Ex-Believers Attack Cult of Intelligence : Disenchanted Former CIA, FBI Members Seek Funds to Support Activist Group

A fledgling national association of former CIA spies, FBI agents and others notoriously disaffected with U.S. covert activities is tapping Los Angeles political progressives for financial and organizational support.

The Assn. for Responsible Dissent, whose 30 founding members include such prominent activists as Daniel Ellsberg, John Stockwell and Philip B.F. Agee, attracted an overflow crowd of 250 counterculture veterans and left-leaning yuppies to an organizational meeting in Studio City last month.

The session raised nearly $6,000, produced 125 volunteers and led ARDIS to schedule a second meeting in Los Angeles on Aug. 29. The association, which opened its first office in Elgin, Tex., earlier this year, hopes to open offices in Los Angeles and Washington if it can reach its fund-raising goal of $330,000.

Formed during the height of the Iran-Contra scandal last year, the association’s purpose is to tell Americans about what its members see as immoral and disastrous actions, particularly covert operations, carried out by the U.S. government under the rubric of national security.

“Since most covert activities are unconstitutional, that makes me more of a patriot than some of the people carrying them out,” said ARDIS board member Verne Lyon, who maintains that he served 10 years in the CIA.

As individuals, the former officials had spoken out and written for years about the national security complex they once served. After the Iran-Contra scandal, they decided to pool their outrage to form ARDIS, the first group of its kind.

CIA Veteran

“The nation was plunged into a disaster, a scandal, a shame again,” said Stockwell, 51, an intense, square-jawed ex-Marine lieutenant and 12-year CIA veteran.

“Iran. The Bay of Pigs. Watergate. Every president since World War II has been embarrassed by these things if not ruined. And there are so many people who have been part of the process who have stepped out and expressed deep concern.”

In the group’s first months, ARDIS members have given 250 speeches nationwide. The group’s ambitious agenda calls for a regular mailing on covert operations and related legislation, a computerized research center on U.S. covert activities, a nationally syndicated column, a weekly television program and a speakers bureau. It has sought tax-exempt status, which precludes any lobbying or partisan activity.

Organizers also say they hope to provide support for others making the difficult transition from serving the national security complex to challenging it.

ARDIS members who gained highly public and controversial profiles by going that route include Ellsberg, the former RAND Corp. analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, and Agee, the ex-CIA operations officer whose passport was revoked because he wrote books disclosing agency operations and operatives. Another member is S. Brian Willson, a Vietnam veteran and peace activist who lost his lower legs under a Navy munitions train in September while protesting the U.S. role in Central America at the Concord Naval Weapons Center in Northern California.

Prominent Activists

ARDIS’ 21-member advisory board also includes several well-known leftist activists: former Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark; actor Ed Asner; Stanley Sheinbaum, a wealthy economist and Democratic fund-raiser, and Noam Chomsky, a linguist and Libertarian socialist. Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez (D-Tex.) and author Studs Terkel are also board members.

Stockwell, ARDIS’ founder and executive director, takes pains to represent the group as responsible and law-abiding.

“This organization works within the system,” he said. “It respects the law. The law prohibits the revelations of secret agents’ names, and we will not be revealing names.” Whether ARDIS will have impact on the national debate remains to be seen. Several national security experts suggested that it may mobilize those who already agree with its decidedly left-wing position but will have little credibility with the political establishment.

A central target of ARDIS is America’s peacetime reliance on covert operations at home and abroad since World War II. Group members tend to recognize the need for intelligence gathering, a role that the CIA was established to perform; but they strongly object to using the agency to destabilize or overthrow foreign governments with which the United States is not at war.

They maintain that such clandestine activity violates American principles and that it simply doesn’t work.

An ARDIS news release asserts that public records are “replete with accounts of U.S. covert operations that killed, wounded and terrorized millions of people whose countries were not at war with the United States nor possessed the capabilities to do remarkable physical hurt to the United States, who themselves bore the United States no ill will nor cared greatly about the issues of ‘communism’ or ‘capitalism.’ ”

ARDIS’ brain trust handled sensitive covert assignments in such Third World hot spots as Vietnam, Guatemala and countries in Africa. They say they contaminated children’s milk supplies and sabotaged electric power plants to destabilize hostile governments, spied on leftist demonstrators in the United States and watched their superiors lie to Congress.

Collectively, they describe a shadowy, topsy-turvy world that resembles a cross between a John le Carre novel and “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.”

“Cast as superpatriots, there were no rules, no controls, no laws, no moral restraints and no civil rights for the CIA game players,” Stockwell wrote in his 1978 book, “In Search of Enemies,” which details his transformation to whistle-blower while running the CIA’s covert operation at the start of the Angolan civil war in the mid-’70s.

“No individual in the world would be immune to their depredations, friends could be shafted and enemies destroyed, without compunction,” he wrote.

Agency’s Reply

The CIA’s official response to ARDIS is low-key.

“Obviously, the group has a right to express its opinion under the First Amendment,” CIA spokeswoman Sharon Basso said. But, she added, “the agency does not make policy; we implement policy.”

Covert action is funded by Congress; each covert initiative requires presidential approval in the form of a “finding” or official directive.

Basso said Stockwell and other ARDIS leaders left the agency years ago and have not “been privy to what intelligence was doing through any firsthand knowledge for some time.”

Contradicting ARDIS board member Lyon’s claim that he worked for the CIA for a decade, including a sensitive undercover stint in Cuba, Basso said, “Mr. Lyon has never been associated with this agency.”

A White House spokesman, meanwhile, called ARDIS’ claim that covert operations are immoral and futile “a sweeping generalization which is obviously not true.”

Intelligence experts, including scholars at nonpartisan think tanks, say ARDIS may appeal to the critics of the CIA and covert operations but is unlikely to influence a power structure that looks askance on whistle-blowers such as Stockwell, Ellsberg and particularly Agee.

“Many people in the intelligence community, even those who are concerned with some activities, view them not exactly as traitors but as turncoats,” said Gregory F. Treverton, a senior fellow on the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations who has just completed a book on covert action. “They are viewed by other parts of the political establishment as people of conscience but people who are zealots.”

Appeal Analyzed

Richard Betts, a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, said: “I don’t think they’ll have much credibility in Washington in official circles. . . . Perhaps they will have some appeal to people on the left.”

At a Washington news conference in November, a reporter asked whether ARDIS would be dismissed as “a bunch of crackpots.”

“No, sir, we’re distinguished citizens, doctors, lawyers,” Stockwell retorted. “We have medals that we earned risking our lives defending the country.”

Months later, he amplified on that response.

“Put me up against the William Caseys and Oliver Norths and I have no problem in letting the public judge who the crackpots are. We have staked out the intellectual high ground in that the truth will make our case.”

Times staff writer Amy Pyle also contributed to this story.