Report uncovers CIA murder plots

On a flight from New York to London a year or two ago, I found myself sitting next to an Englishman, I should guess close to 50, and a young woman close to 20. They were very obviously related and I guessed from his almost excessive chivalry in asking if she was comfortable, if she wanted this or that, not to mention several paternal pats on her wrist, arm, shoulder and kneecap, I guessed in a Sherlock Holmes flash that they were father and daughter, newly reunited.

My deductions stopped well short of the truth. They were newly wed. He an Englishman, she a New Zealander and he was taking his young bride to meet his aged parents somewhere in Sussex. We got to talking and it turned out that he was a movie exhibitor. I've been watching movies since John Bunny kissed Flora Finch and so we had a lot of material to choose from. We fell to talking about a puzzle that is as old as the century and a puzzle that's never been solved. 

Why is it that one movie or play about some worldwide popular hero is a smashing success and why is another a flop? Being temperamentally disposed to peace at almost any price, I began to riffle through my mind for examples of movies about big, historical heroes that had been equally big at the box office. We went on a little mental excursion with such giants as Napoleon, Nelson, George Washington, Hitler and pretty soon decided that the grandeur of the original character is not necessarily enough to guarantee a pittance for the producer and his company. I could think of two films about Hitler that died on their first showing, several films about Napoleon. 

The appeal of the actor who plays the great man is evidently more important than the historical eminence of the original. Otherwise, how to explain the enormous success 40 years ago in the United States, as well as Britain, of George Arliss playing Disraeli – a character who to most Americans sounds like a relief pitcher for the Boston Red Sox? Also, it seems it's not enough for the movie actor to be an international idol, he must be playing a part that roughly approximates to his personal appeal. It was a splendid mating of the man and the actor when Gary Cooper played Wild Bill Hickok and was shot in the back in Deadwood while he was holding nothing but aces and eights, which for a hundred years since has been immortally known as 'the dead man's hand'. But it was not a bright idea to cast Gary Cooper as Marco Polo and the box office reflected the baffling dumbness of the producers. 

But then this man brought up a movie which, to him, to me, to anyone now alive, would seem to be in prospect a gold-plated 18-carat certainty. The movie, which was named after the great man's autobiography, was 'The Spirit of St Louis' and was about Charles Lindbergh's unforgettable first solo transatlantic flight between Long Island and Paris. Unforgettable to whom? That is the rub. 'We discovered too late,' the man said, 'that there was one, maybe two, generations that had never heard of Lindbergh.' 'But surely,' I said, 'you really guaranteed yourself against a flop by casting James Stewart?' At this point, the young bride spoke up, 'Who,' she said, 'is James Stewart?' I guessed from this that their marriage was going to have what we now call 'problems of communication'. 

Well, we wound up this philosophical discussion by deciding that there's no general formula for ensuring whether a given movie will go off like a rocket or a squib. Certainly, the popularity of a star is the most treacherous gamble. Robert Redford has had a couple of flops in a row and Gene Hackman, I believe, five. 'But how do you explain,' the man said, 'the shekels still rolling in all around the world from the exploits of a fictional character played by a formerly unknown boy from Glasgow?' 'How do you explain?' I echoed, thinking of the way my wife and I had tried to catch up with 'Goldfinger' ten years ago on a trip around the world and having continually to postpone the pleasure because of the enormous queues lined up outside theatres in Beirut, Istanbul and Tokyo. I'm talking, of course, about James Bond and his most successful – only successful – impersonator, Sean Connery. It seems that the James Bond movies are imperishable still and so are their revenues. 

This experience came back to me the other evening when I was visited by an old, old friend of mine – an American who has lived in France for, I suppose, the best part of two decades. He's a lawyer, a very astute gent, a very close student of international politics, a lover of the arts and he's just 70. He was mentioning a flourishing British colony of tax refugees in the little town in the Mediterranean Alps where he's lived so long and he was expressing astonishment that a Briton, by staying out of his native land for a year (is it?) can then come back for three months, less one day, a year and never again pay any British taxes. His astonishment was due to the contrast – a sharp one to him – with the situation of Americans abroad. 

An American can decamp from his native land for ever and he will go on paying American taxes as long as he lives. This led to the naming of several eminent Britons who now live on various islands, Wight, Man or on the continent of Europe. And that brought up the name of Sean Connery and he said, 'Who's Sean Connery?' Not wishing to embarrass him in the presence of a Scot, I hissed in an undertone, 'James Bond!' And he said, 'Who's James Bond?' Well, you see how I went back in a circle to the Englishman and his innocent 19-year-old bride. 

Well, it struck me that there are probably legions of people who, even if they've heard of James Bond, have never seen one of the Bond movies for a reason that in the 1960s was given to me over and over again – because they're absurd, extravagant, preposterously violent and bear no relation whatsoever to the way civilised nations conduct their secret services. To which young people would always retort, 'Of course, not. But that's what makes them such fun!' The violence is so comic and extreme that it's all the more entertaining when they pretend it's all being done on the instructions of the British Secret Service or the Foreign Office. 

Well, you must begin to sense what I'm working up to. About a day too late for my talk last week, a Senate committee released its final report after an investigation into something that, in its fictional form, has fascinated and entertained the world for ten or fifteen years, namely the real business of which the James Bond movies are such a shocking and entertaining parody. The bigger shock is the discovery by Senator Frank Church's committee that the James Bond movies are pretty close to the truth, or have been, in the conduct of the United States Central Intelligence Agency for the past 20 years. 

Now there has never been, before, a public enquiry into the methods and targets, you might say the victims, of the American government’s intelligence service. I doubt there has ever been a public enquiry by any other government for painfully obvious reasons. A secret service is, by definition, secret and, in both peace and war, a great deal of time is put in by all government agents trying to guess the secret moves and break the secret codes of other governments. If, at any time, there is a more or less complete revelation of the aims, methods and intended victims of a government's secret service, it might just as well give up the whole intelligence business. 

This bleak conclusion is self-evident and I don't imagine there was ever a time when some responsible public official spoke up and said, 'I tell you what, let's have a Senate committee investigate the CIA?' the way Max Wall suddenly, out of the blue, says, 'I tell you what, Auntie, let's have tea with lashings of toast!' 

The Senate investigation that has just finished – and produced a report, grizzly beyond the most cynical imagining – did not come out of the blue. It was an accidental by-product of the whole Watergate enquiry. Many of you may remember the day in the spring of 1973 when Senator Irvin's Watergate Committee called as a witness Mr Richard Helms, formerly head of the CIA and then ambassador to Iran. There had been hints and rumours and testimony long before the White House tapes that the CIA might have been involved in the bugging of the Democrats' headquarters in the Watergate Building. Mr Helms, a poised and straightforward witness, was there to say, 'Absolutely not!' 

He was called because by the law which set up the CIA, it was forbidden to interfere in domestic matters. Its province was foreign intelligence. That was the small episode from which, after the courts forced the publication of the White House tapes and the House Judiciary Committee heard masses of talk about CIA involvement, that was the episode that sparked, in the end, the Senate committee's investigation into the whole conduct of the CIA at home and abroad. 

In recent testimony, before this committee that's just published its report, there was this exchange between a senator from Maryland and Mr Helms.

Senator: When Thomas à Beckett was proving to be an annoyance, the king said, 'Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?' He didn't say, 'Go out and murder him'.

Mr Helms: That is a warning reference to the problem.

Senator: You mean that is typical of the kind of thing which might be taken as presidential authorisation?

Mr Helms: I think that's right. One sort of grows up in the tradition of the times.

This luminous phrase implied that it was the tradition of the times, from the Eisenhower presidency through Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, to plan for the riddance, i.e. the murder, of Lumumba of the Congo, Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, to make eight attempts on the life of Cuba's Castro, connive in the assassination of President Diem of South Vietnam, plan and finance the destruction of the Allende government in Chile. 

The kindest conclusion of the Senate committee is that it's hard to pin down any clear-cut order from a president to perform these murders though the evidence is very strong, except in the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, that the presidents knew about the plans and tacitly approved them. 

Well, it has come as an enormous shock to hear that government of the people, for the people, by the people includes the planned assassination in peace time of foreign leaders the president may disapprove of. It will come as relief to you, I hope, to know that the next step is a law the Congress is working on to forbid murder as a policy of the United States government.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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