A Whiff of Watergate

...The briefing of two NSC officials in June 1996, with an appeal to hold the information very closely, happened to coincide with revelations that FBI personnel files on Republicans had been improperly given to Craig Livingstone at the White House...

...When the White House, seat of the nation's chief law enforcement officer, has to be viewed as potentially a part of the problem, it is understandable that our intelligence and law enforcement agencies are sometimes ambivalent...

...Its worst experience was reporting to the Nixon White House on its Watergate investigation, only to see that information used to defeat the probe...

...There is a whiff of Watergate and Irancontra in the air as, once again, the CIA examines how it was dragged into improper actions by its political masters...

...How long would you bet it will be before a human being is cloned...

...One-and-ahalf billion pages of documents dating from over a quarter century ago are still classified...

...The Bureau knew because it was eavesdropping on the eavesdroppers...

...He was a Democratic contributor whom the National Security Council (NSC), under Lake, had tried to keep out of the White House...

...When the Communists made a comeback in 1953, the CIA sent William E. Colby, its future director, to Rome with $25 million...

...He wanted to refer back to an earlier summary he had compiled and was informed that he couldn't because it was classified...

...Glenn Seaborg, the former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, has been trying for 14 years to get government permission to publish his diary, from which he says he carefully excluded everything remotely confidential...

...I don't think I can improve on that...

...Some 60 years ago, my first job in journalism was working for a Jewish news agency in New York...

...The theory that TWA Flight 800 was shot down by a misfired Navy missile has recently done a return engagement...

...What she really said upon being apprised by Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post about what his research had turned up was, "All this was a major surprise to me...

...Our side won that election...

...Had he perhaps been programmed years ago by sinisterOrientals...

...From the time that Einstein said it could be done, there was no doubt it would be done...

...Our historical experience with managing what science creates has not been very good...

...But for Senator Kerrey, Lake's inability to enforce a line between foreign relations and foreign donations disqualified him from presiding over the intelligence community...

...Is it possible that the President was suspected of being part of the Chinese intrigue...

...I wait for the sequel, about some rogue laboratory in Mexico or Montana finding profit in human cloning...

...The connection may not be immediately evident...

...China was now where no foreign government should want to be: in the center of an explosive American controversy and a many-faceted investigation that would remain alive long after coffees and Lincoln bedroom overnighters were forgotten...

...Of course, there remains the hardiest perennial among conspiracy theories: that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was really brought off by X with the collaboration of Y and the backing of Z. You may ask: What harm does it do to concoct conspiracies as a way of explaining otherwise inexplicable events...

...Well, the theories do encourage a certain credulity...

...As early as 1971, James Watson, the codiscoverer with Bernard Crick of the structure of DNA, wrote that we were moving toward "the clonal man," adding that this was too important a matter to be left to scientists...

...What happened next was an FBI nightmare come true...

...Aside from whatever damage was done in exposing counterintelligence techniques, the disclosure of the FBI eavesdropping was undoubtedly seen by Beijing as part of some conspiracy in the depths of the U. S. government to sabotage improved relations...

...What the FBI had obtained, with the help of the National Security Agency (known as "the Big Ear"), was reports of intercepts suggesting a Chinese plan to funnel large amounts of money into Congressional campaigns...

...What can be done will be done—and society will be left to cope with the consequences...

...Books are still written to show that the CIA set up Watergate to bring down President Richard M. Nixon—a contention that Fred Thompson, as Republican counsel on the Senate Watergate Committee, tried (and failed) to establish in 1973...

...It has been 40 years since the last such Congressionally mandated panel warned of the dangers of overclassification and advocated more openness...

...Within days of the announcement of the cloned sheep in Scotland, the Wall Street Journal carried an article headlined, "Who Will Cash in on Breakthrough in Cloning...

...And every year there are 3.6 million new pages of secrets created...

...Madeleine Albright, he says, deserves the privacy she needs to "reconsider, reintegrate and refashion" the deepest things she knows about her history and herself...

...Even before being nominated to head the CIA, Acting Director George J. Tenet ordered an Inspector General's investigation of how the Democratic National Committee managed to obtain the CIA's Tamraz file...

...Old secrets remain secret...

...Veteran watchers of the interplay between the spy world and the political world have a distinct sense of déjà vu...

...This may help to explain the Bureau's ambivalent feelings when it reported to the NSC about Chinese efforts to influence the 1996 elections...

...That opened the era of electrical communication...

...Mazel ??v, Madeleine As the joke goes, when Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright was presented with the evidence of her Jewish family background, she said, "Oy vey...

...To be Jewish in Europe was to suffer discrimination and often worse...

...signaled Samuel Morse's invention of the telegraph...

...Clearly, if questionable characters were being admitted into the presence of President Bill Clinton over National Security Council objections, it was because he wanted it that way...

...Would you believe that Volume 22 of the government series Foreign Relations of the United States, covering the years 1961-63, was published with a warning that it was not to be considered reliable because of the deletions made by the CIA...

...Or has that story already been written...

...Inadvertently, he had failed to delete from the French edition something the Agency wanted out...

...whatever that means...

...Its report makes an interesting point: Keeping secrets is a form of government regulation, one that is made even worse by the fact that the public doesn't know what is in the regulations...

...But then she told Newsweek that she was not surprised about her Jewish origin, but only at the news that her grandparents had died in concentration camps...

...And the inquiry is not likely to end there...

...The theory of the murder of White House Counsel Vincent Foster remains alive and well, with the help of Pittsburgh millionaire Richard Scaife...

...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr A Whiff of Watergate After weeks of twisting in the wind, Anthony Lake withdrew his nomination as Director of Central Intelligence, a victim of the spreading campaign funding scandal...

...To believe Oliver Stone on the Kennedy assassination, you must believe that for 33 years the Pentagon, the CIA and the Mafia have been able to hush up their plot to destroy the young President...

...There was also fallout at home...

...Officials will always and everywhere love to stamp "top secret" on papers—it makes them feel important and helps to catch the boss' attention...

...The FBI has had similar problems...

...Time was when foreign money for elections was flowing out of here, not coming in...

...CIA money also played a role in elections in Portugal, France and Latin America...

...It was ordered by Lyndon Johnson and other Presidents to conduct illegal wiretaps...

...Finally, however, in an interview with Ed Bradley for CBS' 60 Minutes, she reiterated that the whole story of her origin and her grandparents had been "totally" unknown to her...

...Most everyone who has dealt with government secrets has some mind-boggling story to tell...

...He quoted from Hindu scripture, "I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds...

...Attorney General Janet Reno then determined that the NSC should also know, and the Bureau was instructed to brief the officials who were its normal liaisons...

...I remember the German who worked on the daily press summary in the American Embassy in Bonn in the early 1960s...

...In February of this year, according to the New York Times, FBI Director Louis J. Freeh flatly refused White House Counsel Charles C. F. Ruff's formal request for material on the "Chinese connection" for the purpose, in part, of briefing Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright before her visit to Beijing...

...Today webs and nets in cyberspace proliferate, full of promise and problems almost beyond our grasp...

...Four decades ago when I was working in the Soviet Union, I found most people there believing that all government—referred to as "them"—was a conspiracy remote from the citizens, to be resisted where possible...

...What can be done tends to be done, for reasons of national or private interest...

...The first covert operation of the newly created CIA in 1947 was pumping some $10 million into Italy for propaganda, bribes and support of the Christian Democrats against the Communists...

...The story was leaked to the Washington Post, and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D.-Calif...

...But whatever it hoped for, its move backfired badly...

...Nothing much came of that report...

...My assignments included covering sermons in Reform temples, where the Sunday service in English, the organ music and the uncovered heads struck me as almost alien until I realized that I was witnessing the phenomenon of assimilation...

...Nor was there much doubt that, even without the wartime imperative, the hydrogen bomb would follow...

...that a competing culture of openness might develop which could...

...For reasons left unclear, he preferred to believe that FBI and NSC intelligence officials had conspired to keep the President in the dark about the sensitive intercept...

...As Albright says, "if you're not looking for a picture, you don't see it...

...Its counterintelligence people have some highly sophisticated ways, beyond ordinary bugging and wiretaps, of finding out what is being said in foreign missions...

...Six of those named were briefed in cautious terms last June...

...Enough already, says Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D.-N...

...So the commission proposes that all documents be declassified within 10 years—an interval that may be extended to 30 years, provided the officials involved can justify doing so—and that a national declassification center be created to work on releasing secrets...

...Secretary Albright's parents, though, chose the option of converting to Catholicism, and sought to shield her from the confusing knowledge of their original religion...

...The other day, one scientist—Harold Varmus, director of the National Institutes of Health—said that human cloning may be justified in some very rare circumstances, such as untreatable infertility...

...So becoming American sometimes meant leaving behind not only a language and a culture, but often a religion as well...

...We have not yet gone that far, but to the extent that Americans credit governmental conspiracies, they make it difficult for government to function...

...A century and a half ago, "What hath God wrought...

...What happened was that the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, turned against Lake's confirmation on learning that someone in the CIA had provided the Democratic National Committee with a classified report on Lebanese-American wheeler-dealer Roger Tamraz...

...While President Clinton warns against the temptation to play God, our scientists are quite accustomed to playing God...

...The theory that United Nations forces will imminently take over part or all of the United States, which behooves militias to arm themselves for defense of our sovereignty, is one that President Clinton professes himself unable to squelch because the militias consider him part of the plot...

...But it is possible to conceive that secrecy, a culture of secrecy, need not remain the only norm...

...He had to pay a fine...

...On the C-SPAN morning program, one presumably representative caller, exclaiming "Give me a break," totally rejected the White House claim that President Clinton had not been intentionally excluded from the FBI information...

...The resulting breakthroughs are typically accompanied by an expression of awe...

...Psychiatrist Walter Reich, the director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, has observed that the "desperate burial of ethnic identity" is one chapter of the Holocaust itself...

...Most children of assimilation knew of the process...

...In this case, moreover, the FBI was worried about compromising the supersecret "sources and methods" by which access was gained to conversations of Chinese officials...

...Some of them require you to accept the notion of a cover-up in which hundreds, perhaps thousands of government officials participate...

...A century after Morse, in New Mexico, Robert Oppenheimer witnessed the explosion of the atomic bomb he had helped to create...

...Names of individuals, mainly from the California delegation, were mentioned...

...In retrospect, it might have been less unsettling for her to have known all along than to deal with all the trauma of discovery...

...In his memoirs, Colby described how he filled the back seat of his Fiat with millions of lire, and dispensed them through his "outside agent," an ostensible student...

...Y), who recently headed a Congressionally created commission on protecting and reducing government secrets...

...The late Colby told me that he had submitted his memoirs for CIA clearance...

...Part of the Plot It is quite remarkable how conspiracy theories flourish in our land today...

...Some years ago the FBI called a Congressman to warn that the sensitive telephone call he was engaged in on his other line was being overheard by Soviet intelligence...

...Now, feebly, President Clinton is trying to climb down from being the "shatterer of worlds...

...It is hard to divine how the Chinese government expected to profit from clandestine, laundered political contributions...

...Given the existing restrictions on human embryo research, all this may have been superfluous...

...A couple of bills to outlaw human cloning were introduced in the House...

...A personal word is necessary here...

...But clearly the shudder of perplexity and apprehension generated by word of a cloned sheep, and then a cloned monkey, seemed to demand some reassurance, however symbolic, from the bully pulpit...

...demonstrate greater efficiency...

...The CIA also mined the harbors of Nicaragua at the Reagan Administration's behest, prompting an angry letter to Casey from Barry Goldwater, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee...

...And where they lead, the market tends to follow...

...We are not out to put an end to secrecy," Chairman Moynihan cautiously says in his Foreword...

...ignoring the terms of her classified briefing, confirmed it publicly...

...When the CIA was found to have been peripherally involved in Watergate—for example, furnishing former agent Howard Hunt with a wig and a disguise for his break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist—the ensuing Inspector General's investigation turned up much more serious improprieties, including illegal surveillance of anti-Vietnam War protesters...

...During the Iran-contra episode, Director William J. Casey, over the strenuous objections of subordinates, gave orders for a CIA plane to delivermissiles to Iran...

...The Clonal Man President Clinton reflected a kind of societal nervous twitch at the idea of human cloning when he banned Federal funding for the field and called for a three-month moratorium on human cloning research pending a study by the National Bioethics Commission...

...While new conspiracies are born every day, old ones do not die...

...A Culture of Secrecy Ironic about the reports of Chinese campaign cash...