The CIA - at Home
excerpted from the book
The Lawless State
The crimes of the U.S. Inteligence Agencies
by Morton Halperin, Jerry Berman, Robert Borosage,
Christine Marwick
Penguin Books, 1976
p135
Responding to enormous pressure from President Johnson to uncover
the foreign links to the growing unrest of the late 1960s, the
CIA opened up a new division within its Counter-Intelligence Branch.
Over the next seven years, the program conducted by this special
staff, known as Operation CHAOS, spied on more than 7,000 American
citizens and 1,000 domestic organizations.
This was the most extensive, but not the first, CIA spying
operation against Americans. For years the agency had been opening
mail, burglarizing homes, wiretapping phones, and secretly watching
the movements of unsuspecting individuals within the United States,
all in violation of its legislative charter.
In 1947, when Congress voted to create the CIA as part of
the National Security Act, there was great concern about whether
the CIA could operate in the United States and against Americans.
Congress wanted to assure the public that this agency would
not lead to the growth of a secret police. Responding to these
suspicions, Dr. Vannevar Bush, an administration witness, explained
that the agency was concerned only with intelligence "outside
this country," and not with "internal affairs. To make
sure, Congress wrote into the ClA's charter that the agency was
prohibited from exercising "police, subpoena, or law-enforcement
powers or internal security functions." Congressional debate
made it clear that Congress anticipated that the CIA would simply
not operate at home.
Two years later, with the passage of the Central Intelligence
Agency Act of 1949, congressional apprehensions were again calmed
by the assertion that the CIA had no jurisdiction within the United
States, that it "has no connection with the FBI; it is not
under the FBI, it does not do the same kind of work as the FBI.
These public assertions, however, did not coincide with the ClA's
secret growth of operations within the United States and the surveillance
of Americans abroad.
Because of the public uproar that would have ensued if the
agency had openly expanded its domestic operations, the CIA wrote
its own secret charter. Through internal directives, executive
orders, and pacts with other government agencies, the CIA expanded
its authority to operate at home so that it eventually encompassed
activities that unquestionably violated the law, as well as its
congressional charter.
From the beginning, CIA justified its involvement in domestic
activities in terms of supplementing its covert operations and
intelligence gathering abroad. As was discussed in Chapter Two
in detail, the CIA created an intricate system of front organizations
and companies to provide cover for its clandestine work. It set
up its own airlines and business firms, and formed dummy foundations
to funnel secret money into domestic student groups, educational
publications, and labor unions. Recruiting its agents from almost
every sector of the private domain, the CIA turned students, missionaries,
and journalists into spies abroad. The agency also used its authority
to protect its "sources and methods" to justify spying
on Americans in the United States.
COLLECTING FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE AT HOME
Immediately after the passage of the 1947 act, the National
Security Council issued a secret internal order for the CIA, authorizing
"the exploitation, on a highly selective basis within the
United States, of business concerns, other governmental organizations
and individuals as sources of foreign intelligence information.
A year later, the CIA negotiated a "delimitation agreement"
with the Federal Bureau o f Investigation, which spelled out the
limits of CIA activities within the United States. The most effective
check on CIA clandestine collection and operations in the United
States was not congressional restrictions, but rather, the FBI's
rigorous defense of what it -regarded as its own turf. Nevertheless,
the CIA got permission to deal with defectors and to gather foreign
intelligence against selected persons and enterprises.
During the cold war, émigrés from the Eastern
European countries became prime sources of information for the
agency within the United States. Later, in its war against Fidel
Castro, the CIA heavily infiltrated the Cuban community based
in Miami, and created its own network of spies. For over a decade,
beginning in 1960, Cuban refugees were paid by the agency to spy
on their neighbors, and report their findings to the CIA. While
on the CIA payroll, and reportedly at CIA direction, Cuban exiles
even launched a campaign to boycott products manufactured by countries
trading with Castro's government, and organized picket lines in
front of foreign embassies. One Cuban explained the operation
as originally a counterintelligence effort, "but it soon
became domestic snooping plain and simple. He added, "As
far as I know they haven't discovered a single Castro spy here,
but they sure made many detailed reports, including gossip, about
personal lives of prominent Cubans, if anything usurping the functions
of the FBI.
By 1963, the CIA had become so intimately involved with briefing
and debriefing its agents, and coordinating their activities within
the United States, it created an extremely secret Domestic Operations
Division. Explained in a classified document, the division was
to "exercise centralized responsibility for the direction,
support, and coordination of clandestine operational activities
of the Clandestine Services conducted within the United States
against foreign targets. Among its activities was the burglarizing
of foreign embassies at the request of the National Security Agency.
Not all CIA foreign-intelligence-gathering efforts on the
domestic front were so clearly in violation of the law. Perhaps
the one legitimate domestic network established within the country
was the Domestic Contact Service (DCS). Authorized in a secret
directive, the service set up field offices around the country
to gather foreign intelligence from willing and open sources.
CIA agents would normally interview American businessmen, scholars,
or even tourists after their return from travels abroad. Sometimes,
however, when the agency learned of a trip to a certain country
beforehand, it would approach the traveler in advance to request
specific information to be investigated.
When the CIA as a whole began to conduct surveillance of Americans,
the Domestic Contact Service was drawn into the process. In early
1969, the service began to receive an increasing volume of reports
on "black militant activity," and opened a new case
on the subject. Since some of the material was related to foreign
contacts, the DCS routed it to Operation CHAOS, the ClA's major
program for spying on dissident groups. The ball was set in motion,
and a few months later, Operation CHAOS requested DCS to expand
its coverage to include all black militants, radical youth groups,
radical underground newspapers, and deserter and draft resistance
organizations. CHAOS also requested specific information from
the DCS, such as background information on twenty-eight co-conspirators
indicted in the Chicago riots, and full coverage of the legal
proceedings of the trial. For four years, the Contact Service
provided both Operation CHAOS and the FBI with hundreds of reports
on domestic political activity, further adding to their already
bulging files. In light of its newfound capabilities, the Domestic
Contact Service was transferred from the Intelligence Directorate
to the Operations Directorate in 1973."
p148
OPERATION CHAOS
In August 1967, the CIA created the Special Operations Groups
within the Counter-lntelligence Division. Richard Ober, chosen
to head the new project known as Operation CHAOS, was uniquely
suited to the job. In early 1967, Ramparts magazine had exposed
CIA secret funding of the National Student Association, causing
acute embarrassment to the agency. In response, Ober was assigned
to investigate members of the staff of the magazine and their
friends, in an effort to discover any connection with hostile
foreign intelligence agencies. (CIA also urged the IRS to open
an investigation on the magazine's tax-exempt status.) By the
time Ober began work at Operation CHAOS headquarters, he had already
proved his credentials by indexing several hundred names of American
citizens, and creating almost fifty files.
From the beginning, the program was predicated on the belief
that the foreign connection existed, and it was just a matter
of finding it. CHAOS agents were to watch antiwar activists in
their travels abroad for this purpose. The first action taken
by the new Special Operations Group was to cable all CIA field
offices abroad, outlining the need to keep tabs on "radical
students and U.S. negro expatriots," in order to find the
extent to which "Soviet, Chicoms [Chinese Communists] and
Cubans are exploiting our domestic problems in terms of espionage
and subversion.
The agency thus monitored the overseas movements of countless
antiwar activists as they traveled around the world, as well as
ex-patriots. The CIA burglarized their hotel rooms and their homes,
eavesdropped on their conversations and bugged their phones. The
internal directives issued to provide "guidance" regarding
who should be the targets for intelligence collection abroad reflected
the confusion and frustration of the government effort as a whole.
Field offices were instructed to look for connections between
United States groups and "communist, communist front, or
other anti-American foreign elements abroad. A November 1967 memo
called on agents overseas to report on foreign relationships,
which "might range from casual contacts based on mutual interest
to clearly controlled channels for party directives. Two years
later, a directive from Tom Huston, a White House assistant, explained
that "support should be liberally construed to include all
activities by foreign communists designed to encourage domestic
groups in any way. The White House and the agency were grasping
at straws. Enormous amounts of useless information were gathered
because it was not clear when and how the intelligence might be
used. Ober directed his agents to collect "any material,
regardless of how innocuous the information may appear.
To deal with this massive influx of material, from other agencies
as well from as the CIA, the agency set up a highly mechanized
system. Whenever the name of an individual or organization showed
up as a result of these efforts, it was analyzed, indexed, and
filed in the CHAOS computer system known as HYDRA. By programming
a specific name, an agent could instantly retrieve all cables,
documents, or memoranda that even mentioned the target.
Due to pressure from President Nixon the CHAOS staff was increased
to over fifty, and by i959, CHAOS began to develop its own agents
abroad who would focus entirely on the task at hand. In order
to track political activists abroad, these agents went through
a process of establishing their "credentials" within
the radical movement in this country. During their training period,
they would be extensively debriefed by their advisers, and CIA
gained purely domestic information. In fact, so much reporting
went on that one agent was likened to a "vacuum cleaner.'
Another actually became an officer within his organization, while
yet another became an adviser in a United States congressional
campaign, and furnished CHAOS reports on behind-the-scenes activity
of the campaign. In one instance, a CHAOS agent, on leave from
his spying activities abroad, rejoined his unwitting friends in
the radical community and reported extensively on their private
lives and personal relationships.
Spying on radicals in this country was also an incidental
result of agents being trained by the CIA to penetrate foreign
intelligence agencies, as part of a program called "Project
2." After a period of basic training, these agents would
enroll at a university and feign involvement in some activist
group. Although the trainees were told by their case officers
not to gather domestic information, one agent, for example, submitted
a sixty-page report over a three-week period, including information
on a planned demonstration, groups meetings, and activities relating
to the women's movement. While abroad, these agents, although
not specifically assigned to CHAOS, were valuable assets to the
overall collection effort.
Throughout the CHAOS operation, the FBI was not only the major
recipient of the massive flow of memos, reports, and clippings
from the CIA, but also the most generous donor. By June 1970,
the FBI was sending in reports to the CIA at the rate of 1,000
a month. In addition, the two agencies extensively briefed and
debriefed each other's agents, with the bureau submitting specific
questions to be answered by CHAOS infiltrators. By 1972, some
twenty FBI informants were actually working abroad under CIA direction
and control.
As the purported expert on foreign ties to the American peace
movement, the CIA prepared a number of major studies on the subject.
One report, known as "Restless Youth," was a thick volume
analyzing the international student movement, including a long
section on the Students for a Democratic Society. Another study's
very title, "Definition and Assessment of Existing Internal
Security Threat-Foreign," exemplifies the extent to which
the CIA was operating outside its congressional charter. The Domestic
Contact Service also produced a series of reports, including one
on the background of certain individuals who had accused the CIA
of involvement in the assassination of the black leader Malcolm
X. Ironically, all these studies concluded that the domestic dissent
was a product of social and political conditions in this country,
and not the result of an international conspiracy. As late as
1971, when Operation CHAOS had grown to grand proportions, a report
was issued confirming "there is no evidence . . . that foreign
governments, organizations or intelligence services control U.S.
new left movements. The program continued to expand its scope,
not because its activities provided any leads, but in order to
prove the opposite. Richard Ober explained the phenomenon:
. . . to respond with any degree of knowledge as to whether
there is significant foreign involvement in a group . . . one
has to know whether each and every one of these persons has any
connection . . . having checked many, many names, and coming up
with no significant directions, one can say with some degree of
confidence that there is no significant involvement.
In its continuing search for that illusive connection, the
CIA worked in concert with every intelligence agency of the federal
government. The Justice Department gave the CIA thousands of names
to be put on file, while army intelligence officers briefed CIA
agents on domestic radicals. Other federal agencies submitted
names to be placed on the "watch list" for ClA's mail-opening
program, while the CIA submitted its targets for the National
Security Agency's program of intercepting cable traffic. Even
friendly intelligence agencies of other countries were asked to
assist. At times, the agencies even put pressure on each other
to step up their activities against the peace movement. In a letter
from CIA Director Helms to FBI Director Hoover in 1970, Helms
encouraged the FBI to reinstate its domestic mail-opening program,
which had been discontinued in 1966. Helms, stressing the need
for expanded coverage of the Soviet bloc, the New Left, and foreign
agents, urged continued cooperation in gathering intelligence
on "bombings, hijackings, assassination, and the demeaning
of law enforcement officers.
The CIA was well aware that it had violated its charter by
becoming so intimately involved in the internal security apparatus
of America. A cover letter from Helms to Henry Kissinger, accompanying
the Operation CHAOS report "Restless Youth," warned
that "this is an area not within the charter of this Agency,
and I need not emphasize how extremely sensitive this makes the
paper. As domestic operations expanded, there was increasing discomfort
among those being asked to carry them out. Some area division
chiefs wanted nothing to do with Operation CHAOS. In fact, the
reaction was so negative at times that CIA Director Helms was
forced to send out a memo in 1969 calling for full support of
the program, and assuring the stations that this was within the
statutory authority of the agency. An inspector general's report
on CHAOS written in 1972 reflects the growing uneasiness:
We also encountered general concern over what appeared to
constitute a monitoring of the political views and activities
of Americans not known to be or suspected of being involved in
espionage.... stations were asked to report on the whereabouts
and activities of prominent persons . . . whose comings and goings
were not only in the public domain, but for whom allegations of
subversion seemed sufficiently nebulous to raise renewed doubts
as to the nature and legitimacy of the CHAOS program.
Agency officials, however, refused to acknowledge illegality
either to the public or to their own personnel. In a speech to
the American Society of Newspaper Editors in April 1971, CIA Director
Helms totally denied rumors that the CIA was involved in domestic
spying. Referring to the 1947 ban on the exercise of police and
law enforcement powers, Helms declared, "We do not have any
such powers and functions; we have never sought any; we do not
exercise any; . . . in short, we do not target on American citizens.
Helms was later to refer to this public assertion in a talk given
to his own employees, when he added, ". . . you can rely
on these denials. Helms's statements dramatically demonstrate
how breaking the law forces endless Iying, deceit, and cover-up.
Before it came to an end, Project CHAOS compiled what the
Rockefeller Commission described as a veritable mountain of material.
It had created personality files on over 13,000 people, including
some 7,000 American citizens, and subject files on 1,000 domestic
organizations.
The CIA spied on the whole spectrum of peace activist and
civil rights groups. CHAOS agents followed the activities of the
organizations' leaders abroad, spied on their meetings, broke
into their hotel rooms, and sent thousands of cables back to headquarters
detailing their activities. Three hundred thousand names of American
citizens were cross-indexed within agency files, and thousands
of Americans were placed on "watch lists" to have their
mail opened and their telegrams read.
Operation CHAOS finally came to an end in 1974, as part of
the winding down of the massive surveillance programs of the late
1960s and early 1970s. In general, specific programs were ended
either because public dissent was in fact subsiding, or out of
fear that the programs would be exposed. There was never a reevaluation
of the ClA's domestic role, and in fact, the agency continues
its operations at home and against Americans abroad. On February
17, 1976, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order that
claims to place restraints on the intelligence agencies' illegal
activities, but in fact authorizes and ratifies their continuation.
In that order, the CIA is authorized to conduct clandestine
operations to gather foreign intelligence information from foreigners
in the United States, as well as Americans believed to be acting
on behalf of a "foreign power." The order reaffirms
ClA's broad mandate to conduct investigations of Americans who
are potential recruits, or whose activities pose a threat to agency
security. The most alarming charter given to CIA is the power
to infiltrate, "for the purpose of reporting on or influencing
activities," organizations primarily composed of foreign
nationals. The obvious targets for such disruption are immigrant
groups and foreign student organizations. Here for the first time,
CIA is officially allowed to conduct covert operations in America.
The agency still spies on Americans abroad, still accepts requests
from the FBI to put traveling citizens under surveillance, and
claims the right to wiretap and burglarize American homes and
apartments overseas.
The 1947 ban on domestic involvement remains inoperative.
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