Howard Osborn

Howard Osborn became director of the Office of Security of the Central Intelligence Agency on July 1, 1964. In April 1974 he was 56 and had served the agency 26 years.¹²

Programs

Under Osborn the office took custody of the defector Yuri Nosenko in October 1967 and assigned him to Bruce Solie. It ran Project MERRIMAC against dissident groups in Washington. "There is no record of MERRIMAC having been authorized at the outset by Director Helms," the Senate committee found. Osborn testified that Richard Helms "had indicated his concern about the security of the CIA facilities." Its companion, Project RESISTANCE, indexed between 12,000 and 16,000 names. By late 1970 Osborn "felt that some of the field offices might be going too far in developing information from cooperating confidential sources," and on January 6, 1971, the field was told that "no attempts should be made to recruit new informants or sources such as campus or police officials for the express purpose of obtaining information regarding dissident groups." At the direction of Helms the office kept the reporters Michael Getler and Jack Anderson under surveillance in 1971 and 1972.¹³

Of the mail opening in New York, HTLINGUAL, he testified: "We got no benefit from it at all. The product was worthless." At a meeting of May 19, 1971, he "stated that he thought the operation served mainly a Bureau requirement." He recalled Helms asking James Jesus Angleton: "If this project is so important to the FBI, why don't they take it over."³

On November 8, 1967, he recorded that William Harvey, about to leave the agency, had asked the bureau's liaison, Sam Papich, for reputable private investigators, and that "Mr. Papich suggested Wackenhut Corporation or the Fidelifax Company as having a good reputation in the trade."⁴

The Jewels

On May 16, 1973, Osborn forwarded to the management committee "summaries of activities conducted either by or under the sponsorship of the Office of Security in the past which in my opinion conflict with the provisions of the National Security Act of 1947." He dated the survey from March 1959 "because I believe that the activities occurring since that time still have a viable 'flap potential' in that many of the people involved, both Agency and non-Agency are still alive." The first item was Johnny Roselli. His memorandum became the opening pages of the Family Jewels.¹

Pennington

After James McCord, "an ex-CIA agent," was arrested at the Watergate in June 1972, Lee Pennington, a former inspector of the FBI then paid by the agency as a consultant and "an old family friend of the McCords," visited Mrs. McCord. "He found her burning papers and documents. Earlier, she had burned typewriter ribbons." He reported it, and the agency wrote it up. "For more than a year and a half, it lay in the CIA files like a paper bomb," while the bureau's agents "were getting persistent denials from the CIA." When Senator Howard Baker began to inquire into the agency's part in the cover-up, "a middle-level CIA employee who knew of the hidden memo threatened to blow the whistle." Director William Colby took it to Representative Lucien Nedzi, who held hearings and concluded that the agency had not sent Pennington to burn the papers, "as the memo seemed to suggest." In January 1974, as the inspector general prepared to review the Watergate files, Osborn "ordered that the Pennington materials be removed." An employee of the Personnel Security Division copied them to his safe. Osborn wrote the memorandum of February 22, 1974, that disclosed the matter, testified to the Senate committee's staff on February 25, and retired on February 26.⁵ Osborn said he had not known of the memorandum. "It led to the early retirement of Osborn," Nedzi said. Osborn said: "I had planned for over a year to retire in June."²