THE VICTIM SYNDROME

...any information" that identifies is enough for prosecution, reads the bill...

...This reason-to-believe qualifier loomed large in the Senate debate...

...CounterSpy editor John Kelly told The Progressive that Welsh was identified first not by his magazine in 1975, but in 1968 by Julius Mader, an East German who wrote Who's Who in the CIA, naming Welsh and the foreign capitals to which he had been assigned since 1960...

...Ober's proposals remain secret, but his was exactly the sort of operation the CIA has in the past called "foreign counterintelligence...

...with reason to believe that such activities would impair or impede the foreign intelligence activities of the United States" (emphasis added...

...The act passed the Senate by a vote of 90 to 6 in March...

...Advocates of the bill say it will protect the lives of those who serve the United States under cover in dangerous, far-flung places...

...So important was passage of the act to the CIA that Vice President Bush, the Ironically, it was the CIA itself that pioneered the practice of naming agents' names...

...With foreign assassins reportedly loose in the United States, an unleashing of the CIA seemed reasonable to most—until the Libyans "disappeared," leaving the FBI without a trace of evidence...

...Most of the Senate fight pivoted on a successful amendment to the bill by Rhode Island Republican John H. Chafee...

...And now, just such a real loophole will allow the CIA to violate its 1947 charter—to spy domestically...

...Oddly enough, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, New York Democrat, agrees with editor Kelly that much of the information the bill would conceal under the cloak of the criminal code is already in the public domain...

...For example, in early 1967, Ramparts magazine, then perhaps the leading publication of the Left, was ready to expose the CIA's funding of the U.S...

...Other Senators made it clear they believed the Chafee language meant the good intent of a writer to expose wrongdoing is not a defense against prosecution...

...The threat of such punishment for those on Government payrolls means that reporters talking to people attached to the intelligence community run a new gamble— jailing by grand juries without benefit of trial—for refusing to reveal their inside Angus MacKenzie is a free-lance writer in San Francisco...

...Joseph Biden, Democrat of Delaware, questioned whether New York Times reporter Robert Pear might be imprisoned if he continued to disclose names of current CIA employes in a series on Korean influence-buying in the Congress...

...Such a potential loophole in any guidelines against CIA collection of information about Americans here in the United States was anticipated by the Church Committee in its 1976 Senate report on CHAOS...

...Some say no...

...Legislators fresh from a war with totalitarians in Europe and Asia warned that a powerful intelligence agency under the control of the President might turn into a security police apparatus...

...and well known are they...

...Now Reagan has circumvented that internal-security ban...

...When examined closely and from the point of view of its backers, the act makes sense, given recent developments in the intelligence community...

...In 1969, an agent published 200 alleged CIA identities in an underground paper, to establish a cover as he threw himself into Operation CHAOS agency's former director, helped smooth its way through the Senate...

...Even backers of the act said on the floor of Congress that it would not bring to an end such overseas identification of U.S...

...We are on the edge of making a crime out of the publication of information which is commonly available, information which is not difficult to obtain...

...Moynihan, acting as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, made a stunning about-face...

...What was left behind was the executive order to unleash the CIA at home—an order the Administration had been preparing long before the lurid hit-squad news bought the Reaganites a marketable excuse...

...The act is intended to protect U.S...

...The new act may help conceal the names of domestic operatives like Ferrera, thanks to its overseas-travel clause, even though most members of Congress thought they were voting for protection of our overseas spies only...

...House approval came last September, 354 to 56...

...And Casey is proposing to Attorney General William French Smith that CIA agents be granted immunity from criminal prosecution while on missions...

...National Student Association...

...agents...

...spies stationed abroad, although 3,000 of them have been named already by one-time CIA agent Philip Agee, CounterSpy magazine, and Covert Action Information Bulletin, all hostile to the CIA...

...Illegal CIA political action is not all that may be shielded under this act...

...So it turns out that the CIA pioneered the practice of naming its agents—something it now wants outlawed...

...One need not even mention any names...

...Representative Don Edwards, California Democrat, told the House that the bill "strikes directly at the heart of the First Amendment," and is "unparalleled by any piece of legislation in our nation's history during peacetime...

...Wilson and Terpil are former CIA officers under indictment for exporting explosives to Libya...

...sources, who themselves will now be liable to long prison terms...

...Their career pattern is overseas," he said...

...Third, the act comes down hard on anyone committing "a pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents...

...Certainly, until now, the press has been asleep...

...He reminded the Sen: ate that he is its only member with ambassadorial experience...

...Supporters have repeatedly cited the case of CIA Station Chief Richard Skeffington Welsh, who was murdered by anti-American leftists in Athens in 1975...

...When the CIA reported that Libyan assassination squads were gunning for him, President Reagan ordered Director William Casey to embark upon "domestic counterintelligence" on December 4,1981...

...The publishers of underground and black-power newspapers, among others, see the euphemism of "counterintelligence activities" for what it too often is...

...Reagan's Executive Order 12333 instructs the CIA to "conduct counterintelligence activities within the United States," and contains a legal aperture the size of a barn: The CIA may "conduct special activities approved by the President...

...It remains to be seen how the courts will rule on this reckless new law...

...He apparently exposed those 200 low-level agency employes to establish credible cover with U.S...

...However, by March of this year Moynihan was fighting Chafee's reason-to-believe standard...

...The CIA got wind of what Ramparts was up to two months before publication and, viewing the rumored article as an attack on the CIA, started to shadow the magazine's editors, ostensibly to find out whether they had ties to hostile intelligence services...

...Once the Intelligence Identities Protection Act is on the books, the press may be prevented from reporting any CIA abuses—of the President's making or an energetic low-level functionary— domestic or foreign...

...On April 24,1947, Representative Clarence J. Brown of Ohio said it all: "I am not interested in setting up here in the United States any particular central police agency under any President, and I do not care what his name may be, and just allow him to have a Gestapo of his own if he wants to have it...

...A little-noticed loophole in the Intelligence Identities Protection Act may help keep them so: The act defines "covert agent" as an officer or employe of an intelligence agency "who is serving outside the United States...

...It got started by the CIA...

...Then he voted against the legislation he himself had proposed...

...for American intelligence operatives...

...His tour in New Delhi proved to him that "we have failed to provide but nominal cover...

...Ferrera had a hand in Operation CHAOS, an illegal CIA domestic program that harassed the dissident press from 1969 to at least 1974, in violation of the 1947 Congressional ban on any "internal-security functions" for the CIA...

...Second, Government workers who have had no access to secret identities but on the strength of classified data deduce identities and give them away may get up to five years...

...Early supporters now worry the act will hit even middle-of-the-road reformers— and that is exactly what the CIA has wanted since revelations of its adventures in domestic spying hit the front pages in 1975 and 1976...

...So Congress, with a respectful eye toward civil liberties at home, wrote into the 1947 National Security Act language barring the CIA from "internal-security functions" and police duties...

...Congress was wary of such Presidential manipulation in 1947, when the CIA was established...

...But even proponents acknowledged in Senate debate that such well-behaved journals of record as The New York Times would risk prosecution for reporting intelligence abuses in the normal course of business...

...In 1969, six years before an angry and disenchanted Philip Agee went public, CIA agent Salvatore John Ferrera published 200 names and addresses of alleged CIA employes in the August 26 issue of Quicksilver Times, a Washington, D.C., underground newspaper he had helped start...

...Washington Democrat Henry M. Jackson replied to Biden, "That is for a jury to decide...

...Indeed, CHAOS agent Ferrera flew overseas to spy on Philip Agee after keeping watch on Quicksilver Times in Washington, Liberation News Service in New York, and Second City in Chicago...

...Representative Robert McClory, Illinois Republican, gleefully pointed out just before the House approved the act that "this legislation also covers FBI agents who operate under cover when they are engaged in counterintelligence activities...

...Yet it was Moynihan who, with Chafee, introduced the legislation in the Senate in January 1980...

...Even before Welsh's body reached home, the finger of blame pointed straight at CounterSpy...

...Bernard Raimo, counsel to the House Intelligence Committee, confirmed that this safety hatch for domestic agents was written into the law at the behest of the CIA...

...In its report recommending the bill to the full Senate, the Senate Intelligence Committee made clear that the identification of even one intelligence agent may be illegal...

...It will apparently be permitted again, thanks to Reagan's December 4 order...

...The new law will, among other things, subject anyone who reveals the names of covert CIA, FBI, or Pentagon personnel to a stretch in Federal prison...

...From here on, domestic spies may be protected from exposure so long as they are flown abroad every five years, as was Ferrera...

...But Bush neglected to tell the Senate how the whole business of naming names got started...

...Darker Cloaks, Longer Daggers A new law protects spies' identities and covers up their dirty work BY ANGUS MACKENZIE Soon President Reagan will sign the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and visit more destruction on the nation's ever-embattled press freedoms than any recent predecessor...

...Hay-akawa, the Senate's only certified semanti-cist, said any distinction between the phrases was "hair splitting...

...The agency ordered counterintelligence agent Richard Ober to conceive a counterattack...

...First, Government employes who have, or once had, access to secrets and intentionally disclose "any information identifying" a covert agent may be imprisoned for up to ten years...

...And so, Biden said, can "long debates in editorial rooms of the newspapers of America as to whether or not they go forward with exposing a [Edwin] Wilson or a [Frank] Terpil or anyone else...

...His name had been connected by CounterSpy to CIA operations in Peru...

...The workings of Operation CHAOS are still largely a secret...

...They] might as well be all Texans with high-heeled boots, so conspicuous...

...The bill posts penalties for three groups...

...Bill Bradley, Democrat of New Jersey, said, "The reason-to-believe standard would cover virtually all disclosures by an investigative reporter involving intelligence agents...

...The Intelligence Identities Protection Act quickly became a top legislative priority for the CIA...

...dissident writers, whose ranks he was infiltrating for the CIA...

...The bill awaiting Ronald Reagan's signature will, sadly, not be a hard act to follow for other hoofers in the President's anti-First Amendment variety show...

...Pear, reached at his paper's Washington bureau, told The Progressive he was unaware that his prospects for prosecution had figured in the Senate debate...

...So prosecution of Times reporters—or anyone else—can be expected...

...In another midstream change, House Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Edward P. Boland, Massachusetts Democrat, also an original sponsor, told his colleagues, "I cannot support this bill on final passage," and he too voted against it...

...When we were drafting this two or three years ago, the CIA prevailed upon the committee to establish some time so as to include people in clandestine service who come back here to train...

...But editors and reporters had better wake up...

...In the name of counterintelligence, the CIA, FBI, and Army waged war from 1967 to 1974 on black, antiwar, and antinuclear dissidents and their publications...

...The CIA is thus encouraged to fly its domestic operatives overseas every five years to assure them the protection of the Identities Act...

...Kelly argues that the law will not accomplish what its drafters set out to do, but will instead chill domestic debate on intelligence activities...

...He made prosecution easier by replacing the so-called intent clause with reason-to-believe, although S.I...

...Spy chief Casey wants authority to search newsrooms without warrants for evidence of disclosures of CIA agent identities...

...He has reported on collisions between the press and intelligence agencies for The Columbia Journalism Review...

...But will the act accomplish what its sponsors want...

...Representative Edwards says the bill prohibits "republication of disclosures made by others...