February 5, 1975
Page 2546
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, Olin Robison, provost of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, wrote an excellent short analysis of the CIA situation in an article published in a recent issue of the Maine Times.
Among his major conclusions Mr. Robison states–
While it may not be possible to eliminate foreign covert operations altogether, at least the CIA and the American public ought to resist the temptation to turn a regrettable necessity into a virtue.
This, and the other points Mr. Robison makes in his article, can provide us good guidance this year in our examination of American intelligence activities.
Mr. Robison, educated at Baylor and Oxford Universities, has been provost of Bowdoin since 1970. He served as Special Assistant to the Deputy Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs for 3 years ending in 1968, and prior to that served in an executive capacity with the Peace Corps.
His article on the CIA makes good reading, and I commend it to my colleagues.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Mr. Robison's article be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
[From the Maine Times, Jan. 24, 1975]
THE CIA AND THE TAR BABY
(By Olin Robison)
Chiselled in stone over the main entrance of the CIA building in Langley, Virginia, are the words of Christ, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
Considering Allen Dulles's Presbyterian background and America's sense of destiny when the building was completed in 1961, the inscription no doubt seemed a logical choice. If the building were being built today, a more apt inscription might be an excerpt from the Tale of Bre'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby. The CIA has discovered that it is far easier to get into covert operations, both foreign and domestic, than to get out, and that the whole sticky mess attracts a lot of unwanted attention.
The recent allegations that the CIA has been involved in systematic surveillance of American citizens cause all past exposes to pale by comparison. Even the CIA's detractors are usually prepared to admit that an argument can be made for some foreign covert activities in an imperfect world. But not even the agency's most ardent supporters are convinced that there is excuse for the alleged domestic operations. Each of the past publicized incidents has produced some refinement of US intelligence policy or practice. We can only hope that this will be so again.
While attention is again focused on CIA activities, it is worth remembering that the CIA's record of public exposure, on balance, has not been too bad. Its agents were America's shock troops during the most intense years of the Cold War. There were some spectacular successes. The CIA was the trendy place to be if you were a young liberal in the 1950's. The Communists were not gentlemen, and certain messy things had to be done. We would take on the Communists at their own game, we told ourselves, and even play by their rules if necessary.
The first time the American public was made aware of how thoroughly we played the game was the U-2 incident in 1959. Public reaction was mixed: there was pride in the technological accomplishment, shame because of the widely-held assumption that caught spies were supposed to destroy themselves, and embarrassment about the Russians lording it over President Eisenhower. Actually, the Russians helped us through that one. Their public behavior was terribly righteous and petulant when everyone knew it to be a case of a splinter in our eye and a board in theirs. Insiders thought it a terribly inconvenient time for this sort of thing to happen.
However, a new precedent had been set. For the first time a chief of state of a major nation had publicly confessed to spying. Spying is an old and honorable profession, but up to 1959, kings, prime ministers and Presidents never owned up to their own. In his memoirs, President Eisenhower acknowledged that a Presidential disavowal was expected but that the evidence the Soviets had was so overwhelming that a lie would not have done any good. It was a momentary victory for practicality over the gray morality of the Cold War.
There was little further public notice of the intelligence community until the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961. Detractors of the CIA, especially those with a moral axe to grind, had a field day. Supporters, or at least defenders, of the CIA were dismayed and angered at the ineptitude of the operation. The President was ill-advised, embarrassed, and worst, was made publicly to appear not in command. Those who felt he was in command believed he had made a very bad decision.
The next major public stir over the intelligence community came in February, 1967, when the CIA was caught financing the overseas activities of the National Student Association and sundry other domestic organizations. Until recently this episode had proven more damaging to the public image of the CIA than any other. There was a genuine furor, and with good reason. The CIA had systematically used unwitting American organizations for its own purposes. It was one thing to infiltrate Communist organizations, but quite another to use Americans who did not know they were being used.
In each of these incidents, the American people became more aware of the extent of CIA activity, and in each case there was public discussion which proved to be helpful and constructive to Washington policymakers. The U-2 episode set the precedent of Presidential public acceptance of responsibility and dramatized the need for better communication between the operational end of the intelligence organization and the most senior policymakers, especially the White House.
The Bay of Pigs disaster provoked managerial reforms of note within the intelligence community and underscored emphatically the limits of covert military operations. Unfortunately these lessons were not well learned, as subsequent developments in Southeast Asia were to show.
The CIA-NSA affair produced a new policy statement from the White House concerning CIA use of and involvement in domestic educational and cultural organizations. Simply put, there was to be none. People knowledgeable in the affairs of the CIA have thought until recently that the CIA had followed this policy to the letter.
Now the CIA is again in the news on two fronts. The first issue is the CIA's admitted covert action aimed at influencing the internal political struggles in Chile. That admission, with the attendant media coverage, has raised the question of the need for and morality of covert action of any sort.
The second, and far more serious, issue is the recent allegation in the New York Times that the CIA has engaged in extensive domestic surveillance, compiling dossiers on thousands of U.S. citizens.
President Ford has now appointed a panel of distinguished Americans to address the latter of these two issues. However, as when President Johnson appointed a similar committee to look into the CIA-NSA affair, the mandate of the new commission is quite narrow. The commission is to decide whether the CIA has violated its charter, "whether existing safeguards are adequate to preclude agency activities that might go beyond its authority," and to make recommendations. The commission has not been asked to go into the question of foreign covert activities.
The President's action is commendable. But it is not enough. An extraordinary opportunity is being missed. The President should give the new commission a far more sweeping mandate. Meddling in another nation's internal politics is a vexing question and ought to be addressed. Just as important is the question of control; to whom is the CIA genuinely answerable? Can the American public be assured that the spirit of the law governing the intelligence community is not being flouted on some legalistic technicality?
It is time for a wide-ranging discussion of intelligence policy.
Intelligence organizations created and sustained by democratic societies are, at the very least, an anomaly. Although Americans have always had a healthy suspicion of any secret government activity, they were prepared to accept Cold War justifications for the creation and growth of the CIA and related agencies. However, the national consensus will not be forthcoming without public discussion of something which costs the taxpayers several billions every year.
No one need pretend that such public discussion of the hard questions will result in immediate or sweeping changes. However, the stage can be set for doing things differently in the future. Why not, for instance, examine the complexity, size, cost, and wastefully duplicative habits of the intelligence community? Why not ask what might happen, if anything, were we to abandon the covert operations field to the Soviets? Could some of these matters, like disarmament, be the subject of negotiation? Is it really necessary for us to inflict on other nations activities which, were our circumstances reversed, we would resent and resist?
Unless the larger questions are addressed, the CIA-Chile affair and the domestic activity allegations may, regrettably, have little effect other than further deflation of public confidence in government. From now on, the government will find it increasingly difficult to keep covert operations covert, and the American public is not likely to become more tolerant of discovered blunders. Nor does it help to have people wondering if they are being spied upon. The problems simply will not go away for two major reasons:
1. The CIA suffers from a syndrome which might be labelled "all dressed up and nowhere to go". It is an organization with extraordinary capabilities employing some of the most talented people in government service (the Watergate personalities notwithstanding). The natural bureaucratic tendency is toward self-perpetuation, and no large organization is likely to change its policies and operations without external pressure to do so.
2. Any American President should have the capacity to influence international events where American interests are clearly in jeopardy. The President, as well as other heads of state, is keenly aware that the vanishing consensus about America's role in the world and the painful Viet Nam experience have made it unlikely that the American people will tolerate or support an executive threat to send in U.S. troops. With his options thus restricted, a President is unlikely to give up a strong and flexible foreign covert action capacity in the intelligence community, though he may be reluctant to use it. If it is there, it is likely to find something to do.
Brer Rabbit fans will remember that the cagey rabbit escaped the Tar Baby by tricking Brer Fox into throwing him in the briar patch, his natural home. Perhaps the U.S. foreign affairs establishment has been in the sticky snare of covert operations for so long that it now regards such action with pride. Nonetheless, the briar patch of public discussion is the natural home of any major instrument of a democratic republic. And while it may not be possible to eliminate foreign covert operations altogether, at least the CIA and the American public ought to resist the temptation to turn a regrettable necessity into a virtue. Any question of the permissibility of domestic covert operations ought to be laid to rest, firmly and permanently.