Epilogue: The Cold War Ends
and Secrecy Spreads

Targets of Domestic Spying

excerpted from the book

Secrets

The CIA's War at Home

by Angus Mackenzie

University of California Press, 1997, paper

p189
Epilogue: The Cold War Ends and Secrecy Spreads

For nearly ten years Aldrich Ames spent money in lavish fashion on cars, real estate, and the good things in life. A longtime CIA agent, Ames often purchased his extravagances with cash. Unbeknownst to his superiors at Langley, the KGB was regularly paying him large sums of cash, eventually totaling more than $2.5 million. In return, Ames was stealing documents from Agency files and supplying the Soviets with the names of U.S. agents working behind the Iron Curtain. As far as can be ascertained, the information passed on by Ames led to the deaths or disappearances of at least twelve members of the U.S. intelligence community in Europe and the former Soviet Union. After sustaining a career of thirty-one years with the CIA, Ames was finally caught in February I994. He immediately made Agency history as the most senior officer ever found spying for the other side in the cold war. He was also by far the best-paid KGB mole inside America-so well paid, in fact, as to raise a question about how he was able to elude detection for so long.

On accepting a plea bargain that sentenced him to life in prison without parole, Ames himself suggested an answer in an extraordinary confession at the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia. First Ames described how a culture of cynicism had taken over at the CIA.

"I had come to believe," he told the judge, "that the espionage business as carried out by the CIA and a few other American agencies was and is a self-serving sham, carried out by careerist bureaucrats who have managed to deceive several generations of American policymakers and the public about both the necessity and the value of their work." In order to protect their own bureaucratic interests, he said, CIA officials set up a system that keeps every detail from the American people. The "sham" of the U.S. intelligence community, he said, is immeasurably aided by secrecy." The revelation of Ames's duplicitous life and the publicity from his courtroom statement sent shock waves across Capitol Hill. Senator John Warner, a Republican from Virginia, spoke grimly about the need to set up an outside, independent group to issue recommendations for a major restructuring of U.S. intelligence.

The new CIA director, R James Woolsey, who had been appointed by the first Democratic president in twelve years, William Jefferson Clinton, felt obliged to try to counter Ames's allegations during a speech on July I8, I994, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Woolsey compared Ames to Benedict Arnold and sarcastically noted that while there were a few differences between the two traitors, "they are all in Benedict Arnold's favor." Clearly no one in Woolsey's audience of journalists and intelligence experts held any brief for someone as mercenary as Ames, and yet the criticisms leveled by Ames had struck a chord with the Washington insiders. Since I947 they had promoted the premise of large-scale secrecy as a necessary element of the cold war. With the cold war over and arguably won, wasn't it time to take a hard look to see if the CIA had become too self-righteous and secretive, too antagonistic to a society based on democratic precepts?

Woolsey tried to deflect the criticisms by accepting some of them as valid. "The camaraderie within the [CIA] fraternity can smack of elitism and arrogance," he admitted. Then, in a Reaganesque tactic, Woolsey straightened up at the lectern and aimed his remarks over the heads of his audience to the public at large. "The American people have the right to ask where the CIA is going after the cold war and after, for that matter, Aldrich Ames," he said. "For us to assume your continued support or your willingness to give us the benefit of the doubt will not do. We have the obligation to provide you with answers through the deliberative process with the members of Congress and through speaking directly to you. Problems that have arisen will be addressed fully, openly and honestly, warts and all. Programs that are no longer relevant will be abolished."

No CIA director had ever sounded so defensive about the Agency in a public speech, nor had a CIA director ever come so close to a mea culpa for the abuses inherent in the secrecy program. Nonetheless, the reforms promised by Woolsey-more openness, more accountability-had been promised before, most recently by Robert Gates. Given the record of past directors and past presidents, was it realistic to believe the Clinton administration would usher in a new era?

The answer lay in a struggle between two forces. One was the historical and political force created by the end of the cold war. In America, land of the free, it had usually been assumed that secrecy was an aberration, something to be tolerated only in the extreme circumstances of wartime. Now, without a security rationale for secrecy, the guardians of open government would presumably be able to rally most of the American people to their side. On the opposite side was the countervailing force of the intelligence bureaucracy, whose leaders for nearly half a century had operated with secrecy uppermost in mind. Although many of the old cold war warriors were now dead or retired, their younger proteges still occupied positions of power. Even if Woolsey could be taken at his word, he would have to overcome active resistance from within his own ranks, as well as the inertia present in any bureaucracy.

The key would be the new president. Clinton's election in I992 had brought into office the first president since Herbert Hoover who had no association with World War II and who had not lived through the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Shortly after his inauguration, Clinton pledged to usher in an era of candor, and he set into motion various efforts to liberalize the rules governing secrecy.

The era of candor began with a presidential memo issued on October 3, I993, addressed to the heads of all government agencies, which directed them to stop their routine resistance to FOIA requests. Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno, explained the rationale for openness by saying that it was essential to government accountability and that the FOIA "has become an integral part of that process." According to Reno, the Justice Department would scrap a I98I rule promulgated by the Reagan administration that allowed agencies to withhold information if they had any conceivable legal excuse. Justice would no longer provide legal counsel as a matter of routine when federal agencies denied FOIA requests. In an even more radical departure from the past, Clinton took the position that the public should not have to rely just on the FOIA to obtain information about the inner workings of the federal government. Rather, he wrote in his memo, it is up to the government to keep the citizens informed: "Each agency has a responsibility to distribute information on its own initiatlve.

Within a month, however, Clinton's enthusiasm for an open, accountable government began to fade, and so did the hope that he would institute a major overhaul of the secrecy program. Like Presidents Johnson and Nixon before him, Clinton found the sticking point to be not concern about national security but rather his own sensitivity about activities at the White House. In essence, Clinton decided that White House affairs would not be subject to his policy of openness. Clinton's friend and associate attorney general, Webster Hubbell, reminded all federal FOIA officers to return to the White House any document found in the course of FOIA searches if it had originated at the White House; under no circumstances were the documents to be released to the public. In addition, Hubbell increased the number of White House departments that could be exempt from the FOIA, including such working groups as the Clinton health care task force, which was then facing a legal challenge for holding meetings in secret under the supervision of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Although actions of the president and his staff had always been exempt from the FOIA, the Clinton administration soon made it clear that the ring of secrecy around the White House would become even tighter. When a request by Knight-Ridder Newspapers for the salaries of presidential staffers was denied, Richard Oppel, on behalf of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, fired off a letter to Clinton: "There may be no specific law commanding the release of the salaries," he wrote, "but there is certainly no law authorizing the withholding of the information. In the absence of such authorization, the information should be public without discussion. The people's business, we submit, is the people's business." Despite the scant possible justification for refusing to disclose as innocuous a piece of information as someone's salary, the Clinton administration held firm.

In addition, the Clinton administration became the first to argue in court in favor of a more restrictive interpretation of the FOIA with respect to National Security Council (NSC) documents. Previous administrations had agreed that the NSC generated two kinds of records-presidential records and agency records-and that the latter were subject to the FOIA. Departing from precedent, the Clinton Justice Department took the position that all NSC records fell into the presidential category and could not be obtained through the FOIA.

A rare opportunity for reforming the intelligence bureaucracy seemed to be slipping away from an embattled Clinton. At the beginning of his presidency, Clinton did not boldly challenge the bureaucracy and relied on others, often the bureaucrats themselves-to carry out reforms. In the case of the CIA, he relied on Woolsey, a Yale lawyer whose background and sensibilities were similar to those of many career officers under him. In light of Ames, that reliance on Woolsey and the Agency good old boys for reform was now seen as questionable.

Clinton showed how far he was willing to go with the new policy of openness in the summer of I994. The issue at hand was whether the total amount of the intelligence community's annual budget would remain a secret. For some time there had been no plausible reason for the American people not to know how much the intelligence community spends. The full Senate had passed resolutions in I99I, I992, and I993 favoring disclosure of the figure. Robert Gates had testified in I99I that he had no problem with disclosure. Besides, almost everyone who frequented the corridors of Capitol Hill or the nearby watering holes (including any foreign agents worth their salt) already knew the number. And, to make the secrecy even more of a joke, a Senate committee had inadvertently published enough figures to allow easy calculation of the intelligence community budget for fiscal year I994 ($28 billion). However, when it came time for Woolsey to release the budget figure formally, he refused. Instead, he and Clinton's other national security officials lobbied Congress to prevent formal disclosure. When Dan Glickman of Kansas, chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and Robert Torricelli of New Jersey introduced an amendment to make the disclosure mandatory, the Clinton team managed to defeat it by a 22I-I94 vote.

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The lifetime secrecy contracts had emerged from the Operation MHCHAOS offices, spreading throughout the CIA and the National Security Agency. Then, at ISOO and CIA insistence, the contract moved into the ranks of government and civilian workers at the State Department and in the Pentagon and to some I., million employees of government contractors. The use of the contract expanded pervasively through the executive branch; as opposition from the defenders of constitutional rights evaporated, it gradually moved into Congress. In I99I Garfinkel made some small changes in the secrecy contract and added whistle-blower protection for congressional Witnesses. That seemed to silence the last outspoken opposition in the House. A few senators, including Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, continued to be wary of White House intrusions on traditional congressional independence.

By the I990s, reflecting the general conservative shift in Congress, many House members were actively welcoming a secrecy oath. Consideration of the oath, less comprehensive than the standard contract, first came up in the House Select Committee on Intelligence during a discussion of the fiscal year (FY) I992 Intelligence Authorization Act. That led to a House rule requiring the intelligence committee members and staff to sign the oath. Interest in broadening the use of the oath did not stop there, especially for committee member Porter J. Goss of Florida. Goss's ties to the CIA dated from I962 and his ten-year stint as a clandestine service officer at the Agency. He and his fellow enthusiast, Henry J. Hyde of Illinois, offered amendments to the FY I993 and I994 authorization acts that would require secrecy oaths from every member of the House. The amendments did not prosper, but when the I04th Congress convened on January 4, I995, backers of the oath changed tactics. This time the oath requirement for every I House member was included in the packet of rules from the House Conference of the Majority. It became a new rule without debate.

***

p200
In the mid-I980s, Jeane Kirkpatrick sounded the alarm about government censorship. Although a member of the Reagan administration's inner foreign policy circle, Kirkpatrick had had a personal encounter with government censors over her refusal to sign the lifetime secrecy contract. Upon returning to her political science chair at Georgetown University from her post as U.S. United Nations ambassador, Kirkpatrick reexamined John Stuart Mill's classic essay On Liberty and delivered a lecture on censorship. "Societies are not made stronger by the process of repression that accompanies censorship," she warned. "Censorship requires an assumption of infallibility, and that seems to Mill invariably negative. Repression of an opinion is thus bad for the censor, who inevitably acts from a conviction of his own infallibility," she told her students, "and bad for the opinion itself, which can neither be corrected nor held with conviction equal to the strength of an opinion submitted to challenge."

As the twentieth century draws to a close, the I947 National Security Act has become the Pandora's box that Ambassador Kirkpatrick and Congressman Hoffman had feared. Placing a legal barrier between foreign intelligence operations and domestic politics in the National Security Act has proved ineffectual. In the decades that followed I947, the CIA not only became increasingly involved in domestic politics but abridged First Amendment guarantees of free speech and free press in a conspiracy to keep this intrusion from the American people. The intelligence and military secrecy of the I940s had broadened in the I960s to covering up the suppression of domestic dissent. The I980s registered a further, more fundamental change, as the suppression of unpopular opinions was supplemented by systematic and institutionalized peacetime censorship for the first time in U.S. history. The repressive machinery developed by the CIA has spread secrecy like oil on water.

The U.S. government has always danced with the devil of secrecy during wartime. By attaching the word "war" to the economic and ideological race for world supremacy between the Soviet Union and the United States, a string of administrations continued this dance uninterrupted for fifty years. The cold war provided the foreign threat to justify the pervasive Washington belief that secrecy should have the greatest possible latitude and openness should be restricted as much as possible-constitutional liberties be damned.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union as a world power in I990, even the pseudo-war rationale evaporated. But the partisans of secrecy have not been willing to accept the usual terms of peacetime They have made clear their intentions to preserve and extend the wartime system. They will find a rationalization: if not the threat of the Soviet Union, then the goal of economic hegemony. Thus the U.S. government now needs to keep secrets to give an advantage to American corporate interests. Yet it is entrepreneurs who have been making the most use of FOIA-not journalists, not lawyers. As of I994, the great preponderance of all FOIA requests have been for business purposes. As the framers of the Constitution understood, the free exchange of ideas is good for commerce, but this idea has been widely forgotten in the years since the passage of the I947 National Security Act.

Only recently in the history of the world's oldest republic has secrecy functioned principally to keep the American people in the dark about the nefarious activities of their government. The United States is no longer the nation its citizens once thought: a place, unlike most others in the world, free from censorship and thought police, where people can say what they want, when they want to, about their government. Almost a decade after the end of the cold war, espionage is not the issue, if it ever really was. The issue is freedom, as it was for the Minute Men at Compo Hill. The issue is principle, as it was for Ernest Fitzgerald, who never signed a secrecy contract but retained his Pentagon job because he made his stand for the First Amendment resonate in Congress. Until the citizens of this land aggressively defend their First Amendment rights of free speech, there is little hope that the march to censorship will be reversed. The survival of the cornerstone of the Bill of Rights is at stake.

***

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Targets of Domestic Spying

An Annotated List of Some FBI Surveillance Targets during the 1980s

I wrote the FBI on February in I987 asking for files on I27 political groups, most of which were opposed to the U.S. government's arming of the Contras. The Bureau's response was dragged out over five years. The vast majority of the files were denied under the I986 FOIA amendment, but the FBI did release some information about the size of the files, the number of pages kept secret, and the reasons for that secrecy. The FBI also released a few heavily blacked-out pages, enough to give a glimpse of the Bureau's investigations into a number of highly visible political groups.

The unwanted and unwarranted attention to ... politically active citizen organizations shows both the FBI's institutionalized disregard for constitutionally guaranteed rights and the use of FOIA exemptions to hide this abuse of power. Many of the groups have a long history of lobbying Congress and publishing newsletters-activities well within the scope of the First Amendment. None of the FBI investigations resulted in criminal indictments. Rather the purpose of the investigations, as is evident from the documents, was to monitor their political activities. The following is a digested version of information concerning these FBI investigations.

American Committee on Africa/Africa Fund was a New York-based organization opposed to apartheid in South Africa. The FBI withheld 42, of 6I pages "in the interest of national defense or foreign policy." On July I8, I979, the FBI searched for all subversive and nonsubversive information on this group, on which the FBI kept a domestic security file and a Registration Act investigative file.

Arms Control Computer Network, Christic Institute, and the Committee Against Registration and the Draft. The FBI kept all records on these groups secret for "national defense" and to protect "confidential sources."

Black Student Communications Organizing Network is based in Jamaica, New York, and unifies black student groups. FBI files have been withheld in their entirety to protect "national defense or foreign policy."

The Center for Defense Information, based in Washington, D.C., opposes excessive spending for weapons and policies that increase the danger of war. The FBI Director, in an administrative matter involving no alleged violation of laws, searched FBI files for data on the group for reasons the FBI kept secret. The FBI withheld fifty-seven pages of documents to protect national defense, privacy, and confidential sources in a "foreign counterintelligence matter." Other FBI reports profiled the head of the group, Gene Robert LaRocque, citing Whos Who: "[He] is a retired naval officer, commander Task Group in Sixth Fleet, member of faculty of Naval War College." Another FBI document said the Center for Defense Information "functions as a 'gadfly' to the U.S. military establishment and is staffed with very liberal, anti-establishment, anti-FBI/CIA academics." A memo from the Special Agent in Charge to the FBI Director was stamped "SECRET" and said that LaRocque published The Defense Monitor, which reports timely information regarding military establishments. On August I3, I986, FBI headquarters requested that information on the group be forwarded to the FBI agent attached to the U.S. Embassy in Bonn.

Central American Solidarity Association was a group opposed to Contra funding. Of the seventeen pages in this foreign counterintelligence-terrorism file, fifteen were kept secret.

Children's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Environmental Policy Center is based in Plainfield, Vermont. The FBI has kept one reference secret to protect "confidential sources."

Citizens Against Nuclear War. The FBI has kept six cross-references secret for reasons of national defense."

Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, conducts public education and research and advocates lowering defense spending. In June I983, the Naval Investigative Service asked the FBI to check on this group because of a counterintelligence interest.

Interfaith Center to Reverse the Arms Race. The FBI has kept six cross-references classified secret to "protect the national defense, privacy, and confidential sources."

Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. The FBI kept two cross-references exempt from disclosure to protect "confidential sources."

Lutheran World Ministries was based on Park Avenue South in Manhattan, New York. FBI documents containing cross-references were determined to be exempt from disclosure to "protect confidential sources.

Medical Aid for El Salvador. The FBI kept secret one file of an investigation that was pending on November 30, I988, to protect "confidential" sources and the "national defense."

National Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala is a Washington group advocating an end to U.S. military aid in Guatemala. All FBI counterintelligence-terrorism records on it are kept secret under the I986 FOIA amendment.

National Network in Solidarity with the People of Nicaragua was a Washington group opposed to arming the Contras. Of the forty-six pages in this file, the FBI kept secret forty-one pages.

National Peace Academy Campaign, Sojourners Peace Ministry and World Peacemakers. Four cross-references were withheld to protect "national defense."

Nuclear Control Institute has worked since I98I in Washington to oppose nuclear proliferation. Of the FBI file on this group, the FBI has kept nine pages secret "to protect privacy and confidential sources."

The Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign was a major opponent of Reagan-Bush arms policies. Of its file, the FBI kept secret thirty pages and released eight, which revealed that in I985, an FBI agent got a leaflet in Burlington, Vermont, about the organization of a nationwide contingency plan by the Resistance Pledge Network to block U.S. intervention in Central America. The agent reported the contents of the leaflet, which advocated a nonviolent, no drugs, no-property damage demonstration against U.S. intervention, and on March 6, I985, forwarded the report to the CIA, the Naval Investigative Service, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, the United States Secret Service, and the Army Intelligence Command at Fort Meade.

Patrice Lumumba Coalition/Unity in Action Network was based in Harlem, New York. Of the FBI's file of I05 pages, it kept secret 78. At least one FBI document in the file had been sent to the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research. The subjects of the documents were the African National Congress, the Pan African Congress, and the identities of individuals who attended the International Conference on Islam during October I986. The contents of the memo were withheld to protect "foreign policy" and "privacy."

Peace Child Foundation. The FBI has kept twenty-two pages secret concerning a June I986 foreign counterintelligence investigation by FBI Squad I4, San Francisco.

Peace Links: Women Against Nuclear War. An FBI agent in Detroit wrote headquarters on November 6, I986, that a Peace Links chapter was part of a national organization of women to promote nuclear disarmament and peace between East and West. The rest of the memo was censored to protect "defense, foreign policy and confidential sources."

Student/Teacher Organization to Prevent Nuclear War of Boston. The FBI Special Agent in Charge of the New Haven, Connecticut, Field Office sent documents to the FBI director that had been provided by a confidential source, including a state, local, or foreign agency or authority, under the I986 amendment. The New Haven FBI office placed this file in dosed status March II, I985.

Union of Concerned Scientists. The FBI has kept 296 pages secret to protect foreign policy, privacy, and confidential informants. According to a December I6, I986, FBI summary, "The central files of this Bureau reveal the following information.... The Union of Concerned Scientists is composed of senior and junior faculty members and graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . . . organized for the expressed purpose of a one-day strike aimed at turning scientific research applications away from military technology and toward the solution of environmental and social problems. The UCS maintained no formal membership rolls.... As of this date, the UCS is under investigation due to the fact that its activities meet the criteria that fall within the Attorney General's guidelines."

United Nations Center Against Apartheid, established by the General Assembly of the United Nations in I962, was opposed to South African racial policies. The FBI files contain a secret report from the CIA dated April I984. The CIA withheld the document in entirety to protect the "national defense."

U.S. Out of Central America. The FBI has kept twenty pages secret to protect confidential sources.

Washington Office on Latin America was a Washington group with thirteen employees and an annual budget of $500,000 that opposed the Reagan policies in Central America. The FBI's file contained seventy-nine pages, of which the FBI kept secret seventy-three pages under the FOIA amendment's provisions for hiding foreign counterintelligence matters. Parts of this file were distributed to the FBI San Antonio office and to the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Witness for Peace is a Washington group with an annual budget in excess of $I million that characterizes itself as a grassroots, faith-based, nonviolent group opposed to U.S. intervention in Central America. The FBI kept secret eleven pages on this group under the I986 amendment because they could "reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings."

Secrets - The CIA's War at Home

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