The Family Jewels (46 page)

24
. CIA, William Colby Memorandum, “CIA Activities in the United States,” April 21, 1972 (declassified, MORI 1451843), CIA,
Family Jewels Documents
, 444–447. In typical CIA fashion the Colby memorandum had already been declassified—in 1985—and lay among Dick Cheney's White House files. It need not have awaited release with The Family Jewels in 2007.

25
. Cord Meyer, Jr.,
Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA
(New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 215. That Meyer, writing five years after the Church Committee investigation, with an increasingly strong Freedom of Information Act in place, still believed that he could get by with this assertion is a telling comment indeed.

26
. Scott D. Breckinridge,
CIA and the Cold War: A Memoir
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993), 165.

27
. Church Committee,
Final Report, Book III
, quoted p. 706.

28
. Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks,
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
(New York: Dell Books, 1980), quoted p. 190.

29
. Helms,
A Look over My Shoulder
, 279. However, the fact that Helms had previously approved both Projects Resistance and Merrimac puts his assertion here in doubt.

30
. U.S. Army, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Memorandum, “Collecting Information on U.S. Persons,” November 5, 2001, declassified copy held by the Federation of American Scientists,
http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/army/uspersons.html
(accessed November 12, 2012).

31
. Christopher Dickey,
Securing the City: Inside America's Best Counterterror Force—The NYPD
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009).

CHAPTER 4. SURVEILLANCE II:
PRIVATE COMMUNICATIONS

1
. Of course it is true that phones existed at the time, and that telegrams and cables were arguably at that time the form taken by today's e-mail, but I believe this characterization is the more accurate one. Long distance telephony was expensive, almost prohibitively so, with telegrams a close second, forcing the bulk of long distance, overseas communications into the mail. In addition, those other forms of communication were also subjected to intrusive monitoring—telephones by FBI wiretaps and telegrams by the National Security Agency. These latter were not CIA projects and thus were not represented in The Family Jewels. The same issues we raise here, however, apply to those FBI and NSA activities.

2
. Until the 1970s the Post Office was a Cabinet-level department of the United States government.

3
. Church Committee,
Final Report, Book III: Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1976), quoted p. 568.

4
. CIA, Inspector General, Survey of the Office of Security, December 1960 (declassified October 9, 1975), Annex II, p. 1 (Church Committee,
Hearings: v. IV: Mail Opening
, reprinted, Exhibit 1, p. 175).

5
. Our italics. To “review first-class correspondence” meant actually opening the letters. Note that (1) Dulles said nothing of opening
U.S
. letters and (2) the precise analogy between 1954 and 2012: foreign mail in transit to Latin America corresponds to global cellphone/e-mail communications transiting U.S. switching centers on their way elsewhere.

6
. CIA, Memorandum, Richard Helms–Sheffield Edwards, “SRPOINTER,” May 17, 1954 (Church Committee,
Hearings: v. IV
, reprinted, Exhibit 27, pp. 257–258).

7
. CIA, 1960 IG Report, p. 8 (Church Committee,
Hearings: v. IV
, reprinted, p. 182).

8
. CIA, Raymond Rocca–Sheffield Edwards, “Project HTLINGUAL,” February 23, 1962 (declassified August 18, 1980), copy in author's files.

9
. Church Committee,
Final Report, Book III
, quoted p. 586.

10
. CIA, Memorandum, Richard Helms–Raymond Rocca, “HTLINGUAL,” February 16, 1961 (Church Committee,
Hearings: v. IV
, reprinted, Exhibits 8 and 10 [retyped], pp. 205, 210).

11
. Church Committee,
Final Report, Book III
, quoted p. 588.

12
. Thomas Powers,
The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA
(New York: Alfred Knopf, 1979).

13
. This might be the place to note that Project HT/LINGUAL was not the only CIA mail-opening program. There was a yearlong effort in Hawaii in 1954–1955; an experimental activity, Project SETTER, in New Orleans in 1957; and an episodic exploitation of mail to the Far East at the San Francisco post office, KM/SOURDOUGH, between 1969 and 1971. These have been left aside here, though SOURDOUGH figures in one document in the original Family Jewels, because the first two clearly fall outside the period of domestic surveillance, while SOURDOUGH never attained the level of HT/LINGUAL, processing only about 16,000 letters throughout its existence. Each of these efforts nonetheless involved the same criminal act embodied in the original program.

14
. Church Committee,
Final Report, Book III
, quoted p. 574.

15
. Columnist Tom Wicker makes the appropriate comment regarding the Helms testimony: “Mr. Helms' ‘assumption,' for example, not only emphasizes the fact that the C.I.A. was scarcely accountable to anyone, and that its power to operate in secrecy was, in fact, the power to do virtually anything it wanted to do. It also suggests the arrogant, expansive and dangerous habits of mind officials can develop when they can act in secret and without accounting for such acts” (“The Mail Cover Story,”
New York Times
, October 24, 1975).

16
. Richard M. Helms with William Hood,
A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency
(New York: Random House, 2003), 439–440.

17
. Church Committee,
Hearings: v. IV
, 30–31.

18
. “Reflections of DCIs Colby and Helms on the CIA's ‘Time of Troubles,'
”
Studies in Intelligence
51, no. 3 (September 2007): 21.

19
. Ibid., quoted p. 6.

20
. Ibid., 7.

21
. Robert M. Hathaway and Russell Jack Smith,
Richard Helms as Director of Central Intelligence, 1966–1973
(CIA: Center for the Study of Intelligence/History Staff, 1993; declassified July 2006), 126.

22
. Church Committee,
Final Report, Book III
, 578.

23
. Ibid., 574.

24
. Ibid., 586–591. Also Church Committee,
Hearings: v. IV
, 202.

25
. For 1971–1972 Angleton claimed to have identified thirty-one Soviet students “academically active” in the United States as civilian or military intelligence agents or sources, about half the total of sixty-seven. Based on his own data for letters copied, that amounts to 1 identification per 619 mail intrusions. Without doubt the collection ratio was much higher for U.S. persons on the watch list, as all the Soviet students—whose identities were already known to the U.S. government—certainly were. Also note the discrepancy between Angleton's claims in 1973 and those made retrospectively by Richard Helms (
A Look over My Shoulder
, 439–440).

26
. CIA, Office of Legislative Counsel, “Journal,” March 20, 1975, 6. Compare at the National Archives and Records Administration (CIA CREST Files) the agency's 2005 redaction of this page (CIA-RDP77M00144R000600120042-0) with the same page as released in 2006 (CIA-RDP77M00144R000600070040-8). It is worth noting that the original classification level of this information (in 1975) was merely “Confidential,” and also that CIA censors considered the document's marking as “CIA Internal Use Only” as worthy of national security protection.

27
. Church Committee,
Final Report, Book II: Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans
, quoted p. 109, fn. 512.

28
. National Security Agency, Assistant Director, Establishment of Sensitive SIGINT Operation: Project MINARET, July 1, 1969 (Church Committee,
Final Report, Book II
, reprinted pp. 149–150).

29
. National Security Agency, Memorandum, Gayler–Laird/Mitchell, January 26, 1971 (Church Committee,
Final Report, Book II
, reprinted pp. 156–157).

30
. Department of Justice, “Report on Inquiry into CIA-Related Electronic Surveillance Activities,” SC-05078-76 (declassified FOIA), quoted p. 107, copy courtesy of James Bamford.

31
.
United States v. United States District Court
, 407 U.S. 297 (1972). This case law, the fact that the government had relied upon the national security exception, the unanimous decision, and the tight
Supreme Court opinion that admitted no exceptions are crucial to understanding the legal status of NSA phone monitoring. The Court found the national security exception in the 1968 Act “is not a grant of authority to conduct warrantless national security surveillances.” The decision essentially meant that NSA programs were legal only during the interval between entry into force of the act and its clarification by the Supreme Court in June 1972. It is highly significant that in his 1975 testimony before the Church Committee, NSA Director General Lew Allen attempted to avoid any reference to “Keith,” as the case is known for the originally presiding federal district court judge. Certain NSA lawyers during the Year of Intelligence professed to believe that the ruling did not constrain the NSA. That is simply not true. The attorney general explicitly referred to Keith in terminating FBI collaboration in the fall of 1973. Moreover, the Department of Justice referred to Keith as a “watershed” in its 1976 review of the legal vulnerabilities of the NSA, CIA, FBI, and other agencies resulting from these domestic operations, and devoted considerable space to contriving arguments for possible defenses against criminal prosecution under the statutes.

32
. Frank van Riper, “Find U.S. Agencies Spy on Embassies' Cables,”
New York Daily News
, July 22, 1975, 1, 24. Britt Snider credits a different press story with breaking open the issue, one in the
New York Times
in early August (Nicholas M. Horrock, “National Security Agency Reported Eavesdropping on Most Private Cables,”
New York Times
, August 8, 1975, 1), but it will be apparent here that by August 8 the only new element in public knowledge would be that the NSA was monitoring “most” cables (L. Britt Snider, “Recollections from the Church Committee's Investigation of NSA,”
Studies in Intelligence
, Winter 1999–2000, p. 45 and fn. 4, p. 50).

33
. Nicholas M. Horrock, “Colby Says N.S.A. Tapped Phone Calls of Americans,”
New York Times
, August 7, 1975.

34
. CIA, Letter, William E. Colby–Gerald R. Ford, September 18, 1974 (declassified February 6, 1995), GRFL, GRFP, Philip W. Buchen Files, box 26, folder “National Security Chronological File.”

35
. CIA, Memorandum, “Electronic Intelligence Legislation,” May 27, 1975 (declassified January 8, 1992), GRFL, GRFP, Robert K. Wolthius Files, box 1, folder “Central Intelligence Agency.”

36
. Quoting from the decision in
Zweibon v. Mitchell
, DC Circuit No. 73–1847.

37
. Loch K. Johnson,
A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence
Investigation
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), quoted p. 92. From the NSA side see James G. Hudec, “Unlucky Shamrock—The View from the Other Side,”
Studies in Intelligence
, no. 10 (Winter 2001): 85–94.

38
. Walter F. Mondale with David Hage,
The Good Fight: A Life in Liberal Politics
(New York: Scribner, 2010), quoted pp. 148–149.

39
. Department of State, Memorandum, Robert S. Ingersoll–Gerald R. Ford, “Attorney General Levi's Proposed Bill on Electronic Surveillance,” March 16, 1976 (declassified May 13, 1997), GRFL, GRFP, Presidential Handwriting File, National Security Series, box 3, folder “Intelligence (14–15).”

40
. George W. Bush,
Decision Points
(New York: Crown Publishers, 2010), 163.

41
. Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney,
In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 350.

42
. General Michael V. Hayden, “What American Intelligence and Especially the NSA Have Been Doing to Defend the Nation,” National Press Club Address, January 23, 2006, Office of the Director of National Intelligence Release,
http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Speeches%20and%20Interviews/20060123_speech_content.htm
(accessed January 25, 2006).

43
. Scott Shane and David Johnston, “Mining of Data Prompted Fight over U.S. Spying,”
New York Times
, July 29, 2007, 1, 17.

44
. Interagency Inspectors General (Department of Defense, Department of Justice, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Office of the Director of National Intelligence), “Unclassified Report on the President's Surveillance Program,” July 10, 2009, 21–24, copy in author's files.

45
. Cheney,
In My Time
, 351.

46
. Condoleezza Rice,
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington
(New York: Crown Publishers, 2011), 115.

47
. Cheney,
In My Time
, 353.

48
. Harold H. Bruff,
Bad Advice: Bush's Lawyers in the War on Terror
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 152.

49
. Dan Eggen, “Bush Warned about Mail-Opening Authority,”
Washington Post
, January 5, 2007, quoted p. A3.

CHAPTER 5. DETENTION AND INTERROGATION