WASHOINGTON REPORT: Policing the Policemen

...FRANK GETEEIN...

...The far worse costs are the kind suffered by Halperin in his service to the Mad Bomber, and detailed by him in The Lawless State...

...Halperin's book-written with Jerry J. Berman, Robert L. Borsage and Christine Marwick, all colleagues in his present activities-details lawlessness not only of the FBI and the CIA, but also of the Military Intelligence in its operations against war dissenters, the National Security Agency, operating, apparently, out of a kind of professional paranoia-that, at least, seems the kindest explanation for Kissinger's easy violation of the most fundamental rights of Americans in relation to their government-and a couple of mild surprises, the Internal Revenue Service and grand juries at large, both of which have followed the lead of the intelligence agencies in placing themselves above the law, answerable to no one...

...Some staff members ought to be reading and taking notes from Morton Halperin's new book The Lawless State: The Crimes of the U.S...

...Sure, government is interfering with his activities, but usually only by a kind of automatic reflex, knee-jerk smothering you could call it...

...What seems paranoia to me, obviously seemed common prudence to many of the administrators engaged in criminal violations of the civil liberties of their fellow citizens...

...Ford and Dole and people of that ilk are fond of pointing out that you don't get anything free and noting further that one of the mstjor problems facing our society is how to control government interference with the lives of citizens...

...In career, thus, Halperin is a kind of non-sensationalist Daniel Ellsberg, without the flakiness that makes a lot of people uneasy about Ellsberg...

...The intelligence agencies, on the other hand, set out to harass all kinds of people...

...If such a case exists, however, with any degree of plausibility, it is one that must be made to the country at large and very specifically to the country's Congress: Here is a clear and present danger...

...From being professionally employed in the advancement of "national security," Halperin has turned to being professionally concerned about how the presumed effort to preserve the Republic, or at least the nation, actually has eroded some of the most fundamental attributes of the Republic...

...National security, that will-o'-the-wisp, has levied costs on this society incomparably greater than would be levied by welfare if every recipient arrived at the check-dispensary by Cadillac and wearing a fur coat...

...to meet it we must sacrifice some of our normal rights for a temporary period...

...Couth doesn't really make up for the corruption both the suavies presided over...

...More important, he has not participated in the assault on the Constitution maintained by the FBI for the profit and even the mere delectation of victorious candidates and their entourages...

...Fifteen years later, it doesn't seem just plain funny...

...It ran from the illegal bugging and taping of King's private conversations, to attempts to peddle the tapes so obtained to the press, to, finally, an effort to drive King to suicide a month before his scheduled award of the Nobel Prize for peace...

...Halperin is now director of the Project on National Security and Civil Liberties set up jointly by the ACLU and the Center for National Security Studies...

...Hoover was a monster, all right, and probably the greatest single threat to the Constitution, the Republic and the Spirit of Law since Jefferson Davis, but there is a great deal more to the undermining of the Republic than Hoover's clinically interesting personality...

...He has not been on the national scene at all...

...In the nature of his previous occupations, there is quite probably no secret record with which the FBI can blackmail him as it has blackmailed any number of presidents and other powers...

...There is, of course, a kind of case to be made for many, not all by any means, of the violations so de-pressingly detailed in the book...

...It was funny material...

...It is easy enough to portray Hoover as a monster, a sport of nature of some sort, the kind of man you more often encounter in Vincent Price movies than in real life, let alone in real government...

...The book should be required reading for anyone about to take high office in the new administration and is recommended reading for any American wanting to restore and preserve the Republic...

...This is precisely the change of focus, or at the very least, enlargement of focus, that the country needs to make...

...Likewise, the poor harried businessman is only the victim of the inertia, as it were, of the bureaucracy...

...For, in this field, this is the great advantage of Jimmy Carter...

...Meanwhile, the security and intelligence agencies are way out of control, must be brought back under the Constitution and, in the process, their whole theory intensively rethought...

...It is very hard to believe that Helms's resignation from his posh post as ambassador to the Shah of Iran, announced the day after the election, was purely coincidental, entirely unrelated to the imminence of outsiders gaining control of the government...

...In that capacity, he found that his home as well as office telephones were being bugged by his boss, whom he is now suing for redress of that unconscionable but apparently, to Kissinger, quite natural invasion of privacy and violation of civil liberties...

...That personality, coming on the national scene in the 1920s, was a little ahead of its times...

...Very early in the Kennedy administration, I was at a dinner with a newly minted Cabinet member who delighted the table by reading excerpts of FBI hearsay opinions on some poor prospective appointee...

...I suppose if we have had a public saint in this country in the last two decades, it was Martin Luther King...

...That that case was neither made nor even attempted by anyone is a strong presumption that it did not exist, even in the minds of those operating on its premises...

...That career change is extremely interesting in itself, for it represents on a personal level exactly what the country as a whole and the new administration in particular ought to be doing, perhaps not as drastically, but certainly as inclusively...

...I laughed along with everyone else...

...Halperin, of course, is the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and senior staff member, reporting to Henry Kissinger, of the National Security Council...

...The money cost is greater, of course, but that's only the beginning...

...The FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover, set out to destroy King, a campaign that Halperin examines in great detail...

...We have got to enlarge our view of "national security" to include consideration of the costs of that elusive quality, or state of being, or condition of life, or philosophical desideratum, whatever "national security" is thought to be...

...His embarrassments are all on the public record: the Playboy interview, the remark about the preservation of neighborhood homogeneity, others...

...I should have been- and wasn't-smart enough to be both outraged and alarmed...

...Kissinger knows which fork to use when and Richard Helms understands wine, but spiritually both of them are tablemates of J. Edgar at the Mayflower's beefsteak emporium...

...Just as the CIA moved on the world scene from intelligence gathering to a monumentally inept series of what were naively called "covert" operations, so at home the corresponding agencies, starting with the FBI, moved from monitoring to messing up the lives of their "subjects...

...The times caught up with Hoover in the late '40s, early '50s, and amazingly, when you think of it, have stayed abreast of that evil mediocrity ever since...

...Intelligence Agencies (Penguin Books...

...What those thinkers mean, usually, is the high cost of welfare on the one hand, and, on the other, the formidable stacks of forms the poor, harried businessman has to fill out in order to get his share of government handouts...