THE 'DIRTY TRICKS' GAP

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01315R000200030003-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 21
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 18, 2004
• Sequence Number: 3
• Content Type: REPORT

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The "Dirty Tricks" Gap
In the climactic year of Watergate it is not hard to make a strong
case against secret intelligence operations. The costs and risks of
maintaining an intelligence underworld sealed from public scrutiny and
free from legislative accountability have become obvious. The "misuse"
of the CIA, one of the counts in the Article of Impeachment adopted by
the Judiciary Committee, can be repeated whenever an insecure president
feels tempted to use this classic instrument of dictatorial rule against
some domestic "enemy". Although the CIA in the Watergate Affair demon-
strated some resistance to improper involvement, there are no institutional
safeguards to prevent wigs and burglar tools once again being supplied to
"the wrong people".
Former Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and others have persuasively
argued that maintaining extensive clandestine operations endangers American
democracy and for that reason they should be ended. It is important to
note that the danger is no less when the CIA and other intelligence agencies
act "properly",i.e. when they perform the missions they are supposed to
perform. The CIA clandestine services represent a special sort of secret
army. The very existence of a large secret war-fighting capability undermines
American democracy because under our system of government it is the people's
elected representatives who are supposed to decide when and where we are to
go to war. The maintenance of a large bureaucracy whose very purpose is
deception breeds suspicion and cynicism about government in general. Systematic
lying to the public, an institutionalized habit in such bureaucracies, has
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eroded confidence in government to an unprecedented extent. Ironically,
the widespread use of the political lie in the name of national security
has helped undermine a crucial foundation stone of national security--
public confidence. In the last days of the Nixon Administration only
about 25 per cent of the American people had confidence in either the
President or the Congress. (Whether the public appreciation of Mr. Ford
for not being Mr. Nixon is going to last is by no means clear.)
The stock in trade of the intelligence underworld is deceit. Its
purpose is to create contrived realities, to make things appear different
from what they are, for the purpose of manipulation and subversion. More
than 200 agents, according to a recent New York Times article, pose as
businessmen abroad. The CIA has admitted that it has had more than 30
journalists on its payroll since World War II. "Proprietary" corporations--
Air America and other agency fronts, fake foundations, student organizations,
church organizations, etc., are all part of the false bottom world that has
ended up confusing the American people as much as-it has confounded foreign.
governments. It is a cliche to talk about our "interdependent world". Yet
we have pretended to ourselves that we can support murder, arson, larceny,
and deceit abroad and still continue to enjoy democracy at home. Indeed, the
official myth 1ias been that unless the United States prosecutes the "backalley
war", as Dean Rusk calls it, with all the brutality of which we are capable,
we will lose democracy in America. The Watergate Effect suggests that the
United States is not immune from social processes which have corrupted past
empires. What the state does abroad eventually has an impact on domestic
society. It is not possible to maintain a bureaucracy of hired killers,
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soon feeling the effects at home. No system of law and order can survive
in a schizophrenic environment in which government is invited to subsidize
assassination and crop contamination abroad and at the same time is expected
to "turn square corners" with its own citizens. That contradiction can
perhaps be maintained for short periods of warfare, although we have seen
how each war the U.S. has fought has taken its toll on civil liberties,
but it cannot be maintained under a state of permanent warfare. In the
"backalley war" there are no truces and no peace treaties.
The secrecy that shrouds covert operations distorts the foreign policy-
making process in a number of specific ways. First, covert operations are
typically discussed by a small group with special clearances. (As a general
rule those able to get the clearances already have a vested interest in the
operation.) Second, covert operations encQ.ur age adventurism because they
create the impression, often a false one, that they can be disavowed if
they fail. Third, covert operations often close options rather than open them.
(One of the reasons President Kennedy decided to go ahead with the Bay of
Pigs operation was Allen Dulles's warning that the Cuban refugees recruited
for it would expose it if they did not get the chance to carry their flag
to Havanna. Similarly, to protect the existence of secret bases in such
places as Pakistan and Ethiopia the U.S. has had to make special concessions
to those countries it would not otherwise have made. Fourth, the lack of
control over covert operations leads to minor diplomatic disasters such as
the recent incident in Thailand when a CIA agent faked a letter from a
guerrilla leader to the Bangkok government for the purpose of discrediting
his movement. (The Thai government was not amused and the CIA station chief
was recall(z:d. )
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As Morton Halperin and Jeremy Stone have pointed out, the secrecy
necessary to maintain an intelligence underworld distorts our constitutional
processes in a number of ways. Congress loses-its ability to monitor foreign
policy when important operations such as the raids on North Vietnam in 1904
are concealed from it and it is asked to make crucial decisions, such as the
fateful Gulf of Tonkin resolution, on the basis of a highly misleading
picture of reality. Similarly, it loses the power of control over the
Treasury when concealed and unaccounted funds can be used at the discretion
of the Executive. Protecting foreign statesmen from embarrassment about
their involvement with the Agency or concealing some of the Agency's own
indiscretions become grounds for misleading or muzzling the press. "National
security" is the holy.oil that converts felonious acts into patriotic exploits.
It is "a universal truth" as James Madison once wrote Thomas Jefferson, "that
the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger,
real or pretended, from abroad."
The fundamental reason why the secret war bureaucracy threatens the rule
of law is that by all democratic norms it is inherently a criminal enterprise.
Perjury, subornation, torture, property destruction, assassination, fraud,
impersonation and a variety of other acts for which ordinary citizens go to
jail become the dictates of duty. The reason that the activities of the
intelligence underground are shrouded in secrecy is that they violate some
accepted principle of constitutional or international law. If there were
no international consensus against staging coups, contaminating crops,
assassinating leaders, bribing parliaments, and suborning politicians, there
would be no need for the elaborate shield of deception behind which these
activities-take place. If the fears that Madison voiced two hundred years
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ago were not still valid, the CIA would not have had to construct an
elaborate cover story. Governments resort to clandestine operations
,precisely because they wish to act in contravention of established
legal principles and specific promises they have made to the outside
world and to their own people.
The dangers which a large extra-legal enterprise pose for the establishment
of an international legal order or for domestic constitutional order in the
U.S. are obvious. Even the highest officials of the "intelligence community"
will admit publicly that there are "risks". It is conventional to call for
"strict controls" and "better accountability", but there is a fundamental
contradiction between the perceived need for a free-wheeling, super-secret
world-wide intelligence apparatus and effective political control. The
`handful of Senators and Congressmen who are permitted even a peek into
the secret life of the U.S. Government are, by some mysterious process of
selection, wholly sympathetic with what Marchetti and Marks call the
"clandestine mentality" and the peculiar code of the. intelligence underworld.
To read the account of the closed hearings on the nomination of Richard Helms
to be ambassador to Iran (subsequently published because of Watergate) is
to realize that Congressional watchdogs are blind and toothless.
The inescapable fact is that effective control over an apparatus of
the size and character of the U.S. intelligence community is impossible. The
choice is between "trusting" that those in charge are "honorable men", as
Richard Helms urged in 1971, or dismantling the covert intelligence arm of
the United States. There is an overwhelming necessity, in my view for the
second choice.
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But getting rid of the intelligence underworld which has begun to
contaminate our society would require some fundamental political choices.
To be sure, there are instances of intelligence operatives embarking on
what English judges used to call "frolics of their own", improvising
unauthorized mischief, sometimes to the dismay of their superiors in
Washington. Indeed an inherent problem of the intelligence underworld is
that it is to a great extent uncontrollable. A criminal enterprise, such
as the "dirty tricks" department. does not respond to ordinary political
controls because it is made up of people who have been trained to respect
no law but the command of the superior. E. Howard Hunt characterized the
breakin at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office as "an entry operation
conducted under the auspices of competent authority." The habit of mind
prevailing in the intelligence underworld.-includes what Richard Bissell calls
the "higher loyalty", a definition of national security developed and
communicated in secret by higher ranking bureaucrats hermetically sealed
from public scrutiny. But despite the code of obedience, agents in the
field have both the power and the motivation to trap their superiors by
giving them a distorted picture of reality, wittingly or unwittingly. The
spectacular intelligence failures--Bay of Pigs, Pueblo--are examples of this
phenomenon. The law that operates in more benign bureaucracies also operates
here: Bureaucrats tend to keep doing what they have been doing, on an expanding
scale, if possible. Thus extraordinary efforts from the top are necessary
to turn off operations once they are begun. The deeper the cover, the more
impervious to political control.
But the most covert intelligence activities are carried out in direct
support of clearly defined U.S. foreign policy objectives. Indeed, some of
those objectives require the maintenance of an intelligence underworld of
the character that has emerged.
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 We cA`r'-'d"~" eI q Q 1 /s 1
"unnecessary" until we determine the kind of foreign policy we want to
pursue'as a nation. With all of its spectacular failures and the pretentious
banality in which the world of spies, buggers, code-snatchers., crop con-
taminators, covert philanthropists, and secret political manipulators live,
the intelligence underworld is a necessary institution for managing a
modern empire. If we cannot find security in the world without trying to
run it, then the "dirty tricks" department must remain a fixture of our
national life.
Let me be more specific. To manage political and social change around
the world and to oppose national revolutions, as the recently exposed
"destabilization" campaign in Chile, is a "responsibility" that requires
covert action. As long as the U.S. maintains its extravagant policy of
trying to make the world safe for estab.l.shed political and economic power,
there will always be men like Colby,. Bissell and Hunt ready to lie, steal,
and kill in that higher cause. Indeed there are many reasons why the CIA
now seems a more important political instrument than ever, including the
improved techniques for "low profile" interventions, the growing desire to
control resource-producing Third World countries, the increasing difficulties
in mounting conventional military operations abroad. If we do not wish to
use the state to legitimize criminal activity at home and abroad, then we
must stop trying to set the conditions for the internal development of
other nations.
It is important to distinguish covert action and covert intelligence
gathering. In 1968 Richard Bissell, former Deputy Director of CIA in
charge of clandestine services defined covert action in these terms:
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 (1) political advice and counsel; (2) subsidies to an individual;
4p F6#-2otagerzD( i'41fav.~kmAG bpw6is4sR@'60290HSb??$ 1 parties;
(4) support of private organizations, including labor unions, business
firms, cooperatives, etc.; (5) covert propaganda; (6) "private"training
of individuals and exchange of persons; (7) economic operations; and
(8) paramilitary [or] political action operations designed to overthrow
or support a regime.
Covert action, in simple terms, is secret warfare. Clandestine intelligence
collection, by contrast, is not designed to influence political affairs in
other countries, but it does as we shall see, have that effect. Both covert
action and covert intelligence collection are primarily directed against
those societies least able to hurt us because these also happen to be the
societies least able to protect themselves from penetration. The Soviet
Union makes such a large investment in counterespionage that, except for an
occasional defector like Penkovsky, most of the information about their intentions
has to be pieced together from open sources. Powerful countries, the only
plausible security threats, can develop!-,sophisticated codes that are, as
cryptologist David Kahn puts it, "unbreakable in practice." In 1970 Admiral
Gayler of the National Security Agency admitted privately, according to
Marchetti and Marks, "that a good part of the NSA.'s successes came from breaks"
into embassies and other places where code books can be stolen. Thus it is
possible to break the codes of poor Third World countries such as Chile. "One
surreptitious entry can do the job successfully at no dollar cost," the
authors of the 1970 Huston Plan reported to President Nixon. But such cheap
petty thievery produces information the U.S. government does not need or
should not have.
The reason the underdeveloped world "presents greater opportunities for
covert intelligence collection," as Richard Bissell explained to a Council
on Foreign Relations study group in January, 1968, is that governments "are
much less highly oriented; there is less security consciousness; and there is
apt to be more actual or potential diffusion of power among parties, localities,
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organizations, and individuals outside the central governments." Thus, the
same internal suspicions, rivalries, and bribery that keep poor nations from
effectively organizing themselves to overcome mass poverty make them attractive
targets of the intelligence underworld. Real and exaggerated fears of being
infiltrated help to keep such societies in a continual state of political
disorganization. As Bissell points out, the less totalitarian the society,
the easier it is to find out and to influence what goes on there. Salvador
Allende's tolerance of forces opposing him made it easy for the CIA and
other intelligence agencies to work with them to hasten his downfall. The
-CIA "destabilization" campaign, which, according to recent revelations of
William Colby's secret testimony, was strongly pushed by Henry Kissinger,
would not have worked had the regime been more repressive. That lesson
"is one of the uglier legacies of the "dirty tricks" department.
The deliberate disorientation of societies by means of bribery, assassination,
black propaganda, subornation, and other methods helps keep them poor and
dependent. Those societies most vulnerable to penetration are, generally:-
speaking, the ones that most need effective organization to develop their
own priorities. When they are manipulated for U.S. foreign policy purposes
rather than. their own development purposes, their capacity even to begin to
deal with the overwhelming problems of mass poverty is undermined. Unfortunately,
U.S. foreign policy purposes in most areas of the Third World have been defined
in such a way as to conflict directly with local development needs. The
crushing problems of Asia, Africa and Latin America--mass poverty, unemployment,
and growing inequality--require structural changes in those societies--a
polite term for overthrowing local elites that run them as personal holding
conpanies.or throwing out foreign business interests that are often equally
exploitative. Consistently, the CIA's continuing secret war has been in
support of local and foreign interests threatened by structural change, the
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maintenance of a repressive "stability" that stifles hope for the majority
of. the population. The capability of the U.S. to support reactionary regimes,
and its clear intent to do so wherever possible, has been a powerful
political factor in preserving a highly inequitable and ultimately explosive
status quo.
The "successes" of the CIA have for the most part not been scored
against the countries with the capacity to destroy the United States. (Some
exceptions include the cultivation of famous defector Colonel Penkovsky, who
did provide important military information on Soviet missile strength when if
could not be obtained by observation satellites, some propaganda victories
in the fight for the "hearts and minds" of European intellectuals in the
early postwar period, limitation of Soviet influence in the international
labor movement, collection of Kremlin gossip by bugging Party limousines, etc.)
But in the weak countries of the Third World the intervention of the CIA
can make a crucial difference in setting the political direction, and it often
has. If we are to abandon the secret warfare which makes the United States
Government the enemy of political change around the world, we must abandon the
basic goal of attemtping to influence the direction of internal politics in
other countries to serve U.S. military and corporate interests.
In the aftermath of Watergate the CIA has been revising the official
rationale for its extensive clandestine operations it gives to Congressmen
and columnists. According to Miles Copeland, former CIA official, the
Agency is now explaining its mission for the mid-1970's in Congressional
briefings in the following terms:
1. Meticulous monitoring of the detente. 2. Collection of data
on international terrorist groups. 3. Protection of access to
strategic materials. 4. Cooperation with multinational corporations.
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It is worth examining each of these proposed missions to determine
whether the risks involved outweigh the advantages and to ask whether such
legiti-mate security interests as they may be designed to serve can be
advanced in other ways.
Certainly the detente must be "meticulously monitored", if by
that is meant we should keep track of what the Soviet Union is doing. The
most important information about the Soviet Union relevant to detente is the
character and state of readiness of the armed forces. Satellite observation
and the collection of order of battle intelligence by conventional means is
the best way to monitor this information. Spies in the Kremlin, if indeed
there are any, and document snatchers are unlikely to provide reliable
information in a socieity that invests as much as the Soviet Union does to
avoid penetration. The effort itself of.course jeopardizes detente. "Testing"
the Soviet air defenses by penetrating their air space is a provocation which
serves no legitimate military purpose. The best way to obtain information
about Soviet attitudes toward detente is to press them hard for real measur6s
of disarmament. The problem is not one of finding some piece of esoteric
information that will provide the key to Soviet behavior but rather of
developing an analysis that is comprehensive and dynamic enough to make use
of the vast amount of information already available. Monitoring the detente
is a mission for diplomats with analytical skills, not spies.
There is no doubt that terrorism will be. an increasing problem in a
world in which the avenues of peaceful change appear to be blocked. There
is no way to "monitor" real or imagined terrorist groups without violating
the civil. liberties of thousands of people. There is no evidence to suggest
that a wor_icl-wide surveillance network can in fact prevent random acts of
terror which are typically the work of individuals or small splinter groups.
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Even If the prospects for pre-empting terrorist attacks through surveillance
were more probable, the political damage caused by widespread surveillance
irk' other countries outweighs any possible benefits.
The suggestion that the clandestine-services of the CIA are needed to
control international drug traffic is amusing in the light of the many
well-documented cases of CIA officials promoting illegal drug traffic in
Southeast Asia and other places.
To say that clandestine services must be available to aid U.S.-based
multinational corporations is to make a virtue of the classic imperialist
relationship in which the power of the state is used to bail out private
interests abroad. The U.S. traditionally equates the "national interest"
with the interests of ITT or Kennecott or some other corporation in conflict
with the local government. But such a policy risks involvement in military
interventions, frustrates possibilities of development, and confirms the
charge that the U.S. is interested only in a "structure of peace" that
preserves its power to dominate weak economies. U.S. corporations should
be required to stand on their own in their dealings with other countries. If
they are prepared to do business in a way that will benefit the host country,
they do not need espionage or "dirty tricks" supplied at the taxpayers' expense.
Similarly, access to raw materials is a problem of bargaining skill and
technological innovation. Unless we are prepared to make war on the producing
nations of the Third World in order to obtain access to resources on our own
terms, there is no place for the CIA in this drama.
In a recent paper at the Naval War College Vice-Admiral John M. Lee
(Ret.) discusses the use of American military power for what he calls "resource
control", the protection of U.S. access to strategic materials and energy sources.
Arguing that it is "hard to conceive of a situation... where direct combat
operations against a Third World resource country to obtain its resources would
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commend itself as feasible,, effective, and on balance, productive,".he
does suggest possibilities "of covert operations and proxy wars." This
_~.._ ...__.-tares he argues, reinforced "with e--en--s
American strength" does produce "leverage". There is nothing new about the
use of covert action to protect access to raw materials. Much of CIA
operations in the Mediterranean and Latin America have been for precisely this
purpose. If we see no alternative way to maintain our economy other than to
spread intimidation, confusion, and murder in the Third World, then indeed
there will always be a role for the intelligence underworld in American
foreign policy.
I. is frequently asserted that the United States must make extensive
use of espionage and other secret means of collecting information about other
nations in order to protect our national security. Here again the crucial
issue concerns a basic choice in foreign policy. Certain kinds of policies
require certain kinds of information. Some information can be obtained only
by clandestine means. Generally speaking, with the dxception of counter-
espionage, which we will take up a little later, covertly collected information
is useful only for the conduct of military or para-military operations. Richard
Bissell argues that espionage in the poorer countries is needed to produce
""timely knowledge" of "tactical significance." In fact most clandestine
collection of information serves no purpose other than to support covert
action. Bissell himself concedes that sometimes "the tasks of intelligence
collection and political action overlap to the point of being almost indis-
tinguishable." For what legitimate purpose does the United States need to
immerse itself in the internal political developments of Third World and
other countries which pose no threat to the security of the United States
other than the assertion of their own independence?.
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If the foreign policy of the United States dictates a large-scale
"destabilization" program for Chile, the information needed to conduct it
can be obtained only by secret means. Such data as the names of Chilean
subversives prepared to conspire with a foreign government against their
own constitutional system, how much it will take to bribe them or equip
them, etc. become vital "national security" information. Since every
government takes some pains to keep such information out of hostile hands,
the process of collecting it must be an undercover operation. Had the
decision been made to permit a freely elected government in Chile to
survive such information would not have been needed. The plain truth is that
there is no information under the control of Third World governments that
the U.S. needs to know unless it is in the business of manipulating and
controlling their internal development., In many cases United States public
and private agencies already have better organized and more accurate infor-
mation about finances, resources, and state of the military than the local,,
government itself. The massive penetration of Third World countries by
U.S. espionage agencies produces information the U.S. does not need for
any legitimate purpose, and in the interests of international stability,
should not seek to acquire.
If the United States were genuinely prepared to live in a "world of
diversity", as..it sometimes claims, it would still need political information, but
it would not need to obtain it by illegal and subversive means. Indeed,
if the U.S. actually engaged in building a "structure of peace" evolving toward
global equity instead of one seeking to freeze a highly unjust and unstable
status quo, then most of the information needed could be obtained from open
sources z,,nd direct inquiry. The principles of espionage were developed
for war-and the more closely diplomacy resembles war the more it must
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 rely on espionage. Undercove ra
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more nor less justifiable than war itself. But they have a way of
surviving the wars they are supposed to support. The Pueblo was captured
.-off Forth Korea in 1967 while engaged in eavesdropping operations that might
have been defensible during the war that concluded fourteen years
earlier but served no plausible purpose in 1967. Similarly, much of the
covert. intelligence apparatus was developed for a "backalley war" with the
Soviet Union that has been overtaken by events. It is not surprising that
Richard Bissell told the Council on Foreign Relations in 1968 that "the
underdeveloped world presents greater opportunities for covert intelligence
collection."
There is indeed an information and analysis gap, but the information .
the United States most needs is not under the control of any foreign nation
and it cannot be wrested from it. The analysis we need cannot be done
iK.
by professional spies. The "clandestine mentality" fostered by intelligence
bureaucracies is a form of. trained incapacity to see the importance of
information that does not have to be stolen. We.are witnessing a profound
crisis in the economic underpinnz.ngs of the postwar world. The behavior
of the world political economy is confounding experts who only a few months
ago professed to understand the "laws" under which the world-wide flow of
goods and services was supposedly operating. Today, it is commonplace to
read public admissions from such experts that they do not understand what
is going on--why we have inflation and recession at the same time, why the
old economic remedies such as the manipulation of interest rates do not
work. There is a crisis of understanding about what is happening to our
institutions, and it has assumed the status of a national security crisis
(as well as an international security crisis). The greatest cost to the U.S.
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 conceived it, was how to overturn a popular election in a foreign country
that produced a result the U.S. government did not like. Once defined
in this way, the problem became simple. The United States could employ
some of the same methods used in Guyana against Cheddi Jagan, in Guatemala
against Arbenz, in Brazil against Goulart. The information needed to carry
out such a policy was easy to identify and to obtain. But the problem of
Chile remains. Because the United States made it clear from the outset to
Allende's opposition that they did not need to compromise with the Unidad
Popular since they had the strong backing of the U.S. the internal politics
of the country became polarized. The Junta has not merely repealed the
reforms of Allende's abortive peaceful revolution. It has turned the clock
back two generations and in a burst of gunfire has obliterated reforms won
under conservative and Christian Democratic presidents. The economic
situation, bad under Allende, is now desperate. Inflation is worse than
in maintaining an anachronistic secret warfare department b dd
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its dar,~apge to the reputation of the nation and the corrosion of American
institutions, is that it distorts our own perspectives. We are spending
several billions a year acquiring knowledge that is useless for solving
our most urgent problems. There is a distinction,, as Marcus Raskin has
pointed out, between problem-creating knowledge and problem-solving
knowledge. Information wrested from poor countries to support subversion
is problem-creating knowledge because even when the information is
accurate and the political operations for which it is used do not backfire,
as in Singapore, Greece, and other cases discussed in this conference,
nothing is solved.
On June 27, 1970 Henry Kissinger at a meeting of the "Forty Committee"
declared, "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist
due to the irresponsiblity of its own people." The problem, as Kissinger
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ever. Large parts of the middle class are considerably worse off than
under the regime they were so happy to be rid of. The incompetance of
..the Junta has brought tens of thousands in the bottom strata of the
.population to the brink of starvation. (The price of food has risen
precipitously; real wages have fallen; and, incredibly, crops are being
exported to earn foreign exchange to buy manufactured goods from abroad.)
It is hard to see how from any point of view the "success" in Chile has
advanced the interests of the American people. (That it has advanced
the interests of a few U.S. firms that had been or were about to be
nationalized is clear.) Adding another "sick man" to the international,
economy is not going to solve the problems that now challenge our basic
institutions.
The intelligence gathered with respect go Chile was useful for
aggravating the economic problems of Chile but not for solving them.
That successful operation also had the effect of complicating U.S. relations
elsewhere in the hemisphere. In his State of the Union Speech delivered
a little over a week ago Mexico's President Luis Echevarria made it clear
that the lessons of the Chile "success" have not gone unnoticed:
[Terrorist groups are] easily manipulated by covert political
interests, whether national or international, that use them as
irresponsible instruments [for] acts of provocation against our
institutions.
This manipulation and control from outside is conducted with great
dexterity, and at times one might think that ...it is the work of
extreme leftist groups; but when one realized the ideological unpre-
paredness of these groups and that their object is really to provoke
repression, what one may call a "witch hunt", one is immediately led
to think that it could very well be that they are using covert
rr,ethods to provoke repression with the effect of halting the function
of our institutions, as has occurred in other countries, and to
cause the curtailing of our liberties when we have only just begun to
follow a policy of economic nationalism in our country. In several
Latin American countries, coups d'etat have been preceeded by rumor
campaigns that have their origin in certain irresponsible groups of
businessmen and have also been encouraged by these acts of terrorism
which attempt to sow confusion.
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 If in or outside of Mexico there'are interests that try to
d ivAprOVe& R4Wasd2004PM?1g1OF 3P$8IO1- 15"M 3 3-bn
1848 we lost half of the territory we inherited from our indiginous
and Spanish fathers, after an unjsut war with the U.S., in which
internal division played a fundamental role ...If these groups that
try to divide us wish some day to provoke the intervention in any form
by any of the powerful nations, let them know that we have full
historic awareness of what has happened in Mexico...
This is an extraordinary statement from the chief of a state as
thoroughly dependent upon the United States as Mexico. That the President
of Mexico would make such.a thinly veiled accusation against the United.
States is evidence not only of the depth of distrust which our "dirty
tricks" have earned us but it is also an indication of the erosion of
American power. Ironically, the U.S. spy network is creating a political
backlash in Thailand, Greece, as well as Mexico, with the result that
these traditional clients are seeking a more independent course. How
puch better it would have been for U.S.-Greek relations had the CIA apparatus
been withdrawn before it was expelled.
Thus the sort of knowledge developed by clandestine collection services
is in the present world situation problem-creating. The sort of knowledge
needed to solve the overwhelming institutional crises cannot be obtained
by adversary means. Cooperation and exchange of information--about the
workings of national economics, about the structural changes in the world
economy, about the successes and failures of social experiments, about the
impacts of domestic policies of one country on another--is absolutely
essential if any country is going to be able to develop a comprehensive
enough understanding of what is happening to the world political economy
in order to devise practical policies and solutions. The development
of a much higher level of international trust is a necessary precondition
for a serious cooperative assault on the real threats facing the American
people--inflation, unemployment, loss of liberty, and in the background,
nuclear war. The intelligence underworld is a serious obstacle to the
building of that new relationship between the United States and the world
now needecpp`r6vgd'FOr 2elease 2004/11/oi CIA-RDP88-01315R000200030003-0
8
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From time to time CIA officials emerge from Langley to reassure the
public that the tax dollars with which they support the intelligence
un erworle (amount undisclosed) are well spent. The classic argument in
support of a large secret warfare department is that other nations have
them too. The "clandestine mentality" pervades the Soviet Union and the
record of the KGB for murder, theft, torture, and forgery is probably
unmatched. But do criminal activities of other countries require us to
maintain our own? Certainly, some counter-intelligence effort against
penetration and manipulation of our government and theft of military
secrets is necessary. That is a job principally for the FBI to be carried
out within the framework of U.S. constitutional safeguards. As. the Watergate
experience demonstrates, there is a point rapidly reached at which the
costs of ferreting out "enemies" and preventing leaks far outweigh the
benefits. If the U.S. were out of the covert action business, its counter-
espionage requirements would be drastically reduced. Much effort is now
devoted to preventing the penetration of our intelligence underworld by
the Soviet intelligence underworld. If we did not have one, we would
create an unemployment problem for the KGB. Similarly, if what the U.S.
actually does in other countries did not diverge so sharply from what we
say we do, or,,to put it more bluntly, if habitual lying in.the "national
interest" were no longer a dictate of duty, then the government would not
need to spend so much money concealing things from other governments and from
the American people. But counter-espionage, which within limits is a
legitimate defensive activity, is one thing, and secret warfare against
other nations is another. (There is, to be sure, the risk that the one.
can be