CIA out of control
Rich Winkel
From: dave%ratmandu.c...@UMCVMB.missouri.edu (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
"Spouting propaganda about true democracy and open
government, our CIA eclipses these very notions."
Webster's defines MACHIAVELLIAN as:
Pertaining to the political doctrine of Machiavelli, which
denies the relevance of morality in political affairs and
holds that craft and deceit are justified in pursuing and
maintaining political power; political opportunism.
bushie-tail pursues his constituent's machiavellian machinations
full bore. the president who was vice, now hides nothing of his
true intentions and agendas from the people who have willingly
become irrelevant to this society. this system, as it is
currently defined and run, cannot repair itself.
the following 45 lines are excerpts from the "CIA Out Of Control" article
(included below) which appeared in the September 10, "Village Voice".
November 30, 1990:
For the first time in history, a president vetoed the annual
Intelligence Authorization Act, which formally authorizes the
expenditure of intelligence funds and designates how those funds
will be spent.
Instead of tolerating the few trivial constraints the bill
imposed on him--apprising the committee of certain covert actions--
Bush simply told our elected representatives he didn't like having
to notify them when he uses private individuals, corporations, or
foreign governments to act as surrogates for CIA operatives.
Moreover, he didn't feel he needed their authorization for anything
(a false assertion, since The National Security Act of 1947 requires
it). He flaunted the fact that the secret intelligence funds had
already been approved in their usual hiding place, deep within the
Pentagon budget.
The congressional humiliation was nothing less than a
constitutional coup. . . . the no-nonsense and unusually blunt
Representative Henry Gonzalez, laid out the growing irrelevance of
Congress in a May 7 speech on the floor of the House: "If a person
can say today, `I am going to send half a million armed service
personnel to Korea, to Europe, to Africa,' and then, `By the way, I
will consult with Congress,' we have no constitution, and we do not
have presidents. We have Caesars." . . .
The congressional committees can't tell the public what they
know--"you just have to trust us," says one committee staffer.
Problem is, the committee's own staff, who essentially run the place
for the busy representatives, is swimming with former CIA officers.
Victor Marchetti, a former top aide to the director of central
intelligence, claims that's by design: As soon as the oversight
committees were created, the CIA targeted them and took them over.
To work for the committees "they sent up top guns . . . like John
Clark--who had been head of Planning, Programming, and Budgeting in
the CIA on the director's staff," he recalls. "The whole idea was
to snow these guys, con these guys, win these guys over, convert
'em, get 'em on the team. That's what has happened. It's now
institutionalized."
. . . "Peace, it turns out, is going to be even more
expensive than the Cold War, and . . . a growth industry for the
intelligence community," wrote former NSC staffer Roger Morris in a
"New York Times" op ed. Among the hits sure to play again and again
are three covert action "growth areas" run by Bush when he was
vice-president: counterterrorism, the drug war, and crisis
management.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The following appeared in the "Village Voice", Sept. 10, 1991 issue:
(subscription info appears at the bottom of this article)
=====================================
C I A O U T O F C O N T R O L
=====================================
by Russ W. Baker
In the Post-Soviet Era, Congress Slumbers
and the Intelligence Community Creates New Bogeymen to Vanquish
THE CANCER IS GONE, but the cure is killing us. From Siberia to
Slovenia, Tallinn to Timisoara, the totalitarian communist state has
ceased to be; and along with it our own fevered nightmares of
Soviet tanks rolling down Main Street. But the U.S. "national
security state" is far too entrenched to be dismantled by the
current political leadership, for whom life without it is simply
unimaginable.
Today, there is ample evidence that those who administer the
national security opiate--including the Central Intelligence Agency-
-are preparing to keep us doped up for the rest of our lives. As
the people of the disintegrating Soviet Union struggle to eliminate
their own out-of-control security complex, it's clearly time that
the U.S. do the same. Yet despite new global realities, the
American security apparatus keeps on growing and adapting to ensure
its long-term survival. As we approach the 21st century, true
democracy and open government move increasingly out of our reach.
Consider these trends:
* While our infrastructure crumbles, the U.S. spy conglomerate
has quadrupled since 1980, and now consumes more than $35
billion each year; the CIA itself spends more than $5
billion and employs more than 25,000, with additional tens
of thousands of "unofficial" workers on its payroll
worldwide. America's foremost intelligence agency has no
comprehensive charter outlining what the CIA may or may not
do (the last effort to impose one failed in 1980). And in a
time of professed global togetherness, its brutal covert
actions go right on violating international law and the
rights of citizens everywhere.
* The Soviet threat veneer torn away, agency operations prove
more than ever a thesis shared by numerous former CIA
agents--that the national security apparatus is little more
than the private army of the Fortune 500. Besides the
official spy outfits, a vast national security alumni
network--positioned from Wall Street to Bangkok--is setting
up private intelligence operations with the cooperation and
encouragement of the CIA. In addition, the collaboration
with multinational renegades is well illustrated by the
collapsed global empire of the Bank of Credit & Commerce
International--already called the largest financial fraud in
history. The bank, with which the CIA had maintained close
financial ties, engaged in spying, bribery, extortion,
kidnapping, and possibly murder. "Time," which broke the
story, boldly went where few in the media will go: "The
discovery of the CIA's dealings with BCCI raises a deeply
disturbing question: Did the agency hijack the foreign
policy of the U.S. and in the process involve itself in one
of the most audacious criminal enterprises in history?"
* While the CIA remains the lightning rod for any criticism,
an enormous parallel but unseen covert-action structure is
rapidly growing inside the military. Their images buffed
through "successes" in the Persian Gulf, Panama, and
Grenada, war heroes like Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf
put a new, improved face on the paramilitary actions and
undeclared wars for which the CIA has been chastised in the
past. The transition is an easy one: Unlike the CIA,
military activities are outside the scope of the
congressional intelligence committees.
* Intelligence is big business for Uncle Sam. More than a
dozen government agencies--including the Defense
Intelligence Agency, the Air Force's National Reconnaissance
Office, and branches of the Customs and Treasury
departments--inhabit this netherworld. Energy department
spooks, for example, were recently in the news for
surveilling energy employees who were reporting departmental
violations. The vast government intelligence enterprise is
funded largely through a secret "black budget," hidden deep
within the Pentagon's overall allocation. Having more than
quadrupled under Ronald Reagan, the estimated $30 billion
black budget is greater than New York City's entire budget,
or the total federal outlay for education.
* One of the most insidious byproducts of the Cold War,
institutionalized secrecy--and the widespread
"classification" of information designed to keep
controversial subjects out of the public arena--seems here
to stay. Even the Freedom of Information Act, created to
open up the system, has become something of a joke as
requested documents increasingly arrive heavily censored
with a thick black marker. Since everything can be termed a
matter of national security, the real operative American
foreign policy is never properly debated or reviewed. And
coated with the Teflon of executive deniability,
institutionalized lying becomes more deeply ingrained in
government.
* One of the many dangers of foreign intrigues is how easily
they become domestic subversions. As Marcus Raskin of the
Center for Policy Studies described it recently: "The U.S.
has been fixing elections abroad for 40 years. People who
undertake to fix elections abroad have no problem doing that
at home." Examples abound, from Watergate to the unraveling
of the 1980 Reagan-campaign October Surprise arms-for-
hostages deal with Iran. Ongoing CIA links with academia,
again in the news (notably the agency's close association
with the president of the Rochester Institute of Technology),
show that the disease is infecting yet another generation.
* Most troubling of all, congressional intelligence committees,
charged with reining in the madness, are variously asleep at
the wheel or helping to steer the ship of state into ever
more dangerous waters. Reformist efforts have been virtually
laughed out of Congress. One such effort, Senator Daniel
Patrick Moynihan's "End of the Cold War Act of 1991," would
transfer all CIA functions to the State Department, and
define the Agency strictly as an information-gathering unit.
Another, authored by Representative Barbara Boxer, would have
eliminated almost all covert action. Moynihan's bill is
legislation non grata; Boxer's has been terminated with
prejudice. Meanwhile, Bush has moved to drastically weaken
Congress's recognized right and responsibility to oversee
intelligence activities, and made it clear no one is to
stand in the way of his vision of a new world order.
BUSH HAS WORKED UNCEASINGLY to weaken the checks and balances that
were instituted following a string of White House-connected scandals
in the 1970s. The ad hoc investigative committees at the time,
chaired by Senator Frank Church and Representative Otis Pike,
produced reports in 1976 that portrayed the intelligence community
as dangerous, often incompetent, and unaccountable to the American
people but "utterly responsive to the directions of the President."
It is telling that Bush, who was CIA director at the time of the
reports should be the one to immobilize those reforms.
From those decade-old queries came today's "watchdog"
intelligence oversight committees, whose job it is to review the CIA
budget and covert action plans, keeping the agency accountable. But
many believe "lapdog" better describes the committees, which almost
always meet in secret, and have knuckled under at every turn.
Although some members talk tough in public, their records
demonstrate that they often go along with secret U.S.
interventionism and are eager to be "intelligence insiders." For
expert guidance on how to get tough with the CIA, committee members
are advised by a staff that is itself dominated by former CIA agents
who are not exactly outspoken reformists.
Iran-contra clearly demonstrated that Congress does not have a
role in controlling the intelligence community. Even the Iran-
contra hearings, during which Congress tried to discover the truth
about activities it should have been regulating from the start,
produced nothing tangible. After endless twists and perturbations,
and hundreds of thousands of pages of testimony, the public was lost
and exhausted, not sure what they'd seen and what it all meant.
Despite overwhelming evidence of collusion and direction from the
White House, the National Security Council (NSC), and the CIA,
virtually no high officials went down, and no changes were
implemented. Allegations of related drug-running disappeared from
sight.
One CIA officer, Joseph Fernandez, was indicted as a result of
Iran-contra, but the case was later dropped. Attorney General
Richard Thornburgh helped him out by ruling that materials for
Fernandez's defense could not be introduced for "national security
reasons." Among the vital secrets to be protected: that Fernandez
was CIA station chief in Costa Rica, or that there even was a CIA
station in Costa Rica. "We've created a class of intelligence
officer who cannot be prosecuted," said frustrated independent
prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, in his own report.
This September, if our legislators get around to grilling Robert
Gates, President Bush's ethics-parched nominee for CIA director, few
will look beyond the tough questions to notice that the deliberative
body has been further neutered by the White House. The latest step
in the shanghaiing of Congress occurred last November 30, in a
rather daring move by President Bush that stunned the Hill but
received little press coverage.
For the first time in history, a president vetoed the annual
Intelligence Authorization Act, which formally authorizes the
expenditure of intelligence funds and designates how those funds
will be spent.
Instead of tolerating the few trivial constraints the bill
imposed on him--apprising the committee of certain covert actions--
Bush simply told our elected representatives he didn't like having
to notify them when he uses private individuals, corporations, or
foreign governments to act as surrogates for CIA operatives.
Moreover, he didn't feel he needed their authorization for anything
(a false assertion, since The National Security Act of 1947 requires
it). He flaunted the fact that the secret intelligence funds had
already been approved in their usual hiding place, deep within the
Pentagon budget.
The congressional humiliation was nothing less than a
constitutional coup. "You get to a certain level and you're dealing
with King versus Parliament all over again," says David MacMichael,
a 13-year CIA veteran whose Association of National Security Alumni
lobbies for stricter agency controls.
On May 2, with two-thirds of the fiscal year already over, the
House finally passed this year's Intelligence Authorization Bill,
but backed off and deleted the oversight section altogether.
Without a presidential signature, the committees continued to meet
in mock session, and officials from the Agency and the White House
continued to humor it with testimony of sorts. Finally, with the
fiscal year virtually over, Bush in August signed an authorization
bill that includes some mild oversight measures. But in September
it will be time for a new, 1992 authorization bill, so the run
around will simply begin again.
Hill observers are appalled by the debacle, but not really
surprised. "The Congress is not in any way an equal branch of
government," says MacMichael. "Look at the State of the Union
addresses; they're basically a pronouncement from the throne. Even
Stalin couldn't ask for more--with the goddamn leaping and capering
[members of Congress], trying to outdo each other with applause."
The Democrats, their hopes of ever regaining the White House
slipping away, are right in there cheering.
One who isn't so thrilled, the no-nonsense and unusually blunt
Representative Henry Gonzalez, laid out the growing irrelevance of
Congress in a May 7 speech on the floor of the House: "If a person
can say today, `I am going to send half a million armed service
personnel to Korea, to Europe, to Africa,' and then, `By the way, I
will consult with Congress,' we have no constitution, and we do not
have presidents. We have Caesars."
It's been a bad year, but even in a good year, oversight tends
more toward the secondary definition found in Webster's New
Universal Unabridged Dictionary: "an overlooking; failure to see
or notice." Leading the parade of Mr. Magoos through the myopic and
moot oversight process is Senate intelligence committee chair David
Boren, widely considered an agency yes-man. Before Gates comes
before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence this fall, he
will have received an unusually complete list of questions that the
committee plans to ask him. Boren claims that he sent them because
the "questions will require a great deal of detail in answering
them."
It is the committee "progressives," however who best illustrate
why the system is out of control. Republican senator Arlen Specter,
of Pennsylvania, mother of all intelligence reformers, is known as a
zealous interrogator of the administration's more offensive
nominees, including Robert Gates and Robert Bork. Specter, who
recently left the committee to comply with rules on revolving
membership--but who hopes to return soon--has authored a number of
"technical" reform bills over the years, designed to increase CIA
accountability to Congress. For example, he wants to require that
the president notify Congress of covert actions within 48 hours,
because, he says, it would help avoid the possibility that two
ultrasecret operations might inadvertently overlap.
But the measure Bush signed last month includes one unremarked
feature of a Specter 1991 intelligence bill, which has the effect of
legally sanctioning every vile behavior imaginable, simply by
writing into law two words: "covert action." The bite-sized phrase
refers to secretly breaking the laws of another country to influence
events there; in practice it includes bribery, kidnapping, torture,
propaganda, coups, helping stifle dissent, and exterminating
national liberation movements.
It's a nasty business, not becoming of a democracy: One of many
recent examples might include the allegation by former Salvadoran
death squad member Cesar Vielman Joya Martinez that his unit--which
received direct U.S. support and advice--carried out the 1989 murder
of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her child.
Legally neither fish nor fowl--not executive diplomacy or
declaration of war--clandestine meddling has nevertheless been woven
into the fiber of U.S. foreign policy.
COVERT ACTION SNUCK in the back door after World War II, when The
National Security Act of 1947 was passed. Although Harry Truman
said the act would help prevent another Pearl Harbor by creating the
CIA and NSC as intelligence organs, his intentions may have been
entirely different. Former Truman aide Clark Clifford, who began
the study that led to the creation of the CIA (successor to the
wartime Office of Strategic Services), has said the key was a brief,
innocuous-looking phrase. It authorizes the CIA, beyond gathering
intelligence, to perform "other functions and duties related to
intelligence," as the NSC "may from time to time direct." Clifford
says it was intended to authorize covert action, but only in the
most limited way.
Clifford, himself mired in the BCCI scandal, says the whole thing
is a lousy idea. "I believe that, on balance, covert activities
have harmed this country more than they have helped us," he told a
House intelligence subcommittee in 1988. "Certainly, efforts to
control these activities, to keep them within their intended scope
and purpose, have failed."
The creeping validation process--to which the public has never
been a party--got a lift from the 1974 Hughes-Ryan Ammendment. It
didn't come straight out and authorize covert action, but did allow
the president to carry out "other activities" besides spying if he
finds they are "important to the national security," and informs
Congress.
Three decades after Truman tried to hide covert action, an
audacious Ronald Reagan slapped democracy in the face, at times
openly admitting to a policy of violating other nations'
sovereignty. But the American public turned cheek after cheek. Now
open intervention is flourishing, thanks to congressionally-funded
vehicles like the National Endowment for Democracy which pumps cash
into Washington's favorite political candidates in Eastern Europe
and elsewhere, proving that it is less a matter of being "free" than
of being costly.
Today, covert action is the cart, intelligence-gathering the
horse; last November, CIA analyst John Gentry quit, charging that
the agency regularly distorts information to support executive-
branch policies. He says it lied about the strength of the Soviet
Union. More recently, the CIA appears to have reversed its
assessment that sanctions against Iraq would work when it became
clear that Bush wanted to get on with the Persian Gulf war. Senator
Specter says the problem is that the CIA director wears too many
hats. He wants the director demoted from foreign-policy czar--as it
was under William Casey--to foot soldier of the president.
But while Specter worries about lines of authority, his bill
institutionalizes the kind of adventures Casey loved. Asked about
the wisdom of carving the words covert action into stone, a testy
Specter at first denied that those words were in the measure. Upon
correction by an aide, he then argued that it wouldn't be the first
time a law codifies "covert action," erroneously citing previous
executive orders--which are not laws.
In truth, when Congress is not apologizing for covert action,
it's out of the loop altogether. Although the president does send
the committees "findings"--or covert action reports--intelligence
insiders say he manages to keep Congress in the dark much of the
time. With low-visibility operations, there is little risk Congress
will find out unless he chooses to tell them. And in the case of
"extremely sensitive" operations, the White House has argued the
necessity of delaying findings for up to a year or more. (Bush has
not taken kindly to Congress's rather timid request that he tell
them "within a few days.")
When and if committee members hear about covert operations, they
are powerless to reject them no matter how offensive they may be.
The legislation that created the oversight process simply called for
notification, but did not authorize the committee to veto any
activities. As for the public, it learns nothing from the black
hole-like intelligence review process. The committees rarely hold
public meetings, and never produce transcripts. Their periodic
reports are filled with bland notations like "We held 320 hours of
hearings," to confirm that all's well.
The congressional committees can't tell the public what they
know--"you just have to trust us," says one committee staffer.
Problem is, the committee's own staff, who essentially run the place
for the busy representatives, is swimming with former CIA officers.
Victor Marchetti, a former top aide to the director of central
intelligence, claims that's by design: As soon as the oversight
committees were created, the CIA targeted them and took them over.
To work for the committees "they sent up top guns . . . like John
Clark--who had been head of Planning, Programming, and Budgeting in
the CIA on the director's staff," he recalls. "The whole idea was
to snow these guys, con these guys, win these guys over, convert
'em, get 'em on the team. That's what has happened. It's now
institutionalized."
Some committee members get so fed up with the charade they simply
leave. Democratic representative George Brown, of California, quit
the House Intelligence Committee in 1986, saying he was tired of
being placed in situations where commonly known information was
presented to him in classified form, prohibiting him from referring
to it in open debate on the floor. Former House committee member
Democrat Norman Mineta, also of California, described being briefed
by the CIA as "like being a mushroom: you're kept in the dark and
fed manure."
In a recent interview, former House Intelligence Committee chair,
Anthony Beilenson, a liberal Democrat from California, said he
couldn't talk about any matters that have come before the committee,
but could assure that there are very few major covert operations
rolling at the moment. There "aren't any really bad things going
on," he says, a remarkable statement considering that in the final
years of the Reagan administration, according to "Covert Action
Information Bulletin" (the publication started by ex-CIA agent and
agency critic Philip Agee), there were "major CIA operations"
underway in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica,
Suriname, Mexico, Afghanistan, Iran, Ethiopia, Libya, Chad, Lebanon,
Seychelles, South Africa, Mozambique, Angola, Zaire, the
Philippines, New Zealand, Vanuatu, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos,
among others. Many of these continue, most notably covert support
for the genocidal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and a renewed effort to
force Fidel Castro from power.
Both Beilenson and Specter became irritated when asked about
specific types of covert operations. Specter, questioned about
bribery of foreign officials, responded: "That's a ridiculous
question. . . . We don't engage in bribery--that's against the
law." On the other hand, he said, "Paying for information is not
bribery."
Ex-CIA officer MacMichael laments: "This splitting of hairs. . .
. How would it be regarded in the United States if an official of
the United States, for payment, offered information to a foreign
government? Would that be legal in the U.S.? [Specter's] statement
is the most extraordinary distinction I've ever heard."
When asked specifically about the dangers of practices like
paying foreign journalists to write knowingly false stories that
often work their way back into American living rooms, Specter
replied: "I have not seen that come before the Intelligence
Committee." When asked again how committee members could possibly
be unaware of such well-documented practices, Specter--answered
haltingly: "I have not voted for any funds which involve bribery."
IF COMMITTEE MEMBERS are so ill-informed, it's partly because the
CIA won't provide correct answers unless the questions are posed in
precisely the right way. Former CIA officials say they take
advantage of unartful questioning in order to withhold information.
"We'd go down and lie to them consistently," says ex-CIA officer
Ralph McGehee. "In my 25 years, I have never seen the agency tell
the truth to a congressional committee."
"I ask questions a number of different ways," says Specter. "But
if they want to be evasive, there's no way you can stop that. . . .
We've had people who've been evasive to Congress--and we raised hell
with them. It's a big part of what we had with Bill Casey and Gates
last time around--the preparation of testimony which was not
candid." Specter's bill has a provision for a mandatory one-year
sentence for lying to Congress. It's unlikely to be signed into law
and even less likely to be enforced, what with lying to Congress
amounting to a way of life.
Often, it's committee members who choose to be bamboozled.
McGehee, a CIA officer in Vietnam, recounts one particularly
juvenile exercise. During his predirector days, William Colby had
been called to testify about the Phoenix operation, in which
thousands of Vietnamese peasants were slaughtered. Colby confirmed
that more than 20,000 died, but argued that the CIA was not to blame
because the deaths were the result of "paramilitary operations."
McGehee recalls the committee members saying, "Oh, okay, so that
excuses most of the deaths." Of course, it excuses nothing, since
the Phoenix program was a CIA-directed and -planned covert
paramilitary operation.
Despite the committee's passive, "just listening" role, Specter
says he's been able to actually block operations, but he can't talk
about them and wouldn't want to characterize his success rate. "The
entire Iran-contra oversight is a case where Congress disagreed with
what the administration was doing," he volunteers. That's hardly
the best example, since Congress only learned about the scandal by
accident. "It was disclosed collaterally with--was it an Iranian
newspaper?" Specter says. Actually it was a Lebanese newspaper.
"Listen," Specter says in frustration, "we look over what they're
doing and we raise objections and we do our best with congressional
oversight."
SINCE MEMBERS GET LITTLE public glory from their role, the
motivation for serving on the committees is a more complex one.
Senate committee chair Boren "suddenly has his own agency," says
Marchetti, coauthor of "The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence."
"He's got a $30 billion industry there. He doesn't want to oversee
that, he wants a say in how it's spent and how it works. He becomes
part of it.
"You might be a little bit of a tiger like [current House
Intelligence Committee chair Dave] McCurdy," continues Marchetti,
"but now they're dangling something out in front of you--`You want
to get on this committee? You want to chair this committee? You
*can* chair it, but you'd better play it our way.' All the
conservatives would have sworn he was a liberal. Now he sounds like
the biggest conservative in the world."
By joining the committee, even the most skeptical agree to be
silenced. Representative Ron Dellums, once the number one critic of
the agency, faced a huge outcry from the right when he was named to
the committee. But Dellums seems to have gone mute since joining
the committee.
Dellums press secretary Max Miller says the representative from
Berkeley, together with majority whip David Bonior--another
outspoken liberal--made an agreement with Speaker Thomas Foley to
maintain a low profile in return for gaining seats on the committee.
After one full round of legislation and briefings, Miller says,
Dellums will be heard from. "They wanted to find out as much as
they could before speaking out." Meanwhile, the energetic Oliver
North, in his role as president of something called the Freedom
Alliance, has launched a campaign to collect a million Dump Dellums
signatures. He calls Dellums "a pro-Marxist, antidefense radical,"
who would be a threat on the "supersensitive" committee. Putting
Dellums on the panel, North says, was an "extremely reckless and
very dangerous appointment."
And those who make trouble get trouble. Reports and rumors that
the apparatus pokes into the personal lives of members of Congress
underlines the danger of investigating national security agencies.
"There's a little bit of fear that if you do go after the
intelligence community, your career is threatened," says McGehee,
author of "Deadly Deceits: My 25 years in the CIA." Even the
complacent Senate intelligence committee chair David Boren has
reason to worry. According to the "Voice"'s Doug Ireland (see Press
Clips, May 28), Boren faced a vicious primary battle in his first
senatorial campaign, during which his opponents accused him of being
a homosexual. At a press conference, Boren swore on a white Bible
that he was not. "It would therefore be utterly churlish," Ireland
wrote, "to speculate on whether or not the Company has a file on the
state of its tamed watchdog's libido." Since then, Boren has called
Robert Gates "one of the most candid people we've ever dealt with."
Leading congressional critics of the CIA have been defeated,
despite their long, distinguished careers in Washington and
Congress's nearly foolproof 98 per cent reelection rate. Both Otis
Pike and Frank Church were defeated soon after chairing their
precedent-setting '70s hearings. Pike's report had been so
incendiary that Congress voted not to release it before the White
House had a chance to censor the document. (It was ultimately
leaked to and published by the "Voice.") Pike's committee staff
director had been warned by the CIA special counsel, "Pike will pay
for this, you wait and see--we'll destroy him for this," according
to "The New York Times." Also defeated were outspoken senators Dick
Clark, Birch Bayh, and Harold Hughes. Foreign money--possibly South
African--is believed to have financed the defeat of Clark, a vocal
critic of the CIA and U.S. ties with South Africa.
Challenging the CIA also means trying to rein in dictatorial
tendencies that naturally accrue to the occupant of the Oval Office.
"Every president of the United States, no matter what he says before
he becomes president, about how he's going to clean things up," says
Marchetti, "once he gets in there and finds out that's *his* agency,
that's *his* intelligence community, hey, all bets are off."
One man who told the truth blew his chance to become CIA
director, thanks to "reformer" Jimmy Carter. Hank Knoche, acting
director following Bush's retirement, had been called down to a
Senate committee. "The chairman was complaining that `we just don't
know what's really going on,'" says Marchetti, who was privy to the
details of the incident. "They asked [Knoche] about covert action
operations: `Do we know all the stuff that's going on? Could you
tell us more about them?'" Asked to reveal the 10 largest ongoing
operations, Knoche offered to name a few of the lesser ones, despite
urgings from his aide that he keep his mouth shut. President Carter
reportedly heard about it, and was none too happy. Instead of
Knoche, the odds-on favorite for the slot, he named intelligence
novice and old Naval Academy chum Admiral Stansfield Turner. "Hank
learned his lesson that day," says Marchetti.
WITH A CIA PRESIDENT and an AWOL Congress, the vast security
bureaucracy is comfortable scaring up new bogeymen for its post-
Soviet survival. "Peace, it turns out, is going to be even more
expensive than the Cold War, and . . . a growth industry for the
intelligence community," wrote former NSC staffer Roger Morris in a
"New York Times" op ed. Among the hits sure to play again and again
are three covert action "growth areas" run by Bush when he was
vice-president: counterterrorism, the drug war, and crisis
management.
Raising the cries of alarm over terrorism are former government
security officials, who presently offer their services and expertise
to private security companies. Among those who have made the switch
are Iran-contra cast members Joseph Fernandez, Clair George, and
Ollie North.
This army of "experts" has fanned out across talk-show land to
warn of the terrorist threat, but the numbers don't bear them out.
Domestic terrorism has been declining: from 111 acts in 1977 to 9 a
decade later. In 1989 there were 35 Americans killed abroad by so-
called terrorists (a striking statistic when compared with the
430,000 Americans who died from federally subsidized tobacco last
year). Domestically last year, there was a grand total of 7
terrorist acts. Virtually all domestic terrorism in recent years
has been attributed to either Puerto Rican separatist groups or the
Animal Liberation Front. Alternative ways of dealing with the
"terrorist threat"--other than spending billions of dollars to fund
counterterrorist activities--are of course not a priority. Nor is
seeking out root causes for the violent activities: Like why in
1990, for example, the largest number of attacks against American
interests abroad came in Chile--an erstwhile ally--with many of
those aimed at Mormon churches.
Terrorism has been a handy facade. It was under the auspices of
Bush's secret counterterrorism operation that his factotum, North,
began building the contra enterprise. Furthermore, William Casey
was able to continue dealing with shady Iranian arms dealer Manucher
Ghorbanifar after such arms contacts were banned--by simply
designating the man a legitimate contact on "terrorism" matters.
The war against terrorists dovetails nicely with another illusory
battle: the drug war. Oliver North misused his anti-terrorism
powers to harass Jack Terrell, a former contract employee of the
CIA, who had complained to government officials that a ranch being
used as a contra base was also being used to smuggle drugs. The
owner of the ranch, an American named John Hull, is currently wanted
in Costa Rica for drug trafficking. North's--and the CIA's--
dealings with convicted drug traffickers should raise real doubts
about whether the drug war is anything but another tool for foreign
intervention.
Another hot-button phrase, crisis management, was a handy excuse
for North to draw up a plan that reportedly would have suspended the
Constitution in the event of a "national crisis," including national
opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad. According to The
"Miami Herald," this called for rounding up domestic critics and
putting them in internment camps.
Bush, meanwhile, wants to pump the whole thing up further. He
signed National Security Directive 147 in October 1990, directing
intelligence agencies to continue "rebuilding" their
counterintelligence programs, according to "The Washington Times."
GOVERNMENT PRIVATIZATION, the Reagan-Bush raison d'etre, can do for
foreign policy what it did for domestic: Reduce it to a shambles by
moving the intelligence community entirely out of the realm of
public accountability and control. "The intelligence fraternity is
big," says Marchetti. "There are a lot of intelligence officers all
over this country in all sorts of positions, and it's kind of an Old
Boys' Club." That includes Wall Street. "Dino Pionzio, after all
his years in Latin America, ends up working for [investment house]
Dillon, Read," Marchetti says. Pionzio--like Bush a former Skull-
and-Boneser at Yale--was a high-ranking CIA official in the 1970s.
As former CIA operations officer Bruce Hemmings describes it,
"since at least 1981, a worldwide network of `free-standing'
companies, including airlines, aviation and military spare parts
suppliers, and trading companies, has been utilized by the CIA and
the U.S. government to illegally ship arms and military spare pans .
. . [that is] staffed primarily by ex-CIA, ex-FBI, and ex-military
officers. . . ." A key component of the private intelligence
circuit are non-profit organizations, including relief groups like
the International Rescue Committee, AmeriCares, and Air Commando
Association, which can quickly gain access to sensitive areas.
Proposing to take the CIA's role as corporate America's private
army to new lengths, departing chief William Webster is calling for
the agency to move into industrial espionage. A recently-revealed
CIA-sponsored report, "Japan 2000," called for creating a "national
industrial policy" like Japan's, in which the government's
overriding mission is to assist corporations. Senator Bill Bradley
worried that economic espionage could become "a pretext for a new
program of counterintelligence by the FBI of either foreigners or
Americans," according to "The Washington Post." Bradley said he
suspected the threat was being exaggerated, and that CIA director
Webster had failed to answer his request for evidence to the
contrary.
The corporate tilt in spy operations ignores a growing dichotomy.
"As corporations have become multinational, they've lost that
original Americanness that characterized them," says John Prados,
author of "Presidents' Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert
Operations Since World War II." While the CIA slaves for big
companies, the firms are busy exporting jobs and bilking the
government on taxes and contracts. Last month's news that General
Electric allegedly ripped off Uncle Sam to the tune of $30 million
adds to a long string of such procurement scandals.
Despite this, influential think tanks like the Heritage
Foundation continue to call for intervention against indigenous
liberation movements abroad whose only connection with American
security is their threat to the cheap labor markets and raw
materials, prized by the multinationals. Heritage, staffed with
Cold Warriors like Ed Meese, is pushing the doctrine of LIC, or
"Low-Intensity Conflict," which advocates battling insurgencies over
long periods of time, by all available means.
Heritage is more direct than most in presenting the true goals of
national security policy, albeit sugar-coated with the parlance of
freedom. In a 1990 "Backgrounder" report, a Heritage scholar warns
that insurgency, "risks U.S. access to strategic minerals and
markets" while "thwarting U.S. attempts to promote democracy."
However, so inconsistent is the policy that Heritage in one breath
warns of "rising Muslim fundamentalism," and in another backs
supplying the fundamentalist Mujahadeen movement in Afghanistan.
Furthermore, the document calls for Bush to "issue a Presidential
Directive enabling the CIA to carry out . . . actions to kill or
overthrow foreign leaders who pose an extreme and direct security
threat to the U.S." It says that the CIA should develop its own
paramilitary units to perform low-level armed operations, and be
given a greater role in planning and executing LIC operations. The
wish list includes creation of a White House LIC "czar," and for
increasing use of the Pentagon's Special Operations Command.
IN FACT, THE PENTAGON'S ROLE in clandestine operations has been
growing by leaps and bounds since Reagan and Bush first took their
oaths. As the Soviet threat recedes, Grenada, Panama, and the gulf
war conveniently demonstrate that there will always be an enemy.
The Pentagon, currently far more popular than the CIA, is ready to
play a more active role than its traditional once-a-generation "big
war" gig. In postwar appearances before Congress, generals Powell
and Schwarzkopf laid the groundwork by complaining about ineffectual
CIA intelligence provided during the war.
Military intelligence, once under the supervision of the CIA, is
now itself "totally out of control, like a herd of steer," says
Marchetti. "Now, everybody has clandestine services, everybody has
covert operations." Already, 80 per cent of the intelligence black
budget is controlled by the Pentagon, and is dispensed to a raft of
different organizations most Americans have never heard of. The
largest, with a budget of $12 billion to $15 billion, is the Air
Force's National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which collects
satellite data. (The government denies its very existence.) Others
include The National Security Agency (NSA), which monitors
international phone calls, and the Defense Intelligence Agency
(DIA), which analyzes military information.
Congress is now recommending that the military be authorized to
conduct covert operations without any oversight whatsoever, so long
as the actions immediately precede or take place during the
execution of a formal, visible military operation. Critics,
including CIA veterans of Indochina in the Association of National
Security Alumni, fear this would encourage the president to stage
fake provocative actions, a la the 1965 Tonkin Gulf "attack" that
brought the United States into total, undeclared war in Indochina.
In fact, since 1980 there has been an explosion of covert
military activity involving everything from hostage rescue to
sabotage actions. These military operations have evolved into
renegade actions that the Pentagon claims little knowledge of or
control over, adding yet another dimension to the problem of
accountability and control.
Some believe a battle royal is coming, as Secretary of Defense
Dick Cheney, who served on the House Intelligence Committee before
joining the Bush administration, tries to reorganize military
intelligence. He reportedly wants each branch of the military to
have its own intelligence structure, with all reporting to an
enhanced DIA, which would rival the CIA. Cheney takes a great
personal interest in military covert operations: the Special
Operations Command is believed to report directly to him, rather
than going through the Joint Chiefs according to military
intelligence specialists.
POLLS SHOW THAT the American public is of two minds about all of
this: Each time a scandal erupts the majority turns briefly against
covert action. But perceived external threats cause a quick
reversal. Overall, the depth of the problem seems to escape most
folks. "People have been brainwashed for years with novels and
movies that have glorified the business and romanticized the
intelligence community and the CIA," says Marchetti.
Back on the Hill, our leaders seem equally confused. "Who are
the good guys and who are the bad guys?" asks Specter rhetorically.
After all he has seen and heard, he still manages to talk about how
"the interests of democracy and freedom and peace . . . are the
objectives that we are trying to promote."
Still, Specter says he is "not satisfied with the system," and
that is why he proposed creating an independent Inspector General to
monitor the CIA from within. Specter calls the IG, Frederick Hitz,
"a certified mole inside the CIA." Hitz has been serving for less
than a year, and it's too early to tell how tough he will be.
However, there are reasons for concern: In 1978 he was the
legislative counsel for the CIA, before becoming the Company's
deputy chief of clandestine operations for Europe during the tenure
of Bill Casey.
After the "Voice" visited the Hill, Congress finally produced a
bill that Bush did sign. Among it's mildly reformist components:
(1) the president must issue written findings on covert actions by
*any* governmental entity, not just the CIA, and (2) that Congress
be notified when third parties are used for covert action. But for
every proposed restriction, there's a giveaway. The new law
incredibly *expands* the president's power to launch covert actions.
No longer does the president have to claim that national security
was threatened; a simple assertion that the covert action furthers
"identifiable foreign policy objectives of the United States" is
sufficient. Things are so bad that reformers reportedly had to
struggle mightily just to get the word "identifiable" into the bill.
And it codifies covert action just as Specter wanted.
Amid all this throat-clearing, a heroic few are seriously trying to
get a handle on the CIA behemoth. Representative Boxer's defeated
bill would have virtually banned all covert action and attached
severe penalties for violating the ban. She plans to reintroduce
the bill in different form. Senator Moynihan--interestingly, a
former, longtime hawk--proposes transfering all CIA functions to the
State Department, unveiling the black budget, and prohibiting
diversion of funds to third parties for banned covert actions. His
bill lacks even a single cosponsor.
Maybe it was unintentional, but former House Intelligence chair
Tony Beilenson underlined the folly of trying to legislate such a
colossal morass. In floor debate, he said he could not vote for the
Boxer bill because it "would not have prevented Iran-contra; the
people there did not comply with the law that was in existence at
that time. If this law were in existence, they would not have
complied with it either."
ULTIMATELY, THERE IS something deeply wrong with putting our
collective security in the hands of people who don't understand what
it is they are protecting. Even an in-house CIA journal seems to
recognize the fatal flaw. "[Oversight] forces the CIA, an
organization schooled in activities abroad, to confront the American
political process. . . . Exposure . . . forces them to learn how a
closed intelligence agency fits into an open society."
With the dearth of official leadership, it could well fall to the
American people to challenge the national security opiate, just as
it has been up to mass movements to lead the way on civil rights,
abortion, and the Vietnam War. Perhaps, there's a lesson to be
learned from the oppressed peoples of Eastern Europe, who broke down
the doors of the security apparatuses in their countries, seizing
files, yanking electronic equipment from the walls, and trying to
bring the agents to justice.
The current period of global realignment offers the United States
an opportunity to question the knee-jerk aggression inherent in our
national security policy. But the chance for profound change and
reform is slipping away. No strong candidate emerges to challenge
the tainted Bush. Congress snoozes on, waking only to munch at the
trough that feeds it. A rare exception, representative Don
Edwards--himself a former FBI agent and hence intimately familiar
with the national security mindset--eloquently summed up a
troublesome truth when he wrote in the "St. John's Law Review" "I
strongly disagree that communism, terrorism, or any other anti-
democratic ideology has ever seriously threatened a nation confident
in its own democratic values; I just as strongly dispute that it
was ever necessary to curtail freedom in order to protect it."
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KOYAANISQATSI
ko.yan.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language) n. 1. crazy life. 2. life
in turmoil. 3. life out of balance. 4. life disintegrating.
5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.