NOTE TO DDCI

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP79M00467A002700110013-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 11
• Document Creation Date: December 12, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 12, 2002
• Sequence Number: 13
• Publication Date: November 16, 1976
• Content Type: NOTES

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16 .November' 1976
The Angleton interview with .. British'
London Sunday Times-says he will have.
several revelations".--- that the '-Soviet
ambassador to the United Nations is a
spy, that Tom Mboya__was killed by tn.e
,KGB,. etc..
TATI NTL
DA/DCJ
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STAT
DDCI,
5 NOV 1976
Per your request, attached are the two
A new one,, title 'uzknown, is due out in
Decembero STATINT
most recent-articles by Angleton and
Y
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 A Tree at Panmunjom
Some observations on the sinister circumstances bearing on the axe-
murder in August of our two American officers on the Korean truce line,
and its larger meaning for Americans who may have forgotten why we
are still there.
by James Angleton and C.J.V. Murphy
Mr. Angleton spent 31 years with the Office of Strategic Serv-
ices (OSS) and the Central Intelligence Agency, and through the
last 20 years was Chief of Counterintelligence for the CIA. Mr.
Murphy is a retired writer, Time-Life and Fortune magazine.
In the whole sorry sequence of recent American failures to
cope with communist challenges in Africa and Asia, no single
event has given more serious cause for concern over the Govern-
ment's capacity for effective action than its singularly evasive re-
sponse to the axe-murder in midsummer of two young American
Army officers by North Korean troops on the truce line at Pan-
munjom.
The offense itself was certainly plain enough in its elementary
brutality. A mixed work party of South Korean and American of-
ficers and men entered the so-called "Demilitarized Zone,"
better known these past 23 years by its acronym, DMZ, on the
innocent chore of pruning an intrinsically valueless poplar tree,
the branches of which were conveniently obscuring the view of
the communist line from a watchtower on the United Nations'
side. For no apparent reason, other than to humiliate the United
States Army, a larger body of North Korean soldiers fell upon
the work force and bludgeoned the two officers to death with
axes wrested from their own men. President Ford rightly
charged the communists with having perpetrated "vicious and
unprovoked murder" in an attack both "brutal and cowardly."
But in their hasty settlement of accounts with the perpetrators of
the outrage, the terms devised by him and Secretary of State
Kissinger are likely to be celebrated in the history of our times
much more for their ingenuity than for their moral character.
Murderers Not Punished
Instead of insisting that the murderers be punished, the com-
mand decision was to punish the tree itself. The mute, unoffend-
ing poplar that had offered welcome shade to travellers on the
old road that runs from Kaesong to Seoul was struck down. It
was annihilated, root and branch.
It's a long way, as human experience is measured, from the
Garden of Eden to the rude compound of Quonset huts and
wooden shacks that form the village of Panmunjom. But the way
our highly placed public servants in Washington conducted
themselves in the test of character raised by the grisly incident
under the poplar is an uncomfortable reminder that ordinary
men are still far from ever achieving the state of eternal grace
that Adam lost for us in an earlier arboreal incident.
Adam, we know, failed a test of character under a fruit tree in
the Garden of Eden. In their own hour of testing under the pop-
lar at Panmunjom, the relatively small but extremely influential
body of politicians, scholars, lawyers, executives, bureaucrats
and technipols* inside the National Security Council who as the
Washington Special Action Group advise the President in crisis
situations showed themselves, under circumstances far less se-
ductive, to be no nobler than the unfortunate Adam. Instead of
grappling with evil, they feasted on the drugged fruit of detente.
They took out their frustrations on the poplar, rather than exact
satisfaction and respect from a bold enemy.
0! Woodman, Do Not Spare that Tree
In the humiliating aftermath, the rest of us Americans would
do well to reflect long and hard on the implications attaching to
that challenge at far-off Panmunjom. There's a saying that
people are sometimes unable to see the forest for the trees.
What that gentle aphorism argues is that some of us can usually
be depended upon to lose sight of a main issue because .we let
ourselves be diverted by the minor pieces. But in the confusion
and doubt that now prevail in the American attitude toward our
responsibilities, risks and true interests abroad, a thoughtful as-
sessment of the circumstances that brought on that bloody
swirl of aggression at Panmunjom may give us a clearer compre-
hension of the forest of trouble and vexation that meets our gaze
in Pacific Asia, on the horn of Africa, in the Indian Ocean and on
the approaches to the Persian Gulf. Understanding what hap-
pened over the tree may, in other words, enable us better to
judge what's going on in the forest itself.
How mixed up we really are is indicated by a poll of American
opinions on current defense and foreign policy matters taken
*Technicians, such as political, physical and social scientists, who con-
duct themselves as politicians, thereby achieving more influence and a
higher status than their precursors, the technocrats.
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 n
Potomac Associates,
by the Gallup Organization of Princeto
a liberal political research group recently settled in Washing-
ton, D.C. The results were published in Foreign Policy,Another
liberal quarterly, also based in the capital. They show that most
Americans no longer expect much to be gained by our seeking
closer relations with the Soviet Union and so have lost confidence
in the magic of detente. Most Americans are also dubious about
the wisdom of wasting too much effort on trying to improve our
relations with communist China. Instead, they favor staying
close to our present allies, seeing to it that American rights are
treated with "respect" by other nations, and (rating 81 on a
scale of 100) "keeping our military and defense forces strong."
More than half-52 percent, in fact-believe that we should set
about becoming "the world's most powerful nation." The be-
wildering aspect of these findings is that strong as was the feel-
ing about the necessity for a powerful defense establishment, as
an issue of urgent concern it was rated behind ten other na-
tional problems, all of a domestic nature, all of a materialistic
interest.
Still, this peculiar anomaly in the American scale of values is
not really as baffling as at first it may seem. Most of us find it all
but impossible to make much sense of the arithmetic that goes
into those awesome tables citing the ranges, the throwweights,
the number of MIRVs associated with the strategic missile
systems now drawn up on the two sides. Even more incompre-
hensible are the esoteric factors which will eventually determine
the relative weights which the emerging Soviet supersonic Back-
fire, the American Cruise Missile, the controversial B-1 bomber
and the huge and costly Trident submarine will each in its turn
contribute to one side or the other of the military balance. These
are all immensely complicated weapon systems that operate in
the ocean deeps, or in upper space, or are based far back in the
hinterlands, and so are but rarely seen by the populaces they are
meant to defend.
Because so much of the new military technologies are over our
heads, Secretary Kissinger can count on applause and cheers
when he assures the rest of us, as he did in Phoenix in April,
that we have no cause to "delude ourselves with fairy tales of
America being second best." And that same month at Bossier
City, in Louisiana, President Ford could promise, as indeed he
did, that ..as long as I hold this honored office I intend to see to
it that the United States will never become second to anybody.
Period."
That was officeseeking rhetoric. The President could not in
truth supply a truly resounding, a wholly convincing period to
his pledge. How far the balance has tilted against us, and in pre-,
cisely which decisive elements of power, are matters that hover
obscurely in the many imponderables affecting the weaponry
and politics involved in the SALT process, beyond question the
most confusing of all the urgent matters before us. The weapons
being bargained over in the murky diplomacy of the Strategic
Arms Limitation Talks have never been tried in war. No one
really knows how precisely they can be controlled in a battle situ-
ation. or how they can best be foiled or countered. And at this
stage our planners can only hypothesize just how our communist
enemies intend to fit their ever-enlarging panoply of mass de-
struction weaponry alongside their huge conventional military
establishments, and how it is all to be used in their broad strat-
egy for isolating and diminishing the United States.
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Even so, one doe not have to master all these technical
factors in order to form some reasonable idea of how we stand.
The mariner in which our communist adversaries conduct them-
selves toward us at various pressure points around the globe
provides a set of measures for judging their intentions toward
us and, even more, their confidence in being able to bring off
whatever enterprise they may have in the making. That is a
good reason for taking a close look at what happened at Pan-
munjom. That tree may tell us something important about the
forest.
How President Eisenhower Stabilized the Line
We had best begin by refreshing our knowledge of how the
truce line came to be fixed in the first place. When General
Eisenhower entered the White House in January 1953, a pro-
visional truce had been in force on the Korean battlefield for a
year and a half. The armies faced each other across a zigzag line
that ran across the waist of Korea a bit north, for the most part,
of the 38th Parallel, the original partition boundary. In the
Truman years, the war, which that decent man had carelessly
described as "a police action," had cost 31,000 American dead,
91,000 wounded and some 13,000 missing who proved to be
mostly dead. Throughout the exhausting haggle of the truce, the
North Koreans and the far stronger Red Chinese forces in the
line never stopped trying to improve their positions and to wear
down American will. They did this by staging an interminable
series of fierce local clashes that did not materially affect the
main dispositions but did have the useful political effect of pre-
senting the American people with an ever lenthening list of
casualties.
Eisenhower's decision was the sensible one of a soldier turned
President. It was to force the communist powers-the North
Koreans, along with their Soviet and Chinese patrons-to bow
to a formal armistice forthwith or face a dramatic enlargement of
the war. He sent a fairly explicit warning through the Indian
Government and various other channels that unless the fighting
was stopped, he was prepared to break open the "sanctuary"
in Manchuria from which the communist powers had supplied
their field forces and to carry the war to whatever ports, air
bases, railway systems and industrial areas in China and Man-
churia that were supporting the communist armies. He warned,
too, that the United States would no longer be self-constrained
in having resort to tactical nuclear weapons, if that was a
quick way to end the war. And to show that the threat was not a
hollow one, he ordered two first-class Army divisions in Japan
and a Marine division in reserve to be prepared for rapid deploy-
ment in Korea. A nuclear bomb wing was moved into the
western Pacific.
That was the last clear-cut decision by an American president
in a make-or-break political-military situation. Kennedy's
blockade of Cuba in 1962 after the Soviet missiles were dis-
covered there was not of the same soul-trying order of magni-
tude. Only a relative handful of Soviet troops had been risked
in Cuba. The missiles themselves were not even operational.
Eisenhower's decision, had he been obliged to execute it, would
have put the United States in head-on collision with the Soviet
Union and Red China, then locked together in fraternal alliance.
It was no bluff. Eisenhower was in dead earnest. The Rus-
sians took him at his word. Stalin had armed the North Koreans
and unleashed them in June 1950, when Soviet intelligence, sup-
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ported by the British traitors Philby an rgess who were then Chiefs of Staff at thIenta on of the attack a -
liaison officials in Washington mistaken' 1 d d g nd waited for in
. c
h
one u e t
at the
Americans no longer felt bound to honor the UN pledge to main-
tain the independence of South Korea. Then, as the North
Koreans were reeling back to the Yalu River in defeat at the on-
set of the first winter, he persuaded Chairman Mao Tse-tung to
launch the Red army south from Manchuria, with the object of
turning the tide of battle and driving the United States from the
rim of Asia. Then, at the start of the second summer, in June
1951, with the Chinese in their turn falling back in defeat to the
old UN line, the Russians deftly re-entered the situation and
rescued the Chinese armies by engineering a cease-fire that
allowed them to hold where they stood. And, finally, as the
fourth summer wore on, with Stalin now dead, a formidable
soldier strategist in the White House and the American mili-
tary buildup in full swing, the Russians and the Chinese con-
cluded they had not only lost the war but also any hope of re-
trieving the loss by undermining the American will to persevere.
On July 27, 1953, six months after Eisenhower took office, the
Armistice was signed at Panmunjom. It established a No Man's
zone two and a half miles wide and 151 miles long that extends
from the Yellow Sea to the Sea of Japan, ascending bitter moun-
tains and coasting down steep and narrow valleys. The hope-a
forlorn one, at best-was that eventually the dividing barrier of
barbed wire would be dismantled and the Koreans on both sides
would themselves reunite in independence under the UN's
sheltering hand. Today, some 23 years later, a force of 41,000
Americans is still there, standing watch with a South Korean
Army of 560,000. Facing them is the communist Marshal Kim II
Sung's first-class Army of at least 410,000 men, bountifully sup-
ported by Soviet-supplied air, artillery and tanks. The line at
Panmunjom remains the most sensitive flashpoint of all the
geography where United States and communist interests in-
tersect.
Provocations Part of Soviet Strategy
It remains only because it serves the long-range strategy of
Soviet-bloc policy to keep it so. The murder of the two officers is
but the last of a continuing series of ambushes, bombings, snip-
ings and assaults that have taken 49 American lives since the
Armistice supposedly began. Add the casualties inflicted by the
Koreans on each other, and the dead number more than 1,000.
Eight years ago, six American soldiers were slain in an ambush
near Panmunjom and last year an American major was all but
beaten to death by North Korean guards at the truce site itself.
The August incident was of a piece with these provocations. A
squad of 11 American and South Korean officers and men ac-
companied five South Korean tree-pruners to the poplar. As
they made ready to proceed with the branch cutting, a group of
North Korean guards came up and ordered them to desist. When
the Americans stood their ground, a truck load of North Korean
soldiers bore down upon them, and one of the officers was
beard to shout an order to "kill." At the end of the melee, only
minutes later, Captain Arthur G. Bonifas and Lieutenant Mark
T. Barrett lay dead, their heads crushed by the blunt heads of
the axes wrested from their workmen.
The survivors, five of whom were also stabbed or badly hurt,
fell back. Reluctant to retaliate on his own, the American Gen-
eral in command notified our Embassy in Seoul and the Joint
.where'the President was vacationing. All they called for was ex-
ercising a handful of fighters and a few B-52s in formation with-
in eyeshot of the communist delegation at Panmunjom, but
cautiously and unprovocatively inside the South Korean frontier.
They also called for sending another and bigger party of work-
men back to the poplar with orders not just to prune it but to cut
it down. The tree was felled, expeditiously, with power saws.
The North Koreans did not interfere this time. There was
hardly reason for them to do so. They had already made their
point. All that President-Marshal Kim 11 Sung felt called upon to
do by way of amends was to toss off a note which termed the
first incident "regretful" but artfully implied that the Americans
had brought it on themselves. The note was gingerly received
by Dr. Kissinger who first deemed it "unsatisfactory" only to
"flip-flop" (a term which has been sharply honed by the presi-
dential speechwriters for use against Governor Carter) into the
opposite conclusion a day later that American honor had some-
how been requited, in ways perceptible only to himself and,
perhaps, President Ford.
United States a "Paper Tiger"
What was the point that President Kim 11 Sung had made? It
stands to reason that when his soldiers sallied forth to repel the
tree-pruners, he was not seeking a casus belli. A big war with
the United States is the last thing either the Soviet Union or
communist China wants at this point in time. But neither was
the attack the "looney" and "unpremeditated" action which
some apologists such as the CBS man Kalb would have us be-
lieve. The point that the North Koreans were out to make under
the poplar was the same one they seek to drive home whenever
they goad, harrass, or waylay an American patrol. It is the one
that was in their minds eight years ago when they crippled and
boarded the Pueblo in international waters. Their point is to
demonstrate to our allies and third-world countries that the
United States is losing the moral fortitude for stru
le
It
b
gg
.
can
e
chivvied into slipping out from under its world commitments. It
is becoming the "paper tiger" that Mao Tse-tung once said it
was, a judgment reinforced at his own bier by the kow-towing
not only by the President but also by a cortege led by a former
Secretary of Defense who was fired by the President himself.
There is no mystery about the long-term objectives which Kim
11 Sung shares with his Moscow suppliers and with his fellow
Asians and war comrades in Peking. It is to finish the task of
driving the United States off its last remaining stronghold on the
Asian mainland that was begun under Soviet-Chinese auspices
16 years ago.
Three years ago, the negotiations that were proclaimed to
produce the "peaceful reunification" of the Korean peninsula
broke down. Since then the North Koreans have concentrated on
further enlarging their already huge military establishments.
The Russians have supplied them with more tanks and air-
craft than we have given the South Koreans. They have added
greatly to the many artillery battalions deployed behind the
truce zone. The Russians have further strengthened them with
missiles capable of striking Seoul from forward positions. And
what is even more ominous as regards the ability of the South
Koreans to arrest another invasion, the North Koreans have
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been busy as moles driving tunnels and a DMZ. The South
Koreans have already uncovered two that are wide and high
enough to pass trucks and tanks and even deliver a division-.of
infantry behind their forward positions in an hour or two. From
intelligence sources, it has been determined that as many as 12
such tunnels have been dug. This massive effort underlines the
communist intent and determination to wipe the slate clean of
the remaining American presence in Asia and it further re-
minds us of the high value which communist strategy places on
surprise.
The Difficult Question of Self-Interest
Why are we Americans still in that distant, dangerous place?
Communist propaganda and our liberal-left journalism would
have the rest of the world believe-and unfortunately, too many
Americans as well-that it is only to maintain the less-than-
democratic regime of President Park Chung Hee and to cling to
the remnants of imperialism. In truth, we remain in Korea be-
cause of the acute vulnerability of an unarmed, still largely
pacifist Japan, now recently awakened by two events to the need
for applying its own mind to its peril: The shattering revelations
leaked by Senator Church, defeated in his own ambitions, and
by the stalwart Soviet pilot, who sought sanctuary and freedom
in a democratic Japan exposed to predatory communism. We
fought there in 1950 primarily to keep that talented and in-
dustrious society from passing in its helplessness under the
hegemony of either communist China or the Soviet Union.
The pity is that too few among us remember that it is the
promise to protect a Japan which we defeated and disarmed
three decades ago that binds us to the defense of South Korea.
A reality governs our presence there that the incalculably influ-
ential organs of our journalism-the networks, The New York
Times, the Washington Post, the liberal weeklies-have de-
liberately ignored in their obsession with the alleged inequities
of President Park. The attack which they have lately and simul-
taneously mounted on him is almost identical in its rationale with
the ones these same organs used to bring down President Thieu
in Vietnam and are now contriving for the downfall of the Shah
of Iran. If we intend to maintain a working position on the west-
ern Pacific, the United States cannot back out of Korea merely
because a mischief-making handful of liberal-leftist journalists
do not like the way Park governs. A pull-out would leave Japan
naked and the islands of the western Pacific-the Phillipines,
Okinawa, eventually even Australia-as strategic counters to be
swept up by the ascendant power.
Self-Interest and Political Morality
The hard lesson that we should have learned from the Ameri-
can experience in the Cold War is that to draw a line in strategy
and foreign policy which attempts to take in both self-interest
and political morality can't help but be tortuous and a slithering
exercise. As The Economist of London pointed out in a char-
acteristically well-reasoned leader in its issue of 28 August, if
self-interest is now to govern American strategy Israel would
AMERICAN CAUSE, INC.
CIA-RDP79M0046 002700110013-7
wholly be eliminated object of concern. So would Europe,
for that matter. Indeed, by that standard, only the energy-
yielding.kingdoms of the Persian Gulf would be absolutely in-
dispensable to American action, and none of them qualifies as
a model of democratic pluralism.
How is either self-interest or morality to be served by "nor-
malizing" relations with the Peking communists (who have
little to exchange with us of practical value) if the process is to be
at the expense of our pledge to defend Taiwan, a stout ally and a
fruitful and fair trade partner to boot? Where is either self-in-
terest or morality, let alone wisdom, to be found in an African
policy that is prepared to sacrifice the material and political
rights of white minorities in Africa to blacks after the squalid
events in Uganda, Kenya and Angola have shown that black
majorities, once in power, sweep minorities, including Indians,
aside?
And, finally, do their people really have sound legal grounds
for their pitiless attack on the Park government? Seoul, Korea is
in a state of war. It is surrounded North and West by enemies.
To suspend a few rights, as it has done, is not unnatural for
democratic societies in similar peril. In fact, Israel has done so
because it, too, is in peril. In fact, given the pathetic American
performance at Panmunjom, we could wish that our leaders had
drawn upon the same moral design that inspired Prime Minister
Rabin to redeem Israel honor at Entebbe.
A House of Many Mansions
Equal with the oil, natural resources, and the political ele-
ments are the intangibles-the worth of stout-minded and inde-
pendent societies ready to help Americans and their allies hold a
crucial line; friends who will stand alongside us in defense of the
vital moral interest. In the real world the only sensible system of
alliance is one that is itself a house of many mansions. That was
what the containment policy started out to be.
Everywhere the lines are shortening. The weakness of the
United States is essentially an inner one. Americans of the lib-
eral left, especially in politics and journalism, are more passion-
ately devoted to confounding the American public than in fac-
ing up to the communist threat. For them, the real enemy in
Korea is our ally, a stubborn President Park who must be re-
sponsive to the perils of his nation. In their view, executing the
tree at Panmunjom was a safe way out of a bad situation in
which no one in authority wanted to consult our immediate self-
interest, let alone our moral responsibility to the tenets of the
nation.
We have a proposal for honoring the trophies from that in-
glorious action. If it has not been done already, let the logs of
the poplar be flown in Air Force One back home and racked
alongside the fireplace in the Secretary of State's Reception
Room at Foggy Bottom. There, when he delights himself in
tete-a-tete confidences with envoys from the other camp, the
men of detente can warm their hands, if not their souls, over
the dying embers of what only 23 years ago was the American
and Korean sacrifice for Panmunjom.
905 16th St., N.W. ? Suite 304 ? Washington, D.C. 20006 ? [phone]
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 Some preliminary observations on t lamentable consequences of
he
_ the Senior Senator from Idaho for the national intelligence services.
James An Teton and Charles J. V. Murphy
r A g etonn spent 31 years with the Office of Strategic
rvices [OSS] and the Central IntelligenceAgency, and through
e last 20 years was Chief of Counterintelligence for the CIA.
r. Murphy is.: a - retired writer, Time Life and Fortune
gazine
When. the first revelations in Washington of the alleged mis-
eds of the Central Intelligence Agency became a sensation in
e European press 17 months ago, a veteran diplomat in Bonn
pressed his consternation that the government of a great
untry should let itself be driven to disgorge vital state secrets
ferting the security of the nation and its allies. "You don't
ve a country over there," he scolded The New York Times'
rrespondent, "you have a huge church."
That subtle witticism went right over The New York Times'
od, gray, humorless head. The friendly diplomat had shrewd-
perceived at the source of the orgy of self-criticism convulsing
ngress and the press alike something more primitive than
tch-burning or the whiplash of Puritan conscience. What he
d discerned was not so much the rett.rn of a rebuking godly in-
itution to American politics as the emergence of a fresh evan-
lical phenomenon in the affairs of State--a church spelled with
capital -C." Frank Church, to be precise, the senior Senator
in Idaho. - Events have borne out the diplomat's appraisal.
May., Senator Church emerged as a bustling candidate for
e Democratic Presidential nomination. In June, he was ma-
uvering on.. Jimmy Carter's coattails for the Vice-Presiden-
l Spot.. .:...
Church is a blown-in-thebottle, copper-riveted, 24-carat ex-
npl-eofthe rough-diamond from the frontier polished into a po-
:icai,celebrity within Washington's liberal left-wing Establish-
ent. At 51, to be sure, he still slides easily when out on the
istings into, the arm-waving, tub-thumping and rolling
etoric that earned him in Time the accolade of "the boy orator
the Snake River Valley." But he is also master, as The Wash-
gton Post's senior political analyst David S. Broder re-
ntly noted, of the "cool, controlled" style that is most effec-
,e on. television and over cigars and brandy in Averell
Harriman's drawing rooms. And, in common with most am-
bitious politicians, he has kept both ears glued to the ground.
Broder makes this additional observation: "He is a man who
says, with a straight face, that only someone with 20 years' ex-
perience as a Washington insider has the know-how to take on
the dreadful bureaucracy."
It takes more than a straight face for a man of Church's asso-
ciations to carry off such a posture. It takes a strong stomach,
too. Church has been a member of the Senate Foreign Rela-
tions Committee for 19 years. During his service there he made
his mark as an Establishment man. When the Johnson admin-
istration presented the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964, he
voted for it. - He was ranged alongside the rest as the calls
came for ever bigger appropriations to carry on the Vietnam
war. The sea change in his opinion about the American role in
the outer world came only after the public had become disillu-
sioned with the feckless strategy devised by President ?.
Johnson and Defense Secretary McNamara to satisfy the lib-
eral establishment of which he is part. By Nixon's day,
Church's interventionism had turned isolationist. Under the
new colors he enlisted with the turncoafs.. and coauthored
the divisive legislation trimming the President's war powers
and bringing disgrace and shame to the American exit from
Southeast Asia. He was all for suspending foreign aid as early as
1971. While our troops were fighting in the field, he took his fam-
ily on a junket to the Soviet Union, the chief arms supplier to our
enemies. His virtuosity on the negative side of foreign policy
makes him the logical successor to the aging Sparkman as
Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee--or, as
Church would render it, the little or No Foreign Relations
Committee.
The Statesman as Muckraker
Church's swift rise inside the Liberal, left-wing Establishment
has been sped by far more dramatic actions than these, however.
In April, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, of which
he was Chairman and in full control, issued a two volume, 815-
page report advocating no less than 183 measures designed to re-
strict the various intelligence activities conducted by the Federal
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overnment. That work was 15 months in the making and dur-
ng that interval scarcely a day passed that a bewildered nation
id not see Senator Church's name on the front pages of the
ewspapers or his round, bejowled presence crowding the tele-
sion screen.
All that while he kept a sideshow going in an adjoining tent
at was almost as destructive as the other. Four years ago, he
ook over the Chairmanship of a subcommittee of the Foreign Re-
ions Committee that was set up to investigate the operations
f American-owned multinational corporations. His progressive
sclosures of certain regrettable practices adopted by famous
rporations to sweeten their sales pitches in foreign lands have
en hardly less destructive of our nation's reputation abroad
an the shocks produced by his exposes of the CIA and the FBI.
minent personages in Japan, the Netherlands, Italy, and
audi Arabia have been embarrassed, possibly ruined, by the
etails which he and his staff leaked to the press. Governments
f friendly nations have been dismayed and shaken by the evi-
ence of scandal in their own ranks, sprung upon them without
arning and certainly without the benefit of judicial process.
There is an old-fashioned word for these lurid enterprises.
he. word is muckraking. The Economist of London, a journal
hick follows American affairs with a perceptive eye, described
hurch in January as "the scourge of immorality in undercover
telligence operations, and the inquisitor of corrupt practices by
merican corporations abroad"--prosecutor-curry judge-cum-
y on the dirty tricks of his countrymen in other lands.
Let us give the muckraker his due. The CIA and the FBI in
eirarcane an d overlapping responsibilities did engage in some
egal .and ill-advised operations, although these were by no
eans altogether reprehensible when weighed in light of the na-
nal security considerations prevailing at the time. The CIA
briefly consort with political assassins who appear to have
en recruited from "the gang that couldn't shoot straight," and
did allow itself to be briefly drawn into unworthy technolo-
s.associated, among other things, with explosive cigars. And
ve, such respectable corporations as Lockheed and Northrop
pay out large sums to foreign agents and middlemen in ways
rich abroad, in most cases, were within the prevailing custom
d usage for paying commissions, finder's fees, or whatever.
skeletons rooted out of the closets of six administrations.
ow is the time to?measure the benefits, if any, from the
ckraking--and to take the measure of the muckraker as well.
e a auto ,da fe proceedings against the plane makers and the
us dealers remain alive, and while they last it is quite impos- ..
le to tell how many jobs of American workers they will even-
lly lose, how much foreign exchange will be sacrificed, and
much of the market for the world's best goods of their kind
1 be dosed off. But the Select Committee on Intelligence has
llybeen disbanded, without tears, and itshuge staff returned
e rear corridors of the Federal ant heap. Now the Senate in
collective wisdom must decide for itself how far it is prepared
o in fitting to the intelligence services, and most importantly
a now shaky and harassed CIA, the straitjacket Senator
rch and the Committee's staff have brazenly tailored for it.
's a good time, too, for the rest of us to start making up our
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minds about the real lessons to be drawn from the whn}e untidy
experience and deciding what is to be salvaged from the ate:,-5. ""
A Fantasy to Match the Idaho Mountains
For these weighty deliberations, Senator Church's report
isn't much of a help. He personally pays lip service to the max-
im that reliable and timely intelligence is desirable in the inter-
est of national security. He praises himself and the committee
staff for the discretion he would have us believe they exercised
where national secrets were concerned. The truth is, of course,
that it was an open secret in Washington that just about every in-
telligence secret revealed-in camera before the committee found
its way to the press. The Committee's report had exhausted its
surprises long before it ever-went to the printer.
The document is disappointing in other and more serious re-
spects.. Senator John G. Tower of Texas, the Vice Chairman, re-
fused to put his name to the report, and he was joined in his ab-
stention by Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Senator Tower
reproved the Chairman and the majority members for ignoring
the main task laid upon them by the Congress: that was to weigh
the nation's needs in intelligence, measure the performance
of the various intelligence agencies in meeting those needs,
and suggest how best the intelligence work could henceforth go
forward without upsetting "the delicate balance between indi-
vidual liberties and national security."
Instead, the document is overwhelmingly a political tract for
those Senators who wish to reduce the American position in the
world: a scornful sermon on the inequities that, by their lights,
are inherent in- the intelligence process, especially in the field
of covert political action. The report, by and large, denigrates
the virtue of vigilance and prudence. It takes a harpy's delight in
dogging the occasional misdeeds and misdemeanors, the impro-
prieties, the blunders. There is contemptuous reference to the
CIA's implied proclivity for the "dark arts of secret interven-
tion-bribery, blackmail, abduction, assassination"-put at "the
service of reactionary and repressive regimes," a bias which the
chairman and his staff has caused U.S. foreign policy to become
the aspirations of the new."
Beyond all that, Senator Church argues airily that the CIA's'
covert activities, as well as those of the FBI in espionage mat-
ters, are largely stimulated by an exaggerated and now outmod-
terests abroad, he would have us believe, would be far better
served if the CIA were to become less edgy about Soviet actions
and indeed if it ignored altogether the less blatant Soviet-fos-
tored interventions in distant parts of the world. "We have gain
ed little, and lost a great deal from our past policy of compulsive
pounded a peculiar prescription for taking the United States out
of the Cold War, which was not of our making, and out of the
world itself. , . . . . .
He urges us all to take "a longer view of history"-hardly an
original piece of advice. He becomes more specific, though,
when he bids the Executive Branch to rid itself of "a fantasy"-a,
figment of presumably overheated imaginations-that has "en-
trapped and enthralled our Presidents." His precise term for
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potence." a polysyllabic echo of former Senator J. William
"Ft;l6rignt's acid phrase, "the arrogance of power," which
mocked earlier American efforts from Truman through Lyndon
Johnson to stay communist aggression and subversion.
. Yet, on the recent evidence, it is Senator Church and his zeal-
ous supporters who have become enthralled with fantasy--the
fantasy that the Russians have called off the Cold War. His long
service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee should have
armored him against such a fancy. It is even more bewildering
that he should still hold that notion after devoting so much time
inquiring into the work of an agency whose principal business it
is to contend with Soviet subversion and strategic deception.
The CIA files on the counterintelligence side of the House
have been consistently clear on the point that the Kissinger di-
plomacy has not deflected the Kremlin from its basic objectives:
Detente is a sham, a tactic; it is Soviet communism's Potemkin
Village for waging Cold War.
It could be that Senator Church is only a cynic, as Mr. Broder
suggests. That is no uncommon trait in a politician. Or it may be
that he has decided to present himself as detente's man for all
seasons. Be that as it may, the intellectual boundaries that sepa-
rate him from the real world in which the CIA until recently op-
erated so spiritedly and the one that fills his private vision are as
stark as the mountains that wall off his native heath in Idaho.
One has only to examine the Committee's findings on the
CIA's intermittent intrusions in Chile, between 1963 and 1973, to
appreciate how successful the man from Idaho has been in rais-
ing a fantasy to match his mountains.
The High Stakes in Chile
That the United States Government, starting with President
Kennedy, channeled support, some of it through the CIA, to pro-
American conservative and moderate political groupings in Chile
is not in dispute, although one might question the wisdom of
making the issue a shuttlecock in our domestic politics. The ef-
forts of the late Sal vadore Allende-Gossens to capture Chile for a.
communist minority in 1964 were foiled in some part by the CIA.
Allende was already looking to Fidel Castro and, through him, to
Moscow for the funds and managerial skills he had to have for
making full-scale revolution. The American motive was to pre-
vent Castro from spreading his influence into the Andes. The
CIA's intervention in the Chilean political process consisted of
little more than of providing funds for political rallies and edi-
torial debate aimed at inducing the Christian Democrats and the
moderate parties, who commanded a massive majority, to put
aside their differences in the common interest of keeping
Allende and his Marxist coalition from slipping into the Presi-
dency through the gap between them.
That glancing intervention succeeded on an investment of but
a few million dollars and the talents of a handful of specialists.
Six years later, the contest was re-enacted, with the noncommu-
nists again split and Allende and the radicals still controlling
only 36 percent of the popular votes. This time he won because
Kissinger was too much engrossed in wangling a visa to Peking,
coming to terms with Hanoi, and cultivating detente with Mos-
cow to heed the intelligence warnings from Santiago. Had the
Army not risen against Allende in September 1973, he would to-
day rank second only to Castro in the communist hierarchy out-
side the Soviet bloc.
The mischief in Church's handling of the CIA role in Chile is-
sues from the crude attempt of his staff to saddle the CIA with
the blame for Allende's fall. A separate report issued by the
staff, which was drafted outside the Committee's cognizance but
issued with the Chairman's sanction, charged the agency with
having "worked through the covert process to subvert demo-
cratic processes" and having thereby brought "an end to consti-
tutional government" in that storm-tossed country.
Such a finding is, to say the least, the shameless distortion of
the facts that Senator Goldwater in his dissent said it was. To ar
rive at it, Senator Church's scholars had to glaze Allende's
avowed schemes, in open association with platoons-of Soviet and
Cuban advisors, for silencing all political opposition, nationaliz-
ing industry, collectivizing the land, and firing up a revolution
that would support Castro's campaign to destroy American in-
fluence, root and branch, below the Rio Grande. -
"Cuba in the Caribbean.- Allende proclaimed in 1970. "'and
a Socialist Chile ...will make revolution in Latin America." Cas-
tro toured Chile before the 1970 election to rally the discontented
to Allende's banner. Allende himself made no less than nine
trips to Havana between 1956 and 1970. In 1968, he saw to it, as
President of the Chilean Senate, that Cuban survivors from Che
Guevara's foundered guerrilla war in Bolivia were given safe.
passage home; and, later, as President he permitted Castro to
use Cuba's diplomatic offices in Chile to run his espionage and
political agents in Bolivia, the Argentine, Brazil and Uruguay.
There was no doubt about Allende's ambition: it was to set the
Andes aflame.
Chile escaped sinking into a communist dictatorship by the-
skin of its teeth. The U.S. had little influence in the outcome.
As for the liberal, left-wing panjandrums in the Congress and the
press, it is depressingly plain that they still would have *us be-
lie ve that the overthrow of Allende was a "crime against the con-
stitutional order. They seem to have learned nothing from the
test: Castro and the Soviet revolution-makers did. Allende's in-
itial success in 1970, for which they orchestrated the strategy, en-
couraged them in the belief that Chile would provide communists
in other societies with a model of how an electoral minority-
could achieve mastery inside parliamentary societies through
skillful manipulation of the democratic process--a strategy pres-
ently being pursued with delicacy in Italy, France and Portugal..
Allende's failure drove home the lesson that where the margins
are thin the power cannot be held unless the armed forces have
been brought under communist control.
When, therefore. Moscow's man in Portugal, Alvaro Cunhal,
made his move in Portugal in 1974, just about a year later, he- did
so from what appeared to be a solid base of support within the
armed forces themselves. Fortunately for Europe, the base was,
not as solid as at first it seemed. Once it started to crumble, as
it finally did last winter, Cunhal prudently yielded the field-with
scarcely a shot. Then in Angola. a textbook application of Cuban
military force behind a locally contrived "Popular Front"finally
produced a decisive result-another fallen domino.
We would do well to ponder two inescapable questions: What
weight would American counsel carry throughout Latin America,
now that Castro has conquered an immensely promising strate-
gic base for communist expansion in southern Africa, if Allende,
his grateful ally, stood astride the Andes today?
p
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 What if anything can we expect from a Senate Foreign Rela-
tions Committee dominated by a man as befuddled as Frank
Church is by the fantasies of detente, when Castro returns his at-
tentions to Latin America, as in due course he will and must, to
knock down for good the Chilean domino Allende all but toppled?
The Missed Opportunity
The missed meaning of the struggle for Chile is central to an
understanding of the. Church Committee's failure in what could
and should have been a landmark inquiry into the methods and
worth of intelligence. Quite above and beyond the question of
whether the CIA was a "rogue elephant" running amok inside a
constitutional society-the Committee to its credit ruled other-
wise--there was the larger continuing question of whether it is up
to the job. To understand what the job is, one has to take stock of
the threat that the communist bloc presents to national security.
On this crucial subject the report is all but silent.
Nowhere in, its wordy, censorious document is there to be'
found a reasonable appraisal of the threat: which the CIA was
created to meet and fend off; nor of the changing disguises which
that threat wears; nor of the changing targets at which it is
aimed. There is no helpful information for American citizens
about the character and resources of the KGB and the 27 other
clandestine intelligence and espionage organizations which the
Soviet bloc has mounted against the West. One looks in vain for
a judicious assessment of the competence of the CIA to cope with
these adversary services. And as for judging the performance of
our own agency in appraising the Soviet Union's true capabili-
ties and exposing its intentions, the pages are disgracefully
blank.
American intelligence, along with its brilliant successes in the
reconnaissance technologies. has suffered at least three serious
failures over the last eight years. It was surprised by the Soviet
bloc invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. It failed to call the Tet
offensive in Vietnam earlier that same year. And it missed the
Arab strike prepared for Yom Kippur. What is even more em-
barrassing, the communist war memoirs that have lately ap-
peared in Hanoi convey a sinister hint that the highest Ameri-
can and South Vietnamese war councils were thoroughly pene-.
trated by the enemy.
Finally, on the analytical side, the CIA has lately concluded
that it has been underestimating the annual Soviet investment in.
weapons, forces, and military research and development by as
much as 100 percent..
These are matters that Senator Church might profitably have
addressed. Last fall, the House of Representatives own parallel
Select Committee on Intelligence under Representative Otis
Pike of New York made a promising start toward identifying the
reasons for these failures. Unfortunately, that high purpose was
quickly knocked aside by a left-wing majority bent on surpassing
the rival committee in the volume of its leakage. Its final and
..still classified report, passed to a radical newspaper in New
York, was consigned to the dust bin by an embarrassed House.
Unfortunately, the mischief has by no means ended. In May,
the Senate responded to the Church Committee's report by cre-
ating a permanent IS-member select committee to oversee the
AMERICAN CAUSE, INC. 905 16th St:, N.W.
operations not only of the CIA but also those of all the other in-
telligence agencies-the National' Security Agency anti t*',v De-
fense Intelligence Agency as well. The Armed Services Corti- -
mittees and the Appropriations Committees in both Houses
will, as in the past, retain a jurisdiction in intelligence opera-
tions. The range of oversight had earlier been greatly widened
by the Hughes-Ryan Amendment of October 1974 requiring that
six committees in Congress--with"half the Senate and 20 Repre-
sentatives on their rosters-be apprised in advance of any covert
action by the CIA under consideration by the President.
In emptying the CIA's "bag of dirty tricks," in Church's melo-
dramatic phrase, the Congress had thus ended. up by unclothing
and all but disarming that agency at the same time. The vulnerra-.
bility of the new committee to the vagaries of political self-in-
terest can be ascertained from a cursory examination of the-.,
stands taken in the Senate on defense and foreign policy issues:
by the,majority of its members. A sobering benchmark is the
National Security Voting Index published in April by the Ameri-
can Security Council. This index rates the members of both
Houses of Congress, on a scale ranging from zero to 100, by
their votes on ten critical national security defense issues which
a poll taken by the Opinion Research Corporation has estab-
lished are favored by most Americans. On that index and in
terms of the relative weights of their support of legislation most
Americans consider critical to the nation's security, the eight
most liberal members of the new intelligence oversight com-
mittee rank
Case, New Jersey v .r. as n- ----
Huddleston, Kentucky = 5%
Inouye, Hawaii 43 fo
4.301
It comes as a shock to realize that the paramount authority ,
over the CIA and the associated military intelligence agencies
will henceforth be exercised for the Senate by a body the major-
ity of whose members are convinced, with Church, that the
Soviet threat has waned. They will be supported, as he was, by a
staff drawn from specialists of congenial outlook. Senator Mans
field has assured us that the traditional rules of self-discipline
binding these bodies to reticence can be depended upon to pro-
tect
the nation's intelligence secrets from disclosure. Alas, the
feeble gestures the House of Representatives has so far made
toward uncovering the source of the leak of the Pike Committee -
report to Daniel Schorr of the Columbia Broadcasting System
hardly makes for confidence on that score.
Intelligence is the nation's first line of defense. In weighing
the numerous other proposals put before it by the Member from -
Idaho, for further crippling and truncating the intelligence. _
function, the Senate would be well advised in the Bicentennial
year to give heed to the wisdom of the Founding-Fathers: to
keep Church (Frank) and State (affairs of) separate, at least
where these life-and-death matters are concerned.
Suite 304,,.? Washington, D.C. 20006 ? (1202) 638-4006
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