Posted on 09/24/2002 1:20:35 PM PDT by robowombat
Undermining Counterintelligence Capability By CI Centre Professor W. Raymond Wannall
Following the Islamist al-Qaeda terrorist attack of 11 September 2001 on the United States, the U.S. intelligence community faced a rumble of criticism for not having forewarned the assaults. Media spokesmen raised the question as to whether a breakdown had occurred in U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence operations. The issue became a matter of considerable concern on Capitol Hill. But if the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives choose to pursue the matter to its logical conclusion, their study will discover a progressive loss of ability on the part of the intelligence agencies to carry out their functions, particularly in the domestic aspects of subversion and terrorism, dating back to, at the very least, the Watergate event of 1972 and the congressional hearings of 1973-1975.1
PERCEIVING A MOUNTING THREAT
The Cold War spawned a series of situations that foretold a potential threat to the United States and the rest of the Western world from the Soviet Union, which, in the aftermath of World War II, absorbed the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia; reduced the Central and East European nations of Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Romania to satellite status; and subverted Czechoslovakia. As former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill put it, the Soviets drew an "iron curtain" across the face of Europe. For eighteen months, beginning in April 1948, Allied forces were denied access to Berlin, the former capital of defeated Germany, a city by then divided into four zones: American, French, British, and Soviet. The Russians set up an illegal blockade of the narrow corridor allowing vehicular traffic into Berlin, forcing U.S. President Harry S Truman and the Allies to establish an airlift of necessary supplies to both the residents of that city and to the Western occupying forces.
In the United States, at about the same time, two Americans who had been couriers for the Soviet intelligence services, Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers, disclosed that the U.S. Communist Party's members and sympathizers had infiltrated numerous U.S. government agencies and were stealing information, some highly classified, for the Soviets. Instilling additional concern was the revelation in September 1949 that the Soviet Union now had its own atomic bomb, thereby eliminating a major U.S. military advantage.
LEGISLATIVE FOUNDATIONS OF INTELLIGENCE
The U.S. Congress took numerous legislative steps to meet the mounting threat from Moscow. The National Security Act of 1947 created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), with responsibility for intelligence and counterintelligence activities outside the United States. Several new statutory provisions enhanced the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) domestic investigative and intelligence responsibilities.
The Internal Security Act of 1950 (ISA 50), passed over President Truman's veto, required Communist-action organizations, their officers, and members to register with the Attorney General's office as agents of foreign powers. The bill provided for the establishment of a Subversive Activities Control Board to determine whether an organization was or was not a Communist-action or -front group. Title 842 of ISA 50 declared that the Communist Party was not entitled "to any of the rights, privileges and immunities attendant upon legal bodies created under the jurisdiction of the laws of the United States or any political subdivision thereof."
Section 811 of the same Act, bearing the caption "Emergency Detention of Suspected Security Risks," provided for the incarceration or sequestration of persons posing a probable security risk in the time of an emergency affecting the well-being of the United States. Under this section, the FBI conducted, over the years, literally tens of thousands of domestic intelligence investigations and, with the approval of the Department of Justice, categorized those involved in accordance with the apparent degree of threat they would pose.
The Immigration and Nationality Act, widely known as the McCarran-Walter Act, was adopted on 27 June 1952 as 8 USC 1101 et seq. It provided for the exclusion of subversive aliens from the United States, and broadened the class of deportable aliens by specifically including anarchists, Communists, and other totalitarians. The Act established in the State Department a Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs, headed by an administrator who, with the Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization, "shall maintain direct liaison with the FBI and Central Intelligence Agency" in order to receive intelligence information that would assist in enforcing the act.
And a statute known as the Communist Control Act of 1954 was directed against Communist infiltration of trade unions. This had become a problem of international import, leading the AFL-CIO leadership to undertake collaborative efforts with the U.S. intelligence agencies and those of other powers to hamstring efforts by Communist parties in many countries from subverting and controlling labor organizations.2
Referring to the FBI's domestic intelligence and security investigations, the Bureau's director, J. Edgar Hoover, on 6 November 1958, briefed President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his Cabinet, explaining:
The public usually associates the FBI's internal security investigations with Communist Party activities only. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our investigations encompass any and all organizations based on a creed of force and violence to determine whether they are a threat to our internal security or whether they violated any federal laws.
We investigate the activities of such diverse and international organizations as the Marxist Socialist Workers Party and the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico.3
FBI investigation revealed that the Socialist Workers Party had frequent contact with international Trotskyite groups, particularly the Fourth International, headquartered in Belgium.
The Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico (NPPR) was charged by Puerto Rico's governor Luis Munoz Marin with having international Communist connections. On 30 October 1950, members of that party instigated a revolt in Puerto Rico in an attempt to assassinate the governor. Although the attempt failed, 31 people were killed.4 Two days later, NPPR members tried to shoot their way into the Blair Mansion in Washington, where President Truman was residing while the White House was being renovated. Their effort to kill him was not successful, but one of his bodyguards was fatally shot and two others were injured. An NPPR member was killed and another wounded. The latter was subsequently convicted of murder and sentenced to death. President Truman later commuted his sentence to life imprisonment.5
THE ANTI-INTELLIGENCE LOBBY
As suggested by President Truman's veto of the Internal Security Act of 1950, which Congress overrode, people on the Left side of the political spectrum generally opposed legislation which sought to expand intelligence and counterintelligence operations, particularly those with a domestic focus. In the 1950s an anti-intelligence lobby, supported by diverse groups and individuals, undertook efforts to curtail or eliminate certain types of intelligence functions, and questioned their overall legitimacy.
Some objections were presented in the form of the denigration or ridicule of those legislatively authorized to carry out the statutory mandates. In his 1962 suspense novel The Light of Day, popular author Eric Ambler observed:
I think that if I were asked to single out one specific group of men, one type, one category, as being the most suspicious, unbelieving, unreasonable, petty, inhuman, sadistic, double-crossing set of bastards in any language, I would say without hesitation: "The people who run counter-espionage departments."6
According to Francis J. McNamara, a former Executive Secretary of the Subversive Activities Control Board, the Campaign for Political Rights (CPR), previously known as the Campaign to Stop Government Spying, became the coordinating group for a nationwide campaign against the FBI, CIA, and other elements of the U.S. intelligence community. It described itself as "a national coalition of over 80 religious, educational, environmental, civic, women's, black, Latino, and labor organizations" which "serves as a national information clearing-house providing materials, organizing-assistance, press and publicity advice and speaker-scheduling to organizers across the country." This umbrella-type organization was said to have two basic aims: (1) to end all covert actions abroad, and (2) to terminate what it termed "political spying and harassment in the U.S.7
Among the CPR's 51 member and 30 cooperating organizations were the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the Center for National Security Studies (CNSS), the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), the National Organization of Women (NOW), the Committee for Public Justice (CPJ), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
The forces opposing the intelligence community were successful in having the act on "Emergency Detention of Suspected Security Risks" repealed on 25 September 1971, twenty-one years after its passage. This withdrew one of the solid bases for the FBI's intelligence and counterintelligence efforts against both subversives and domestic terrorist groups.
LOSS OF SUPPORT FOR INTELLIGENCE
The June 1972 burglary at the Democratic National Committee's headquarters in Washington's Watergate complex gave impetus to a series of policy changes instituted or supported by the anti-intelligence lobby. These changes resulted in the elimination of certain committees and initiatives established to contribute to the effective functioning of intelligence and counterintelligence missions.
Between the time of the Watergate burglary and the completion in March 1976 of public hearings by the Church Committee of the U.S. Senate, three such initiatives and a congressional committee were eliminated.
The Internal Security Division of the Department of Justice, originally established to support the FBI and other agencies with responsibilities in the area of internal security, was abolished. The Subversive Activities Control Board, created by the Internal Security Act of 1950, was disbanded. The responsibility of the Attorney General to maintain a list, made available to the public, of organizations determined to be Communist or totalitarian, was cancelled. In the U.S. House of Representatives, the long-standing Committee on Internal Security, formerly known as the House Committee on Un-American Activities, was put out of business.
Public hearings of the congressional investigatory committees, headed by Senator Frank Church (D., Idaho) and Congressman Otis G. Pike (D., New York), which looked into U.S. intelligence operations, went far toward checkmating intelligence capabilities.
ADVERSE EFFECT OF LEVI GUIDELINES
On 18 February 1976, President Gerald R. Ford Jr. issued an order directing the Attorney General to prepare guidelines under which the FBI would carry out its investigatory and security functions.
A decade later, in referring to this order during testimony on 20 May 1986 before the National Committee to Restore Internal Security, former Subversive Activities Control Board director Francis J. McNamara stated:
Now, these guidelines, promulgated in March 1976 by Attorney General Edward H. Levi, said that in conducting domestic security investigations, the Bureau was strictly limited to investigating groups and individuals "which involve or will involve the use of force or violence and which involve or will involve the violation of Federal law." So intelligence as such was out.8
Explaining the impact of the guidelines on the FBI, McNamara pointed out that, in mid-1973, more than 21,400 domestic security matters were pending. After the guidelines were issued, the number had been reduced to 4,868. This number was continuously reduced under the new rules, so that by 1982, only 43 cases were being handled, 23 on organizations and 20 on individuals. Commented McNamara, " And this is in a nation of over 200 million people that is the main target of Soviet subversion and espionage efforts."9
This drastic reduction in the caseload led to the abolition of the internal security branch of the FBI's intelligence division in 1976.
A comparable de-emphasis on Communist matters took place in the CIA. In 1977 President Jimmy Carter appointed Admiral Stansfield Turner as the new Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). He soon dismissed several hundred of the Agency's experts on Communism. Turner, in his memoirs, justified the reduction in staff by pointing to a previous study, conducted in mid-1976 under DCI, later President, George H. W. Bush, which recommended the abolition of 1,350 positions in the Agency's espionage branch. Turner claimed that, of the final total of 820 positions vacated largely by attrition, only 17 people were actually dismissed, while 147 took an early forced retirement.10 But the CIA has never fully recovered from the Turner-era reductions in this critical area.
CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE FBI
Outside the halls of the government, the anti-intelligence forces utilized various publicity ploys to advance their cause. On 15 February 1977, draft legislation, titled "A Law to Control the FBI," was unveiled at a Capitol Hill press conference sponsored by three organizations whose supporters comprised individuals who, for the most part, were bitterly opposed to intelligence: the ACLU, CNSS, and the CPJ. Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, one of the participants in the press conference, said it was important to control the FBI by law and to get away from the Levi guidelines issued barely a year earlier.11
A sectional analysis of the proposed legislation, as presented at the session, stated in part, "Since the FBI has been turning to existing statutes to rationalize its domestic intelligence operations in recent years, Section 105 repeals those laws . . . ".
The laws named were the Riot Act, the Seditious Conspiracy statute, the Smith Act (i.e., the Internal Security Act of 1940), the Voorhis Act, and the Peacetime and Wartime Military Sedition acts.
During the remainder of 1977, three bills were introduced in the House of Representatives that incorporated provisions of the externally generated "Law to Control the FBI," which, if passed, would have repealed existing statutes: H.R. 4173, introduced by Ronald V. Dellums (D., California); H.R. 6051, by Herman Badillo (D., New York); and H.R. 10400, by Don Edwards (D., California). Had the Edwards bill passed, the FBI would have been removed from both the domestic and foreign counterintelligence fields. The sponsors of these bills were all members of the House's activist group of liberals: Dellums, a radical black member from Oakland, later became chairman of the House Armed Services Committee; Badillo, the first Puerto Rican congressman, two decades later renounced the Democratic party and became a Republican, losing a bid for the GOP nomination for mayor of New York City in 2001; Edwards ultimately became the second-ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and chair of its civil liberties subcommittee. An ardent opponent of the intelligence community, Edwards was, ironically, a former FBI agent.
REDUCTIONS IN SUPPORT
Lobbying by the anti-intelligence operations groups could not fail to have had, in those troubled years, some impact on actions taken by the Senate Judiciary Committee, which abolished its Subcommittee on Internal Security once the Senate was reorganized in the aftermath of the 1978 elections. The panel had been the last Senate committee to follow such matters over the years.
In January 1981, when the Senate was again reorganized, this time under a Republican majority, a Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism was set up to pursue domestic security and intelligence concerns. But, in 1987, after the Democrats recaptured control of the body, it, too, was eliminated.
While the domestic intelligence and counterintelligence operations have consistently been the principal targets for retrenchment or elimination, cutbacks have also been made in the ability of U.S. intelligence agencies to function in the foreign counterintelligence arena, commonly referred to as FCI. For example, in January 1992, Attorney General William P. Barr reassigned 300 FBI counterintelligence agents to the investigation of street gang activities in more than three dozen U.S. communities.12
AFTER 9/11: NEW STRENGTH?
The historical record over the past three decades shows clearly that the United States's retrenchment in intelligence and foreign counterintelligence operations has been extensive. During that time, the U.S. intelligence community has been under constant siege in a concentrated, and admittedly successful, attack by its enemies at home, let alone abroad.
Since the 1970s, the intelligence community had largely failed to receive support, from both executive and legislative branches, and from the public at-large, for its work, particularly in the realm of combating domestic subversion and terrorism. Proponents of civil liberties, on both the political Left and Right, had generally been able to control the media dialogue in ways inimical to the FBI. Had that not been the case, the intelligence community might have been better able to give a forewarning to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon.
Although an arguable proposition, the fact remains that intelligence, often described as the nation's first line of defense, has itself been placed in an almost indefensible position by its critics.
Some relief may be in sight. President George w. Bush's establishment of a still largely symbolic Office of Homeland Security,13 followed by his commitment to improved domestic security measures, might reinvigorate the FBI and the CIA.14 The public's shock over last year's successful attacks on the U.S. mainland, and the response of the world's security forces to U.S. demands for collaboration in deracination of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations in their own countries, may augur anew era of respectable, responsible, and effective intelligence gathering.
REFERENCES
1 "Congress Sets Inquiry on U.S. Flaws in Attack," The New York Times, 12 February 2002, p. A21.
2 The collaboration of the AFL-CIO with the U.S. intelligence community, especially the Central Intelligence Agency, in combating Communist influence in unions worldwide has been dealt with in numerous books. Among them are Ronald Radosh, American Labor and United States Foreign Policy: The Cold War in the Unions from Gompers to Lovestone (New York: Random House, 1969); Joseph C. Goulden, Meany: The Unchallenged Strong Man of American Labor (New York: Atheneum, 1972); and Ted Morgan, A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster (New York: Random House, 1999).
3 Socialist Workers Party et al. v. Attorney General of the United States et al., 73 Civ. 3160 (TPG). Defendants' Exhibit QT and W. Raymond Wannall's testimony at pp. 7543-7547 of transcript.
4 Legislative Reference Service, Library of Congress, World Communist Movement: Selective Chronology, Vol II.
5 The World Almanac, 1974 (New York: Newspaper Enterprise Association, 1973), pp. 865, 878.
6 Eric Ambler, The Light of Day (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), p. 55.
7 Periscope, official publication of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, McLean, Virginia, Vol. IV, No.4, Fall 1979, p. 5.
8 Hearing conducted in U .S. House of Representatives Office Building, Annex No. 1, on 20 May 1986, by the National Committee to Restore Internal Security: subject, "A Citizens' Inquiry on Domestic Security," testimony of Francis J. McNamara, pp. 7, 9.
9 Ibid.
10 Stansfield Turner, Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), pp. 196-197.
11 "Civil Libertarians Propose Curbs on FBI," The Washington Post, 16 February 1977, p. 4.
12 Sharon LaFreniere, The Washington Post, 10 January 1992, p. A3.
13 Joel Brinkley and Philip Shenon, "Ridge Meeting Opposition From Agencies," The New York Times, 7 February 2002, p. A16; Edward L. Rowny, "Homeland Defense Needs a Real Commander," The Wall Street Journal, 14 February 2002, p. A20.
14 David E. Sanger, "Bush Plans Early Warning System for Terror," The New York Times, 6 February 2002, p. All; John Markoff, "Chief Takes Over at Agency To Thwart Attacks on U.S.," The New York Times, 13 February 2002, p. A27.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
First published in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Volume 15, Number 3, Fall 2002, copyright 2002 Taylor & Francis. Reprinted with permission
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.