I was looking for testimony that I knew Jesus James Angleton gave before the Church Committee and, lo and behold, Google provided a link to an article I wrote about it on January 4th, 2007. I decided to reprint it here because it involves some painful transcribing that I undertook back then. The Church Committee reports are available online but not in a cut and pasteable format.
After the reprint of my old article, I have a screenshot of more testimony that Angleton gave under questioning from Senator Walter Mondale. And I will discuss that at the bottom of this piece.
Here is that January 4th, 2007 article:
Mail Opening: Back to the 1970’s Again
It’s days like this that make my geeky habit of reading Church Committee testimony worthwhile. All of you should read the Church Committee’s report on mail opening. It’s especially relevant today because the program was run by James Jesus Angleton and he is the subject of a movie currently in the theaters, The Good Shepherd. Yes, he was a quite an unsavory fellow.
It’s also relevant today because the New York Daily News is reporting that the President has asserted his authority to read our mail with a signing statement.
President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans’ mail without a judge’s warrant, the Daily News has learned.
The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a “signing statement” that declared his right to open people’s mail under emergency conditions.
That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it.
Bush’s move came during the winter congressional recess and a year after his secret domestic electronic eavesdropping program was first revealed. It caught Capitol Hill by surprise.
I have developed a theory that Dick Cheney has made it a personal mission to eliminate every piece of legislation that was enacted post-Watergate to rein in the intelligence community. The Church Committee did a report on the NSA called The National Security Agency and Fourth Amendment Rights that led directly to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA). FISA was the law the administration ignored when they decided to spy on domestic electronic commincations without obtaining a warrant. The Church Committee also did a report called Mail Opening. It has never been legal to open the mail without a warrant. Below the fold I have excerpted some of James Angleton’s testimony about the CIA’s mail opening program. His testimony occurred, somewhat strangely, in a different Church Committee report, called Huston Plan.
The first segment here has Curtis R. Smothers, Counsel to the Minority (Republicans), questioning Angleton about why the CIA would open the people’s mail and who would authorize such an operation.
Mr. SMOTHERS. All right. With respect to the question then of mail opening, is it your experience that this kind of operation by the CIA
would have been discussed in interagency working group meetings among persons who would otherwise have been uninformed of such operations?Mr. ANGLETON. No, we would not raise such an operation.
Mr. SMOTHERS. In the normal course of things, would there have been an approval channel other than such interagency groups for securing
Presidential advice and consent to such operations?Mr. ANGLETON. I am not aware of any other channel.
Mr. SMOTHERS. Would such channels as the Special Group or the Intelligence Board have been a proper place for such matters to be raised?
Mr. ANGLETON. I do not believe that an operation of this sensitivity would have been raised in any body. It would have been-if there was going to be submission for Presidential approval, it would have been raised either by the Director of the FBI or the Director of Central Intelligence.
Mr. SMOTHERS. But in any event, it would not have been raised with this working group involved with the Huston plan?
Mr. ANGLETON. That is correct. That is correct.
Here is the Chairman, Senator Frank Church asking Angleton why the CIA would open people’s mail without any Presidential authority to do so. It should be kept in mind that the CIA might have actually had Presidential approval at one time (originating with Eisenhower) but their official story was that they did not. The CIA might have felt that if they ratted out prior Presidents no future Presidents would trust them. Or they might have been, as Senator Franck Church called them, acting like rogue elephants. In any case, here’s Angleton’s response.
The CHAIRMAN. But the CIA was the agency principally involved in the mail openings.
Mr. ANGLETON. That is correct for all foreign mail, not for domestic.
The CHAIRMAN. Yes; and we will explore the whole breadth of that program in due course. Did not the CIA have an affirmative duty to inform the President about such a program?
Mr. ANGLETON. I believe so, without any question.
The CHAIRMAN. But it apparently was not done. You did not inform the President. Director Helms did not inform the President?
Mr. ANGLETON. I would say, sir, not by way of any excuse, but those were very turbulent periods for the intelligence community and particularly for the FBI, and I think that all of us had enormous
respect for Mr. Hoover and understood the problems which he had in sustaining the reputation of the FBI.The CHAIRMAN. But the fact that the times were turbulent, the fact that illegal operations were being conducted by the very agencies we entrust to uphold and enforce the law makes it all the more incumbent that the President be informed of what is going on, does it not? It is really not an excuse.
Mr. ANGLETON. I do not think there was ever the forum in which these matters could be raised at that level. I think that has been one of the troubles in domestic counterintelligence and foreign counterintelligence that the issues never do get beyond the parochial circle of those engaged in that activity.
The CHAIRMAN. But you have said that there was an affirmative duty on the CIA to inform the President.
Mr. ANGLETON. I don’t dispute that.
The CHAIRMAN. And he was not informed, so that was a failure of duty to the Commander in Chief; is that correct?
Mr. ANOLETON. Mr. Chairman, I don’t think anyone would have hesitated to inform the President if he had at any moment asked for a review of intelligence operations.
The CHAIRMAN. That is what he did do. That is the very thing he asked Huston to do. That is the very reason that these agencies got together to make recommendations to him, and when they made their
recommendations, they misrepresented the facts.Mr. AXGLETON. I was referring, sir, to a much more restricted forum.
The CHAIRMAN. I am referring to the mail, and what I have said is solidly based upon the evidence. The President wanted to be informed. He wanted recommendations. He wanted to decide what
should be done, and he was misinformed. Not only was he misinformed, but when he reconsidered authorizing the opening of the mail 5 days later and revoked it, the CIA did not pay the slightest bit of attention to him, the Commander in Chief, as you say. Is that so?Mr. ANGLETON. I have no satisfactory answer for that.
The CHAIRMAN. You have no satisfactory answer?
Mr. ANGLETON. No, I do not.
I’ve always found this exchange both chilling and humorous. To really understand the context I’d have to write a diary about the Huston Plan, and Watergate, etc. But it is important to remember that, at the time of this testimony, Dick Cheney was the chief-of-staff to President Gerald Ford and Donald Rumsfeld was his Defense Secretary. And they did not like the Church Committee. They did not like the exposure of all the country’s dirty secrets. They didn’t like the resulting oversight and reforms. And when they came back into power in 2001, they set about rolling back all those reforms, piece by piece. Bush’s latest signing statement is a case in point.
“Despite the President’s statement that he may be able to circumvent a basic privacy protection, the new postal law continues to prohibit the government from snooping into people’s mail without a warrant,” said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the incoming House Government Reform Committee chairman, who co-sponsored the bill.
Experts said the new powers could be easily abused and used to vacuum up large amounts of mail.
“The [Bush] signing statement claims authority to open domestic mail without a warrant, and that would be new and quite alarming,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington.
“The danger is they’re reading Americans’ mail,” she said.
“You have to be concerned,” agreed a career senior U.S. official who reviewed the legal underpinnings of Bush’s claim. “It takes Executive Branch authority beyond anything we’ve ever known.”
A top Senate Intelligence Committee aide promised, “It’s something we’re going to look into.”
Yeah! Why don’t you look into that? That’d be real cool.
End of article
This above article didn’t include the testimony I was looking for. I had not transcribed the relevant material. So, for simplicity and time, I made a screenshot of the most relevant part of it. You can discover the full context by going here. Sen. Mondale wanted to know under what authority Angleton had been opening mail. Angleton said that the authority came from the Deputy Director of Plans, which would have been Frank Wisner at the outset of the program.
Now, this program was ongoing in the early 1970’s when President Nixon briefly authorized mail opening before changing his mind. Nixon was never told that the CIA was already opening mail, and when he canceled his order for mail opening the CIA went right along opening mail as if the president hadn’t made it clear that he didn’t think it was legal.
The interesting thing, and it’s the reason that I have never forgotten this testimony, is that the whole reason the program worked is that our propaganda had brainwashed the Soviets along with the American public to believe that our government would never violate the privacy of the public mail. The Soviets actually believed our mail system was secure. If they hadn’t believed that, the information we received would have been unreliable. For the CIA, it was too much of a risk to tell any president about the program. For one thing, they might put a stop to it. For another, they might talk about it and be overheard by the Soviets.
The Church Committee rejected that logic. As far as they were concerned, if that was the only way we could get reliable information, then it wasn’t worth having.
I think we’re back at the same point today. The government wants to have certain capabilities, but those capabilities run up against our constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches and our right to privacy. At the same time, the effectiveness of certain programs still relies in part on the enemy not knowing what we’re capable of doing. That creates a conundrum, because if the enemy can’t know, then Congress can’t know. Maybe even the president can’t know.
It does only if you are pushing to do illegal stuff. The same kind of argument has been made about imminent attack and used to concentrate war powers into the hand of a sometimes rash (such as W) President. The same kind of argument, again using imminent attack is being used to justify targeted killing on the orders of the President.
The fact is that in all three cases, those expedients have made democracy in America the loser and have not in any appreciable sense actually improved our security over alternatives.
Time for America to stop getting all romantic over unsavory characters like Angleton and efficient decisions that aren’t. The closest we came to nuclear war was the Cuban Missile Crisis; concentrating decision-making in the executive worked only because JFK was a cooler head than his advisers. Politics worked. But the aggressiveness of the US miitary in its patrolling almost triggered war. The risk of imminent attack was US attack on USSR vessels in the Atlantic. The same is true of targeted killing. There has not yet been a credible example of when one targeted killing prevented an “imminent” attack. And the authority to use targeted killing on US soil granted in the NDAA? Nonsense, unless the target is in the middle of nowhere and you have impeccable intelligence about his capabilities and intentions.
These doctrines of plausible deniability and centralization of decision-making because of imminent attack are just self-serving macho fantasies. Legal ways of breaking the rules and getting away with murder.
In general, I agree with you.
But, in principle, you could be wrong.
It is not necessary for a capability to be illegal for it to be effective only so long as the enemy doesn’t know we have it.
This doesn’t necessarily impact anything currently under discussion in the media, but it’s still true.
There is very little that we aren’t permitted to do in collecting foreign intelligence. So, pretty much any new capability is potentially undermined if it is briefed to Congress.
We still have these conundrums.
That assumes that Congress leaks like a seive. Which it might, but there have been Congresses that could keep secrets.
And it is possible to describe how civil liberties are protected through minimization that do not necessarily give folks ways to evade them.
What we are permitted to do in collecting foreign intelligence and what it is wise to do are always two different things. Germans right now are having Stasi flashbacks.
The conundrums are not as big as the derring-do guys want you to believe. Cheney and his “we have to deal with unsavory characters” fantasy got us Curveball.
No, there hasn’t been any Congresses that could keep secrets. We are not the only country with frightening surveillance capabilities. To find a Congress that could keep a secret, you’d have to go back to the early 20th Century to have even a prayer.
Certainly before 1945. Never heard much complaints of WWII leaking from Congress. Prior to Wilson there wasn’t a whole lot of federal internal security apparatus and most intelligence was handled personally and by diplomats. Not a whole lot of reason for Congressional oversight of much of anything but the money and results.
The point is that there is a tension between the need for the American public to know and approve of what the government is doing and the need to keep our adversaries from knowing what we are capable of doing. It’s not as easy as always siding with transparency. You can take that view, but it isn’t inarguable.
The tradeoff has been overhyped for the past 65 years. And it really only is an acutely difficult tradeoff during wartime. But the same folks who hype the tradeoff hype the state of permanent war.
Too much of this is “Great Game” thinking.
There is transparency and candor that still has discretion and minimization of suspicion. It is a political art that can be learned again, and flourishes best in a regime of trust and verification.
It’s when you go looking to create a new enemy that it becomes problematic.
“There is very little that we aren’t permitted to do in collecting foreign intelligence.”
And why is that not enough (along with the more obviously-legal powers of law-enforcement organizations stateside)?
Keep in mind that the CIA analysis of what was going on in the Soviet Union really was unreliable, as developed spectacularly in the 1980s, and that people working in the I F Stone world of publicly available sources understood it a lot better.
Really interesting.
I’m thinking of Chris Carter’s Xfiles and his penchant for never letting you see the monster…that its shadow was much much more potent. Secrecy in and of itself, and surely used to detour around presidential power is pretty damnable stuff. Machiavelli lives.
I’ve mentioned this somewhere before, but it used to be a daily practice for someone from the government to screen all mail going to the Soviet consulate in San Francisco. There was a means, I’ve heard, of examining the contents without actually opening the envelope.
Now I doubt that the Kremlin was sending anything important through the mail to their consulates, so I’m guessing that this surveillance was to examine what American citizens were sending to the Russians.
11th Dimension Chess department:
The Section 215 Dragnet Started as Abusive Exigent Letter Practice Wound Down
Very interesting. It seems sunlight starts improving the capabilities and reducing the abuses.
The biggest architectural problem with the current system as best we know it is that its “big data” correlation concept hides the needles under too much hay, generates false positives that are treated by law enforcement as positive proveable evidence, and generates enough false negatives, or has enough missing information not to be terrible useful for preventing imminent threats. Smaller and better designed would be better. Having an absolute Constitutional constraint as a design requirement would be an extremely useful design exercise. The biggest issue is how duplicative and “dirty” the incoming data is.
I think that NSA might start by assuming that the potential set of terrrorists is substantially less than 7 billion people and figure out some way to avoid the embarrassment of putting 16-month-old kids on no-fly lists.
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Thus it’s no coincidence Bradford continous – JFK Facts and the Church Committee Report.
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Don’t stare yourselves blind on the information by Greenwald and Snowden, most information was out in the open due to earlier whistleblowers. Everytime the media gets up in a frenzy, the wagons are circled. Must be an old habit coming from fear of them savages.
See also my recent comment How We Became Israel.
There are two kinds of swaps that are being speculated: NSA-sanctioned spying by other nations to avoid the injunction against domestic surveillance (e.g. Israeli companies collecting US communications or US-Britain intelligence swaps) and domestic interagency swaps (i.e. the request for data collection comes from the FBI but is given directly to the NSA, with the obvious advantages).
These are work-arounds that I think would shock the conscience of Americans who understand them and destroy the credibility of the entire process of oversight, in which plain-meaning questions are answered in the context of laws that have been outlandishly but secretly interpreted.
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It’s the US Navy again! Bay of Pigs invasion – Tonkin Bay false flag operation – Attack on the espionage vessel USS Liberty.
See also my posting of an old diary – TIA Never Dead Under Jeb/George Bush-Cheney.
BooMan,
Thanks for this piece.
I’m old enough to remember reading about all of this in the NY Times.
I always used to use The Church Commission as a good example of what a free country does to balance security with freedom, and privacy rights.
And I think you’re right about Cheney and Rummie. They’ve been authoritarians throughout their lives.
And, when handed power back, especially with a weak “leader” like W, they went about reversing as many controls on authority and security, as they could.
We won’t be able to eliminate the taint left from W, Cheney, and Rummie, in a century.
That taint will permanently stain this countries reputation, if we last 1,000 years – which I grow less and less optimistic of it doing.
We won’t be able to eliminate the taint from Obama, either. Neither W. nor Cheney suggested that the POTUS has the power to summarily execute American citizens, but Obama and Holder have claimed that the POTUS has that power.
W. rendered; Obama executes by drone.
Obama has done more damage to the country than Bush and Cheney: until Obama, the atrocities were committed by Republicans alone. As a fully signed on Democrat continuing Bush’s assault upon the Constitution and what used to be known as civilization, Obama has made America’s descent into tyranny an utterly bipartisan affair.
It is the Roman Optimates and Populares all over again. At the end, the politicians of both parties abandoned their nominal constituents and just engaged in naked power grabs.
“I don’t want to kill everyone, Kay. Just my enemies.”
That depends on how the White House handles this. If they keep stonewalling critical members of Congress and attacking the whistleblowers who are pointing out that there illegal, unconstitutional, or unwise acts going on in national security, they will get tainted by those acts when they are finally exposed–as they will be.
There is still sufficient time for the White House to get ahead of this issue and establish an independent inquiry that will expose the long roots of this trend in both Republican and previous Democratic administrations going back to Woodrow Wilson.
The question is whether the White House can get out of hunkered-down mode enough to do it.
The White House communications staff has been pretty hamhanded about this. Example: Carney’s platitude about being 100% safe and 100% free. That was a complete and transparent evasion of the issue that does not make it go away.
If I remember correctly, the 100% statement was Obama’s own. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear him using lots of absolute rhetoric to construct straw-man defenses and platitudes.
An independent investigation is critical, but who has the necessary clearances who isn’t compromised by the military-corporate alliance? Who would head it if not someone like Diane Feinstein?
The mandate of the Commission must sweep aside the clearances issue; it is, after all, how the intelligence community covers their tracks. People of proven integrity and judgement can be granted the necessary clearances as investigators for the staff. This has been done in the past. Yes, this requires the executive and enough of the Congress to drop the stonewalling and the prevarication. If those move forward, all it is is a chain-of-command issue in the executive (which, as the Church Committee aftermath showed, is not a trivial issue).
Authoritarian systems are the most brittle and collapse the fastest. You make assumptions about Presidential power that are not in fact the case. It is more likely that Obama’s decision to use drones was presented as the least bad option by a military and intelligence community over-confident of its ability to identify “bad actors” and unconcerned about the political consequences internationally to “collateral damage”. A decision-maker in an environment that allows no widely dissenting opinions (and the White House staff seems pretty narrow and business-as-usual in its background and opinions on foreign and domestic policy) is not likely to present the sort of contrary arguments and more importantly practical policy alternatives necessary to move away from business as usual.
This crisis provides that opportunity to be transformative. Will they take it?
The future is open. Let us watch and wait instead of prejudging.
I have developed a theory that Dick Cheney has made it a personal mission to eliminate every piece of legislation that was enacted post-Watergate to rein in the intelligence community.
A more direct way of stating this is that Cheney is fundamentally a fascist, and that everything that stood in the way of his lunatic “unitary executive” theory of presidential power had to be ignored, suppressed, repealed, overridden, etc. during the Bush-Cheney regime.
As to Maybe even the president can’t know the beauty of Cheney’s position as VP was that he was able to pour that knowledge into the (constitutionally) empty vessel of his office, at least until Bush’s second term when even W started to get wise to the magnitude of the power grab.
The present age makes the Church Committee’s efforts to curb Executive power seem quaint. “9/11 changed everything.”
Thomas Drake: Snowden saw what I saw: surveillance criminally subverting the constitution
Note the use of over-inflated felony charges to try to turn Drake into an informant.
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It’s the US Navy again! Bay of Pigs invasion – Tonkin Bay false flag operation – Attack on the espionage vessel USS Liberty.
See also my posting of an old diary – TIA Never Dead Under Jeb/George Bush-Cheney.
Cross-posted from my recent diary – Sliding Ethics – 3 Years Ago: “Fire Mueller”.
I think we’re back at the same point today.
Thinks were very different in 1976. When the Hoover-era abuses were revealed (I know it wasn’t just Hoover, but he set the tone) there was a widespread reaction of revulsion and something-must-be-done-ism. Very similar to what happened as Watergate was revealed. Both parties, albeit with a few foot-draggers, were united in fixing the problem as was the media.
Today it is a very different climate. How would today’s Congress and media react to the revelations of 1976? Easy to guess – they’d rally behind the security state – albeit with a few foot-draggers on the other side who were appalled. If this were a GOP president you’d see absolutely zero concerns about this from the right wing … even from Ayn Rand Paul.
This transformation in our culture did not happen by accident. As our various military think tanks – both those funded by the Pentagon directly and those “outside” – studied the “lessons of Vietnam” the key lesson was about media control and propoganda. When Reagan got into power among the huge increases in military spending was on propoganda spending – though of course not under that guise. This continued with the killing of the Fairness Doctrine in 1986 and the repealing of laws that prevented concentrated media ownership.
Just as GOP media meisters like Frank Lutz came up with propoganda terms like “family values” the Pentagon was also coming up with propoganda strategies. The first Gulf War was the first test of a lot of these – from the indoctrinated embeds to the tight control of information from the comfortable media centers. It helped that the new media ownership was encouraging only those who toed the company line on war cheerleading to get reporting positions. Language changed – language changes most of us have adopted wholesale not even realizing we were doing it. Military people now “serve” – we no longer “occupy a country” we instead are “fighting the enemy”. Citizens of occupied countries still use resistance tactics against their occupiers but now we buy into the idea that they are “terrorists”.
Along the way they also learned that a volunteer military is a great thing because the draft had the side effect of extending the impact of war-making to most of the populace, through friends and relatives. Now there is a small class of citizens who happily and freely participate in war-making leaving the rest of us to cheer them on.
And, as always throughout history, the way to keep the populace in line through all this is fear. Deep irrational fear of things we can’t control but for which the solution coincidentally is more spending on military, more spying domestically, more loss of personal freedoms (for example, you throw out your Constitutional rights when you re-enter the US – that’s not true in other first world countries).
In this context, there is no way in hell that we’ll see anything like the Church Committee – let alone any actual reforms. And that is exactly the way things were intended.
It took two years to get the Watergate story from the event (nothing to see here) phase to a bipartisan investigation in Congress. It was only when the information from that investigation started to come out that those in Congress who wanted a wider investigation of intelligence community abuses could get momentum. And as more information came out and the public knew more, the momentum increased.
But the key event that occurred that allowed it to happen was the death of J. Edgar Hoover. As long as he was alive, no one in politics would touch it. There is no such figure (that we know of) involved in the current situation. The resistance is mostly GOPer trying to protect W’s precious reputation. Now that some rightwingers think that this is an issue that might harm Obama, there might be an opening for an independent investigation again. The political trick is how to keep it independent and not turn into a runaway GOPer investigating like Whitewater (which is I think the stonewaller’s major fear).
The future is always open to surprises. How Democrats react to this determines to a great deal how it will play out. Trying to cover it up means that Democrats own it as well. Getting maneuvered into a partisan investigation will mean that the primary GOP responsibility for these abuses will never be aired. Going for airing out the truth is the path that is most beneficial to the future of Democrats and for the public. And for the President. He has pulled it from being a clearly illegal operation to one under the color of law; Congress’s “tough on terrorists” peacock act is the major impediment as is the force of BAH money and military-bureaucratic career aggrandizement.