THE CIA: Tales of an Old Soldier

He was tanned, stocky, neatly dressed, attentive and anxious to please —the kind of man who could be “anybody’s grandfather,” according to one of his new acquaintances. But the witness was a good deal more than he appeared, and the scene and the situation last week were extraordinary. John Roselli, 69, a known Mafioso, was willingly appearing before Senator Frank Church’s Senate intelligence committee to talk freely not of gangland matters but of how he had tried to help the CIA kill Cuba’s Premier Fidel Castro.

For weeks, Senator Church has vowed to get to the bottom of the claim that the CIA was involved in foreign assassination plots, a subject that the Rockefeller commission sidestepped while concentrating on the agency’s domestic transgressions. Roselli was an invaluable witness, particularly since his partner in the planned crime was no longer available for questioning. Two weeks ago, Sam Giancana, 66, the onetime Mafia don in Chicago and Roselli’s friend since their days in the old Capone gang, was shot to death by persons and for reasons still unknown.

Hot Pursuit. Roselli told the Senators how he had taken part in four or five separate attempts to kill Castro in the early ’60s, usually by poisoning, confirming the accounts previously reported by TIME and other publications. The testimony of the Mafia’s genial old soldier dovetailed with other information gathered by the committee and strengthened the view that at least in the case of Castro, the CIA had tried to instigate what Senator Church bluntly calls murder.

The hot pursuit of the CIA continued on other fronts in Washington last week. Declaring he was “shocked” by the revelations in the Rockefeller report, Attorney General Edward H. Levi ordered a study that could lead to the prosecution of CIA officials for violating the agency’s tight restrictions on activities in the U.S. The CIA’S domestic excesses were also foremost in the mind of Congresswoman Bella Abzug when she convened her Subcommittee on Government Information and Individual Rights and called CIA Director William Colby to the chair. Suffering coolly and patiently, Colby endured 5% hours of excoriation as Abzug (“What are you trying to hide, Mr. Colby?”) angrily raked over ground turned up by the Rockefeller commission. During an earlier appearance, Colby had admitted that the CIA kept counterintelligence files on four members of Congress, including Abzug, who had become involved with people and causes abroad that interested the agency. This time Colby acknowledged that the CIA also had another set of files on about 75 current legislators, indicating that most had cooperated with the agency in some way.

That explanation did not satisfy Congressman John Conyers, a Democrat from Detroit and one of the 75 on file. “I certainly wasn’t one of those who cooperated with the CIA in any way,” he said. When he had asked for his own file, Conyers discovered that it consisted entirely of newspaper clippings.

Secret Files. Despite sharp criticism from the committee, Colby insisted that the CIA had every right to keep files on members of Congress if they became involved in a matter of foreign intelligence that was within the agency’s purview. Said he: “If a Congressman appeared abroad and made contact with some agency we were appropriately watching, then we would put that in our files.”

Since the news stories broke last December about the CIA’S excesses, Colby estimates that he has spent 80% of his time on the scandal. He already has made 38 appearances on Capitol Hill, and there will be at least nine more to come.

Trying to pin down who was ultimately responsible for the CIA’S assassination plans, Church’s committee has persuaded the Ford Administration to let it examine top-level White House and National Security Council files. After studying the data, Church plans to call as witnesses such key figures of the Kennedy Administration as McGeorge Bundy, Walter Rostow and Robert McNamara. In addition, both Church’s committee and the recently reorganized House Select Committee on Intelligence are interested in learning what control Secretary of State Henry Kissinger may have exercised over the CIA’S more recent clandestine operations abroad. “Before this thing is over,” says one congressional source, “Kissinger may find himself right in the middle of the CIA controversy.”