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Publication Date:
August 25, 1976
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T AN M.TTAL. RR 9rd'~or Release 200
-Director of_-Securvt
: CIA-RDP79-00498A00060 M -O
"Bob Gambino
"I hope the FBI follows up on this
matter-- We crust protect documents and,
if facts are as presented, we should
encourage FBI to do its thing and
prosecute!!" /s/ G.B.-
23 August 1976
Noted by JFBlake:DDA (25 August 1976
Att: DDA 76-3881 Memo to DCI fr D/OS, dtd 3 August 1976; Subject:
Unauthorized Release of Agency Classified Documents .
Distribution: DCI Handwritten Note w/Orig of Attachment to D/OS
-RS - DDA Subject w/att
1 RS - DDA.'Chrono w/o att
1 RS - JFB Chrono w/o att
DDA:JFBlake:der (25 August 1976)
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a1,3 0-4 / 74.
DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGIONGE
Executive Bagisty
7G-741t~,
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Next 2 Page(s) In Document Exempt
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mmittevs
o (let the Facts
by Gregory G. Rushford
Woodrow Wilson observed that
"Congress stands almost helplessly
outside. of the departments. Even the
special, irksome, ungracious investiga-
tions which it from time to time
institutes... do not afford it more
than a glimpse of the inside of a small
province of federal administration....
It can violently disturb, but it cannot
often fathom, the waters of the sea in
which the bigger fish of the civil
service swim and feed. Its dragnet stirs
without cleansing the bottom."
This elegant statement summarizes
what I learned during the irksome,
ungracious, congressional investigation
of the CIA.
As a staff member of the House
Select. Committee on Intelligence, I
was charged with investigating how
well the intelligence agencies had been
doing their job. It was a simple and
reasonable question, but in trying to
get an answer, I encountered the
Gregory G. Rushford was on the staff of the
House Select Committee on Intelligence.
bureaucratic obstacles that hide the
truth about government performance,
The story of those obstacles, and
our attempts to surmount them, sheds
light on the present balance of power
between the executive and legislative
branches. Despite recent press stories
that Congress is reasserting itself, the
CIA-exceptional in many ways but in
this one quite typical-used every ex-
ecutive branch tactic to frustrate our
investigation.
The CIA's idea of a perfect investi-
gation was roughly as follows: The
committee's staff members would be
investigated by the FBI, and. if we
passed, we would receive Top Secret
security clearances. We would sign
CIA employee secrecy oaths and
would be denied access to the com-
partments of information beyond Top
Secret-that is, to most of the files.
CIA censors would read every docu-
ment we requested. Those censors
would have authority to delete words,
paragraphs, even entire pages. If we
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took notes from documents at agency
headquarters, the notes would be cen-
sored. Monitors would be present
every time we interviewed agency
employees.
Moreover, the committee would
sign agreements limiting the areas of
investigation and agree to disclosure
restrictions. The chairman of our com-
mittee, so the CIA intended, would
keep much of his information from
other committee members. The com-
mittee, in turn, would keep informa-
tion from the rest of Congress.
Whenever I requested documents
from the CIA (or the State Depart-
ment, or the Pentagon, or whatever
agency we were studying) the liaison
officer would ask why I needed them.
Did I realize how sensitive they were?
Wasn't I worried about showing such
secrets to congressmen?
We started off with a series of
hearings on the intelligence budget.
Senior officials came from all over the
intelligence community to brief us.
But the briefings were canned affairs
in which the officials took hours to
read from tables and charts and to
initiate us into the nuances of bureau-
cratese. We saw the same budget
books they present to the appropria-
tions committees and learned how
vague they were. After repeated tele-
phone calls, we managed to get a few
documents delivered right to our of-
fices, but when we looked at them, we
found entire pages missing-only the
"Top Secret" stamp remained. Staff
investigators who asked for further
details could not get them. With only
a week left before the scheduled
opening of our hearings, Rep. Otis
Pike had to call the Pentagon and
threaten to hold a press conference
before we received any information
from them. The National Security
Agency (which monitors foreign com-
munications) would not give us even
the basic document which controls its
operations.
Despite all this, we had, by July
31, assembled at least as much infor-
mation as the standing appropriations
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never received a reply. Even when the
CIA came up with the information
Staats wanted, he had no way to
verify it independently.
Next came James Lynn, director of
the Office of Management and Budg-
et. Lynn repeatedly refused to discuss
ea
an
um
anything of substance as long as the
William Colby and Otis Pike
committees traditionally have, a re-
flection less of our diligence than of
the other committees' timidity.
During the next eight days we held
our first seven hearings.
f
d D
D
b
The Comptroller General of the
United States, Elmer Staats, was the
first witness. He testified that he knew
very little about where the intelligence
agencies put their money because he
had to depend on them for all the
information about their programs.
The General Accounting Office, which
Staats directs, had written to the CIA
in January 1975, for instance, but
conirnittee sat in open session. If we
would only lock the doors and go into
closed session., Lynn said, he was
ready to answer all questions. The
committee closed the doors.
After waiting for nearly a half
hour, while experts "debugged" the
hearing room, we discovered another
problem. Lynn said he would not
discuss certain subjects because the
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stenographer was cleared only for Top
Secret. When the committee finally
got to question Lynn, he was not
much more specific than he had been
in the public session. Pike later called
the experience "miserable and worth-
less." Lynn certainly could not dem-
onstrate that his organization had any
sort of grasp on the CIA's budget.
The Lynn experience was repeated
time and again that week with other
witnesses. In public, we were prom-
ised full cooperation; in private we did
not get it. William Colby, then the
director of the CIA, gave us little
lectures on. the evils of communism,
illustrated with a "Freedom of Infor-
mation" chart. "We live in a free
society," he said, pointing to a series
of X's on the American side of the
chart. The X's marked off such insti-
tutions as newspapers, television, gov-
ernment publications, and, naturally,
congressional hearings. That was how
the Russians gathered intelligence on
us. But on the Russian side-aha!-tlie
X's were controlled. Such gimmickry
prompted Rep. Philip Hayes to tell
Colby he was tired of hearing "appeals
to a very low level of political sophis-
tication."
The testimony of Colby and Gen.
Lew Allen of the National Security
Agency illustrated one other way the
intelligence agencies have traditionally
thwarted congressional oversight. Over
the years both the CIA and the NSA
have answered hundreds of questions
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from congressional committees by
providing summaries of internal docu-
ments, almost always self-serving, and
not the documents themselves. What
is.. the difference? Colby had said, in
one of our closed sessions, that "cer-
tain differences had arisen between a
certain ambassador and the CIA per-
sonnel" over the wisdom of one cov-
ert operation. We finally got hold of
the original document, which put the
matter in somewhat different terms.
The ambassador had actually said to
the CIA station chief, "To hell with
your headquarters. If you don't go
along with this, I will instruct the
Marine guards to take you and place
you on the airplane and ship you out
of here."
In August, we questioned the Pen-
tagon's top civilian intelligence offi-
cial, Albert Hall. He explained, help-
fully, that his organization worked
very well. When asked if the system
had broken down at any time in
recent crises, Hall responded, "Well, if
you are talking about the 1973 Middle
East war, in fact, the outbreak of war
was foreseen, and this information
was handled correctly and was pro-
vided to the people who should have
had it." Here too the documents told
a different story. Weeks later we
received the basic CIA post-mortem
on that war, which began: "There was
an intelligence failure in the weeks
preceding the outbreak of war in the
Middle East on October 6. Those
elements of the intelligence commu-
nity responsible for the production of
finished intelligence did not perceive
the growing possibility of an Arab
attack and thus did not warn of its
inuninence."
Hall also demonstrated some of the
more incongruous aspects of the clas-
sification system. Published informa-
tion put out by the Defense Depart-
ment revealed that military attaches
were stationed in 86 different coun-
tries, including two recent additions,
Algeria and Bangladesh. But the De-
fense Department said that the
numbers and locations of the attaches
were classified as "secret." Hall,
looking embarrassed, could not
explain the disparity. Rep. Aspin
termed such practices "bizarre" and
pointed out the weaknesses of a
classification system which permitted
executive branch officials to decide,
apparently on whim, what to keep
secret. Repeated experiences with this
sort of capriciousness fostered the
committee's subsequent decisions to
publish information despite the
executive branch's unwillingness to do
SO.
Family Jewels
Many frustrations lingered after
the August hearings were over. On
June 10, before the hearings had
begun, President Ford said publicly
that he would give the committee
material from the Rockefeller Com-
mission's investigation of intelligence
abuses, "plus any other material that
is available in the executive branch."
Yet we did not receive an uncensored
version of the "family jewels," the
in-house CIA study of abuses, until
mid-October, 15 minutes before Pike
held a press conference to charge that
there had been a coverup and more
than four months after Ford had
promised to supply the material.
On September 11, the committee
held a hearing on one of the most
widely suspected instances of incom-
petent intelligence-that associated
with the 1973 Middle East war. We
knew of several instances in the past
when the intelligence system had
failed-the 1968 Tet offensive, the
Soviet invasion of. Czechoslovakia in
1968, the 1974 coups in Portugal and
Cyprus, and India's nuclear explosion
in 1974. The Mideast hearing was
designed to explore why the intelli-
gence agencies had failed at the job
they were supposed to carry out-
namely, to provide accurate informa-
tion on international developments.
Just one day after we held that
hearing, President Ford announced
that we would be denied any further
classified information. He asked us to
return our files and later compared us
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to common criminals. What the com-
mittee had clone the previous after-
noon was to vote in closed session to
publish a portion of an official CIA
post-mortem of the Mideast failure.
Under the resolution which set up
the committee, we were supposedly
authorized to disclose information
which related to the intelligence
agencies' activities. In public session
the CIA had read us two of the seven
paragraphs of the post-mortem, both
moderately favorable to the agency.
But it had refused to declassify the
other five. That afternoon the com-
mittee spent hours on those five para-
graphs and realized the CIA had no
reasonable grounds for keeping them
secret. They did not reveal any intelli-
gence sources and methods-the two
items the CIA might legitimately want
to protect-but they did demonstrate
just how badly U.S. intelligence had
performed prior to the Middle East
war. There was no "national security"
at stake, only bureaucratic self-
protection.
For example, the CIA wanted to
suppress one sentence which revealed
only a misjudgment: "The movement
of Syrian troops and Egyptian mili-
tary readiness are considered to be
coincidental and not designed to lead
to major hostilities." Another para-
graph the CIA wanted to censor noted
that a "Watch Committee," which was
supposed to judge the imminence of
hostilities, failed to do so even after
the war had begun.
So the committee decided to pub-
lish. The CIA's reaction was predicta-
ble; among other things, it called a
press conference and told reporters
that the release of four words ("and
greater communications security") en-
dangered national security.
President Ford finally agreed to
deliver more classified information,
promising we would get everything we
needed-but only after a full month of
negotiation and on the condition that
he could veto any material the com-
mittee chose to publish.
But we still faced repeated delays.
On October 20, for example, Pike
wrote to the President, asking permis-
sion for me to visit the National
Security Council. There I was to
obtain a list of all CIA covert opera-
tions authorized by the top-level "40
Committee" since 1965 and to find
out the committee's procedures for
approving the operations. We needed
this information in order to confirm
or refute other indications that the
procedures had often been haphazard.
After repeated calls I did get the list.
On it I found each CIA operation
described as follows: "On [date giv-
en] the 40 Committee approved a
covert operation in --- ." Or, "A
media project was authorized for
---." Not one actual operation
was disclosed.
In one way, however, even this
document contained a major revela-
tion. Beside each blank from May
1972 until the end of 1974, the word
"telephonic" appeared. I asked Gen.
Brent Scowcroft, Ford's National Se-
curity advisor, what that meant. He
said that the approval had been given
over the telephone, without formal
meeting. In other words, the 40 Com-
mittee, the most sensitive committee
in government, had not met in more
than two years. Nearly 40 CIA opera-
tions had been approved without the
opportunity for debate, or a consider-
ation of risks and alternatives by
anyone outside the CIA. (We held a
public hearing on that point the fol-
lowing week. Since then, President
Ford has taken steps to insure that
meetings are held and accurate records
maintained.)
As the investigation. progressed, the
CIA dropped even the pretense of
cooperation. All of the intelligence
agencies went to great lengths to keep
us from informal contact or interviews
with their employees. They were also
adamant about having monitors pres-
ent. A monitor came along from the
National Security Agency when I in-
terviewed all NSA Middle East ana-
lyst. The poor monitor panicked when
The Washington Monthly/July-August 1976
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I left him behind in the front office.
After a quick phone call to NSA
headquarters, he broke past. our Capi-
tol Hill police guard and ran through
the committee room yelling that the
witness should not say anything to
"those people." Genuinely afraid that
the scene would lead to violence,
committee staff director Searle Field
agreed that the monitor could sit in
on just this one interview.
Kissinger Balks
The NSA had reason for .its fears.
The analyst I interviewed was one
who had accurately forecast war in
the Middle East before it broke Out on
October 6, 1973. The NSA leadership
had discounted her courageous predic-
tions. Truly excellent technical intelli-
gence had gone unheeded.
Henry Kissinger, of course, threw
up the. most obstacles. We had to
request information from him; he
chaired three crucial panels-the 40
Committee, the NSC's Intelligence
Commttee, and the Verification Pan-
el, which handled intelligence related
to the Strategic Arms Limitations
Talks (SALT).
But Kissinger refused to give tip a
single.-piece of paper without a fight.
He termed one of our subpoenas
merely a "request" and refused to
honor it. It took a contempt of
Congress resolution approved by the
committee to get him to honor several
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subpoenas. He silenced witnesses and
at one point issued instructions that
nobody in the State Department was
to talk to anyone from the Pike
Committee unless an official State
Department monitor was present.
We wanted, for example, to ask
one of Kissinger's subordinates to
explain a mysterious contradiction in
our policy toward Greece. We had
heard that, when tensions were rising
on Cyprus, the State Department had
warned that Greek dictator Dimitrios
loannidis was moving to overthrow
Archbishop Makarios. But the CIA, at
just that time, was conducting diplo-
matic talks with loannidis in Athens.
We learned that Thomas Boyatt, a
The Washington Monthly/July-August 1976
foreign service officer, might. be able
to explain what the CIA station lead
been up to. But Kissinger refused. to
let us talk to Boyatt without a State
Department monitor present, and the
monitor forbade the man to tell -us
even the most basic details. Later I
interviewed another foreign service
officer on the same subject, with the
same result. We called one of Kissin-
ger's deputies to ask for cooperation.
He asked us to put the FSO on the
phone and then told him again not to
give us any help.
Th.- committee was getting angry
about treatment like this, especially
because we had received almost no
documents on the Cyprus affair. So
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the committee voted to subpoena a
memo which Boyatt had written to
Kissinger after the Cyprus affair. Once
more we found ourselves in trouble.
Among the other accusations that
rained down upon us was a compari-
son to Joe McCarthy. The State De-
partment said we were "interfering"
with advice given on policy by a
subordinate. But Boyatt, the subordi-
nate in question, had said that he was
willing to give us the information.
Under existing law, there was no way
the State Department could prevent
its employees from giving information
to Congress.
The State Department's claim that
it was protecting Boyatt from "inter-
ference" like ours was somewhat dis-
ingenous. Boyatt had been denied
normal reassignment by two ambassa-
dors and one assistant secretary, both
for his Cyprus dissent and for his
activities on behalf of the Foreign
Service Association, which lobbies for
employee rights. We eventually pres-
sured the State Department to reas-
sign him.
A human victory, only we never
learned what the intelligence network
had told Henry Kissinger before the
Cyprus coup, nor did we receive all
the documents we sought.
Despite all these obstacles, by De-
cember we had acquired a great deal
of information the CIA did not want
us to have, thereby meeting one of the
tests of a good investigation. We had
data about the intelligence budget
which Congress had never obtained
before. We had learned about every
CIA operation the National Security
Council had approved since 1965. We
also had original documents on an
especially vital _issue-Soviet_,_cornpli-
ance with SALT' agreements-thanks
to committee -votes to..., cite__..Henry
Kissinger for contempt of_ Congress
when heyfirst refused to_-honor,.our
subpoenas.
These were our successes. To a
large extent they were achieved be-
cause of our reaction to the dismal
failure of those first eight days of
hearings, when the administration of-
ficials just refused to cooperate. This
inspired us to grit our teeth. Pike and
Field set a basic rule for the investiga-
tors: be so aggressive you get com-
plained about. There were complaints
every week. When the CIA tried to
distract us with proposals that we
investigate sexy trivia, such as a minor
official's indiscretions with shellfish
toxins and other poisons, we refused.
We learned one of the timeless
lessons of bureaucratic life-that it is
necessary to talk to people at the
"working levels" of the bureaucracy
and not just the leadership. Leaders of
huge agencies, responsible for any
mismanagement, will always resist giv-
ing evidence of their own corruption
or incompetence. One senior official
close to the CIA's hierarchy told me
privately that he considered the CIA's
analytic system "rotten," and that
Colby's management was ruining the
agency. "But why should I risk all and
tell these things to the Pike Commit-
tee?" he asked. "Where were those
congressmen when the CIA was not
on the front pages, and where will
they be when the Pike Committee's
jurisdiction expires?" It was an argu7
ment I heard often and could not
really refute.
It was different one step down.
The majority of mid-level officials,
contrary to the conventional wisdom,.
are competent and hard working,
Above all, they are concerned with
poor management and will talk about
it to anyone who seems interested in
improving their condition. And even
when these officials don't give you
any valuable information, the simple
knowledge that you've talked with
them makes their superiors more can-
did.
These interviews helped us pick
out some of the weak points in the
intelligence bureaucracy. Pentagon an-
alysts would tell us what they thought
of their counterparts in the . CIA.
Asking one agency about another, or
one office in the same agency about
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another, is a simple but effective
device. Everyone wants to tell his side
of the story, and the rivalries among
the intelligence agencies are as fierce
as those anywhere in government.
From analysts in the Defense Intel-
ligence Agency, CIA, and State De-
partment, I learned that the intelli-
gence studies made on the Soviet
Backfire bomber might have been
dishonest. The most important ques-
tion was whether the Backfire could
(or would) be deployed against targets
in the United States. Answering this
question correctly obviously was
important for SALT.
The accusations about the Backfire
ranged all through the intelligence
community. The Air Force was al-
leged to have put pressure on a de-
fense contractor, simply because the
Air Force disagreed with a study the
contractor had done for the CIA. One
office of the CIA accused another of
deliberately hiring a consultant who
was known as a "downgrader" of
Soviet aircraft in order to influence
the Backfire study results. Another
CIA office was accused of misrepre-
senting the plane's performance char-
acteristics, because that office had its
own policy line to peddle to our
negotiators.
The CIA takes great pride in its
intellectual integrity, so these accusa-
tions could hurt. The SALT negotia-
tions_were under way even as we car-
ried out our investigation, and Pike
did not waist_. to risk complicating
them by having a public hearing on
the Backfire. But the CIA did not
know that. I was able to imply several
times, when dealing with the CIA
censor, that this issue could be very,
very unpleasant if it were publicized.
When I got far enough into the story
to present a threat, the CIA censor
decided to call. The agency had found
some documents I might want to look.
at, he said. Those documents-whicli
were "secret," but which served' the
agency's ends-revealed, among,many
ottte"r things, that the director of the
DRA-and a high 'CIA official, once
thou ght that Henry Kissinger might be
suppressing.. vital information -.about
SALT., Upset, they had gone to the
acting CIA director, Vernon Walters,
and asked him to approach President
Nixon about the problem. Those doc-
uments, which told us a great deal
about the bureaucratic politics of
SALT, were essentially a damage-limi-
tation exercise by the CIA, which was
concerned about its own reputation.
Otherwise, we would never have ob-
tained them.
A Sorry Picture
The intelligence administrators had
shown us neat organization charts
outlining their functions. What we
actually found, however, was a very
poorly administered intelligence sys-
tem The NSC's Intelligence Commit-
tee, for example, which looked im-
pressive on the charts, had had only
two 'meetings-one of them to organ-
ize itself.
Perhaps our more important find-
ing was that Congress cannot oversee
the intelligence agencies without mak-
ing a determined effort to separate the
truth from lies. Other less aggressive
committees had been over the same
ground before. The House Armed
Services Intelligence subcommittee,
for example, had been told about the
official CIA post-mortem study of the
intelligence failure before the Middle
East war. But that subcommittee nev-
er saw the actual document; its brief-
ing consisted of reading selected ma-
terial from the study displayed on a
slide projector. And it was not told
there was a second Middle East post-
mortem, which documented a shock-
ing intelligence performance at the
time of the U.S.-Soviet confrontation
in late October 1973. Nor did the
subcommittee know the official post-
mortem covered up key weaknesses in
the intelligence bureaucracy. Other
official briefings I saw, including those
related to nuclear awns matters, were
always vague, always incomplete.
We also found evidence that the
true intelligence budget is several
times larger than that which the Con
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gress annually approves. The six for-
eign episodes we selected for closer
study revealed mismanaged intelli-
gence on a large scale. The CIA could
offer no major analytical success.
"Current intelligence" reports suf-
fered because the leadership kept the
analysts busy with meetings, phony
deadlines, and "coordinating" policy
differences between offices. There was
precious little time left to think and
write. The CIA's longer-term intelli-
gence estimates were also weak, and
the bureacratic structure promised lit-
tle improvement. We found an alarm-
ing number of cases in which crucial
information had been collected in
time, but had not been disseminated
until after the war had begun--just
like the classic Pearl Harbor failure.
We found that Henry Kissinger kept
valuable information away from the
CIA. We had only to go beyond the
official explanations to realize that
reform of the analytical side of U. S.
intelligence is long overdue and sorely
needed.
We also found pressures which
distorted honest intelligence during
the entire Vietnam war. The pressures
came from the military, the State
Department, and the White House,
and had one purpose: to force the
CIA to report "facts" about Vietnam
which would support the war policy,
regardless of truth. Many officials who
resisted such pressures found their
careers finished; those who kept quiet
were promoted.
Director of Strategic.. Research. to say:
"Dr. Kissinger wanted, to. avoid any
written judgments "to , the. effect that
the Soviets have violated any of the
SALT agreements. If the Director
believes that. .the"Soviets .may-" be in
violation, this should be the subject of
a memorandum from him _.to Dr.
Kissinger. The judgment that _a viola-.
tion is considered to have occurred is
one t " hat will be made "at_ the- highest
level.
What__ this meant, in_effect, was
that the intelligence service.: had been
deprived of its basic rationale. "Henry
Kissinger, the official most responsible
for" making SALT policy, also..con-
trolred information about how well
the policy was working-ail affront
not only to the purpose, of the CIA
but to every prudent notion about
avoiding administrative disasters.
To be sure, Kissinger had his prob-
lem with some elements of the intelli-
gence community who were leaking to
the press inaccurate information
about Soviet violations, but the, way
to handle that problem -was--with a
rifle aimed at the sinners-not-a. shot-
gun blasting away at the entire area of
factualreporting of SALT violations.
."Even- more disturbing -than-what
Kissinger was doing was-his passion
far concealing it from Congress. And
even more disturbing than that is the
fact that Kissinger and the intelligence
chiefs are typical of the executive
branch leadership in their determina-
tion to protect Congress from know-
ledge of their affairs; in their tendency
Fight Like Hell
But it was, the question of.how
well we monitor Soviet adherence to
the SALT agreements which I found
most ..,troublesome. It showed how
dangerous bureaucratic rivalry can be-
come for the whole country when the
bureaucrats operate in secret.
On October 17,-1972, when the
agencies established a steering. mech-
anism to monitor Soviet SALT
compliance'-with'- the agreements
signed the -previous May, -colonel oii
Kissinger's NSC staff called the CIA's
to ignore the tact that, after all, the
executive and legislative branches
work for the same employer.
I am convinced that Wilson was
wrong in thinking Congress cannot
overcome this tendency. Congres-
sional committees can probe the
depths of the federal bureaucracy, and
provide the information that we all
need to know. But pending the day
when irrational adversary attitudes
between the branches are replaced by
a cooperative spirit of service, they
had better be prepared to fight like
hell. N
Approved For Release 2002/05/02 : CIA-RDP79-00498A000600100015-8