Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI

Challenging the Secret Government

Challenging the Secret Government

The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI

Kathryn S. Olmsted

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill and London

© 1996 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Olmsted, Kathryn S.

Challenging the secret government: the post-

Watergate investigations of the CIA and FBI / by

Kathryn S. Olmsted.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2254-x (cloth: alk. paper).—

ISBN 0-8078-4562-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Intelligence service—United States. 2. United States. Central Intelligence Agency. 3. United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation. 4. Watergate Affair, 1972-1974. I. Title.

JK468.16045 1996

320.973—dc20 95-23354

CIP

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

00 99 98 97 96 5 4 3 2 1

THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY MANUFACTURED.

To Bill

You peel off Watergate and you find the Plumbers and the Ellsberg break-in. Peel off the Plumbers and you find the 1970 Huston plan to use the CIA and FBI for domestic surveillance, wiretapping and break-ins. But what would you find if you peeled off another layer and had a close look at that secret world from which these things had been launched?

Daniel Schorr

My 17 Months on the CIA Watch

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Secrecy and Democracy

The Press, the Public, and the Secret Government to 1975

2. Trusting the Honorable Men

The Post-Watergate Press and the CIA

3. The Meat Ax or the Scalpel?

The Congressional Investigations Begin

4. Sensational Scoops and Self-Censorship

The Journalistic Investigations

5. Abuses and Aberrations

The Church Committee Investigation

6. Challenging the System

Otis Pike’s Investigation

7. Counterattack

The Investigators under Siege

8. Unwelcome Truths

The End of the Investigations

Epilogue

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

President Gerald Ford meets with Vice President Nelson Rockefeller in the Oval Office in December 1974 50

Senator Frank Church of Idaho 54

Vice President Rockefeller presides over a meeting of the President’s Commission on CIA Activities within the United States on 13 January 1975 83

A meeting of the Church committee 92

President Ford meets with members of the Church committee on 5 March 1975 to negotiate the committee’s access to documents 104

Senator Church reads his committee’s assassination report, which was released on 20 November 1975 106

Representative Otis Pike of New York 118

President Ford meets with members of the Pike committee on 26 September 1975 to devise an agreement on the release of classified documents 130

Army pallbearers carry the casket of assassinated CIA officer Richard Welch out of the Fort Meyer Memorial Chapel following funeral services on 6 January 1976 152

President Ford escorts the widow of Richard Welch, Maria Cristina Welch, to her motorcade following funeral services for her husband 153

Acknowledgments

Many people have helped me complete this project. The University of California at Davis provided several research grants and fellowships, and the Gerald R. Ford Foundation and Phi Beta Kappa supplied money for travel and research.

The archivists at the Gerald R. Ford Library were very helpful, especially Helmi Raaska and David Horrocks. I also received cheerful assistance from Mary Carter and Alan Virta at the Frank Church Collection at the Boise State University Library. I wish to thank Journalism History for permission to reprint portions of an essay published in volume 19, number 2 (summer 1993).

I am also grateful to all of the people who granted me interviews. I especially thank Doris McClory, who shared her hospitality with me and allowed me to peruse the files of her late husband, Robert McClory.

Roland Marchand, Michael Smith, Paul Goodman, and Larry Berman provided encouragement and constructive criticism along the way. Michael Schudson read an early draft of the manuscript and made some astute suggestions.

I could not have written this book without the loving support of my parents. They made great sacrifices to give me the best education possible. Finally, my largest debt is to my husband, Bill, who read every chapter at least three times. Without his encouragement, interest, and editing skills, my task in writing this book would have been far more difficult.

Challenging the Secret Government

Introduction

When Richard Nixon resigned in August 1974, the United States concluded one of the most traumatic chapters in its history. During the Watergate scandal, Americans had been shocked by the crimes of the Nixon presidency. Investigations by the press and Congress had exposed previously unimaginable levels of corruption and conspiracy in the executive branch. The public’s faith in government had been shaken; indeed, the entire system had been tested. Now, with Nixon’s resignation, two years of agonizing revelations finally seemed to be over. The system had worked.

Yet only four months later, New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh disclosed that the government’s crimes went beyond Watergate. After months of persistent digging, Hersh had unearthed a new case of the imperial presidency’s abuse of secrecy and power: a massive domestic spying program by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). According to Hersh, the CIA had violated its charter and broken the law by launching a spying program of Orwellian dimensions against American dissidents during the Vietnam War. The Times called it son of Watergate.

These revelations produced a dramatic response from the newly energized post-Watergate Congress and press. Both houses of Congress mounted extensive, year-long investigations of the intelligence community. These highly publicized inquiries, headed by experienced investigators Senator Frank Church and Congressman Otis Pike, produced shocking accusations of murder plots and poison caches, of FBI corruption and CIA incompetence. In addition to the congressional inquiries, the press, seemingly at the height of its power after Watergate, launched investigations of its own. The New York Times continued to crusade against CIA abuses; the Washington Post exposed abuses and illegalities committed by the FBI; and CBS’s Daniel Schorr shocked the nation by revealing that there might be literal skeletons in the CIA closet as a result of its assassination plots.

In this charged atmosphere, editorial writers, columnists, political scientists, historians, and even former officials of the CIA weighed in with various suggestions for reforming an agency that many agreed had become a monster.¹ Several policymakers, including presidential candidates Fred Harris and Morris Udall, called for massive restructuring or abolition of the CIA. Media and political pundits suggested banning CIA covert operations; transferring most CIA functions to the Pentagon or the State Department; or, at the very least, devising a new, strict charter for all members of the intelligence community.²

Few barriers seemed to stand in the way of such reforms. The liberal, post-Watergate Congress faced an appointed president who did not appear to have the strength to resist this tidal shift in attitude, as Senator Church called it.³ Change seemed so likely in early 1975 that a writer for The Nation declared the heyday of the National Security State to be over, at least temporarily.⁴

But a year and a half later, when the Pike and Church committees finally finished their work, the passion for reform had cooled. The House overwhelmingly rejected the work of the Pike committee and voted to suppress its final report. It even refused to set up a standing intelligence committee.⁵ The Senate dealt more favorably with the Church committee, but it too came close to rejecting all of the committee’s recommendations. Only last-minute parliamentary maneuvering enabled Church to salvage one reform, the creation of a new standing committee on intelligence. The proposed charter for the intelligence community, though its various components continued to be hotly debated for several years, never came to pass.

The investigations failed to promote the careers of those who had inspired and led them. Daniel Schorr, the CBS reporter who had advanced the CIA story at several important points and eventually had become part of the story himself, was investigated by Congress, threatened with jail, and fired by CBS for his role in leaking the suppressed Pike report. Seymour Hersh’s exposés were dismissed by his peers as overwritten, over-played, under-researched and underproven.⁶ Otis Pike, despite the many accomplishments of his committee, found his name linked with congressional sensationalism, leaks, and poor administration. Frank Church’s role in the investigation failed to boost his presidential campaign, forced him to delay his entry into the race, and, he thought, might have cost him the vice presidency.⁷

The targets of the investigation had the last laugh on the investigators. When all is said and done, what did it achieve? asked Richard Helms, the former director of the CIA who was at the heart of many of the scandals unearthed by Congress and the media. Where is the legislation, the great piece of legislation, that was going to come out of the Church committee hearings? I haven’t seen it.⁸ Hersh, the reporter who prompted the inquiries, was also unimpressed by the investigators’ accomplishments. They generated a lot of new information, but ultimately they didn’t come up with much, he said.⁹ Why were the early high expectations of Hersh, Schorr, Pike, and Church not met? Why did so little reform result from such extensive investigations?

Scholars have previously examined these investigations as case studies in public policymaking. Loch Johnson has related his personal experience as a Church committee staff member in A Season of Inquiry: Congress and Intelligence.¹⁰ Frank J. Smist, Jr., and Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones have included chapters on the Church and Pike committees in their larger studies of congressional oversight of intelligence in the post–World War II United States.¹¹

Beyond their obvious importance to policy studies, however, the intelligence investigations of 1975 are significant historical events of post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America. They provide insight into how Americans understood and reacted to the lessons of a very divisive war and their greatest political scandal.

These investigations illustrate a historic moment in post-1945 American history: the breakdown of the Cold War consensus. As Godfrey Hodgson has pointed out, U.S. foreign policy during the 1950s and early 1960s was supported by a broad, almost universal spectrum of Americans from left to right. This was the foreign policy of the liberal consensus.¹² Conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats alike agreed on the need for an aggressive, anticommunist foreign policy, including overt and covert intervention abroad. Even the most liberal policymakers in this era agreed that the president needed extraordinary power and secrecy to meet the Communist threat.

But the defeat in Vietnam and the humiliation of Watergate shattered this consensus. In Congress and the mainstream media, the boundaries of debate suddenly expanded. Elite opinion leaders were willing to question institutions that had never been challenged before. Nowhere was the resulting excitement, conflict, and confusion more evident than in the intelligence investigations. These inquiries provoked a monumental clash between the legislative and executive branches, raising fears that a system stabilized after Nixon’s resignation might now collapse. They also prompted a battle within the media, as journalists were forced to reassess their coverage of national security issues for the past three decades.

The stakes during the year of intelligence, as the New York Times came to call it, were high. The congressional investigators, by exposing the past abuses of the secret government and assessing the risks and benefits of covert action, were challenging the foreign policy of the Cold War. The executive branch, in response, worked frantically to restore the powers of the presidency and to limit the scope of the investigations. Members of the media, for all their enthusiasm about the opportunities to publish prize-winning investigative stories, hesitated to break their long tradition of deference in national security coverage. The public, shocked by the inquiries’ revelations, soon became disillusioned with the secret agencies and with the investigators.

The investigations raised basic questions about the nature of power in the post–World War II United States. Had Watergate exposed a systemic problem requiring structural solutions, or was it the unfortunate product of an outlaw president and his unethical advisers? After Vietnam and Watergate, should the media and Congress be more skeptical when presidents defended secrecy in the name of national security? Should congressional committees and individual journalists ignore presidential pleas for secrecy? Did the Cold War make it necessary for the government to pursue an amoral, clandestine foreign policy? If so, how could that policy be reconciled with America’s view of itself as an open, ethical democracy? After years of accepting governmental secrecy and presidential supremacy in foreign policy, many Americans began asking these questions for the first time in 1975.

Because they confronted these issues, the intelligence investigations can help us understand how members of Congress, the press, and the public interpreted and responded to this moment of crisis for the American system. Despite the transformations caused by Watergate, the inquiries show that American political culture of the 1970s was characterized more by continuity than by change. This resistance to change is shown in three important areas.

First, Congress hesitated throughout the 1970s to assume responsibility for the nation’s secret agencies. Immediately after Nixon’s resignation, it appeared that members of Congress would reclaim the prerogatives they had conceded to the executive branch after World War II. Many observers have concluded that they were successful in that effort, at least until the advent of the Reagan administration in 1981. Scholars have written of a resurgence of Congress during this period, which resulted in a tethered presidency or even an imperiled presidency.¹³ As Louis Koenig wrote in 1981, "The question is not whether there is an imperial presidency but whether there still is a presidency as that office has traditionally been known."¹⁴

But the reports of the demise of the presidency were exaggerated, as this book shows. The post-Watergate Congress may have been more assertive in many areas, but it was ultimately unwilling to shoulder its responsibilities for overseeing the intelligence community. On this issue, at least, there were distinct limits to the congressional revolution.

Second, the media proved reluctant during the investigations to confront the national security state. Beginning in the early 1970s, many scholars, policymakers, and journalists concluded that Watergate and Vietnam had transformed the media. After these two epochal events, the argument went, the press became an assertive, independent institution, a full-fledged fourth branch of government determined to serve as an extra check on executive authority. While some people celebrated this development, others were terrified by its implications. Political scientist Samuel P. Huntington was one of the earliest proponents of what Daniel Hallin has termed the oppositional media thesis.¹⁵ Huntington and his successors claimed that the imperial media began in the late 1960s and early 1970s to oppose and to question all political authority.¹⁶ Even in the early 1990s, books by Suzanne Garment and Larry Sabato continued to warn of an irresponsible press that pursued political scandals without discrimination.¹⁷

The journalistic investigations of the intelligence community fit nicely into this paradigm of an aggressive, adversarial press. To many observers, the media’s anti-CIA crusade of 1975 proved that reporters had a liberal bias and were determined to tear down the nation’s defense establishment. The press, in short, had become an arrogant, irresponsible practitioner of advocacy journalism.¹⁸

This study, however, demonstrates that there were definite limits to the adversarial nature of post-Watergate journalism. The image of the fearless press, determined to oppose political authority and expose incompetence and corruption in government whatever the consequences, is, as Michael Schudson has noted, largely a myth.¹⁹ Like many myths, it has an element of truth. Some Washington journalists were indeed eager to question the government departments that were open to public scrutiny. And a few reporters, like Hersh and Schorr, tried to remove the veil of secrecy from the national security state. But many others were uneasy about the media’s post-Watergate power. In the end, when they wrote about the secret government, most members of the press showed great restraint—and they severely criticized their colleagues who did not.

Finally, the American people, acculturated for years to view their country and their leaders as moral and democratic, were reluctant to acknowledge unpleasant truths about their secret agencies. During the Cold War, the United States had used authoritarian tactics to meet the threat of an authoritarian adversary. But, as William W. Keller has explained in The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover, the liberal state did not like to admit that it had violated its ideology in this way.²⁰ Therefore, the extensive powers of its clandestine agencies were kept secret. This secrecy enabled Americans to assume that the nation’s foreign policy goals were compatible with traditional American ideals. But the intelligence investigations brought these secret powers into the open; they forced Americans to acknowledge that their country had tried to kill foreign leaders, had spied on civil rights leaders, and had tested drugs on innocent people. Because this knowledge was very painful, many Americans, including members of Congress, refused to accept it. Secrecy, as journalist Taylor Branch has said, protects the American people from grisly facts at variance with their self-image.²¹ The investigations failed in part because Americans, insulated from painful knowledge about their country’s activities during the Cold War, did not want to face those facts.

As the investigations began, a failed war and a momentous scandal had caused many Americans to question Cold War assumptions about secrecy in foreign policy and about the power of the presidency. But by the time the investigations concluded, most members of the press, the Congress, and the public had demonstrated that—even after Vietnam, even after Watergate—they preferred to maintain their basic deference to the secret government.

Within this overall story of continuity, there are two recurring themes. One is the relationship between the players’ altruistic motives and their own self-interest. Sometimes these needs were congruent. For example, Senator Church wanted to use the investigation to attract public attention before launching his presidential campaign; he also wanted to mobilize public support for real reforms of the intelligence community, which he had urged consistently since the early 1960s. President Ford tried to protect the Republican Party from further scandal; he also wanted to restore the power of the presidency and safeguard the secret agencies he had defended for twenty-five years.

Sometimes, however, the investigators did not follow their selfish interests. Otis Pike wanted to build public support, possibly before running for the Senate. Yet he continued to hammer away at the secret agencies long after it became apparent that the press and much of the public had turned against him. In several cases, journalists decided to suppress information even though it was clearly in their short-term self-interest to publish it. These examples show that the investigations represented more than mere political posturing, more than the simple journalistic desire to scoop the competition.

Another theme woven throughout this story is the complex, dynamic relationship between the post-Watergate press and Congress. Seymour Hersh’s domestic spying stories did not appear in a vacuum. He published his series at a time when Congress was eager to challenge the executive branch, especially the secret agencies. A few months earlier, a Hersh exposé on CIA covert action in Chile had prompted Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield to introduce yet another of his many proposals that the Senate investigate the intelligence community. Hersh’s domestic spying articles provided the momentum for the Senate to pass the bill at last.

Throughout the first months of the investigations, the press continued to pressure Congress. A Washington Post series on FBI abuses ensured that the congressional investigators would not neglect the domestic intelligence agencies. A CBS report on CIA assassination plots added a new, sensational charge for the committees to investigate. As the months went by, however, the most powerful members of the press and Congress began to worry that the investigations had gone too far. The reform movement faltered simultaneously on the floor of Congress and in editorial board conference rooms.

Chapter 1 provides the background for this study by tracing the history of the intelligence community and its ambiguous relationship with the media and the public. The chapter explains the post-Watergate changes that motivated the critics of the secret agencies—as well as the continuities that would ultimately help the agencies’ defenders.

Chapter 2 examines the media’s response to Hersh’s revelations and analyzes why so many members of the press criticized his stories. As this chapter demonstrates, Hersh’s revelations of domestic spying appeared to come at a propitious time for exposés of governmental abuses. But, in fact, many members of the press were alarmed by the role they had played in bringing about Nixon’s fall and apprehensive about continued assaults on established institutions.²²

Chapter 3 turns to the congressional investigations. After looking briefly at earlier congressional attempts to regulate the intelligence community, the chapter examines Congress’s motivations and expectations in creating the two investigating committees. Because of institutional differences, the House and Senate took divergent approaches to the investigations.

After the committees were established, they met behind closed doors for many months. Chapter 4 examines the conduct of the press during these months and analyzes three cases of self-censorship by the supposedly aggressive post-Watergate media.

Chapters 5 and 6 analyze the performance of the Pike and Church committees, comparing and contrasting their agendas, styles, and accomplishments. Senator Church chose to focus on the intelligence community’s past abuses, thus paving the way for these abuses to be seen as aberrations. Representative Pike took a more systemic and confrontational approach. His committee proved to be more threatening to the intelligence community—and also more vulnerable to charges that it was acting irresponsibly.

Chapter 7 traces the executive branch’s strategy in generating a public backlash against the journalistic and congressional investigators. The concluding chapter brings the narrative to a close and seeks to answer the central question of this study: After starting the investigations, why did most members of the press and Congress back away from challenging the secret government?

Chapter 1

Secrecy and Democracy

The Press, the Public, and the Secret Government to 1975

No major act of the American Congress, no foreign adventure, no act of diplomacy, no great social reform can succeed in the United States unless the press prepares the public mind.

Theodore White, The Making of the President, 1972

The sedate New York Times was not known for screaming headlines—especially when the headlines concerned events that had happened years, rather than hours, before. But on 22 December 1974, the Times editors gave extraordinary prominence to what they considered to be an explosive story. The four-column headline proclaimed, HUGE C.I.A. OPERATION REPORTED IN U.S. AGAINST ANTIWAR FORCES, OTHER DISSIDENTS IN NIXON YEARS. The story itself, written by Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize winner renowned for his scoops on the My Lai massacre, the secret bombing of Cambodia, and the Kissinger wiretaps, was a quintessential example of aggressive, post-Watergate reporting. The Central Intelligence Agency, directly violating its charter, conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups in the United States, according to well-placed Government sources, read the shocking lead paragraph.¹

Hersh went on to claim that the CIA, forbidden by law from operating in the United States, had gathered files on 10,000 American citizens and conducted illegal break-ins, wiretaps, and mail openings. This extraordinary story turned out to be the first of many. In the next eighteen days, the Times ran thirty-two CIA-related stories—and managed to mention its own role in uncovering the scandal thirty-eight times.² The Times had reason to crow; later investigations would prove that its story was accurate.

The Hersh story triggered a firestorm, CIA director William Colby ruefully wrote later. All the tensions and suspicions and hostilities that had been building about the CIA since the Bay of Pigs and had risen to a combustible level during the Vietnam and Watergate years, now exploded.³ The White House, Congress, and the public responded quickly to the story. President Gerald Ford asked Colby to make a thorough investigation of the Times revelations. Soon after receiving Colby’s report, Ford appointed a blue-ribbon commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to examine the allegations further. The House and Senate, undeterred by the presidential commission, both created special investigative committees within two months. What the Times variously called the year of intelligence and son of Watergate had begun.⁴

Hersh’s exposé was an unlikely topic for the New York Times’s first venture into advocacy journalism, as Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus termed it.⁵ The alleged CIA abuses had ended years before; the Times was exposing what many considered to be ancient history. But several developments combined to make it an auspicious time for the Times’s crusading coverage. Vietnam and Watergate had left many important legacies: a disillusioned, skeptical public; a drastically weakened intelligence community; and a seemingly confident, assertive press. As a result, some journalists abandoned their traditional deference to the nation’s secret agencies.

At the same time, however, restraints from the pre-Watergate era continued to exert their power throughout this era of change—restraints that would ultimately serve to limit the media’s newfound aggressiveness. At the time that the New York Times published the domestic spying exposé, most Americans had only begun to learn about the secret government agency known as the CIA. The agency had been established with minimal public debate at the dawn of the Cold War era and had taken on unanticipated duties in relative secrecy over the subsequent years. Congress held hearings on the section of the National Security Act of 1947 that created the CIA. But according to historian Harry Howe Ransom, nothing in the published hearings suggests that Congress intended to create, or knew it was creating, an agency for paramilitary operations.⁶ The hearings also never discussed covert operations or psychological warfare. The congressmen believed they were simply creating an agency to gather and evaluate foreign intelligence.

As the Cold War continued, however, presidents secretly began directing the CIA to take on new functions. The CIA’s evolving Cold War ethos was best articulated in a secret 1954 report on its covert operations. President Dwight Eisenhower established the Doolittle committee to avoid a planned public examination of the CIA’s most secret directorate.⁷ The committee, headed by World War II hero General James Doolittle, endorsed an activist role for the agency and advocated methods previously considered un-American:

It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, longstanding American concepts of fair play must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.⁸

The president, however, decided not to acquaint the American people with the committee’s conclusions. The public was not told that the CIA had begun to intervene covertly in foreign countries and that it might need to abandon long-standing American concepts of ‘fair play’ in the process. By keeping the Doolittle report secret, Eisenhower avoided messy domestic debates about these fundamentally repugnant actions and ensured that they would continue. Only a handful of congressmen were informed of the details of the CIA’s new duties. From time to time, some congressmen would demand more oversight of the agency, but CIA supporters easily managed to defeat these attempts.⁹

Agency officials appreciated this absence of oversight and accountability. Complete secrecy helped to protect their sources and methods. Moreover, the cloak of national security allowed CIA officials to escape public debate over their actions. But at the same time, this secrecy posed a potentially serious public relations problem. Democratic America’s spy agency faced a conundrum: How could it generate public support for its activities when most of the public was not told—and did not understand—what it did?

Initially, what historians have called the Cold War consensus in American political culture—the almost universal support for anticommunism—helped the CIA to solve this problem. Because of the CIA’s unwillingness to publicize its activities, Americans before the investigations drew most of their knowledge about the agency from popular culture. Throughout the 1950s and the early 1960s, during the height of Cold War culture, the CIA enjoyed a romanticized, heroic image in novels and films. Inspired by author Ian Fleming’s success in glamorizing the British secret service, many American imitators portrayed America’s secret warriors as unblemished heroes fighting the international menace of communism.¹⁰ The CIA promoted this Cold War tradition of spy fiction by encouraging favored thriller authors, even allowing them access to secret files. The movies and television shows of the 1950s and 1960s—such as Mission: Impossible and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.—also celebrated America’s spies.¹¹ Popular culture, in short, helped