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THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE

TEN: Controlling the CIA

I submit that there is no federal
agency of our government whose
activities receive closer scrutiny
and "control" than the CIA.
-- LYMAN KIRKPATRICK
former Executive Director, CIA
October 11, 1971

The reverse of that statement
[Kirkpatrick's] is true in my
opinion, and it is shameful for
the American people to be so
misled. There is no federal
agency of our government
whose activities receive less
scrutiny and control than the CIA.
-- SENATOR STUART SYMINGTON
Member, Joint Senate
Committee for CIA Oversight
November 23, 1971

ALTHOUGH Harry Truman wrote in 1963 that "I never had
any thought when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into
peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations," he-and each President
after him-willingly employed the agency to carry out clandestine
espionage and covert intervention in the internal affairs of other
countries-those activities, in short, subsumed under the "such
other functions and duties" language in the enabling legislation. In
that phrase lies the authority, according to Richard Helms, for
overthrowing foreign governments, subverting elections, bribing
officials, and waging "secret" wars. As Helms told the American
Society of Newspaper Editors in 1971, this "language was designed
to enable us to conduct such foreign activities as the national
government may find it convenient to assign to what can best
be described as a 'secret service.' "
From its beginning, the CIA's actual functions were couched
in deception and secrecy. Richard Bissell's notorious Council on
Foreign Relations speech in 1968 (see p. 381) stressed that the
original legislation was "necessarily vague." He continued:
CIA's full "charter" has been frequently revised, but it has
been, and must remain, secret. The absence of a public
charter leads people to search for the charter and to question
the Agency's authority to undertake various activities. The
problem of a secret "charter" remains as a curse, but the need
for secrecy would appear to preclude a solution.
There was never any doubt in the minds of men like Bissell that
the CIA's functions should not be a matter of public record. In
fact, the National Security Act of 1947 and the supporting Central
Intellige'nce Act of 1949 are little more than legal covers which
Controlling the CIA 323
provide for the existence of the CIA and authorize it to operate
outside the rules affecting other government agencies. The CIA's
actual role is spelled out in Bissell's "secret charter"-that series of
classified executive orders called National Security Intelligence
Directives (NSCIDs or "en-skids"). These directives were "codified"
in 1959, but remain unavailable to all but a few key government
officials. Not until July 1973 did the CIA offer the
congressional subcommittees which supposedly oversee its activities
a glimpse at the "secret charter." And the public still has no way of
knowing if the agency is exceeding its mandate, because it has no
way of knowing what that mandate is.
During the 1947 congressional debate concerning the agency's
formation, Representative Fred Busby asked, "I wonder if there
is any foundation for the rumors that have come to me to the
effect that through this CIA they are contemplating operational
activities." The rumors were indeed accurate, and the following
year President Truman approved NSC directive 10/2 which
authorized first the semi-independent Office of Policy Coordination,
and then in 1951 the CIA itself, to carry out "dirty tricks"
overseas, with the two stipulations that the operations be secret
and "plausibly deniable," A whole series of NSCIDs expanding the
CIA's activities were issued in the years that followed. One, NSCID
7, gave the CIA powers inside the United States to question Americans
about their foreign travels, and to enter into contractual arrangements
with American universities, even though the National
Security Act of 1947 forbade the agency to exercise any "police,
subpoena, law enforcement powers, or internal security functions."
Another NSCID was apparently shown to the judge in the 1966
court case in which one Estonian-American slandered a fellow
refugee and then claimed "absolute privilege" to have done so
because he was acting under the CIA's orders. Having seen the
secret directive, the judge ruled that the agency had the power
to operate among emigre groups in the United States, and he dismissed
the suit. Yet another, NSCID 6, apparently spells out the
functions of the National Security Agency (which itself was created
by executive order), since in the Nixon administration's 1970
secret plan for domestic espionage there is a recommendation that
324 • THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I GENe E
this directive be revised to allow NSA "coverage of the communications
of U.S. citizens using international facilities."
The essential point is that successive Presidents have regularly
enlarged the functions of the CIA by executive fiat. No new laws
have been passed, and only a handful of Congressmen have been
informed of what was happening. And sometimes Presidents have
acted without informing even these normally indulgent congressional
"watchdogs," as was the case when President Nixon approved
the domestic spying program, and received the CIA's
cooperation. The CIA, if nothing else, has always considered that
anything a President told it to do was permissible-indeed, necessary-
for the defense of the country.
"Out of the crisis of World War II and ensuing cold war,"
Senator Jacob Javits said on July 18, 1973, "lawyers for the
President had spun a spurious doctrine of 'inherent' commanderin-
chief powers broad enough to cover virtually every 'national
security' contingency." Top CIA officials heartily endorse this
broad interpretation of presidential powers, even though they
understand that the agency's activities often are of doubtful legality.
Senator Symington asked Director-designate William Colby on
July 2, 1973, "Do not large-scale operations, such as the war in
Laos, go considerably beyond what Congress intended when it
provided [in the 1947 act] for other functions and duties related
to intelligence?" Colby replied, "I think it undoubtedly did." But
Colby justified the Laotian operation on the grounds it was carried
out with "proper review, instructions, and direction of the National
Security Council" and-most important-the President. The legality
of the matter, in Colby's apparent view, stemmed from the
chief executive's authorization, not the law. Senator Harold Hughes
later asked Colby, "Do you believe it is proper under our Constitution
for such military operations to be conducted without the
knowledge or approval of the Congress?" Colby's written response
is an interesting commentary on the modern meaning of congressional
approval:
The appropriate committees of the Congress and a number
of individual senators and congressmen were briefed on CIA's
Controlling the CIA 325
activities in Laos during the period covered. In addition,
CIA's programs were described to the Appropriations Committees
in our annual budget hearings. *
Colby's explanation reflects the general belief in the CIA that
legislative and judicial restraints simply do not apply to the
agency-as long as it is acting under presidential order. The CIA
sees itself, in Senator Symington's words, as "the King's men or
the President's army." Nevertheless, Congress must take some
responsibility for contributing to the agency view of being "above
the law," since it specifically exempted the CIA from all budgetary
limitations which apply to other government departments. The
1949 statute reads: "Notwithstanding any other provision of law,
sums made available to the Agency by appropriation otherwise
may be expended for purposes necessary to carry out its functions
.... " This law, which also gives the DCI the right to spend
unvouchered funds, t does not say, however, that the CIA should
not be accountable to Congress; but that, essentially, has been the
experience of the past twenty-five years.
The 40 Committee
The executive branch has its own mechanisms to control the CIA.
While these procedures are slanted greatly to favor the agency's
position, they do require high-level-usually presidential-ap-
* Colby's claim that these committees were informed conflicts directly
with the 1971 statements of the late Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman,
Allen Ellender (quoted later in this chapter), that he knew nothing
about the CIA's 36,OOO-man"secret" army in Laos.
t These provisions, along with Congress' practice of hiding the CIA's
budget in appropriations to other government departments, may well violate
the constitutional requirement that "No money shall be drawn from the
Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by law; and a regular
Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public
Money shall be published from time to time." A legal challenge (Higgs
et al. v. Helms et al.) to the CIA's secrecy in budgetary matters, based on
these constitutional grounds, is currently pending in the federal court system.
326 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
proval of all major covert operations except the CIA's classical
espionage activities.
By the 1947 law, the CIA falls under the National Security
Council, reports to the President through it, and takes its orders
from it. But the NSC has, in fact, become a moribund body during
the Nixon administration, and the agency reports sometimes to the
President but more often to the NSC staff headed by Henry Kissinger.
By levying intelligence-collection priority requirements and
requesting analytical contributions to policy studies, the Kissinger
staff plays a large part in directing the CIA's information-gathering
effort. As far as the agency is concerned, however, the NSC
itself is little more than a conduit from the President and Kissinger
to the CIA, a legal fiction which is preserved because the 1947
law gives it authority over the agency.
Every major CIA proposal for covert action-including subsidies
for foreign political leaders, political parties, or publications,
interference in elections, major propaganda activities, and paramilitary
operations-still must be approved by the President or
the 40 Committee. * The nearly ubiquitous Kissinger chairs this
committee, just as he heads the three other principal White House
panels which supervise the intelligence community.
Allen Dulles described the 40 Committee's role in The Craft of
Intelligence: "The facts are that the CIA has never carried out
any action of a political nature, given any support of any nature
to any persons, potentates or movements, political or otherwise,
without appropriate approval at a high political level in our
government outside the CIA" (Dulles' italics). Dulles' statement
was and is correct, but he carefully omitted any mention of the
CIA's espionage activities. He also did not mention that the 40
Committee functions in such a way that it rarely turns down CIA
requests for covert action.
The committee is supposed to meet once a week, but the busy
* Over the last twenty-five years this body has also been called the Special
Group, the 54-12 Group, and the 303 Committee. Its name has changed
with new administrations or whenever its existence has become publicly
known.
Controlling the CIA 327
schedule of its members * causes relatively frequent cancellations.
When it does meet-roughly once or twice a month in the Nixon
administration-intentionally incomplete minutes are kept by its
one permanent staff member, who is always a CIA officer. All the
proposals for American intervention overseas that come before
the committee are drafted by the CIA's Clandestine Services, and
thus are likely to maximize the benefits to be gained by agency
action and to minimize the disadvantages and risks. More often
than not, these proposals are put into final form only a few
days before the 40 Committee meets. Thus, the non-CIA members
often have little time to investigate the issues adequately. And
even when sufficient prior notice is given, the staff work that can
be done is extremely limited by the supersecrecy surrounding the
40 Committee's deliberations and the fact that only a handful of
people outside the agency are cleared to know about its activities.
Even within the CIA the short deadlines and the excessive secrecy
allow for little independent review of the projects by the Director's
own staff.
The 40 Committee's members have so many responsibilities in
their own departments that they usually have only a general knowledge
about most countries of the world. On specific problems, they
generally rely on advice from their agency's regional experts, but
these officials are often denied access to 40 Committee proposals
and never are allowed to accompany their bosses to committee sessions.
Only the DCI is permitted to bring with him an area
specialist, and the other high officials, deprived of their own spear
carriers, are at a marked disadvantage. Moreover, the 40 Committee
members are men who have been admitted into the very
private and exclusive world of covert operations, and they have an
overwhelming tendency to agree with whatever is proposed, once
they are let in on the secret. The non-CIA members of the committee
have had little or no experience in covert operations, and
they tend to defer to the views of the "experts." Columnist Stewart
* In addition to Kissinger, they are currently the Under Secretary of State
for Political Affairs, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Director of
Central Intelligence, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
328 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
Alsop, himself an ass veteran, described in the May 25, 1973,
Washington Post how the brightest men in the Kennedy administration
could have approved an adventure with so small a chance of
success as the Bay of Pigs invasion, and his explanation applies just
as well to other CIA activities. Alsop stated, "The answer lies
somewhere in the mystique of the secret-service professional visa-
vis the amateur. Somehow in such a confrontation, the amateur
tends to put a childish faith in the confident assertions of the
professionaL" Similarly, Marilyn Berger in the May 26, 1973,
Washington Post quoted a veteran intelligence official about his
experiences in dealing with the 40 Committee: "They were like a
bunch of schoolboys. They would listen and their eyes would bug
out. I always used to say that I could get $5 million out of the
Forty Committee for a covert operation faster than I could get
money for a typewriter out of the ordinary bureaucracy."
The 40 Committee process is further loaded in favor of the
CIA because the agency prepares the proposals, and discussion is
thereby within the CIA's terms of reference. The non-CIA members
have no way of verifying that many of the agency's assertions
and assumptions are correct, for example, (
DELETED
) The non-CIA members had to accept the agency's
word that this program would have a chance of success. For
security reasons, the specific people and methods that the CIA
intends to use in a secret operation of this type are never included
in the proposal. 40 Committee members can ask about the details
at the actual meetings, but they have no way of knowing, without
their own regional experts present, whether or not the CIA is
providing them with self-serving answers.
In fact, much of the intelligence upon which the recommended
intervention is based comes from the Clandestine Services' own
sources, and this mixing of the CIA's informational and operational
functions can cause disastrous results, as occurred when the
Controlling the CIA 329
agency led the Kennedy administration to believe in 1961 that a
landing of an exile military force would lead to a general uprising
of the Cuban people. A more recent if less cataclysmic case occurred
in 1970 when intervention in the Chilean elections was
under government consideration. At (
DELETED
) the content of the report provided a
strong argument for U.S. intervention to forestall Soviet gains.
This report mayor may not have been genuine. In either case, it
was disseminated by the people in the Clandestine Services who
favored intervention, and they were well aware of the effect it
would have on the 40 Committee members. If, in this instance, the
covert operators were not actually misleading the committee, they
certainly could have been, and there was no way that any independent
check could be made on them.
Until the 1967 disclosure of secret CIA funding of the National
Student Association and scores of other ostensibly private organizations,
the 40 Committee was called on only to give initial approval
to covert-action programs. * Thus, most CIA-penetrated and
subsidized organizations went on receiving agency funds and other
support year after year without any outside review whatever of
* Final approval for a covert-action program is normally given by the
40 Committee chairman-still Henry Kissinger, even since he has become
Secretary of State. He, in turn, notifies the President of what has been
decided, and if there is a matter on which the committee was in disagreement,
the chief executive makes the final decision. Although the President
either reviews or personally authorizes all these secret interventions in other
countries' internal affairs, he never signs any documents to that effect. Instead,
the onus is placed on the 40 Committee, and if he chooses, the President
can "plausibly deny" he has been involved in any illegal activities
overseas.
330 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
the continuing worthiness of the project. But the 1967 scandal
caused the 40 Committee to revise its procedures so that all ongoing
non-espionage operations were regularly reviewed. In these reviews,
however, the committee is perhaps even more dependent
on the CIA for information and guidance than with new programs.
For unless there has been a public controversy, only the Clandestine
Services usually know whether their efforts to subsidize a
particular organization or undermine a certain government have
been successful. And the Clandestine Services would be unlikely
to admit that their own operation was going badly, even if that
were the case. (
DELETED
) American officials hoped that
through this "democratic front" Thieu could widen his political
base by rallying various non-communist opposition elements to his
camp. The effort was a resounding failure from the American
point of view, since Thieu showed no interest in broadening his
support-as long as the Vietnamese army and the U.S. government
still supported him. Even though this was one of the few instances
where the State Department, through its diplomatic reporting from
Saigon, (
DELETED
)
Even Richard Bissell in his 1968 Council on Foreign Relations
talk admitted that the 40 Committee "is of limited effectiveness."
Bissell stated that if the committee were the only control instrument,
he would "view it as inadequate," but he believed that
prior discussions on covert projects at working levels in the bureaucracy
compensated for the failings of the "interdepartmental committee
composed of busy officials who meet only once a week." To
some extent what Bissell says is true, but he omits the fact that
the most important projects, such as the Bay of Pigs, are considered
so sensitive that the working levels outside the CIA are
forbidden all knowledge of them. And he does not state that even
Controlling the CIA 331
when a few outside officials at the Assistant Secretary level or
just below are briefed on covert operations, they are told the
programs are so secret that they cannot talk to any of their colleagues
about them, which prevents them from calling into play
the bureaucratic forces usually needed to block another agency's
projects. Furthermore, these officials, having been let in on the
U.S. government's dirtiest and darkest activities, are often reluctant
to do anything in opposition that will jeopardize their right
to be told more secrets at a later time. Nevertheless, the bureaucracy
in State and, to a much lesser extent, in Defense does have
some effect in limiting the CIA's covert operations, although not
nearly so much as Bissell claimed.
As previously mentioned, there is one CIA activity, classical
espionage, over which there is no outside control-not from the
40 Committee, from the bureaucratic working level, nor from
Congress. The Director of Central Intelligence has a statutory
responsibility to protect intelligence sources and methods from
unauthorized disclosure, and every DCI since Allen Dulles has
taken this to mean that the CIA cannot inform any other government
agencies of the identity of its foreign agents-the agency's
most closely guarded secrets. While this secrecy in order not to
jeopardize the lives of foreigners (or Americans) who spy for the
CIA is understandable, the use of a particular agent can sometimes
have a political effect as large as, or larger than, a covert-action
program. For example, if the CIA recruits a foreign official who is
or becomes his country's Minister of Interior (e.g., Antonio
Arguedas in Bolivia), then discovery of his connection to the
agency can cause an international incident (as occurred in 1968
when Arguedas publicly admitted that he had worked for the
CIA). In other instances, there have been Foreign Ministers
and even Prime Ministers who were CIA agents, but the 40 Committee
never was permitted to rule on whether or not the agency
should continue its contact with them. Sometimes the CIA station
chief in a particular country will advise the American ambassador
that one of his agents is in a very high place in the local government
or that he intends to recruit such a man, but the station chief
does so at his own discretion.
332 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
The recruitment of lower-level foreigners can also have an important
effect, especially if something goes wrong. This was the
case in Singapore in 1960 (described in Chapter 9) when a CIA
lie-detector expert blew a fuse, wound up in jail, caused the U.S.
government to be subjected to blackmail, and damaged America's
reputation overseas. The point to be noted is that since the CIA
lie-detector man was putting a potential spy through the "black
box," his mission was part of an espionage operation and hence
not subject to control outside the agency. Similarly, during the
mid-1960s (
DELETED
)
Prepared by the Pentagon's National Reconnaissance Office, the
Joint Reconnaissance Schedule is always several inches thick and
filled with hundreds of pages of highly technical data and maps. To
a non-scientist, it is a truly incomprehensible collection of papers,
and the staffs of the various 40 Committee members usually have
only a day or two to look it over before the meetings. Under these
conditions, the 40 Committee usually passes the schedule with little
or no discussion. From time to time, the State Department will object
to a particularly dangerous flight, such as sending an Air Force
drone over South China subsequent to the American invasion of
Cambodia, but nearly always missions-including the cruise of
the Liberty (attacked by the ,Israelis during the 1967 Six Day
War), the voyage of the spy ship Pueblo (captured by the North
Koreans in 1968), and the flight of the EC-121 (shot down by the
North Koreans in 1969)-are routinely approved.
(
DELETED
Controlling the CIA 333
DELETED
)
Even as the 40 Committee fails to keep a close watch on secret
reconnaissance activities, is relatively ineffective in monitoring
the CIA's covert operations, and is totally in the dark on espionage
operations, President Nixon and especially Henry Kissinger are
unquestionably aware of its shortcomings and have done little to
change things. Institutionally, the committee could easily provide
better control over American intelligence if its internal procedures
were altered, if it were provided with an adequate staff, and if it
could develop its own sources for information and evaluation independent
of the agency's Clandestine Services. But it is the President
and Kissinger who ultimately determine how the CIA operates,
and if they do not want to impose closer control, then the form
of the control mechanism is meaningless. The fact remains that
both men believe in the need for the United States to use clandestine
methods and "dirty tricks" in dealing with other countries,
and the current level and types of such operations obviously coincide
with their views of how America's secret foreign policy
should be carried out.
Therefore, as long as the CIA remains the President's loyal
and personal tool to be used around the world at his and his top
advisor's discretion, no President is likely, barring strong, unforeseen
pressure, to insist that the agency's operations be brought
under closer outside scrutiny.
334 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
The PFIAB and the OMB
In addition to the 40 Committee, the President has two other
bodies in the executive branch which could conceivably assist him
in controlling the CIA. One of these is the President's Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), a group of eleven presidentially
appointed private citizens who meet several times a year
to evaluate the activities of the intelligence community and to make
recommendations for needed change. President Eisenhower
originally set up the PFIAB in 1956 under the chairmanship of
Dr. James Killian of MIT, and its other heads have been General
John Hull, Clark Clifford, General Maxwell Taylor, and, currently,
retired Admiral George Anderson. The majority of its
members have always been people with close ties to the Pentagon
and defense contractors, * and it has consistently pushed for bigger
(and more expensive) intelligence-collection systems.
The PFIAB meets approximately once a month in Washington,
and is thus of limited value as a permanent watchdog committee.
It is further handicapped by its status as an advisory group, with
the resulting lack of bureaucratic authority. In general, the various
members of the intelligence community look on the board as more
of a nuisance than a true control mechanism. Periodically, when
PFIAB is in session, CIA officials brief the members on current
intelligence collection and the latest national estimates. The
Clandestine Services' activities-particularly covert-action opera-
* In February 1974, the PFIAB's members in addition to Admiral Anderson
were Dr. William Baker, Bell Telephone Laboratories' Vice President
for Research; John Connally, former Governor of Texas and Secretary of
the Navy and the Treasury; Leo Cherne, Executive Director of the Research
Institute of America; Dr. John Foster, former Director of Defense Department
Research and Engineering; Robert Galvin, President of Motorola;
Gordon Gray, former Assistant to the President for National Security
Affairs; Dr. Edwin Land, President of Polaroid; Clare Boothe Luce, former
Congresswoman and ambassador; Nelson Rockefeller, former Governor of
New York; and Dr. Edward Teller, nuclear physicist and "father" of the
hydrogen bomb.
Controlling the CIA 335
tions-are almost never considered unless an operation has already
been publicly disclosed.
Over the years, Presidents have tended to use the PFIAB as a
prestigious but relatively safe "in-house" investigative unit, usually
at times when the chief executive was displeased with the quality
of intelligence he was receiving. Whenever an intelligence failure
is suspected in connection with a foreign-policy setback, the board
is usually convened to look into the matter. President Kennedy
called on it to recommend ways to reorganize the intelligence community
after the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle, but virtually no changes
resulted from the PFIAB's efforts. The following year Kennedy
asked the PFIAB to find out why the CIA had not discovered
sooner that there were Soviet offensive missiles in Cuba, and the
PFIAB found the two accurate agent accounts of the Soviet buildup
buried among the thousands of misleading or irrelevant reports
which had piled up at the agency in the month before the crisis.
With perfect hindsight the PFIAB declared that the CIA should
have recognized the truth of these reports and rejected all the
others. Similarly, in 1968 President Johnson had the board investigate
why the CIA had not determined the precise timing of
the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in advance.
These PFIAB post-mortems can be of great value to the intelligence
community in pinpointing specific weaknesses and recommending
solutions; they could be even more useful in making clear
that certain events simply cannot be predicted in advance, even
by the most efficient intelligence system. However, the PFIAB
has tended to operate with the assumption that all information is
"knowable" and that the intelligence community's problems would
be solved if only more data were collected by more-advanced systems.
This emphasis on quantity over quality has served to accentuate
the management problems that plague American intelligence
and, in recent years at least, has often been counterproductive.
Probably the PFIAB's most notable contribution to the nation's
intelligence effort occurred in the 1950s and early 1960s when
one of its subcommittees, headed by Polaroid's Dr. Edwin Land,
conceived several new technical collection programs. Land's sub336
• THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
committee was instrumental in advancing the development of the
U-2 spy plane, which, with the exception of the ill-fated Powers
flight over the Soviet Union, may be considered one of the CIA's
greatest successes. (
DELETED
) The new systems are technologically feasible, but
they are fantastically expensive, costing billions of dollars, and the
intelligence benefits to be gained are marginal.
The President's last potential regulatory body for intelligence
affairs is the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Known
as the Bureau of the Budget until 1969, the OMB is the White
House agency which closely scrutinizes the spending of all government
departments and determines fiscal priorities for the administration.
It has the power to cut the spending of federal
agencies and even eliminate entire programs. Cabinet secretaries
can sometimes appeal the OMB's decisions to the President, but
he is understandably reluctant to overrule his own budgetary
watchdog. For the CIA, however, the OMB (and the BOB before
it) has never been more than a minor irritant. Its International
Affairs Division's intelligence branch, which in theory monitors
the finances of the intelligence community, has a staff of only five
men: a branch chief and one examiner each for the CIA, the
NSA, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the DIA (including
the rest of military intelligence). These five men could not possibly
do a complete job in keeping track of the $6 billion spent annually
for government spying, even if they received full cooperation from
the agencies involved-which they do not.
The theology of national security, with its emphasis on secrecy
and deception, greatly limits the effectiveness of the President's
budget examiners, who are generally treated as enemies by the
intelligence agencies. In this regard, the CIA has been particularly
guilty. When the OMB started monitoring the agency in the 1950s,
Controlling the CIA 337
the budget man was refused a permanent pass to visit headquarters.
He was regularly forced to wait at the building's entrance while a
CIA official upstairs was telephoned and asked to verify the auditor's
credentials. The situation improved somewhat in 1962 after
Robert Amory, former CIA Deputy Director for Intelligence,
became head of the OMB's International Division, and the examiner
received his own badge. (The former examiner was meanwhile
recruited by the CIA and assigned to deal with the OMB,
and the new examiner turned out to be himself a former agency
employee, who eventually returned also to handle relations with the
OMB.)
In the mid-1960s President Johnson gave the OMB expanded
power to scrutinize agency spending, but even this presidential
mandate did not appreciably improve the bureau's access. For
example, after the (
DELETED
) the OMB examiner wanted to look into
how the money was being spent. At one point, he came to the
agency with the intention of speaking to the knowledgeable personnel
in the Clandestine Services, after first stopping off to see one of
the CIA's Planning, Programming, and Budgeting (PPB) officers.
The PPB man was told not to let the OMB representative leave his
office while Director Helms was being informed of what the OMB
was trying to investigate. Helms promptly called a high White House
official to complain that the OMB was interfering with a program
already approved by the 40 Committee. The White House, in turn,
ordered the OMB to drop its inquiry. (
DELETED
)
The significance of this incident is not so much that the CIA
makes life difficult for the OMB and gets away with it. Rather,
what happened reflects the agency's attitude that its operations are
above normal bureaucratic restraints and that when the President
338 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
has given his approval, not even the technicalities can be questioned.
The CIA has also resorted to the use of outright lies and deceit
to prevent the OMB from being informed about its activities. In
1968 an examiner made a fact-finding tour of CIA installations
in Europe and the Middle East. He was accompanied by an agency
officer from headquarters, and his escort was specifically told by
the Clandestine Services' European Division chief that the budget
man should not be allowed to see anything "which might later
cause us difficulty or embarrassment." The examiner was to be
entertained, given cursory briefings, but not educated. (
DELETED
)*
CIA headquarters knew that the OMB man was extremely interested
in guns and police work, and the field stations were so
informed. (
DELETED
) he was asked if he would first like
to visit Scotland Yard. With his interest in police work, he was
unable to resist such an offer and, by prearrangement, the British
police snowed him under with extensive briefings and tours of the .(
DELETED
Controlling the CIA 339
facilities. This diversion, which had nothing to do with the purpose
of his trip, cost him a whole day out of his tight schedule. The
next day he was slated to drive to another CIA installation about
a hundred miles from London. But the agency did not want him to
have much time to ask questions or to look around. Thus, his
route was planed to pass through Banbury, the picturesque old
English town whose cross is of nursery-rhyme fame. As the agency's
operators had suspected, he could not forgo the pleasure of stopping
in a typical English pub for lunch and then doing some sightseeing.
The better part of another day was killed in this fashion, and he
never had time to dig deeply into matters the agency did not want
him to know about. Soon after, he left England without ever closely
inspecting the agency's extensive activities there (aimed principally
at Third World countries). To be sure, he had hardly been assiduous
in his effort to penetrate the CIA smoke screen.
In the Near East, things worked out better for the man from
OMB. The head of that division, unlike the European Division
clandestine chief, saw the tour as an opportunity to impress the
OMB examiner with the agency's activities. Thus, the escort officer
was instructed to give the visitor "the full treatment," and the
clandestine operators in the field were told to confide in him in
order to win him over to the CIA side.
This examiner's experience was not exceptional. Many similar
instances point up the OMB's-and, earlier, the BOB's-failure
to exercise any degree of meaningful control over the CIA. As
Director, Richard Helms was fully aware and indeed encouraging
of the agency's efforts to escape OMB scrutiny. Still, he could
apparently in good conscience tell the American Society of Newspaper
Editors in 1971, "Our budget is gone over line for line by
the Office of Management and Budget."
The Ambassador
The American ambassador in each country where the United States
maintains diplomatic relations is, in theory, the head of the "country
team," which is made up of the chiefs of all the U.S. govern340
• THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
ment agencies operating in that country, including the CIA. The
Eisenhower administration originated this expanded role for the
ambassador, but also issued a secret directive exempting the CIA
from his supervision. President Kennedy, shortly after taking office,
reiterated that the ambassador should supervise all the agencies
and then sent out a secret letter which said the CIA was not to be
excluded. The Kennedy letter remains in effect today, but its application
varies from country to country.
In nearly every case, the personalities of the ambassador and
the CIA station chief determine the degree to which the ambassador
exercises control over the CIA. Strong-willed diplomats like G.
McMurtrie Godley, first in the Congo and then in Laos (where
he became known as the "field marshal"), and Ellsworth Bunker in
Vietnam have kept the agency under close supervision, but they
are also stanch advocates of extensive clandestine operations. Some
ambassadors insist, as did Chester Bowles in India, that they be
informed of all CIA activities, but usually do not try to exert any
control over the operations. Still others, because of a lack of
forcefulness or a lack of interest, give the CIA a free hand and
do not even want to be informed of what the agency is up to.
Again, quoting the Bissell doctrine:
Generally the Ambassador had a right to know of any covert
operations in his jurisdiction, although in special cases (as a
result of requests from the local Chief of State or the Secretary
of State) the [CIA] chief of station was instructed to
withhold information from the Ambassador. Indeed, in one
case the restriction was imposed upon the specific exhortation
of the Ambassador in question, who preferred to remain
ignorant of certain activities.
One ambassador, John C. Pritzlaff, Jr., refused to play such a
passive role and, in a fashion highly uncharacteristic of American
envoys, stood up to the CIA. In the process, Pritzlaff, a political
appointee, became something of a hero to the few State Department
officers familiar with the way he virtually banned CIA covert
activities from his country of assignment, Malta. The problem
Controlling the CIA 341
started early in 1970 when retired Admiral George Anderson took
a trip through the Mediterranean countries and became alarmed
that leftist Dom Mintoff might win the Maltese elections scheduled
for the end of the year. As a Navy man, Anderson was a strong
sea-power advocate, and he feared Malta might be lost to N.A.T.O.
forces and become a base for the Soviet fleet. Although he was not
yet head of PFIAB, he used his White House connections to urge
the Clandestine Services to intervene in the Maltese elections. The
agency was not enthusiastic about the project, partly because of its
lack of "assets" on the island, but it agreed to send a clandestine
operative to make a study of how the election could be fixed. Ambassador
Pritzlaff, in telegram after telegram, resisted even this
temporary assignment of an agency operative to his country. In
the end, the Clandestine Services did not intervene and Mintoff
was elected. N.A.T.O. retained access to the island through British
bases.*
Congress
Congressional control of the CIA can be broken down into two
distinct periods: before and after Watergate. In the agency's first
twenty-six years, the legislative branch was generally content to
vote the CIA more than enough money for its needs, without seriously
questioning how the funds would be spent. In fact, only a
handful of Congressmen even knew the amount appropriated, since
all the money was hidden in the budgets of other government agencies,
mainly the Defense Department. To be sure, four separate
subcommittees of the House and Senate Armed Services committees
were responsible for monitoring the CIA, but their supervision was
minimal or nonexistent. In the House, the names of the members
were long kept secret, but they were generally the most senior
* Anderson's fears seemed partially justified, however, in 1971, when
Mintoff precipitated a mini-crisis by expelling the N.A.T.O. commander
from the island and by greatly increasing the cost to Britain of keeping its
facilities there. In an incident reminiscent of Cyprus President Makarios'
blackmail of U.S. intelligence several years before, the U.S. government was
forced to contribute several million dollars to help the British pay the higher
rent for the Maltese bases.
342 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
(and thus often the most conservative) men on their respective
committees. (Allen Dulles was reported by the New York Times
in April 1966 to have had "personal control" over which Congressmen
would be selected.) In August 1971, House Armed Services
chairman F. Edward Hebert of Louisiana broke with past practice
and dipped down his committee's seniority ladder to appoint Lucien
Nedzi, a hard-working liberal from Michigan, head of the oversight
subcommittee. Hebert, however, kept complete control of
the subcommittee's staff, and Nedzi is the only non-conservative
among the panel's five permanent and two ex officio members.
When Hebert made his unusual choice, it was widely speculated
that he was trying to defuse outside criticism of the subcommittee's
performance by naming a liberal as chairman, and that he felt he
could keep Nedzi isolated. Nedzi had little time for overseeing the
CIA during 1972, his first full year as chairman, because he faced
tough primary and re-election challenges. In 1973 he launched a
comprehensive inquiry into the agency's role in the Watergate
affair, but it remains to be seen whether his subcommittee will
delve any deeper into CIA covert operations than the House panels
have done in the past. In the Senate the Armed Services and Appropriations
subcommittees have traditionally met together to maintain
joint oversight of the CIA. As is true in the House, the members
have almost all been conservative, aging, military-oriented
legislators.
Many Congressmen and Senators-but by no means a majority
-believe that these oversight arrangements are inadequate, and
since 1947 nearly 150 separate pieces of legislation have been
introduced to increase congressional surveillance of the CIA. None
has passed either chamber, and the House has never even had a
recorded vote on the subject. The Senate, by a 59-27 margin in
1956, and by 61-28 in 1966, has turned down proposals for expanded
and more active watchdog committees for the agency and
the rest of the intelligence community. To strengthen his case for
maintaining the status quo at the time of the 1966 vote, Senator
Richard Russell, then chairman of the Armed Services Committee,
agreed that starting in 1967 the three senior members of the
Foreign Relations Committee would be allowed unofficially to sit
Controlling the CIA 343
in on the joint oversight subcommittee's meetings. But after this
arrangement was in effect for several years, Senator John Stennis,
Russell's successor as chairman, simply stopped holding sessions.
There was not a single one in either 1971 or 1972. Stennis is
generally believed to have ended the subcommittee's functions
because foreign-policy liberals J. William Fulbright and Stuart
Symington would have been present for the secret deliberations.
Neither man was trusted at the time by either the CIA or by the
conservative Senators who have kept oversight of the CIA as their
own private preserve. In the absence of any joint subcommittee
meetings, the five senior members of the Appropriations Committee,
all of whom were stanch hawks and administration supporters, met
privately to go over the agency's budget.
Senator Symington challenged this arrangement on November
23, 1971, when, without prior warning, he introduced a floor
amendment which would have put a $4 billion limit on governmentwide
intelligence spending-roughly $2 billion less than what the
administration was requesting. Although Symington's amendment
was defeated 51-36, it produced perhaps the most illuminating
debate on intelligence ever heard in the Senate.
Symington berated the fact that the Senate was being asked to
vote billions of dollars for intelligence with only five Senators knowing
the amount; and in a colloquy with the Appropriations chairman,
the late Allen Ellender, Symington established that even those
five Senators had limited knowledge of the CIA's operations. Ellender
replied· to Symington's question on whether or not the appropriations
subcommittee had approved the financing of a 36,000-
man "secret" army in Laos:
I did not know anything about it. ... I never asked, to begin
with, whether or not there were any funds to carryon the war
in this sum the CIA asked for. It never dawned on me to ask
about it. I did see it published in the newspapers some time
ago.
Laos was, of course, the CIA's largest operation at the time
that supposed overseer Ellender admitted ignorance about it.
344 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
Richard Russell, too, had had a similar lack of interest in what
the CIA was doing. He had once even told CIA Director Helmsprivately-
that there were certain operations he simply did not
want to know about. Senator Leverett Saltonstall, who served for
many years as ranking Republican on the oversight subcommittee,
expressed the same view publicly in 1966: "It is not a question of
reluctance on the part of CIA officials to speak to us. Instead it
is a question of our reluctance, if you will, to seek information
and knowledge on subjects which I personally, as a Member of
Congress and as a citizen, would rather not have."
Faced with this rejection of responsibility on the part of the
congressional monitors, the CIA has chosen to keep the subcommittee
largely in the dark about its covert operations-unless a
particular activity, such as the 1967 black-propaganda effort against
mainland China, has been successful in the agency's eyes and could
be bragged about to the legislators. Helms did make frequent
visits to Capitol Hill to give secret briefings, but these usually
concerned current intelligence matters and estimates of the communist
countries' military capabilities-not the doings of the
Clandestine Services. Yet Helms won a reputation among lawmakers
as a man who provided straight information. * Senator
J. William Fulbright, who sat in on Helms' briefings to the joint
oversight committee until they were discontinued in 1971, described
the proceedings to author Patrick McGarvey for the latter's CIA:
The Myth and the Madness:
The ten minute rule is in effect, so the members have little if
any chance to dig deep into a subject. The director of CIA
spends most of the time talking about the Soviet missile threat
* Although Helms had been for many years providing current intelligence
and estimates to congressional committees in secret oral briefings, the CIA
officially opposed legislation introduced in 1972 by Senator John Sherman
Cooper of Kentucky which would have provided the appropriate committees
with the same sort of data in the form of regular CIA reports. The bill was
favorably approved by the Foreign Relations Committee, but subsequently
died in Armed Services. Director-designate William Colby told the latter
committee in July 1973 that he thought this information could be supplied
on an informal basis "without legislation."
Controlling the CIA 345
and so on. The kind of information he provides is interesting,
but it really is of little help in trying to find out what is going
on in intelligence. He actually tells them only what he wants
them to know. It seems to me that the men on the committee
are more interested in shielding CIA from its critics than in
anything else.
Once a year the CIA does come before the appropriations
subcommittees in both houses to make its annual budget request.
These sessions, however, are completely on the agency's terms.
Prior to the meeting, CIA electronics experts make an elaborate
show of sweeping the committee rooms for bugging devices, and
blankets are thrown over the windows to prevent outside surveillance.
The transcripts of the sessions are considered so secret that
copies are locked up at CIA headquarters. Not one is left with
the subcommittees for future study. Committee staff members, who
normally do most of the substantive preparation for hearings, are
banned at the CIA's request. *
Allen Dulles set the tone for these CIA budget presentations in
the 1950s when he commented to a few assistants preparing him
for his annual appearance, "I'll just tell them a few war stories."
A more current example of the CIA's evasive tactics occurred in
1966 when the Senate appropriations subcommittee was thought
to have some hard questions to ask about the growing costs of
technical espionage programs. DCI Helms responded to the senatorial
interest by bringing with him the CIA's Deputy Director for
Science & Technology, Dr. Albert D. "Bud" Wheelon, who loaded
himself up with a bag full of spy gadgets-a camera hidden in a
tobacco pouch, a radio transmitter hidden in false teeth, a tape
recorder in a cigarette case, and so on. This equipment did not
• A relatively similar procedure is followed when an individual Senator
or Congressman writes to the CIA about a covert operation. Instead of
sending a letter in return, an agency representative offers to brief the
legislator personally on the matter, on the condition that no staff members
are present. This procedure puts the busy lawmaker at a marked disadvantage,
since his staff is usually more familiar with the subject than he isand
probably wrote the original letter.
346 THE C I A AND THE C U L T a FIN TEL L I G ENe E
even come from Wheelan's part of the agency but was manufactured
by the Clandestine Services; if, however, the Senators wanted
to talk about "technical" matters, Helms and his assistant were
perfectly willing to distract them with James Bond-type equipment.
Wheelon started to discuss the technical collection programs,
but as he talked he let the Senators inspect the gadgets. Predictably,
the discussion soon turned to the spy paraphernalia. One persistent
Senator asked two questions about the new and expensive technical
collection systems the CIA was then putting into operation, but
Wheelon deftly turned the subject back to the gadgets. When the
Senator asked his question a third time, Chairman Russell told him
to hold his inquiry until the CIA men were finished. But the Senators
became so enthralled with the equipment before them that
no more questions were asked. *
In 1967 the CIA, as usual, prepared its budget request with a
dazzling collection of slides and pictures, emphasizing the agency's
role in fighting communism around the world and producing intelligence
on the military threat posed by the Soviet Union and China.
Also included in the "canned" briefing was a description of the
CIA's technical collection expertise, its work with computers and
other information-processing systems, and even its advanced techniques
in printing-but, again, no "dirty tricks." The presentation
was rehearsed several times at CIA headquarters while calls were
awaited from Capitol Hill to set specific dates. A Congressman
serving on the House appropriations oversight group was even
invited to come out to the agency to see one of the dry runs. A few
days later a staff man on the House panel telephoned the CIA to
say that the Congressman who had seen the rehearsal said that
everything seemed in order and that the chairman simply did not
have the time to hear the presentation, but that the committee
would approve the full budget request of nearly $700 million anyway.
Shortly thereafter a similar call came from the Senate committee.
The chairman had apparently been told by his opposite
* Seven years later, the same panel would investigate the 1971 assistance
furnished by the Clandestine Services to E. Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy
for their "plumbers" operations-assistance comprised of many of the same
gadgets that amused the Senators in 1966.
Controlling the CIA 347
number in the House that the CIA request seemed reasonable, and
on the strength of the House recommendation the Senate would
also approve the full amount without a hearing.
Thus, in 1967 the CIA did not even appear in front of its
budgetary oversight committees. The experience that year was
extreme, but it does illustrate how little congressional supervision
the agency has been subject to over the years.
Many congressional critics of the CIA have advocated broadening
the membership of the CIA oversight subcommittees to include
legislators who will hold the agency up to the same sort of scrutiny
that other government departments receive. They argue that in the
equally sensitive field of atomic energy a joint congressional committee
has kept close track of the Atomic Energy Commission
without any breach in security. However, some liberals who advocate
greater control of the CIA fear that a joint CIA committee
analogous to the Joint Atomic Energy Committee might easily be
"captured" by the agency, just as the atomic energy committee has,
to a large extent, been co-opted by the AEC.
Those who oppose increased congressional control of the agency
claim that if the CIA is to operate effectively, total secrecy must
be maintained, and that expanding the functions and the membership
of the oversight subcommittees would mean much greater likelihood
of breaches in security. They fear that larger subcommittees
would necessarily lead to the presence of administration opponents
who might exploit agency secrets for political gains. Moreover, it
is said that friendly foreign intelligence services would be reluctant
to cooperate or share secrets with the agency if they knew that
their activities would be revealed to the American Congress.
No matter what the merits of the arguments for closer congressional
control, there was no chance that a majority of either house
would vote for any appreciable change until the Watergate affair
broke wide open in early 1973. Suddenly the long-dormant oversight
subcommittees began to meet frequently to investigate the
degree of CIA involvement in the illegal activities sponsored by
the White House and the Committee to Re-Elect the President.
The obvious abuses of power by the administration and its supporters
stirred even conservative legislators into demands for cor348
THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
rective action. And the administration, in trying to justify its excesses
on the grounds of protecting the "national security"-a justification
largely unacceptable to Congress-seriously weakened the
position of those who claimed that the CIA's actions should escape
scrutiny on those same "national security" grounds. Furthermore,
there was a widespread public and media outcry against concentration
of power in the White House, and against President Nixon's
penchant for taking unilateral actions without the approval or even
the advice of Congress. The CIA, as the President's loyal tooltainted
to some extent by involvement in Watergate-related activities-
also became vulnerable.
The four oversight subcommittees which met so frequently in
the first six months of 1973 are still made up of the same overwhelmingly
conservative members. But, pushed by either their own
revulsion over Watergate or by public reaction to it, they seem
likely to take some action to increase congressional surveillance of
the CIA.
For example, John Stennis, the Senate Armed Services chairman,
declared on July 20, 1973: "The experience of the CIA in Laos,
as well as the more recent disclosures here at home have caused
me to definitely conclude that the entire CIA act should be entirely
reviewed." This is the same Stennis who nineteen months earlier,
when the CIA's "secret" war in Laos was at its peak, stated:
This agency is conducted in a splendid way.... As has been
said, spying is spying. But if we are going to have an intelligence
agency, ... it cannot be run as if you were running a
tax collector's office or the HEW or some other such department.
You have to make up your mind that you are going to
have an intelligence agency and protect it as such, and shut
your eyes some and take what is coming.
Yet, from all indications, Stennis has become sincerely convinced
that the chief executive, on his own, should never again
be able to take the country into a Vietnam-type conflict. On October
18, 1973, he introduced legislation-while reserving his right
to change it after study and hearings extending into 1974-which
Controlling the CIA 349
would modify the CIA's legal base. First, it would limit the agency's
domestic activities to "those which are necessary and appropriate
to its foreign intelligence mission," apparently defining this in a
way to abolish covert activities in the United States. Second, it
would set up tighter procedures for congressional oversight, while
"recognizing essential security requirements."
A simple majority in either chamber would be sufficient to
change the present system of CIA oversight. As much as the
agency wants to keep its activities secret, it would have little choice
but to comply with serious congressional demands for more information
and more supervision. The power of the purse gives the
legislative branch the means to enforce its will on a reluctant CIA,
and even one house standing alone could use this power as a
control mechanism. That is, assuming that Congress is willing to
accept the responsibility.
CIA and the Press
In a recent interview, a nationally syndicated columnist with close
ties to the CIA was asked how he would have reacted in 1961 if
he had uncovered advance information that the agency was going
to launch the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. He replied somewhat
wistfully, "The trouble with the establishment is that I would have
gone to one of my friends in the government, and he would have
told me why I shouldn't write the story. And I probably wouldn't
have written the story."
It was rather fitting that this columnist, when queried about
exposing a CIA operation, should have put his answer in terms of
the "establishment" (of which he is a recognized member), since
much of what the American people have learned-or have not
learned-about the agency has been filtered through an "old-boy
network" of journalists friendly to the CIA. There have been exceptions,
but, by and large, the CIA has attempted to discourage,
alter, and even suppress independent investigative inquiries into
agency activities.
The CIA's principal technique for fending off the press has been
to wrap itself in the mantle of "national security." Reporters have
350 THE CIA AND THE CULT OP INTELLIGENCE
been extremely reluctant to write anything that might endanger an
ongoing operation or, in Tom Wicker's words, "get an agent killed
in Timbuktu." The CIA has, for its part, played upon these completely
understandable fears and used them as a club to convince
newsmen that certain stories should never be written. And many
reporters do not even have to be convinced, either because they
already believe that the CIA's activities are not the kind of news
that the public has a right to know or because in a particular case
they approve of the agency's aims and methods.
For example, on September 23, 1970, syndicated columnist
Charles Bartlett was handed, by a Washington-based official of
ITT, an internal ITT report sent in by the company's two representatives
in Chile, Hal Hendrix and Robert Berrellez. This eightpage
document-marked PERSONALANDCONFIDENTIAL-Saidthat
the American ambassador to Chile had received the "green light
to move in the name of President Nixon ... [with] maximum
authority to do all possible-short of a Dominican Republic-type
action-to keep Allende from taking power." It stated that the
Chilean army "has been assured full material and financial assistance
by the U.S. military establishment" and that ITT had "pledged
[its financial] support if needed" to the anti-Allende forces. The
document also included a lengthy rundown of the political situation
in Chile.
With the material for an expose in his hands, Bartlett did not
launch an immediate investigation. Instead, he did exactly what
ITT hoped he would do: he wrote a column about the dangers of
a "classic Communist-style assumption of power" in Chile. He did
see some hope that "Chile will find a way to avert the inauguration
of Salvador Allende," but thought there was little the United States
could "profitably do" and that "Chilean politics should be left to
the Chileans." He did not inform his readers that he had documentary
evidence indicating that Chilean politics were being left
to the CIA and ITT.
Asked why he did not write more, Bartlett replied in a 1973
telephone interview, "I was only interested in the political analysis.
I didn't take seriously the Washington stuff-the description of
Controlling the CIA 351
machinations within the U.S. government. [The ITT men who
wrote the report] had not been in Washington; they had been in
Chile." Yet, by Bartlett's own admission, his September 28 column
was based on the lIT report-in places, to the point of paraphrase.
He wrote about several incidents occurring in Chile that he could
not possibly have verified in Washington. Most reporters will not
use material of this sort unless they can check it out with an independent
source, so Bartlett was showing extraordinary faith in the
reliability of his informants. But he used their material selectively
-to write an anti-Allende scare piece, not to blow the whistle on
the CIA and ITT.
An ITT official gave the same report to Time's Pentagon correspondent,
John Mulliken. Mulliken covered neither the CIA nor
Chile as part of his regular beat, and he sent the ITT document to
Time's headquarters in New York for possible action. As far as he
knows, Time never followed up on the story. He attributes this to
"bureaucratic stupidity-the system, not the people." He explains
that Time had shortly before done a long article on Chile, and New
York "didn't want to do any more."
Thus, the public did not learn what the U.S. government and
ITT were up to in Chile until the spring of 1972, when columnist
Jack Anderson published scores of lIT internal documents concerning
Chile. Included in the Anderson papers, as one of the most
important exhibits, was the very same document that had been
given eighteen months earlier to Bartlett and Time magazine.
Jack Anderson is very much a maverick among Washington
journalists, and he will write about nearly anything he learns-and
can confirm-about the U.S. government and the CIA. With a few
other notable exceptions, however, the great majority of the American
press corps has tended to stay away from topics concerning the
agency's operations. One of the reasons for this is that the CIA,
being an extremely secretive organization, is a very hard beat to
cover. Newsmen are denied access to its heavily guarded buildings,
except in tightly controlled circumstances. No media outlet in the
country has ever assigned a full-time correspondent to the agency,
and very few report on its activities even on a part-time basis.
352 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
Except in cases where the CIA wants to leak some information,
almost all CIA personnel avoid any contact whatsoever with
journalists. In fact, agency policy decrees that employees must
inform their superiors immediately of any and all conversations
with reporters, and the ordinary operator who has too many of
these conversations tends to become suspect in the eyes of his
co-workers.
For the general view in the CIA (as in some other parts of the
federal government) is that the press is potentially an enemy force
-albeit one that can be used with great success to serve the
agency's purposes. Former Deputy Director for Intelligence Robert
Amory was speaking for most of his colleagues when in a February
26, 1967, television interview he said that press disclosures
of agency funding of the National Student Association and other
private groups were "a commentary on the immaturity of our
society." With the pronounced Anglophile bias and envy of Britain's
Official Secrets Act so common among high CIA officials, he
compared the situation to our "free motherland in England,"
where if a similar situation comes up, "everybody shushes up in
the interest of their national security and . . . what they think is
the interest of the free world civilization."
Former CIA official William J. Barnds* was even more critical
of journalistic probes of the agency in a January 1969 article in
the influential quarterly Foreign Affairs:
The disclosure of intelligence activities in the press in recent
years is a clear national liability. These disclosures have created
a public awareness that the U.S. government has, at least
at times, resorted to covert operations in inappropriate situations,
failed to maintain secrecy and failed to review ongoing
operations adequately. The public revelations of those weaknesses,
even though they are now partially corrected, hampers
* Barnds had been with the _agency's Office of National Estimates until he
joined the staff of the Council on Foreign Relations in the mid-1960s. In
1968 he was the secretary at the CFR session where Richard Bissell laid out
his views on covert operations.
Controlling the CIA 353
CIA (and the U.S. government) by limiting those willing to
cooperate with it and its activities. As long as such disclosures
remain in the public mind, any official effort to improve CIA's
image is as likely to backfire as to succeed.
Barnd's admission that the CIA has certain weaknesses is
unusual coming from a former (or present) agency official, but
very few in the CIA would disagree with his statement that press
stories about intelligence operations are a "national liability."
The CIA's concern about how to deal with reporters and how to
use the press to best advantage dates back to the agency's beginnings.
During the 1950s the agency was extremely wary of any
formal relations with the media, and the standard answer to press
inquiries was that the CIA "does not confirm or deny published
reports."
To be sure, there was a CIA press office, but it was not a very
important part of the agency's organization. To CIA insiders, its
principal function seemed to be to clip newspaper articles about
the CIA and to forward them to the interested component of the
agency. The press office was largely bypassed by Director Allen
Dulles and a few of his chief aides who maintained contact with
certain influential reporters.
Dulles often met his "friends" of the press on a background
basis, and he and his Clandestine Services chief, Frank Wisner,
were extremely interested in getting across to the American people
the danger posed to the country by international communism. They
stressed the CIA's role in combating the communist threat, and
Dulles liked to brag, after the fact, about successful agency operations.
The reporters who saw him were generally fascinated by his
war stories of the intelligence trade. Wisner was particularly concerned
with publicizing anti-communist emigre groups (many of
which were subsidized or organized by the CIA), and he often
encouraged reporters to write about their activities.
According to an ex-CIA official who worked closely with
Wisner, the refugees from the "captive nations" were used by the
CIA to give credence to the idea that the United States was truly
354 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
interested in "rolling back the Iron Curtain." This same former
CIA man recalls Dulles and Wisner frequently telling subordinates,
in effect: "Try to do a better job in influencing the press through
friendly intermediaries."
Nevertheless, the agency's press relations during the Dulles era
were generally low-keyed. Reporters were not inclined to write
unfavorable or revealing stories about the CIA, and the agency,
for its part, received a good deal of useful information from
friendly newsmen. Reporters like Joseph Alsop, Drew Pearson,
Harrison Salisbury, and scores of others regularly sat down with
CIA experts to be debriefed after they returned from foreign
travels. These newsmen in no way worked for the agency, but they
were glad to provide the incidental information that a traveler
might have observed, such as the number of smokestacks on a
factory or the intensity of traffic on a railroad line. The Washington
bureau chief of a large newspaper remembers being asked, after
he returned from Eastern Europe, "to fill in the little pieces which
might fit into the jigsaw puzzle." This type of data was quite
important to the intelligence analyst in the days before the technical
espionage programs could supply the same information. The
agency's Intelligence Directorate routinely conducted these debriefings
of reporters, as it does today. Selected newsmen, however,
participated in a second kind of debriefing conducted by the
Clandestine Services. In these the emphasis was on the personalities
of the foreign officials encountered by the newsmen (as part
of the unending probe for vulnerabilities) and the operation of the
internal-security systems in the countries visited.
At the same time the CIA was debriefing newsmen, it was looking
for possible recruits in the press corps or hoping to place a
CIA operator under "deep cover" with a reputable media outlet.
The identities of these bogus "reporters" were (and are) closely
guarded secrets. As late as November 1973, according to Oswald
Johnston's Washington Star-News report (confirmed by other
papers), there were still about forty full-time reporters and
free-lancers on the CIA payroll. Johnston reported that CIA
Director Colby had decided to cut the "five full-time staff corControlling
the CIA 355
respondents with general-circulation news organizations," but that
the other thirty-five or so "stringers" and workers for trade publications
would be retained. American correspondents often have
much broader entree to foreign societies than do officials of the
local American embassy, which provides most CIA operators with
their cover, and the agency simply has been unable to resist the
temptation to penetrate the press corps, although the major media
outlets have almost all refused to cooperate with the CIA.
William Attwood, now publisher of Newsday, remembers vividly
that when he was foreign editor of Look during the 1950s a CIA
representative approached him and asked if Look needed a correspondent
in New Delhi. The agency offered to supply the man
for the job and pay his salary. Attwood turned the agency down.
Clifton Daniel, former managing editor of the New York Times
and now that paper's Washington bureau chief, states that in the
late 1950s "I was very surprised to learn that a correspondent
of an obscure newspaper in an obscure part of the world was a
CIA man. That bothered me." Daniel promptly checked the ranks
of Times reporters for similar agency connections, but found "there
did not seem to be any." He believes that one reason why the
Times was clean was that "our people knew they would be fired"
if they worked for the agency.
In 1955 Sam Jaffe applied for a job with CBS News. While he
was waiting for his application to be processed, a CIA official
whom Jaffe identifies as Jerry Rubins visited his house in California
and told him, "If you are willing to work for us, you are going
to Moscow" with CBS. Jaffe was flabbergasted, since he did not
even know at that point if CBS would hire him, and he assumes
that someone at CBS must have been in on the arrangement or
otherwise the agency would never have known he had applied for
work. Moreover, it would have been highly unusual to send a new
young reporter to such an important overseas post. Rubins told
Jaffe that the agency was "willing to release certain top-secret
information to you in order that you try and obtain certain
information for us." Jaffe refused and was later hired by CBS for
a domestic assignment.
356 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
Before the CIA's successful armed invasion of Guatemala in
1954, a Time reporter dropped off the staff to participate, by his
own admission, in the agency's paramilitary operations in that
country. After the Guatemalan government had been overthrown,
he returned to the Time offices in New York and asked for his
old job back. According to another Time staffer, the managing
editor asked the returned CIA man if he were still with the agency.
The man said no. The managing editor asked, "If you were still
really with the CIA and I asked you about it, what would you say?"
The returned CIA man replied, "I'd have to say no." Time rehired
him anyway. *
The Dulles years ended with two disasters for the CIA that
newspapers learned of in advance but refused to share fully with
their readers. First came the shooting down of the U-2 spy plane
over the Soviet Union in 1960. Chalmers Roberts, long the
Washington Post's diplomatic correspondent, confirms in his book
First Rough Draft that he and "some other newsmen" knew
about the U-2 flights in the late 1950s and "remained silent."
Roberts explains, "Retrospectively, it seems a close question as to
whether this was the right decision, but I think it probably was. We
took the position that the national interest came before the story
because we knew the United States very much needed to discover
the secrets of Soviet missilery."
Most reporters at the time would have agreed with Richard
Bissell that premature disclosure would have forced the Soviets
"to take action." Yet Bissell admitted that "after five days" the
Soviets were fully aware that the spy planes were overflying their
country, and that the secrecy maintained by the Soviet and American
governments was an example "of two hostile governments col-
* More recently CIA men have turned up as "reporters" in foreign countries
for little-known publications which could not possibly afford to pay
their salaries without agency assistance. Stanley Karnow, formerly the
Washington Post's Asian correspondent, recalls, "I remember a guy who
came to Korea with no visible means of support. He was supposed to be
a correspondent for a small paper in New York. In a country where it takes
years to build up acquaintances, he immediately had good contacts, and he
dined with the CIA station chief. It was common knowledge he worked
for the agency."
Controlling the CIA 357
laborating to keep operations secret from the general public on
both sides."
The whole U-2 incident may well have been a watershed event.
For much of the American press and public it was the first indication
that their government lied, and it was the opening wedge in
what would grow during the Vietnam years into the "credibility
gap." But as the Eisenhower administration came to an end, there
was still a national consensus that the fight against communism
justified virtually any means. The press was very much a part
of the consensus, and this did not start to crack until it became
known that the CIA was organizing an armed invasion of Cuba.
Five months before the landing took place at the Bay of Pigs,
the Nation published a secondhand account of the agency's efforts
to train Cuban exiles for attacks against Cuba and called upon "all
U.S. news media with correspondents in Guatemala," where the
invaders were being trained, to check out the story. The New
York Times responded on January 10, 1961, with an article
describing the training, with U.S. assistance, of an anti-Castro force
in Guatemala. At the end of the story, which mentioned neither
the CIA nor a possible invasion, was a charge by the Cuban
Foreign Minister that the U.S. government was preparing "mercenaries"
in Guatemala and Florida for military action against Cuba.
Turner Catledge, then the managing editor of the Times, declared
in his book My Life and The Times: "I don't think that anyone
who read the story would have doubted that something was in
the wind, that the United States was deeply involved, or that the
New York Times was onto the story."
As the date for the invasion approached, the New Republic
obtained a comprehensive account of the preparations for the
operation, but the liberal magazine's editor-in-chief, Gilbert Harrison,
became wary of the security implications and submitted the
article to President Kennedy for his advice. Kennedy asked that
it not be printed, and Harrison, a friend of the President, complied.
At about the same time, New York Times reporter Tad Szulc
uncovered nearly the complete story, and the Times made preparations
to carry it on April 7, 1961, under a four-column headline.
But Times publisher Orvil Dryfoos and Washington bureau chief
358 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
James Reston both objected to the article on national-security
grounds, and it was edited to eliminate all mention of CIA involvement
or an "imminent" invasion. The truncated story, which
mentioned only that 5,000 to 6,000 Cubans were being trained
in the United States and Central America "for the liberation of
Cuba," no longer merited a banner headline and was reduced to a
single column on the front page. Times editor Clifton Daniel later
explained that Dryfoos had ordered the story toned down "above
all, [out of] concern for the safety of the men who were preparing
to offer their lives on the beaches of Cuba."
Times reporter Szulc states that he was not consulted about the
heavy editing of his article, and he mentions that President
Kennedy made a personal appeal to publisher Dryfoos not to run
the story. Yet, less than a month after the invasion, at a meeting
where he was urging newspaper editors not to print security information,
Kennedy was able to say to the Times' Catledge, "If you
had printed more about the operation, you would have saved us
from a colossal mistake."
The failure of the Bay of Pigs cost CIA Director Dulles his job,
and he was succeeded in November 1961 by John McCone.
McCone did little to revamp the agency's policies in dealing with
the press, although the matter obviously concerned him, as became
evident when he reprimanded and then transferred his press officer,
who he felt had been too forthcoming with a particular reporter.
In McCone's first weeks at the agency, the New York Times got
wind of the fact that the CIA was training Tibetans in paramilitary
techniques at an agency base in Colorado, but, according
to David Wise's account in The Politics of Lying, the Office of the
Secretary of Defense "pleaded" with the Times to kill the story,
which it did. In the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, President
Kennedy again prevailed upon the Times not to print a storythis
time, the news that Soviet missiles had been installed in Cuba,
which the Times had learned of at least a day before the President
made his announcement to the country. *
• According to the Times' Max Frankel, writing in the Winter 1973
Columbia Forum, there was still a feeling that the paper had been "remiss"
Controlling the CIA 359
Then, in 1964, McCone was faced with the problem of how to
deal with an upcoming book about the CIA, and his response
was an attempt to do violence to the First Amendment.
The book was The Invisible Government, by reporters David
Wise of the New York Herald Tribune and Thomas Ross of the
Chicago Sun-Times. Their work provided an example of the
kind of reporting on the agency that other journalists might have
done but had failed to do. In short, it was an example of investigative
reporting at its best and, perhaps as a result, it infuriated the
CIA.
McCone and his deputy, Lieutenant General Marshall Carter,
both personally telephoned Wise and Ross's publisher, Random
House, to raise their strong objections to publication of the book.
Then a CIA official offered to buy up the entire first printing of
over 15,000 books. Calling this action "laughable," Random
House's president, Bennett Cerf, agreed to sell the agency as many
books as it wanted, but stated that additional printings would be
made for the public. The agency also approached Look magazine,
which had planned to run excerpts from the book, and, according
to a spokesman, "asked that some changes be made-things they
considered to be inaccuracies. We made a number of changes but
do not consider that they were significant."
The final chapter in the agency attack against The Invisible
Government came in 1965 when the CIA circulated an unattributed
document on "The Soviet and Communist Bloc Defamation
Campaign" to various members of Congress and the press.
This long study detailed the many ways used by the KGB to discredit
the CIA, including the "development and milking of Western
journalists. Americans figure prominently among these." The study
singled out as an example of KGB disinformation a Soviet radio
broadcast that quoted directly from The Invisible Government.
in withholding information on the Bay of Pigs, so the Times extracted a
promise from the President that while the paper remained silent he would
"shed no blood and start no war." Frankel notes that "no such bargain was
ever struck again, though many officials made overtures. The essential
ingredient was trust, and that was lost somewhere between Dallas and
Tonkin."
offiClms.-:f'urtnermOfe~swa-s- an-exceuerrrrrew SOUTChis
friends. Columnist Joseph Kraft (another Nixon-administration
bugging victim) generally sums up the view of Helms by reporters
who saw him frequently: "I wanted to see Helms a lot because he
was talking with the top men in government. He was a good analyst
-rapid, brief, and knowledgeable about what was going on."
Kraft recalls that Helms was the only government official who
forecast that South Vietnamese President Thieu would successfully
block implementation of the Vietnamese peace accords until after
the 1972 American election, and other reporters tell similar stories
of Helms being among the most accurate high government sources
available on matters like Soviet missiles or Chinese nuclear testing.
He did not usually engage in the exaggerated talk about communist
threats that so often characterizes "informed sources" in the Penta-
-_~..l t" hwe less of an operational ax to grind than
360 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G E N C E
The agency's message was not too subtle, but then the CIA never
put its name on the document.
When Richard Helms took over the agency in 1966, press relations
changed noticeably. Helms himself had been a reporter with
United Press in Germany before World War II, and he thought
of himself as an accomplished journalist. He would tell his subordinates,
when the subject of the press came up in the agency's
inner councils, that he understood reporters' problems, how their
minds worked, what the CIA could and could not do with them.
He had certain writing habits (which may have originated either
with a strict bureau chief or a strict high-school English teacher)
which set him apart from others in the clandestine part of the
agency, where writing is considered a functional, as opposed to a
literary, skill. For instance, he would not sign his name to any
document prepared for him that included a sentence beginning
'1 ' J (f' " 66' 11 -
362 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
The source of a news leak is not usually revealed in the newspapers.
Yet when Helms, or any other government official, gives
a "not-for-attribution" briefing to reporters, he always has a
reason for doing so-which is not necessarily based on a desire to
get the truth out to the American people. He may leak to promote
or block a particular policy, to protect a bureaucratic flank, to
launch a "trial balloon," to pass a message to a foreign government,
or simply to embarrass or damage an individual. Most reporters are
aware that government officials play these games; nevertheless, the
CIA plays them more assiduously, since it virtually never releases
any information overtly. The New York Times Washington bureau
chief, Clifton Daniel, notes that although the agency issues no press
releases, it leaks information "to support its own case and to serve
its own purposes .... It doesn't surprise me that even secret bureaucrats
would do that." Daniel says, however, that he "would accept
material not-for-attribution if the past reliability of the source is
good. But you have to be awfully careful that you are not being
used."
In early 1968, Time magazine reporters were doing research on
a cover story on the Soviet navy. According to Time's Pentagon
correspondent, John Mulliken, neither the White House nor the
State Department would provide information on the subject for
fear of giving the Soviets the impression that the U.S. government
was behind a move to play up the threat posed by the Soviet fleet.
Mulliken says that, with Helms' authorization, CIA experts
provided Time with virtually all the data it needed. Commenting
on the incident five years later, Mulliken recalls, "I had the impression
that the CIA was saying 'the hell with the others' and was
taking pleasure in sticking it in." He never did find out exactly why
Helms wanted that information to come out at that particular time
when other government agencies did not; nor, of course, did Time's
readers, who did not even know that the CIA was the source of
much of the article which appeared on February 23, 1968.
From the days of Henry Luce anci Allon •...•...••
Controlling the CIA 363
lates, "With McCone and Helms, we had a set-up that when the
magazine was doing something on the CIA, we went to them and
put it before them .... We were never misled."
Similarly, when Newsweek decided in the fall of 1971 to do a
cover story on Richard Helms and "The New Espionage," the
magazine, according to a Newsweek staffer, went directly to the
agency for much of its information. And the article, published on
November 22, 1971, generally reflected the line that Helms was
trying so hard to sell: that since "the latter 1960s . . . the focus
of attention and prestige within CIA" had switched from the
Clandestine Services to the analysis of intelligence, and that "the
vast majority of recruits are bound for" the Intelligence Directorate.
This was, of course, written at a time when over two thirds of the
agency's budget and personnel were devoted to covert operations
and their support (roughly the same percentage as had existed for
the preceding ten years). Newsweek did uncover several previously
unpublished anecdotes about past covert operations (which made
the CIA look good) and published at least one completely untrue
statement concerning a multibillion-dollar technical espionage
program. Assuming that the facts for this statement were provided
by "reliable intelligence sources," it probably represented a CIA
disinformation attempt designed to make the Russians believe something
untrue about U.S. technical collection capabilities.
Under Helms, the CIA also continued its practice of intervening
with editors and publishers to try to stop publication of books either
too descriptive or too critical of the agency. In April 1972 this book
-as yet unwritten-was enjoined; two months later, the number-two
man in the Clandestine Services, Cord Meyer, Jr., visited the New
York offices of Harper & Row, Inc., on another anti-book mission.
The publisher had announced the forthcoming publication of a book
by Alfred McCoy called The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia,
charging the agency with a certain degree of complicity in the Southeast
Asian drug traffic. Meyer asked old acquaintances among
Harper & Row's top management to provide him with a copy of the
book's galley proofs. While the CIA obviously hoped to handle the
matter informally among friends, Harper & Row asked the agency
for official confirmation of its request. The CIA's General Counsel,
364 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
Lawrence Houston, responded with a letter of July 5, 1972, that
while the agency's intervention "in no way affects the right of a
publisher to decide what to publish ... I find it difficult to believe
... that a responsible publisher would wish to be associated with
an attack on our Government involving the vicious international
drug traffic without at least trying to ascertain the facts." McCoy
maintained that the CIA had "no legal right to review the book"
and that "submitting the manuscript to the CIA for prior review is
to agree to take the first step toward abandoning the First Amendment
protection against prior censorship." Harper & Row apparently
disagreed and made it clear to McCoy that the book would not be
published unless first submitted. Rather than find a new publisher
at that late date, McCoy went along. He also gave the entire story
to the press, which was generally critical of the CIA.
The agency listed its objections to Harper & Row on July 28,
and, in the words of the publisher's vice president and general
counsel, B. Brooks Thomas, the agency's criticisms "were pretty
general and we found ourselves rather underwhelmed by them."
Harper & Row proceeded to publish the book-unchanged-in
the middle of August.
The CIA has also used the American press more directly in its
efforts against the KGB. On October 2, 1971, the week after the
British government expelled 105 Soviet officials from England
because of their alleged intelligence activities, the New York Times
ran a front-page article by Benjamin Welles about Soviet spying
around the world. Much of the information in the article came from
the CIA, and it mentioned, among other things, that many of the
Russians working at the United Nations were KGB operators.
According to Welles, the agency specifically "fingered as a KGB
man" a Russian in the U.N. press office, Vladimir P. Pavlichenko,
and asked that he be mentioned in the article. Welles complied and
included a paragraph of biographical information on the Russian,
supplied by the CIA. Ten days later the Soviet Union made an
official protest to the U.S. government about the "slanderous" reports
in the American press concerning Soviet officials employed
at the U.N.
The Times' charges about espionage activities of the Soviets at
Controlling the CIA 365
the U.N. were almost certainly accurate. But, as a Washingtonbased
media executive familiar with the case states, "The truth
of the charges has nothing to do with the question of whether an
American newspaper should allow itself to become involved in the
warfare between opposing intelligence services without giving its
readers an idea of what is happening. If the CIA wants to make a
public statement about a Soviet agent at the U.N. or the U.S.
government wants to expel the spy for improper activities, such
actions would be legitimate subjects for press coverage-but to
cooperate with the agency in 'fingering' the spy, without informing
the reader, is at best not straightforward reporting."
The CIA has often made communist defectors available to
selected reporters so news stories can be written (and propaganda
victories gained). As was mentioned earlier, most of these defectors
are almost completely dependent on the CIA, and are carefully
coached on what they can and cannot say. Defectors unquestionably
are legitimate subjec.ts of the press's attention, but it is unfortunate
that their stories are filtered out to the American people in such
controlled circumstances.
David Wise remembers an incident at the New York Herald
Tribune in the mid-1960s when the CIA called the paper's top
officials and arranged to have a Chinese defector made available
to reporters. According to Wise, CIA officials "brought him down
from Langley [for the interview] and then put him back on ice."
Similarly, in 1967 the agency asked the Times' Welles to come out
to CIA headquarters to talk to the Soviet defector Lieutenant
Colonel Yevgeny Runge. On November 10 Welles wrote two articles
based on the interview with Runge and additional material on the
KBG supplied by CIA officers. But Welles also included in his
piece several paragraphs discussing the CIA's motivation in making
Runge available to the press. The article mentioned that at least
some U.S. intelligence officials desired "to counter the international
attention, much of it favorable, surrounding the Soviet Union's 50th
anniversary," which was then taking place. Publicizing the defection,
Welles continued, "also gave United States intelligence men
a chance to focus public attention on what they consider a growing
emphasis on the use of 'illegal' Soviet agents around the world."
366 • THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
According to Welles, these paragraphs stating, in effect, that the
CIA was exploiting Runge's defection for its own purposes infuriated
the agency, and he was "cut off" by his CIA sources. He
experienced "long periods of coolness" and was told by friends in
the agency that Helms had personally ordered that he was to be
given no stories for several months.
The CIA is perfectly ready to reward its friends. Besides provision
of big news breaks such as defector stories, selected reporters may
receive "exclusives" on everything from U.S. government foreign
policy to Soviet intentions. Hal Hendrix, described by three different
Washington reporters as a known "friend" of the agency, won a
Pulitzer Prize for his 1962 Miami Daily News reporting of the
Cuban missile crisis. * Much of his "inside story" was truly inside:
it was based on CIA leaks.
Because of the CIA's clever handling of reporters and because
of the personal views held by many of those reporters and their
editors, most of the American press has at least tacitly gone along,
until the last few years, with the agency view that covert operations
are not a proper subject for journalistic scrutiny. The credibility
gap arising out of the Vietnam war, however, may well have
changed the attitude of many reporters. The New York Times' Tom
Wicker credits the Vietnam experience with making the press
"more concerned with its fundamental duty." Now that most reporters
have seen repeated examples of government lying, he
believes, they are much less likely to accept CIA denials of involvement
in covert operations at home and abroad. As Wicker points
out, "Lots of people today would believe that the CIA overthrows
governments," and most journalists no longer "believe in the
sanctity of classified material." In the case of his own paper, the
New York Times, Wicker feels that "the Pentagon Papers made the
big difference."
The unfolding of the Watergate scandal has also opened up the
agency to increased scrutiny. Reporters have dug deeply into the
* This is the same Hal Hendrix who later joined lIT and sent the memo
saying President Nixon had given the "green light" for covert U.S. intervention
in Chile. See p. 350 above.
Controlling the CIA 367
CIA's assistance to the White House "plumbers" and the attempts
to involve the agency in the Watergate cover-up. Perhaps most
important, the press has largely rejected the "national security"
defense used by the White House to justify its actions. With any
luck at all, the American people can look forward to learning from
the news media what their government-even its secret part-is
doing. As Congress abdicates its responsibility, and as the President
abuses his responsibility, we have nowhere else to turn.

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