Challenging the Secret Government

The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI

Kathryn S. Olmsted

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780807863701
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Just four months after Richard Nixon's resignation, New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh unearthed a new case of government abuse of power: the CIA had launched a domestic spying program of Orwellian proportions against American dissidents during the Vietnam War. The country's best investigative journalists and members of Congress quickly mobilized to probe a scandal that seemed certain to rock the foundations of this secret government. Subsequent investigations disclosed that the CIA had plotted to kill foreign leaders and that the FBI had harassed civil rights and student groups. Some called the scandal 'son of Watergate.' Many observers predicted that the investigations would lead to far-reaching changes in the intelligence agencies. Yet, as Kathryn Olmsted shows, neither the media nor Congress pressed for reforms. For all of its post-Watergate zeal, the press hesitated to break its long tradition of deference in national security coverage. Congress, too, was unwilling to challenge the executive branch in national security matters. Reports of the demise of the executive branch were greatly exaggerated, and the result of the 'year of intelligence' was a return to the status quo. American History/Journalism

Chapter 1
Secrecy and Democracy

The Press, the Public, and the Secret Government to 1975

No major act of the American Congress, no foreign adventure, no act of diplomacy, no great social reform can succeed in the United States unless the press prepares the public mind.
Theodore White, The Making of the President, 1972

The sedate New York Times was not known for screaming headlines—especially when the headlines concerned events that had happened years, rather than hours, before. But on 22 December 1974, the Times editors gave extraordinary prominence to what they considered to be an explosive story. The four-column headline proclaimed, “HUGE C.I.A. OPERATION REPORTED IN U.S. AGAINST ANTIWAR FORCES, OTHER DISSIDENTS IN NIXON YEARS.” The story itself, written by Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize winner renowned for his scoops on the My Lai massacre, the secret bombing of Cambodia, and the Kissinger wiretaps, was a quintessential example of aggressive, post-Watergate reporting. “The Central Intelligence Agency, directly violating its charter, conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups in the United States, according to well-placed Government sources,” read the shocking lead paragraph.¹

Hersh went on to claim that the CIA, forbidden by law from operating in the United States, had gathered files on 10,000 American citizens and conducted illegal break-ins, wiretaps, and mail openings. This extraordinary story turned out to be the first of many. In the next eighteen days, the Times ran thirty-two CIA-related stories—and managed to mention its own role in uncovering the scandal thirty-eight times.² The Times had reason to crow; later investigations would prove that its story was accurate.

The Hersh story “triggered a firestorm,” CIA director William Colby ruefully wrote later. “All the tensions and suspicions and hostilities that had been building about the CIA since the Bay of Pigs and had risen to a combustible level during the Vietnam and Watergate years, now exploded.”³ The White House, Congress, and the public responded quickly to the story. President Gerald Ford asked Colby to make a thorough investigation of the Times revelations. Soon after receiving Colby’s report, Ford appointed a blue-ribbon commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to examine the allegations further. The House and Senate, undeterred by the presidential commission, both created special investigative committees within two months. What the Times variously called “the year of intelligence” and “son of Watergate” had begun.⁴

Hersh’s exposé was an unlikely topic for the New York Times’s first venture into “advocacy journalism,” as Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus termed it.⁵ The alleged CIA abuses had ended years before; the Times was exposing what many considered to be ancient history. But several developments combined to make it an auspicious time for the Times’s crusading coverage. Vietnam and Watergate had left many important legacies: a disillusioned, skeptical public; a drastically weakened intelligence community; and a seemingly confident, assertive press. As a result, some journalists abandoned their traditional deference to the nation’s secret agencies.

At the same time, however, restraints from the pre-Watergate era continued to exert their power throughout this era of change—restraints that would ultimately serve to limit the media’s newfound aggressiveness. At the time that the New York Times published the domestic spying exposé, most Americans had only begun to learn about the secret government agency known as the CIA. The agency had been established with minimal public debate at the dawn of the Cold War era and had taken on unanticipated duties in relative secrecy over the subsequent years. Congress held hearings on the section of the National Security Act of 1947 that created the CIA. But according to historian Harry Howe Ransom, nothing in the published hearings “suggests that Congress intended to create, or knew it was creating, an agency for paramilitary operations.”⁶ The hearings also never discussed covert operations or psychological warfare. The congressmen believed they were simply creating an agency to gather and evaluate foreign intelligence.

As the Cold War continued, however, presidents secretly began directing the CIA to take on new functions. The CIA’s evolving Cold War ethos was best articulated in a secret 1954 report on its covert operations. President Dwight Eisenhower established the Doolittle committee to avoid a planned public examination of the CIA’s most secret directorate.⁷ The committee, headed by World War II hero General James Doolittle, endorsed an activist role for the agency and advocated methods previously considered “un-American”:

It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, longstanding American concepts of “fair play” must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.⁸

The president, however, decided not to acquaint the American people with the committee’s conclusions. The public was not told that the CIA had begun to intervene covertly in foreign countries and that it might need to abandon “long-standing American concepts of ‘fair play’” in the process. By keeping the Doolittle report secret, Eisenhower avoided messy domestic debates about these “fundamentally repugnant” actions and ensured that they would continue. Only a handful of congressmen were informed of the details of the CIA’s new duties. From time to time, some congressmen would demand more oversight of the agency, but CIA supporters easily managed to defeat these attempts.⁹

Agency officials appreciated this absence of oversight and accountability. Complete secrecy helped to protect their sources and methods. Moreover, the cloak of national security allowed CIA officials to escape public debate over their actions. But at the same time, this secrecy posed a potentially serious public relations problem. Democratic America’s spy agency faced a conundrum: How could it generate public support for its activities when most of the public was not told—and did not understand—what it did?

Initially, what historians have called the “Cold War consensus” in American political culture—the almost universal support for anticommunism—helped the CIA to solve this problem. Because of the CIA’s unwillingness to publicize its activities, Americans before the investigations drew most of their knowledge about the agency from popular culture. Throughout the 1950s and the early 1960s, during the height of Cold War culture, the CIA enjoyed a romanticized, heroic image in novels and films. Inspired by author Ian Fleming’s success in glamorizing the British secret service, many American imitators portrayed America’s secret warriors as unblemished heroes fighting the international menace of communism.¹⁰ The CIA promoted this Cold War tradition of spy fiction by encouraging favored thriller authors, even allowing them access to secret files. The movies and television shows of the 1950s and 1960s—such as Mission: Impossible and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.—also celebrated America’s spies.¹¹ Popular culture, in short, helped to legitimize the agency.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was another government intelligence agency that enjoyed a glamorous image in popular culture, but FBI officials took a much more active role in creating and shaping this image. Beginning in 1933, bureau boss J. Edgar Hoover turned the FBI into what one scholar has called “one of the greatest publicity-generating machines the country had ever seen.”¹² The FBI’s responsibilities included law enforcement as well as domestic intelligence and counterintelligence. In contrast to the secretive and anonymous CIA officials, FBI publicists readily shared the bureau’s accomplishments in all of these areas with the press. They also tried to damage the public image of bureau targets, like New Leftists or civil rights leaders, by leaking derogatory information about them to reporters. Some friendly journalists even served as FBI informants.¹³

Hoover’s public relations unit eventually became one of the most influential divisions within the FBI, helping reporters, film and television producers, and writers over the years to sculpt the popular image of the virtuous “G-man.” Hoover decided that publicity, instead of hurting the bureau by exposing its “secrets,” actually helped to build public support and to prevent attacks by liberals in Congress.

This popular support for the secret agencies proved strong enough to help them survive the occasional Cold War scandal. The first major CIA embarrassment occurred in 1961, when the Bay of Pigs invasion backfired disastrously. But after the initial calls for reform and restructuring, the agency weathered the crisis with only minor changes. In 1967, the CIA again found itself under attack, this time for domestic improprieties. Ramparts magazine revealed that the CIA had secret ties to the National Students Association and other voluntary organizations. Many Americans worried that CIA money and advice for such groups could discredit American organizations abroad and enable the agency to manipulate public opinion at home. President Lyndon Johnson headed off this potential scandal by appointing former attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach to chair a blue-ribbon investigative commission, which recommended that the CIA stop funding such associations. The FBI faced a scare in 1965 when Senator Edward Long of Missouri threatened to investigate and curb the bureau’s surveillance of Americans. But Hoover first blackmailed Long over his alleged support from organized crime and then leaked these allegations to the press. The senator’s threat was easily contained.¹⁴

The CIA and FBI thus avoided damaging press and congressional investigations until the early 1970s, when the Watergate scandal transformed American political culture. For reporters and congressmen interested in investigating the CIA, as author Thomas Powers has observed, Watergate was “the foot in the door.” The CIA “had been in unwelcome spotlights before, but Watergate did what the Bay of Pigs had not: it had undermined the consensus of trust in Washington which was a truer source of the Agency’s strength than its legal charter.”¹⁵ It demonstrated that “national security” claims could serve as veils for illegal activity.

Although the CIA was not directly implicated in the illegal burglaries, wiretapping, and cover-up that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation, it did have links to some of the principal conspirators. Of the seven men involved in the Watergate break-in, five had worked for the CIA.¹⁶ Two of them, James McCord and Howard Hunt, were twenty-year veterans of the agency. In addition, the agency had supplied Hunt and his colleagues with equipment and services for earlier projects.

CIA director Richard Helms intensified public suspicion of the agency by withholding evidence from the Watergate prosecutors for months. Later, after the Watergate tapes were released, Americans learned that President Nixon had made an enigmatic reference to Helms on the crucial “smoking gun” tape of 23 June 1972. Speaking with his top aide, Bob Haldeman, Nixon explained why he thought the CIA would cooperate in his plan to block the FBI from investigating Watergate. “We protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things,” Nixon said.¹⁷ Historians are still not sure what the president meant by that remark.¹⁸

As the public learned the incredible details of the Watergate affair, no conspiracy seemed too outlandish to believe. Some Americans even speculated that the CIA itself was the mastermind behind the Watergate burglary.¹⁹ Although a Senate subcommittee headed by Senator Howard Baker found no evidence of CIA complicity in the break-in, the general tone of the subcommittee’s report implied, as one CIA officer put it, that “there might still be some unseen but noisy creatures in the woods.”²⁰ Baker himself suggested that there was more to the CIA’s involvement in Watergate than he was able to prove.

The FBI’s credibility was also damaged by Watergate. L. Patrick Gray, Nixon’s nominee to head the bureau after J. Edgar Hoover’s death, destroyed critical Watergate evidence. When Gray withdrew his nomination under fire, a Nixon aide appeared to play politics with the bureau by offering the directorship to the presiding judge in the trial of Da...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Challenging the Secret Government
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Secrecy and Democracy
• Chapter 2 Trusting the “Honorable Men”
• Chapter 3 The Meat Ax or the Scalpel?
• Chapter 4 Sensational Scoops and Self-Censorship
• Chapter 5 Abuses and Aberrations
• Chapter 6 Challenging the System
• Chapter 7 Counterattack
• Chapter 8 Unwelcome Truths
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index