JFK Conference: Rex Bradford detailed the historic importance of the Church Committee

[Octafish]

14. And then, it was gone...

Thanks to Poppy's Crew.

CIA Censors Books

Bush Perfects the Cover-up

excerpted from the book

Secrets

The CIA's War at Home

by Angus Mackenzie

University of California Press, 1997, paper

EXCERPT...

Bush Perfects the Cover-up

Amid the numerous scandals of the Nixon administration and under particular pressure from partisans of Ralph Nader, Congress was moving toward a new openness. Amendments to strengthen the I966 Freedom of Information Act were drafted. The FOIA had been reduced to near uselessness by bureaucratic intransigence and judicial refusals to restrain executive secrecy. The U.S. Supreme Court, in deciding the I973 FOIA case Environmental Protection Agency v Mink, had said the courts should not be allowed to inspect classified national security records unless Congress directed otherwise. By rejecting judicial review, the Supreme Court had in the Mink case adopted basically the same line of reasoning as had Chief Judge Haynsworth in the Marchetti case.

In the fall of I974, however, Congress amended the FOIA to reverse the Mink decision. The main proponents of the amendment were Edward Kennedy in the Senate and John E. Moss in the House. The amendment explicitly authorized federal judges to inspect classified records in chambers in order to determine whether the government was warranted in withholding them from public release. In addition, Congress added teeth to the FOIA in several other ways. In the future, the government would have to prove why secrecy was necessary for each specific case. Government agencies would have to publish indexes identifying information that had been made public, as a means of assisting citizens in locating government documents. And the fees charged to citizens for copies of government records, which sometimes were prohibitively high, could be waived under a new range of circumstances, thus ensuring that fees could not be used as barriers to disclosures. Bureaucratic delays in the release of data also were sharply curtailed. A new deadline of ten working days was imposed on the government for all FOIA requests. In a case in which the government denied a request, a twenty-day appeal period was established, after which the case could be taken to court.

The CIA would spend the next two decades fighting the release of documents to citizens who requested them under the FOIA. For CIA officials, whose lives were dedicated to secrecy, the logic behind the checks and balances of the three-branch system of government may have been incomprehensible. The idea that federal judges not trained in espionage could inspect CIA files and even order their release was enough to curdle the blood of secret operatives like Richard Ober. CIA officers felt that neither Congress nor the courts could comprehend the perils that faced secret agents. Their instinctive reaction, therefore, was to find any avenue by which they could avoid judicial or journalistic scrutiny.

A month after Congress enacted the new FOIA amendments, someone at the CIA leaked the news of MHCHAOS to Seymour Hersh at the New York Times. Hersh's article appeared on the front page of the December 22, I974, issue under the headline "Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years." Although sparse in detail, the article revealed that the CIA had spied on U.S. citizens in a massive domestic operation, keeping 10,000 dossiers on individuals and groups and violating the I947 National Security Act. Hersh reported that intelligence officials were claiming the domestic operations began as legitimate spying to investigate overseas connections to dissenters.

Gerald Ford, who only four and a half months earlier had assumed the presidency in the wake of Nixon's resignation, took the public position that the CIA would be ordered to cease and desist. William Colby, who had replaced James Schlesinger as CIA director, was told to issue a report on MHCHAOS to Henry Kissinger. Apparently Ford was not informed that Kissinger was well aware of the operation. A few days later, after Helms categorically denied that the CIA had conducted "illegal" spying, Ford named Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to head a commission that would be charged with making a more comprehensive report. Ford's choice of Rockefeller to head the probe was most fortunate for Ober. Rockefeller was closely allied with Kissinger, who had been a central figure in the former New York governor's I968 presidential primary campaign. Although Rockefeller was well regarded in media and political circles for his streak of independence, it was all but certain from the beginning that his report would amount to a cover-up.

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A continuing series of scandals had eroded the CIA's public credibility. In November I975, Frank Church's Senate committee reported that the CIA had tried to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro and had engineered the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of the new Republic of the Congo. The Church Committee also contradicted the sworn testimony of Richard Helms by revealing that the CIA had helped engineer the I973 coup in Chile. Moreover, several former CIA operatives-Victor Marchetti, Philip Agee, and Stanley Sheinbaum-had joined the CounterSpy advisory board to help consolidate the outside pressure against the CIA.'

The CIA was not without resources, of course. In I975, former CIA officers, including David Atlee Phillips, organized the Association of Retired Intelligence Officers to undertake a public relations campaign to enhance the Agency's image. Phillips also operated behind the scenes. He told Marchetti, whose name was on the CounterSpy masthead, "Get your name off. We're going to land on them." Marchetti respected the CIA's power and took the warning to heart. He withdrew from the magazine and talked others into leaving with him.

Just before Christmas I975, a tragedy had provided an opportunity to shift the scrutiny away from the CIA scandals. In Athens, Greece, the CIA chief of station Richard Skeffington Welch was assassinated on December 23, gunned down as he returned to his house from a party at the U.S. ambassador's residence. His death focused attention on the danger inherent in publishing the names of CIA agents. Welch had been identified as a CIA officer in a letter to the editor published by the Athens News a month earlier on November 25. The letter, signed by the "Committee of Greeks and Greek Americans to Prevent Their Country, Their Fatherland, from Being Perverted to the Uses of the CIA," denounced the CIA for its role in the installation of a reactionary Greek government. While Welch's assassins most likely learned about his CIA affiliation from this letter (or from his decision to live in an Athens house well known as a CIA residence), most of the blame for his death was aimed at CounterSpy, which also had printed Welch's name.

In the midst of the Senate vote to confirm George Bush in January I976, intelligence officials were making no secret of their outrage over Welch's death and their fury at CounterSpy. A well-known reporter told editor Tim Butz that his own life had been threatened by angry former intelligence officers, and Butz began to carry a gun. Members of the New York intelligentsia, who had been drawn to CounterSpy by Norman Mailer, began to keep their distance. It was unseemly to be contributing money to a magazine accused of having blood on its hands.

Even though CIA critics were put on the defensive by the Welch assassination, it did not take Bush long to appreciate that he had his work cut out for him when it came to casting the Agency in a positive light. Less than a month after taking over, he had to answer questions about a report by the House Select Committee on Intelligence. Although the House had voted to suppress the report at President Ford's request, someone leaked it. The whole report, known as the Pike Report after U.S. Representative Otis Pike, Democrat of New York, was reprinted in the Village Voice issues of February I6 and z3, I976.

The Pike Report was shocking because it provided the first official overview of CIA excesses: the Agency ran large propaganda operations, bankrolled armies of its own, and incurred billions in unsupervised expenses. The report revealed that top CIA officials had tolerated cost overruns nearly 400 percent beyond the Agency budget for foreign operations and 500 percent beyond the budget for domestic operations, for years concealing their profligacy from Congress. The CIA also was said to have secretly built up a military capacity larger than most foreign armies; the CIA and FBI between them had spent $I0 billion with little independent supervision. Further, the CIA's single biggest category of overseas covert projects involved the news media: it supported friendly news publications, planted articles in newspapers, and distributed ClA-sponsored books and leaflets. The phony CIA dispatches had often found their way into domestic news stories, thus polluting with inaccuracies the news received by Americans.

SOURCE:

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/CensorsBooks_SecretsCIA.html

That above, we learned thanks to the Church Committee. We need a party full of Frank Churchs.