WASHINGTON REPORT: Watching the Watchdogs:
Sisyphus
WASHINGTON REPORT WATCHING THE WATCHDOGS "Power is the greatest crime, mitigated only by responsibility." -William Faulkner Institutional disasters, whelped by the Cold War and its attendant...
...President Ford, vacationing in Colorado, requested a report, to his credit...
...The risk of a whitewash is high if left to the congressional subcomit-tees, now charged with responsibility for oversight, because their leadership is not congenial to such an inquiry...
...The Cold War gave it birth...
...A few critics of the CIA would abolish the agency...
...26, 1974) is in direct opposition to that of Victor Marchetti, a former high-ranking official of the CIA, as published in a current issue of a bunny magazine, Penthouse...
...The trip covered the period during a violent change in the Greek government...
...and if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe...
...Perhaps in the course of such an inquiry, both branches would acknowledge the validity of that phrase in a bishop's oath taken upon consecration-"Nolo epis-copari...
...It's in the nature of the beast-however necessary the beast is/may be...
...Recently, in a floor speech, Sten-nis said: "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...
...The 93d Congress, which just concluded, did rouse itself to expel a President, trim the powers of a President to commit troops to combat overseas, and to re-assert its latent powers of budgetary control...
...And so with the CIA or the FBI-or your local police department...
...A few years ago, one middle-aged wife of a CIA official told another woman, "You're the first non-Agency wife I've ever gotten to know...
...Marchetti in his criticisms doesn't object to having a CIA...
...Even giving them credit for publishing the Hersh stories, these editors need to spend less time with Fowler's Modern English Usage and more time insisting that their reporters cover the news and stop playing footsie with congressional chieftains and Cabinet members...
...Code) that stipulates "the Agency (the CIA, i.e...
...Lord Salisbury phrased it this way on one occasion when speaking in Parliament: "If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome...
...Unlike John le Carre's "hero," Angleton was pushed to come in out of the cold...
...The CIA's files, according to Hersh, include information about "at least" 10,000 American citizens...
...We've come a long way since the late '20s when Secretary of State Stimson turned off his department's cryptography section with an observation, "Gentlemen do not read other gentlemen's mail...
...Vietnam and Mylai . . . foreign aid and Pakistan . . . Cuba and Castro . . . Watergate and the Presidency . . . etc...
...The issue leads itself to demagoguery by headline hunters among both stand-patters and revisionists...
...Occasionally, such security breaks down as when a young son of a CIA official, who had returned from a "trip" of several weeks, brought over to a neighboring (non-CIA) household some Greek coins that "my father left on the bureau...
...As other press people joined Hersh in the hunt, the CIA, in typical bureaucratic fashion, threw one of its operatives to the hounds...
...However, it appears that globe-trotting anti-war activists-Sanford Gottlieb of SANE, for example-are observed by the CIA whether in Paris or at SANE's Washington office, 318 Massachusetts Avenue, North-East...
...An Executive Branch inquiry, with both Henry Kissinger and Vice President Rockefeller, a strong supporter of CIA, looking over the shoulders of investigators, is not promising...
...Later, he denied it all...
...Apparently assigned its employes to train members of local police departments...
...But the legislation establishing the CIA prohibited it from engaging in internal-security (domestic) activities...
...Richard Helms, CIA director during the period Hersh's stories suggest the Agency illegally worked its agents within the United States, ducked for cover...
...Indeed, most members until recently have not wanted to know...
...Permitted its equipment to be used in the burglary of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office building...
...A British minister of the last century gave what could be the most sympathetic, or, at least, understandable characterization of the allegations contained in the Hersh articles...
...Hersh's stories have upset the old-school-tie chaps of the Times-as reflected in an editorial about Hersh's stories...
...Senators Prox-mire and Baker and Rep...
...this was left to the FBI...
...Not that the CIA is without newspaper friends...
...Intelligence-gathering activities, he accepts, as do most other critics...
...sisyphus...
...Sunlight is still the best disinfectant...
...The task of asserting control over the CIA in an effective and responsible manner is not an easy one...
...The failure of our intelligence services, as revealed by the Pearl Harbor post-mortem, helped break ground for a centralized intelligence institution...
...Another friend of the CIA is Tom Braden, also a syndicated columnist...
...In fact, Hersh's stories strengthen a supposition, expressed in these columns, that the Watergate was less scandal and more in the nature of an attenuated, but sloppy, attempted coup d'etat...
...Harrington are gaining support among their colleagues for substantive supervision of an agency that: • Meddled in the National Student Association a few years ago...
...It's not easy for Hersh to write about the CIA...
...William Faulkner Institutional disasters, whelped by the Cold War and its attendant mentality, continue...
...But most don't...
...Joseph Kraft, whose relationship with CIA officials has been occasionally perceived, has already defended it in one of his syndicated columns published just a few days after Hersh's first story was printed...
...These, and perhaps other yet undisclosed domestic activities, are in addition to its work abroad in the back-alleys and barrooms of national rivalries...
...One may correctly assume that "the Company," as some CIA employes refer to it in mixed social gatherings, will probe into and prowl around his personal life as it will anyone else's who writes or speaks publicly in critical fashion...
...The scope of the Hersh story-the first one occupied approximately nine newspaper columns-was so wide that it could not be routinely slapped down by a government press agent...
...In fairness, many CIA officials have been alarmed about covert actions-even as to questioning their value...
...Most members of these (four) subcommittees are political conservatives whose views are best expressed by one of them, the current chairman of the Armed Services Committee of the Senate, John Stennis of Mississippi...
...Kraft's staunch defense of the incumbent CIA Director, William Colby, (Baltimore Sun, Dec...
...There are subcommittees of the Appropriations and Armed Services Committees of both the House of Representatives and the Senate which are charged with the responsibility for congressional supervision...
...Persons both within and without the Company had babbled to Hersh...
...This editorial was a milk-and-water one, which not only did not mention Hersh, its own reporter, but also treated the matter as if it involved a couple of Exeter Academy boys found haying a water-fight in the dorm after lights-out...
...Hersh, incidentally, is the "hired gun" on the re-portorial staff of the Times, which insists that it is a newspaper of record, but consistently muffs stories in Washington...
...He's James Angleton, 57, in charge of the CIA's counter-intelligence efforts, which, the Hersh stories said, included illegal domestic activities...
...And, according to Hersh, agreed to the Nixon Administration's request to let CIA employes shadow domestic political dissidents...
...shall have no police, subpoena, law-enforcement or internal-security functions . . ." The CIA is an intramural institution...
...A successful inquiry as to the proper limits of CIA activities would be useful both as to the inquiry itself and to the strengthening of the legislative branch vis-a-vis the President...
...The latest revelation, unwrapped during the Christmas season by Seymour Hersh of the New York Times, relates to operations of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA...
...So much for congressional supervision to date...
...Fortunately, this attitude is changing...
...They tend to socialize among themselves...
...Whatever the validity of its intelligence-gathering functions, the CIA is a fearsome giant in a representative democracy...
...The sinister corridors of our era will lure still more of our leaders if the CIA is not brought to heel...
...With a bang, not a whimper, Angleton resigned...
...There is talk of a special civilian review panel presided over perhaps by a Justice of the Supreme Court...
...Those returned to Washington on rotation seem to reside successively in the same rental units...
...Marchetti is also a co-author of a new book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence...
...This in spite of the 1947 statute (Title 50, Section 403, U.S...
...CIA employes in responsible positions are encouraged, if not required, to reside with their families in specific communities in the Washington area...
...The Hersh allegations require a thorough inquiry...
...He does criticize an overemphasis on clandestine activities, particularly covert action...
...All except a few of the 535 members of Congress do not know when they are voting funds for the CIA, or how much (the amount is in dispute, but $6 billion is a recurring figure) or what for...
...From the standpoint of working further toward a revitalization of the legislative branch, an inquiry by a specially elected joint congressional panel holds promise as events help force the Congress to a walk from its baby-crawl of the last 30 years...
...At this writing, he's not yet been heard from, but he will be...
...Day-after-day, Hersh wrote stories about allegations that the CIA, in his words, "had violated its charter by conducting massive, illegal intelligence operations aimed at (domestic) anti-war activists and other American dissidents inside the United States...
...if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent...
...Its editors in Washington and New York should spend less time feuding with each other and worry less about reporters who write "over" instead of "more than" and confuse the arcane uses of "that" and "which...
...Well, as Teddy Roosevelt once said, some things and some people have the guts of a chocolate eclair...
...The funds are scattered among several departmental budgets under false identities...
...But, last year Helms, during his confirmation hearing in the Senate, when asked by Senator Case of New Jersey, said: "I don't recall" whether the CIA was asked by President Nixon's men to join with the FBI and other agencies in domestic surveillance of the anti-Vietnam war movement...
...Congressional monitoring of the CIA is ineffective-or more precisely, effective from the standpoint of spy-minded CIA officials...
Vol. 101 • January 1975 • No. 12
