Curbing America's Invisible Government: The CIA

I know what spies do. I've watched enough of them in action by now. I've seen James Bond and Derek Flint and Napoleon Solo and that fellow who was such a good cook in The Ipcress File. I know all about them. They have attaché cases fitted out with death-dealing transistorized gadgets. They are quick on the draw and adroit at getting up ladders dropped from rescuing helicopters; they tend to favor blue shirts and wear wrist watches that broadcast their whereabouts. Often, in the course of carrying out their mysterious missions in exotic lands, they have their way with curvaceous, liquid-eyed and possibly treacherous ladies. Oh, yes, I know these fellows have their troubles, too. Didn't I see poor Alec Leamas sulking his way through The Spy Who Came in from the Cold? Let no one say, therefore, that I am writing on a subject on which I am improperly informed.

The difficulty is that we live in an age when truth is consistently stranger than fiction. We have reached a point where even the most garishly Technicolored production, dealing with the unlikeliest hocus-pocus in the most lurid locale, can scarcely compete with the real thing. It is getting progressively more difficult to know where fiction ends and reality begins. The reality of our spy system taxes the imagination far more than any cinematic thriller.

Nobody knows for sure, but it is estimated that the United States is now spending something close to four billion dollars a year on the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies of what has turned into an intelligence empire. This sum includes the budgets of the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and various branches of military intelligence. This is many, many times the amount of money appropriated for the entire State Department. It is estimated that more than 100,000 Americans are employed today in intelligence work. This small army, to put it baldly, is all but operating a separate, secret government of its own.

All this is paid for by tax dollars. You would think that Congress might have some control over such far-flung operations, which not only gather intelligence but sometimes determine U.S. policy as well. But we don't. The intelligence agencies are free to spend their billions, accountable only in the vaguest fashion to the vaguest people. They can flout international law. They can take part in shadowy conspiracies to overthrow foreign rulers. In defiance of our official policy, they can determine where the weight of U.S. support is actually thrown. They can even influence our domestic institutions, through foundation "fronts"--as was widely publicized recently. And they are scarcely accountable for their actions. After the fact, it is almost impossible to find out just what those actions were and who authorized them.

It is time this whole cavalier approach were brought under Congressional control. With the world as volatile as it is today, laxity is too dangerous to tolerate.

I am not so native as to suppose that the U.S. can walk through the world in this grim period of international anarchy without the most highly organized intelligence operation, any more than I would suggest that we strip ourselves unilaterally of armaments and weaponry. As long as the Russians have spies and the Chinese have spies and the British and the French have spies, we, too, will continue to need a highly organized structure of intelligence and counterintelligence. What is shocking to me and to many of my colleagues in Congress is the idea that our intelligence structure should be exempt from accountability to the elected representatives of the people.

There simply is no other branch of the Federal Government functioning with this kind of immunity. Every cent appropriated by Congress to the Federal Bureau of Investigation must be accounted for. When it comes to secrecy, there is no agency guarding more vital classified data than the Atomic Energy Commission, which operates under the intense scrutiny of a legislative committee, the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. The Department of Defense must account for its activities and expenditures to the Armed Services Committees and to the Appropriations Committees of both the Senate (continued on page 132) America's Invisible Government (continued from page 97) and the House of Representatives.

The CIA, however, is accountable only to an informal committee known as the Special Group, consisting of the Director of the CIA, the Deputy Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense and two Presidential representatives. They meet about once a week and make many of the crucial decisions affecting our secret policy abroad--all in the most informal way. There is no regular consultation with objective experts outside the Special Group. All the regular forms of democratic control are absent. The CIA, as Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield pointed out as far back as 1956, is free from practically every ordinary form of Congressional check and scrutiny. Control of its expenditures is exempted from the provisions of the law that prevent financial abuses in other Government agencies. Its appropriations are hidden in allotments to other agencies. A few years ago, 34 other Senators joined Mansfield in sponsoring a resolution calling for a joint Congressional Committee on the Central Intelligence Agency. None of these 34 Senators, nor Mansfield, nor myself, is insensitive to the CIA's need for secrecy. What disturbs us is secrecy for secrecy's sake. The Mansfield resolution was defeated in the Senate. And so today you cannot directly learn anything about the CIA operation--not what it does, nor what it costs, not how efficient it is, not even when it succeeds or when it fails--until it is too late to make any useful judgment.

If the record of the CIA were more impressive and more in keeping with our officially expressed foreign policy, there might be less reason for concern. Perhaps those of us whose natural suspicions have been aroused would not have been trying--in every one of the last 11 years--to secure proper Congressional control over the CIA. Too often, however, the CIA has not only sent men who are little more than adventurers to dabble in underground plots and maneuvers on foreign soil but has also ended up aiding just those right-wing regimes showing the least in common with our publicly announced democratic objectives. In other instances, the CIA has simply led us through a maze of shadowy political cloak-and-dagger obfuscation, resulting in our making fools of ourselves in the eyes of the entire world.

Take the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. It would be painful and futile to delve into that complex fiasco at this late date except as an object lesson in stupidity and international policial failure. As the full story came out, it was appalling to learn how thoroughly all the signals were confounded--the lack of coordination, the waste of manpower, the failure to provide the promised umbrella of bombers over the beaches as the Cuban freedom fighters made their landing. The late President John F. Kennedy gallantly took the blame for the Bay of Pigs disaster. "I am the responsible officer of the Government," he said; but it was plain by that time how disgracefully faulty had been the information he was given before the April 1961 landings, how ill-advised he had been by both the CIA and his military strategists, how mismanaged the whole affair was from beginning to end, largely by CIA bungling. After all, the CIA had virtually guaranteed that the invasion of Cuba was assured of success. Even if they couldn't overthrow the Castro regime immediately, the invading exiles were supposed to be able to reach the mountains and operate as a trained guerrilla force. As it turned out, the guerrilla brigade had undergone no guerrilla training and had no guerrilla plan. They were taught only the techniques of amphibious landings and infantry assault tactics. The CIA not only deceived the President in this case; the people of the United States were also deceived, and quite deliberately. Some devious mind in the CIA cooked up the idea of wheeling a B-26 bomber out on a Central American landing strip, peppering it with machine-gun bullets and getting an exiled Cuban pilot named Mario Zuniga to fly over Miami with it in a propaganda raid. After the first air strike against Castro's Cuba, Zuniga was to claim that members of Castro's air force turned their own planes against the dictator and bombed his bases. This story was palmed off on the American public through the American press, and Ambassador Adlai Stevenson was supplied with CIA propaganda that was false. Relying on its truth, he was subjected to humiliation in the United Nations. He displayed photographs of Zuniga's bullet-ridden plane as alleged proof that defecting Cubans had staged the bombing on their own initiative--only to learn that he had been misinformed, in fact, duped, by CIA officials and others. This highly honorable statesman should never have been deceived by the CIA. Yet as far as is known, there were no resultant dismissals or shake-ups at or near the top of the CIA hierarchy. The CIA concocted and conducted the whole operation. Cuban exile commanders reported later that even if President Kennedy had called off the invasion, they were going to go ahead, pretending to overthrow the CIA men who had trained them, in the smug expectation that the full might of our military would back them up against Castro. It seems evident they had been assured of this.

It is equally distasteful to recall the U-2 incident seven years ago that wrecked a summit conference with the Soviet Union. The apologists for the CIA point out that by the very nature of its operations, it is impossible for the Agency to have the sort of public relations available to other branches of Government. They "cannot talk" about either their failures or their successes; they cannot put out press releases explaining or justifying what they have done. Like the heroes in the spy movies, they must keep their mouths shut, even under the torture of public criticism.

"Until we have world stability," said an unnamed high-ranking veteran of the CIA recently, "our Government is going to have to have intelligence and it is going to have to be on a world-wide basis. There is no place we don't need information."

We who advocate Congressional control have no quarrel with this. We do not object to the surreptitious collection of information by intelligence agents. In this space age of change and challenge, with its Cold War and highly developed methods of espionage, counterespionage and subversion, no one questions the need for secrecy in intelligence activities. But enfolded in its nebulous cloud of secrecy, the CIA has played too large a part in the making of our foreign policy. It has assumed responsibilities that were heretofore solely those of the President and of Congress. Its officials have squandered taxpayers' money. Payments of $2500 per month for U-2 pilot Powers and certain unemployed reservist National Guardsmen seemed customary. When spies and adventurers are given power to make decisions more appropriate to statesmen, democracy is in trouble. Unfortunately, the record of the CIA proves this in one incident after another.

In Burma in the 1950s, our ambassador, William J. Sebald, found his authority flouted and ignored by CIA operators, who conspired to keep 12,000 Nationalist Chinese troops on Burmese territory, despite our assurances to the Burmese Government that they would lay down their arms. These maneuvers not only endangered our relations with Burma but contributed to the decision of General Ne Win, when he seized the government in a bloodless coup five years ago, to move his nation to the left.

In Indonesia, an American pilot was shot down after he bombed and strafed an airstrip on Ambon island on instructions from the CIA, which was secretly supporting a rebellion against President Sukarno. The incident helped turn the country at that time against the whole concept of parliamentary democracy.

In Laos, the CIA supported General Phoumi Nosavan and his royalist army for years--one of the many instances in which this privately operated wing of our Government has put its money and (continued on page 154) America's Invisible Government (continued from page 132) its maneuvers on the side of rightism and reaction.

The CIA is proud of its record in Guatemala, where it claims to have masterminded the overthrow of the Communist-influenced government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in 1954. Yet who was it our CIA agents backed afterward? A ruling junta led by Colonel Castillo Armas! He routed the Communists, all right. Then he set up a committee that seized without compensation some 800,000 acres of land from the peasants, returned rich holdings to the United Fruit Company, repealed laws guaranteeing the rights of workers and labor unions to bargain for their wages and, within a week after taking over the government, arrested 4000 persons on suspicion of Communist activities. In Guatemala today, 2,000,000 Indians continue to toil for starvation wages while ultrarich and antidemocratic landowners flourish. Their wealth is increasing, but, according to reports, anti-United States, pro-Castro sentiment has been smoldering under the surface.

In the days when John Foster Dulles was practicing brinkmanship in the State Department and his brother, Allen, was heading up the CIA, some fancy prose works were issued to justify the operation of the CIA adventure. In a book entitled The Craft of Intelligence, Allen Dulles cited the story in the Book of Numbers about Moses sending spies to the Land of Canaan, offered a solemn history of medieval Europe, alluded to Disraeli's coup in connection with the Suez Canal and, in general, built up a hair-raising picture of clear and present danger to justify the free-ranging powers of his agency. Mr. Dulles made eloquent arguments, but on the wrong subject. We who call for Congressional supervision of intelligence activities are not so much disturbed by the fact that billions of dollars are being poured into the collection of information. We are more disturbed by the fact that the CIA is not satisfied to be our watchdog, but wants to be its own master. It has taken on the character of a second government, answerable only to itself.

The CIA was never intended to direct the foreign policy of our country. It was organized as an intelligence-collecting agency only, not as an operating, policymaking branch of Government. Congress created the Agency in 1947 because of the failure on the part of our intelligence to anticipate the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The duties of the CIA were set forth in five short paragraphs:

1. To advise the National Security Council in matters concerning such intelligence activities of the Government departments and agencies as relate to national security;

2. To make recommendations to the National Security Council for the coordination of such intelligence activities...;

3. To correlate and evaluate intelligence relating to the national security, and to provide for the appropriate dissemination of such intelligence within the Government...provided that the Agency shall have no police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers or internal-security functions...;

4. To perform, for the benefit of the existing intelligence agencies, such additional services of common concern as the National Security Council determines can be more efficiently accomplished centrally;

5. To perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.

There is nothing in those paragraphs about overthrowing foreign governments, or mounting invasions, or offering $3,000,000 bribes--as was done to Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore. There is nothing about interfering in the affairs of the Dominican Republic or Vietnam--where I heard from an American official in October 1965 that Vietnam Nationals employed by the CIA had, in one instance, posed as Viet Cong and committed atrocities in a South Vietnamese village, either to discredit the Viet Cong or to prove loyalty to them. Whether such allegations were true, I cannot say. Other Senators visiting southeast Asia heard similar reports. All these powers were usurped on the basis of the little phrase "other functions." That is too broad a definition for me. Even President Truman, who called the CIA into being in 1947, wrote in 1963:

I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment that I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue--and a subject for cold-war enemy propaganda.

The far-flung power of the CIA operates not only in foreign lands today but even within the continental limits of the United States; 70 percent of all those thousands of employees are wearing their cloaks and carrying their daggers right here at home. There are regional CIA offices in most of our major cities. There is CIA money subsidizing college programs, subtly and sometimes not so subtly influencing academic attitudes.

Such was the case when Michigan State University was used from 1955 to 1959 as a cover for CIA operations connected with our activities in South Vietnam. At Michigan State, the CIA is reported to have spent millions of dollars to train policemen and officials for President Ngo Dinh Diem; the university neglected its functions of scholarship to groom leaders for a foreign government. So, at least, were the accusations in an article in the April 1966 Ramparts, written by Stanley K. Sheinbaum, former coordinator of the university's Vietnam project. Mr. Sheinbaum certainly ought to know. Ralph Smuckler, acting dean of the Office of International Programs at Michigan State, has deprecated the story, asserting that everything in it was false and distorted. Other responsible department heads at the university say that there was substance in Sheinbaum's charges. The most disturbing part of the story is that there is no way to get at the real truth. There must be good reasons, however, for Harvard and other reputable universities to have refused to have any institutional involvement with the CIA.

Even more shocking was the disclosure in February that for 15 years the Central Intelligence Agency gave secret financial support, totaling millions of dollars, to the National Student Association, the nation's largest student organization, and additional millions to other youth, labor, education and church groups. The discovery of such maladroit maneuvers on the part of the CIA reduced virtually all scholarly and professional groups in America to the ranks of the suspect.

Such CIA interference in organizations outside its jurisdiction is inexcusable and indefensible. In this case, it brought embarrassment upon us at home and humiliation abroad. And it still poses a serious threat to academic freedom. Certainly other means could be found to handle financial assistance for these organizations and for similar ones when our country needs to be represented abroad. What the CIA did was not only immoral but in the end worked to the detriment of our national interests. It seems at least a possibility, for instance, that the National Student Association will disband. Certainly its overseas operations will be drastically curtailed. Henceforth, the credibility of all the organizations that received CIA funds--in some cases unwittingly--will be diminished.

The CIA also supports foundations and cultural groups, a publishing firm and even a few trade unions. The CIA director can bring 100 foreigners into this country every year, totally exempt from our immigration laws. Some supposedly spontaneous demonstrations by anti-Castro Cubans and others may well have been inspired by the CIA. There is no way of finding out for sure.

What kind of minds control this vast organization? For the most part, they have been military in orientation. The first director of the CIA was Rear Admiral Roscoe S. Hillenkoetter, a brilliant Annapolis graduate who speaks three languages. He was succeeded in 1950 by General Walter Bedell Smith.

In February 1953, Allen Dulles was appointed by President Eisenhower to head the CIA. Dulles certainly brought remarkable experience and tremendous zeal to his post. He had earned a brilliant reputation as chief of the OSS in Switzerland. Educated at Auburn, Paris and Princeton, a former English teacher in the Far East, a successful international lawyer who knew personally many of the political and industrial leaders of Europe, he was eminently qualified for the job. Besides, his brother was Secretary of State.

Dulles' successor was John McCone, a man with white hair and a kind face. The American public learned little about him. He was not in the habit of giving interviews or making speeches. It is known, however, that he is a multimillionaire who made money in the shipbuilding business in wartime, directed the Panama Pacific Tankers Company (which carries oil to the Middle East); and that he received an engineer's degree from the University of California in 1922.

McCone was followed by Vice-Admiral William Francis Raborn, Jr., U. S. N. (retired). Admiral Raborn had been a Navy man since he received his ensign's commission in 1928. He had served his country with distinction as a Naval officer through the years. He helped develop the Navy's guided missiles and aviation ordnance. He became Director of Central Intelligence in 1963 and was formerly deputy chief of Naval Operations.

The present ruler of the CIA empire is Richard M. Helms, 53, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Williams, who speaks three languages and has been in the spy business for 25 years. During World War Two, he worked for the Office of Strategic Services and--after a brief stay with the War Department's intelligence unit--he joined the CIA when it was founded in 1947. Unlike most of his predecessors, Helms is not a professional military man. As a civilian, he is presumably better suited to head this civilian agency.

What kind of people work for the CIA? On the one hand, there is the vast number of employees who work in the headquarters at McLean, Virginia, and in the various regional offices. Many of them are recruited on college campuses from the cream of the student body. All are young people with excellent educations, many of them Ph.D.s. Quite different are the agents in the field. The "career" secret agent must have an unusual combination of skills. He must be keen and sensitive, adept at languages, at geography, at duplicity. He must be highly motivated and patriotic, willing to undergo dangers, yet always remain anonymous. But from the report on CIA operations in countries like Laos and Guatemala, there is clearly a streak of the adventurer in many of these individuals. They may not be as colorful or sartorially impeccable as James Bond, but a number of them have certainly shown themselves capable of equally highhanded, picaresque behavior. While many have proved themselves competent spies, few are the type to whom the American people would be likely to turn for the fateful decision-making powers that have sometimes been left in their hands.

At the CIA's $46,000,000 "hidden" headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the interior architecture is so designed that half the time, I am informed, one CIA employee hasn't the slightest idea what anyone else in the place is up to. This secrecy within secrecy may reinforce the security of the operation, but has been known to interfere with its efficiency and economy. The building contains some fantastic facilities--enough to gladden the heart of any spy-movie director in the world. There are special explosives, miniaturized weapons, invisible inks, an electronic brain, a phototype robot with the thrilling designation of Intellofax, and a huge library containing 200,000 newspapers, books and other periodicals. The CIA's electronic brain can call up information stored on 40,000,000 punch cards. I was amused to learn also that the CIA library harbors a gigantic collection of spy and mystery stories, from Edgar Allan Poe to Ian Fleming. It is comforting to know that if our boys ever run out of their own ideas, they can consult the creative masters in the field.

All of these resources, of course, help account for the staggering sums funneled through the CIA and the other agencies in our intelligence effort. Don't misunderstand me. If the CIA is our most hush-hush agency, that is surely as it should be. If everything about it is kept under cover, the needs of the operation would seem to require this. I would be the last to want to hamper CIA employees from satisfactorily performing their important duties. But how can I, as an elected representative of the people, be sure that this is happening? I know of ample evidence, which has come to light just in the past three years, to cause me to doubt the efficiency and good judgment of some CIA employees and officials. About some of the details I prefer to exercise the charity of my own silence. The purpose of this article is not to impugn the motives of our intelligence people nor to hamper their legitimate work in protecting our interests, but to suggest a better form of control. Many millions of taxpayers' dollars are being spent for the maintenance of this operation, and the taxpayers are entitled at least to reliable assurance that money for the CIA is at all times being spent wisely.

Twelve years ago, the Hoover Commission recommended a joint Senate-House "watchdog" committee to supervise the CIA. Primarily because officials of the CIA opposed it, this recommendation was never implemented.

I recently introduced a legislative proposal providing for a joint Congressional committee to serve as master to the CIA watchdog and to monitor its activities and expenditures. My bill proposes that a special committee be set up, composed of 12 Senators and Representatives, one majority and one minority member of each of the House and Senate committees on Armed Services, Appropriations and Foreign Relations. This joint Congressional committee would be empowered to hold regular executive or secret sessions and would be provided with adequate funds, space and staff.

The present two informal committees--one in the Senate, the other in the House--have no staff whatever. They are composed of the chairmen and ranking majority and minority members of the Appropriations and Armed Services committees of both houses. The members of these two committees already have a tremendous work load. I must say, I was surprised when I learned that one very influential member of Congress, with considerable seniority and a fine record of personal and political achievement, had stated sometime following his appointment to this committee, "I don't know much about the operations of the CIA and I don't want to know." That's a shocking state of affairs.

Our founding fathers, who were the architects of our Constitution, gave the Senate the power to offer advice and consent to the President in making treaties with foreign nations and to advise and consent to the appointment of certain high officials in the Executive and Judicial branches of our Government. The Congress alone is the source and must remain the source of all foreign-policy legislation. Congress alone must decide the proper appropriations for foreign assistance. If it is true that the CIA, however indirectly, is infringing on the responsibilities of the State Department, the Defense Department and the authority of Congress, this infringement must stop.

I have no way of proving that the CIA is overstaffed. I have no way of proving that the CIA is spending too much of the taxpayers' money. Neither can any other Senator or Representative. But we have good reasons for suspicion. We do not need two governments; one is enough.

In their eye-opening book on the Central Intelligence Agency, The Invisible Government, David Wise and Thomas B. Ross state:

Can the Invisible Government ever be made fully compatible with the democratic system?

The answer is no. It cannot be made fully compatible. But, on the other hand, it seems inescapable that some form of Invisible Government is essential to national security in a time of Cold War. Therefore, the urgent necessity in such a national dilemma is to make the Invisible Government as reconcilable as possible with the democratic system, aware that no more than a tenuous compromise can be achieved.

What, then, is to be done?

Most important, the public, the President and the Congress must support steps to control the intelligence establishment, to place checks on its power and to make it truly accountable, particularly in the area of special operations.

The danger of special operations does not lie in tables of organization or questions of technique, but in embarking upon them too readily and without effective Presidential control. Special operations pose dangers not only to the nations against which they are directed but to ourselves. They raise the question of how far a free society, in attempting to preserve itself, can emulate a closed society without becoming indistinguishable from it.

In our free society, the end cannot be construed to justify the means. The danger of emulating the methods of our enemies is that we may find ourselves also parroting their morality. Those inside the secret ring of the CIA are all too likely to succumb to the simple human failing of rationalizing their own decisions and behavior. Objective evaluation by responsible elected representatives is the best way to counteract this. That is the whole point of our constitutional system of checks and balances. Swashbuckling, duplicitous, highhanded, adventurous behavior is tremendously amusing in books and movies--the more the better. But when dealing with the real world, and real human lives, secrecy and duplicity cannot be allowed to run amuck with our safety, our prestige and our national welfare.

A small joint committee on the Central Intelligence Agency, such as I have proposed, would provide the safeguards necessary to prevent abuses of power by the CIA. It would assure that Congress is included in decisions vital to our national security, in accordance with the provisions and intent of the Constitution of the United States.

In the CIA's vast hideaway in Virginia, the marble inscription on the left wall reads: and Ye Shall know the Truth and the Truth Shall make you free. How about that?