ON THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01314R000100010051-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 22, 2004
• Sequence Number: 51
• Publication Date: June 1, 1976
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

eriocan Cause
a bipartisan, tax-exempt, political education organization
The Honorable George Murphy, Director
On the Separation of Church and State
Some preliminary observations on the lamentable consequences of
the Senior Senator from Idaho for the national Intelligence services.
by James Angleton and Charles J. V. Murphy
Mr. Angleton spent 31 years with the Office of Strategic
Services [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.
When the first revelations in Washington of the alleged mis-
deeds of the Central Intelligence Agency became a sensation in
the European press 17 months ago, a veteran diplomat in Bonn
expressed his consternation that the government of a great
country should let itself be driven to disgorge vital state secrets
affecting the security of the nation and its allies. "You don't
have a country over there," he scolded The New York Times'
correspondent, "you have a huge church."
That subtle witticism went right over The New York Times'
good, gray, humorless head. The friendly diplomat had shrewd-
ly perceived at the source of the orgy of self-criticism convulsing
Congress and the press alike something more primitive than
witch-burning or the whiplash of Puritan conscience. What he
had discerned was not so much the return of a rebuking godly in-
stitution to American politics as the emergence of a fresh evan-
gelical phenomenon in the affairs of State--a church spelled with
a. capital "C." Frank Church, to be precise, the senior Senator
from Idaho. Events have borne out the diplomat's appraisal.
In May, Senator Church emerged as a bustling candidate for
the Democratic Presidential nomination. In June, he was ma-
neuvering on Jimmy Carter's coattails for the Vice-Presiden-
tial spot.
Church is a blown-in-the-bottle, copper-riveted, 24-carat ex-
ample of the rough diamond from the frontier polished into a po-
litical celebrity within Washington's liberal left-wing Establish-
ment. At 51, to be sure, he still slides easily when out on the
hustings into the arm-waving, tub-thumping and rolling
rhetoric that earned him in Time the accolade of "the boy orator
of the Snake River Valley." But he is also master, as The Wash-
ington Post's senior political analyst David S. Broder re-
cently noted, of the "cp*p Vd&f rtRel*Nsia 2O 1TO 28
tive 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 turncoats and co-authored
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.
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-
designed to re-
strict the various intelligence activities conducted by the Federal
 Government. That wgttt~ta{ WWIF Re M.1* j?ea 1 28 : CFA ~sb9 ~~~ ~ fg~m the whole untidy
ing that interval service day passe that a bewildered nation experience and deciding what is to be salvaged from the debris.
did not see Senator Church's name on the front pages of the
newspapers or his round, bejowled presence cr)wding the tele- A Fantasy to Match the Idaho Mountains
vision screen.
All that while he kept a sideshow going in an adjoining tent For these weighty deliberations, Senator Church's report
that was almost as destructive as the other. Fo it years ago, he isn't much of a help. He personally pays lip service to the max-
took over the Chairmanship of a subcommittee of the Foreign Re- im that reliable and timely intelligence is desirable in the inter-
lations Committee that was set up to investigate the operations est of national security. He praises himself and the committee
of American-owned multinational corporations. His progressive staff for the discretion he would have us believe they exercised
disclosures of certain regrettable practices adopted by famous where national secrets were concerned. The truth is, of course,
corporations to sweeten their sales pitches in foreign lands have that it was an open secret in Washington that just about every in-
been hardly less destructive of our nation's reputation abroad telligence secret revealed in camera before the committee found
than the shocks produced by his exposes of the CIA and the FBI, its way to the press. The Committee's report had exhausted its
Eminent personages in Japan. the Netherlands, Italy, and surprises long before it ever went to the printer.
Saudi Arabia have been embarrassed, possibly ruined, by the The document is disappointing in other and more serious re-
details which he and his staff leaked to the press. Governments spects. Senator John G. Tower of Texas, the Vice Chairman, re-
of friendly nations have been dismayed and shaken by the evi- fused to put his name to the report, and he was joined in his ab-
dence of scandal in their own ranks, sprung upon them without stention by Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Senator Tower
warning and certainly without the benefit of judicial process. reproved the Chairman and the majority members for ignoring
There is an old-fashioned word for these Grid enterprises. the main task laid upon them by the Congress: that was to weigh
The word is muckraking. The Economist of Landon, a journal the nation's needs in intelligence, measure the performance
which follows American affairs with a perceptiv,; eye, described of the various intelligence agencies in meeting those needs,
Church in January as "the scourge of immorality in undercover and suggest how best the intelligence work could henceforth go
intelligence operations, and the inquisitor of corrupt practices by forward without upsetting "the delicate balance between indi-
American corporations abroad"--prosecutor-cum-judge-curry- vidual liberties and national security."
jury on the dirty tricks of his countrymen in other lands. Instead, the document is overwhelmingly a political tract for
those Senators who wish to reduce the American position in the
Let us give the muckraker his due. The CIA and the FBI in world: a scornful sermon on the inequities that, by their lights,
their arcane and overlapping responsibilities did engage in some are inherent in the intelligence process, especially in the field
illegal and ill-advised operations, although these were by no of covert political action. The report, by and large, denigrates
means altogether reprehensible when weighed b light of the na- the virtue of vigilance and prudence. It takes a harpy's delight in
tional security considerations prevailing at the time. The CIA dogging the occasional misdeeds and misdemeanors, the impro-
did briefly consort with political assassins who appear to have prieties, the blunders. There is contemptuous reference to the
been recruited from "the gang that couldn't shoot straight," and CIA's implied proclivity for the "dark arts of secret interven-
it did allow itself to be briefly drawn into unworthy technolo- tion--bribery, blackmail, abduction, assassination"--put at "the
gies associated, among other things, with explosive cigars. And service of reactionary and repressive regimes," a bias which the
in the realm of international commerce, whete saints would chairman and his staff has caused U.S. foreign policy to become
starve, such respectable corporations as Lockheed and Northrop generally identified with "the claims of the old order, instead of
did pay out large sums to foreign agents and micdlemen in ways the aspirations of the new."
which abroad, in most cases, were within the prevailing custom Beyond all that, Senator Church argues airily that the CIA's
and usage for paying commissions, finder's fees, or whatever. covert activities, as well as those of the FBI in espionage mat-
It has all been laid out for the rest of the world to sec--the crum- tcrs, are largely stimulated by an exaggerated and now outmod-
bled skeletons rooted out of the closets of six administrations, ed fear of Soviet intentions which he fails to define. American in-
Now is the time to measure the benefits, if any, from the terests abroad, he would have us believe, would be far better
muckraking--and to take the measure of the mu:kraker as well. served if the CIA were to become less edgy about Soviet actions
The auto-da fe proceedings against the plane nakers and the and indeed if it ignored altogether the less blatant Soviet-fos-
arms dealers remain alive, and while they last it is quite impos- torcd interventions in distant parts of the world. "We have gain-
sible to tell how many jobs of American workers they will even- ed little, and lost a great deal from our past policy of compulsive
tually lose, how much foreign exchange will be sacrificed, and intervention." he argues, and from this conclusion he has com-
how much of the market for the world's best gocds of their kind pounded a peculiar prescription for taking the United States out
will be dosed off. But the Select Committee on Intelligence has of the Cold War, which was not of our making, and out of the
finally been disbanded. without tears, and its huge staff returned world itself.
to the rear corridors of the Federal ant heap. Now the Senate in He urges us all to take "a longer view of history"--hardly an
its collective wisdom must decide for itself how far it is prepared original piece of advice, He becomes more specific, though,
to go in fitting to the intelligence services, and most importantly when he bids the Executive Branch to rid itself of "a fantasy"--a
to a now shaky and harassed CIA, the straitjacket Senator figment of presumably overheated imaginations--that has "en-
Church and the Comm PO~s 'b} .t t it ~iolr 28 : O APR PS8.G181U o o' ?O51-S~is precise term for
It's a good time, too, or the rest of us to stari making up our this deranged condition is "the illusion of American omni-
 potence," a polysyllah vet Ref6? 2bQ& 8 : G~ $-RE'~P$r8 $ OOH unist hierarchy out
Fulbright's acid phras the arrogance o power, ' whit side the Soviet bloc.
mocked earlier American efforts from Truman through Lyndon The mischief in Church's handling of the CIA role in Chile is-
Johnson to stay communist aggression and subversion. sues from the crude attempt of his staff to saddle the CIA with
Yet, on the recent evidence, it is Senator Church and his zeal- the blame for Allende's fall. A separate report issued by the
ous supporters who have become enthralled with fantasy--the staff, which was drafted outside the Committee's cognizance but
fantasy that the Russians have called off the Cold War. His long issued with the Chairman's sanction, charged the agency with
service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee should have having "worked through the covert process to subvert demo-
armored him against such a fancy. It is even more bewildering cratic processes" and having thereby brought "an end to consti-
that he should still hold that notion after devoting so much time tutional government" in that storm-tossed country.
inquiring into the work of an agency whose principal business it Such a finding is, to say the least, the shameless distortion of
is to contend with Soviet subversion and strategic deception. the facts that Senator Goldwater in his dissent said it was. To ar-
The CIA files on the counterintelligence side of the House rive at it, Senator Church's scholars had to gloze Allende's
have been consistently clear on the point that the Kissinger di- avowed schemes, in open association with platoons of Soviet and
plomacy has not deflected the Kremlin from its basic objectives: Cuban advisors, for silencing all political opposition, nationaliz-
Detente is a sham, a tactic; it is Soviet communism's Potemkin ing industry, collectivizing the land, and firing up a revolution
Village for waging Cold War. that would support Castro's campaign to destroy American in-
It could be that Senator Church is only a cynic, as Mr. Broder fluence, root and branch, below the Rio Grande.
suggests. That is no uncommon trait in a politician. Or it may be "Cuba in the Caribbean," Allende proclaimed in 1970, "and
that he has decided to present himself as detente's man for all a Socialist Chile... will make revolution in Latin America." Cas-
seasons. Be that as it may, the intellectual boundaries that sepa- tro toured Chile before the 1970 election to rally the discontented
rate him from the real world in which the CIA until recently op- to Allende's banner. Allende himself made no less than nine
erated so spiritedly and the one that fills his private vision are as trips to Havana between 1956 and 1970. In 1968, he saw to it, as
stark as the mountains that wall off his native heath in Idaho. President of the Chilean Senate, that Cuban survivors from Che
One has only to examine the Committee's findings on the Guevara's foundered guerrilla war in Bolivia were given safe
CIA's intermittent intrusions in Chile, between 1963 and 1973, to passage home; and, later, as President he permitted Castro to
appreciate how successful the man from Idaho has been in rais- use Cuba's diplomatic offices in Chile to run his espionage and
ing a fantasy to match his mountains. political agents in Bolivia, the Argentine, Brazil and Uruguay.
There was no doubt about Allende's ambition: it was to set the
Andes aflame.
The High Stakes in Chile Chile escaped sinking into a communist dictatorship by the
skin of its teeth. The U.S. had little influence in the outcome.
That the United States Government, starting with President As for the liberal, left-wing panjandrums in the Congress and the
Kennedy, channeled support, some of it through the CIA, to pro- press, it is depressingly plain that they still would have us be-
American conservative and moderate political groupings in Chile lieve that the overthrow of Allende was a crime against the con-
is not in dispute, although one might question the wisdom of stitutional order. They seem to have learned nothing from the
making the issue a shuttlecock in our domestic politics. The ef- test: Castro and the Soviet revolution-makers did. Allende's in-
forts of the late Salvadore Allende-Gossens to capture Chile for a itial success in 1970, for which they orchestrated the strategy, en-
communist minority in 1964 were foiled in some part by the CIA. couraged them in the belief that Chile would provide communists
Allende was already looking to Fidel Castro and, through him, to in other societies with a model of how an electoral minority
Moscow for the funds and managerial skills he had to have for could achieve mastery inside parliamentary societies through
making full-scale revolution. The American motive was to pre- skillful manipulation of the democratic process--a strategy pres-
vent Castro from spreading his influence into the Andes. The ently being pursued with delicacy in Italy, France and Portugal.
CIA's intervention in the Chilean political process consisted of Allende's failure drove home the lesson that where the margins
little more than of providing funds for political rallies and edi- are thin the power cannot be held unless the armed forces have
torial debate aimed at inducing the Christian Democrats and the been brought under communist control.
When, therefore, Moscow's man in Portugal, Alvaro Cunhal,
moderate parties, who commanded a massive majority, to put made his move in Portugal in 1974, just about a year later, he did
aside their differences in the common interest of keeping so from what appeared to be a solid base of support within the
Allende and his Marxist coalition from slipping into the Presi- armed forces themselves. Fortunately for Europe, the base was
dency through the gap between them. not as solid as at first it seemed. Once it started to crumble, as
That glancing intervention succeeded on an investment of but it finally did last winter, Cunhal prudently yielded the field with
a few million dollars and the talents of a handful of specialists. scarcely a shot. Then in Angola, a textbook application of Cuban
Six years later, the contest was re-enacted, with the noncommu- military force behind a locally contrived "Popular Front"finally
nists again split and Allende and the radicals still controlling produced a decisive result--another fallen domino.
only 36 percent of the popular votes. This time he won because We would do well to ponder two inescapable questions: What
Kissinger was too much engrossed in wangling a visa to Peking, weight would American counsel carry throughout Latin America,
coming to terms with Hanoi, and cultivating detente with Mos- now that Castro has conquered an immensely promising strate-
cow to heed the intelliA b) e} tmc2O4f 1 8 : f t'i4a ltM 41 46$?Q(MG0$4r-8 Africa, if Allende,
Army not risen against A lende in September 1973, he would to- his grateful ally, stood astride the Andes today?
 What if anything ca A4?1?1 l f o as e u ur~t 'Fr J8
lions Committee domtn y a man e as ran
Church is by the fantasies of detente. when Castro returns his at-
tentions to Latin America, as in due course he v-ill 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 failu?e 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 ol'whether it is up
to the job. To understand what the job is, one hat 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 documem 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 target i at which it is
aimed. There is no helpful information for Anerican 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 '_IA to cope with
these adversary services. And as for judging tht 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 1468. 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 taoroughly pene-
trated by the enemy.
Finally, on the analytical side, the CIA has ately 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 Rep-esentative 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 beat 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.
t ~~qqqq1 of all the other in-
NO n`t i~ ~ dfib '~1"5 t ' gency and the De-
fense Intelligence Agency as well. The Armed Services Com-
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 vulnera-
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 as follows:
Hart. Colorado 0%
Bayh, Indiana 17%
Stevenson. Illinois 0%
Biden. Delaware 0%
Case, New Jersey 11%
Hatfield, Oregon 0%
Huddleston. Kentucky 25%
Inouye. Hawaii 43%
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
Unfortunately, the mischief has by no means ended. In May. year to give heed to the wisdom of the Founding Fathers: to
the Senate responded to the Church Committee's report by cre- keep Church (Frank) and State (affairs of) separate, at least
ating a permanent 15-member select committe_ to oversee the where these life-and-death matters are concerned.
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