HOGWASH ABOUT THE CIA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80M01009A000100050070-7
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 23, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 29, 2013
• Sequence Number: 70
• Publication Date: February 15, 1964
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified and Approved For Release 2013/10/29: CIA-RDP80M01009A000100050070-7
The Saturday Evening Post
February 15, 1964
AFFAIRS OF STATE by STEWART ALSOP
Hogwash about the CIA
Harry S. Truman
Sen. Eugene McCarthy
WASHINGTON: In all fairness,
it is time somebody had a kind
word to say for the poor old
Central Intelligence Agency.
The OA is rather like the boy
in school who always gets
slapped around because every-
body knows he won't hit back.
CIA's McCone The State Department has
slapped the CIA hard for "invading the policy-
making field," on the grounds that the agency
briefed some newspapermen on the sad state of
the Soviet economy. A lot of the press has also
been slapping the CIA around, and a few highly
respectable journals have even half-echoed the
Communist Worker's charge that Lee Harvey
Oswald, murderer of President Kennedy, went to
the Soviet Union in 1959 as a CIA hireling.
Former President Harry Truman has got in
his licks. "I never had any thought when I set up
CIA," he has written, "that it would be injected
into the peacetime cloak-and-dagger business."
Sen. Eugene McCarthy, in an article recently
published in this magazine [Jan. 4-11], has
charged that the CIA is getting out of hand.
Neither the President nor the Congress, the
senator maintains, really controls the agency or
knows what it is up to.
Somebody certainly blundered when the CIA
held a mass press conference on the Soviet
economy, and let reporters name the agency as
their source. But with all due respect to a former
President and an able senator, the other charges
against CIA are a lot of hogwash. Let us con-
sider them, in order.
First, Lee Harvey Oswald never at any time
had any connection whatever with CIA, al-
though suspicions on that score are perhaps
natural in view of the mystery surrounding Os-
wald's travels and his sources of income. The
highest officials of the CIA are ready to so
testify?and indignantly?before the Warren
Commission investigating the murder. "If any-
body in the CIA had hired so obvious a psy-
chotic," says one of the greatest experts in the
intelligence business, "he should have been fired
on the spot."
Second, the odd fact is that Harry S. Truman
himself put the CIA into the "peacetime cloak-
and-dagger business." The CIA's operational,
or cloak-and-dagger, unit was established by
President Truman's National Security Council
in the summer of 1948, after the Communists
grabbed Czechoslovakia. In the subsequent four
and a half years, before President Truman
stepped down, certain highly effective secret
operations were mounted with the President's
full knowledge and approval.
Third, the notion that neither Congress nor
the President controls the agency or knows what
it is doing is nonsense. The CIA is unquestion-
ably the most supervised agency in the Govern-
ment?dozens of people spend much of their
time breathing down its neck.
The neck-breathers include four subcommittees
of Congress, headed by Representatives Carl
Vinson and Clarence Cannon and Senators
Richard Russell and Carl Hayden. These con-
gressional grandees are acutely jealous of con-
gressional prerogatives, and they are not about
to let any executive agency, in Senator Mc-
Carthy's words, "[decide] for itself just how
much or how little Congress ought to know."
Neither CIA director John McCone nor his
predecessor, Allen Dulles, when meeting in
closed session, ever refused a candid answer to
any question. To cite one example, contrary to
the popular mythology, the four subcommittees
were thoroughly briefed on the U-2 operation
virtually from its inception.
By the same token, ever since Mr. Truman
established the operational section, every Presi-
dent has been thoroughly informed of every
important secret operation. And every President
has had, and sometimes exercised, an absolute
veto power over any operation. When there have
been disputes on major policy matters between
the CIA and the State Department or the Penta-
gon, the last word in the argument has always
been the President's. Again contrary to the pop-
ular mythology, President Eisenhower personally
authorized the U-2 flight which Khrushchev used
to break up the 1960 summit meeting.
Moreover, the President has plenty of help in
keeping an eye on the agency. For example, a
blue-ribbon presidential board, headed by former
White House counsel Clark Clifford, is charged
with continuous supervision of the agency. And
there are all sorts of special committees, like that
headed by Under Secretary of State Averell
Harriman, with responsibility in the field of sub-
version and guerrilla warfare.
It is just plain silly, in short, to suppose that
the CIA is "a law unto itself." The real danger
is that the CIA will become a vast cautious
bureaucracy, bound by the lowest common de-
nominator of timidity among its innumerable
supervisors. The CIA in any case spends less
than a third of the money and "owns" less than
a quarter of the people in the intelligence busi-
ness. The Pentagon intelligence agencies, the
Defense Intelligence Agency and the National
Security Agency, spend most of the money and
own most of the people, but nobody seems
interested in supervising them.
The NSA particularly could do with a bit of
supervision. It has a horrible security record.
Recent cases include a couple of homosexuals
who defected to the Soviet Union and spilled
all the beans; and an Army sergeant who col-
lected $50,000 from Russian agents for really
important American secrets, and spent the loot
in the most conspicuous possible way on mis-
tresses, motor yachts and the like. If the CIA
had been responsible for either case, there would
have been a hullabaloo to make the Alger Hiss
case seem tame.
In fact, the CIA has not yet suffered a single
known defection or penetration, which is better
than par for the course. Certainly there are time-
servers in the agency, and certainly it has had its
failures, in the Bay of Pigs and elsewhere.
But those who enjoy slapping the CIA around
ought to ask themselves what might have hap-
pened if Mr. Truman had not been wise enough
to put CIA into "the peacetime cloak-and-dagger
business." It is virtually certain that parts of the
world now free would be under Communist
control. It is absolutely certain that we would
disastrously lack the solid information on Soviet
missile-nuclear capabilities which we now have,
thanks to the CIA-created U-2 and reconnais-
sance satellites. If Mr. Truman had not been
wiser than he remembers being, we would be
today like the only blindfolded man in a murder-
ous game of blindman's buff.
Declassified and Approved For Release 2013/10/29: CIA-RDP80M01009A000100050070-7