STUDIES IN INTELLIGENCE ARTICLE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP79M00095A000100030007-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 16
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 23, 2005
• Sequence Number: 7
• Publication Date: March 3, 1977
• Content Type: NOTES

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t
INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY STAFF
Deputy to the DCI for the
Intelligence Community
Director of Performance Evaluation
and Improvement
SUBJECT : Studies in Intelligence Article
PRM-11.
Here is an article on the decision process
that gave us EO 11905 by a White House participant.
It recently appeared in Studies in Intelligence
and is must reading for anyone concerned about
Note that it i
l[JNCLASSIJ I1;9.
Attachment:
I larticle,
"Intelligence Reform in the
Mid-1970s"
AD/DCI/IC
D/OPP
D/OPBD
SA-D/DCI/IC
AD/OPEI/IS
SA-D/DCI/IC
C/OPEI/ID
C/OPEI/SD
C/OPEI/HRD
C/OPEI/PAID
INFORMATION
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STAT
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From the inside looking out:
INTELLIGENCE REFORM IN TILE MID-1970s
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are stars. They are reaping millions from their
investigative reporting. When Watergate rates a chapter in history books, they will no
doubt get more than a footnote. But another investigative reporter, whose role in the
story he broke was probably more integral and essential, is almost forgotten already.
Had Seymour Hersh not written his CIA domestic surveillance stories for the New Yoik
Times in December 1974 (indeed, had not the Times seen fit to splash the first story
across five columns of page one headlined "Massive Surveillance"), there seems little
doubt that there never would have been a Rockefeller Commission, a Pike " Report," a
Church Committee, or an Executive Order 11905.
Books by Victor Marchetti and Philip Agee or occasional columns by Jack
Anderson were not able, as the Hersh article was, to stampede the new Ford
Administration into appointing a presidential commission, the first step down an ever-
widening path of inquiry. Hersh, and Ilersh alone, caused the President, and then
Congress-put in the position where it could not allow the Executive Branch alone to
be the investigator-to make intelligence a major issue of .1975. His stories, combined
with a presidential reaction that gave the stories great credibility, took a long-
smoldering collection of problems and put them on the nation's front burner. One
would . ave to be quite persuasive to make the case that Woodward and Bernstein were
nearly as crucial to the unfolding of their story.
On the other hand, had not Woodward and Bernstein set a favorable tone for
investigative reporting, by giving great credibility to the delvings of the press into
once-sacred institutions, the splash made by the Hersh article might never have been
possible. The public and Congress had become quite susceptible to claims that the
government was out of control, that bizarre stories about secret conspiracies might
indeed be true. And the whole Watergate scenario led, as Senator Baker had been
fascinated to learn and determined to probe as an adjunct to his Watergate committee
tasks, in a number of bizarre ways to the CIA gates in Langley.
Yet Hersh may not even merit a historical footnote, perhaps, because the ball he
started rolling never really knocked clown all, or even any, of the pins. The ending of
the Post dynamic duo's story, after all, was the resignation of a reigning President. No
such result capped Ifersh's story. The CIA is thriving in Langley, its constituent parts
all strung together, its basic mission unchanged. The Defense Department still spends
more than 80 percent of the billions of national intelligence dollars in ways only
vaguely known to the American public. The new FBI building is still named for
J. Edgar Hoover. And one of the nation's most expensive and most important
intelligence organizations remains to this day unacknowledged by the U.S.
Government. Nonetheless, the Hersh article did set in motion events that led to
trumpeted "reforms"-of the foreign intelligence community.
What follows is one insider's attempt to reconstruct that train of events. First, as
an investigator (with the Rockefeller Commission), then as a staff assistant to the
decision process (in the White House), and finally as an implementer (with the
Intelligence Oversight Board), I watched the intelligence issue wax and wane, both at
the office and on the nation's front pages. The views expressed here are biased by this
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Intelligence
background. In particular, the views are biased by not reflecting how the intelligence
community itself, either collectively or individually, viewed what was happening.
Nonetheless, the odyssey has provided some unique opportunities to see the events
unfold.
The most obvious result of any government investigation is the release of
information to the public. Even in the highly secretive world of intelligence, the past
two years have seen many revelations. The American public has available to it much
more information on the foreign intelligence COIllm1111lity-the CIA, FBI, National
Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and other elements of Defense, State,
Treasury, and the Energy Resources and Development Administration-than it ever
had before. Most prominent in this regard are the histories of abuses. The Church
Committee's report on CIA involvement in assassinations details meticulously all the
scraps of information that could be found. The Rockefeller Commission told for the
first time the story of the suicide of a person on whom the CIA had been testing LSD,
and numerous stories on government drug testing have followed. NSA and CIA watch
lists that collected thousands of Americans' communications by cable and mail have
been amply documented.
Some of these stories have been told and retold so many times that it is doubtful
much of the public has been able to recognize that such activities, as reprehensible as
they may have been, do not characterize the overwhelming focus of foreign
intelligence activities. Take, for instance, CIA's Operation CHAOS. The CIA collected
substantial amounts of information on domestic dissidents from 1967 to 1973. The
Rockefeller Commission deemed the program a violation of the CIA statutory charter.
The story has been told so often, though, that it would be easy to assume such activities
were at the heart of CIA operations. CHAOS was the focus of the original Ilersh New
York: Times articles. It merited a 20-page chapter in the Rockefeller Commission
report. Church Committee hearings with James Angleton, Tom Huston, and Richard
Helms Put CHAOS in the headlines again in the fall of 1975. CHAOS was featured in
the final Church Report, only to be on the front pages again several weeks later when
the Senate Select Committee issued a supplemental report on the operation. Each
time, headlines highlighted the 7,200 Americans on whom the CIA compiled files, but
none of these reprises added substantial new details to the story first comprehensively
told by the Rockefeller Commission. Rarely was there mention that an earlier story was
being retold.
It cannot be denied, though, that the retellings had their purpose. On the first
telling, many readers remained skeptical, on the one hand doubting that such events
could really have occurred, while on the other hand wondering whether there might be
even more to the story than was being told. With repetition, the story grew in
credibility; newspaper stories shaded into documented history. Skeptics from varied
viewpoints could begin to accept the story and begin to come to agreements on
rational responses to abuses of the past. Retellings could also be used, as they were by
the Church Committee, to highlight proposed reforms: otherwise dry legislative
proposals that would gain little publicity unless placed in the context of the wrongs at
which they were aimed. The Church Committee's retellings were especially well-timed
to provide new impetus last spring when enthusiasm seemed to be dying for
establishment of a permanent Senate Intelligence Committee.
The past year's revelations have, however, gone beyond detailing abuses of the
past. When 1975 began, the CIA organization chart was classified. The Rockefeller
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Commission report in June 1975 was careful not to name offices below the level of the
four Directorates. By April 1976, the Church Committee talked freely of lower-level
offices, like the Domestic Collection and Foreign Resources Divisions, and told what
they do. Similarly, the Rockefeller Commission avoided using operation code
names-violating its rule only in the case of CI IAOS, the particularly apt name chosen
to denote attempts to understand American dissidence, and there only after serious
debate among the staff about the appropriateness of using even that name in an
unclassified report, The Church reports talk freely of RESISTANCE and
MERRIMACK, of AMLASII and MONGOOSE. Naming names may seem
insignificant today, but it certainly did riot seem insignificant a mere year ago when
they were still kept under wraps.
Naming names was but a first step. While the Rockefeller Commission discussed
CIA proprietary companies and methods of establishing cover only in the very
broadest sense-and even there with great trepidation and after much agonizing-the
Church report details their types and uses. The method of producing finished
intelligence, the types of covert actions conducted in the past, the budget process,
relations with the academic world-all are detailed in official government documents
as they had never been before. Reading the congressional documents, one familiar
with issues in the intelligence community over the past 15 years would find little that
was new to intelligence leaders, but much that was discussed for the first time in a non-
classified document. On the other hand, the documents contained much that was new
even to career intelligence officers who had never had a view from the top. Intelligence
agencies had traditionally compartmented information, made it available only to
those persons who had a genuine need to know it. As a result, many employees of
intelligence agencies no doubt learned more about their employers than they ever had
reason to suspect they would learn before retirement. One classic example of this
learning process is exemplified by the references to the CIA's old Domestic Operations
Division in Victor MVlarchetti's book. As knowledgeable as Marchetti had become in his
years at the Agency, his description of this office contrasts starkly with its true nature,
since revealed by the Church reports.
Among the purposes of any revelations should be publication of that information
needed for informed public debate, There was for many years little or no public debate
on the role of intelligence agencies, the only exceptions being aftermaths of the U-2
and Bay of Pigs incidents. The last year has seen much debate; has the information
been made available for it to be informed? In the civil liberties area, the answer is
largely yes. As the recommendations of the Rockefeller and Church reports and the
detailed prohibition section of the President's Executive Order 11905 on Foreign
Intelligence (18 February 1976) demonstrate, public discussion is possible and has
begun on the limits-at least domestically-to be placed on foreign intelligence
activities. On the other hand, the still-classified Attorney General guidelines for NSA
collection and FBI counterintelligence activities cover areas where public debate
cannot be easily accommodated with the demands for security. Revelation of the
details of what communications the U.S. does not allow itself to intercept world be of
great value to unfriendly nations who would be happy to know how they can
communicate without being intercepted. In the broader area of the effectiveness of the
Intelligence agencies-their resource allocations and the organization of their
effort-problems have been identified publicly, but informed debate remains difficult
because of the limits placed by security on further description. Which collection
systems deserve more emphasis-or less; whether National Intelligence Estimates are
any good-or not; whether the overall intelligence budget is big enough-or too
big-these questions cannot be debated in a public forum on time basis of publicly
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available information. Although studies of these questions have gone on for years
within the Executive Branch and will he more intensely reviewed by Congress in the
future, publie discussion is unlikely to be useful. While it might be easy to find fault
with the Church report because it is so focused on prevention of abuses that it has
little to offer in the area of effective operation of the intelligence community, the limits
placed on publicly available information represent one stumbling block to any
congressional committee that would wish to bring the public into this debate.
Congressional and press revelations do more than get information into the public
sector. An article like Ilersh's can be the catalyst for change. Once either estate latches
on to any person or institution-be it Gulf Oil or the CIA-reactions to the revelations
by those attacked are inevitable. The most immediate reactions are likely to be aimed
at preventing future activities like those that made the splash in the press in the first
place. Over the longer term, the press of scandal may also-from time to time-lead to
substantive improvements. Administration responses to the intelligence revelations
have aimed at both the short and long range. What is the lasting value of either?
Start with prevention of abuse-the response to the immediate, highly publicized
issue. The largely unrecognized story is that many abuses had been attacked well
before Seymour Hersh wrote his article. Indeed, the article would probably never have
been written had not the attack already begun. The original compilation of CIA
wrongs was pulled together for James Schlesinger when Watergate revelations-the
Woodstein team intrudes again-were making life unpleasant for the new CIA
Director. The "Family jewels," as the compilation came to be known, represented a
long, comprehensive, in-house collection of dynamite materials. Rarely, if ever, had
any government agency pulled together in on - place such a damaging document. The
mere process of putting this information in one place may well have provided the
source of I-Iersh's article, and subsequently, provided the material that formed the
backbone (and most of the skeleton and even skin) of the Rockefeller Commission
Report.
It should not be taken as a criticism of the Rockefeller Commission to state that it
served primarily as a blue-ribbon panel to edit and publish the CIA Family Jewels;
rather, that fact should be seen first as a commentary on the useful role of outsiders
invited in to counsel the government, and secondly as a tribute to the Agency-a
tribute, not just because the Agency demonstrated an ability probably unmatched in
the Government bureaucracy to learn what had been and still was going on
throughout its organization, but also because as a result new regulations to end abuses
were issued by Director Colby even before 1975 began. The mail opening
program-probably the most damaging of the domestic abuses-had been terminated.
Operation CHAOS had been phased out, largely because the events that provoked it
were over, but also because the CIA had never been fully comfortable about its
involvement with domestic dissidence. Formal procedures to limit physical and
electronic surveillance and gathering of income tax information from IRS had also
been put into effect. Assassination was outlawed by Director Colby long before the
President mentioned that story to the press.
No matter how honorable had been the CIA's actions subsequent to collecting the
Family Jewels, convincing the American public of the wisdom of its actions could
never have been accomplished by the Agency itself. The merit of asking a commission
made up of members and staff from outside the government to make such judgments
was that some degree of impartiality was necessary to establish credibility. The limited
nature of the Rockefeller Commission's "outsideness -being chaired by the Vice
President and populated to a large extent by former government officials-ensured,
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however, that even its credibility remained to be tested by continuing investigations by
Congress and the press. The Commission's credibility became especially crucial just
before its report was issue(]. Rumors flew in the press that two versions of the
report--one classified and one not-were being written, that the White Douse was
censoring the report, and that it would contain the full story of the alleged foreign
assassination attempts. The first rumor was completely false; from the beginning the
Commission had planned to issue only an unclassified report, knowing full well that
the existence of a secret report would only fuel demands for the full, unabridged story.
Every draft done by the Commission was thus written to be an unclassified document.
The second rumor had some validity, but no truly embarrassing connotations. The
Commission was justifiably concerned not to release inadvertently sensitive classified
information, while still telling the full story of the activities investigated. The White
House was given an advance copy of the report to review, but no attempt was ever
made to change even one word of the investigative findings. The third rumor
particularly strained credibility when the Commission failed to make any findings
with respect to alleged assassinations of foreign leaders. Although the Commission had
become aware of the assassination stories early in its work, it had not been pushed to
explore this area until it was well along in probing the domestic activities that had
originally led to its formation. Regardless of what political motivations led to exclusion
of any findings on the assassinations in the Commission's June 5, 1975, report-and
such motivations did exist-the underlying problem was that by this date-the
scheduled deadline, already extended several months-the Commission was still far
from completing this aspect of its inquiries. Whatever credibility the Rockefeller
Commission could muster would have been sapped by a premature publication of
preliminary findings in this highly sensitive area.
The minimal need for further reform of the CIA-assuming internal regulations
alone could be considered sufficient to prevent abuse in the future-can be seen in the
welcome embrace of the Rockefeller Commission recommendations by the Agency.
Only the suggestion that the CIA's budget total be made public provoked serious
disagreement. By mid-summer 1975, it was apparent that the intelligence community
was quite willing to accept implementation of the Rockefeller recommendations. A
number of White house staff people, with Counsel to the President Philip Buchen and
Associate Counsel James Wilderotter in the lead, bustled around putting together a
draft Executive Order imposing restrictions, not only on CIA, but on all foreign
intelligence agencies. Inter-agency representatives were called in to make sure the
restrictions were acceptable. At one point, disagreements led the drafters back to an
Order that dealt only with the CIA. As suggested by the Rockefeller Commission, the
Executive Order for the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) was
drafted and redrafted to give it the new responsibility of policing the community; the
only issue at the time was whether the Board, given this new task, would continue to be
allowed to have a staff detailed from the intelligence community.
It appeared, around Labor Day 1975, that there was a real opportunity for the
President to take the initiative away from Congress by announcing that the Rockefeller
recommendations had been implemented. At that time, the Church Committee had
not yet had any public hearings, the Pike Committee was still trying to get organized,
and the Rockefeller agenda represented most of what was in the news. 'There was an
opportunity for quick, decisive action. Against a background of a Nixon
Administration notorious for ignoring reports from presidential commissions, tile I,ord
Administration could show it was different; when good ideas were advanced, they
were inipielnented. The staff effort, however, died aborning. It died not because of any
serious policy objections to the types of restrictions that would have been
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imposed-hut rather, it seemed, because no one within the White I louse was pushing
to grasp the opportunity. Lack of direction was apparent. Those who counseled that
Congress would never act and that therefore issuance of restrictions was in the long
term an unnecessary limitation of foreign intelligence won the day.
The interaction of publicity, politics, and substantive reform was clear. Publicity
had created an issue worthy of Presidential attention; publicly imposed restrictions on
intelligence agencies would never have been on the Oval Office agenda had not I iersh
and the New York limes put them there. Politics, however, framed the issue for the
President; the issue had become less one of what restrictions should be unposed and
more one of whether any Executive actions were necessary to prevent more drastic, less
appealing congressionally imposed restrictions. There was at the time only a small
constituency within the Executive Branch for unilaterally limiting its own activities.
Unless forced to do so, or unless political benefits could be derived by such action, the
Executive Branch was loath to act.
Within but a short several months, it seemed that the moment for making an
impact through the Rockefeller recommendations had passed. The Administration had
been put on the defensive. The Pike Committee was beating on the intelligence
community for documents, subpoenas were issued, threats to find the Secretary of
State in contempt of Congress were on the front pages, and questions were being raised
whether the community could even predict the next Pearl Harbor. The assassination
report was not far from completion in the Senate; covert actions in Chile and Italy
were about to be attacked. Mere implementation of the Rockefeller recommendations
would have appeared a weak gesture once these wider issues had been opened. James
Angleton's testimony that intelligence agencies should not always be expected to obey
the law cast into extreme doubt the vale:; of issuing any executive older wit'
restrictions on the intelligence community. Through the autumn, it seemed less and
less likely that the Administration would pull itself together to implement even the
Rockefeller recommendations. The once frantic pace in writing and rewriting
restrictions ended completely.- All Administration effort was directed toward
controlling the damage public revelation could cause intelligence agencies, as
Congress kept threatening more and more embarrassing days of public hearings and
kept demanding more and more sensitive intelligence information.
By mid-November 1975, the time when implementation of the Rockefeller
recommendations would be an effective public stance for the President had passed, but
a new initiative began. By this time, the White House role in the intelligence issue was
no longer being run out of the Counsel's office; the Intelligence Coordinating Group,
with representatives of the major intelligence agencies and chaired by presidential
counsellor Jack Marsh, had been formed. The group was staffed by Michael Duval,
formerly of the Domestic Council. From within this group, the realization arose that if
the President were prepared to move further--go beyond the Rockefeller
recommendations-Congress could still be scooped, and the political initiative
regained from a Congress that had seized the momentum and placed the
Administration on the defensive. When the President announced his intelligence
decisions in February 1976, much press comment spoke of the shifting public
perception of intelligence issues caused first by the murder of Richard Welch in
Athens, and then the congressional fiasco with the leaking of the Pike Report. From a
perspective in the White House, however, neither event had much to do with the
intelligence reform package. These events may have been important in some respects,
but they were not central to reform. Rather, the failure of the President to act in August
seemed due to disorganized staff work then, while his action in February seemed due
to an organized staff effort five months later,
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The new White ]louse staff intelligence leadership hod prevailed in arguing that
the investigations had created an opportunity for decisive (and "historic") presidential
action. The passing of the late summer opportunity opened up new opportunities in
the winter. Ilad the President implemented the Rockefeller recommendations around
Labor Day, it seems in retrospect extremely doubtful that the impetus to wade in again
in early 1976 with more intelligence actions would have been strong. The Rockefeller
recommendations dealt only with CIA domestic activities and by the end of August, it
appeared unlikely that agreement could be reached oil restrictions for other agencies.
The recommendations included few organizational issues. The President's
announcements on February 18, 1976, went much ftuther. They dealt with all foreign
intelligence agencies; they set limits overseas as well as in the United States; they
included presidential support of an electronic surveillance bill that Congress alone had
been pushing previously; they addressed organization and management issues.
Thus began the effort to put together an "affirmative action plan--a series of
positive reforms to accompany any announcement of presidential restrictions to he
placed on foreign intelligence, a shift from damage control to leadership. The first
concrete evidence that such a plan was in the works was the convening of a National
Security Council study group, chaired by the Office of Management and Budget, with
representatives of all intelligence agencies, to lay out options for reorganization. From
mid-November to raid-December, daily, in President Nixon's old Executive Office
Building hidea+vay, this group worked to put together four major options for overall
reorganization and subsidiary options for oversight and control of intelligence
activities.
The NSC/OMB task force did not have to start from scratch. A whole series of
intelligence organization and management issues had-almost since the September
day in 19-17 when the CIA was born--remained open to debate. Hersh and the s'et6
York Times had provided an opportunity to set in front of the President these issues:
Could the Director of Central Intelligence really be the leader of the foreign
intelligence community? No, said the CIA because lie had never been given adequate
control of the 80 percent plus of national intelligence assets in the Defense
Department, even by President Nixon's 1.971 letter which the Schlesinger Report had
inspired. No, said the Defense Department, because the Director would always have a
conflict of interest as long as he still ran the CIA. But, yes, it would be nice if someone
could be given effective control so that resource decisions would be better
made-provided, of course, that resource control was possible without usurping
Defense's needed operational control. Do consumers of intelligence get the product
they need? No, they do not always, but whose fault is that-the consumer's or the
producer's? And, anyway, is there any organizational way to solve that problem? Does
the intelligence community's organization promote competing analyses, or rather
accommodation and compromise of views? Where does the CIA fit in-as the collator
above partisanship, or as another partisan in competition among intelligence
judgments? Is there any way to assure that intelligence agencies do not abuse the
secrecy within which they operate, or conversely, clo not allow Presidents to abuse
them? Give an oversight responsibility to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board? Or, a new Board? Or, a Special Counsel? Or, a super Inspector-General? Do
covert actions have to be run by the CIA? Or, should they be run out of State? Or
Defense? Who should approve them before they start?
Each of these issues had a history; none required the glare of press and
congressional inquiry to be recognized within the government. The NSC:/OM I3 group
set forth no options that had not been considered internally before, did no original
research, and added no new understanding to complex problems-its importance was
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that it wrote a report at a time when persons around the President wanted options for
him to choose among and announce: The group also served to give all the intelligence
agencies a role in the formulation of decisions for the ('resident. Each agency could see
what options were being presented and thus prepare its arguments pro and con,
Providing for such participation was necessary if the President wanted to enlist internal
support for reform. At the same time, the group provided assurance to the President
that reforms being pushed by his staff had been reviewed by intelligence experts.
After the submission of the NSC/OMB study, the decision process moved hack
into the White House staff structure. The President asked for a comprehensive
statement of issues and options. A thick notebook with a white cover embossed with
the presidential seal was prepared for hire to take on his Christmas skiing trip to Vail.
The press was told of the notebook to ensure that it would be publicly embarrassing for
anyone to try to stop the momentum that was building for announcement of reform.
(The press not only created issues for the White House; it thus also served as a willing
tool of the White House.) The NSC/OMv1B study was an appendix, but it was also the
basis for the main text of the notebook. The four major organizational options-( I ) a
Department of National Intelligence; (2) a DCI with resource control over all national
assets but operational control over none; (3) a DCI with only coordinating authority,
even over the CIA; and (4) maintenance of the status quo with a few tinkerings--were
all described. They were set in the context of the issues the study group had identified
and debated. The CIA's graphics shop prepared a number of pie charts, flow diagrams,
and organization charts to emphasize certain issues. The familiar old penchant for
finding government organization characterized by "mess" charts was carried into the
intelligence area with a chart showing the complex web of operational, resource and
substantive intelligence chains of command, The notebook, like the study group
report, represented no new insights into intelligence issues; but it gave great reality tu
the reform movement. It demonstrated that real issues and options existed. By pulling
them together in one document for high-level consumption, it made a decision process
inevitable. The use of graphics and other professional-looking packaging contributed
greatly to the momentum.
After Christmas the coordination process that began at the staff level in the
NSC/OMB group was further promoted at the top management level. Copies of the
"White Book" were made available to top intelligence leaders, and they were called
into the Cabinet Room on January 10 to be briefed, along with the President, by Jack
Marsh on the book's issues and options. At the meeting, the CIA threw a fifth
organizational option into the hopper, moving the decision process a step closer to a
workable reorganization plan. The CIA's option (#4A, as it was tagged) gained
particular credibility by being presented on a large chart done by the same CIA
graphics shop in the same format as it had used for the large charts of the first four
options, which the White Ifouse staff used at the Cabinet level meeting. Coordination
having been "achieved," the decision process moved once again back to the White
House staff structure. With the President leading the way, and with heavy
participation of Marsh, Duval, Buchen, and Brent Scowcroft of the National Security
Council and Don Ogilvie of the Office of Management and Budget, over a four-week
period, the options were narrowed, the decisions made.
Again, packaging played a major role. Shortly after the Cabinet-level briefing,
drafts of the Executive Order, a press fact sheet, organization charts, and presidential
public statements and messages to Congress were prepared, and once again, put in a
notebook (blue cover this time) embossed with the presidential seal. Just as the White
Book had demonstrated that real options existed, the Blue Book demonstrated that an
impressive package of decisions was possible. Added to the decisions on reorganization
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and restriction were support for electronic surveillance and anti-assassination bills
already before Congress, submission of legislation to protect information on
intelligence sources and methods, and presidential comments on congressional
oversight.
Progress ebbed and flowed. Decisions at this point were being made within the
White House; the intelligence agencies were left largely in the dark on which options
were being chosen. Some clue must have been given, though, when the NSC/OMB
group was called together hastily to critique Option 4A. The evolving decision that this
was the option to choose was masked, however, by asking the group at the scone tinic
to critique a Defense Department proposal for realigning intelligence research and
development activities of Defense and CIA, a proposal that no one in the White House
was seriously considering at the time.
By early February, the President had fully digested the issues and made his
decisions. Ile decreed that the package should be readied for announcement at his
upcoming press conference, and the final pieces fell together quickly. Last-minute
inter-agency drafting sessions on the Executive Order gave each agency its final chance
for input and its first opportunity to see some portions of the Order which had been
worked on solely in the White House. The restrictions portion of the Order was
polished for the umpteenth time. Other portions of the order that had not received
such painstaking care were hastily reviewed. Little opportunity for objection to the top
management restructuring was given the intelligence agencies; they were shown its
structure only in the last few days before announcement. Any chance for dilution of
the restructuring was deliberately circumvented through keeping possible agency
opposition uninformed. Members of the new Intelligence Oversight Board were chosen
and asked ') serve. Executive Branch and congressional leaders were briefed:: the
President began his regular press conference with announcement of the intelligence
reforms, and the press got a background briefing. Seymour Hersh was not at the
briefing, but it certainly represented the culmination of the process lie had initiated.
The President had scooped Congress by announcing and initiating implementation of
his decisions before the Senate even made its recommendations public.
Reactions to the press and Congress alone, however, cannot fully explain how the
reorganization came out the way it did. Indeed, although the impetus for some sort of
action came from outside the Executive Branch, the substantive decisions were made
almost solely on the basis of internal inputs, As a result, several concepts that operated
for most active participants in the decision process as generally accepted guidelines
were particularly important. Although each is probably quite sound, none was ever
seriously scrutinized. No major conflicting guidelines were ever explored. Given these
concepts, the decision process actually had quite limited options. Description of the
concepts fills in the other half of the picture of how the February 18 actions came
about:
Restrictions d la Rockefeller Commission: Although the Executive Order's
restrictions (Section 5) went through literally hundreds of rewordings, the final product
did not vary significantly from the recornrnendations of the Rockefeller Commission
(which themselves were, in part, borrowed from Defense regulations drafted after the
Ervin Army surveillance hearings). It includes the ban on domestic CIA electronic
surveillance, the general prohibition-with exceptions-on collection of information
on domestic activities of Americans, and the admonitions to obey the law in obtaining
IRS information, opening mail, and giving assistance to lasti enforcement agencies.
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hveti though the Rockefeller Commission spoke only to CIA domestic operations, its
basic format and intent were carried forward into limits on activities of all intelligence
agencies. Some limits were given worldwide application. At no point was any
substantial attempt trade to refocus the effort, to resist the use of a public document
such as an executive order to issue the restrictions, or to add significant new loopholes
or restrictions.
Throughout the process there was concern that valuable sources of foreign
intelligence not be outlawed inadvertently, and, thus, a need arose to write restrictions
carefully; but at no time was any attempt made to legitimatize the clear abuses of the
past or to create hidden loopholes by tricky drafting. In that area where drafting was
most difficult-electronic surveillance-the solution was to direct the Attorney
General to issue guidelines (guidelines which could be classified and thus be more
detailed and tailored to technological capabilities). Foreign intelligence agencies were
always to be limited to legitimate foreign intelligence activities; although reasonable
men could differ on exactly where lines should be drawn, there was always a sincere
recognition that lines did need to be drawn to protect civil liberties of Americans. The
Ford Administration was given a bum rap by those commentators who characterized
the Executive Order restrictions as an attempt to authorize the wrongs of the past; the
close similarity between many of the Church Committee recommendations in this area
and the Order itself are testament to that bunt rap. The Church Committee diverged
substantially from agreement with the Executive Order only in its insistence that
restrictions oil intelligence agencies be enacted in statute, thus eliminating the
possibility that a future President would simply amend the Executive Order whenever
it became unduly inhibiting.
Increasing Accountability: Even before the drawing of the first intelligence
mess chart, a key phrase in White House discussions of intelligence reform was
increasing the accountability of top intelligence leaders. The concept lies behind much
of what was done. The Executive Order speaks of the obligations of senior leaders; it
delegates responsibilities to agency heads, not their agencies; Cabinet-level appointees
were asked to replace their top deputies in reviewing covert action proposals, and the
President for the first time embraced his responsibility to approve them; individual
Department and Agency inspectors-general, general counsels, and agency heads were
told to report directly to the new Oversight Board.
This focus on accountability had several intriguing aspects. For one, it led to
much drawing of boxes and of lines connecting boxes. Often the question of
organization seemed primarily one of which organization could be drawn most easily
on a simple pyramided organization chart. Boxes and lines substituted for in-depth
analysis of how decisions get made or information flows. The net result.was a clean
chart-with direct accountability to the President-that could be contrasted for the
press and public with the mess chart with which the community began. Yet, perhaps
not so surprisingly, the increase in accountability is not nearly as clean as the new
chart. The National Security Council may be officially in a leadership position just
under the President, but its intelligence role remains as it always has been quite fuzzy.
The Committee on Foreign Intelligence may have been given resource "control," but
it remains a "committee" attempting to run a multibillion dollar show. The U.S.
Intelligence Board may have been abolished; but, as all knew it would, it has
resurfaced with the new name, National Foreign Intelligence Board.
The emphasis on accountability may also have contributed to the unspoken
decision that the President's reforms would not include any shifting of responsibilities
among intelligence agencies. The focus of all reform was on top management; no
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change dipped below that level to affect existing inter-agency divisions of labor. 'T'hose
divisions were accepted; although problems mii;ht exist, they could be solved by
ensuring that community leadership was well-structured; the President creed not enter
that fray hrrnsclf. Inclusion in the Executive Order of "charters" of responsibilities for
each element of the community was, therefore, merely a process of putting in non-
classified form similar lists that already existed in NSC directives and other documents.
Within the Executive, much was made of these charters; they were to substitute for
absence of statutory charges to the National Security Agency and Defense Intelligence
Agency and for adequate statutory guidance to CIA; they were to represent the open,
candid attitude of the Ford Administration. Perhaps predictably, they had little if any
impact; the country had been too saturated with other, more detailed information to
find much value in these quite general statements.
A third intriguing aspect of the emphasis on accountability is that it should have
become the focus of Executive Branch intelligence reform after the revelations that
many of the abuses of intelligence agencies were caused not by too little, but rather by
too much, accountability to the President. Often the agencies had wandered from their
statutory roles precisely in an effort to be responsive to Presidents who sought (or
ordered) their help either in covert operations overseas or in dissident surveillance on
the home front. Well before the reforms were announced, Senator Church had
admitted he was no longer in pursuit of a rogue elephant. 'T'his apparent irony was a
major focus of criticism after the intelligence announcements were made; it had been
rarely, if ever, a subject of debate within the Executive prior to the announcements. It
was perhaps symptomatic of the Ford Administration's image of itself-and indeed
largely its reality-that no doubt would ever enter its mind that Presidents could be
trusted, were honest, and always proceeded by leg:d means. The result may be long-
term inerc.-,se in beneficial accountability, but the short-term fallout was strong
criticism for the President's plan. It was lack of implicit trust in the integrity of the
Presidency that provided the thrust of the Church Committee recommendations and
marked the basic distinction between those recommendations and the President's plan.
We Need Covert Action. The Bay of Pigs had opened to public debate the value
of covert action; the secret war in Laos escalated criticism of such activities; but more
recent revelations about Chile and Italy had sparked serious and sustained public
arguments for the first time that covert action was inimical and detrimental to
American foreign policy. Are covert action's gains worth the costs? Must all such
actions be conducted secretly? The answers are by no means obvious; the questions are
quite complex when viewed in the context of the wide range of activities covered by
the term. Options presented to the President always made a bow to the question and to
the related question whether the capability, if maintained, should be kept within the
CIA; but real study of either question was never initiated. The accepted gospel-that
the President must retain a capability somewhere between declaration of war and
diplomatic initiative, and that only the CIA was equipped to handle such
actions-remained throughout the reform discussions just that: accepted gospel.
Although the need to impose restrictions on intelligence agencies was seized on as an
opportunity to tackle other issues such as resource control, it was not similarly used to
reassess covert action. The only announced limitation on covert action was the ban on
political assassination. Further events will be required to push the executive to study
the costs and benefits of such activities. In the interim, covert action will continue
under any Admi:ristratiorn., although probably continuing only at tire much reduced
level of recent years.
Better Control of Resources: When. James Schlesinger, then at the Bureau of tire
Budget, reviewed intelligence in 1971, his focus had been on resource control. Since his
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report, it had often been observed that the intelligence budget process had not focused
on resource tradeoffs between carnpeting systerns and agencies; that the ability to
collect-rather than the need to collect-often drove resource decisions; and that
possible savings could be had through tighter resource control. It was these
observations that led to formation of the Committee on Foreign Intelligence, which
was given resource "control" over all national intelligence assets, The Committee was
to have the control that had not been achieved by the Director of Central
Intelligence-since being given centralized resource responsibility in 1971--or by
existing Office of Management and Budget, Intelligence Coinmurrity Staff, and
executive committee arrangements. Because the emphasis in setting up the new
committee, the one major organizational rearrangement of the February 18
announcement, was on resource control, its membership embraced only CIA and
Defense (with a swing vote given to the National Security Council), the two major
resource users in the intelligence community. The State Department, and other smaller
intelligence units, long represented in the U.S. Intelligence Board structure, were not
included.
Despite this emphasis on resource control, at no point in the reform deliberations
was there serious study whether the resource problem, which most agree (lid exist in
1971, was still a central management problem. The intervening five years had seen
much budget pressure on intelligence, both from a tight overall federal budget and
from inflation. Adjustments to tight budgets had inevitably forced budget decisions
that may not have been made as frequently in earlier, less constrained years. Never
explored was the observation made by some budget reviewers that what the mid- and
late 1970s called for was not tight budget control, but, rather, encouragement of
creativity in initiating new intelligence techniques and programs. Instead. the
Schlesinger conclusions of 1971 were parroted each time the issues were set forth. Thus,
the CFI was established as a means of controlling demands for more money, when it
was quite possible that the needed mechanism by 1976 was one that encouraged the
funding of such demands.
Outside Oversight: The Rockefeller Commission had been convinced that
oversight of the CIA had to include an outside voice. It called for a congressional joint
intelligence committee, and it said the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
should be given, for the first time, an oversight role. In retrospect, it had become clear
that CIA and FBI had suffered, not benefited, from a three-decade absence of
overseers. The Rockefeller Commission worried especially about the absence of
institutions to which a beleaguered intelligence head could appeal when being
pressured by the White I louse to bend rules of law or propriety. Congress could help do
this job, but a role was also foreseen for a separate safety valve, within the Executive,
but outside the chain of command. The President easily embraced these concepts.
Thus, the new Intelligence Oversight Board, three distinguished persons from outside
Government, was asked to review, and report to the President and Attorney General
on, illegality or impropriety. Although options such as Special Counsel on the White
House staff or a centralized Inspector-General were also advanced, the need to have
this Executive oversight include an outside influence was always given the highest
priority. Disputes were limited to whether it made sense to give PFIAB this role, or to
constitute a new Board. The decision was to split this responsibility in recognition of
the other overriding and somewhat conflicting responsibility of the already existing
PFIAB to encourage more and better intelligence activities. Ironically, given this
decision, the Oversight Board was manned with three members all of whom were
already on, or added to, PFIAB.
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,s in the President's plan, establishment
As with other top management reshuffling
of the Oversight Board represented victory for a central concept without any study of
the anticipated result. It was a given that outsiders should be brought into the
propriety review process; questions about what those outsiders would do were not
asked. Thus, on February 19, even for the fairly well defined role of the Oversight
Board (touch better defined, for instance, than the role given the Committee on
Foreign Intelligence), implementation of the Executive Order began without detailed
guidance. Numerous questions arose: Would the Board issue advisory opinions on
activities it found legal and proper, or would it buck all decision to the President or
Attorney General? Would the Oversight Board initiate inquiries of its own or wait for
Misconduct to be reported to it? What would the Board do if it found an activity to be
illegal and it nonetheless continued? Ilow important did an activity have to be to
deserve reporting to the President? Ilow would the Board relate to the new Senate
Intelligence Committee which also expected to have reported to it all infractions of law
or regulation? What in the clandestine world of intelligence was the distinction
between proper and improper activities? The bare outlines of the Executive Order left
the Oversight Board with much leeway in which to interpret its role, ensuring that the
implementation process would be more important than the establishment of the Board
itself.
The President also endorsed a joint congressional intelligence committee as an
idea whose time-after at least 21 years of discussion-had come.* Ile opposed
unilateral declassification of information by Congress and supported repeal of the
hiughes-Ryan requirement that appropriate congressional committees be informed of
all covert actions. At the same time, he made it clear that it was up to Congress, not the
Executive, t , fashion its oversight mechanism. As the Senate moved toward setting tap
its own p~ manent intelligence committee, a number of issues separated the
congressional advocates from Administration positions. Many Senators saw a need for
this committee to authorize all intelligence appropriations, to be "fully and currently
informed" of all activities including those still in planning, and to have authority to
make classified information public. On each issue, the Administration felt Congress
would unduly hamper flexibility and endanger security. It was around these issues that
debate flowed in the Senate. From the Administration viewpoint, however, none
should have been nearly as important as establishment of an overriding principle of
comity. Each of the issues was significant only if one assumed antagonsim between the
committee and the Administration. Threats to reveal secrets, revelation of budget
figures as part of an authorization process, and difficulties in meeting a fully and
currently informed standard would be unlikely if committee and Administration
recognized they were involved in a joint endeavor to assure the best possible
intelligence-by legal means. Each issue, however, became a sticking point that
endangered establishment of such a spirit of comity. Administration secrecy in the
foreign policy areas and congressional irresponsibility in several well-publicized leaks
over recent years had so soured relationships that reestablishment of a spirit of comity,
as had existed, for instance, in the 1950 Cold War period, seemed impossible. Disputes
about how the two estates could work together quickly became issues of .principle on
which neither side wished to be accommodating. By acting through a Senate
Resolution, rather than a statute, the Senate avoided any chance of it White House
veto and won on all these issues. Only time will tell how the practice of congressional
oversight works.
Quality of the Product-No Guideline: Congressman Pike seemed to have hit on
a real nerve when lie lambasted the intelligence community for not predicting Tet in
'The first such proposal was introduced in the [louse as early as 1918, but caused little discussion--Ed.
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Vietnam, the coup in Portugal, the 1973 Arab-Israeli war or the Turkish invasion of
Cyprus. He further delved into quality of the intelligence product by giving the
spotlight to Stun Adams to talk about massaging of Vietnam statistics and to retired
CNO Admiral Elmo Zumwalt to comment oil SALT verification. Civil liberty abuses
of the past were admitted and could be prevented in the future, but if all the billions of
dollars of efforts were not producing what they were supposed to, then really serious
problems existed in intelligence. Pike's well-publicized attacks are, of course, easily
answerable; his concept of the value and use of intelligence was limited by being
oriented toward splashy headlines rather than in-depth understanding. Nonetheless,
he was aiming at the tip of an iceberg of a genuine issue: is the intelligence product
any good? And, if not, what can be done about it? Questions along similar lines had
been asked within the Executive Branch. The National Intelligence Estimates had
from time to time drawn questioning of their reliability and usefulness. The daily
publications were often criticized for being less enlightening than the New York Times.
Yet when the intelligence cornrnunity was "historically reorganized," minimal
attention was paid to the quality of the intelligence product. The NSC/OMB working
group added some options to shake up the production community only at the last
minute, and those options were never seriously considered afterward. Production (lid
not involve the dollars that would make it a resource issue, nor the glamour of
accountability, nor-despite Pike--the public urgency, to be included on the agenda.
Production was considered a management issue to be pursued, if at all, by the newly
~I) reorganized intelligence community, not through presidential initiative.
Secrecy Alust be Improved: The President endorsed and sent to Congress a bill to
enact criminal penalties for unathorized disclosure of information containing sources
and methods of intelligence. The bill had been kicking back and forth between the
CIA and Justice Department for several years They had reconciled their differences
over it in late 1975, and it was, Without further coordination or any debate, included in
the President's February announcement. Never was any doubt expressed that this was
an easily justified, limited piece of legislation, important to the protection of the
secrecy of the guts of the intelligence community, and acceptable to most
congressmen. The Administration should have known better. The Rockefeller
Commission had wandered into this issue somewhat innocently and had been attacked
for its efforts. It also had been shown the CIA draft legislation; but, because it was
quite worried about Bill of Rights problems in the area, the Commission attempted to
avoid taking any stand by recommending:
... legislation, drafted with appropriate safeguards of the constitutional rights of
all affected individuals, which would make it a criminal offense for employees of
the CIA willfully to divulge to any unauthorized person classified information
pertaining to foreign intelligence. (Emphasis added.)
The intent may have been to avoid taking a stand, but the press immediately
interpreted the recommendation as an attempt to muzzle both itself and employees
seeking to reveal wrongdoing. The President's sources and methods bill brought the
same reaction. Never were Administration spokesmen able to convey the message that
this legislation was targeted on a limited amount of classified information and that
criminal penalties were being established only for those persons who, having been
given authorized possession of such information, passed it on to unauthorized persons.
The press and critics of the Administration quickly picked on this legislation as
indicative of a tone of increased secrecy that rubbed off on the whole reorganization.
This piece of legislation drew more comment than any other portion of the intelligence
announcement and detracted greatly from the opportunity to portray the overall
reforms as beneficial to civil liberties interests, In retrospect, given the slim chances for
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passage of the bill nosy or any time soon, it is extremely doubtful that its inclusion Was
beneficial to either the intelligence community or the President.
Leave Out the F1B1: Ilersh had written about the CIA, and not the FBI, and thus
the focus from Christmas 197.1 to Valentine J)ay 1975 was all on foreign intelligence. It
was the CIA that the Rockefeller Commission was asked to probe all spring; (.IA
involvement in foreign assassinations was what preoccupied the Church Committee all
summer; Congressman Pike focused his fall hearings on berating CIA activities. The
National Security Agency got dragged into the inquiries, partially because of oblique
references in the Rockefeller Commission Report to CIA receipt of information on
dissidents from "another" agency. But the FBI came in for its major lumps only after
the President's February 18 announcement.
As a result, the annourice ment had little to say about the FB1, Part of the FBI was
included in the description of the foreign intelligence community, but the Bureau was
totally excluded from the restrictions on intelligence activities. Instead, the Attorney
General was told to draft internal justice regulations for the FBI. There was good
reason for excluding the Bureau from the general intelligence restrictions; its combined
intelligence arid law enforcement responsibilities required different ground rules.
Nonetheless, failure of the President's package to address the FBI left a hole in the
otherwise comprehensive set of documents. Now that FBI black bag jobs are the
scandal getting press and justice Department attention, the Administration has once
again lost the initiative. As it becomes more and more likely that attempts to justify
break-ins will be grounded on arguments of national security and the foreign threat,
the failure of the February 18 plan to address them explicitly will require new
responses.
*
The President's February 18 announcement spark .1 a flurry of newspaper articles.
Some dissected the Executive Order restrictions, probing unsuccessfully for tucked-
away loopholes; others analyzed whether the reorganization changes would have any
impact. All such articles, though, could only be predictive, and thus speculative.
Would the Oversight Board stop abuse? Would the Committee on Foreign Intelligence
save the taxpayers millions? Would covert actions be thoroughly reviewed? The
announcement had no answers; implementation was what mattered. Directions to
Inspectors-General and General Counsels to report to a board of outsiders on illegal
activities could easily be ignored or even forgotten. Giving the Director of Central
Intelligence chairmanship of the committee controlling national intelligence was no
guarantee that he or his Intelligence Community Staff would have any grasp over
Defense assets. It would be easy for cabinet principals to stop attending Advisory
Group meetings and allow covert actions to be approved without deliberation. Once
the glare of publicity and presidential attention was.off intelligence, old patterns could
easily be revived.
Now, as the Executive Order approaches its anniversary, when sonic answers are
beginning to he available, the press has by and large lost interest. Few questions have
been asked about even murndane-though enlightening-details such as the hiring of
staff, initiation of reports, and convening of meetings. Establishment of a Senate
Intelligence Committee will mean there will be a new staff in town probing these
questions, but the press has moved on to new scandals (including FBI bag jobs),
leaving the cleaning up of the old to others. Only time will tell whether Congress
effectively oversees. Seymour Hersh could initiate a year of intelligence revelation,
which could precipitate real changes in the way intelligence is structured, but only the
tried and true government official was still involved when the dust settled. Left to him
will be the final word.
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