A'Spy' in the White House?

Bombarded by criticism and hounded by investigations, the CIA is beginning to take on some of the characteristics of the State Department during the McCarthy era in the early 1950s: morale is falling, effectiveness is diminishing, recruiting is becoming tougher, and good men are wary of committing their thoughts to paper in memos and recommendations that might come back to haunt them some day. Last week the pressure on the besieged CIA continued with a welter of new accusations.

The most sensational charge was that the CIA had secretly planted its agents not only in the Treasury, Commerce and many other departments but also in Richard Nixon's White House. What was more, the alleged top agent was no file clerk or chauffeur but Alexander Butterfield, the former presidential deputy assistant who did as much as anyone to break open the Watergate scandal. It was Butterfield who supervised Nixon's notorious taping system. When an aide to the Senate Watergate committee casually asked Butterfield in July 1973 if conversations had been taped in the White House, Butterfield forthrightly said yes, and Nixon's fate was sealed.

The report that Butterfield had been a CIA man was persuasively denied by many sources, but it started a wave of speculation about how high and wide the agency had spread its covert operations. More basically, it produced a rare glimpse into the mysterious workings of the CIA and its use of "contact" people in Government agencies.

The story began last week when Congressmen Robert Kasten and Ronald Dellums, members of the House committee investigating the CIA, reported that the agency had planted its own operatives in the White House and many other arms of Government. Both men said that the committee's staff director, A. Searle Field, had reviewed CIA documents reporting such plants. The next day the agency's alleged man in the White House was named by L. Fletcher Prouty, 57, who retired as an Air Force colonel in 1963.

For nine years, while still in the Air Force, Prouty was a contact for the CIA in the Pentagon.

As such, he had acted as a liaison between the two establishments. Last week he said he had learned in 1971 that the CIA'S contact in the White House was Butterfield. At the time, Prouty was looking for access to the White House to get help for a project involving U.S. prisoners of war in Viet Nam. His CIA connections referred him to Howard Hunt, the convicted Watergate burglar and a longtime CIA agent. "If you're a Rotarian," explains Prouty, "you go to a member of the Rotary Club." The old school tie worked. Prouty said that Hunt, who was working for a CIA front company, told him, "My contact is Butterfield.

There'll be no problem with it.

Give me a week or so." Soon after, said Prouty, the White House began to help.

Still, Prouty did not go so far as to call Butterfield a CIA "spy" in the White House. Indeed, from what Prouty said, Butterfield was performing only the traditional role of contact in Washington--acting as a go-between. The CIA, like most federal departments, relies heavily on contact men in other agencies to look out for its interests.

Prouty cited his own experience as a contact man. At the beginning of 1960, the CIA wanted to fly two Cubans into Cuba in the hope that they might assassinate Fidel Castro. As a contact in the Pentagon, Prouty was approached by the CIA to see that the plan worked smoothly. Said he: "I set it all up, made sure some [U.S.] fighter plane didn't shoot us down."

Vicious Nonsense. It was long rumored in Washington that Butterfield had been the "CIA man" in the White House and that the relationship was known to Nixon. As a contact, Butterfield would have routinely handled requests from the CIA. That certainly did not make him an "agent." CIA Director William Colby angrily maintained that the claim that the agency had infiltrated the White House was "outrageous, vicious nonsense." Without clearing Butterfield unequivocally, the White House declared that as far as it knew, no presidential aide had ever acted as "a secret CIA agent."

The CIA may not have "infiltrated" the White House, as charged, but the bothersome question remained of just when a contact man becomes so loyal to the agency that in effect he turns into its agent. As time goes on, the congressional committees investigating the CIA will want to know more about the agency's invisible web of influence that stretches throughout Washington. The CIA's ordeal has a long, long way to go.

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