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

1. A New Intelligence Paradigm: Surveillance and Preventive Detention

1 A New Intelligence Paradigm Surveillance and Preventive Detention T he crisis of the Great Depression transformed American politics. Capitalizing on the severe economic downturn and the seeming ineptitude of Herbert Hoover, the incumbent Republican president , Democratic presidential nominee Franklin Roosevelt easily captured the presidency in the 1932 election. Candidate Roosevelt, however, had offered no specific blueprint for the New Deal he pledged to enact if elected beyond promising bold new initiatives and a willingness to experiment. His commitment to change course and commanding personality , nonetheless, captured the public’s mood, enabling the new president to steer through Congress in the ensuing years a far-reaching legislative agenda that radically expanded the federal government’s regulatory and spending roles while at the same time focusing public attention on his leadership as president. In the process, Roosevelt undercut the checks on executive power that Congress and the media traditionally exercised. Roosevelt’s success in enacting the so-called New Deal for that very reason precipitated criticisms from many American conservatives and progressives. Roosevelt’s conservative critics decried the undermining of limited government and the emergent more powerful presidency. For fundamentally different reasons, progressives also criticized Roosevelt’s presidency, dismissing New Deal legislative reforms as half-hearted and as co-opting needed fundamental change. Conservatives and progressives, moreover, extended their divergent criticisms to the president’s foreignpolicy initiatives. 2 / Chapter 1 Their criticisms of Roosevelt’s attempts to extend U.S. international commitments struck a responsive chord in the mid- to late 1930s, given the public’s principal concerns, in the depths of the Great Depression, centering on the domestic economy and viewing with great skepticism an activist international role. Disillusioned over U.S. involvement in World War I, the public had come to perceive international involvement as unnecessary and counterproductive. This antipathy was greatly influenced by the highly publicized hearings conducted by the so-called Nye Committee during the years 1934–1937 that triggered enactment of the so-called Neutrality Acts of 1935, 1936, and 1937. Intended to avert U.S. involvement in foreign wars, these acts limited the nation’s financial and commercial relations with belligerent powers and the president’s discretion to counter Nazi Germany’s expansionism. Moreover, by the mid-1930s, progressives and conservatives directly connected an interventionist foreign policy with the shaping of domestic reform. For many conservatives, President Roosevelt’s justification for the expanded federal regulatory and spending policies under the New Deal as having precedence in the nation’s emergency responses during World War I confirmed this connection, while for many progressives the consequences of President Woodrow Wilson’s unneutral policies that resulted in U.S. intervention in World War I had created the repressive political climate that not only led to the Red Scare of 1920 but also underpinned the conservative politics of the 1920s. These convictions shaped the political context that President Roosevelt felt compelled to address in the mid- to late 1930s through a series of tactical decisions to counter a perceived internal security threat that a resurgent Nazi Germany and Soviet Union posed. These governments, as “subversive” powers , Roosevelt feared, could influence the actions of the American Fascist and Communist movements. To contain this perceived subversive threat, Roosevelt concluded, required a fundamental shift in the role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)—from a law enforcement agency that sought to develop evidence to prosecute violators of federal laws to an intelligence agency that would seek to acquire advance information about the plans and capabilities of suspected spies and saboteurs. Under this scenario, the FBI should anticipate and thereby frustrate potential acts of espionage and sabotage and furthermore contain “subversive” activists and movements from being able to influence the public debate about the president’s interventionist initiatives. These goals, the president further concluded, could not be achieved through new legislation authorizing FBI intelligence investigations, given prevailing suspicions about executive and presidential powers. President Roosevelt, his attorneys general, and the FBI director instead opted for secret executive directives, a method that had as a central purpose the foreclosure of a potentially divisive and contentious debate. The FBI’s new proactive approach meant that agents A New Intelligence Paradigm / 3 would seek to identify potential spies and saboteurs by adopting ideological and associational criteria. Moreover, as in the case of the evolution of the domestic New Deal, this profound shift was effected not through a well-defined blueprint but through a...