Where was their sense of duty, the code of omerta that had for so long protected those who toil in the shadows, who do the dirty work to keep the United States fat and safe and happy? What right did these mere senators and representatives have to tell the people -- the big dumb dazed mobocracy out there -- the truth about what their leaders were doing in their name? They were like children, they could never understand the higher wisdom that guided the elite. Oh, it was a far cry from the old days, back on the Warren Commission, when a good soldier like Gerald Ford knew just what to do: You accepted whatever the agencies told you, and you steered investigations away from anything that might break the code and pierce the shadows.

So Ford seethed. What the hell is wrong over there at the Central Intelligence Agency, he complained to his chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld. Why couldn't Bill Colby, the director, keep a lid on things? Colby had even come clean about Operation Phoenix, for Christ's sake. More than 20,000 Vietnamese murdered in the CIA-run program -- did Joe Lunchbucket really need to know about that?

What next? Are they going to find out about Reinhard Gehlen, too: the Nazi spy who joined the CIA and recruited thousands of Hitler's best and brightest -- including Klaus Barbie and a cadre of SS veterans -- to work for the Agency? Sure, it would look bad, but come on: Gehlen was championed by Allen Dulles himself -- the founding father of the CIA, the hotshot lawyer who kept Prescott Bush's name out of the papers when Pres was caught trading with the Nazis in 1942. Dulles and those Yale boys knew what was best -- but try explaining that to some poor schmuck whose father got killed at Normandy or Auschwitz or some other godforsaken hole, eh?

As it happened, the "Gehlen Organization" stayed secret for another 26 years. But in July 1975, Ford had still more worries. A top White House aide, Dick Cheney, sent a memo to Rumsfeld, warning him about an upcoming lawsuit. The family of Army scientist Frank Olson had found out -- through the congressional investigations -- that he had been secretly drugged by the CIA not long before he apparently committed suicide in 1953 by jumping through a hotel window. Now they were suing the government for damages.

The lawsuit could be bad business, Cheney told Rumsfeld. "It might be necessary to disclose highly classified national security information" during the trial. That would include the truth about Olson: that he was actually a high-level CIA employee working on biochemical weapons; that he had discovered his colleagues were experimenting with mind-control drugs and torture techniques on prisoners and unsuspecting civilians, "sometimes to the point of termination"; that the CIA had built this program on research by Nazi scientists in the death camps; that Olson wanted to quit the agency, but was instead drugged with LSD, whisked away to New York and there fell from the window in the presence of his CIA handler.

The family's lawsuit might even reveal the existence of special "CIA Assassination Manuals," like the one issued in 1953, stating: "The most efficient accident, in simple assassinations, is a fall of 22.5 meters or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stairwells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. [In some cases], it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him."

Such revelations had to be avoided at all costs. Rumsfeld and Cheney urged Ford to make a settlement before the trial started. To avoid the courts entirely, they would arrange a private bill in Congress to give the family some cash. The deal would be sweetened by private audiences with both Ford and Colby, apologizing for the CIA's past "mistakes," and promising "full disclosure" of all the facts, so the family could at last find peace.

As noted here last week, it was all lies. Ford and Colby revealed almost nothing -- beyond the bare fact, already unearthed by Congress, that Olson had been drugged by the CIA before his death. It took Olson's son Eric another 27 years to piece together as much of the truth as we are ever likely to know.

But Ford, Rumsfeld and Cheney had kept the faith; they had honored omerta. Colby was not so lucky. For his sins -- his "weakness" in allowing a few spears of sunlight into the shadows -- he was summarily dismissed a few months later. He was replaced by a man who also lived by the code, who would keep the precious agency -- and all its Gehlens, its torturers, its dopers, its shooters -- safe from the mobocracy, the ignorant rabble with their pathetic fairytale notions about democracy, justice, law and honor. He would guard the shadow world so well that one day the headquarters of the CIA would proudly bear his name:

George Herbert Walker Bush.