Ford's meeting on the submarine leak (27 May 1975)

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holystone-ford-memcon-1975.pdf · 5 pages · 3.0 MB

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Presidential Library (National Archives)

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26 October 2026, from the government's own site

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Public domain: a work of the US federal government (17 U.S.C. § 105).

On Sunday 25 May 1975 the New York Times ran Seymour Hersh's report that US Navy submarines had for years been gathering intelligence inside Soviet coastal waters, under a program he called Holystone⁴. At five o'clock on the Tuesday afternoon, President Gerald Ford met in the Cabinet Room with Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, CIA Director William Colby, Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Ingersoll and Brent Scowcroft. This memorandum of conversation is the record of that 55-minute meeting¹. It is the clearest document on Operation Holystone in the open record, and it is about the leak, not the submarines.

What was said

Ford opened by saying he had learned more about the operation from the newspaper than he knew himself, and that "someone must be made an example of." He wanted State, CIA and Defense to investigate¹. Schlesinger called the story a flagrant violation of the law, said there was some indication that Hersh held files of signals intelligence material, and floated a search warrant to get them, while doubting a jury would convict¹.

Colby linked the story to earlier disclosures: a less detailed Times article in June 1974, and material from Victor Marchetti's book on the CIA, which the agency had fought in court. He noted that the Espionage Act section on communications intelligence, 18 U.S.C. 798, made publication a crime but had produced only one conviction, by guilty plea, and that the government was seeking to indict Philip Agee under it¹. Scowcroft put the opposite case: the people to pursue were the leakers, not the press¹.

The record then says that the code word "has been obsolete since 1972." Ford ordered an FBI investigation on Schlesinger's advice. Colby complained that protection of secrets was "lousy" and asked for new laws. Ford closed by asking Justice to look at "getting at Hersh and the New York Times"¹.

The redactions

The released copy is a three-page memorandum between two National Archives withdrawal sheets. The first records that the memo was withdrawn in 2002 and later opened in part; the second marks five pages of handwritten notes of the meeting that are still withheld¹. Inside the memo, the code word in the classification line is blacked out on every page, along with a full statement by Schlesinger on page 2, most of Colby's answer to Ford's question about how many people knew of "one or both of these operations," and the name of a "mission" Schlesinger proposed to "turn off" before seeking a warrant. The redactions cite section 3.3(b)(1) of Executive Order 13526, which covers intelligence sources and methods¹. The phrase "one or both" shows that a second operation was being discussed; the record does not say which.

What happened next

The Cheney files at the Ford Library show the push to prosecute running out. On 30 May the NSC staff reported that the Navy wanted the operation to continue, with its next arrival in the operating area set for 7 July, and judged a visible investigation "a bad idea"². A memo of 31 May in the same file reported that Attorney General Edward Levi had asked the Criminal Division and the FBI to draw up a plan but would not open an FBI case unless there was an intention to prosecute. It added that the Director of Naval Intelligence thought Hersh's sources were probably former employees and the Marchetti court file, citing his use of "the outdated codename Holystone"². The file records no final decision, and no case against Hersh or the Times was brought^2,4.

Reading it

This is the NSC staff's summary, not a transcript. It confirms that submarine operations off the Soviet coast existed and mattered to the President. It says nothing about what they collected. The Federation of American Scientists lists Holystone among the code names of the Navy's Special Naval Collection Program, whose mission records remain closed³.