CIA IS A NECESSARY EVIL

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00149R000500020061-1
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 30, 2003
• Sequence Number: 61
• Publication Date: February 4, 1966
• Content Type: NSPR

ST. PAUL DISPATCH
Approved For Release b(tb41 7dl DP75-00149R000500020061-1
0
CIA Is a Necessary Evil
St. Paul Dispatch
Leave ae pies Alone
By FRANK GETLEIN
In the swelling crop of this
year's probable misses in
Congress, two proposals com-
mand especially high odds
against their ever getting any-
where.
Submitted by Democratic
Senators Young of Ohio and
McCarthy of Minnesota, the
proposals would attempt to
bring the Central Intelligence
Agency under congressional
scrutiny. Never.
The CIA is difficult to ex-
plain as an inviolable island
? ?in the midst of a government
usually subject to congression-
al shot and shell. Who likes
spies-r Despite recent romant- j . against their own people., so
is literature on the subject, THEY LEAVE out the thing far at least, ' the
CIA Is strict-'
l
,
most Americans probab
y that makes it all possible, 1Y for foreigners. ' 'I
still hold to the old-fashioned
belief that spying is some- even inevitable. We are now
thing we'd rather not do. a great power. Power, to be
Right there Is pant of the realized at all, has to be abso-
reason for the great latitude lute. And absolute power has
accorded the CIA. `The agen- to be basically unaccounted
cy, like James Bond, is It. for and carried on in a high,
censed to do the dirty work. degree of secrecy.
that needs to be done. The This is the fundamental
rest of us, including our elect- principle of the secret police.:
ed representatives, don't have. In czarist Russia as in So
to think about. it and hence viet Russia, a great deal of;
are, obviously, not responsi- the impact of the state upon.
ble fot It. It's not Us. It's the citizen-subject has been
that crowd of?, spooks'.out In : through the seci *t police, f
-; Virginias , answerable to, no . p tt b l i'o
Sen. Young, to ; :hi# :bill :of., body..
particulars last week, com- In a democracy such ex-"
plained that "Wrapped In its pressions face special prob-
cloak of secrecy, the CIA has, lems. But man's ingenuity Is
In effect, been making foreign equal to the challenge of
policy . . . has assumed re- power in whatever guise.
sponsibilities w h I c It were Hence, the CIA. Its predcese-
heretofore solely those of the sor, the OSS of World War 1
President and Congress ..., II, was a schoolboy gambol,
has gradually taken on the with free-wheeling scholar -
character of an invisible gov- gypsies wandering through
ernment, answerable only to ' enemy-occupied. Europe with
itself." bags of gold tied round their
There have been times 'middles.
when many Americans have The change, a profound one,
wished the invisible govern- required signification and the')
ment would be a little more transformation of the OSS into
invisible, but neither Young's CIA did the trick,
conclusions nor those of Sen. ' At that, we're lucky. His--.
,McCarthy, follow in the least torically most great-powers ,
Approved For Release 2004/01/16 : CIA-RDP75-00149R000500020061-1