Abuse of Power: How Cold War Surveillance and Secrecy Policy Shaped the Response to 9/11

7. Ignoring the Lessons of the Cold War

7 Ignoring the Lessons of the Cold War S ecrecy had enabled Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officials (and, as well, those of the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] and the National Security Agency [NSA]) to avoid public scrutiny of their abuses of power throughout the World War II and cold war years. This success in avoiding accountability seemingly ended in the early 1970s. The Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations’ conduct of the Vietnam War had increased public skepticism about the wisdom of deferring to presidential national-security claims and provoked an attendant questioning about the role of the U.S. intelligence agencies. Then, a cascading series of developments in the early 1970s combined to finally breach the wall of secrecy that had heretofore shrouded White House, FBI, CIA, and NSA operations. The first of these involved the discovery in 1970 that FBI agents had monitored those attending and planning Earth Day rallies, followed by the public release of thousands of pages of FBI records illegally obtained by radical activists through a break-in of the FBI’s resident agency in Media, Pennsylvania. The widespread dissemination of these pilfered FBI records in turn led to NBC correspondent Carl Stern’s successful Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit that brought about the release of the FBI’s now-infamous COINTELPRO records. These records confirmed that FBI agents, with the approval of senior officials at FBI headquarters, had harassed and disrupted radical organizations and their adherents. The subsequent special Senate committee inquiry of 1973 into the Watergate break-in and resultant uncovering of the Nixon 142 / Chapter 7 White House cover-up added a further dimension—the Nixon White House had secretly exploited the resources of the FBI and the CIA for political purposes , with White House and intelligence-agency officials willingly resorting to illegal investigative techniques. This evolving scandal culminated with the publication in December 1974 of Seymour Hersh’s front page New York Times expose of the CIA’s massive and illegal domestic-surveillance program, Operation MHCHAOS, and then Attorney General Edward Levi’s disclosure during February 1975 testimony before a House Judiciary Subcommittee that former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had maintained a secret office file containing dossiers on the personal and political activities of prominent Americans, including members of Congress. In response, in 1975, the House and Senate created special committees (the so-called Church and Pike Committees) to investigate FBI, CIA, and NSA operations and their White House relationships. For the first time, congressional committees obtained unprecedented access to the heretofore secret records of the U.S. intelligence agencies, many of which had been created on the premise that they would forever remain secret. These records documented the FBI’s widespread abuses of power dating from the mid-1930s:1 the extensive use of illegal investigative techniques, the monitoring of the personal and political activities of liberal and radical activists (notably, prominent civilrights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.), and the implementation of the codenamed COINTELPRO program to “harass, disrupt, and discredit” targeted organizations and their members. The House and Senate committees, however, failed to explore the record of FBI counterintelligence operations (the ostensible reason for the FBI’s shift from law enforcement to intelligence and for the secret authorization of illegal investigative techniques). For one, despite having closely monitored Soviet agents stationed in the United States (as consular, embassy, or press officials or employees of the Soviet trading corporation, Amtorg) and having massively monitored members of the U.S. Communist Party (with the use of illegal investigative techniques—wiretaps, bugs, break-ins, and mail opening), FBI agents nonetheless failed to uncover Soviet atomic and industrial espionage operations during World War II. These included the espionage activities of Justice Department employee Judith Coplon; of four individuals employed at the Manhattan atomic bomb project, George Koval and Russell McNutt (at Oak Ridge, Tennessee), David Greenglass and Theodore Hall (at Los Alamos, New Mexico), and their recruiters or collaborators Julius Rosenberg, Harry Gold, Saville Sax, and Lona Cohen; of employees in private defense industries having government military contracts, notably Rosenberg, Joel Barr, and Alfred Sarant; and of employees in sensitive government offices, notably Nathan Silvermaster, Victor Perlo, Harry Dexter White, and Alger Hiss. The after-the-fact discoveries of these espionage activities in late 1945– Ignoring the Lessons of the Cold War / 143 1950, some of which had been conducted during the 1930s and others in 1944–1945...