvals, name checks and other paper-work. License-plate numbers of vehicles from the U.S., together with photographs of their occupants, are taken by the observation posts at the Soviet, satellite and Cuban embassies and forwarded to headquarters for additional investigation. The Office of Security obtains the names and other data from state office registration files and we forward to the FBI memoranda when the information involves U.S. citizens or foreigners resident in the U.S.. There are also a number of counter-intelligence cases involving U.S. citizens with known or suspected connections to Soviet or satellite intelligence operations in Mexico City. In some cases U.S. citizens were recruited while travelling in the Soviet Union and were given instructions for contact in Mexico City or some other city in Mexico. Usually in these cases the participants are considered to be under the control of the Soviets, or the satellite intelligence service as the case may be, as opposed to double-agent cases where control is supposed to be ours. One particularly complicated and lurid case came very close to home because it involved a sensitive experiment in cover. About two years ago when Des FitzGerald was Chief of WH Division, he decided to make an experiment to see just how productive a group of CIA officers could be if they worked from a commercial cover office with very little direct contact with the CIA station under State cover in the Embassy. The experiment could have had a profound influence on the future of CIA use of State cover, which is the main type of cover used in countries where large U.S. military installations do not exist. Because the problem with non-official cover is that officers under official cover in embassies so often have to devote inordinate amounts of time to support of the non-official cover officers (security, communications, finance, reporting, name checks, etc.), non-official cover tends to be counter-productive. The experiment in Mexico City was to establish several officers under commercial cover with direct communication to headquarters and as little burden on the station as possible. The LILINK ‡ office -- cryptonyms for Mexico begin with LI -- was set up for three operations officers under cover as import representatives. The Office of Communications designed a special cryptographic machine that looks like an ordinary teletype and that transmits and receives encoded messages via a line-of-sight infra-red beam,. The LILINK office is located in an office building that provides line-of-sight to a station office in the Embassy where similar transmitting and receiving gear is located. Secure communications exist without the need for personal meetings between the inside and outside officers. The LILINK office can also be hooked into the regular station communications system for direct communication with headquarters. Thus support duties for officers inside the Embassy have been reduced to the absolute minimum. The experiment has been only partially successful. Our officers have had difficulties getting sufficient commercial representations to justify their cover, on the one hand, while station support for them has not been reduced as much as had been thought possible. The counter-intelligence case that I have inherited involved one of the officers of the LILINK office and led to the recent decision to close the office completely. The officer in question has a serious drinking problem and was engaged in a liaison with a girl who was a clerk in the U.S. Embassy communications and records unit -- not the station but the regular State Department unit. It was discovered that they had taken photographs and films of themselves and other couples in pornographic scenes, sometimes with the use of animals. One of the participants was a character of doubtful nationality who was connected with a combined Soviet-Polish espionage case in the U.S. several years ago but who had dropped out of sight. When the photographs and films became known, along with the participation of the Soviet-Polish agent, headquarters decided to allow the officer to resign -- a decision also taken by the State Department when advised of participation by their communications and records clerk. The other party -- the ringer -- again disappeared and the station has been vainly trying to locate him and the films. Neither our LILINK officer nor the girl were willing to discuss the matter prior to resignation and they have apparently floated off together to California. My job is now to coordinate the station investigation with the headquarters CI staff which handles the case with State Department security. No one has determined yet whether the Polish-Soviet agent recruited our officer or the girl -- which is the main reason why LILINK is being closed. Already Arthur Ladenburg, ‡ the junior officer under LILINK cover, has returned to headquarters. In my dealings with the Counter-Intelligence staff on these sensitive cases I have discovered the solution to a seldom-discussed mystery in headquarters. During the weeks of study of the headquarters bureaucracy during formal training in 1959, there was never any mention of an Israeli branch or desk in the Near East Division. When someone once asked about this the instructor gave one of those evasive answers that suggests the question was indiscreet. Now I find that the Israeli branch is tucked away within the Counter-Intelligence staff so that its secrets are more secure from Israeli intelligence than they would be if the branch were in 'open' view in the Near East Division. One of my CI staff contacts said that this is unfortunately necessary because of possible divided loyalties of Jewish employees of the Agency. Washington DC 5 October 1966 At last I've found a small apartment and moved away from Janet. The strain of the moment of leaving the children was even worse than I'd expected -- but I'll be going to see them regularly. With Janet I think I'm in for a long and bitter struggle. Leaving the children with her is going to take all the emotional control that I can muster -- there simply is no way that I could obtain their custody in the face of tradition. Moreover, I don't want to create the kind of domestic fuss that will cause headquarters' security and cover people to worry. Better that I sacrifice some equity for the time being. Washington DC 6 October 1966 This headquarters work is deadly -- all I do is route paper for people to initial. But the truth is that it's not just boredom. Sooner or later things are bound to get worse. If I resign now I'll have to find a job in this wretched city, if only to be able to see my sons - and now Janet tells me she wants to wait a year or even longer for the divorce. What I would really like to do is go back to California to work, but then I would almost never see the children. If I don't resign I'll just stay bogged down in miserable work -- and eventually I'll be assigned back to Latin America and be separated from the boys. Any way I look at it I get bad news. But I'm going to resign from the CIA. I no longer believe in what the Agency does. I'm going to finish writing the resume, advise Jake or Broe that I'm looking for another job, and then quit when something decent appears. I won't say exactly why I'm quitting, because if the truth were known my security clearance would be cancelled and I would simply be released. I'll give 'personal' reasons and relate them to my domestic situation. Otherwise I won't have an income while I look for another job. The question is not whether, but when, to resign. I wonder what the reaction would be if I wrote out a resignation telling them what I really think. Something like this:
I could go on with this letter but it's no use. The only real alternative to injustice in Latin America is socialism and no matter which shade of red a revolutionary wears, he's allied with forces that want to destroy the United States. What I have to do is to look out for myself first and put questions of principle to rest. I'll finish the resume and find another job before saying what I really think. Washington DC 7 October 1966 This morning at the Uruguay desk there was a celebration. The government at last expelled some Soviets -- four left yesterday -- and now the Montevideo press is speculating on whether the NCG will cancel a recent invitation to Gromyko to visit Uruguay. The expulsions are the result of Luis Vargas's ‡ persistence -- when I said farewell he told me that when the government unions started agitating again before the elections, the Soviets would suffer. (Before leaving Montevideo I wrote a memorandum recommending that Vargas be given a tourist trip to the U.S. as a reward if he finally got any thrown out, and it'll be small compensation since I never paid him a salary.) The expulsion order was based on the same false report we prepared for Storace ‡ last January, with minor updating, and it accuses the Soviets of meddling in Uruguayan labour, cultural and student affairs. Only four Soviets are being expelled right now because the cultural attache and one other on the original list are on home leave in Moscow and their visa renewals can be stopped by Vargas. The other two not included in the expulsion are commercial officers and they will be expelled, according to Vargas, as soon as these four with diplomatic status leave. The Montevideo station and others will be using the expulsions for a new media campaign against the Soviets. Our report for Storace ties the most recent wave of strikes to the PCU Congress in August and to the Soviet participation therein, together with the usual allegations of Soviet-directed subversion through the KGB, GRU and local communist parties. Proof of the authenticity of the subversion plan outlined in the report, according to Storace, are the eleven different strikes occurring in Uruguay at this moment. The Soviets were given forty-eight hours to leave Uruguay. Recently, too, the decree expelling the two remaining East Germans, Vogler and Kuhne, was approved. They were given thirty days to clear out. The gambit on Soviet expulsions may have worked against the unions last year but not this time. Strikes are spreading and the station reports street fighting between police and the strikers. Yesterday the Montevideo transport system, the banking system and many government offices were struck, while the CNT described Storace's report as an insult to the trade-union movement and pledged to continue the struggle against the government's economic policies -- mainly the IMF-pressured reforms of the past year. The pressure is showing again on President Heber. Last night in the NCG meeting he exchanged words with one of the Colorado Councillors who left the meeting but returned shortly to challenge Heber to a duel. The NCG meeting broke up as seconds were named, but later agreement was reached that the honour of neither man had been wounded. The seconds signed a document to that effect and the duel was cancelled. What provoked the challenge was Heber's loss of temper when the Colorado Counsellor reminded him that last year, two days before the first bank failed, Heber withdrew some 800,000 pesos from it. Washington 15 October 1966 A curious cable from the Mexico City station started me thinking again. Kaufman gave me the action -- it has the RYBAT indicator for special sensitivity -- because it is a proposal for a CIA officer to be named as the U.S. Embassy Olympic attache for the Games in 1968. For some time the station has been reporting on the increasing number of coaches from communist countries contracted by the Mexican Olympic Committee to help prepare Mexican athletes for the Games. Six coaches from the U.S. were also contracted but they are outnumbered by the fourteen or fifteen communists -- all of whom come from the Eastern European satellites. A little cold war is going on between several of the Americans and their communist colleagues, particularly in track and field, but the cold war chauvinism is really a degeneration of professional rivalry. The Embassy in Mexico City is involved because the USIS cultural section has given Specialist Grants to the Americans under the Educational Exchange Programme. These grants supplement their salaries from the Mexican Olympic Committee and in several cases have been used as incentives to keep several coaches there who otherwise would have quit. The station has also been reporting on the assignment of intelligence officers from the communist embassies to handle duties relating to preparations for the Olympics. These activities bring them into contact with a wide range of Mexican officialdom working on the Olympic Committee and the sports federations preparing the Mexican teams, and with an even larger number of people in the Olympic Games Organizing Committee preparing the Games themselves. The attraction to the communist intelligence services in using the Olympic Games as a vehicle for expanding operational potential among such a large group of government, business, professional and cultural leaders is obvious. The cable from the Mexico City station describes a recent suggestion by the Ambassador, Fulton Freeman, that the CIA provide an officer to fulfil the duties as U.S. Embassy Olympic attache. Such an assignment, the Ambassador reasons, would be logical since the CIA officer could keep an eye on the communist intelligence officers through the regular meetings of Olympic attaches -- some of whom are private citizens resident in Mexico City while others are officers of diplomatic missions. The CIA officer would also be able to watch the communist Olympic attaches because his work with the Mexican Olympic Committee and the Organizing Committee would overlap with the communists. If the Agency is unable to provide an appropriate officer as Olympic attache, the Ambassador will choose from among several possibilities he already has in mind, because increasing requests from the Mexicans to the Embassy on Olympic-related matters, together with the expected large influx of Americans for the Games, justifies an officer working full-time in the Olympics. The Chief of Station, Win Scott, ‡ comments in the cable that assigning an officer to this job would be advantageous to the station for a number of reasons. First, the station is handicapped because only three of its fifteen or twenty officers under Embassy cover are allowed to be placed on the diplomatic list. Such exclusion, a policy of successive Ambassadors, limits the mobility of station officers among the Diplomatic Corps, the governing (and only important) Mexican political party, the Foreign Ministry and other government offices, and professional organizations -- all of which are important station targets for penetration and covert-action operations. An officer under Olympic cover would have ready access to these targets for spotting, assessment and recruitment of new agent assets in all these fields through his Olympic cover duties. Secondly, the officer would be close enough to monitor at least some of the communist Olympic attaches' more interesting developmental contacts as well as engaging them in direct personal relationships -- right now practically no station officer has any direct personal relationship with communist counterparts. Thirdly, the station Olympics officer would be able to obtain information on the communist coaches training Mexican athletes, through the American coaches who already are beholden to the Embassy because of their Specialist Grants. The Chief of Station adds in the cable that the Olympic officer will have a separate office in the Embassy and will operate as an extension of the Ambassador's office -- having of necessity a very discreet contact with the station. I've ordered the files on past Olympics from Records Integration. It would be an exciting job. Washington DC 25 October 1966 I've reviewed the files on operations connected with past Olympics -- we've been in every Olympics since the Soviets appeared in Helsinki in 1952. Melbourne, Rome, Tokyo -- and now Mexico City. Provocations, defections, propaganda, recruitment of American athletes for Olympic Village operations, Winter Games and Summer Games -- all the way with CIA. I've written a memorandum to Bill Broe ‡ and to Dave Murphy, t Chief of the Soviet Bloc Division, recommending approval of the Mexico City station's proposal. In my memorandum I said I might qualify to be the Ambassador's Olympic attache as I have always been a great athlete -- albeit in fantasy. I was only half serious and I thought they would laugh, but Murphy is interested. Broe was Chief of Station in Tokyo during the Olympics in 1964 and he's not too enthusiastic. But I sent another cable back to Mexico City, telling them that the proposal is approved in principle and that headquarters will discuss with the State Department and look for a candidate. Kaufman says I've got better than a fifty-fifty chance of going. I think I'll postpone that resignation -- maybe in the Olympics I could make a connection for a new job. Tonight I'll do some push-ups and maybe run around the block. They say Mexico City is a great place to live. The other day a RYBAT cable arrived from Mexico City showing how the system works there. The Chief of Station advised that Luis Echeverria, ‡ the Minister of Government (internal security), told him he has just been secretly selected as the next Mexican President. Echeverria is now the famous tapado (covered one) whom the top inner circle of the ruling party, the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI), select well in advance to be the next president. Although Echeverria said it in a somewhat indirect manner, the Chief of Station has no doubt that he was intentionally being let in on the secret -- even though the elections won't be held until 1970. The information in the cable is extremely sensitive, not so much because it's a secret but because presidential succession in Mexico is supposedly a decision made by a broad representation within the PRI. For years leaders of the PRI have been denying that presidential succession is determined secretly by the incumbent, ex-presidents, and a few other PRI leaders -- they even have a nominating convention and all the appearances of mass participation. The Mexico branch Reports Officer sent a 'blue stripe' report (very limited distribution) over to the White House and the State Department on Echeverria's good news. Washington DC 1 December 1966 In last Sunday's elections in Uruguay the Blanco-Colorado constitutional- reform pact was adopted, and the Colorados won the presidency -- it'll be General Gestido who resigned from the NCG last April to campaign for reform. The Colorados will also control the legislature so there will be no more excuses for lack of action. The PCU political front, FIDEL, made considerable gains. They won six seats in the legislature on 70,000 votes (5.7 per cent of the total) reflecting a gain from 41,000 votes (3.5 per cent) in 1962 and 27,000 votes (2.6 per cent) in 1958 when the Blancos took over. During these eight years the PCU has more than doubled its percentage of the vote and tripled its representation in the legislature. Heber and Storace didn't fare very well. They were running together, Heber for President and Storace for Vice-President, and among Blanco lists they came in a distant third with only 83,000 of the over one million votes cast. Yesterday Heber decided to take a two-month vacation -- his term as NCG President has only three months left -- and Luis Vargas resigned as Director of Immigration. It is unlikely that any additional action against the Soviets, East Germans or others will be taken, but the record for expulsions during the eleven months since we started working with Storace and Vargas is impressive: six Soviets, three North Koreans, two East Germans, and one Czech. Washington DC 5 December 1966 My assignment to the Mexico City station under Olympic cover is still hopeful although there have been several delays caused by consultations between the station and the Ambassador and between headquarters and the department. Meanwhile I've embarked on a reading programme that reveals Mexico to be just as interesting as Ecuador and Uruguay -- perhaps more so because of the terrible failures of its violent movements for social justice. As in Ecuador and other Latin American countries, Mexico had its 'liberal revolution' during the nineteenth century, but here too it served mainly to curtail power of the Catholic Church. By the time the Revolution broke out in 1910, ending thirty-five years of dictatorship, over three-quarters of total investment in Mexico was in foreign hands, with U.S.-owned capital valued at close to one billion dollars. Not surprisingly, then, the two main forces in the 1910-20 Revolution were agrarian reform and economic nationalism, the latter of increasing importance after U.S. military occupation of Veracruz in support of the side seeking a return to pre-1910 conditions. However, struggles over the degree and immediacy of implementing the Revolution's goals produced a civil war that claimed over a million lives, perhaps two million, by the time it ended in the 1920s. Many of the Revolution's leaders were among its victims. Most of the nationalist and agrarian ideals of the Mexican Revolution are embodied in the 1917 Constitution which is still in effect today. Specific implementation of the Constitution's principles, however, was left for later state and federal laws -- what amounted to a gradualist approach that would allow for postponement and negotiations in the short run and major change in emphasis in the long run. From the beginning of the Revolution, agrarian reform was considered as the basis for all other social and economic change, although there was plenty of disagreement over the degree and speed of land redistribution. The dominant theme was backward looking: revindication for land deprivation of peasants caused by prior patterns of concentration. Possession of the land by peasants, it was thought; would increase production and above all would lead to dignity, the rural dignity that would serve as the foundation for the new sense of nationality, as the Revolution reversed the habit of exhalting foreign things while denigrating things Mexican. Although private landholdings rose in number after redistribution began, the dominant institutional pattern for agrarian reform was the ejido: the communal lands owned by a village and divided among the peasants who could alienate their parcels only with great difficulty. The ejido, then, was in theory a return to the pre-Reform a tenure that was eliminated by the Constitution of 1857. Agrarian reform proceeded slowly at first, restricted mainly to the 'legitimizing' of land seizures made during the years of civil war. But in the late 1920s expropriations and redistribution accelerated, reaching a zenith during the presidency of Lazaro Cardenas (1934-40) who distributed over forty million acres that affected more than two million people. Presidents who followed Cardenas continued to redistribute land, although on a reduced level, while persistent mass rural poverty provoked criticism and allegations of failure in this most fundamental of the Revolution's programmes. In addition to being the high point for land redistribution, the Cardenas regime is also considered to be the culmination of the Revolution's goal to recover industry and natural resources from foreign control. Nationalization of the American and British-owned petroleum industry in 1938 is the best-known of Cardenas's applications of the 1917 Constitution's provisions for nationalist economic policies. World War II brought Mexico and the U.S. closer together again, and for many observers the original agrarian and nationalist drives ended during this period. During the government of Miguel Aleman in 1946-52 foreign capital was invited back to Mexico and has been increasing steadily in spite of a 'mexicanization' programme requiring 51 per cent Mexican ownership of important firms. Aleman and the governments that followed channelled new investment into major mining and manufacturing industries as well as agriculture, irrigation, electric power and tourism. By 1965 foreign investment in Mexico had grown to 1.75 billion dollars, 80 per cent of which pertained to the hundreds of U.S. companies operating there. Also, since World War II, the Mexican government has constructed thousands of miles of roads, hundreds of new schools, and many social overhead projects such as potable water systems. By 1965 the coefficient of investment was up to 18.9 per cent following an average GDP growth rate during 1961-65 of 6.6 per cent, equivalent to 3 per cent per capita. Mexico's diversified exports (coffee, cotton, sugar, wheat, corn, fruits, sulphur, precious metals) rose in value an average of 8.5 per cent annually during the same period. At first glance this would appear to be an optimistic situation with the land in the hands of the peasants and high agricultural and industrial growth rates. Surely the faster industry grows, the more resources will become available for investment in rural projects like irrigation and transportation, and in social overhead like education, housing and medical services. But a closer examination reveals the uneven nature of post-World War II developments in Mexico and lends credence to the view that the original goals of social justice and equitable distribution of income disappeared following the Cardenas regime. The central problem is similar to much of the rest of Latin American development: the emergence of a capital-intensive modern sector that provides employment for only a relatively small portion of the labour force -- in the case of Mexico about 15 per cent. In spite of rapid expansion the modern sector seems unable to absorb a greater portion of the workers, leaving the vast majority bogged down in the primitive sector of unemployed and marginally employed, subsistence farming and menial services. Perhaps the best illustration of Mexico's uneven growth is found in the way its average per capita income of 475 dollars -- slightly higher than the general Latin American average -- is distributed. According to the Inter-American Development Bank the poorer half of Mexico's population receives only about 15 per cent of the total personal income -- averaging about twelve dollars per person per month. According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, [1] the 15 per cent of national income received by the lower-income 50 per cent of the population is less than is received by the same group in almost all the other countries of Latin America. In Mexico the poorest 20 per cent of the population receives only 3.6 per cent of total national income -- lower than the comparable amount for El Salvador, Costa Rica and Colombia. The poorest 10 per cent of the Mexican population, who number some 4.2 million persons receive an average income of only about five dollars per month. Moreover, both the shares of the poorest 20 per cent and the lower 50 per cent of the population have declined between 1950 and 1965 -- and the absolute value of the income of the poorest 20 per cent has also declined. Clearly the poor in Mexico have been getting poorer despite near-boom conditions in agriculture and industry. What groups, then, has the Mexican government favoured during the period since World War II? According to the same ECLA data, the high 5 per cent of the Mexican income scale receives almost 26 per cent of the national income -- although the share of this group has fallen from about 33 per cent since 1950. The other 45 per cent of the top half of the population has increased its share and is now receiving about 55 per cent of the national income. In conclusion, ECLA reports that there is little indication of change in Mexican income distribution since 1950 except that the poor are somewhat worse off and the high 5 per cent has yielded some of its share while retaining over a quarter of the national income. What to think about this disproportionate income distribution -- an average per capita annual income of 475 dollars yet with half the population receiving only about 150 dollars a year. Or put another way, the richest 20 per cent of the Mexican population receives about 55 per cent of national income whereas the poorest 20 per cent receives less than 4 per cent. Never mind material incentives and creation of internal markets -- the Mexican Revolution, if it ever moved towards social justice, is clearly serving minority interests today. Washington DC 10 December 1966 The more I learn of Mexico, the more the Mexican Revolution appears as empty rhetoric, or, at best, a badly deformed movement taken over by entrepreneurs and bureaucrats. For the decisions that have allowed such grossly out of proportion income distribution to develop have been brought about by the single political organization that evolved on the winning side during the Revolution and that became the umbrella for attracting the diverse sectors of Mexican society into the 'revolutionary process'. This party, now called the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI), has exercised a one-party dictatorship since the 1920s. The PRI is a curious institution both because of its long monopoly of power and because of its heterogeneous composition. Theoretically it consists of three sectors, each embodied in a mass organization: the peasant sector in the National Campesino Confederation (CNC), the workers' sector in the Mexican Workers' Confederation (CTM) and the popular (middle class) sector in the National Confederation of Popular Organizations (CNOP). Each of the mass organizations has its own national, state and local bureaucratic structures that participate in the corresponding national, state and local PRI bureaucracy, lobbying for political decisions favourable to its interests. In reality, however, decisions of importance, including the naming of candidates for office, are usually made by the PRI headquarters in Mexico City, which is headed by a seven-man executive committee, often with participation by the Ministry of Government (internal security) or the Presidency. Lobbying by the mass organizations and the local PRI organizations assists in the decision-making process, but the direction of the process is clearly from the top down. The PRI's effective use of its three mass organizations and its internal system of democratic centralism has enabled it to make good its claim to a monopoly on interpreting the goals and executing the programmes of the Revolution. Advantages accruing from this success are political stability since the 1920s and the attractive climate for foreign investment since World War II. Efficiency has also been high inasmuch as the legislature and the judiciary are subordinate to the executive and under PRI control anyway. Suppression of the political opposition, especially communists and other Marxists, has been easy and effective whenever necessary. Such political opposition that appears from time to time is still treated by the PRI in the traditional manner. First, an attempt is made to bring the opposition group into some form of inclusion or cooperation with the PRI itself. If this fails a close watch is maintained until the right moment arrives for repression. One recent example of the first method was the straying by former President Cardenas in 1961 when he became a leader of the newly-formed and extreme-left National Liberation Movement (MLN). By 1964, after public attacks against him by PRI leaders, Cardenas returned to the fold and supported the official PRI candidate for President -- causing a serious split in the MLN . Another example was the Independent Campesino Confederation (CCI) set up in the early 1960s as a rival to the PRI's CNC. The CCI was led by Alfonso Garzon, a former CNC leader, and had a strong following with a radical agrarian programme. A combination of government repression of the CCI and overtures to Garzon to return to the PRI succeeded in obtaining renewed support for the PRI by Garzon. Meanwhile Garzon caused a split in the CCI by trying to expel its communist leaders, who nevertheless continued active in the branch of the CCI they controlled. Because the challenge to the PRI's leadership of the Revolution must obviously come from the left, both ideologically and in terms of specific social and economic programmes, the PRI shows the least tolerance towards leftist groups that refuse to cooperate. Repression is regular and punishment is severe. A recent example is the jailing in 1964 of Ramon Danzos Palomino, leader of the pro-communist branch of the CCI, who campaigned for the presidency that year even though his communist-backed electoral organization was not allowed to be officially registered. His effectiveness in creating a following, however, led to the PRI decision to put him away for a while. Usually, the offence for undesirable opposition political activities is 'social dissolution' of one kind or another. The PRI, then, has its own version of democratic centralism and transmission belts through mass organizations. Political opposition that can be controlled or co-opted is tolerated, in fact encouraged, while adamant opposition is kept well in check through heavy-handed repression. Civil liberties are commensurate with toleration of dissent, variable from time to time, and public-information media are well trained in self-censorship. Prudence suggests working within the system in Mexico, and PRI slogans, not surprisingly, are coined on the themes of 'social peace' and 'national unity'. The seemingly simple questions cannot be avoided: if the PRI represents the campesinos, workers and popular classes as its mass organizations and propaganda would have them believe, how then has it allowed the business, industrial and professional leaders to corner such an inordinate share of the national income? Can it be that the PRI leaders themselves aspire to enter that top 5 per cent through their political activities? Or, perhaps more accurately, is not the PRI -- and the revolutionary process earlier -- simply the instrument of the industrial, professional and business communities and the servant of the top 5 per cent? Why, finally, are the supposed beneficiaries of the Mexican Revolution still the most deprived some fifty years after the fighting ended in victory? Washington DC 15 December 1966 The Mexico and Cuba branches have returned to headquarters from the Ames building, which makes meetings with colleagues from the Soviet Bloc Division easier, but the daily routine involved in keeping paper moving is heavy and uninspiring. Reading the intelligence reports and the daily cable and dispatch correspondence between headquarters and the Mexico City station, and the operational files as well, reveals the same basic counter-insurgency approach as in Montevideo, Quito and other WH stations. We prop up the good guys, our friends, while we monitor carefully the bad guys, our enemies, and beat them down as often as possible. In Mexico the government keeps our common enemy rather well controlled with our help -- and what the government fails to do, the station can usually do by itself. The operational environment, then, is friendly even though the enemy is considerable in size, dangerous in intent and sensitive in its close proximity to the United States. The enemy in Mexico: The Popular Socialist Party (PPS) The largest of several extreme-left political groups is the PPS with an estimate membership of about 40,000. Founded in the late 1940s by Vicente Lombardo Toledano, who had reorganized Mexican labour into the Mexican Workers' Confederation (CTM) during the Cardenas presidency, the PPS is the only communist party recognized by the Mexican government. During the transitional government following Cardenas and preceding Aleman -- the World War II years -- Lombardo was eased aside as leader of the PRI labour sector, and during the years that followed he built the PPS into one of the largest Marxist parties in the Western Hemisphere. He was also the President of the Latin American Labor Confederation (CTAL), the regional affiliate of the Prague-based World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), until the CTAL was disbanded in 1964. Although for CIA purposes the PPS sis considered a communist party, it is unorthodox because of its local character and autonomy, both features resulting from the forceful, caudillo-like personality of Lombardo. Nevertheless, it supports Soviet foreign policy and Marxist solutions to national problems while disdaining violent revolution for gradualist, peaceful tactics. It is strongly opposed to U.S. investment in Mexico and to the close ties between the Mexican and the U.S. governments. The odd PPS autonomy in the international context is confused by its cooperative, though limited, support for the PRI at home. Thus the PPS is perhaps the best example of the PRI policy of allowing a controlled opposition to operate in order for dissidents to be attracted to the submissive opposition instead of to the uncompromising groups. Since the 1958 elections, for example, the PPS has publically supported the PRI presidential candidates while running its own congressional candidates. The PPS receives corresponding support from the PRI in several ways, apart from simply being allowed to operate. Mexican law requires 75,000 signatures for a political party to be registered officially for elections. Although the PPS membership is far below the required number, the PRI allows the fiction to exist that the PPS is entitled to registration. As a result, in the 1964 elections the PPS increased its representation in the Chamber of Deputies from one to ten, taking advantage of the new electoral law providing for special deputies seats for minority parties. These ten seats of the PPS constitute 5 per cent of the Chamber's seats although the PPS polled less than 1 per cent of the votes. It is common belief, moreover, that the PPS receives a direct financial subsidy from the PRI although good intelligence on the subject is lacking. The PPS has a youth wing, Juventud Popular, which has two to three thousand members and exerts some influence in the two main Mexican student organizations: The National Federation of Technical Students (FNET) and the University Student Federation (FEU). The PPS has supported the frequent student demonstrations this year although with care not to promote revolutionary violence. The principal front work of the PPS is concentrated in the General Union of Workers and Peasants (UGOCM) formed by Jacinto Lopez, former leader of the CNC which is the PRI campesino front. The UGOCM has an estimated membership of 20,000, mostly campesinos, and is affiliated with the WFTU. With major strength in the state of Sonora, the UGOCM has sponsored land invasions by peasants but with little government repression -- an indication of PRI tolerance and use of its controlled opposition. Lopez himself, although a defector from the PRI, was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1964 and is generally considered to be the PPS number-two man. He too is a gradualist and clear beneficiary of working-within-the-system. In spite of its tactical successes the PPS is considerably troubled by factionalism on the left. Recently a 'leftist' PPS group led by Rafael Estrada Villa split from the PPS and took the name National Revolutionary Directorate (DNR). Estrada continues as a PPS Deputy although the DNR leans towards the more militant Chinese line. The PPS, then, is the approved watering-hole on the left for those who find the PRI too moderate. Its voter attraction is slight, almost negligible, and in the PRI's eyes its function is tolerable as long as the PPS follows the rules. The PRI makes a few rewards available to keep the PPS leadership bought off -- like the ten Deputies' seats -- and the only danger is in the PPS's condition of unwilling gestator of dangerous factions such as the Estrada group. The Communist Party of Mexico (PCM ) Although operating in Mexico since the 1920s, the PCM has never been able to attract a numerous membership -- now estimated at about 5000, mostly from rural and urban lower middle and lower classes. The PCM also includes some professionals, intellectuals and cultural leaders, most notably the muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, but for lack of members the PCM has never been able to register officially for elections. The PCM closely follows the Soviet line with main emphasis on the legal struggle, leaving armed action for specific tactical purposes. Its domestic programmes are founded on anti-U.S. nationalism while its foreign policy supports positions of the Soviet Union and defence of the Cuban revolution. Although party activities are seriously hampered by a lack of funds, the PCM manages to keep open a bookstore and to publish a weekly newspaper, La Voz de Mexico. The party's youth wing, the Communist Youth of Mexico, has only about 500 members but exerts considerable influence in the important student organization, the National Center of Democratic Students (CNEO), and in the colleges of law, political science and economics of the National University in Mexico City. Like the PPS, the PCM has supported the student protest demonstrations this year but is careful not to advocate violent revolutionary solutions publically. Until recently the PCM has been fairly successful in penetrating the petroleum workers', railway workers' and teachers' unions. However, PRI repression through the government of the PCM leaders of the petroleum and railway workers' strikes in 1958 has removed much of their influence from these two important unions. The party's influence in the National Union of Education Workers (SNET), an affiliate of the WFTU, remains. In peasants' organizations the PCM has also been successful. In 1963 the party, together with the MLN and a peasant organization led by ex-PRI leader Alfonso Garzon, formed the Independent Campesino Confederation (CCI). When Garzon broke with the PCM later, the PCM leaders of the CCI under Ramon Danzos Palomino retained control of one CCI faction. Also in 1963 the PCM, with the CCI and the faction of the MLN it controlled, formed the People's Electoral Front (FEP) in order to run candidates in the 1964 elections. The PRI, however, did not allow the FEP to register but Danzos obtained about 20,000 write-in votes in spite of the FEP ban. Not long after the elections, Danzos, who was uncompromising and hostile to the PRI, was arrested and he remains in jail today. Government repression of the PCM, the FEP and the PCM -controlled faction of the CCI continues, and the movement is kept well in hand. The repression itself, however, is indicative of PRI worry over PCM influence among the poverty-bound peasant masses. The National Liberation Movement (MLN ) The MLN was formed at the Latin American Conference for National Sovereignty, Economic Emancipation and Peace held in Mexico City in 1961. Former President Lazaro Cardenas, who headed the Conference, also became one of the leaders of the MLN . The idea behind the MLN was to form a political movement dedicated to extreme-left causes that would transcend the ideological differences then separating the established parties, like the PPS and the PCM, and independents. Under Cardenas the MLN had considerable initial success in uniting Marxists of many shades in its programme of promoting Mexican nationalism, support for the Cuban revolution, denunciation of U.S. imperialism, freedom for political prisoners, redistribution of wealth, socialization of the land and similar causes. But in 1962 Vicente Lombardo Toledano, unable to control the MLN in his accustomed manner, withdrew the PPS from the MLN . Then in 1964 Cardenas himself withered under PRI attacks and that year supported the PRI presidential candidate instead of Danzos Palomino who was running the 'illegal' campaign of the People's Electoral Front with PCM and MLN support. Dissention over the FEP electoral campaign started a decline in the MLN although the Mexican delegation to the Tri-Continental Conference in Havana was headed by an MLN leader. The semi-official journal of the MLN, Politica, continues to be published under the direction of Manuel Marcue Pardinas, formerly one of the intellectual leaders of the PPS. Partly because of Cardenas's participation in the MLN, the PRI has not yet mounted really serious measures against it. Nevertheless, some MLN leaders come under regular fire from the PRI as a result of government repression against the PCM, FEP and CCI. The Bolshevik Communist Party of Mexico (PCBM) Some four splinter communist parties follow the Chinese line of which the PCBM is the most important. However, it is not thought to have more than a few hundred members. The People's Revolutionary Movement (MRP) Of three Trotskyist groups, the MRP is the most important although several of its leaders, including Victor Rico Galan, have been jailed this year for agitating in peasant communities. With Rico Galan out of action the MRP has started to decline. The Soviet Mission The Soviets have their largest mission in Latin America (not counting Cuba) in Mexico City with twenty-five diplomatic officials and about an equal number serving in administrative. trade, press and other non-diplomatic capacities. Of these approximately fifty officers, some thirty-five are known or suspected intelligence officers (about twenty-five KGB to ten GRU) which is a rather higher ratio of intelligence officers than the Latin American average for the Soviets. Both the KGB and the GRU missions are believed to have multiple-purpose programmes, including penetration of the U.S. Embassy and the CIA station and intelligence collection on U.S. military installations in the south-west and western us. An unusual number of Soviet intelligence officers in Mexico City have served in the Soviet missions in Washington or New York prior to their Mexican assignments, and they are thought to be continuing to work against U.S. targets from their new vantage-points. Additionally, the Soviet intelligence missions are also thought to be active in penetration operations against the PRI and the Mexican government through their 'agents of influence' programmes, in liaison and support for Mexican and Central American communist parties, propaganda, and the usual friendship and cultural societies. The Czechoslovakian Mission There are eight Czech diplomats and four or five others, of whom three are known and two are suspected intelligence officers. This intelligence mission is also thought to be targeted against the U.S. Embassy and against objectives in the U.S. proper. As elsewhere they are considered to be an auxiliary service of the Soviets, even though they engage in operations of their own peculiar interest such as the cultural exchange and friendship society programmes. The Polish Mission The Poles have six diplomats and five non-diplomatic personnel. About half are known or suspected intelligence officers, and their functions are similar to the Soviet and Czech officers although they seem to be more active among Polish emigres and other foreigners resident in Mexico City. The Yugoslav Mission There are also six Yugoslav diplomats and several additional officials. Three intelligence officers are in the mission and their operations, which are independent of the other communist intelligence services, are directed towards penetration of the local Yugoslav emigre community. U.S. targets are also on their list as are the Soviets, Poles and Czechs. The Cuban Mission The only Cuban diplomatic mission in Latin America is in Mexico City. They have thirteen diplomatic officials and an equal number of non-diplomatic personnel. Over half the officers in the mission are known or suspected intelligence officers. The main Cuban target is penetration of the Cuban exile communities in Mexico and Central America, but they also have operations in Mexico City designed to penetrate the exile communities in the U.S., particularly Miami. Other Cuban intelligence operations are for propaganda and support to the revolutionary organizations of their liking in Mexico and Central America. Traditionally, moreover, the Cuban mission in Mexico City supports the travel of revolutionaries from all over Latin America and the U.S. through the frequent Cubana Airlines flights between Mexico City and Havana. The New China News Agency (NCNA) The Chinese communists have had an NCNA office in Mexico City for several years. However, last month the three Chinese officials were expelled through station liaison operations on the grounds that they were engaged in political activities. The Chinese had, in fact, been using the NCNA office for propaganda and support to pro-Chinese revolutionary organizations in Mexico and Central America. Central American Exiles Mexico has traditionally been a haven for political exiles from Central American countries including communists and other extreme leftists. Several Central American parties, including the Guatemalans, maintain liaison sections in Mexico City in order to keep lines open to the Soviets, Cubans and others. They operate semi-clandestinely for the most part in order to avoid repression from the Mexican government. Washington DC 20 December 1966 Because of the strategic importance of Mexico to the U.S., its size and proximity, and the abundance of enemy activities, the Mexico City station is the largest in the hemisphere. Altogether the station has some fifteen operations officers under State Department cover in the Embassy political section, plus about twelve more officers under assorted non-official covers outside the Embassy. In addition, a sizeable support staff of communications officers, technical services, intelligence assistants, records clerks and secretaries bring the overall station personnel total to around fifty. Liaison Operations Dominating the station operational programme is the LITEMPO ‡ project which is administered by Winston Scott, ‡ the Chief of Station in Mexico City since 1956, with the assistance of Annie Goodpasture, ‡ a case officer who has also been at the station for some years. This project embraces a complicated series of operational support programmes to the various Mexican civilian security forces for the purpose of intelligence exchange, joint operations and constant upgrading of Mexican internal intelligence collection and public security functions. At the top of the LITEMPO operation is the Mexican President, Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, ‡ who has worked extremely closely with the station since he became Minister of Government in the previous administration of Adolfo Lopez Mateos ‡ (1958-64) with whom Scott had developed a very close working relationship. Scott has problems, however, with Luis Echeverria, the current Minister of Government, who is generally unenthusiastic and reluctant in the relationship with the station. Scott fears that Echeverria is following Diaz Ordaz's orders to maintain joint operations with the station only under protest and that the current happy situation may end when Echeverria becomes President in 1970. Scott's chummy relationship with Diaz Ordaz none the less has its problems. In 1964 Fulton Freeman went to Mexico City as Ambassador to crown a, Foreign Service career that had started in the same Embassy in the 1939s. He is expected to retire after the 1968 Olympic Games. At the time of his assignment to Mexico City Freeman's expectations of meaningful diplomatic relations with Diaz Ordaz collided with the President's preference for dealing with Scott, and Freeman was relegated to protocol contacts with the President while his diplomatic talents focused on the Foreign Minister. The problem of who would deal with the President was confused somewhat by the Ambassador's insistence, not long after arrival, on a detailed briefing about the station operational programme, which Scott refused. Eventually both Scott and the Ambassador visited the White House, where President Johnson settled matters according to the wishes of the Agency and of his friend Diaz Ordaz. Scott continued, of course, to work with the President and the Ambassador never got the full briefing he had demanded. Since then the relations between Scott and the Ambassador have warmed, but the Ambassador forbids any station operations directed against the Mexican Foreign Ministry. While Scott frequently meets the President and the Minister of Government, two non-official cover case officers handle the day-to- day contact with the chiefs of the security services subordinate to Echeverria. One of these officers is a former FBI agent who worked in the legal attache's office in the Mexico City Embassy -- the legal attache is usually the FBI office in an American embassy. The FBI officer had left the FBI to come with the station, but pains have been taken to conceal his CIA employment in order to avoid the bad blood that would result from the CIA's 'stealing' of an FBI officer. The two non-official cover officers are the equivalent of an AID Public Safety mission but in Mexico this function is performed secretly by the station in deference to Mexican nationalist sensitivities -- as is the case in Argentina. Through the LITEMPO project we are currently providing advice and equipment for a new secret communications network to function between Diaz Ordaz's office and principal cities in the rest of the country. Other joint operations with the Mexican security services include travel control, telephone tapping and repressive action. The station also prepares a daily intelligence summary for Diaz Ordaz with a section on activities of Mexican revolutionary organizations and communist diplomatic missions and a section on international developments based on information from headquarters. Other reports, often relating to a single subject, are passed to Diaz Ordaz, Echeverria and top security officials. These reports, like the daily round-up, include information from station unilateral penetration agents with due camouflaging to protect the identity of the sources. The station is much better than are the Mexican services, and is thus of great assistance to the authorities in planning for raids, arrests and other repressive action. Liaison between Scott and the Mexican military intelligence services consists mainly of exchange of information, in order to keep a foot in the door for future eventualities. The U.S. military attaches, moreover, are in constant contact with their Mexican military intelligence counterparts and their reports are received regularly by the station. Stan Watson, ‡ the Mexico City Deputy Chief of Station, has been meeting with a South Korean CIA officer who was recently sent under diplomatic cover to monitor North Korean soundings for establishment of missions in Mexico and Central America. Communist Party Operations The station CP section consists of two case officers, Wade Thomas ‡ and Ben Ramirez, ‡ both under Embassy cover, plus two case officers outside the station under non-official cover: Bob Driscoll, ‡ a retired operations officer now working under contract, and Julian Zambianco who was transferred from Guayaquil to Mexico City about a year ago. These officers are in charge of agent and technical penetrations against the revolutionary organizations of importance. The quality of this intelligence is high, although not as high as it was before 1963. In late 1962 Carlos Manuel Pellecer, ‡ the station's most important communist party penetration-agent, broke openly with communism by publishing a book. He was a leader of the Guatemalan Communist Party (PGT) arid had been Minister of Labor in the Arbenz government during the 1950s. However, after the Agency-sponsored overthrow of the Arbenz government Pellecer made his way to Mexico City where for years he was the station's best source (cryptonym LINLUCK) on all the revolutionary organizations in Mexico, not just the Guatemalan exiles. His book, of course, was financed by the station and distributed by the Agency all over Latin America. Pellecer is still being used by the Mexico City station as a propaganda agent, as with other former penetration agents who formally break with communism without revealing their years of work as spies -- Eudocio Ravines, ‡ the well-known Peruvian defector from communism is a parallel case. Another book by Pellecer, also financed by the station, has just appeared. This book is a continuation of CIA exploitation of the Marcos Rodriguez and Joaquin Ordoqui cases in Cuba, and is aimed at denigration of the Cuhan revolution. The station also collects information about communists from the U.S. living in Mexico. Many of them arrived during the McCarthy period and some have subsequently become Mexican citizens. Information about them is mainly of interest to the FBI, which calls them the American Communist Group in Mexico City (ACGMC). Information collected about them includes that obtained through the LIENVOY telephone-tapping operation described below. The station also receives copies of reports from FBI penetration operations against Mexican revolutionary organizations. Mexico is the only country in Latin America, except Puerto Rico, where the FBI continued operations against the local left when the CIA took over in 1947. The FBI intelligence is of high quality. Soviet/ Satellite Operations The largest section in the station is that covering Soviet/satellite operations. It has four case officers, three intelligence assistants and a secretary, all under Embassy cover, and four case officers under non-official cover. It is headed by Paul Dillon ‡ and the other official cover case officers are Donald Vogel, ‡ Cynthia Hausman ‡ and Robert Steele. ‡ A number of sensitive operations are underway. The station has two observation posts in front of the Soviet Embassy, which cover the entrances, plus a third observation post in the back of the Embassy to provide coverage of the gardens. The LICALL A observation post in the back is the closest of five houses bordering the Embassy property -- all five are owned by the station. Several years ago films were made of Soviets conversing in the garden, but attempts by Russian lip-readers to discover their conversations were unsuccessful. From one of the front OP's, radio contact is maintained with the LIEMBRACE surveillance team for signalling when a particular Soviet surveillance target leaves the Embassy, his route and other data. Photos are regularly taken from all the OP's of Soviets and their families and all visitors to the Embassy. When visitors use vehicles, photographs are taken of their license plates for tracing. Occasionally the LICALLA OP is used for electronic monitoring, since it is close to the Embassy, but so far attempts to pick up radiations from Soviet cryptographic equipment have been unsuccessful. In addition to the LIEMBRACE surveillance team, several other support operations include coverage of the Soviets. Through the LIENVOY operation, Soviet telephones are constantly monitored, and through the LIFIRE travel-control operation photographs of travel documents are obtained along with data on arrivals and departures. Monitoring of Mexican diplomatic communications reveals requests for Mexican visas by Soviet officials, including the diplomatic couriers. In addition, NSA is also monitoring several communications systems involving' burst' transmissions from the USSR to as yet unidentified agents believed to be in Mexico -- possibly Soviet intelligence officers assigned abroad as 'illegals', with false identity and non-official cover. The station runs between fifteen and twenty access agents against the Soviets with varying degrees of effectiveness and reliability. Several of these agents are suspected of having been recruited by the Soviets for use as double agents against the station. Twp of the most important of the current access-agents are Katherine Manjarrez, ‡ Secretary of the Foreign Press Association, and her husband - both of whom are targeted against the Soviet press attache and the Tass correspondent. Others are LICOWL-1 ‡ and LIOVAL-1. ‡ LICOWL-1 is the owner of a tiny grocery store situated in front of the Soviet Embassy where the Soviets buy odds and ends including their soft drinks -- TSD is studying ways of bugging a wooden soft-drink case or the bottles themselves. More important, LICOWL-1 is involved at the moment in an operation against the Embassy zavhoz (administrative officer), who spends considerable time chatting with the agent. Because Silnikov, the zavhoz, has been on the prowl for a lover -- or so he said to LICOWL-1 -- the station decided to recruit a young Mexican girl as bait. An appropriate girl was obtained through BESABER, ‡ an agent who is normally targeted against Polish intelligence officers and who runs a ceramics business specializing in souvenirs. By loitering at LICOWL-1's store the girl attracted Silnikov's attention, and a hot necking session in a back room at the store led to several serious afternoon sessions at the girl's apartment nearby -- obtained especially for this operation. Silnikov's virility is astonishing both the girl and the station, which is recording and photographing the sessions without the knowledge of the girl. Although promiscuity among Soviets is not abnormal, relationships with local girls are forbidden. Eventually it will be decided whether to try blackmail against Silnikov or to provoke disruption by sending tapes and photos to the Embassy if the blackmail is refused. LIOVAL-1 is not as interesting a case but is more important. The agent is an American who teaches English in Mexico City and is an ardent fisherman. Through fishing he became acquainted with Pavel Yatskov, the Soviet Consul and a known senior KGB officer -- possibly the Mexico City rezident (KGB chief). Yatskov and the agent spend one or two week-ends per month off in the mountains fishing and have developed a very close friendship. When Yatskov is transferred back to Moscow -- he has already been in Mexico for some years -- we shall decide whether to try to defect him through LIOVAL-1. There is some talk of offering him $500,000 to defect. The Company is also willing to set him up with an elaborate cover as the owner of an income-producing fishing lodge in Canada. Recently Peter Deriabin, ‡ the well-known KGB defector from the 1950s who is now a U.S. citizen and fulltime CIA employee, went to Mexico City to study the voluminous reports on Yatskov written by LIOVAL-1. He concluded that there is a strong possibility that LIOVAL-l has been recruited by Yatskov and is reporting on Paul Dillon, the station officer in charge of this case. Nevertheless, the operation continues while the counterintelligence aspects are studied further. The station double-agent cases against the Soviets, LICOZY-1, ‡ LICOZY-3 ‡ and LICOZY-5, ‡ are all being wound up for lack of productivity or problems of control. One of these agents, LICOZY-3, is an American living in Philadelphia who was recruited by the Soviets while a student in Mexico, but who reported the recruitment and worked for the Mexico City station. He worked for the FBI after returning to the U.S. -- the Soviet case officer was a UN official at one time -- but recently Soviet interest in him has fallen off and the FBI turned the case back over to the Agency for termination. Against the Czechs and the Poles many of the same types of operation are targeted. Access agents, observation posts, telephone tapping, surveillance and travel control are continuous although with somewhat less intensity than against the Soviets. In the Yugoslav Embassy the code clerk has been recruited by the CIA as has one of the Embassy's secretaries. Until the New China News Agency (NCNA) office was closed last month by the Mexican government, the Soviet/satellite section of the station was responsible for following the movements of the Chinese communists. Telephone intercepts through LIENVOY and occasional surveillance by the LIRICE team were directed against them, but the most important intelligence collected against them was from the bugging of their offices. The audio operation was supported by the Far East Division in headquarters, who sent an operations officer and transcribers to Mexico City. Now that the NCNA offices are closed, the audio equipment will be removed and the station will continue to follow up the many leads coming from the bugging operation. Cuban Operations The Cuban operations section consists of two case officers, Francis Sherry ‡ and Joe Piccolo, ‡ and a secretary under Embassy cover and one case officer under non-official cover. An observation post for photographic coverage and radio contact with the LIEMBRACE surveillance team is functioning, as well as LIENVOY telephone monitoring and LIFIRE airport travel control. Through the LIFIRE team the station obtains regular clandestine access to the Prensa Latina pouch from Havana, and copies of correspondence between PL headquarters in Havana and its correspondents throughout the hemisphere are forwarded to the stations concerned. Through the L1TEMPO liaison operation the Mexican immigration service provides special coverage of all travellers to and from Havana on the frequent Cubana flights. Each traveller is photographed and his passport is stamped with arrival or departure cachets indicating Havana travel. The purpose is to frustrate the Cuban practice of issuing visas on separate slips of paper instead of in the passport so as to obscure travel. Prior to each Cubana departure the station is notified of all passengers so that name checks can be made. In the case of U.S. citizens, the Mexican service obliges by preventing departure when requested by the station. The most important current operation targeted against the Cuban mission is an attempted audio penetration using the telephone system. Telephone company engineers working in the LIDENY tapping operation will eventually install new wall-boxes for the Embassy telephones in which sub-miniature transmitters with switches will have been cast by TSD. At the moment, however, the engineers are causing deliberate interference in Embassy telephones by technical means in the exchange. Each time the Embassy calls the telephone company to complain of interference on the lines, the engineers report back that everything in the exchange is in order. Eventually, as the interference continues, the engineers will check street connections and finally arrive to check the instruments in the Embassy. They will find the wall-boxes 'defective' and will replace them with the bugged boxes cast by TSD. Right now, however, this operation (cryptonym: LISAMPAN) is still in the 'interference-complaint-testing' stage. Another important operation directed against the Cubans is a sophisticated provocation that won the CIA Intelligence Medal for Stan Archenhold, ‡ the case officer who conceived it. The operation consisted of a series of letters sent to the Cuban intelligence service in their Mexico City Embassy from a person who purported to be a CIA officer trying to help them. The letters purport to implicate Joaquin Ordoqui, a respected, old-guard leader of the Cuban Communist Party and a high-ranking military leader, as a CIA agent. I haven't learned all the details of this operation, but my impression is that Ordoqui may have been an informant during the 1950's when exiled in Mexico, but that he refused to continue and was subsequently 'burned' by the Agency to the Cubans. The letters continue to be sent to Cuban intelligence although Ordoqui was arrested in 1964, and the desired controversy and dissension in the Cuban revolutionary leadership followed. As the cover of Sherry, the chief of the Cuban operations section, is in the Embassy consular section, he has been able to meet several of the Cuban consular officers directly. However, his main agent for direct assessment of the Cubans is Leander Vourvoulias, ‡ Consul of Greece and President of the Consular Corps. Support Operations The support operations must also be detailed. The joint operation for telephone tapping, LIENVOY, is effected in cooperation with the Mexican authorities and has a capacity for about forty lines. The station provides the equipment, the technical assistance, couriers and transcribers, while the Mexicans make the connections in the exchanges and maintain the listening posts. In addition to monitoring the lines of the communist diplomatic missions and those of Mexican revolutionary groups, LIENVOY also covers special cases. For years the telephones of ex-President Cardenas and his daughter have been tapped, and recently tapping has started on that of Luis Quintanilla, a Mexican intellectual who is planning a trip to Hanoi with the publisher of the Miami News and with a fellow of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara. Reports on plans for this trip are sent immediately to the White House. The station also has its own unilateral telephone-tapping operation which is limited to special cases where the involvement of the Mexicans is thought to be undesirable. Connections for this operation are made outside the exchanges by telephone company engineers who work as station agents, as in the case of the bugging of the Cuban Embassy (LISAMPAN). However this is restricted as far as possible in order to avoid damaging relations with the Mexicans in the event of discovery. Travel control, general investigations and occasional surveillance are the duties of a six-man team called LIFIRE. They obtain flight-travel lists from the airport, which are passed daily to the station and take photographs of passengers to and from communist countries and of their passports as they pass through immigration. Another eight-man surveillance team, known as LIEMBRACE, has vehicles (including a Volkswagen photo-van) and radio-communications equipment and is mainly concerned with Soviet/ satellite and Cuban targets. It is administered by Jim Anderson, ‡ who also controls another eight-man team (LIRICE), similarly equipped, which deals with the Mexican revolutionaries and other miscellaneous targets. Postal interception is mainly directed towards the mail from communist countries, but can occasionally be used to get correspondence from selected Mexican addresses. As in every station, a variety of people assist in support tasks which they perform in the course of their ordinary jobs. For processing the immigration papers for station non-official cover personnel, for example, Judd Austin, ‡ one of the U.S. lawyers in Goodrich, Dalton, Little and Riquelme (the principal law firm serving American subsidiaries) is used. The Executive Vice-President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Mexico City, Al Wichtrich, ‡ channels political information to the station that he picks up in his normal work with American and Mexican businessmen. For technical support the station has an officer of TSD under Embassy cover with a workshop and qualifications in audio, flaps and seals, and photography. Covert-Action Operations The station covert-action operations section consists of Stanley Watson, ‡ the Deputy Chief of Station, and two case officers under Embassy cover plus one case officer under non-official cover. Operations underway provide for placing propaganda in the major Mexico City dailies, several magazines and television. Student operations are centred mostly in the National University of Mexico (UNAM), while labour operations are concentrated on support for and guidance of the Mexico City headquarters of ORIT. ‡ Station labour operations also include agents at the new ORIT school in Cuernavaca (built with CIA funds) for spotting and assessment of trainees for use in labour operations after they return to their country of origin. The Mexico programmes of the American Institute for Free Labor Development ‡ (AIFLD) are also under station direction. Although the LITEMPO operation and others provide constant political intelligence on the Mexican situation, the station has one official cover case officer, Bob Feldman, ‡ working full-time on LICOBRA, which is the operation for penetrating the PRI and the Mexican government. This officer works closely with the legitimate political section of the Embassy and is currently cultivating several PRI legislators for recruitment. Another LICOBRA target is an office in the Ministry of Government called the Department of Political and Social Investigations. This office, although part of a government ministry, is the main repository of the PRI for information on political officialdom (PRI and opposition) throughout the country. Still another LICOBRA target is the Foreign Ministry, where operations are now stalled because of the Ambassador's insistence that the station refrain from operations against this Ministry. It is in LICOBRA operations that the station and headquarters believe the Olympic attache cover would be especially useful. By a determined effort at recruitment of unilateral penetrations of the PRI and the Mexican government, a better balance can be obtained between the excellent liaison operations and controlled agent sources. Rafael Fusoni, ‡ an agent who has been in the LICOBRA programme for some time, is already working as an agent in the Olympic Organizing Committee, as Assistant Director of Public Relations. The Mexico City station, in spite of its wide-ranging operational activities and numerous personnel, is well known for its excellent administration. Two administrative officers and a secretary handle finances and property, but Win Scott, the Chief of Station, is exceptional in his attention to administrative details as well as to operations. Each officer in the station is required on leaving to advise the receptionist where he is going and when he will be back. Morning tardiness is not tolerated, cables and dispatches are answered promptly, and project renewals and operational progress reports are expected to be submitted on time. Considered altogether, the Mexico City station is a tight operation -- it has to be with fifty employees and a budget of 5.5 million dollars. The station also has a reports section that consists of one senior reports officer and an assistant. This office processes all information received by the station that can possibly be of interest to headquarters customers or other stations, writes the reports, and keeps appropriate files. The records section is the largest and most efficient of any station in the hemisphere and is said to be Scott's pride. It contains detailed personality files on thousands of Mexicans and foreigners resident in Mexico, in addition to intelligence subject files, project files and extensive index files. The records section is administered by a qualified records officer with two full-time assistants and four working wives. Such a large station obviously cannot get many more than half the employees integrated as State Department employees. Some of the secretaries and intelligence assistants who work in the station go to Mexico ostensibly as tourists and are taken on the Embassy payroll as 'local hire'. Others work in the station without 'normalization' as Embassy employees. Still others, who do not work in the Embassy, use cover as tourists, public relations representatives, businessmen, even retired people. Adequate cover is a continuing problem but solutions can usually be found. The nearness of Mexico to the U.S., the exceptional relations between the station and the Mexican government, and abundant U.S. tourism allow thin solutions that would be impossible in other countries. Washington DC 15 January 1967 Still more delay on whether and when I'll go to Mexico City under Olympic cover. For the time being, unfortunately, attention in WH Division has turned to the Montevideo station where preparations have started for the conference of OAS Presidents to be held in Punta del Este in April, to which President Johnson will be going. In WH Division a special group has been formed to assign additional personnel to Montevideo, to set up a special base in Punta del Este, and to establish special liaison procedures with the Secret Service White House Detail. John Hanke, ‡ the officer in charge of the headquarters task force, told me that the Montevideo station has asked that I go back to work with the police. Old bureaucrat Kaufman, however, doesn't want my desk empty any longer than necessary so he's going to delay my departure as long as he can. I'm not terribly cheered by the idea of working again with Otero and company but just getting back to Montevideo would be a joy compared with this headquarters work. Before going I'll have to finish the paper-work on two new officers going to Mexico City under non-official cover to work on Soviet operations. One is a contract agent who formerly trained infiltration-exfiltration teams for maritime operations against Cuba - he ran a special base on an island not far from Miami. The other is Jack Kindschi, ‡ a staff officer who is being reassigned to Mexico City from the Stockholm station. Conveniently his cover as a public relations expert for the Robert Mullen Co. ‡ will be the same in Mexico as in Sweden. While I'm away, my work will be handled by Bruce Berckmans, ‡ a recent graduate of the Career Training Program, the new name given to the old JOT Program. Berckmans is an ex-Marine and will be going to Mexico City in a few months for communist party penetration-operations, which is his area of responsibility now in the branch. He'll have nonofficial cover as a marketing and agri-business consultant. Montevideo 1 March 1967 If Johnson gets assassinated it won't be for lack of protection. Our task force here has grown to about sixty people from headquarters and from other WH stations. Every nook and cranny in the station offices is filled with a desk or typing table. In Punta del Este we've set up a base in a house not far from where Johnson will stay which is almost next to the hotel where the conference sessions will be held. The Secret Service advance party has set up an office in the station for quick passage of intelligence reports, which we are receiving from many other stations as well as from our own sources here. The object is to follow up all the leads on possible assassination attempts that turn up here or in other countries -- all WH stations are reporting the travel of extreme-leftists or their sudden dropping out of sight. Two sections of the task force are doing most of the work in following up these leads and in other preparations with Uruguayan security people. The station CP section under Bob Riefe is combing files on every important Uruguayan resident of far-left tendencies who might be involved in action against Johnson or other presidents. Taking pains to avoid passing information that might jeopardize sources, reports for police intelligence are being prepared along with a master check-list for use at the control points separating the different security zones that increase in intensity from Montevideo to Punta del Este. The Liaison section, in which I am working, is in charge of writing these reports in Spanish and getting them over to Otero at police headquarters. Under normal circumstances we would not pass information from unilateral sources of high quality to the police, because there is high probability that the reports will seep out to the enemy through poor police security, but we're taking chances given the high stakes. Argentines, Paraguayans, Brazilians and others not resident. in Uruguay but possible threats are included in this report procedure, and Otero's files are growing as never before. By the end of the month several hundred of these individual reports will have been passed along with many special leads from sources in Montevideo and other stations. Montevideo 2 April 1967 Each day, it seems, another wild story reaches the station on a terrorist plan to assault, bomb, poison or simply hex the conference. Checking these stories out has brought me into the homes of an array of weird people, sometimes with an over-eager Secret Service agent anxious to try thumbscrews to get the whole truth. One story, however, couldn't be taken lightly and for the past week I've been spending day and night trying to resolve it. The original report came from BIDAFFY-1, ‡ a penetration agent of the Buenos Aires station who is on the fringes of the terrorist group of John William Cooke. Cooke is a well-known extreme left-wing Peronist with close ties to Cuban intelligence. The report from BIDAFFY-1 alleged that Cooke and an unknown number of his followers are coming to Montevideo before the Conference in order to infiltrate the restricted Punta del Este area for bomb attacks and such other terrorism as they can mount. The agent does not know the names of persons to accompany Cooke but the plan is first to operate from an apartment owned by Cooke in the Rambla Hotel, a twenty-storey decaying building on the beachfront in Pocitos. Rather than pass this data to the police, which might jeopardize BIDAFFY-1, we decided to try to verify the report and call in the police after Cooke is here. Through the AVENIN surveillance team I obtained a hotel room on the same floor as Cooke's apartment and called over Frank Sherno, the regional technical support officer stationed in Buenos Aires. For two long nights Sherno tried unsuccessfully to open the lock to Cooke's apartment, using the battery-operated handgun vibrator with assorted picks. Then he made a key for the door -- by the time it would work three more nights had passed. By this time our repeated trips between our room and the Cooke apartment had aroused the suspicions of the elevator operators, while the lobby employees were wondering out loud what three men were doing night after night in a room for two. My fear has been growing that the hotel manager might advise the police, which could reveal one or two of the AVENIN agents to Otero. Last night, nevertheless, Sherno finally got Cooke's apartment open. On our first entry, after checking carefully for booby traps, we found a large wooden crate in the main room -- just about the right length for rifles or other shoulder weapons. It was nailed shut and banded but the panelling was broken towards one of the corners and inside I could see books, magazines and other printed matter -- possible filler or cover for more important objects underneath. I decided to leave the crate alone but we installed two battery-operated radio transmitters -- one in the bedsprings and one above a curtain box. In our room we left receivers and recording equipment for the AVENIN agents who will alternate on monitoring duties. This morning a cable arrived from Buenos Aires with another BIDAFFY-1 report: Cooke's daughter is coming today and will probably stay at the apartment -- possibly others of the group will follow shortly. I discussed the crate with the Secret Service chief who offered to lend us a portable X-ray machine that the Service uses on gifts given to President Johnson. Tonight the Secret Service agent who operates the machine will accompany me with the machine to our hotel room where we will stand by for a surreptitious entry. This afternoon Cooke's daughter did indeed arrive -- with her lover. The AVENIN team will follow them when they leave the building and will advise us by radio when they begin to return. Meanwhile we will slip into the Cooke apartment and take X-ray pictures of the crate. I hope the elevator in the hotel will be able to lift this 'portable' machine, never mind our wrestling it clandestinely down the hall. Anybody who interferes with us gets enough radiation to fry his bone marrow. Montevideo 4 April 1967 After a night and a morning of listening to regular concerts from the bedsprings, we finally heard Cooke's daughter and boyfriend leave the apartment. With great effort we got the X-ray machine into place, donned lead aprons and turned on the juice. With each picture -- we had to take several because the crate was much larger than the X-ray negative -- the lights dimmed and I thought we would blow the electrical system, but we were back in our room with the machine quite soon. The X-ray operator and I took the machine back to the station where he developed the film -- fortunately nothing showed up except nails. This afternoon the couple returned to Buenos Aires without having made one remark about other people coming or even of the conference. They had a quiet little visit, our monitors learned a new trick or two, and in my report I'll recommend BIDAFFY-1 for a special bonus on account of his imaginative reporting. Getting the reports and check lists to the police security force has been consuming more time during this final period. Now we have started to organize the procedures for Johnson's security on arrival at the Montevideo airport and for the helicopter flight to Punta del Este. John Horton, ‡ the Chief of Station, will be at the aircraft parking site beside the terminal building with Secret Service agents while ten other CIA officers will be at strategic locations in the terminal building. Each of us will be responsible for watching certain windows and making certain that they are not opened. My post will be on the roof of the terminal building, just below the control tower. Each of us will have walkie-talkie communications with the rest of the airport team, and I will have a second, higher-powered walkie-talkie to report each detail to the station. Instantaneous reports will be sent by the station to Washington based on my indications of when Johnson's aircraft comes in sight, the moment of touch-down, parking, Johnson's descent and reception, his boarding of the helicopter, lift-off and disappearance. Other reports will follow from officers in cars on the highway to Punta del Este -- Johnson's helicopters, in fact, will never be out of sight of CIA officers from before landing in Montevideo to the helicopter pad in Punta del Este, seventy miles away. Once Johnson is in Punta del Este, security will be less of a problem because of zonal restriction of movement in that area, the use of special badges and other precautions. As Johnson will be one of the last presidents to arrive, we will be able to practice on his colleagues during the two days before he gets here. Montevideo 14 April 1967 Both for Johnson's arrival three days ago and his departure today everything went perfectly. Back in the station during the party Horton handed me a cable from headquarters telling me that I should return immediately in order to prepare to go to Mexico City for the Olympic assignment. Tonight I'll try for a seat on one of the Air Force cargo planes flying back to Washington. Results of the Conference? Well, they finally put to rest the original concerns of the Alliance for Progress for agrarian reform, income redistribution and social and economic integration. Just as well, I suppose, since none of the governments seem to have had a very serious concern for these matters anyway. Now the emphasis is on regional economic growth. Presumably economic growth alone will take care of the marginalized majority, and reform, in any case, will be easier to accept when there is more to spread around -- meaning the privileged will be able to avoid significant cuts in consumption. Foreign aid will be channelled principally to education and agriculture which, in the absence of agrarian reform, means the development of high-productivity commercial farm operations. Those of the modern sectors should rejoice, for their increasing share of national income is sure to continue increasing. Forget the reforms -- the pressure's off thanks to counter-insurgency. Washington DC 30 April 1967 While I was in Montevideo several decisions on the Olympic cover job were made, both in the Agency and in the Department of State. Bill Broe, the WH Division Chief, had got lukewarm about sending me down because he had been Chief of Station in Tokyo during the 1964 Olympic Games and he believes the softening of political attitudes inherent in a cultural event like this will impede recruitments. Only if I stay on in the Mexico City station after the Games does Broe think I'll be able to justify the time spent between now and late next year on strictly Olympic cover matters. On the other hand Dave Murphy, Chief of the Soviet Bloc Division, believes that the bland political atmosphere will help me move in circles that might otherwise be closed to a U.S. government official. Besides, the Mexico City station has no contact operations under way between officers of the station and their Soviet counterparts. Since I am already known to the Soviets from Montevideo I'll be able to develop personal relationships with Soviet and satellite intelligence officers assigned to Olympic duties in their embassies. Murphy's opinion was shared by the Mexico City station which is anxious to use the Olympic job to develop agents for the LICOBRA targets: the PRI and the Mexican government. The differences were resolved in my favour but then another problem arose. The Ambassador made it a condition of my assignment that I had never been exposed as a CIA officer to Latin American police officials. Kaufman, the Mexico Branch Chief, resolved this one by telling me to write a memorandum for Broe's signature assuring the State Department that I'm not known to any police. Kaufman reasoned that we could stretch the truth a little by claiming, if it's ever necessary, that any police officers who know me as a CIA officer are paid intelligence agents first and policemen second. The most encouraging development is that the Ambassador has decided he wants two Olympic attaches -- the other one will be Dave Carrasco, former basketball coach at the American University and now head of the Peace Corps sports programme in Ecuador (who of course, has no connection whatsoever with the Agency). Ostensibly I'll be his assistant, which will help me considerably because he has really legitimate sports credentials. Moreover he was born on the Mexican border, and has had friends for many years in Mexican sports circles. Next month Carrasco will come to Washington for discussions at the Department and with Kaufman and me. Barring other delays we should be opening the Embassy Olympic Games office in June. Luis Vargas, my old Immigration Director in Montevideo, is here now on a trip with his wife financed by the station. It's the reward I recommended last year for his help in the expulsions and other action against the Soviets, East Germans, Czechs and North Koreans. As headquarters control officer for the visit I've taken them over to Senator Montoya's office for a chat, then out to Raymond Warren's ‡ house for a cocktail party -- he's Chief of the WH branch that includes Uruguay -- then to the White House for a special tour conducted by Secret Service friends. In New York yesterday we watched the Loyalty Day Parade. Vargas was impressed at the magnitude of support demonstrated for the Vietnam War effort, as was I. If only these marchers knew the effects of counter-insurgency in Latin America. Washington DC 5 June 1967 We have decided that Dave Carrasco should arrive in Mexico City a week or two before me, so while he arranges his personal affairs I have returned to paper shuffling at the Mexico branch. I have also just finished the Soviet Operations Course, a two-week full-time programme ostensibly under the Office of Training but in fact controlled by the Soviet Bloc Division. I was to have taken the course last year but was able to plead personnel shortages at the Mexico branch. This time there was no begging off. SB Division has been notably successful in peddling this course -- they have, in fact, prevailed on the DDP to make the course compulsory for all Chiefs and Deputy Chiefs of Station being assigned to countries having Soviet missions, in addition to operations officers who will be engaging in Soviet operations. As I will probably be developing personal relationships with Soviet intelligence officers there was no way I could escape. However I was lucky because Jim Noland, my former Chief of Station in Quito, is back from an abbreviated tour in Santiago, Chile, and was also taking the course -= prior to taking over the SB Division office that coordinates Soviet matters with the Western Hemisphere Division. The Soviet Operations Course is the last word in the Agency on recruitment and defection of Soviets. It is based largely on the opinions and theories of Dave Murphy, SB Division Chief, which are highly controversial because of the dogmatic attitudes of Murphy and his subordinates, and the lack of demonstrated success. The majority of the officers taking the course were from area divisions other than SB, but most of us simply refrained from public dissent, knowing that SB would take note of dissidents and, given SB's weight within the DDP, such heresy would sooner or later reflect back on us. Notably absent from the course are lectures and readings on Marx, Lenin and other communist theoreticians and leaders, although a thick paperback history of Russia was placed in our course kits for retention. What this course deals with are contemporary Soviet realities and how to use them to our advantage -- how to get Soviets to commit treason by spying on their country. But how to get to these Soviets, the most interesting of whom will be CPSU members? The most accessible and most vulnerable are those working in some capacity in the free world -- more than 25,000 of them and still others who travel abroad on temporary assignments. Usually the accessible ones are on the staff of diplomatic, trade and technical assistance missions, including military personnel, but of special importance are Soviet scientists who attend conferences and congresses abroad. Of the Soviets stationed in a mission abroad for several years, the diplomats and intelligence officers are the most accessible and of these the most desirable recruitment, after the Ambassador, is a GRU officer -- because of his military connections. Next in desirability would be a KGB officer because of his state security background. The focus of the Soviet Operations Course, then, while taking into account the inestimable value of a recruitment of someone who is prepared to return to the Soviet Union, concentrates on the organization of Soviet communities in the non-communist countries and on the CIA operational programmes to discover the vulnerable and disaffected. The theory is that the pressures built into the rigidly conformist routine for Soviets abroad, largely for internal security reasons, generates a natural disaffection by serving as a contrast with the relatively greater freedom of thought, movement and association that they usually see about them. Somewhere, the theory goes, there are Soviets who are already along the road to defection, and the CIA goal is to identify them and bring it about. The longer such a person can be persuaded to keep working (before 'disappearing' and coming to the U.S.), best of all to return to the Soviet Union, the greater the possibilities for exploitation. But first to identify the candidates. Most of the theory and doctrine for operations against Soviets has come from actual defectors as they have described their personal histories and the forces that brought them to defect. We studied, then, in considerable detail, the officially prescribed organization of both the professional and the leisure routines of the members of a Soviet mission. There usually is not much variation from one mission to another. First there is the overt diplomatic and administrative function of the mission, headed by the Ambassador, with sections dedicated to political, economic and cultural matters -- normal in all respects. The administrative section under the zavhoz (chief) and his komendants (assistants) performs the housekeeping chores and attends to Embassy reception and other security functions. The commercial offices include representatives of Soviet enterprises peddling books, films, machinery and other goods, while arranging for imports of the host country's products. More important is the other level of functions -- the use of these overt positions as cover slots for KGB and GRU intelligence personnel. We reviewed the various techniques used to identify the rezident (intelligence chief) and his subordinates in each of the services. Of much interest also is the location of the restricted area where all classified documents are kept and where the cryptographic and radio communications activities take place. Identification of personnel in this section is obviously high priority. From the point of view of recruitment operations, however, prospects are limited because only designated persons in a Soviet mission are allowed to have personal relationships with foreigners, particularly non-communist foreigners, and each meeting with such people requires a full written report. Usually permission for such relationships is restricted to intelligence operations officers, diplomats and others such as the zavhoz who have legitimate need to deal with outsiders. The restrictions on contact with the outside world by most members of Soviet missions require rigid internal organization. The Komsomol, or communist youth organization, usually operates under 'sports club' cover while the CPSU uses the cover of 'trade union organization'. The real trade-union organization is called the mestkom, or local committee, and the SK, or community security officer, is responsible for personnel security in each mission. Additionally, each mission has a club with a programme of games, films, political studies and lectures, and social affairs -- all centred around a designated clubroom. Participation in club activities is assigned and compulsory, and is designed to keep the group together and avoid wandering into temptations in the decadent bourgeois surroundings. Personal conflicts, gossiping, petty jealousies and backbiting are the usual product of such mental and emotional inbreeding as is, according to SB doctrine, the need to break out of it all. Most CIA operations against the Soviet community abroad are designed to provide an orderly and complete body of working knowledge about the Soviet presence in the country of concern. Systematic organization is the theme, so that the extensive detail required can be effectively managed. Standard operations in the non-communist world are the kind we have in Mexico and Uruguay: travel control for arrivals and departures and for passport biographical data and photographs; observation posts for additional photographs, analysis of relationships within the community and support to surveillance teams; surveillance for discovery of overt and clandestine activities; telephone tapping for analysis of relationships and general information; audio penetrations for general information and secrets. The better the access agent can cultivate a close personal relationship with the Soviet, the more the station can assess his vulnerability. Some of the best access agents are satellite officials serving in the same city as the target Soviet -- often recruited to work against the Soviets for nationalistic motives. Still others are third-country diplomats, local politicians and government officials, and persons having the same hobby as a Soviet. Double agents, while primarily used to reveal Soviet intelligence requirements and modus operandi, and to occupy their time, also reveal the identities of intelligence officers and provide data on their professional competence and personality. The access agent programme is designed to provide disaffected Soviets with 'channels for defection' -- bridges to the other side -- that they can build little by little while making up their minds. Access agents are people a Soviet can confide in, assuming the internal pressures create such a need. After a while, hours, months or even years, the access agents can initiate political discussions. The first rule of this game is never to denigrate Russia or things Russian. The key is to distinguish in the target's mind between Russia the homeland and Russia the subjected territory of the CPSU -- to separate government from people and country. As most Soviet bureaucrats are thought to harbour some cynicism towards the CPSU bureaucracy, the good access agent can foment patriotic balances against the fostering of doubts towards the Party. One obvious and effective method is to combine praise for Russian cultural traditions with dismay over treatment of dissident writers and artists. Covert-action operations against the Soviets are also varied: the Agency is deeply involved in the samizdat system of clandestine publishing in order to get dissident literature out of the Soviet Union for publication and to make books by banned writers available in the USSR. Major emphasis is also given to exposing Soviet subversive activities abroad and to circulating anti-Soviet propaganda to make them feel oppressed and disliked by the local community. Expulsions are constantly promoted in order to 'prove' the Soviets are subversives. The course also included a review of the procedures for keeping the Defector Committee of the U.S. mission in readiness, together with the rules for handling defectors: first efforts to get the Soviet to continue in his job as if nothing had happened, in order to make audio installations and rifle files; pre-planned safe places for keeping him hidden before departure for the U.S.; anticipation of violent reaction by the Soviet mission, with charges that the defector stole the cash-box; anticipation of procedures for letting the defector be interviewed by Soviet mission officials; initial debriefing requirements; military aircraft evacuation procedures. Most of us took the course with some scepticism because SB lecturers refused to state the number of Soviets who have been snared through this vast effort. Surely there is some truth to the old saying that nobody recruits a Soviet -- if they come over they recruit themselves, and this they can do without channels, bridges, OPS, surveillance teams, passport photography and insidious access agents. And what happens when the dream agent comes along? Might not a Soviet so compromise their security that the CPSU would be obliged to take serious action? SB Division lecturers also avoided comment on how the recruitment of Colonel Oleg Penkovskiy ‡ might have been related to the Cuban missile crisis. Here was a man embittered against the CPSU leadership who passed on information of great value about Soviet missiles: numbers, locations, accuracy, megatonnage, readiness factors. The Agency got valuable intelligence, Penkovskiy eventually got the firing squad -- but did the Soviets send missiles to Cuba because they needed desperately to balance back from the damage caused by this intelligence breakthrough? Perhaps October 1962 was the price of that intelligence success. If I were honest I would pull back from the Olympic cover assignment and ask for leave to find a new job. Working in the Olympics office with Carrasco, however, I'll be able to avoid close control by the station and concentrate on cover work. At the same time I'll also be watching for job opportunities after the Olympics -- almost a year and a half from now and a lot can happen. And Mexico is just too attractive to refuse. I'll drive down during the first week of July. Mexico City 15 July 1967 This Olympics cover is extraordinary. Dave and I have been making the rounds together calling on the leaders of the different organizations involved in the Olympic preparations: the Organizing Committee, the Mexican Olympic Committee and its vast new training centre for Mexican athletes, the Mexican Sports Confederation and the individual sports federations. Each of these organizations seems to have some special needs that the U.S. Embassy Olympic Games office might help to fulfil. The Organizing Committee wants odds and ends related to putting on the sports events and major assistance in arranging for U.S. participation in the Olympic cultural programme. The Mexican Olympic Committee, which is responsible for preparing the Mexican teams, needs help in getting several more coaches and additional State Department Specialist Grants for American coaches already here. After only five days on the job, access to an exceedingly large and varied range of people has suddenly opened up. The officers in the station, from Win Scott down, are all excited about how my Olympic entree can help them in their particular areas of responsibility. For his part, Scott told me first to concentrate on meeting as many people as possible and to establish my Olympic cover firmly. In the Soviet operations section, where I arranged for a desk and typewriter, the chief interest is on spotting and assessment of new access agents and on my establishing direct contact operations with the Soviet and satellite intelligence officers who are handling Olympic duties. The CP section wants me to spot possible recruitments for infiltration into revolutionary organizations, while the CA section wants assessment data on press officers of the Organizing Committee for use as media placement agents. The liaison section wants information on the Soviet and satellite Olympic attaches that can be passed to the Mexican services while the LICOBRA section wants me to spot possible agents for use in penetrating the PRI and the Mexican government. The Cuban operations section, probably the most destitute in agent material, wants personal data on the Cuban Olympic attache, on leftists within the Olympic milieu who might eventually travel to Cuba, and on anyone at all who might be of interest to the Cubans. All these officers see my Olympic cover as promising for their operational goals. No way to deny that this job could be valuable to the station. General practice is to exchange calling cards with a new Olympic acquaintance, and so far a very high percentage of the people I've met have significant reports in station files. I've begun my own card file and am writing short memoranda on the people I meet. Perhaps if I keep producing memoranda to circulate among the different sections I can avoid making any recruitments for some considerable time -- possibly right up to the Olympics. No problem getting discreetly up to the station from the Olympic office on the second floor, because the station's entrance is just to the side of the elevator in the back of the Embassy and not many people go up to the top floor. New York 13 December 1967 Events have taken several unexpected turns in recent months. Dave has assumed responsibility for Embassy support to the Olympic cultural programme, which the Mexicans hope will add a dimension almost equal in importance to the sports programme. The view in the Organizing Committee is that Mexico, in spite of sizeable efforts under way in recent years to prepare teams, will be far down the list in national medal accumulation. Partly to overcome this deficit, and partly to excel in a different area, the Organizing Committee is putting on an impressive year-long Cultural Programme of twenty events to correspond to the twenty sports events -- although non-competitive. Officially the Organizing Committee has invited all the national Olympic committees to participate in the events in the Cultural Programme, but many national committees, including the USOC, are not set up for such varied cultural activity. Response has therefore been slight, and the Organizing Committee has turned to the embassies in Mexico City to seek official support. In our Embassy the cultural section has failed to become more than peripherally interested in the Cultural Programme, so the Organizing Committee appointed a special representative to work with Dave and me on promoting wider participation by the U.S., especially the U.S. government, in the Cultural Programme. I never thought I would be doing cultural attache's work but Dave asked me to take responsibility for the Cultural Programme, and since then I have been trying to generate interest in Washington and elsewhere for bringing participants to such events as a poets' encounter, theatre and the performing arts, a folk arts festival, a stamp collectors' exhibit, a monumental sculpture programme, a film festival, youth camp, atomic energy and space exploration exhibits, a children's painting festival, a popular arts and crafts exhibits, and other similar events. I didn't like Dave asking me to work on the Cultural Programme because it can easily take up all one's time, but after checking the names of Cultural Programme officials in station files I immediately saw the advantage: the cultural section of the Organizing Committee is just loaded with people of established leftist credentials who would be very difficult for an American official to cultivate without suspicion. But in the Olympic atmosphere of peace and brotherhood, and given the Organizing Committee's dire need for U.S. government backing, I now have an open door to many more people of interest to different sections of the station. Moreover, by assuming these new, very time-consuming duties, I will have all the excuses needed for not making any recruitments. Up to now the station is very pleased, because I've also been regularly meeting Provorov and Belov, the Soviet Olympic officers (GRU and KGB, respectively) as well as the Czech, Pole and Yugoslav Olympic officers. My only problem is to keep away from DNNEBULA-1, ‡ the Korean CIA officer who is also handling Olympic duties, and who corners me at every meeting, Generally, though, I'm only keeping up appearances with the station because I have no interest in developing operations. The other unexpected development is a serious and deepening relationship with a woman I met on the Organizing Committee. I took a chance and told her I had worked for the CIA before, but in spite of her strong reaction she agreed to keep seeing me. She iS one of the many leftists in the Cultural Programme and she believes, with great bitterness, as do many other people, that the Agency was responsible for Che Guevara's execution. Mexico City 20 June 1968 One more CIA career comes to an end. It was a little earlier than I had expected, but Paul Dillon invited me for coffee the other day and told me Scott had asked him to make a proposal. He said that the station is very pleased with my work and that Scott would like me to transfer to the political section in the station after the Olympics, so that in the coming two or three years I will be able to make the recruitments and take part in other station operations for which I've been preparing since arrival last year. They especially want me to begin recruitments of some of the PRI bureaucrats I've met, such as Alejandro Ortega San Vicente, the Secretary- General of the Olympic Organizing Committee and former chief of the Ministry of Government's Department of Political and Social Investigations, which is really the PRI'S information centre on its own people. Scott said he will arrange for me to get another promotion and that the Ambassador has approved this plan. I told Dillon that I appreciated the offer but that I planned to resign after the Olympics, to remarry, and remain in Mexico. He was startled, of course, because I hadn't mentioned this to anyone in the station yet. Later I spoke to Scott and wrote a memorandum for headquarters outlining my intentions. I was careful to cite my personal reasons as the only motive behind my decision, lest someone pounce on me as a security risk. The sense of relief is very strong now that I have formally announced my intention to resign. Perhaps I should have done this on returning from Montevideo, because I have felt very strained beneath the surface since coming to Mexico -- like being dishonest in a dishonest situation, except that the two negatives don't make a positive. The truth is that Bill Brae was right: the Olympics aren't conducive to cold war politics. Working in the Cultural Programme, moreover, has driven still another wedge between the rationale for counter-insurgency and the reality of its effects. It isn't just 'them and us' but 'all of us'. The cultural work has bridged many gaps; even though I've only been organizing rather than creating, the experience has been enough to ease the pains of increasing separation, of feeling a fraud, of isolation. Who knows if without it I could have given up all the security and comfort of continued CIA work. Headquarters and stations alike are peppered, as we all know, with officers who long ago ceased to believe in what they're doing - only to continue until retirement as cynical, bitter men anxious to avoid responsibilities and effort. I'll at least avoid joining them, no matter what happens. Mexico City 1 August 1968 This past week has seen a sudden flare-up of confrontation between students and university leaders and the government. It began with some confusion on 26 July when a street demonstration celebrating the anniversary of the Cuban Revolution clashed with a rival demonstration and then turned into a protest against the Mexican government. Two days later police entered buildings of the National University of Mexico (UNAM), and next day there was rioting in the streets by students and severe police repression. Three days ago another violent confrontation occurred in the streets and yesterday rioting spread to provincial university towns of Villahermosa and Jalapa. Today in Mexico City a peaceful protest march numbered at least 50,000 and was headed by the Rector of UNAM. The original confused issues have broadened into more basic political demands, led on the student side by a national strike committee strongly influenced by former leaders of the National Liberation Movement (MLN) and the National Center of Democratic Students (CNED) -- both influenced in turn by the Communist Party of, Mexico. Even so, the movement is a spontaneous popular demonstration against police violence with clear tendencies towards protest against the PRI'S power monopoly and traditional service to the privileged. Demands formulated by the strike committee are impossible for the government to meet but are nevertheless popular: resignation of the police chiefs, disbanding of the riot police, repeal of the crime of 'social dissolution' and compensation for the wounded and families of the dead -- since 26 July, at least eight students have been killed, 400 injured and over 1000 arrested. The government for its part has had to call in military forces several times when police have been unable to cope. Luis Echeverria is responsible as Minister of Government for re-establishing order but so far he has only made matters worse. He has publically blamed the CNED and the PCM youth wing for the violence, which is only partly true -- other demonstrators and the police too are to blame -- while also claiming that five 'riot coaches' from France, and other communist agitators had plotted the insurrection from outside the country. No one believes such trash which makes the government look ridiculous and makes compromise more difficult. If Echeverria doesn't stop overreacting the situation will get even worse. Last month I made a trip to Washington and New York for some final details on Cultural Programme participation sponsored by the State Department. In Washington, not only would Janet not agree that I bring the boys here for the Olympics, she also made my seeing them very difficult. I decided to bring them anyway and had my lawyer telephone her to advise after we were on the flight. An uproar followed between headquarters and the State Department and between the Ambassador and Scott -- all of whom have ordered me to send them back because Janet is threatening to expose me as a CIA officer. I have refused and told them to fire me if they want but that I believe I have a right to have my children in my home, whether in Mexico City or any other place. Besides, I'm sure the threat of exposure is only a bluff. Mexico City 1 September 1968 Throughout the greater part of August the government had taken a fairly gentle line about the massive demonstrations taking place. Then on 27 August a huge demonstration of some 200,000 marchers turned out to protest against the cost of the Olympics to Mexico which will be at least 175 million dollars. The turning-point in government policy came early the following morning when the considerable concentration of demonstrators that remained in the main downtown plaza was forcibly broken up. On the 29th another 3000 demonstrators turned up and were driven off. Today Diaz Ordaz, in his annual message to the country, pledged the use of the armed forces to ensure that the Games will be held. However he also promised to consider changing the penal code on 'social dissolution'. The strike committee has added to its demands the release of all political prisoners, and in this speech Diaz Ordaz took the trouble to claim that in Mexico there are no political prisoners -- a claim so widely known to be false that it is ridiculous. In the station the CP section is very busy getting information from agents on planning by the strike committee and on positions taken by the communists and other far-left groups. Highlights of this intelligence are being passed to Diaz Ordaz and Echeverria for use by the security forces. It's almost like being in Ecuador or Uruguay again -- but I'm glad I'm not working on the government's side this time. Mexico City 19 September 1968 So far the only significant demonstration this month was a silent march of protest on the day that Diaz Ordaz opened the new Olympic sports installations. Protesters are increasingly saying that the police have burned the bodies of those students killed in repressive action and that the students' families have been frightened into silence. Student brigades have been going daily to factories, offices and homes to explain the student position and have been doing so with considerable effect. Last night, as a result of this activity, the government seized the National University in violation of the University's traditional autonomy. Echeverria justified this invasion by saying that the University has been used for political rather than for educational purposes. Thousands of troops with tanks and armoured cars were employed in the takeover of the University and although hundreds of people were arrested, the student strike leaders all escaped. The student brigades exposing government policies to serve minority interests have now made their headquarters in the Polytechnic Institute, where a battle is now going on between students and police. Two of the big exhibits for the Olympic Cultural Programme are being delayed because of the violence. At the National University we had a huge Jupiter Missile set up for the space exhibit, but it had to be taken down rather quickly before it got torn down by the demonstrators. The Organizing Committee is now looking for somewhere else to put it. Similarly the atomic energy exhibit at the Polytechnic has had to be put off while another site is found. The space exhibit was to be opened yesterday by Michael Collins, an Air Force astronaut, but I have had to cancel much of his programme. Mexico City 25 September 1968 Each day since the UNAM was invaded has been filled with violence. Some ten to twenty more students have been killed and over 100 wounded in riots which have broken out in different parts of Mexico City but are now most frequent in the Plaza of the Three Cultures in the Tlatelolco section, where one of the main vocational schools of the Polytechnic Institute is located. Yesterday a pitched battle lasted about twelve hours as students defended the Polytechnic and the vocational school at the Plaza, but finally both were occupied by the Army and police. All street demonstrations are now being suppressed with much violence. After a PRI campaign against him of several weeks, the Rector of UNAM resigned, but the professors association voted to resign with him if his resignation was accepted. Today the UNAM governing council refused the resignation and the Rector is expected to withdraw it. Increasingly the protest is turning towards the cost of the Olympic Games. Parents and teachers have joined the students, while vigilante groups controlled by the government have begun night raids on schools to intimidate the occupying students. This afternoon I went up to the station offices to read the intelligence reports sent to headquarters over the past week. One report was on a meeting between Scott and President Diaz Ordaz in which Scott got the strong impression that the President is confused and disoriented, without a plan or decision on what to do next. Mexico City 3 October 1968 In one savage display of firepower at the Plaza of the Three Cultures, the government wiped out the protest movement and probably several hundred lives. The massacre yesterday afternoon came as a surprise, because for almost a week both the government and the strike committee had been backing off from confrontation and nearly everyone believed the crisis was passing. The Army had even evacuated the UNAM and the Rector withdrew his resignation. Nevertheless, yesterday about 5 p.m. some 3000 people -- students, teachers, parents and some workers and peasants -- gathered at the Plaza of the Three Cultures for a march in protest against continued government occupation of the Polytechnic Institute and several of its vocational schools. The first speaker at the rally, however, called off the march because of a concentration of about 1000 troops with armoured vehicles and jeep-mounted machine-guns along the route. The rally continued peacefully but the military units surrounded the Plaza. Just after 6 p.m. the Army opened fire on the crowd and on the surrounding buildings believed to be sheltering sympathizers. Not until an hour later did the Army stop firing. Officially the toll . is set at twenty-eight dead and 200 wounded, but several hundred were probably killed and many more wounded. Over 1500 were taken prisoner. Today mass confusion reigned as thousands of parents and relatives sought to find the bodies -- already disappeared -- of those unable to be located in hospitals or jails. This morning the International Olympic Committee under Avery Brundage held a secret emergency meeting on whether to call off the Games. The IOC decision, according to a U.S. Olympic Committee member, was only one vote short of cancellation. Afterwards Brundage announced that the Games will proceed as scheduled and that local student problems have no connection with the Olympics. Mexico City 28 October 1968 Suddenly it's all over -- capped by the gushing of colour and sound from what must have been history's most spectacular display of fireworks. As of today we can all begin again to weigh whether this two-week circus was really worth all the bloodshed, and whether Mexico lost more prestige by killing protesters than it gained by putting on the Games. My resignation will be effective early next year, although for practical purposes my service with the Agency is ending now. Perhaps I've been foolish dedicating all my time in recent months to the Olympics instead of finding a new job. But I have money saved that will allow time to find work although it won't be easy because combining two families and continuing to live like this will take a hefty income. My sons have asked to continue living here with me instead of returning to Washington, which didn't surprise me, so the legal measures I've taken will be useful. All the fuss by the Ambassador and Scott and headquarters was foolish because Janet's threat was only a bluff. I try not to show it, but I feel unsure about finding satisfying work inside the same system I rejected long ago as a university student. The difficult admission is that I became the servant of the capitalism I rejected. I became one of its secret policemen. The CIA, after all, is nothing more than the secret police of American capitalism, plugging up leaks in the political dam night and day so that shareholders of U.S. companies operating in poor countries can continue enjoying the rip-off. The key to CIA success is the 2 or 3 per cent of the population in poor countries that get most of the cream -- that in most places get even more now than in 1960, while the marginalized 50, 60 or 70 per cent are getting a lesser share. There is a contradiction in what I'm doing but I don't have much choice given the plans we have and our need for income. One has to take the realistic view: in order to fulfil responsibilities you have to compromise with the system knowing full well that the system doesn't work for everybody. This means everybody has to get what he can within decency's limits -- which can be stretched when needed to assure a little more security. What I have to do now is get mine, inside the system, and forget I ever worked for the CIA. No, there's no use trying to change the system. What happened at the Plaza of the Three Cultures is happening all over the world to people trying to change the system. Life is too short and has too many delights that might be missed. At thirty-three I've got half a lifetime to enjoy them. _______________ Notes: 1. La Distribucion del Ingreso en America Latina, Naciones Unidas, New York, 1910, based on official Mexican statistics of the mid-1960s. |