Panel Could Prompt Easing of Three Decades of Restraints on Agencies’ Domestic Intelligence Efforts
by Dana Priest, Washington Post
In scope and importance, the congressional intelligence inquiry that begins today behind closed, soundproof doors on the Capitol’s top floor rivals the 1975 hearings chaired by Idaho Sen. Frank Church (D) that curbed spying on U.S. citizens and prompted stricter oversight of covert operations overseas.
But facing an elusive terrorist enemy based both abroad and in the United States, the bipartisan panel of Senate and House intelligence committee members that meets today is poised to undo nearly three decades of restraints aimed at curbing CIA and FBI abuses and safeguarding civil liberties.
“In terms of national significance, this is on par with the Iran-contra hearings and the Church commission and in some ways, it’s a more focused investigation and even more important,” said Jeffrey H. Smith, former CIA general counsel and the State Department’s liaison lawyer to the Church panel.
At 2:30 this afternoon, in Room S-407, just beyond a set of World War II-era posters proclaiming the dangers of leaking classified information, the House-Senate committee will begin briefings by a staff of 30 aides who have read more than 100,000 pages of documents and interviewed nearly 200 witnesses.
The committee, co-chaired by Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), is trying to answer three interwoven questions: What did the intelligence agencies know about the 19 al Qaeda hijackers before the Sept. 11 attacks? What did these agencies do with the information? And how can the system be improved to ensure that planning for such an assault does not slip past the $30 billion-a-year U.S. intelligence apparatus again?
“This is a sort of final exam,” said Thomas Powers, author of several books on the CIA. “This is an operation whose entire method of operation is in the intelligence sphere. The intelligence community has just got to deliver.”
Recent accounts about important trails left cold - a memo by an FBI agent in Phoenix on flight-school training by Middle Eastern men and FBI suspicions about the “20th hijacker” never forwarded to the CIA - have heightened attention on the need for change.
At issue, said experts, are profound questions about how the nation protects itself at home and conducts surveillance and operations overseas, while safeguarding the rights of Americans and immigrants - or decides to modify those rights.
The Patriot Act, passed by Congress after last year’s attacks, and Justice Department decrees have rolled back some of the protections that agencies adopted as a result of the Church inquiry. Language in this year’s House and Senate intelligence spending bills also gives the FBI, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency and the CIA new latitude in pursuing leads on potential terrorists.
Top Bush administration officials have been aggressively pushing for more changes, arguing that Americans should alter some long-held notions of civil rights. They note that the U.S. law enforcement system - as currently constructed - is not particularly well-suited for domestic counterintelligence.
“The problem we’ve got is . . . the tension between treating something as a law enforcement problem, and treating it as an intelligence gathering problem,” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in an interview yesterday with Washington Post reporters and editors. “That is not an easy thing to deal with for a country” that doesn’t “even have a domestic intelligence gathering entity.”
Top-ranking law enforcement and intelligence officials said the committee’s recommendations will help to indicate how much leeway they can expect in the future. “Everyone’s feeling their way,” said one intelligence official. The mood is to “use more of the authorities we have now and see what obstacles get in the way.”
Another major issue for the committee is the widely accepted view that over the last 20 years, the CIA, the presidents it served and Congress allowed the agency to become distracted from its most basic and unique skill: using spies, agents and informants to gather information.
Church’s select committee in 1975 uncovered details of CIA involvement in plots to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro and aid a coup against Chilean President Salvador Allende. And it revealed FBI, Army and National Security Agency spying on radical groups and such prominent individuals as Martin Luther King Jr., Adlai Stevenson and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.
The inquiry prompted significant changes in the intelligence system and created the congressional oversight committees that will lead the Sept. 11 inquiry. Most of the steps recommended by the Church panel, such as restricting the use of wiretaps, break-ins and other surveillance within the United States, were adopted by the Justice Department, FBI and CIA without changes in laws, but as a change in practice.
The 1987 Iran-contra hearings investigated the White House’s role in shipping arms to Iran in exchange for American hostages in the Middle East and its covert support - despite congressional restrictions - for overthrowing the Nicaraguan government. That inquiry resulted in another round of restrictions aimed at ensuring that the CIA kept Congress informed of covert action overseas.
The changes were also an attempt to make the FBI and other intelligence and law enforcement agencies more effective, argued Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a private research institute. “They were not doing a good job of figuring out threats,” Blanton said. “The purpose of the reforms should be to make them go after the bombers and criminals, not radicals in the basement of a mosque.”
The Church commission staff spent more than nine months studying documents and interviewing witnesses before hearings began.
By contrast, the Sept. 11 intelligence panel has worked for four months, much of it without a director. The new staff director, Eleanor Hill, a former Defense Department inspector general, was at her new job for the first time yesterday.
Some say the panel is moving too fast. “This is a rush to judgment,” said Loch Johnson, Church’s top committee aide. “You don’t have sophisticated, meaningful hearings after four months. . . . Public hearings are not, ideally, fishing expeditions.”