For the Record

■ About the Rockefeller Commission report on the CIA. What did it cost? $245,000, according to Budget Director James Lynn. What did it contain that you haven’t seen widely mentioned? The estimate that the USSR and Communist bloc nations have a worldwide network of half a million spies, at least 2,000 of whom are operating in the United States. . . . Commission member Ronald Reagan has called on the government to end all other investigations into the CIA because, says Reagan, some congressmen and senators cannot keep secrets. . . . One congressman in point, Michael Harrington (D., Mass.), who was barred from handling confidential material by the House Armed Services Committee last week (he had admitted leaking secret information to the press on CIA’s involvement in Chile last winter), now indicates he may step down from Rep. Lucien Nedzi’s subcommittee on intelligence, in order to permit Nedzi to get on with the job. (Harrington had led an abortive revolt against Nedzi’s chairmanship.) When Nedzi committee was setting up rules for its investigation, only Harrington and Rep. Ron Dellums (D., Calif.) among committee members had insisted that at least one member of their own staffs be permitted to inspect hearing files. . . . The CIA got an assist last week from Charles Wiley’s National Committee for Responsible Patriotism, which urged Americans around the country to speak out in support of the intelligence community.

■ But the attacks continue: Houghton Mifflin is bringing out a book in September, The Cuba Project, by former CIA agent William Turner and Warren Hinkle, on 15 plots to murder Fidel and Raul Castro in the early Sixties. Walter Hinkle, in case you’ve forgotten, was the publisher of Ramparts when Ramparts was making big news, and his story on how that big news was made he himself recounted a couple of years back in If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade. . . . Emile de Antonio—who identifies himself as “a Marxist filmmaker”—plans a fictionalized movie of Philip Agee’s Inside the Company: CIA Diary, which may, according to de Antonio, star Jane Fonda. Other de Antonio films: Millhouse, Point of Order (about the Army-McCarthy hearings), In the Year of the Pig, on Vietnam. . . . Also on the Left, the Rev. Cecil Williams, who was contacted by the SLA at the time of Patricia Hearst’s kidnapping, believes Tanya is working on a book that the underground will bring out. . . . And Alger Hiss’s name has turned up as signatory to a New York Times ad by the National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case. Hiss was identified as “a former State Department official.”

WR

About the Author

William F. Rickenbacker

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William F. Buckley Jr.

■ About the Rockefeller Commission report on the CIA. What did it cost? $245,000, according to Budget Director James Lynn. What did it contain that you haven’t seen widely mentioned? The estimate that the USSR and Communist bloc nations have a worldwide network of half a million spies, at least 2,000 of whom are operating in the United States. . . . Commission member Ronald Reagan has called on the government to end all other investigations into the CIA because, says Reagan, some congressmen and senators cannot keep secrets. . . . One congressman in point, Michael Harrington (D., Mass.), who was barred from handling confidential material by the House Armed Services Committee last week (he had admitted leaking secret information to the press on CIA’s involvement in Chile last winter), now indicates he may step down from Rep. Lucien Nedzi’s subcommittee on intelligence, in order to permit Nedzi to get on with the job. (Harrington had led an abortive revolt against Nedzi’s chairmanship.) When Nedzi committee was setting up rules for its investigation, only Harrington and Rep. Ron Dellums (D., Calif.) among committee members had insisted that at least one member of their own staffs be permitted to inspect hearing files. . . . The CIA got an assist last week from Charles Wiley’s National Committee for Responsible Patriotism, which urged Americans around the country to speak out in support of the intelligence community.

■ But the attacks continue: Houghton Mifflin is bringing out a book in September, The Cuba Project, by former CIA agent William Turner and Warren Hinkle, on 15 plots to murder Fidel and Raul Castro in the early Sixties. Walter Hinkle, in case you’ve forgotten, was the publisher of Ramparts when Ramparts was making big news, and his story on how that big news was made he himself recounted a couple of years back in If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade. . . . Emile de Antonio—who identifies himself as “a Marxist filmmaker”—plans a fictionalized movie of Philip Agee’s Inside the Company: CIA Diary, which may, according to de Antonio, star Jane Fonda. Other de Antonio films: Millhouse, Point of Order (about the Army-McCarthy hearings), In the Year of the Pig, on Vietnam. . . . Also on the Left, the Rev. Cecil Williams, who was contacted by the SLA at the time of Patricia Hearst’s kidnapping, believes Tanya is working on a book that the underground will bring out. . . . And Alger Hiss’s name has turned up as signatory to a New York Times ad by the National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case. Hiss was identified as “a former State Department official.”