THE CURIOUS CAPERS OF THE CIA

...CIA has never officially admitted that it was in any way responsible since by law it need not give any public accounting of its activities...

...This group, composed of 20,000 Germans, had within it a special group called Technical Service...

...The Burmese government has decided to wipe out these troops for two reasons: 1) They constitute a menace to safety in the nearby villages, and 2) the Burmese fear that Communist China will use the Nationalist raids as an excuse to march into Burma to stop the attacks...

...Even such warm friends of the CIA as Sen...

...No competent official would say publicly whether he might have been held by an agency other than the military...

...Ill In December of 1952, CIA was back in the news again, this time in another part of the world...

...On Dec...

...Much more of their activity has been devoted to looting Burmese villages...

...McCarthy's scheduled smear of Bundy didn't quite come off, mostly because the White House and the Pentagon successfully pleaded a special immunity which, they whispered, sets the CIA apart from the rest of the government and clothes it with the authority to trust no one, including its creator, the Congress of the United States...

...Two days later, the Times reported: "The U. S. Central Intelligence Agency was identified by reliable sources as the group that held the Japanese writer Wataru Kaji in custody for...

...If present legislation excludes CIA from this responsibility, then perhaps that legislation ought to be subject to review and change...

...Can we really afford to allow this agency to operate in total secrecy and promote policies contrary to many being publicly enunciated as basic elements in our foreign policy...

...Hans Jahn, president of the German Railway Workers Union, and others like them...

...Latin-America has also seen its share of CIA capers...

...Smith appreciated my letter, but thought perhaps I had drawn some erroneous conclusions...

...Included were Eric Ollen-hauer, national head of the Social Democratic Party, largest in Germany: Max Brauer, mayor of Hamburg...

...14, 1952: The letter said in part...

...Stanley Grogan, assistant to Gen...

...Hinrich Kopf, prime-minister of Lower Saxony...

...As a result, the Burmese government, which has received $31,000,000 in economic aid from this country, announced that July 1 it is terminating all aid agreements with the United States...

...Mike Mansfield, Montana Democrat, have reached the point where they are urging Congressional scrutiny of the work of the super-spy agency...

...I am writing to find out whether it is part of CIA policy to make . . . arrangements with ex-Nazis . . . there is good reason to believe that an effective democratic opposition to Communism cannot be bought by alliances with ex-Nazis...

...I would appreciate hearing from you on this matter...

...It was given an annual subsidy of nearly $150,000, together with funds for the purchase of a lumber company which was to serve as a dummy front for the training activities...

...He replied that he could not tell me because existing legislation did not allow CIA to discuss what they did or how they did it...

...As the Washington Post observed earlier this year, the presence of "cloak-and-dagger boys and gum-shoe artists" can "play hob with foreign policy . . . and even land us in war...

...I replied that I would be glad to correct any errors if he would tell me what they were...

...Critics who find this super-secrecy incompatible with the functioning of a democracy are even more dismayed by the limitless capacity for mischief in the delicate areas of foreign policy that is inherent in an agency responsible to no one...

...Ought there to be any kind of agency responsible for collecting intelligence information which is completely walled off from Congressional or public scrutiny...

...A Communist offer to help was made to the Burmese government in its clean-up campaign, which was rejected...

...Smith...

...President Zinn, a Socialist, was the fact that the League of German Youth had drawn up a list of those to be liquidated as politically unreliable...

...He stated that Gen...

...The political dynamite involved in such a situation is obvious...

...Ever since the end of World War II, a band of Chiang Kai-shek's troops has been hovering on the China-Burmese border, where according to both the Washington Post and the Alsops, they have been supplied and trained by CIA agents, as well as the Chiang regime...

...Although the CIA did not figure in the UN debates, Burmese officials outside the UN continued to charge that Americans were involved...

...II After reading a number of accounts in reliable publications—all of which agreed that CIA was responsible but differed on some details of the story—I wrote Gen...

...One month later, Dec...

...The Technical Service received guerrilla and sabotage training from Americans in order, presumably, to harass the Russians when they try to overrun Western Europe...

...Coerced Him to Spy, Diet is Told by Leftist Writer, Army Held Him a Year—Long Detention Denied...

...In self-defense, Burma, in April of this year, went before the United Nations, and asked that the Chinese government on Formosa be labeled an aggressor because of the actions of Nationalist troops in Burma...

...it would seem that . . . the CIA ought to be responsible for giving some explicit explanation of its actions...

...relieves it of any responsibility to report to Congress, and generally does away with the traditional democratic safeguard that demands a public accounting from agencies financed by public funds...

...9, 1952, the New York Times headlined a story, Japanese Says U.S...

...Ambassador Robert D. Murphy said all he knew was what had appeared in the press...

...These sources said the essentials of this information had been made known to the highest Japanese authorities...

...CIA activities in Burma could conceivably provoke a shooting war that might send all of Asia up in flames...

...The CIA's immunity from public scrutiny is complete...

...I believe," said the Montanan, "that a joint Congressional committee should be created to keep a check on CIA, and to supervise and safeguard its policies...

...The aggressor tag was not used, but the General Assembly voted 58 to 0 to ask the Nationalists to give up their arms and submit to internment...

...15, I received a telephone call from a Col...

...When I inquired how an American citizen was to obtain information on CIA's practices, the Colonel's reply was that "you must trust in our patriotism and efficiency...

...The case dealt with a charge by Wataru Kaji, a pro-Communist author, that he had been kidnapped and detained a year by American officials, and that during that detention the American officials tried to get him to spy for them...

...A CIA agent, for one example, was caught red-handed in an attempt to tap the telephone of the former president of Costa Rica, Jose Figures...

...Kaji...

...McCarthy's retreat in the Bundy case was received with mixed feelings—elation over this setback for the Wisconsin demagogue, and concern for what Walter Lippmann has rightly called the "false doctrine" of special immunity for a secret government agency...

...8, 1952, August Zinn, minister president of the German State of Hesse, formally charged that an American agency was secretly training and financing an organization called the League of German Youth...

...Occasionally the Nationalists have conducted raids against Communist China...

...What was even more shocking to ROBERT REPAS is head of the labor-international affairs division of the American Friends Service Committee...

...What made the case significant was not the doctrine of guilt by marriage or guilt by association, both of which are now well-established, but the fact that Bundy is employed by that mysterious holy-of-holies, the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA...

...The incredible difficulty involved in attempting to get the facts on this kind of matter are illustrated by this paragraph from the same news story in the New York Times: "The Army did not define the word 'briefly' nor disclose exactly when it had released Mr...

...A few recent examples of CIA operations, and the agency's refusal to discuss the fiascos in which it sometimes becomes involved, may explain the fears of the Posr and many others...

...After Zinn's exposure of the organization and its American connection, American officials went through a curious buck-passing performance, at the end of which they announced they had no knowledge of the liquidation list...

...Public Law 283 of the 80th Congress, which created the agency as the intelligence arm of the National Security Council, exempts the CIA from the standard requirements of disclosing the names of employes, or the number employed, or the nature of its functions...

...Certainly such a procedure, similar to the watchdog role of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, might help measurably to keep the CIA from plunging along in a way which, the Washington Post warned, might "even land us into war...

...Bedell Smith, then head of CIA, Nov...

...It happened when he decided to have a formal pillorying of William Bundy, Dean Acheson's son-in-law, because it was thought the young man had contributed to Alger Hiss' legal defense fund...

...The paradox is that the Point Four Program is giving aid to Burma for reconstruction, while CIA gives aid to the Nationalists, who are wreaking destruction in the same country and who could conceivably promote a Communist invasion of Burma...

...seven months, after Japan had regained her independence...

...Renger, private secretary to the late Kurt Schumacher...

...IV These CIA activities show that this kind of agency poses special problems for a democracy...

...Hein-rich Zinnkamm, Hessian minister of interior...

...On Oct...

...Far East Command Headquarters stated that Kaji had been detained in late 1951 and "held briefly for questioning, after which he was released from military custody...

...Ought there to be an agency that indulges in "black-propaganda," consisting of guerrilla activities and sabotage—a program quite similar in nature to the Comin-form's...

...Of those on the list, only 15 were Communists, while the remain' ing 80 were the leading Socialists and trade unionists of Western Germany...

...The government has also announced that it may make some kind of similar agreement with the Soviet Union instead...

...Apparently the cloak-and-dagger boys were operating without any regard for Japanese reaction to our foreign policy...

...Japanese public opinion was particularly aroused because a Japanese citizen had been held incommunicado after April 28, 1951, when Japan regained her sovereignty with the signing of the peace treaty...

...American Embassy officials regarded the matter as being outside their authority...

...The Technical Service, he charged, consisted of about 2,000 ex-Nazi officers who had held army ratings from first lieutenant to full colonel...

...I said I did not question their patriotism and efficiency, but that I did question their political judgment...