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The FBI, and Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, quickly discovered what seemed to be CIA fingerprints. Among the five men caught burglarizing Democratic headquarters in the Watergate was James Walter McCord Jr., a former employee of the CIA's Office of Security. Three Cuban exiles who participated in the break-in had also worked for the agency, and one of them was still on retainer. A search of the men's rooms at the Watergate turned up an envelope containing a personal check made out by E. Howard Hunt, another former CIA employee. President Nixon self-servingly encouraged the notion that the burglary was a CIA operation. Meeting with his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, six days after the arrests, Nixon said: "The only way to solve this, and we're set up beautifully to do it, is for us to have [Deputy CIA Director Vernon] Walters call [FBI Director] Pat Gray and say, 'Stay the hell out of this… They [CIA] should call the FBI in and say that, 'We wish, for the good of the country, [that you] don't any [look] further into this case.' Period." These words, recorded by a secret White House taping system which Nixon himself installed, later provided irrefutable proof that he had conspired in a cover-up. When made public 1974, they became the basis of impeachment proceedings against him — the famous "smoking gun." By then, both Woodward and the FBI had concluded that the burglars, despite their intelligence ties, were working solely for the Nixon White House. Exhaustive hearings in Congress also cleared the CIA of any role. Nevertheless, the post-Watergate inquiries would comprise what former CIA officer Cord Meyer called "a string exploding Chinese firecrackers," leading to devastation of the CIA. The agency's refusal to cooperate in Nixon's obstruction of justice led directly to the firing of its director, Richard Helms, a veteran covert operator who knew how to keep secrets. By August 1973 the CIA was under William E. Colby, a political liberal, ACLU-member, and onetime union-organizer. Colby had absorbed certain themes floated by the campus movement of the 1960s: self-determination by the young, equal opportunity, ethnic diversity. He effected parking spaces for the handicapped, and a program of minority hiring. Junior officers admired him as the epitome of egalitarianism. Senior officers saw him as CIA's answer to California's eccentric governor, Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown. During Colby's tenure, as the legislative branch examined the secret operations of the executive during the Nixon years, congressional staffers stumbled upon a number of domestic operations by the CIA. Colby acquiesced in their inquiries, and assembled a list of alleged CIA sins. It ran to 693 typed pages, and became known as the "Family Jewels." Though none of the items on the "Family Jewels" list was palpably illegal, their disclosure by Colby fed into, and heightened, the post-Watergate distrust of government secrecy. In the furor which ensued, CIA's legal counsel reminded all employees of their rights under the Miranda decision. The crown jewel on the list, the black diamond of the CIA, was its surveillance of antiwar protesters, who were suspected of collusion with hostile foreign powers. The program, known as Operation Chaos, was disclosed by Colby himself to the New York Times. "Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years," declared a front-page banner headline on December 22, 1974. Buried at end of the article, by Seymour Hersh, was the admission that, when it came to CIA's monitoring of Americans, "laws were fuzzy." That the agency had not worked "against" the protest movement, but had given it a clean bill of health, was ignored. The Times article marked a turning point in public attitudes toward spying. Overnight the CIA became, in the minds of many Americans, a shadowy, sinister organization. A season of inquiry began. On January 5, 1975, President Ford called former CIA Director Helms into the Oval Office and said, "Frankly, we are in a mess." Ford told Helms that he was naming a Blue Ribbon Panel, under Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, to examine CIA domestic operations. Helms reminded Ford that "The CIA is the president's creature," and defended Operation Chaos. "The basic allegation — that we spied on dissidents — stemmed from the charge to me to discover if there was any foreign connection to the dissidents," Helms said. "If you get a name, of course you make a record and open a file in case it is relevant thereafter." Ford replied: "I plan no witch hunt, but in this environment I don't know if I can control it." A witch-hunt did ensue, and it lasted five years. The role of Grand Inquisitor was played by Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho, chairman of the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence. Depicting the CIA, in a famous phrase, as a "rogue elephant," Church and other Democrats led a sustained and successful campaign to regulate American intelligence. One result was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which President Carter signed in October 1978. Under FISA, all applications for surveillance of "U.S. persons" must be must be reviewed and approved by the attorney general, and by a special FISA court. "U.S. persons," under the law, means not American citizens, but anyone — even Osama bin Laden — who might cross the Rio Grande. As the presidentially appointed National Commission on Terrorism lamented in a June 2000 report, both FBI agents and CIA officers are discouraged from watching suspected terrorists in the United States "without fear of being sued individually for officially authorized activities." Since government representation is not always available, our counterterrorist operatives have been forced to buy personal liability insurance, which provides for private representation. The legal limits on surveillance, the commission warned, have made our intelligence community "overly risk averse." Among the consequences of this risk aversion, as Minneapolis FBI counsel Coleen Rowley wrote in her May 21 memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller, was that when FBI agents tried to tell the CIA about the suspicious activities of Zacharias Moussaoui — later identified as the 20th hijacker — they were "chastised" by FBI headquarters. By post-Watergate criteria, after all, the CIA could not be involved in the investigation of a "U.S. person." The imposition of these regulations was a fatal mistake. The net effect of FISA and other "reforms," as the former Republican Senator Malcolm Wallop noted in 1982, was "to confuse intelligence gathering with criminal law." The damaging effects of this shift have been described by many writers, and have become eminently clear in the headlines of the past weeks. A timely and expert recapitulation is provided by Rich Lowry in "A Better Bureau," in the July 1 issue of National Review. As Lowry shows, we have the Nixon-era inquiries to thank for a host of strictures, which have impeded both the CIA's and FBI's ability to track al Qaeda operatives within the United States. The gun of Watergate is still smoking. — Mark Riebling is the author of Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA. |
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<% dim printurl
printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%>
ecent
disclosures about intelligence failures relating to September 11 have
left Americans wondering what is wrong with our spy system. Congress is
already probing this question. The answer, however, will not be found
by any inquisition centered on the George W. Bush years. The crippling
of our espionage effort in fact began 30 years ago today, when Washington
police arrested the White House "Plumbers" at the Watergate
Hotel.
