CIA, DIA, FBI - AND 50 MORE!
Rosenberg, Bernard
After reading the Rockefeller Commission report, Senator Frank Church declared, "This is just the tip of an iceberg." A little later it looked like the tip of a glacier. From December 22, 1974,...
...With poorly planned mendacity, inadequate containment of informers, clumsiness, imbecilities piled on third-rate burglaries, we seem to have gone semi-Czarist, raising more of a goofed-up Okhrana than a KGB...
...Meanwhile, jobs, housing, education, health care, and freedom shrivel...
...No doubt...
...I can't believe I destroyed people's rights to privacy...
...So are convicts...
...Consider the new block-size $126 million FBI building...
...K elley refused to call continued collection "rank abuse...
...Am Curious Yellow, which Grove had a hand in distributing...
...That would make the Pentagon happy...
...We are informed that this little obliteration, which showed our doctors to be so much less obliging than the Nazi MDs who at least left their records intact, was carried out shortly after Richard Helms "ordered other unspecified records to be destroyed...
...The point is to do better, not to botch the job and to cover up the coverup with more finesse...
...The new FBI citadel contains records of over 81 million Americans, with an annual flow of more than 7 million fingerprints pouring in from local and state police who more and more have their own secret squads...
...The CIA has been compromised...
...Ford, yet another amiable man of limited educability, might even clinch his first victory outside Grand Rapids...
...The mayoral contest boiled down to Daley versus a reluctant Republican, John J. Hoellen who received less than a quarter of the vote...
...Few officials warn about the police state...
...With that gesture, he would banish the doubt that has been overconcentrated on a single segment of the bureaucratic brontosaurus that envelops us...
...Much more interesting...
...The retrospective wisdom or sudden sensitivity of Braden and many men like him, who were immersed in the slime they could not then detect, is more than welcome...
...It implies power wedded to arrogance, secrecy and deception...
...The FBI is aware of them...
...TRIVIA...
...So far we know only of one LSD subject's suicide...
...The gray filing cabinets with six drawers bulge with three-by-five cards...
...No wonder Nixon, yearning for a little efficiency, wanted something more like the KGB...
...With that heroic gesture, Mr...
...But do let's rid ourselves of the CIA...
...Punch a button and you can find reviews of the X-rated film...
...Why the scruple about not subscribing to that type of thing in which he finds "no gross abuse of authority," no "corruption of the trust that was placed in us...
...The Secret Service acknowledges that much more than politics is involved...
...The DIA is supposed to be a huge umbrella under which Army, Navy, and Air Force intelligence services cluster in separate but sometimes parallel or antagonistic action...
...Ford who if he had a clever Machiavellian on his staff would be best advised as follows: Jerry, stop chewing that gum for a minute, put a WIN cap or a helmet on your head, take a passel of journalists out to the Rose Garden and try to read this statement: "Upon due reflection, I have found it possible to make a judgment about the CIA, and ladies and gentlemen, that judgment is negative...
...Here the overlap among agencies must be tremendous...
...If other operatives did that, her "good work" should not be tarnished by their immorality...
...To remain ideologically pure, a measure of decentralization might be in order...
...If we are bemused as our cities rot, as pollution spreads through our waterways, as blight spreads across the countryside, it is a comfort to know that the beauty of Pennsylvania Ave...
...By such criteria, which of us is immune...
...Some of this [material] might well be helpful in later investigations...
...Among others, there's the Defense Intelligence Agency with its $100 million budget, a succubus that has been growing by cellular multiplication ever since Robert McNamara conjured it into being...
...Unfortunately, some of its valuable records have been shredded and dumped, producing an ecological mess...
...Hear Clarence M. Kelley, celebrating the completion of his second year as FBI director, dilating on 30 years of national security break-ins and burglaries, known privately as blackjack jobs and publicly as "surreptitious entries" that, having been disclosed, are no longer "a viable procedure...
...A Chicago Sun-Times staff writer noted that: "While Hoellen denounced `Daley and his Gestapo' and called the mayor `a paranoid old man peeping in keyholes'," Daley and Police Superintendent James Rochford defended police intelligence as a legitimate weapon against possible terrorist tactics...
...Well, Indians are notoriously unstable...
...Hirelings sometimes feel that way...
...The FBI was right...
...Look and you will find subtler dangers...
...This from Mr...
...A Secretary of HEW leaves with but one parting shot: Beware of the welfare state (which barely exists...
...The FBI would neither confirm nor deny the charges," and a Douglas Durham, "the alleged informant," could not be reached for comment...
...Decriminalize semitotalitarian police action that strict constitutionalists have foolishly defined as unlawful...
...The cities are already doing their job but still short of perfection...
...You think that sounds too much like the Imperial Presidency...
...Calls outside the U.S...
...Ten days later Miss Cook repeated her story under oath, adding that Gary Lash was her control agent...
...Rochford said that "the intelligence work would continue...
...Nevertheless, too many facts will out...
...some seem laughable at first sight (a file on Ford) but maybe they're not so laughable after all...
...Several clergymen who have mediated Indian/government disputes also claim that AIM has been infiltrated by FBI agents...
...And we ought to think about the criteria by which names are assembled...
...those unwittingly courageous CIA employees who, like the Army's 1,500 subjects and HEW's 2,500, contributed so freely to scientific advancement...
...Billions of dollars for the Director's little hobby—in fact a rather sizable share of what's left over from the production and sale of instantly obsolete military hardware...
...Not likely" is what most insiders think...
...TRB makes it vivid: Suppose your name was in a telephone conversation monitored under court order by the FBI (or without court order under former Attorney General Mitchell...
...How did it all come to pass...
...We ought to do that...
...They can have the DIA...
...The press has spotted but hardly highlighted two vital provisions of their law-and-order meat axe...
...Congressman Harrington has been denied access to confidential data since June 1975...
...you may well have a red "C" card (cross-reference) in the index...
...Through its cunning counterintelligence arm, which is becoming familiar as Cointelpro, 3,138 pages of secret documentation on the SWP have now been made public...
...Thus Assistant Treasury Secretary David R. MacDonald recently told a House subcommittee that "mental instability and failure in work and in personal relationships" were also taken into account...
...most are grisly (like Operation Phoenix: can there have been 20,000 political assassinations in Vietnam...
...Since FDR created the OSS during World War II, a monstrously large American "intelligence community" has materialized...
...In March, after a local expose, Elizabeth J. Bettner called a press conference to explain that she was only one of 20 or 25 persons in the Miami area hired by Internal Revenue to pick up all the dirt she could on Florida politicians who from 1970 to 1973 annoyed Dick Nixon's gang...
...Was there complicity or worse in the murder of heads of state like Allende, Trujillo, Lumumba, and Diem...
...Not for the Secret Service, with its computerized "watch list" of people considered dangerous to the President—which once grew to 500,000 but has supposedly been trimmed down to a mere 47,000...
...It will...
...So wrote an Israeli, Michael Chilewich, of his government...
...How could such computers so readily disgorge those lovely dossiers...
...Whoever despises it, constitutes a threat to our endangered species—whether by justifying the appalling record that has lightly been touched on here or by using that record for "leftist" or "rightist" contempt of democratic ways...
...can always be enhanced...
...And with all that, as the tapes make monotonously clear, Nixon felt nothing but outrage 314 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS at the intelligence community, which was never sufficiently responsive to his criminal needs, his extralegal and unconstitutional demands...
...Kelley insists that no illegal activities ever occurred in his bureau and that they have been discontinued...
...A media's worth of the stuff every day, plus weekly and monthly supplements, quarterly reactions, revelations, confessions...
...Its computer index contains 300,000 names, including all those associated with Grove Press, Inc., which once published a book by the British double agent Kim Philby...
...And 7,200 "personality files" and a thousand dossiers on U.S...
...This syndrome strikes one agent-turned-pundit as deadly to the democratic process...
...Citizens are cynical about an intelligence organization that plotted, bugged, tapped, stole, killed, fought secret wars, overthrew democratic governments, installed dictators, blundered and lied...
...Still, that very opprobrium, the possibility of opposition, of alertness to abuse, of continuous crying out that fish stink, fish multiply and stink, is our great, remaining glory...
...Unlike the more exalted criminals in our midst, she was capable of this outburst: I took the FBI job on, thinking it was honorable...
...Although no past attorney general can "recall" it, CIA Director William E. Colby has testified to a 20-year agreement with the Justice Department not to prosecute CIA criminals...
...The woman, Mary Jo Cook, explained, "I have a big mouth—I said a lot," (to her "control agent") about "some Attica defendants" and the jury selection project on which their lawyers were working...
...Mary Jo Cooper evidently does not subscribe to the general proposition that decency is an idea whose time has come and gone...
...And his government, besieged as it is, hardly deserves a fraction of the opprobrium that, looking back on the "covert operations" of the last 20 years, we pour on ours...
...In the long run, however, a search for historical origins leads us into an infinite regress...
...For we have begun to see that the CIA is only one glacier in an Ice Age of covert operations...
...Item: tipped off by H. R. Haldeman that Leonard Bernstein planned to sneak a peace message into his "mass oritorium" at the Kennedy Center, the FBI warned that this "opera" would follow "an antiwar theme," that it would be sung in Latin and that if the President or other important government officials attended they might unwittingly applaud a message inimical to them...
...Ten years for sure, maybe 20 years after Frank R. Olson, his mind suitably altered, leaped out of a Manhattan hotel-room window, the LSD experiments still continued...
...They are psychopaths in the strictest sense: men without a superego to check or a conscience to prick them...
...Voters are agitated about it...
...Leaders with eyes and no nose, with a nose and no eyes, with brains and no soul—but all of them with ambitions above their stature and their abilities...
...Anyway, less than rank abuse is for others...
...Think of that huge building as a warehouse, wholesaling information on Americans...
...Why not...
...The electronic retrieval system is a marvel...
...It was as if I was a TV monitor into people's lives...
...Braden, the conservative columnist...
...Further item: the after-hour passes of celebrated quarterback Joe Namath, his affair with an airline stewardess and additional proof of Namath's sexual prowess, are the subject of another FBI report...
...But what does it signify if all they have learned is that the Central Intelligence Agency should be abolished...
...All right...
...And give the DIA the $86 million headquarters it wants...
...Tom Wicker points out that more than 50 federal agencies have some law enforcement function that may involve the protection of "security" by spying, prying, and snooping...
...He is suing that agency for deprivation of income...
...Maybe he also acted out of a deeper conviction...
...The subversive comedian was 80 years old at the time and an obvious danger to the Republic...
...Is that all...
...million new ones coming in every year...
...If so, Justice deserves no more exculpation than any other subdivision of the government...
...Or make it so you don't have to cover up...
...And that community has been notably inept...
...Bernstein's Mass did contain one line, "Dona Nobis Pacem," or "Give Us Peace," that might have been disquieting to the Administration...
...Eyebrows were lifted, however, at least mine were, when Tom Braden took the same position...
...Maybe Senator Church's Select Committee will discover something about the supersecret National Security Agency—compared to which the CIA is an open book...
...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS 313 If the DIA is too cumbersome, many another apparat is in place...
...To this end Senator Birch Bayh, that paragon of liberals, and Senator James O. Eastland, never previously associated with progressive politics, have helped reintroduce Nixon's old bill to recodify the criminal law...
...One would empower the government to wiretap without a court order anyone the President may consider a "danger to the structure" of government, and the other would make it more difficult to prosecute a public official engaged in illegal conduct with the "express permission" of the President...
...Its parts are dispersed like the limbs of Osiris...
...Were the computers unable to predict that this kind of thing could only invite retaliation...
...Hence, a frontpage story in the Times begins: A 26-year old Buffalo woman said yesterday that she had infiltrated the Attica defense camp and reported back to the Federal Bureau of Investigation on legal strategy surrounding the trials of former inmates under indictment for crimes stemming from the Attica revolt...
...By the CIA...
...And what has all this expenditure of time and money led to...
...Braden remembers when Dulles was obliged to appear about this matter before Senator Richard Russell's Armed Forces Committee, our first CIA Director announced to those around him, "I guess I'll have to fudge the truth a little...
...A spokesman for the American Indian Movement 312 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS said to a Washington Post reporter that the organization's former chief security officer was a paid FBI informant...
...But let the rest be salvaged...
...He may have something on you...
...If it is clear that the CIA overreached itself by encroaching on the domestic field of espionage, sabotage, and provocation, one should not forget that the FBI also greatly overstepped its bounds...
...Who were the "unsuspecting volunteers" (Ay, how the language is enriched...
...But who ever heard of a more devoted trivia-collector than the FBI...
...That incident now seems paradigmatic to Braden...
...152 separate files down the drain by order of Dr...
...are more frequently monitored...
...During the course of it, I realized it was not honorable...
...They're Jews," is among his more notable aphorisms...
...Sidney Gottlieb, a biochemist "personally involved" in the fatal experiment...
...Involvement in dissident politics is one...
...By the FBI...
...F. Edward Hebert, deposed chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, which practices oversight in the original sense of that word, resumed his old seat for the Harrington auto-da fe, as Mary McGrory dubbed it...
...The Cold War had its precedent in President Wilson's Red Raids and, for that matter, in the Alien and Sedition Acts...
...Only Chileans and other foreigners need to be destabilized...
...Newsworthy enough...
...According to Jack Anderson, the Secret Service has a file number, CO 23970009205, on Groucho Marx for a wisecrack he made about President Nixon...
...A platitudinous but not therefore inaccurate answer is that it was a product of the Cold War...
...TRB of the New Republic admonishes his readers to lower their voices when they pass "Big Brother's home...
...Before Daley's latest and biggest election victory, his city (or its press) was agog with scandal about the Chicago police who infiltrated the local Urban League chapter and similarly subversive community organizations along with the State's Attorney's office, while keeping Father Hesburgh of Notre Dame under surveillance and compiling dossiers on newspapermen and politicians like Richard Newhouse, a black who had the gall to run against Daley in the Democratic primary...
...Durham is accused, inter alia, of telling the Justice Department details of the legal defense prepared for Indians arrested at various demonstrations...
...Local officials can administer the new and better law...
...horror upon horror...
...involvement in Chile—suspects that his syndicated column was dropped by a number of publishers under pressure from Naval Intelligence...
...One "facet of its role" is already under Senate investigation, namely, a program allegedly related to codebreaking and electronic spying that permits "eavesdropping on literally thousands of long distance telephone calls" in the United States...
...Operation Chaos generated quite a yield...
...There are some 58 million, with 1.3...
...I. F. Stone's call for liquidation of the CIA surprised no one...
...Take one more from the great miscellany currently in Senator Church's hands: a file on Gerald Ford presumably commencing on April 23, 1963, when the FBI bugged a conversation between two AVCO executives discussing how helpful Congressman Ford had been to them...
...We have Dick Daley to show the way...
...Horrock tells us that the NSA, with 20,000 employees, functions in a "carefully guarded complex" at Fort Meade, Md...
...From December 22, 1974, when Seymour Hersh's first dispatch on "Massive Illegal CIA Operations" appeared in the New York Times, we have been swamped with more "classified" information than anyone can assimilate...
...I have not reviewed files to find out about reporters, Congressmen or other public figures," and "I do not subscribe to that type of thing...
...I committed a political crime...
...Military men who already manage an efficient spy-in-the-sky operation could bring it down to earth as a properly run war on restrictive mandates...
...Accordingly, I hereby abolish the CIA...
...Apparently it's not just Ma Bell who has us by the calls...
...The Newark FBI, with only one forged letter of defamation, followed a scoutmaster whose wife attended party meetings and drove him from his job...
...Isn't it a pity to have lost all the records of that program...
...Seymour Hersh's colleague Nicholas Horrock has disclosed the existence of 10 regular federal agencies employing 200,000 persons who spend over $6 billion a year on intelligence activities...
...Concerning their machinations only the tiniest tip has so far surfaced...
...The Director's logic is as unassailable as his moral sense, which has been surpassed of late only by Jerry Ford...
...Let the historians make a judgment, and let Congress use discretion...
...Or that a genius in the IRS, not the CIA, dreamed up, say, Operation Leprechaun...
...Congress has perversely balked at appropriating this paltry sum even though its members know that the DIA is housed in substandard facilities, and a former Air Force base is available for the new site...
...And they had their European sources...
...organizations should not go to waste...
...If the psychologically and occupationally unstable but apolitical population is vulnerable, what of those who are not simply imperfect but political as well...
...Only those at the top and the sycophants who surround them could lie their way nervelessly through a polygraph test...
...And the voters agree...
...Stay away from the arts...
...She vehemently denied having been ordered to sleep with any victim...
...But the FBI still keeps tabs on the personal behavior of reporters and government officials, including members of Congress...
...Our leader, upon careful study of the CIA report and the addendum on assassinations for his eyes only, asserted twice and thrice that he would make no judgment about it...
...WHO NEEDS the CIA...
...But Braden, the long-time CIA agent who lately views his old organization as a threat to representative government...
...Michael Harrington, the dedicated socialist—not COMMENTS AND OPINIONS 311 Michael Harrington, the liberal congressman who spilled too much about U.S...
...Here's the same Braden who by April 1975 finally recounts a story about the time Allen Dulles bought an entire intelligence network "for a lot of money" and it somehow wound up with the KGB...
...Director Kelley simply perpetuates it...
...His flacks proclaim that he makes Chicago work...
...Director Kelley finds that "in light of changing standards of law enforcement conduct," J. Edgar Hoover terminated certain "imprudent" counterintelligence practices...
...There are 7,500 cabinets, growing at the rate of 300 a year...
...Nixon stayed away...
...Nor should we lose the knowledge scientifically gathered on LSD, or other drugs, in addition to certain unnamed "harassment substances," electroshock, and radiation...
...When in the early '70s military intelligence was caught investigating such prominent politicians as Adlai Stevenson III and infiltrating various domestic groups, we were assured that these escapades would be halted and that the "vast computerized information" derived from them had been destroyed...
...None can have equaled President Nixon's if only because of advanced technology at his disposal...
...The Socialist Workers party, the American Trotskyist— shall we say movement?—has been under continuous surveillance for at least 31 bloody years...
Vol. 22 • September 1975 • No. 4
