Rocky's Probe: Bringing the CIA to Heel

Rocky's Probe: Bringing the CIA to Heel

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated... --Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

The [CIA] shall have no police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers, or internal-security functions. --National Security Act of 1947

In defiance of Constitution and statute, the Central Intelligence Agency has a sorry record of illegal snooping on Americans that stretches back more than two decades. It has burgled and bugged U.S. homes, tapped citizens' telephones and opened their mail. It has unlawfully infiltrated antiwar groups and black radical organizations and accumulated 7,200 files on those it considered to be dissidents. It has improperly, and sometimes unwittingly, allowed itself to be used by Presidents and their aides for political purposes.

Those were the main findings of an eight-member presidential commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller after a five-month investigation involving 2,900 pages of documents and testimony from 51 witnesses. Released last week by President Gerald Ford, the commission's 299-page report emphasized that "the great majority of the CIA's domestic activities comply with its statutory authority." But the panel found that on numerous occasions, the CIA has violated its charter, which restricts it for the most part to foreign operations. Congress originally set up the agency in 1947 to gather foreign intelligence. Later, as directed by the National Security Council, the CIA undertook covert operations to counter Communist influence in other countries. But the agency has always been prohibited from domestic activities, except those that supported its foreign mission.

The Rockefeller commission found that some of the CIA's illegal activities were brought about by pressure from Presidents, chiefly Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Others fell within the gray area between the CIA's legal responsibilities and activities prohibited it by law. But all of the improper activities, the commission declared, "should be criticized and not permitted to happen again--both in the light of the limits imposed on the agency by law and as a matter of public policy." To that end, the commission made 30 recommendations designed primarily to tighten presidential and congressional control over future CIA operations.

The commission's investigation largely confirmed allegations--made initially by New York Times Reporter Seymour Hersh--that the CIA had conducted a "massive" domestic intelligence operation in the U.S. during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The commission did not use the word massive, perhaps because CIA Director William Colby and his predecessors had denied that there were illegal activities of that magnitude. Colby admitted only a relative handful of CIA abuses in a report to the Senate Armed Services Committee (TIME, Jan. 27). But the commission used other words, such as "considerable," "large-scale" and "substantial," that left no doubt that its members had considered the extent of the CIA's improper or illegal activities to be as broad and disturbing as the agency's more responsible critics had claimed.

The report's detail and comprehensiveness surprised many Administration opponents, especially congressional Democrats, who had feared a whitewash. Still they are unlikely to be satisfied that the entire record has been laid bare until after the Senate committee finishes investigating the CIA later this year. The chairman of the Senate probe, Democrat Frank Church of Idaho, declared that the Rockefeller commission report "may represent just the tip of the iceberg." Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield called the report "good but not complete." In particular, the Democrats were disappointed that Ford had not released 85 pages of the original report that dealt with charges of CIA involvement in assassination plots against foreign leaders. Ford explained that the investigation of assassination plots, which he had asked the commission to look into only after its work was well under way, was "incomplete and involves extremely sensitive matters." But he promised to deliver all of the commission's evidence, including materials on assassinations, to the congressional investigating committees. In addition, he turned the same evidence over to the Justice Department and ordered it to determine whether criminal charges should be brought against anyone because of the CIA abuses.

Even without the section on assassinations, the report provided a wide-ranging picture of CIA misdeeds that went far beyond both previous press accounts and Colby's statements. The major findings:

MAIL OPENINGS. Starting during the cold war, the CIA conducted four programs to examine the mails between the U.S. and Communist countries, chiefly the Soviet Union. The projects were in New York, from 1952 to 1973; in San Francisco, during four separate periods of a month or less in 1969, 1970 and 1971; in Hawaii in late 1954 and early 1955; and in New Orleans for three weeks in 1957. The chief purposes were to keep track of Americans who were corresponding with Communist officials and to assess Communist secret-writing and censorship techniques.

Initially, the CIA led postal officials to believe that the projects would involve only examination of the outside of the envelopes ("mail cover" in CIA parlance), which is legal. But apparently unknown to Postmaster General Arthur Summer field, his successors and most other top postal officials, the CIA used its mail cover to open many of the letters, which is illegal unless authorized by a search warrant. In the last full year of the New York operation, for example, eight CIA employees examined the envelopes of more than 2.3 million items of mail between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, photographed about 33,000 and opened about 8,700, most of those in the latter category, because their senders or intended recipients were on a CIA list of dissidents or suspected Communist sympathizers.

The commission found that top CIA officials knew that the mail openings were illegal. For example, an internal CIA memorandum warned in 1962 that "a flap would put us out of business immediately and give rise to grave charges of criminal misuse of the mail by Government agencies." Similarly the commission learned that during one of the San Francisco operations, CIA representatives abstracted and "concealed selected pieces of mail in an equipment case or a handbag," apparently without the knowledge of a postal official who was present. Later CIA officials analyzed the contents of the purloined letters, resealed the envelopes and surreptitiously returned them to the post office.

OPERATION CHAOS. During the antiwar and black radical protests of the late 1960s and early '70s, both Presidents Johnson and Nixon were obsessed with the idea that the dissidents were financed or otherwise influenced by foreign subversive groups, and put great pressure on the CIA to find evidence to prove it. According to the commission, the agency's repeated reports that it could find no significant foreign connections with domestic disorders led only to more insistent White House demands that CIA officials look harder and "remedy any lack of resources for gathering information."

In 1967 the CIA established within its counterintelligence staff a special group, called Operation CHAOS, ostensibly to gather information abroad about U.S. dissidents' foreign contacts. Located in a vaulted basement area at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., CHAOS operated under secrecy that was excessive by even CIA standards, leading the commission to conclude that top CIA officials knew "that the operation, at least in part, was close to being a proscribed activity." For instance, CHAOS' chief reported directly to then CIA Director Richard Helms, rather than to Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton, who was not even informed of all of the operation's activities. Eventually, CHAOS had 52 full-time employees and about 30 part-time agents and accumulated some 13,000 files, including 7,200 on American citizens and organizations. Drawing from those files and related documents, officials developed an index of 300,000 names, which were stored in a CIA computer. Some of its entries were absurd as well as illegal (because the operation exceeded the CIA's statutory authority). For example, CHAOS analysts opened a file on Grove Press after the firm published a book by British Double Agent Kim Philby. The file was so unduly complete that it even contained reviews of the sexually explicit movie / Am Curious (Yellow) because it was distributed by Grove Press.

Although Operation CHAOS' official purpose--keeping track of U.S. radicals' overseas contacts--fell well within the CIA charter, some of its activities were illegal. On a number of occasions, agent recruits who had infiltrated dissident groups to establish cover before going abroad reported improperly on radicals' domestic activities. Such reporting, when warranted, is the legal province of the FBI. Further, the CIA used one agent to report on major domestic demonstrations in 1969, and another to obtain information about the leaders of an unnamed group in the U.S. The agency questioned still a third agent about dissidents in 1971 and passed his answers on to the FBI. Helms told the commission that he was unaware of the domestic use of agents--one of the rare instances in which a CIA director claimed ignorance of abuses turned up by the panel.

In another operation, the CIA'S office of security paid about a dozen agents a monthly retainer of $100 or less in 1967-68 to infiltrate several activist organizations in the Washington area, including the Women's Strike for Peace and the Congress of Racial Equality. The ostensible purpose was to keep the CIA informed of plans for demonstrations that might endanger its employees, buildings or operations. To that end, the office compiled a weekly situation report and calendar of planned demonstrations that was shared with the Secret Service. That office also maintained files on as many as 800 dissenters.

But the CIA also used its agents to ferret out information about the organizations' financing and to photograph their leaders and determine their attitudes and home addresses. When the Washington police department organized a similar undercover operation, the CIA stopped its own project as unnecessary. Still the commission concluded that the CIA operation "went far beyond steps necessary to protect the agency's own facilities, personnel and operations, and therefore exceeded the CIA'S statutory authority."

SECURITY INVESTIGATIONS. By law the CIA is responsible for investigating breaches of its own security. The commission found that some of the methods used by the CIA to scrutinize the activities of its employees have been illegal or at the least of questionable propriety. For example, the commission turned up twelve break-ins, the last in 1971; 32 domestic wiretaps, the last in 1965; and 32 instances of bugging, the last in 1968. In a footnote, however, the report warned that "there may actually have been more 'mike and wire' operations than the commission has otherwise been able to document." In one case in the late 1940s and early '50s, the CIA used agent surveillance, wiretaps and bugs to keep tab for eight years on an employee who was suspected of having contacts with Communist sympathizers; he eventually was fired. In the late 1960s the CIA cut through the walls of an employee's apartment to plant seven microphones; no evidence of disloyalty was found.

The commission reported no evidence that CIA investigations of security breaches were directed against any Congressman, judge or other public official. But the panel learned that the CIA tapped without proper judicial authorization the telephones of three newsmen in 1959 and in 1962 and assigned agents to follow other reporters in 1967, '71 and '72 in an effort to identify their sources.

WHITE HOUSE PRESSURES. The commission found that on several occasions the CIA gave in to improper pressure from the Nixon White House in providing help to presidential aides. As Watergate investigators had determined previously, the CIA in 1971 drew up a psychiatric profile of antiwar Activist Daniel Ellsberg; aides to President Nixon intended to use it to discredit Ellsberg's motives for leaking the Pentagon papers. That same year, the CIA gave Watergate Burglar E. Howard Hunt, a former agency employee, bogus identification papers, disguise materials, a camera and tape recorder that he later used in the break-in at the Beverly Hills office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding.

Nonetheless, the Rockefeller panel turned up no evidence that the CIA had known about or participated in the Fielding and Watergate break-ins or aided the White House coverup. But the commission roundly criticized the agency for not willingly cooperating with the Watergate investigation from the outset. At first, for example, the CIA withheld some information about Watergate suspects who were former employees or agents. Moreover, the commission decided that Helms had used "poor judgment" in destroying tapes and transcripts in 1973 that were related to the agency's dealings with Hunt. Said the report: "It reflects a serious lack of comprehension of the obligation of any citizen to produce for investigating authorities evidence in his possession of possible relevance to criminal conduct."

The report also disclosed that in the spring of 1970, at the request of the White House, the CIA improperly provided $33,655.68 to help pay for replies to people who had written to President Nixon after the invasion of Cambodia. The White House sought the funds from the CIA apparently because its "secret budget provided an opportunity to hide the expenditures." In 1971 Nixon made another improper demand on Helms for highly sensitive files relating to the 1958 U.S. landing in Lebanon, the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and the 1963 fall of the Diem government in South Viet Nam. Nixon told Helms that he wanted the documents as part of his short-lived program to declassify Government documents; if that had been true, the request would have been perfectly proper. But in fact, the commission reported, Nixon hoped that the documents would provide information that would discredit critics of his policies, particularly Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts.

CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS. For 20 years, the Justice Department improperly allowed the CIA the sole authority to decide whether to prosecute federal criminal charges involving CIA employees and agents. Never confirmed in writing, the agreement apparently was made orally in 1954 by then Deputy Attorney General William Rogers, who later served as Eisenhower's Attorney General and Nixon's Secretary of State, and then CIA Director Allen Dulles. Top agency officials had argued that the arrangement was necessary to eliminate any danger of public disclosure of CIA operations and procedures. So secret was the deal that according to Justice Department Press Officer Robert Havel, several of the Attorneys General in the ensuing years were not told of it.

During the 20-year period, no CIA employee was prosecuted on federal charges, apparently because of the agreement. Offenders were simply quietly weeded out of the agency. The commission found "nothing to indicate that the CIA abused the function." Nonetheless, the report strongly criticized the Justice Department for having illegally "abdicated its statutory duties" in relinquishing the authority to prosecute American spooks and the CIA for getting involved "directly in forbidden law-enforcement activities." Attorney General Edward Levi ended the agreement last January soon after learning about it. Aides reported that he is prepared to prosecute, where it is warranted, CIA employees and agents for any crimes committed while the agreement was in force, though the statute of limitations for most cases expired in 1970.

DEFECTORS. Generally the CIA resettles defectors to the U.S. within a few months. In one case, however, the commission discovered that the CIA had illegally held a defector against his will --in effect, imprisoned him without trial --in an unnamed CIA installation for about three years while the agency determined whether he was a genuine defector or a spy. According to the report, "for much of this time, the defector was held in solitary confinement under extremely spartan living conditions." Eventually, he was released and, despite his treatment, became a U.S. citizen. In another case, the panel reported, "a defector was physically abused, although not seriously injured." The report included no other details except that the CIA employee involved was fired.

BRAINWASHING. Concerned over Soviet and North Korean brainwashing techniques, the CIA in the late 1940s and early '50s began testing the effects of behavior-influencing drugs, radiation and electric shock. Many of the records were later destroyed. But the commission learned that the CIA had fed LSD to a number of unsuspecting people between 1953 and '63. In one case in 1953, an employee of the Army developed such serious side effects that he was sent to New York for psychiatric treatment. Several days later, he jumped to his death from the tenth-floor window of his hotel room. According to the report, Dulles reprimanded the two CIA employees involved, but the study continued for another ten years, even though several other test subjects became ill for hours or days.

KENNEDY ASSASSINATION. The commission dismissed recurring theories that the CIA was somehow involved in the assassination of President John Kennedy. The report rejects as "farfetched speculation" the claim that the agency had connections with either Assassin Lee Harvey Oswald or Nightclub Owner Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald two days after Kennedy's death. Similarly the commission dismantled the theory that E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis, a sometime CIA informer, had participated in the assassination. As evidence, proponents have cited newsmen's photographs of three men taken into custody by Dallas police after the assassination; two of the men, identified by police as derelicts, bear a faint resemblance to Hunt and Sturgis. At the commission's request, FBI Photoanalyst Lyndal Shaneyfelt studied the photographs and determined that they were not of Hunt or Sturgis. Moreover, the panel found no evidence that either man was in Dallas that day.

Nor could the commission find any evidence that Hunt and Sturgis had known each other before 1971. One unidentified witness asserted that Sturgis, born Frank Fiorini, had taken his name from the fictional character Hank Sturgis in Hunt's 1949 novel Bimini Run. But the commission found court records that Sturgis had changed his name in 1952 at the request of his mother, who had divorced his father and married a man named Ralph Sturgis.

Although it could not reassess all of the monumental Kennedy assassination evidence, the panel agreed with the Warren Commission that Oswald had acted alone. Some critics have claimed that two bystanders' movies of the assassination recorded the indistinct images of other gunmen on a grassy knoll near where Kennedy was shot. But the Rockefeller commission found that the vague shapes were "merely the momentary image produced by sunlight, shadows and leaves."

One of the movies also recorded violent back-and-forth movements of Kennedy's head and body, leading some people to believe that he was struck by bullets from two directions: from the rear by Oswald and from the front by someone else. But medical witnesses told the Rockefeller panel that the movements were caused by a neuromuscular reaction to the bullet entering from behind and that there was no medical evidence that Kennedy was shot from any other direction. In fact, one witness said, the motions of Kennedy's body could not possibly have been caused by a frontal bullet's impact. The report said that the witness "attributed the popular misconception on this subject to the dramatic effects employed in television and motion picture productions."

RECOMMENDATIONS. To prevent future CIA abuses, the commission made 30 recommendations. The three most important:

1) Congress should establish a joint committee to supervise the CIA'S operations in place of the four subcommittees that have loosely and inadequately overseen the agency since 1947.

2) Congress should give "careful consideration" to making the CIA budget public "at least to some extent" to eliminate partly the pervading atmosphere of secrecy, which the commission considered to be "one of the underlying causes of the problems confronting the CIA."

3) The functions of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, now a toothless body of distinguished citizens, should be expanded to include full oversight of the CIA. To do the job, the board should be given a full-time chairman and a full-time staff.

The report also recommended a number of changes that would tighten internal controls over employees. Among them were proposals to add a second deputy director for administration and to expand the role of the CIA's inspector general to include investigation of reports by employees that the agency was violating the law.

But the commission found no way to shield the CIA director from improper White House pressures in the future, other than to admonish both Presidents and directors to adhere strictly to the CIA charter. The exhortations struck many experts as worthless. As one Rockefeller commission staff member put it: "You need oversight of the presidency more than you need oversight of the CIA." Ray Cline, a former CIA official and director of intelligence for the State Department who knew both Johnson and Nixon, noted: "They were very strong-minded men. A director of Central Intelligence who said, 'Go to hell' to one of them would not have been director of Central Intelligence next day." As one solution to the problem, Church favors fines or prison sentences for CIA directors if they violate the law, reasoning that penalties would give them a much stronger case for resisting a President's improper blandishments.

SENATE INQUIRY. That doubtless will be one of the Church committee's recommendations when it completes its investigation of the CIA at the end of the year. Another probe of the agency was to begin in the House last week but broke down because of a prolonged controversy over the admission by the investigating committee's chairman, Lucien Nedzi, that he had been briefed by the CIA in 1973 about its involvement in assassination plans and domestic espionage. Because of the seeming conflict of interest--the committee might have to investigate Nedzi's failure to act on the matter--five of his six Democratic colleagues insisted that he resign. Nedzi did so last week. The squabble virtually ensured that the main investigation will be left to the Church committee.

Church scorned the Rockefeller commission for having "finessed" the charges of CIA assassination plots and promised that his committee would concentrate on them in hopes of finishing that part of its investigation and issuing a report by mid-July. Last week, however, the committee was stymied temporarily when Robert Maheu, a former associate of reclusive Billionaire Howard Hughes, refused to answer questions about his role as a liaison between the CIA and organized crime figures in an alleged plot to assassinate Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro. The committee has voted to try to get Maheu to testify by granting him limited immunity from prosecution. CIA schemes to do away with Castro sometimes reached bizarre proportions. TIME learned last week that in 1960 some agency officials proposed to kill him with poisoned cigars. The CIA's medical section even prepared a box of suitably doctored fine Havana cigars, though the cigars seem never to have left the laboratory; as other CIA employees apparently pointed out, there was no way of making sure that Castro would not pass them out to other people.

The CIA has also been accused of being involved in plots to kill South Viet Nam's President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, Haitian Dictator Franc,ois ("Papa Doc") Duvalier that same year, Congo Nationalist Patrice Lumumba in 1961 and Dominican Republic Dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1961. Last week TIME Correspondent Bernard Diederich, who has spent four years researching a book on Trujillo's assassination, reported that the CIA actually was involved in three plots to kill the dictator. In 1958 the agency promised to provide a group of dissident Dominicans with a sharpshooter and rifle if they could induce Dominican General Rodriguez Reyes to lead a coup after Trujillo's death. The plot backfired when Reyes told a conspirator: "Trujillo made me, and I am a Trujillo man."

Two years later the CIA brought 60 Dominican exiles to a secret site in Venezuela, intending to use them as the spearhead of an invasion force to overthrow and kill Trujillo. But the Dominicans decided that the mission would be suicidal and backed out. In 1961, the CIA turned over three fast-firing M-l carbines and 500 rounds of ammunition concealed in a box of groceries to an intermediary for delivery to Angel Severo Cabral, a member of a group of right-wing Dominicans who were plotting against Trujillo. They apparently had expected more extensive material help from the CIA. When Cabral saw the rifles, he angrily declared: "This is the pyramid of arms, the arsenal we were promised that wouldn't fit into a garage?" In any case, four of the conspirators took one of the rifles with them when they ambushed the dictator in May 1961, though they actually gunned him down with a sawed-off shotgun fired at pointblank range as he cringed by the side of his car.

In fact the Rockefeller commission delved into assassination plots against only two targets--Trujillo and Castro. Both probes were incomplete, but a commission member reported that no evidence was turned up that implicated any Presidents. In each case, he said, "it doesn't really track much higher than someone in the CIA saying that he thinks he talked to someone on the National Security Council staff, and the NSC people saying that they can't remember anything about it. The inference is that the CIA wouldn't have gone off on its own without direction from above, but it's only an inference." After the hearings are over and all of the evidence has been collected, the investigators must still find a solution to the difficult problem of how to prevent future CIA misdeeds without impairing the agency's ability to carry out its legitimate--and vital--foreign intelligence mission.

The U.S. obviously cannot afford to disband the CIA; it would simply have to be reinvented in another guise. For all the progress of detente, the world is still a dangerous place; other nations have industrious and aggressive secret services at work. Nonetheless, ways must be found to curb the CIA's excesses, to ensure that the agency operates in the nation's best interests. The Rockefeller commission dealt with one part of the problem: how to make certain that U.S. spies restrict their snooping to enemies abroad. The commission left to the Congress the equally important problem of how to prevent CIA excesses abroad, such as assassination plots and other flagrant abuses of American principles. Before those investigations have run their course, the debate may become far more intricate. For those issues are not bounded by clear rules of law but precepts of morality and, ultimately, the way the U.S. perceives its responsibilities as a civilized nation.

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