INTERVIEW WITH PATRICK J. MC GARVEY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP74B00415R000400140007-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 16
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 1, 2005
• Sequence Number: 7
• Publication Date: November 10, 1972
• Content Type: TRANS

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41 EAST 42ND STREET. NEW YORK. N. Y. 10017, 697-5100
PROGRAM UP THE FLAGPOLE STATION WRVR/FM
DATE November 10, 1972 7 PM CITY New York
INTERVIEW WITH PATRICK J. MC GARVEY
,DANIEL MACK: Come with us now, back to the mid-60s when
we have asked not what we could do for ourselves but what ourselves
could do for our country or something like that. With Patrick
McGarvey who was a young man In his twenties, then, decided to
join the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency. He'd just been
in training about a week now., and all of a sudden he's at this
orientation session when in steps Allen Dulles. This is just
a preview of a tape that we'll hear later on In the program,
ex-CIA agent Patrick McGarvey describing one orientation session
back in the mid-60s.
PATRICK J. MC GARVEY: I look on that year of training as
sort of though if I were a Sioux Indians, the rites of passage
into the Sioux Indian tribe as a brave because it's so structured
psychologically by advancing through the very basics of intelligence
to capping your training program off with a paramilitary demonstration
of blowing up bridges and exiting submarines and that sort of
thing that it's bound to have an obvious, fraternal kind of impact
on you and they really, what we called, pump it to you, during
that period, and really psych you up.
And of course in the 60s, late 50s and early 60s, early
60s particularly with John Kennedy's ask not what you can do
for your country (sic], it was the place to be wit-hin government.
And they trotted Allen Dulles out for us in the first or second
day of our training program and he was the king. He came out
on the stage of the auditorium there with his tweed jacket and
leather patches on the sleeves and his pipe and his twinkly eyes
like Santa Claus and he launched into a story which started off,
with, I can't imitate his Establishment accent, but nevertheless,
it went something to the effect that when he was a Foreign Service
officer posted to Geneva, Switzerland In 1917, he had the Saturday
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duty one morning. And he got a phone call from the railroad
station and it was a man with a foreign accent wanting to speak
to an American official. And he said, now I toyed with this
notion; he said, I had a date to play tennis that afternoon with
a comely young lady. And he said, were I to go down to the railroad
station and meet with this man, I couldn't have made my date,
he said; I made a decision on the spot that the young lady would
take first priority and I refused the man.
And he paused and he lit his pipe and we're all sitting
there in the audience, thinking, yeah, that's the way to do It,
I'd go with the broad myself, you know; the hell with this old
weird sounding guy.
And when that had sunk in, his pipe lit, he took a couple
of puffs, he looked at us, and he says, twenty-two years, I found
out that man's name was Lenin.
And of course that sunk in and then he launched Into the,
you know, we're saying, you really blew it, Al, you know; and
then he launched Into the forefront -- in Intelligence, you're
on the forefront of the world scene, you're days ahead of the
ati-c community; you're days ahead of the world press; and
us of course being In in our early to mid-20s, were highly
impresionable, all of our own, personal emotional identities
were beginning to get wrapped and entwined in the agencies and
we became true believers.
And by the time the year of training was over, you know,
we were ready to do or die for the old CIA.
MACK: This is Up The Flagpole. I'm Daniel Mack and I'm
talking with Patrick J. McGarvey, the author of "C.I.A., The Myth
and The Madness"; it's a book just published by Saturday Review
Press and it's a book that catalogues the foibles and the bumblings
and the mistakes of the CIA and tries to debunk the myth that
it's a topnotch, well run, highly efficient, well organized James
Bond sort of operation that many of us in our private paranoias
think It is or even our collective paranoia. The book goes through
the - some of the successes but generally the shortcomings of
the CIA, showing that it's just another government agency and
if you know something about the way the Social Security people
run or the way the Congress runs Itself, you should probably know
something about the way the CIA runs itself.
It's filled with a number of anecdotes and stories that
run from the absolutely outrageous to the hair-raising, to the
hilarious and it's a delightful book and it took me three hours
and I read it in one sitting and I enjoyed it very very much.
And I just wondered if I really should indulge myself in enjoying
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a book about the CIA so much, whether or not - this isn't just
another CIA plot; getting a book like this published does do
a little bit of debunking about the CIA, but nonetheless, it
maintains its shroud of secrecy and I think at one point you
describe the Direcotr of the CIA, Helms, as having a peculiar
relationship with the press, that he'll talk to them and give
a little bit of inside dope on generally another agency and that
this way he keeps the hounds off his own heels. I was just wondering
if a book like this doesn't really do that about the CIA itself.
MC GARVEY: Well, this is again, part of the myth aspect
of CIA. I have been suspect, in my own family, and among friends
and among - generally among people who know me; they don't believe
that I've actually left Intelligence. And I don't honestly have
an adequate answer to that other than the fact that I say that
I know that I have. I sleep better at night and am a happier
person as a result of it all.
MACK: All right, let's use that as the basis; and let's
go on, you describe In labyrinthean detail the intelligence structure
In the United States which numbers about a hundred and fifty
thousand men which is probably a hundred thousand men more than
necessary; we can get into the figures; do you want to roughly
give some sort of outline, as simply as. possible, on just what
the intelligence structure Is?
MC GARVEY: Well, essentially there's ten federal agencies
of government involved in intelligence. It's a pyramid-like structure
- at the top you've got the CIA; then each one of the four services
has got their own Intelligence elements.
You've got the FBI, the Atomic Energy Commission, the National
Security Agency, and the Treasury Department, also in intelligence.
Now CIA came about after World War Ii when the internal
bickering and feuding between the four branches of the service
finally proved that you need somewhere a centralized authority
in intelligence; in other words, the Army would pick a piece
of - a tidbit of intelligence up during the wary, they wouldn't
share it with the Navy, the Marine Corps or the Air Force.
And out of that sprung the concept of a Central Intelligence
Agency. However, as in most large organizational changes, there
were compromises made at the very beginning and the basic compromise
that was made in intelligence was to retain the departmental structure
and build this superstructure of CIA on top of the nine departments
that were already involved.
And the result has been the fact today. that you've got ten
agencies involved in all four basic phases of.ingelligence, of
collecting, of processing, of analyzing, and of reporting. The
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obvious, most blatant problem there Is the tremendous and enormous
-?dplication ~f effort that results.
MACK: Which is in a certain way, it's a check and a balance
on things, isn't it?
M GARVEY: Well, yeah, everyone has to keep everyone else
honest. When I was at CIA, I worked for a while in the military
intelligence shop. Now that came Into being, .J,hatvery shop
came into being because we couldn't trust the analysis that the
Defense intei 1 igence Agency was _ Qyrjing up with and-_ theconc us ons,
particularly,' it's not so much when you get into the area of
let's say the Soviet capability, but, rather, it was in the area
of estimating what Soviet intentions would be with their military
capability.
And of course the military always took the hard-nosed worst
case approach to things. So the CIA found that it couldn't really
rely on the judgment of its uniformed brethren so that they put
.together a shop of their own.
And that goes throughout the entire structure of intelligence;
as a minute example, they've got an agricultural, economic analysis
section, where we'll get earth satellite photography of the Soviet
wheat crop and from this photography, deduce and project a forecast
of Soviet wheat production.
Now the men at the Pentagon will come, based on the same
?evidence, they'll come to a different set of conclusions than
will the man at CIA and also the men at the National Security
Agency are analyzing the same thing and they come to another
set of conclusions.
The result is that you form a committee; you get together
and you hammer these things out and you reach a consensus of
an estimate of what's going to happen and you know one common
expression in intelligence is, a camel is a horse built by a
committee. So many of the intelligence estimates come out intending
to be horses, but looking like camels.
MACK: Are many of the conclusions that are reached independently
by the various branches of the agency, are they independent of
the data, are they almost - are they the conclusions that are
desired, wanted?
MC GARVEY: Well, yah, you've always got that problem; you've
got -- the military intelligence scene is dominated by the budgetary
interests, in other words, I point out one example in the book
where the Air Force wanted to Increase the number of tactical
fighter squadrons that we had in Western Europe. So to do this
they took the available intelligence evidence and indicated that
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the easte-rn~European countries Air Forces' capability was far
greater than it actually was.
Closer analysis of the evidence that they had come up with
showed a lot of the evidence to be faulty. So we got ourselves
into a fight with the - it ended up going to the Bureau of Budget
and was resolved in this one instance, against the Air Force.
But you end up with a situation where for the first couple of
years that I was in intelligence, I enjoyed the daily battles
with the Pentagon; the daily battles with the State Department
and other agencies of government, because you actually felt like
you were contributing to policy.
But what it really is Is a form of bureaucratic incest.
And It's sort of like kissing your sister. A couple of years
of that routine and you begin to ask yourself, well, what am I
really doing, am I just playing an Incestuous little game with
information and are mypurposes guided by the principle of informing
the President as best I can or am I protecting the vested interests
of the particular agency I'm working for?
MACK: You called the men in the intelligence branch, I
guess there's a hundred and fifty thousand now working; you say,
It turns men into vegetables, what do you mean by that.
MC GARVEY: Well, in two areas, one in the operational area
and two is in the other side of the business, the analytical side;
in the operational area, I met, for example, the man who ran the
base in Central America from which the Bay of Pigs operation
was mounted and this poor guy was a quivering, alcoholic wreck.
And this was several years after the Bay of Pigs.
Now, of course, the Agency kept him on the payroll andthey
made him an Instructor in maritime operations at their training
facilities. But the guy could barely live with himself; he really
had tremendous emotional problems about the whole thing having
gone down the tubes and felt personally responsible for It.
There's the phenomenon of the burned-out case officer which
is the spy who came in from the cold. It's the guy who spent
twenty to twenty-five years working overseas and when you're working
in the area of human intelligence, you're looking for human weakness.
So your own consumption of alcohol, your own involvement in vice
and things. licentious in your own preying on the periphery of
human weakness has got a degenerating and debilitating effect
on you emotionally and even physically.
And these burned out guys are pretty tragic individuals
to meet In their late 40s and early 50s.
MACK: Now you spent fourteen years In the C-LA yourself.
How much of a vegetable di you turn lWT-
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MC GARVEY: Well, I got a duodenal ulcer and ended/up having
six operations and today I'm ? minus a stomach, a spleen, and a
goodly part of my intestines. got
MACK: There's one story that tried to lighten it a little
bit about getting into the seamy side of things and that's the
v chec.k the
gvhealth
his doctorarouk.
(AA thought it waaccomplished? important
And how was this
and ask, how is the King?
MC GARVEY: No, they set up a crazy operation. I think
it was in Monte Carlo. And he used to vacation there and play
at the gaming tables. They set up a weird situation wherein
they got some plumbing from the outside of the men's room hooked
bathrooms urine when
into theutontheabathroamcatoegoetosamples
he went in
sample,
Now, to make sure they hadtt~e right
commodes. man's
had to put a CIA agent in one of
men anything,
came in with his
o
beeped a the , slignal d to t the say
button which transistor
he just p pushed aa
collect this urine.
And of course they whisked it off to Washington and put
it through the normal urine lab tests. And from there evolved,
you know, a medical breakdown of King Farouk's condition.
let's just take that sort of information
MACK:- All right, now,
and just follow it to see how it gets up to the President. The
way any information whether it be the analysis of satellite photographs
of the wheat crop in the Soviet Union, in the Ukraine, or the
analysis of King Farouk's urine or some of the other crazy stories
you tell, it goes through a number of processes of analysis and
then summarization and then rewriting, and it ends up in this
crazy labyrinthean kind of report system.
MC GARVEY : Thats right. At the top of
and i percolate
t takes a goodly' amount of time for the information to y
up to the top. But at the ~to ....the_.Pre-si dent J-tehe ve structure
receives
~ CL P-I-C-L the President's -_lntelligenc~
I
f
something that's called t e P
S- t.*P in length and
uns
Check List, It usually r
it's a top secret skimming of the crop of overnight and the last
ents in the world of intelligence.
l
opm
twenty-four hour deve
i
Y It's l
the kesnews
thoseurissues'that thetAgency knowsTare scurrently
ret
a
o
Just crops I~ on the President's mind, then ...
MACK: Can you give me an example of what would be on one
of these -- I mean, six to eight pages is not very long.
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MC GARVEY: No, it's much the same, as well, I think John
Kennedy put it well, In a press conference, he was asked questions
much in. the same vein and Kennedy's reply was,'well, most days
I get more Information out of the New York Times.
For example, when the SALT talks were going on, I'm sure
that there were daily reports to the President which would analyze,
a) what went on at the SALT talks on a particular day and b)
contrast what was going on at the diplomatic table with what
was going on In the Soviet research and development area, whether
In fact, they are cutting back in research or deployment of ABMs
and things like that.
And people have a tendency to, think that intelligence is
a sort of straight line to the creator, the inner circle and
the real truth. And lamentably, that's not the case.
John Kennedy was very accurate when he said, maybe he gets
more information out of the New York Times, primarily because
.i't's better written in the times.
But essentially, he y, gets a summary of the world news with
an occasional background or mention of Intelligence operations
that do influence news.
Lyndon Johnson in a presss conference was asked something
along these lines and he says, well, he says, we have a few secrets
In government, he says, but give the press and the tv a week
or so and they usually know them also.
MACK: It's Patrick McGarvey, an ex-CIA.agent, and author
of a book, "C.I.A., The Myth and Madness" and we'll be back with
more stories in a minute.
MACK: This is Up The Flagpole on WRVR New York. I'm Daniel
Mack and I'm talking with Patrick J. McGarvey, the author of
the "C.I.A., The Myth and The Madness". We're describing the
clay feet: of the CIA.
You talk about the fate of the free world being in the hands
of the intelligence officers. Is this ...
(CROSS TALK)
MC GARVEY: ... high blown and high flown, I would think,
that's rhetorical ...
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MACK:. What I'm asking really Is seriously is to what extent
does intelligence affect the safety of United States?
MC GARVEY: Well, to a tremendous extent. It does. Because
decisions on military spending, for example are based almost
j solely on a reading of the intelligence by the intelligence community
of the Soviet military intentions and capabilities.
Now, if the analysis of the technical aspects of Soviet weaponry
is wrong, then the conclusions that are gone from the capabilities
and said to be Soviet intentions could also be gone.
However, we make enormous budgetarydecisions based on that
kind of information. The Vietnam War every four months we had
to do a total reassessment of the picture of the North Vietnamese
will to persist.
Now, obviously we kept saying, intelligence kept saying
those guys are going to hang in there. What gets done with that
intelligence judgment is another matter. In the case of Lyndon
Johnson, Wait Whitman Rostow, Lyndon Johnson himself, chose to
ignore those conclusions that intelligence was writing of and
chose to interpret things more along the lines of what the military
was Interpreting-.
MACK: How much time left? Fifteen
minutes. Okay.
is there a direct fact between what. the intelligence gathered
and the ability of you and I to sit here and talk about this
sort of thing? Are we going to see red either red hordes come
sweeping through San Francisco or Russian -- you see what I'm
saying, this is part of the myth which I think you tried to get
at in the book. That people do believe that we have to spend
... billion dollars a year and sustain the hundred and fifty
thousand employees because it's part of being a Democratic society.
MC GARVEY: Senator_Fulbright, when I talked to him,, before
y~ ~ie_..i~a_lked__about this c_old__ ar_menta i ty_ ..that
I wrote the book
prevails in Congress andpart+_.4_ul_arly in the Appropriations and
he den"I --3-6
~ en
Armed Services Committees in ^bothHousesand t
the intelligence people have to ds~ jxs.wave what I ca.l.l..the
---'--d'
National Securiy..Fla,g and Congressmen immediately shrink away,.
from probing any_deeper. The Pueblo Mission ~`5eautiful example
of t ,t 't`he4 hearings that were held on the Ne51 and the EC-
1 ?) twenty-one shootdown; no one challenged the Pentagon remark
that the Pueblo mission was vital and essential to American national
security and that's why it was run -- within intelligence we were
able to document and -- but it never did make the official record
that the Pueblo missionwas totally unnecessary.
Now it was targeted against three essential targets in North
Korea. One was the activity at the jet fighter fields in North
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Korea. Two was the activity and the deployment of North Korean
;air defense radar. And three was the activity of the - the daily
activity, of the Soviet Navy fleet out of Vladivostok In the Sea
of Japan.
Now there were already two land based Intercept stations
in Japan who monitored the Soviet fleet activity to the point
where we knew when they changed a roll of toilet paper on a Soviet
cruiser.
The Air Force was flying sixty missions a month, reconnaissance
missions a month up over the Sea of Japan and getting --,that's
two a day - getting accurate readouts of the activity of the
Jet fighter field, and also the deployment and the activity and
the kinds of radar that were being used in the air defense radar
system. And then as a sort of a backup to it all, there was
a lan.dbased intercept site In South Korea which monitored all
the activity in and out of Won Thon Harbor which was another
target that the Pueblo was working against.
A lot of these things - you know, one problem I see, was
that when the Pueblo then happened, the information that the government
gave out to the public was accurate. The problem in my view comes
from the information that they didn't give out to the public;
that acts of omission; they didn't mention for example that intelligence
with radar tracking data showed that the Pueblo had, in fact,
violated North Korean territorial waters four times before it
was seized in a three day period.
They didnt' talk about the fact that those targets were
already being adequately covered by other sources of intelligence
information. It's those acts of omission that are not put Into
the, public arena that worry me.
MACK: (UNCLEAR) ... I think a good example of the duplication
of effort and then the omission of certain information; you quote
one other example in recent history that is just almost the opposite
of that and that's the raid on the prisoner of war camp or supposedly
the prisoner of war camp In North Vietnam.
MC GARVEY: That's right.
MACK; Thong Kay(?) where the Information that was supposed --
the intelligence that that raid was based on was sorely lacking.
You want to describe that?
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MC GARVEY: Well, I know the fellow who personally put together
those reports and it goes to the basic problem that with at the
defense intelligence agency,, the operating credo is intelligence
exists to justify whatever operations wants to do. And in this
case, President Nixon obviously determined that he wanted a grandstand
gesture about the POW problem and the Joint Chiefs of Staff of
course went along with this.
So the Joint Chiefs of Staff came to intelligence and they
said, look, we're going to raid a POW camp in North Vietnam; pick
one out for us.
Now the fellow who did the picking out, the information
base about where the POWs were being kept in North Vietnam was
sketchy-to non-existent. There just was very very little information
so they went through the files, they pushed all the buttons on
the computers and they came up with prisoner interrogation report
of a North Vietnamese soldier who was captured in South Vietnam
in 1970, I think it was, in 1969 and he in his initial debriefing
made mention of the fact to the Army guy who did it that he used
to be stationed up around Son Tay(?) and the rumor in his camp
was that there were American prisoners of war there in this compound.
So the next step was to take overhead photography of that
Son Tay area and they did in fact find a compound. And it was
walled and it had buildings inside of it and there were signs
of human activity there; there was a garden growing and there
were clothes hanging on the clothes line. _
But that information, the man had been up there in Son Tay
area in 1966 or -'7, some years prior to his actual capture.
And that was the basis on which the Son Tay prisoner of war camp
was mounted. The JCS refused to accept the notion from intelligence
that we don't know enough about where the POWs are. They refused
to accept that. And of course intelligence wasn't on this enough
to say that directly to the JCS. So they said, give us something,.
give us the best you've got.
Now the best you've got is terrible, but they still give
it to them and there's another saying in intelligence that if
you want it real bad, you're going to get it real bad. And in
this case, they did. And they raided the camp and there was
no sign of American prisoners up there.
But here again, you know, if we had, I think, that what
we need is every five years, have something along the lines of
in Hoover Commission. which just takes a fullblown look at all of
what's going on in intelligence. And then in the interim of
every five years, the President already has a mechanism called
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jthe Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Governor Rockefeller
and many other famous Americans are on it.
And these men could provide an annual report to Congress.
It's unclassified.
Or(?) intelligence. ... the stupid way this Mickey Mouse
aspect of it and just get down to the hard facts of, all right,
here's the intelligence budget; here's how much we're spending;
here's our organizational management. problems that we have encountered
this year and here's how we're going to remedy these problems.
I mean, they do this in agriculture, they-do this in labor,
why can't they do this in intelligence?
MACK: Is there any evidence that the stories - the story
of Son Tay, the story of the Pueblo, the EC-121 that was shot
down.over North Korea, these all happened anywhere from two to
four years ago when you were still with the CIA. Is there any
reason that things have changed since then? That decisions are
being made on any more evidence, are being made any more wisely
than they were made then?
MC GARVEY: I don't think so. I see something going on
now in our government decision making process that worries me
and that is President Nixon made some cosmetic changes at the
top of the intelligence structure in 1971 after he was - after
the Son Tay Camp raid, after the problem of bickering delayed
progress in the SALT talks for a long time. Bickering within
intelligence.
What he did Is realign the very superstructure of it and
redefine some of Richard Helms's responsibilities and brought
Intelligence closer to the National Security Council arena where
Henry Kissinger operates.
Now, Henry Kissinger obviously Is a capable guy but he's
not so totally capable that he can, you know, make all of the
necessary judgments and analysis on the intelligence Information
he's gotten. They've brought the flow of information now is
even a little more discrete right to Henry Kissinger and he makes
the considerations.
Now his considerations are not solely In the objective intelligence
field; they've got other, you know, much far broader policy implications
of where he would like to see policy go and that sort of thing.
I don't - I see further problems in that area.
MACK: Would you want to decentralize this? Have it go
to another committee of men? I would think it would be one step
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In one direction. I don't know -- it would be good or bad but
to have it go to one man rather than this committee system you
were describing earlier.
MC GARVEY: Yah, well, here's -- my feeling on what's wrong
In intelligence organizationally is that the problems don't exist
at the top -- how that information goes from the Director of
Central Intelligence to the President is irrelevant because the
problems in my view exist at the bottom in the lower intestines
of those ten departments of government. If you correct those
problems, today, we've got ten departments; my idea is to have
maybe four departments functionally organized. Correct those
basic problems and you're going to get a better quality of information
going up to the top than how that information gets transmitted
to the White House is irrelevant to the issue.
But today the focus and the concern is on that aspect of
it. Organizationally, I think it's time to re-ask some basic
questions, do we need a departmental approach to intelligence?
1-don't think we do. I think we need a functional approach.
There's as I said before, four phases of intelligence: there's
collection. Right now, we've got ten agencies collecting information.
There is processing. Today we rely so much on technology that
the computer is very active in the intelligence field and the
from one orbit of the earth from an earth satellite produces
on the order of two hundred tons of information put onto paper.
So the processing angle of this is very critical. And this Is
of course where things bog down.
I think that we could form an organization where you would
have a.collection element. This way, immediately, the ringers
would stick up in the collection program. You'd see where you're
duplicating your effort.
In the processing phase today, the National Security Agency
has a computer element and they process all this information.
Now, for them to turn around and say, hey, we don't need this
information is a form of heresy or blasphemy in their own organization.
They're not going to call their own boss to task; whereas if
there was a processing department separate from the collecting
department; they could take a more objective view of what's being
collected and say, hey, we don't need this. This is one of the
basic problems.
Then'I think more iinpo.rtant than the organizational aspects
of intelligence are some of the philosophical ones. The idea
j of secrecy in government. Obviously,'in my opinion, we've got
to have secrecy in intelligence first. I think it should be
;constrained and restricted primarily to the area where you're
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:factually protecting a source of Information; much the same as
a newspaper reporter who has a confidential source; he wants
to protect that.
Today we don't have that situation. The sources of information
are protected but far far too many other things are protected.
Bureaucratic judgments and things of that nature. The budget.
Any control of any organization Is through the money they spend.
Today the House and Senate Appropriations Committee are -- they're --
one of their responsibilities of course is to review the intelligence
budget. Now the only part of the CIA or the whole intelligence
budget and there's five to six billion dollars spent a year,
the only part that the House and Senate sees is about five percent
of that, which represents the housekeeping budget for the CIA
headquarters; the entire rest of that is buried in the Agriculture
Department budget, the Labor Department the Commerce Department
and all other agencies of the government which have nothing to
do with Intelligence. Under miscellaneous items. It's just
broken up and-diffused throughout the system.
The rationale for that is the old World War Ii Cold War
mentality that you can't let the opposition know what you're
spending. My opinion and observation on that is first of'all that
the KGB in Moscow, the America Desk.knows pretty well to the buck
what we're spending on intelligence and if they did know, I ask
the question, what difference does It make if they know how much
we're spending? Every year on the appropriations for the Defense
Department budget, which is more critical than intelligence, they
have appropriations hearings that fill nine and ten volumes and
they lay out the Defense program, the Research program, the weapons
systems program in elaborate detail. Now, the Soviets obviously
come over and pick up copies of those documents at the House
Documents Room in the Capitol Building and take them back and
analyze them.
Yet they still can't influence(?) the American defense budget.
I asked the same question about the intelligence budget.' I think
It's time to quit playing schoolboy games with them. The only
people who are getting shortchanged in that process are the American
people who are footing the bill.
Now, if Congress would sit down and require that the budget
be Investigated in its entirety every year, they, themselves,
even though they're not technical experts in intelligence, their
own human wisdom would point out obvious areas of problems.
And that veil of secrecy around the budget is probably one of
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the fundamental areas that once you tear that veil down and let
some sunshine in there, you're going to have far fewer problems.
MACK: Okay, we'll take a break and we'll be right back.
MACK: I'm Daniel Mack and the program is Up The Flagpole.
Talking on tape, I'm afraid with Patrick J. McGarvey, an ex-CIA
agent, a man who spent fourteen years in the service of the CIA,
sometimes dubbed -- Confusion of America -- as well as the Central
Intelligence Agency and we're talking -- we talked yesterday,
and playing the tape now about the way the CIA operates. (PROGRAM
INTERFERENCE) ... . examples of King Farouk's urine to check
on his health when the Ministry could just as easily go to his
doctor and say, Excuse me Doctor, I understand one of your patients
is named King Farouk. Could you-tell me what sort of health he's
in? No., no, they don't do that, they wait till the King goes
to a casino in Monte Carlo and they especially fix up the men's
room so that they collect King Farouk's urine when he's at the
urinal and other such things'of the CIA that cost us, the taxpayer
five to six billion dollars a year and it employs a hundred and
fifty thousand Americans though in strange peculiar ways.
This is WRVR NEW YORK 106.7 FM.
How would the Congress go about checking on the budget of
the CIA? I'm led to believe that there's a certain connection
between the Congressmen that sit on the review panel and the
CIA itself.
MC GARVEY: That's right. There's a very obscure but I
think very important part that is generally overlooked by the
;public and that is that the CIA retains the right and privilege,
if you will, of passing or clearing with those members of Congress
who will sit on the four select subcommittee-s to review Intelligence.
Now, this is all done under the guise of we can only have
men who can get a top secret clearance for this kind of proeces-s.
The result in practical terms has been generally, you have southern,
very conservative, almost reactionary Congressmen whose main
purpose it strikes me and was said to me by Senator Fulbright
is to protect CIA from an enquiring public.
But the basic fact does remain that CIA does have some say
in its own degree of influence on which members of Congress actually
sit on those subcommittees.
MACK: You quote one Congressman, I believe it's Jamie Whitten,
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l as being somewhat criticial and outspoken against the CIA. Well,
what committee does he sit on?
MC GARVEY: He's on the Appropriations Subcommittee and
in his years of experience reviewing Intelligence budgets, the
only time, the only part of the intelligence budget really that
comes to the public view is the Defense Intelligence Agency.
When the Defense Department budget is being reviewed. So Jamie
Whitten has got some obvious strong feelings about what's going
on in intelligence and every year, consistently, he's used the
appropriations hearings as a sort ofplatform to vent his own
feelings on the subject.
MACK: Is this going to make any change, though? We're
still going to have the Southern Congressmen In control, aren't
we?
MC GARVEY: Yah, really, essentially, I don't hold any illusions,
:that, for example, my book will bring about any realistic change.
The change has to come from a number of- areas. First of all,
4' of course, would be the President. Second would be the Congress.
.Now there's been over two hundred resolutions tabled in the House
;lof Representatives since 1950 trying to form a Joint Committee
/on Intelligence in the same way that there is and has been a
1 Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, which would bring together
of let's say the Government Operations Subcommittee which is
really important because the Operations Subcommittee gets into
.the day to-day nitty gritty of management of resources.
Now If they were to take a realistic look at what goes on
In intelligence, those guys could have a heck of a clout. It
would bring together the Foreign Affairs people, committees in
the House and Senate slide(?) who obviously have an interest
in intelligence but who have been kept out of the intelligence
picture. It would bring together, of course, the Appropriations
Committee members and it would also bring together people from
the Armed Services Committee because so much of the Intelligence
really directly military policy(?).
Unless we get something more realistic and more rational
along those lines, the thing is just going to continue to muddle
along.
MACK: Patrick McGarvey's book "The C.I.A. Myth And Madness"
is published by Saturday Review Press.
It's very funny the way that Congress gets into this. We'll
be talking about Congress in a little while and the way the cold
war lingers on, still freezing certain elements, certain institutions
in our society. And there's a certain amount of truth in the
statement that this fear of the monolithic communist ogre coming
across the Arctic or slithering across the Pacific Ocean onto
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the shores of California does keep us doing strange things, such
as supporting this crazy CIA to the tune of over five billion
dollars, keeping a hundred and fifty thousand men employed in
the Armed Services basically when they could be used other places
and once again it falls in the lap of Congress, those fellows
and women who allot our money for us. Maybe we could write to
them. The one Congressmen that mentioned there, Jamie Whitten
seems to be very concerned about the way the money's spent and
spent too lavishly on intelligence and that there could be an
intelligent use of money for intelligence in this country. No
one is disputing the fact that some form of intelligence is needed
and I just wish it would be applied to the budget.
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