Nobody Asked: Is It Moral?

It did not matter that much of the information had already been released --or leaked--to the public. The effect was still overwhelming: a stunning, dismaying indictment of U.S. intelligence agencies and six Presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, for having blithely violated democratic ideals and individual rights while gathering information at home or conducting clandestine operations abroad.

The two-volume, 815-page report released last week by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was 15 months in the making. It documents as never before how the White House and the baronies of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency took the law into their own hands in the cause of preserving liberty. To cure the sweeping excesses, the eleven-member Church committee--so named for its chairman, Idaho Democrat Frank Church--proposed some sweeping reforms, 183 in all. Yet many of the key reforms may well be gutted or killed by the full Senate.

Scarcely anyone who was involved in the operations--bugging phones, breaking into houses, slipping LSD to unsuspecting bar patrons, planning assassination attempts, undermining governments--seems to have wondered whether he was doing anything wrong. The values of the men who operated in the shadowy underground world were summed up by William C. Sullivan, for ten years the head of the FBI's domestic intelligence division: "Never once did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the question: 'Is this course of action ... lawful, is it legal, is it ethical or moral?' We never gave any thought to this line of reasoning, because we were just naturally pragmatic."

Foremost among the pragmatists were the six Presidents, Democrats and Republicans alike. Before World War II, F.D.R. authorized wiretaps of suspected "subversives" without ever defining just what a subversive was. He also asked the FBI to file the names of Americans who criticized his national defense policies and supported those of Colonel Charles Lindbergh, who was then preaching isolationism. With similar Executive arrogance and in the same tradition, the Nixon Administration was installing illegal wiretaps and using the Internal Revenue Service to hound its domestic "enemies" 35 years later.

There was guilt aplenty to go round.

As U.S. Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy gathered information on the "sugar lobby" by tapping ten telephone lines of one law firm, plus the phones of two lobbyists, three Executive Branch officials, a congressional staffer and North Carolina's Congressman Harold D. Cooley, then chairman of the House Agriculture Committee. A squad of FBI men used informants, undercover agents and bugging to let Lyndon Johnson know what was happening behind the scenes at the 1964 Democratic convention in Atlantic City.

"Black Bag." Trying to sniff out subversion, the FBI, the CIA, the Army and the National Security Agency violated Americans' rights over the years by opening some 380,000 first-class letters, staging hundreds of "black bag" break-ins, securing copies of millions of private cables and tapping an unknown number of telephones.

With a paranoid compulsion, the agencies developed lists of troublesome or potentially troublesome Americans. These included members of organizations on the right (the John Birch Society, Ku Klux Klan) as well as the left (the Socialist Workers Party, Students for a Democratic Society). The FBI kept handy a list of people--26,000 strong at one point--who were to be detained during a national emergency (including Novelist Norman Mailer). The Army accumulated the names of 100,000 people who were involved, even tangentially, in political protest activities (including Illinois Senator Adlai Stevenson III, who made the list for merely attending a peaceful political rally watched by the service's agents). The CIA surpassed everyone, maintaining a catchall index of 1.5 million names taken from the 250,000 letters opened and photographed by the agency. Noted the Senate report: "Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies, and too much information has been collected."

Looking for leads, the organizations would infiltrate almost anything. The

FBI dutifully investigated women's liberation groups and decided to keep up the surveillance, even though they appeared to be concerned just with freeing "women from the humdrum existence of being only a wife and mother." In 1941, the FBI began an intensive probe of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, after 15 black mess stewards in the Navy protested against racial discrimination. For 25 years, the bureau hunted for signs of Communist influence in the N.A.A.C.P., although a report in the first year of the investigation said the organization had a "strong tendency" to "steer clear of Communist activities." There were more chilling examples of excesses by the FBI. Operation COINTELPRO (counterintelligence program), which sought to disrupt dissident groups, tried to get members of the Black Panthers and a black activist group based in California, US, Inc., to kill one another. The cold-eyed crusade against Martin Luther King Jr.--"the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country"--included not only the familiar taping of his bedroom activities but also plans to harass his widow after his assassination.

In the past year and a half, the U.S. intelligence community has taken a number of steps to correct its faults. The CIA has severely limited its activities at home. U.S. Attorney General Edward Levi has laid down some strict ground rules for the FBI. Even so, the Senate committee was unappeased. It recommended 96 steps to make sure that the domestic intelligence apparatus would concern itself only with the legitimate goals of catching spies and stopping crime, including acts of terrorism.

The committee urged the passage of laws limiting intelligence probes to terrorist action and hostile foreign espionage when there was a clear-cut and immediate danger, and the threat is certainly there. Of the 1,079 Soviet officials assigned to the U.S. in 1975, more than 60% were intelligence agents according to the FBI.

Own Airlines. The committee recommended that wiretapping, bugging and break-ins occur only after proper court orders. Within the U.S., the CIA would be permitted to act only to protect its own employees or infiltrate a domestic group to establish "cover" for a foreign intelligence mission.

In describing U.S. operations overseas, the committee noted that the CIA was so autonomous that it ran its own airlines and set up its own businesses to act as covers for agents and even created its own insurance companies, whose total assets amount to more than $30 million. More disturbing to the committee was the fact that the CIA put academics, newsmen and missionaries on its payroll and propagandized not only foreigners but Americans. CIA types wrote books backing up U.S. policy that were made available in the U.S.--sometimes after they had been favorably reviewed by other CIA types.

The report itself was evidence of the agency's continuing clout. At the urgent request of CIA officials, some 200 pages of material on secret overseas operations were deleted from the final version, and many portions of the surviving text were heavily censored. These changes may have been justified, but the CIA even tried to delete transcripts of hearings that had already been publicly telecast. At this, however, the Senators plucked up their courage and drew the line.

The committee did get across its main point: from 1961 to 1975, the CIA conducted some 900 major covert operations overseas. Many of these not only were of questionable value but occurred without proper supervision by the White House or oversight by Congress.

For a while, the committee gave serious consideration to proposing a total ban on all covert activities, reasoning that they were simply incompatible with the tenets of a democratic society. But the final report concluded that the U.S. should be able to mount undercover operations to counter grave threats to the nation. Last February, President Gerald Ford announced new Executive guidelines to control the CIA'S covert activities, but the committee remained unsatisfied, insisting that the restrictions be made even tougher and written into law.

To establish clear-cut responsibilities and lines of authority for foreign and domestic intelligence operations, the committee recommended the formation of a special watchdog committee in the Senate (leaving it up to the House to enter into a joint committee later on, if it wishes). Under the reorganization recommended by the Senators, the new committee would be able to pass on the foreign intelligence budget (which is now considered so vital a secret that the figure--estimated at about $10 billion --was eliminated from the report at the request of the CIA). What is more, the President would be compelled by law to inform the committee before any significant undercover operation was undertaken--thereby giving the members a chance to object to, although not veto the enterprise. Political assassinations would be forbidden by statute, as they now are by Ford's decree. In addition, the committee would ban by law any attempt to subvert a democratic government--a step that Ford says he favors.

There are already strong indications that the Senate is not prepared to approve the radical new reforms or even the creation of a new oversight committee. G.O.P. Senators John Tower and Barry Goldwater refused to sign the report, arguing that its strict recommendations would make it impossible for the CIA to operate effectively. The proposed change, said Tower, vice chairman of the committee, "could endanger American security."

Heated Issue. Under the present law, six committees on the Hill (three in the Senate and three in the House) are charged with overseeing intelligence operations. Their oversight has been infrequent and ineffectual. Yet their chairmen are reluctant to share any power. In addition, Church and his allies face another problem as they try to push through their proposals: growing apathy. Because the whole process has taken so long, and so much has been written and said, controlling the CIA is no longer a heated political issue. The substantial reforms initiated by Ford, the CIA and the Department of Justice have also eased the pressure.

There is, finally, a real fear among some Senators that a committee so powerful and fully informed could do profound damage if it sprang any leaks. Last week the Senate Rules Committee voted 5 to 4 against proposals by the Church committee to set up a new watchdog unit to keep an eye on the intelligence agencies. But the fight is not over yet. This month Church plans to carry the struggle to the floor of the Senate, where he feels the younger liberals in both parties may help him carry the day. The "crucial" element of reform, says Church, is a committee that can pass on the CIA's budget and learn about its planned covert activities in advance. Adds Minnesota's Walter Mondale, chairman of the subcommittee on domestic operations: "In the past, Congress has been able to excuse its lack of vigilance on the grounds that it didn't know [what was happening]. Now it does. And if we know it and don't do anything about it, then we're really saying, 'O.K., let 'er rip.' "

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