Making Enemies:The Pike Committee's Struggle to Get the Facts
Rushford, Gregory G.
Making Enemies: The Pike Committee's Struggle to Get the Facts by Gregory G. Rushford Woodrow Wilson observed that "Congress xtands almost helplessly outside of the departments. Even...
...It was a simple and reasonable question, but in trying to get an answer, I encountered the bureaucratic obstacles that hide the truth about government performance...
...The State Department's claim that it was protecting Boyatt from "interference" like ours was somewhat disingenous...
...Its dragnet stirs without cleansing the bottom...
...But Boyatt, the subordinate in question, had said that he was willing to give us the information...
...Even the special, irksome, ungracious investigations which it from time to time institutes...
...Those documents—which were "secret," but which served the agency's ends—revealed, among many other things, that the director of the DIA and a high CIA official once thought that Henry Kissinger might be The Washington Monthly/July-August 1976 suppressing vital information about SALT...
...The CIA could offer no major analytical success...
...Those documents, which told us a great deal about the bureaucratic politics of SALT, were essentially a damage-limitation exercise by the CIA, which was concerned about its own reputation...
...We live in a free society," he said, pointing to a series of X's on the American side of the chart...
...The chairman of our committee, so the CIA intended, would keep much of his information from other committee members...
...We also found pressures which distorted honest intelligence during the entire Vietnam war...
...We had learned about every CIA operation the National Security Council had approved since 1965...
...There was precious little time left to think and write...
...Leaders of huge agencies, responsible for any mismanagement, will always resist giving evidence of their own corruption or incompetence...
...If the Director believes that the Soviets may be in violation, this should be the subject of a memorandum from him to Dr...
...Once more we found ourselves in trouble...
...It can violently disturb, but it cannot often fathom, the waters of the sea in which the bigger fish of the civil service swim and feed...
...The testimony of Colby and Gen...
...These interviews helped us pick out some of the weak points in the intelligence bureaucracy...
...The National Security Agency (which monitors foreign communications) would not give us even the basic document which controls its operations...
...Fight Like Hell But it was the question of how well we monitor Soviet adherence to the SALT agreements which I found most troublesome...
...It was an argument I heard often and could not really refute...
...All of the intelligence agencies went to great lengths to keep us from informal contact or interviews with their employees...
...But the CIA did not know that...
...Bureaucratic Lessons Despite all these obstacles, by December we had acquired a great deal of information the CIA did not want us to have, thereby meeting one of the tests of a good investigation...
...On June 10, before the hearings had begun, President Ford said publicly that he would give the committee material from the Rockefeller Commission's investigation of intelligence abuses, "plus any other material that is available in the executive branch...
...Gregory G. Rushford was on the staff of the House Select Committee on Intelligence...
...The six foreign episodes we selected for closer study revealed mismanaged intelligence on a large scale...
...After waiting for nearly a half hour, while experts "debugged" the hearing room, we discovered another problem...
...In August, we questioned the Pentagon's top civilian intelligence official, Albert Hall...
...The majority of mid-level officials, contrary to the conventional wisdom, are competent and hard working...
...Repeated experiences with this sort of capriciousness fostered the committee's subsequent decisions to publish information despite the executive branch's unwillingness to do so...
...The agency had found some documents I might want to look at, he said...
...The ambassador had actually said to the CIA station chief, "To hell with your headquarters...
...The X's marked off such institutions as newspapers, television, government publications, and, naturally, congressional hearings...
...There were complaints every week...
...The State Department said we were "interfering" with advice given on policy by a subordinate...
...Congressional committees can probe the depths of the federal bureaucracy, and provide the information that we all need to know...
...After repeated telephone calls, we managed to get a few documents delivered right to our offices, but when we looked at them, we found entire pages missing—only the "Top Secret" stamp remained...
...Since then, President Ford has taken steps to insure that meetings are held and accurate records maintained...
...The Lynn experience was repeated time and again that week with other witnesses...
...Another paragraph the CIA wanted to censor noted that a "Watch Committee," which was supposed to judge the imminence of hostilities, failed to do so even after the war had begun...
...Hall also demonstrated some of the more incongruous aspects of the classification system...
...Kissinger wanted to avoid any written judgments to the effect that the Soviets have violated any of the SALT agreements...
...Among the other accusations that rained down upon us was a comparison to Joe McCarthy...
...When I got far enough into the story to present a threat, the CIA censor decided to call...
...Other official briefings I saw, including those related to nuclear arms matters, were always vague, always incomplete...
...Family Jewels Many frustrations lingered after the August hearings were over...
...After a quick phone call to NSA headquarters, he broke past our Capitol Hill police guard and ran through the committee room yelling that the witness should not say anything to "those people...
...That was how the Russians gathered intelligence on us...
...The committee was getting angry about treatment like this, especially because we had received almost no documents on the Cyprus affair...
...Despite recent press stories that Congress is reasserting itself, the CIA—exceptional in many ways but in this one quite typical—used every executive branch tactic to frustrate our investigation...
...he chaired three crucial panels—the 40 Committee, the NSC's Intelligence Committee, and the Verification Panel, which handled intelligence related to the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT...
...To a large extent they were achieved because of our reaction to the dismal failure of those first eight days of hearings, when the administration officials just refused to cooperate...
...So the committee decided to publish...
...He silenced witnesses and at one point issued instructions that nobody in the State Department was to talk to anyone from the Pike Committee unless an official State Department monitor was present...
...It took a contempt of Congress resolution approved by the committee to get him to honor several subpoenas...
...He explained, helpfully, that his organization worked very well...
...in their tendency to ignore the fact that, after all, the executive and legislative branches work for the same employer...
...Henry Kissinger, the official most responsible for making SALT policy, also controlled information about how well the policy was working—an affront not only to the purpose of the CIA but to every prudent notion about avoiding administrative disasters...
...He asked us to return our files and later compared us to common criminals...
...Or, "A media project was authorized for...
...We wanted, for example, to ask one of Kissinger's subordinates to explain a mysterious contradiction in our policy toward Greece...
...Where were those congressmen when the CIA was not on the front pages, and where will they be when the Pike Committee's jurisdiction expires...
...Lynn certainly could not demonstrate that his organization had any sort of grasp on the CIA's budget...
...On October 20, for example, Pike The Washington Monthly/July-August 1976 wrote to the President, asking permission for me to visit the National Security Council...
...But it had refused to declassify the other five...
...As a staff member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, I was charged with investigating how well the intelligence agencies had been doing their job...
...There I was to obtain a list of all CIA covert operations authorized by the top-level "40 Committee" since 1965 and to find out the committee's procedures for approving the operations...
...Above all, they are concerned with poor management and will talk about it to anyone who seems interested in improving their condition...
...I was able to imply several times, when dealing with the CIA censor, that this issue could be very, very unpleasant if it were publicized...
...We knew of several instances in the past when the intelligence system had failed—the 1968 Tet offensive, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the 1974 coups in Portugal and Cyprus, and India's nuclear explosion in 1974...
...The most important question was whether the Backfire could (or would) be deployed against targets in the United States...
...What the committee had done the previous afternoon Was to vote in closed session to publish a portion of an official CIA post-mortem of the Mideast failure...
...CIA censors would read every document we requested...
...He termed one of our subpoenas merely a "request" and refused to honor it...
...They were also adamant about having monitors present...
...We also had original documents on an especially vital issue—Soviet compliance with SALT agreements—thanks to committee votes to cite Henry Kissinger for contempt of Congress when he first refused to honor our subpoenas...
...And even when these officials don't give you any valuable information, the simple knowledge that you've talked with them makes their superiors more candid...
...Moreover, the committee would sign agreements limiting the areas of investigation and agree to disclosure restrictions...
...Senior officials came from all over the intelligence community to brief us...
...Boyatt had been denied normal reassignment by two ambassadors and one assistant secretary, both for his Cyprus dissent and for his activities on behalf of the Foreign Service Association, which lobbies for employee rights...
...Did I realize how sensitive they were...
...What is the difference...
...Otherwise, we would never have obtained them...
...The judgment that a violation is considered to have occurred is one that will be made at the highest level...
...On October 17, 1972, when the agencies established a steering mechanism to monitor Soviet SALT compliance with the agreements signed the previous May, a colonel on Kissinger's NSC staff called the CIA's Director of Strategic Research to say: "Dr...
...Henry Kissinger, of course, threw up the most obstacles...
...CIA Monitors In one way, however, even this document contained a major revelation...
...We also found evidence that the true intelligence budget is several times larger than that which the Congress annually approves...
...The Air Force was alleged to have put pressure on a defense contractor, simply because the Air Force disagreed with a study the contractor had done for the CIA...
...Lew Allen of the National Security Agency illustrated one other way the intelligence agencies have traditionally thwarted congressional oversight...
...The committee closed the doors...
...Everyone wants to tell his side of the story, and the rivalries among the intelligence agencies are as fierce as those anywhere in government...
...It was different one step down...
...Pentagon analysts would tell us what they thought of their counterparts in the CIA...
...When the committee finally got to question Lynn, he was not much more specific than he had been in the public session...
...Here too the documents told a different story...
...Many officials who resisted such pressures found their careers finished...
...in private we did not get it...
...If we would only lock the doors and go into closed session, Lynn said, he was ready to answer all questions...
...Hall, looking embarrassed, could not explain the disparity...
...One office of the CIA accused another of deliberately hiring a consultant who was known as a "downgrader" of Soviet aircraft in order to influence the Backfire study results...
...We learned one of the timeless lessons of bureaucratic life—that it is necessary to talk to people at the "working levels" of the bureaucracy and not just the leadership...
...The Mideast hearing was designed to explore why the intelligence agencies had failed at the job they were supposed to carry out— namely, to provide accurate information on international developments...
...A human victory, only we never learned what the intelligence network had told Henry Kissinger before the Cyprus coup, nor did we receive all the documents we sought...
...We had to request information from him...
...Even more disturbing than what Kissinger was doing was his passion for concealing it from Congress...
...Aspin termed such practices "bizarre" and pointed out the weaknesses of a classification system which permitted executive branch officials to decide, apparently on whim, what to keep secret...
...Perhaps our more important fmding was that Congress cannot oversee the intelligence agencies without mak-, ing a determined effort to separate the truth from lies...
...Over the years both the CIA and the NSA have answered hundreds of questions from congressional committees by providing summaries of internal documents, almost always self-serving, and not the documents themselves...
...But why should I risk all and tell these things to the Pike Committee...
...We had heard that, when tensions were rising on Cyprus, the State Department had warned that Greek dictator Dimitrios Ioannidis was moving to overthrow Archbishop Makarios...
...he asked...
...Upset, they had gone to the acting CIA director, Vernon Walters, and asked him to approach President Nixon about the problem...
...One senior official close to the CIA's hierarchy told me privately that he considered the CIA's analytic system "rotten," and that Colby's management was ruining the agency...
...Despite all this, we had, by July 31, assembled at least as much information as the standing appropriations William Colby and Otis Pike committees traditionally have, a reflection less of our diligence than of the other committees' timidity...
...The analyst I interviewed was one who had accurately forecast war in the Middle East before it broke out on October 6, 1973...
...Current intelligence" reports suffered because the leadership kept the analysts busy with meetings, phony deadlines, and "coordinating" policy differences between offices...
...William Colby, then the director of the CIA, gave us little lectures on the evils of communism, illustrated with a "Freedom of Information" chart...
...Nearly 40 CIA operations had been approved without the opportunity for debate, or a consideration of risks and alternatives by anyone outside the CIA...
...He asked us to put the FSO on the phone and then told him again not to give us any help...
...We needed this information in order to confirm or refute other indications that the procedures had often been haphazard...
...Just one day after we held that hearing, President Ford announced that we would be denied any further classified information...
...Yet we did not receive an uncensored version of the "family jewels," the in-house CIA study of abuses, until mid-October, 15 minutes before Pike held a press conference to charge that there had been a coverup and more than four months after Ford had promised to supply the material...
...Pike later called the experience "miserable and worthless...
...So the committee voted to subpoena a memo which Boyatt had written to Kissinger after the Cyprus affair...
...Not one actual operation was disclosed...
...Whenever I requested documents from the CIA (or the State Department, or the Pentagon, or whatever agency we were studying) the liaison officer would ask why I needed them...
...Other less aggressive committees had been over the same ground before...
...There was no "national security" at stake, only bureaucratic selfprotection...
...The accusations about the Backfire ranged all through the intelligence community...
...For example, the CIA wanted to suppress one sentence which revealed only a misjudgment: "The movement of Syrian troops and Egyptian military readiness are considered to be coincidental and not designed to lead to major hostilities...
...But the briefings were canned affairs The Washington Monthly/July-August 1976 in which the officials took hours to read from tables and charts and to initiate us into the nuances of bureaucratese...
...Lynn repeatedly refused to discuss anything of substance as long as the committee sat in open session...
...We finally got hold of the original document, which put the matter in somewhat different terms...
...those who kept quiet were promoted...
...Nor did the subcommittee know the official postmortem covered up key weaknesses in the intelligence bureaucracy...
...A Sorry Picture The intelligence administrators had shown us neat organization charts outlining their functions...
...But pending the day when irrational adversary attitudes between the branches are replaced by a cooperative spirit of service, they had better be prepared to fight like hell...
...We held a public hearing on that point the following week...
...Truly excellent technical intelligence had gone unheeded...
...In public, we were promised full cooperation...
...What we actually found, however, was a very poorly administered intelligence system...
...Pike and Field set a basic rule for the investigators: be so aggressive you get complained about...
...We would sign CIA employee secrecy oaths and would be denied access to the compartments of information beyond Top Secret—that is, to most of the files...
...It showed how dangerous bureaucratic rivalry can become for the whole country when the bureaucrats operate in secret...
...What this meant, in effect, was that the intelligence service had been deprived of its basic rationale...
...Colby had said, in one of our closed sessions, that "certain differences had arisen between a certain ambassador and the CIA personnel" over the wisdom of one covert operation...
...The General Accounting Office, which Staats directs, had written to the CIA in January 1975, for instance, but never received a reply...
...We saw the same budget books they present to the appropriations committees and learned how vague they were...
...But the Defense Department said that the numbers and locations of the attaches were classified as "secret...
...But Kissinger refused to give up a single piece of paper without a fight...
...But that subcommittee never saw the actual document...
...Next came James Lynn, director of the Office of Management and Budget...
...Those censors would have authority to delete words, paragraphs, even entire pages...
...We eventually pressured the State Department to reassign him...
...Beside each blank from May 1972 until the end of 1974, the word "telephonic" appeared...
...Staff investigators who asked for further details could not get them...
...The House Armed Services Intelligence subcommittee, for example, had been told about the official CIA post-mortem study of the intelligence failure before the Middle East war...
...These were our successes...
...We learned that Thomas Boyatt, a The Washington Monthly/July-August 1976 foreign service officer, might be able to explain what the CIA station had been up to...
...He said that the approval had been given over the telephone, without formal meeting...
...When asked if the system had broken down at any time in recent crises, Hall responded, "Well, if you are talking about the 1973 Middle East war, in fact, the outbreak of war was foreseen, and this information was handled correctly and was provided to the people who should have had it...
...On it I found each CIA operation described as follows: "On [date given] the 40 Committee approved a covert operation in...
...I asked Gen...
...After repeated calls I did get the list...
...In other words, the 40 Committee, the most sensitive committee in government, had not met in more than two years...
...From analysts in the Defense Intelligence Agency, CIA, and State Department, I learned that the intelligence studies made on the Soviet Backfire bomber might have been dishonest...
...The NSC's Intelligence Committee, for example, which looked impressive on the charts, had had only two meetings—one of them to organize itself...
...do not afford it more than a glimpse of the inside of a small province of federal administration...
...The CIA's idea of a perfect investigation was roughly as follows: The committee's staff members would be investigated by the FBI, and if we passed, we would receive Top Secret security clearances...
...This inspired us to grit our teeth...
...The pressures came from the military, the State Department, and the White House, and had one purpose: to force the CIA to report "facts" about Vietnam which would support the war policy, regardless of truth...
...But the CIA, at just that time, was conducting diplomatic talks with Ioannidis in Athens...
...We called one of Kissinger's deputies to ask for cooperation...
...its briefing consisted of reading selected material from the study displayed on a slide projector...
...Lynn said he would not discuss certain subjects because the stenographer was cleared only for Top Secret...
...And even more disturbing than that is the fact that Kissinger and the intelligence chiefs are typical of the executive branch leadership in their determination to protect Congress from knowledge of their affairs...
...He testified that he knew very little about where the intelligence agencies put their money because he had to depend on them for all the information about their programs...
...On September 11, the committee held a hearing on one of the most widely suspected instances of incompetent intelligence—that associated with the 1973 Middle East war...
...But Kissinger refused to let us talk to Boyatt without a State Department monitor present, and the monitor forbade the man to tell us even the most basic details...
...Answering this question correctly obviously was important for SALT...
...The CIA's reaction was predictable...
...among other things, it called a press conference and told reporters that the release of four words ("and greater communications security") endangered national security...
...Kissinger Balks The NSA had reason for its fears...
...This elegant statement summarizes what I learned during the irksome, ungracious, congressional investigation of the CIA...
...Brent Scowcroft, Ford's National Security advisor, what that meant...
...With only a week left before the scheduled opening of our hearings, Rep...
...A monitor came along from the National Security Agency when I interviewed an NSA Middle East analyst...
...If we took notes from documents at agency headquarters, the notes would be censored...
...The SALT negotiations were under way even as we carried out our investigation, and Pike did not want to risk complicating them by having a public hearing on the Backfire...
...Philip Hayes to tell Colby he was tired of hearing "appeals to a very low level of political sophistication...
...And it was not told there was a second Middle East postmortem, which documented a shocking intelligence performance at the time of the U.S.-Soviet confrontation in late October 1973...
...The story of those obstacles, and our attempts to surmount them, sheds light on the present balance of power between the executive and legislative branches...
...Another CIA office was accused of misrepresenting the plane's performance characteristics, because that office had its own policy line to peddle to our negotiators...
...As the investigation progressed, the CIA dropped even the pretense of cooperation...
...Deaf and Dumb The Comptroller General of the United States, Elmer Staats, was the first witness...
...If you don't go along with this, I will instruct the Marine guards to take you and place you on the airplane and ship you out of here...
...But we still faced repeated delays...
...Weeks later we received the basic CIA post-mortem on that war, which began: "There was an intelligence failure in the weeks preceding the outbreak of war in the Middle East on October 6. Those elements of the intelligence community responsible for the production of finished intelligence did not perceive the growing possibility of an Arab attack and thus did not warn of its imminence...
...During the next eight days we held our first seven hearings...
...When the CIA tried to distract us with proposals that we investigate sexy trivia, such as a minor official's indiscretions with shellfish toxins and other poisons, we refused...
...That afternoon the cornmittee spent hours on those five paragraphs and realized the CIA had no reasonable grounds for keeping them secret...
...intelligence had performed prior to the Middle East war...
...Wasn't I worried about showing such secrets to congressmen...
...In public session the CIA had read us two of the seven paragraphs of the post-mortem, both moderately favorable to the agency...
...We found that Henry Kissinger kept valuable information away from the CIA...
...I am convinced that Wilson was wrong in thinking Congress cannot overcome this tendency...
...The CIA's longer-term intelligence estimates were also weak, and the bureacratic structure promised little improvement...
...Under the resolution which set up the committee, we were supposedly authorized to disclose information which related to the intelligence agencies' activities...
...They did not reveal any intelligence sources and methods—the two items the CIA might legitimately want to protect—but they did demonstrate just how badly U.S...
...We had data about the intelligence budget which Congress had never obtained before...
...Kissinger...
...The committee, in turn, would keep information from the rest of Congress...
...We had only to go beyond the official explanations to realize that reform of the analytical side of U. S. intelligence is long overdue and sorely needed...
...Such gimmickry prompted Rep...
...Monitors would be present every time we interviewed agency employees...
...Genuinely afraid that the scene would lead to violence, committee staff director Searle Field agreed that the monitor could sit in on just this one interview...
...The poor monitor panicked when I left him behind in the front office...
...We started off with a series of hearings on the intelligence budget...
...Published information put out by the Defense Department revealed that military attaches were stationed in 86 different countries, including two recent additions, Algeria and Bangladesh...
...President Ford finally agreed to deliver more classified information, promising we would get everything we needed—but only after a full month of negotiation and on the condition that he could veto any material the committee chose to publish...
...We found an alarming number of cases in which crucial information had been collected in time, but had not been disseminated until after the war had begun just like the classic Pearl Harbor failure...
...The CIA takes great pride in its intellectual integrity., so these accusations could hurt...
...Under existing law, there was no way the State Department could prevent its employees from giving information to Congress...
...The NSA leadership had discounted her courageous predictions...
...To be sure, Kissinger had his problem with some elements of the intelligence community who were leaking to the press inaccurate information about Soviet violations, but the way to handle that problem was with a rifle aimed at the sinners not a shotgun blasting away at the entire area of factual reporting of SALT violations...
...Otis Pike had to call the Pentagon and threaten to hold a press conference before we received any information from them...
...But on the Russian side—aha!—the X's were controlled...
...Even when the CIA came up with the information Staats wanted, he had no way to verify it independently...
...Later I interviewed another foreign service officer on the same subject, with the same result...
...Asking one agency about another, or one office in the same agency about another, is a simple but effective device...
Vol. 8 • July 1976 • No. 5
