The Intelligence Tangle: The Cia and the Fbi Face the Moment of Truth

THE INTELLIGENCE TANGLE:

THE Atlantic

FOUNDED IN 1857

by Sanford J. Ungar

“The committee does not believe that the acts which it has examined represent the real American character. They do not reflect the ideals which have given the people of this country and of the world hope for a better, fuller, fairer life. We regard the assassination plots as aberrations.

“The United States must not adopt the tactics of the enemy. Means are as important as ends. Crisis makes it tempting to ignore the wise restraints that make men free. But each time we do so, each time the means we use are wrong, our inner strength, the strength which makes us free, is lessened.

“Despite our distaste for what we have seen, we have great faith in this country. The story is sad, but this country has the strength to hear the story and to learn from it. We must remain a people who confront our mistakes and resolve not to repeat them. If we do not, we will decline; but, if we do, our future will be worthy of the best of our past.”

—Epilogue to the interim report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities , “Alleged Assassination Plots involving Foreign Leaders. ”

I. What We Have Learned

It seemed at times the cruelest kind of juxtaposition. Crises were breaking nearly everywhere, at home and abroad, demanding official attention and perhaps action. Terrorism: a siege at the headquarters of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in Vienna; a bomb explosion at a baggage claim area of La Guardia Airport in New York. International tension; a civil war in the newly independent African nation of Angola between factions loyal to the communists and the “free world”; a situation that threatened to reach the same point in Angola’s former colonial parent, Portugal, a NATO ally. A United Nations increasingly unfriendly toward and uncomfortable for its American hosts. A virtually complete underground society in the United States that permits fugitives to evade the authorities for years without serious threat of capture. Religious and ethnic strife: in Lebanon, where it could explode a fragile Middle Eastern peace; and in Northern Ireland, where many of the arms were paid for by American partisans. Doubts about détente; curiosity about the Chinese; ominous-looking antennas on the roof of the Soviet Embassy on Sixteenth Street in Washington, which may be intercepting the most sensitive deliberations of the American government. In an ever more complex world, full of trouble and danger, the need, obviously, was for information, for good “intelligence”—a loaded and often undefinable word—and for some formula that would permit the country to cope and to calculate its roles carefully, to avoid the prospect and the appearance of becoming a helpless giant.

At the same moment, the nation was steeped in self-doubt, painfully examining events in the recent past that raised questions about the society’s commitment to its own most fundamental principles. In the post-Watergate era, when nothing is any longer sacred, men and women once considered the ultimate patriots who could do no wrong—the likes of J. Edgar Hoover—are put under a microscope, and the enlargement is not pretty. The misbehavior of those responsible for gathering this commodity called intelligence has been so severe, says Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, that at one point “the possibility existed of destroying freedom in order to save it.” A black congressman from Detroit, Charles Diggs, travels to Addis Ababa, where the Organization of African Unity is meeting, to denounce his own government’s policy in Angola as “the biggest blunder in the history of [American] relations with Africa.” The international image of the United States has been severely damaged. Once regarded as the bulwark of freedom—and as the country which saved Western Europe from successive totalitarian threats in the 1940s—it has come to be widely identified with the torturers in Chile, the racial separatists of South Africa, and assorted minor anticommunist despots. Richard Welch, the station chief for the Central Intelligence Agency in Athens, is murdered, setting off a new round of recrimination about who is revealing too much and who concealing too much. Is Welch’s death a result of American policies and practices, or of their disclosure? Or of sloppy “cover”? Or is it a coincidence shamelessly played upon by an agency seeking relief from its pain?

At the center of this affair of state is, naturally enough, the United States Congress, itself dizzy with dreams of renewal and enhanced power at a time when the presidency stands discredited. The accusations are a bit overdrawn at times, the personalities flawed, and the exultation over disclosure sometimes extreme. There is an air of examining yesterday’s events with today’s morality and an ohso-much-wiser perspective than that of the last generation. One of the ironies is that many of the examiners—the bright young professors and lawyers on the congressional committee staffs—are out of the same mold and tradition and education as those who once went into the CIA with notions of saving the world.

The political climate is typical, suggests Attorney General Edward H. Levi, of a country that has just come through a war, this time an especially unpopular war which left wounds not yet healed. William E. Colby, the career spy in reformist clothes whose term as director of central intelligence was cut short by the uproar, says the situation reminds him of the 1920s, when the Western world was inclined to ignore realities because it was tired, disgusted with war, economically depressed, and myopic about better days on the horizon. Yet the intelligence-spying debate of 1975-1976 has also renewed some of the most encouraging qualities of a self-conscious democratic government. The country has been forced to evaluate itself, discuss some very embarrassing facts in public, and pick up the pieces and move on—while much of the world watches with a mixture of amazement and horror. It is an all-American adventure.

For Congressman Morgan F. Murphy, an old-line Democrat from Chicago who seemed at once honored and pained by the opportunity to participate, the congressional inquiries were a matter of “getting into the bowels of the FBI and the CIA.” Senator Richard S. Schweiker of Pennsylvania, a liberal Republican who had been quiet through most of his first term in the Senate, discovered in himself a sense of outrage and found an exciting issue to apply it to: the need to re-examine President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. To Democratic Congressman Ronald V. Dellums, a black man from Berkeley who has been the target of official surveillance now and again, there was a genuine danger that the congressional investigations would turn out to be a charade: “We are working with people who have been trained to disinform, to lie, and to falsify.” he warned. Senator Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona, guardian of the conservative Republican faith, could not be bothered to attend many of the hearings; he took every occasion to proclaim that “enough is enough.” and he advocated suspending the investigations in midstream before they damaged national seeurity and “prove[d] harmful to the United States and to freedom everywhere.” Henry Kissinger, the aggrieved secretary of state whose world view was challenged by the nature and substance of the inquiries as by other contemporaneous developments, saw it all as one more case of American “self-flagellation.” the kind of exercise that, he believes, makes it impossible for the country to deal confidently and confidentially in international affairs.

Frank Church of Idaho was selected as chairman of the Senate Select Committee precisely because he was not among the many Democratic candidates for President; but soon the national exposure and opportunity for center-stage performing inherent in his role as chief inquisitor aroused old dreams and aspirations. He showed genuine concern over and insight into the intelligence business, but he began indulging in routine pronunciamentos. Church’s tendency to speak slowly and sanctimoniously, in near-perfect syntax, brought on the accusation that he was converting the hearing room into a campaign platform. Otis Pike, a Democratic congressman from Long Island with half an eye on a New York Senate seat, became chairman of the House Select Committee when it was reorganized and sent belatedly into the fray. Sassy and sarcastic. Pike aimed for the jugular and the headlines. His pyrotechnics, including staged personal confrontations with Kissinger over access to classified documents (at one point he tried to obtain a contempt-of-Congress citation against the Secretary of State), tended to obscure the real substance of his committee’s inquiry. He was accused of rank showboating.

It was, at best, a confusing and chaotic effort, this congressional surge to investigate, expose, and. presumably, improve the intelligence community. There were moments when the investigating legislators appeared to be shouting, “Here, look! We have discovered a corner of the executive branch that has been misbehaving all these years. Let us tell you about it.” What they were not saying, but were dramatically demonstrating, is that Congress is a reactive institution, moving clumsily now to unravel a web and to expose a subculture that it had itself been weaving, creating—and, at least on paper, overseeing—for decades.

Congress was reacting this time, as in other recent crises of public conscience, to newspaper stories: the revelation by the New York Times that the Central Intelligence Agency had, probably in contravention of its legal mandate, conducted extensive domestic intelligence investigations and kept improper files on American citizens; and the timely reminder by the Washington Post (repeating what the Chicago Tribune and others had said previously) that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had extensively wiretapped and bugged the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., most notably at the 1964 Democratic national convention in Atlantic City where it was also doing other political chores for Lyndon B. Johnson.

Those were the starting points, the stimuli, for a grand round of public, and well-publicized, congressional hoopla. To unravel and expose, and to demonstrate unwittingly the degree of Congress’s own dereliction since World War II—the extent to which it has permitted and encouraged these governments-within-a-government to develop and flourish—the Senate Select Committee will have spent about $2.5 million, and its counterpart in the House some $400,000, by the time they close up shop. It is an investment with an uncertain return.

Even before the congressional committees were formed, Gerald Ford—who, as a graduate of the Congress, had every reason to anticipate how slow and scattershot in approach the investigative process would be—moved to upstage them. He named a commission of eight public figures, chaired by Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller (then still useful to the President and in his good graces) and including Ronald Reagan (whom the President then thought he could neutralize), to study CIA activities within the United States. Although many of its members had at some point helped to design, direct, or defend the Agency’s Work, and although its investigation was hurried and superficial, the Rockefeller Commission produced a report that showed the CIA to be systematically insensitive to its legal limitations and to the civil liberties of Americans. The report’s tone was mild and almost apologetic—it used language on the order of “such missteps as did occur” to describe circumstances that others might have called a shocking pattern of abuses—but it included an impressive litany of Agency wrongdoing.

But even with some of the most significant information about the CIA already skimmed off the top of the investigative pot, the committees would try to catch up. Church’s committee stepped into the uncertain legacy—and the same locale, the Senate Caucus Room—of the “Watergate Committee” that broke open the Nixon Administration scandals in the summer of 1973. While millions of Americans had thrilled to the televised folksiness of Chairman Sam Ervin, many of his Senate colleagues had not; they criticized Ervin’s investigation for being politically stagey, disorganized, riddled with leaks of sensitive information, and for failing to come up with any reform legislation. Church, desperate to avoid comparable bad notices from his peers, installed a security system worthy of Fort Knox at his committee offices and pursued a course of studied moderation: “Unless I could instill a sense of confidence that we were doing this in a responsible manner,” he said later, “I knew we would create a tremendous backlash.”

When, after six months of private mulling, the Senate committee finally did go public in September, it was with a set of hearings on how the CIA, apparently out of control and beyond supervision, had disobeyed presidential orders by storing a deadly cache of shellfish toxin and other poisons (information made available to Church by the Ford Administration and already rejected by Pike). To Church it was evidence to support his favorite theory of the CIA as “rogue elephant.” Eventually, as evidence gathered that higher authorities had known about and approved of many other Agency capers and misdeeds, Church, embarrassed, backed away from his characterization.

Before long, Church was on the defensive. His committee looked grossly overstaffed (120 at its peak) and sounded pompous, especially by comparison with the sparer (a staff of 31) and more earthy House committee, which held quick and lively hearings on what Pike called the fundamental issues—the costs and risks of intelligence-gathering, as well as the value, accuracy, and usefulness of the product. Although the preparation was at times shallow and inadequate and the questioning (except for that of the chairman and a few of the younger members) dreary, Pike’s group stayed in the news-as it hopped from one topic to another like a pack of waterbugs. But in contrast to the senators, the congressmen had little hope of winning legislative support from their brethren; 122 members of the House had voted against letting the committee go to work at all, and still others were alienated by Pike’s tactics of confrontation with the Ford Administration (by a two-to-one majority the House refused to release the Pike committee report without censorship by the White House). While Church appealed for reason and calm and the long, careful view, Pike charged that the intelligence agencies had so lost their bearings that they might not even be capable of alerting the nation to the possibility of an impending foreign attack.

Some of the congressional revelations were not so new or, by the time they came, devastating. Press stories based on leaks, many from within the Ford Administration or from CIA alumni, told most of the details about Agency involvement in assassination plots against foreign leaders whose philosophies and policies put them on the hit-lists of successive Presidents and secretaries of state: Fidel Castro in Cuba, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo (now Zaire), Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, and Rene Schneider in Chile. It was known that American intelligence had failed to predict international crises like the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, the 1973 Yom Kippur War in the Middle East, and the 1974 Greek and Turkish moves on Cyprus. The Justice Department and regularly constituted congressional committees had been revealins bits and pieces of the FBI’s counterintelligence programs (COINTELPROs) since late 1973. Attorney General Edward Levi had already provided an unusually extensive accounting of some of J. Edgar Hoover’s secret personal files.

Yet when the investigating committees addressed these subjects, they lent additional credibility, an official imprimatur, and a certain drama to the information. And much of the detail was fresh and sordid: back-room mail-openings; COINTELPRO actions, justified on the basis of preventing violence, but used to frighten people and to destroy their family life and livelihood, even when there was no sign of violence or illegal activity on their part. The FBI. it emerged, was handy at the impersonation of newsmen; at “DO NOT FILE” procedures to prevent the uncovering of illegal “black bag jobs”; at looking the other way while local police wiretapped illegally and then shared the catch with their friends the Feds. Frederick A. O. Schwarz and Curtis R. Smothers, majority and minority counsel respectively for the Church committee, one white and one black, scored a theatrical coup when, sitting before the senators and the television cameras, they testified in grotesquely specific detail about Hoover’s vengeful pursuit of Martin Luther King. Jr. Church’s controversial report on the assassination plots, perhaps the most significant document to emerge from the entire process, drew a stark portrait of the well-bred gentlemen in the CIA and the White House scheming to take the lives of foreign statesmen who posed no actual threat to the United States—a secret government at its worst that had flourished in an atmosphere of euphemism, subterfuge, and cynicism.

The committees also shed new light on the intelligence activities of the Internal Revenue Service, and the fact that its reservoir of personal information on individuals had long been exploited for political purposes, converted into, as Church put it, “a lending library of tax information.” And there was a first public glance into the National Security Agency, ostensibly responsible to the secretary of defense, exposed as a sort of electronic gun for hire that does little thinking about who its targets will be, but stands ready to zero in on one or another “watchlist” when so ordered by its superiors, listening for evidence of everything from travel to Cuba to international drug trafficking and “possible foreign support or influence on civil disturbances.” It became clear how easily the NSA made the transition from matters of foreign concern to domestic ones. And all of these findings came in the context of a General Accounting Office report to the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that the federal government spends $2.6 billion a year on police, investigative, and intelligence-gathering activities (including $482 million for the FBI, but not including the budgets of the CIA, NSA, and “certain sensitive activities of the Defense Department”). Piecing evidence together, the Pike committee estimated that the United States spends $10 billion on all intelligence activities, more than three times what is acknowledged in the annual appropriations budget.

II. How the Jungle Grew

The real importance of the congressional probes lies less in headlines about assassinations or statistics than in the investigations’ long-range impact: the universalization of concern about federal agencies that have slipped out of control and strayed from their original purpose; the lessons they teach about the past; and, with any luck, the creation of a climate for thoroughgoing reform of the system and the structures that led to the abuses.

The investigations also had a subtler lesson: that the “intelligence community” has indeed become a genuine community within the government, a special-interest group that lobbies for its own positions, struggles for influence and authority in policy-making circles, and becomes haughty or defensive when it is challenged.

This community consists largely of intelligent, well-educated, well-motivated, and patriotic men and women. But they—especially those whose attitudes are formed during assignment to CIA and FBI headquarters in Washington—are inclined to act as if they are above the public dialogue, forced to deal with politicians and other petty men who do not share their wisdom.

Where did this intelligence community come from, and how did it evolve into a many-headed monster? The clumsiness and heavy-handedness may be explained in part by the fact that Americans are new to the intelligence business. Unlike the European powers that had empires and a wide range of vested interests to protect, and thus have intelligence establishments dating back centuries, the United States used to view intelligence, both offensive and defensive, as it did armies and armaments: something to build up in wartime and dismantle in peace. As a result, the country was an easy target for spies and terrorists; indeed, German agents had a field day here in the years leading up to both world wars, and the Soviets were suspected of doing the same during the 1930s. It was out of concern over that situation that Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the FBI back into the intelligence field in 1936 (it had been ordered out more than a decade earlier, when Hoover was appointed director by Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone, because of the abuses of its authority during the post-World War I “red scare" and the Harding Administration scandals). The threats from foreign agents and from their domestic allies in—such organizations as the German-American Bund and the American Communist party were—seen as one.

Only as actual American involvement in the European hostilities became a prospect did the United States contemplate setting up its own apparatus to conduct espionage. Espionage was not a part of American tradition; it involved exhorting foreign citizens to commit treason and otherwise to violate their own countries’ laws and standards of behavior. But various government agencies clamored for the job, and Roosevelt, in a Solomonlike solution, split it up among them: the FBI won jurisdiction over all of the Western Hemisphere except Panama; the Navy over the Pacific; and the Army over Europe, Africa, and the Canal Zone. The derring-do of the Bureau’s Special Intelligence Service in Latin America, mostly unheralded at the time, was soon to be overshadowed by the newly created, quasi-military Office of Strategic Services, which operated mostly in Europe, including behind enemy lines.

Thus began a competition that has continued to this day. Hoover and the chief of the OSS, General William J. “Wild Bill" Donovan, were old rivals—dating back to the 1920s, when they were both in the Justice Department—and their organizations tried to match each other in currying favor with the British (whose secret intelligence service, MI-6, had trained most of the OSS teams) and with the White House. After the war, Donovan’s successor, Allen Dulles, and his regiment of wellbred lvy League spies beat out Hoover’s corps of law-enforcement types for the ongoing foreign intelligence assignment. They became the Central Intelligence Agency and were given responsibility by the Truman Administration and its successors for a major piece of the American action abroad. Still, Hoover did not give up or forgive easily. He kept some of his men overseas as “legal attachés”; they were billed (and still are today) strictly as liaison officers with foreign police, but they also collected (and still collect) intelligence. And the Bureau held on to its growing domestic role in the fields of counter-intelligence and internal security.

The charters of the CIA and the FBI that emerged from World War II were designed to be open-ended, and were fitted out with loopholes. Roosevelt’s dispatch of the Bureau into the security field had been accomplished through executive orders and press statements. As Hoover wrote to Roosevelt and Attorney General Homer Cummings on October 20. 1938:

In considering the steps to be taken for the expansion of the present structure of intelligence work, it is believed imperative that it be proceeded with the utmost degree of secrecy in order to avoid criticism or objections which might be raised to such an expansion by either ill-informed persons or individuals having some ulterior motive ...it would seem undesirable to seek only special legislation which would draw attention to the fact that it was proposed to develop a special counterespionage drive of any great magnitude.

And there, in bureaucratic ambiguity, the matter would stand; the FBI had a splendid reputation, and the country seemed prepared to trust it with virtually any job. Similarly, the National Security Act of 1947, which formally created the CIA, was deliberately written to be vague. Because the drafters “were dealing with a new subject with practically no precedents,” says one of them. Clark Clifford, a Truman adviser and later secretary of defense under Lyndon Johnson, “it was decided that the Act . . . should contain a ‘catch-all’ clause to provide for unforeseen contingencies.” So it was that the CIA would be asked to “perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.” Within the framework of Cold War policies, the United States would be vigilant against the communists abroad and, in the name of “internal security,” against the Left at home.

“A desperate struggle [was] going on in the back alleys of world politics,” is how former Secretary of State Dean Rusk perceived the situation, and the United States would have to meet the challenge. In order to measure up, said a special committee that reported to President Eisenhower in 1954, the country might have to reconsider “long-standing American concepts of fair play” and adopt tactics “more ruthless than those employed by the enemy.” Out of this philosophy came a heavy reliance on “covert actions.” in which the Agency moved beyond its reporting and evaluation roles to try to influence the course of events more directly. As William Colby puts it. “You were asked to go do the job, without anybody telling you what it was or being willing to share the responsibility for it.” The CIA’s covert operatives had advanced technology and brilliant technicians available to them, they had the confidence of the rest of the government, and they had to report to no one outside the Agency about how they spent their money.

There was another complicating—and, for the intelligence community, liberating — factor; a double standard in international affairs between the pretense of official behavior and the reality of what went on behind the scenes. Looking back on the crisis in 1959 when Francis Gary Powers was shot down and captured by the Soviets during his aerial reconnaissance mission for the CIA. Colby recalls that “the Soviets knew for some years that we were flying U-2s over. When we used the cover story that it was a weather plane, they weren’t going to do much about it.”It was only after a controversy developed within the United States over the fact that the intelligence collectors were responsible, and after Eisenhower admitted that this was true. Colby says, that “Khrushchev went up the wall,” not because of that specific flight but because the Americans were, in effect, breaking the unwritten rules by publicly asserting the right to violate the Soviet borders and airspace. Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy went on to sign the Vienna Convention of 1962, which stressed, among other points, the inviolate nature of each other’s embassies. But as one source close to the CIA puts it. “The embassies are to the intelligence agencies as the bank was to Willie Sutton—where the money is. That agreement was never intended to be respected, and it never was.”

Other treaties and agreements paid ritual lip service to the sanctity of the mails and of other international communications; but each side seemed to assume that they were written to be mutually broken. “Oh, that mail—yes. that mail was opened.” CIA officials would acknowledge discreetly, when pressed to say whether the agreements, not to mention domestic laws, had been honored. Little wonder, then, that Nathan Gordon, a CIA scientist, could not fathom a presidential order to destroy the Agency’s precious reserve of shellfish toxin, so powerful that 11 grams (a couple of teaspoons), if properly administered, could kill 55,000 people. Gordon had spent much of his career developing the potion; to destroy it must have seemed tantamount to destroying himself. Yes, the United States had signed a treaty outlawing chemical and biological warfare, and yes, CIA Director Richard Helms had issued a directive implementing it; but nobody bothered to tell Gordon whether this was one of those things we really meant to do.

The CIA’s daring and profligacy was reinforced by a certainty that its Soviet counterpart, the KGB, was far more ruthless about its covert activities. Everyone knew, or assumed, how nasty the KGB could be and how often the Kremlin sent it to the ramparts to implement its needs and desires. At times, the conception of the threat posed by the KGB was based less on actual evidence than on an assumption that they must be playing the same subversive games abroad that we were playing, and that even if they were not we had to keep the game going lest they join in. The logic became a conundrum that could only have the effect of strengthening both the CIA and the KGB, throwing them into a symbiotic relationship. They became an international community of interest, probably more similar than either would ever admit. Each needed the threat of the other to justify its own existence.

There was a home-front parallel to overseas covert action, something the FBI came to call “preventive action" and to justify under the rubric of “counter-intelligence programs.” Domestically, too, the threat was ill-defined and the development of tactics left in the hands of the implementers. Although the Bill of Rights officially guarantees certain basic freedoms to every citizen, political hysteria made some people less equal than others under the Bill of Rights provisions. First communists, then fringe Marxist groups, and eventually others-the Ku Klux Klan, the “New Left,” and “black extremists” —came in for special treatment. Unchecked, unmonitored, that treatment included disruption of personal lives and maneuvers that seemed to be intended more to foment violence than to prevent it. As with the CIA. intelligence came to mean both investigation and action. The two activities seemed inseparable. The world had to be set right.

The community was not only doing what it perceived to be its duty, but after a time it was also having fun. As times grew more tense and complicated, business got better. Presidents, secretaries of state, attorneys general, aroused politicians, and editorial writers fulminated in the most general terms over the need to “do something” about the likes of Fidel Castro, the Klan, or the Black Panthers. The agencies did something: they developed exploding cigars and poisoned diving suits. They ordered Klansmen informants to sleep with the wives of other Klansmen. They wiretapped and bugged beyond the most energetic agents’ ability to read and digest the product. The CIA, ever ambitious and sensitive to presidential whims, got more into the FBI’s line of work, and the FBI, ever defensive and the best of bureaucratic infighters, got into the CIA’s. The Bureau reached out further for targets, finding among ecologists and women’s liberation groups and other purveyors of discontent sure signs that the revolution was at hand. The CIA zeroed in on the Grove Press and the American Indian Movement, among other purely domestic targets. The higher authorities winked and went about their work, taking refuge in “plausible deniability,” express or implied. Congress saw clear enough hints of what was going on to have set off alarms, but none came from Capitol Hill. The secret war in Laos was funded time and again; J. Edgar Hoover’s quite public lists of targets for special attention were perused regularly in the course of annual congressional appropriations testimony.

III. What Can Be Done?

Those congressmen who expected some degree of contriteness from the agencies under investigation were in for a disappointment. The first level of reaction was more on the order of anger, coupled with a warning that the committees might be doing grave harm to the FBI and the CIA, not to say the national security.

Old rules of the game and standards of behavior, a sense of politesse and stoicism in the service of a noble cause, prevent the community from expressing publicly the full outrage it feels over being dragged ungratefully through the mud. But there is plenty of complaining in private. “The whole ambience these days, the increase in the decibel count ... is damaging.” said one CIA man; “you begin to wish that something harmless would come along, like a typhoon, to distract attention.” FBI Director Clarence M. Kelley, who had the delicate problem of trying to renounce the abuses of the past without damaging the morale and pride of old-timers still in powerful positions, was fuming. “Some of the charges people have made against us are absolutely ridiculous.” he said, “but we’re just going to sit here and take it. We’re not going to fight back.” “Fight back” is exactly what the FBI would have done in the old Hoover days—with a public relations offensive, even to the point of seeking to undermine the reputations of the congressmen and journalists who were the bearers of bad tidings about the Bureau.

But the best revenge, the proof of the community’s strength, may be business as usual. Even while the congressional committees were conducting their investigations, the CIA set out on new secret and controversial projects—about $50 million worth of aid to pro-Western factions in Angola (the exact amount of the assistance was unknown, because the Agency undervalued some of the arms it shipped to Angola via Zaire) and an infusion of $6 million to the noncommunist centrist political parties in Italy, to bolster their effort in that country’s next parliamentary elections. Both initiatives were dear to the heart of Kissinger, who was determined to prevent the Italian Communists from joining a coalition government in Rome, notwithstanding their well-known differences with Moscow, and who wanted to use Angola to score points with critics of his policy of détente with the Soviets. The only reason the American public found out about these two involvements was that Congress passed a law in 1974 requiring the director of central intelligence to brief six congressional subcommittees on any plans for covert actions; Angola leaked through the Senate and Italy through the House. The leaks, rather than their substance, gave the agencies a new ground for crying foul. But beyond the charges and countercharges the leaks gave proof, if any was needed, that for all the CIA’s humiliations and consequent internal reforms, the basic process had not changed a bit; the Agency could be sent off on chores that bore little clear relationship to any national policy known to the public.

There were modest reforms at the FBI too, aimed at avoiding repetition of past abuses, beginning with Acting Director L. Patrick Gray’s 1972 order that every “security” case state some formal basis for the Bureau’s jurisdiction, and continuing through to Attorney General Levi’s decision in the last days of 1975 to scrap the “administrative index” (ADEX), a catalogue of people who would come in for intensive investigation in time of national emergency. (Under the old “security index.” predecessor to the ADEX, they could have been put in detention camps.) FBI Director Kelley, while defending some of the Bureau’s excesses in the 1960s on grounds of the “temper of the times” then, swore that they could not happen again. No more professors getting fired because of their political views and associations; no more agents flying from Washington to Atlanta to mail poison-pen letters. And yet the FBI was still conducting voluminous domestic intelligence investigations against targets of its own choice, coordinated out of the Internal Security Section of its Intelligence Division at Washington headquarters. A study by the General Accounting Office showed that barely 3 percent of these actually led to federal prosecutions.

Both agencies invited—in effect, dared—Congress and the executive branch to go beyond fighting the last war and to write new rules that would be appropriate for this and future seasons, that would respect civil liberties without neglecting the genuine dangers of the real world. It is not an easy job, especially if one wants to do something more than tinker (an extra deputy director here and strengthened powers for an inspector general there), but stop short of dismantling the intelligence community entirely.

A fundamental problem is how to define, and perhaps realistically limit, modern-day American intelligence needs. The United States does not confront the threat of invasion by a foreign power. With new electronic and photographic capabilities, fewer and fewer people are directly involved in the collection of tactical military intelligence. What nations want to know about each other, and need live bodies to collect and analyze, is more in the nature of political, economic, and social information, the kind of knowledge that helps governments to perceive the intentions and understand the motives of both their friends and their potential enemies. Much of that can be learned through the press, especially in the Western world, or through normal diplomatic channels. But dealing with closed societies may require some use of clandestine sources and methods.

There is strong sentiment in Washington in favor of new ground rules that would be based more squarely than ever on American concepts of fair play and due process. Senator James Abourezk, Democrat of South Dakota, for example, has repeatedly proposed legislation that would, in its broadest application, prevent the United States from doing anything in its overseas intelligence operations that would be a violation of the law if done at home, and he has a small but solid bloc of votes on his side. But Walter Mondale, Abourezk’s colleague from Minnesota, no unreconstructed cold warrior himself, criticizes this as a “simple answer” that ignores crucial realities. The United States might gain something in self-righteousness and moral certitude if it stops listening in on private conversations overseas and no longer urges foreign nationals to commit espionage and treason against their own governments, even if most other powers continue to do these things with impunity, but would it not at the same time lose in other very important ways?

In the same vein, the American Civil Liberties Union has proposed that the FBI give up “all foreign and domestic intelligence investigations of groups or individuals unrelated to a specific criminal offense,” without suggesting anyone else who could take over the Bureau’s counterintelligence function. The intent is pure, but does the proposed remedy go too far when, according to Colby, every year sixty to eighty Americans are approached overseas and asked to spy for the Soviet Union, and when there is evidence of a substantial network of illegal foreign agents operating in this country? Should the government not be looking for those agents well in advance of any hard probable cause to believe that specific acts of espionage have been committed? Even Mondale, disturbed as he is over FBI abuses, thinks that it should. “We have to be able to keep track [of foreign agents] without abiding by all of the requirements of due process.” he concedes. But then what about the “agents of influence,” the American citizens, fully protected by the Constitution, upon whom the foreign agents depend? And the “dormant assets.” the potential spies who are in place and waiting to be activated? Where to stop?

The best solution, obviously, would be to achieve some measure of détente in those back alleys of the world, as well as in the official channels. Indeed, during the closing days of World War II, when Soviet—American cooperation against the Axis was still operative. “Wild Bill” Donovan proposed an exchange of security delegations in Moscow and Washington between the OSS and the NKVD (forerunner of the KGB). The intended purpose was to trade information about sabotage operations behind German lines, but the cooperation presumably would have continued after the war. At the time, Hoover interceded to shoot down Donovan’s plan; and the CIA and KGB agents in the embassies in Moscow and Washington today are hardly there on a formal exchange basis. Even if Kissinger and Leonid Brezhnev were to startle the world by swapping lists of secret agents, as some seriously propose, each would suspect the other of a nasty trick, and they would probably both be right.

Failing that, where can and should the United States draw the lines? Much of the recent dialogue has focused on the red herring of the intelligence investigations, covert actions. The Abourezk proposal, in a somewhat milder form, and recommendations of the Center for National Security Studies, among others, would ban them completely. Morton Halperin, a former official of the Defense Department and the National Security Council, and now director of the center’s “Project on National Security and Civil Liberties,” told the Church committee that “covert operations are incompatible with our democratic institutions.” But Cyrus Vance, who was himself concerned with national security issues as deputy secretary of defense and in other government positions, argues, “It is too difficult to see that clearly in the future.... I believe it should be the policy of the United States to engage in covert actions only when they are absolutely essential to the national security.”

The real question is whether the United States wants, and considers it to be in the interests of national security, to influence events in other nations. If the answer is yes, as it probably is, then some of that influence may have to be exercised secretly, because sovereign governments are not likely to welcome open interference in their affairs. Ironically, a democratic system like the American one has a problem the Soviets do not. Our government cannot funnel its aid through an organization like the Communist party and say that it is simply helping kindred political spirits.

Certain hypothetical dilemmas are easily solved: the United States almost surely would have liked to be able to assassinate Hitler before or during World War II; that act might have saved millions of lives and earned the gratitude of people the world over. In drawing up standards for peacetime, however, it is easier to delineate what should be prohibited than what should be permitted. No assassinations or even peripheral involvement in plots that might lead to them; no interference in the electoral processes of other countries; no more secret wars; no misleading propaganda that distorts the truth about the world situation; no drug-dealing or other activity that affects the health, livelihood, and wellbeing of people at home or abroad. But what about secret support for an underground publishing network in the Soviet Union which advances freedom of expression by making the writings of dissidents available to Soviet citizens who want to read them? And what about continuing the postwar tradition of American help to democratic parties in Western Europe that might otherwise be swamped, and eventually repressed, by minority parties that are heavily endowed by Moscow? Or help even to the Western Communist parties that have broken from the Soviet Union and are committed to working for Marxist principles through free elections? Those are tougher cases.

Mitchell Rogovin, a liberal Washington attorney who has represented the CIA through its recent trials and tribulations, proposes a three-part standard for evaluating future proposals for covert action: “Does it advance the legitimate interest of the country [the United States]? Is the means [of carrying out the action] acceptable in a moral sense? If it is revealed, would it hurt more than it would help?” But even that kind of standard would make sense, Rogovin acknowledges, only within the context of basic, well-defined and -articulated national policies—which are nonexistent right now. If those policies were openly debated and established (along with reformed and strengthened procedures for review and accountability), then even if the actions themselves remained secret, the public could know the fundamental attitudes being implemented.

As for “preventive action.”the FBI’s equivalent of the CIA’s “covert operation,” it is only a little easier to decide. Again, there is no trouble drawing up a list of prohibited activities: no character assassination: no interference with freedom of speech and association and travel: no indiscriminate electronic surveillance; no provocation to violence. Tentative guidelines drawn up by a Justice Department-FBI committee named by Levi would permit some official preventive actions—at times when violence threatens, on the condition that the attorney general authorize the action in advance and later report on it to Congress—but Senator Mondale, for one, feels that this might set a dangerous precedent. He argues for use of the arrest power, when necessary under the conspiracy laws, in such circumstances. (People who share his view contend that even an occasional “bad” arrest, which is thrown out of court later, would be preferable to an express government policy of disruption.)

Whatever the standard, all police and intelligence work is bound to continue to include a certain number of unofficial counter-intelligence techniques; any smart policeman or agent will make a pretext phone call to try to determine whether a fugitive is home before he goes out to arrest him. And doesn’t society want and expect its protectors to find out about terrorist plans in advance and then prevent occurrences such as the bomb explosion at La Guardia?

How much reform and restructuring is really necessary? Levi insists that however many fail-safes are built in. “you have to trust someone at some point.” Otis Pike believes that if “more people have to sign off” on controversial policies and actions (that is, if more of the agencies’ superiors in the executive branch have to record their approval of such steps) and share responsibility for the outcome, they are likelier to foster and enforce caution and care. But the recent sorry record of abuse of trust and sheer neglect by government officials at all levels provides little basis for relying on the human instincts and personal judgments of those to whom the FBI and CIA must answer. Nor can the solutions be left to the courts; their arbitration of such matters generally comes after it is too late to protect the innocent victims of government excesses.

Proposals for assuring greater accountability and better behavior are now as numerous as the past abuses, but general agreement is crystallizing around a few basic propositions:

■ A new apparatus—either a single special assistant or a small committee—reporting directly to the President on intelligence matters. As envisioned by Ralph Dungan, who was ambassador to Chile when the CIA launched its program of covert activity as a parallel to official American policy there, the new chain of command would assure that all controversial activities could ultimately be said to be carried out in the President’s name, and would make the decision-making process on covert actions less casual and informal.

■ A new system of congressional oversight of and participation in intelligence decisions. Although it would mean offending both the powerful apologists for the intelligence community and some of the more effective existing units, the wisest course would probably be to establish a new Joint Committee on Intelligence or, preferably, a separate committee in each house, with exclusive jurisdiction in the area. The members would be selected to represent a cross-section of the Congress, and they and their staffs would automatically rotate off the committee after fixed terms to prevent the kind of cozy buddy system and protection of the agencies that has characterized congressional oversight in the past.

Once a reasonable system is developed for protecting that narrow category of confidential information that legitimately deserves to be kept confidential, Congress could begin to be consulted in advance on any covert actions. (The threat of fines or even suspension from Congress might be necessary to assure adequate security. As matters stand now, a single member of Congress can effectively sabotage or even veto delicate Administration plans with a clever leak.) Some procedure might ultimately be devised for the legislative branch to overrule plans that it considers to be in clear violation of the public interest. The committees could weigh the question of whether the CIA’s budget should continue to be kept secret, in apparent violation of the Constitution.

■ The writing of detailed charters for both the FBI and CIA, so that they no longer have to rely upon loopholes, outdated executive orders, and secret communications from the White House for major areas of their jurisdiction. Enacted into statutes, the charters should be specific enough to make it clear what the agencies are forbidden to do. (The GAO has privately told the Church committee that Levi’s draft guidelines for the FBI would permit a repetition of virtually all the questionable activities it discovered in its audit of the Bureau’s domestic intelligence operations.) But they should not become so specific as to eliminate executive discretion altogether. (Levi has pointed out that once rulemakers get into the business of proscribing certain areas of investigation—for example, personal sexual preference or drinking habits—they may also change their minds and require just such areas of investigation later.)

In all of these areas, Congress, the Executive, and, for that matter, the public must realize that a durable solution will not come overnight. Exact definition of terms and the ability to forecast all hypothetical situations may well elude the drafters, just as they did in 1947. The intelligence community will probably require frequent checkups and routine re-examination of its ground rules. And other problems lie ahead: one is the issue of what Senator Mondale calls “idle hands,” large bureaucracies within the bureaucracies whose job it is to spot subversion or dream up covert actions.

Many people, including Dungan and former CIA covert operator David Phillips, suggest taking covert actions out of the Agency and attaching them instead to the Department of State or Defense. A similar solution might be necessary for the Internal Security Section of the FBI. One problem is that when reform of the FBI and the CIA is complete, the old ways of doing business might crop up in the NSA and other lesser-known dark corners of the intelligence community. (Exact numbers vary, depending on whom you talk to about what figures, but an informed estimate is that even now the CIA’s budget of approximately $1.5 billion accounts for only 15 percent of the total intelligence community’s budget, compared to the NSA’s 25 percent.) As Senator Gary Hart puts it, “The danger is not so much the assassin or the black bag job as the Orwellian electronic capacity.... It outruns the human ability to control it.”

Little can be accomplished, however, until public-confidence in the intelligence community is restored. That will take time, and the appointment of a politician like George Bush to be director of central intelligence does not help. One of the most tangible effects of the congressional investigations was indeed to lower this confidence still further, to reinforce and legitimize the fears of dirty tricks that were so widespread in the 1960s and early 1970s. For all the assurances that the FBI and the CIA have changed, that they are no longer misbehaving, many people remain skeptical. They are still not sure whether they are getting the truth. Washington reporters working on sensitive stories still retreat to pay phones for their most delicate calls, and controversial politicians worry about the privacy of files in their offices and homes. (Indeed, when the homes of two members of the Church committee, Howard Baker and Charles Mathias, were burglarized, valuables were ignored but documents were gone through. Police were unable to solve the crimes.) Otis Pike asked the Capitol police to sweep the offices of all members of his committee for wiretaps and bugging devices.

Some executive branch officials agree that it is always a good idea to be careful—one never knows to what lengths the spies of the Soviets, the Chinese, and other potentially hostile foreign powers might go. But it was not those spies whom the journalists, senators, and congressmen feared; it was the ones who work for their own government. □