Discussion

Which issue or activity during the Early 20th century through Operation Iraqi Freedom had the greatest impact on the development of the United States Intelligence Community (IC)? This is meant to be a wide open question...
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The 20th event that had the greatest effect on the IC was the Church Committee. There are several reasons for my claim.

1: The reforms resulting from the Church Committee had the effect of changing the direction and management of the IC from a right-wing and anti-leftist, nominally controlled by the public via the Exectuive Office, to a leftist oriented management dominated by the “Political Class”, as Rasmussen describes it. Codevilla, who served on the Church Committee, calls these people “the ruling class”, and in a 2019 interview (Samuels), argues that the Church Committee was “a joint operation between, let’s call it ‘the left’ inside the intelligence community, specifically the CIA, and their friends on the Hill” which left the Left in control of the CIA. I extrapolate that in light of subsequent events to include the entire IC.

Codevilla’s claim certainly updates my own views; my interest in intelligence began way back in high school (1987), and one of the first questions I asked was “Why was the FBI allowed to destroy the Klan, but held back in attacking the leftist terrorists (SDS, Weathermen, Black Panthers, et al)?” I have since learned there is much more to the question than the question of “allowed”, but I assumed a hostile attitude on the part of the Left to the defense of this country. Codevilla’s assertion that the left simply used the abuse crisis to take the reins makes more sense to me.

And it should, considering Conquest’s (Robert Conquest studied the Soviet genocide of Ukrainians) Second Law of Politics (2008) :
“Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.”

However, Codevilla also argues that the IC acquiesced to leftist control because that would free them from constantly being sued by the Left. Now that I reread my paraphrase, I have to imagine he said that with a smirk on his face. Andrew (1995) notes the eagerness in which Church took to the Committee

Angelo Codevilla

2:The actions of the Church Committee reflected a major shift in American political culture. I will note that Hoover, ever guarding his burrocratic turf, had restricted FBI operations including black bag jobs depending on court rulings, but before laws were put into place. I’ll also point you to the differences in Supreme Court cases involving Communists in 1961 (Communist Party v. Subversive Activities Control Board) compared to1967 (Keyishian v. Board of Regents) to highlight a greater tolerance for leftism. This does not necessarily mean a sea change in popular political culture, but can be explained by changes in the attitudes and actions of the influential.

3: These changes left a number of hindrances to efficient IC management; such hindrances resulted in the consequences of failed information sharing in 9/11, and the political correctness that led up to terror attacks in San Bernandino, Fort Hood, Orlando, and Boston.

• FSB had warned the FBI regarding the Tsarnaev brothers (Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector general, 2014). But “FBI training manuals were systematically purged in 2011 of all references to Islam that were judged offensive by a specially created five-member panel. Three of the panel members were Muslim advocates from outside the FBI, which still refuses to make public their identities” (“Examiner Editorial,” 2013).

Burrocratic limitations such as the Gorelick Wall were not new hindrances to intelligence sharing, simply reminders of restrictions of the legal environment that the Church Committee had created. Powers (2004a, 2004b) goes into detail on how the changes wrought by the Committee affected the ability of the IC to do it’s job.

4: There was no effort to determine how to define threats to the United States. While this is a constant through IC reformation efforts, consider that airing our “dirty laundry” was intended to prevent the repeat of intelligence abuses, keeping in mind that the portrayal of otherwise legal activities by the IC. In particular, COINTELPRO operations against violent terror organizations, was often portrayed as “abuse” by the Church Committee.

Johnson (2004) makes several claims along these lines; “simply because they had expressed opposition to the war in Vietnam, criticized the slow pace of the civil rights movement, or (quite the opposite) advocated racial segregation.”

For Johnson, who was also a staffer on the Church committee, to make this statement without acknowledging the 1000s of acts of terror committed by the Klan and the various leftist groups is base dishonesty, but his limited constriction of COINTELPRO efforts to only the abuses committed is gross deception:
“The goal of wrecking the civil rights movement stood at the heart of Cointelpro.”

Johnson’s claim is wholly without merit. Both Sullivan (1979) and Powers (1987) note Hoover’s reluctance to use the FBI to assist the civil rights movement, and provide reasons for the decision. But when Johnson ordered Hoover to deal with the Klan (WHITE HATE), the FBI did it’s job of countering violent subversion. But there is no evidence that “wrecking” the civil rights movement had anything to do with the goal of COINTELPRO operations, which Hoover himself explained in 1969, while addressing Klan and leftist terror:
“Every citizen and group has the right (and duty) to point out the many imperfections in society and to take steps to have them corrected. But these steps must be within the democratic process-not in opposition to the law. Civil disobedience, violence and flouting of the law have no place in a democratic society. Free government is tragically weakened when individuals show disrespect for the law, engage in vigilante actions or endeavor to set one element of society against the other. When any group openly proclaims that our government should be overthrown by violence, the time has come to be concerned-and we as a nation have reached that point!”

It is a shame that we as a nation have never sat down and decided what makes an inherent, or fundamental, threat to our liberty and prosperity. A major consideration is that we have decided as a nation, born out of political strife, to forgo the creation of “political crimes”. Kittrie and Wedlock (1998) point out that while there have been may politically based prosecutions, there is not a body of American law devoted to “political crime”.

5: An adjunct idea to Item 4 is that we have a legal separation between foreign and domestic threats to the nation. There are good reasons for this, but I will argue that we can achieve both a more efficient and Constitutionally adherent IC by defining what the threats are first, and legally organizing the IC from there.

The idea of what a threat is may have been simpler at the time the country was created, but the idea that a hostile ideology must be of foreign origination certainly has been overtaken by political evolution. The idea is tested by terror acts committed by recent immigrants or their first generation citizens. It is also tested by citizens taking up a fundamentally hostile ideology. A good example of this is pointed out by Johnson (2004):
“The executive branch had concluded, wrongly, that the youthful dissenters were agents of Moscow.”

CHAOS/ and the Huston Plan were indeed abuses. There were also abuses under the COINTELPRO aegis. Opposing a policy is not adherence to overthrowing the government. But what about those who choose a political goal that is the subversion of the Constitution?

From the beginning of the country, the idea was such ideologies had to be of foreign origination: the Alien and Sedition Acts, and the Red Scare of the 20s (Palmer, 1920) come to mind. Eliff (1979), referring to the pre-Church FBI asserts that “the constitutional legitimacy of FBI security operations in this period depended primarily upon the link with foreign threats”.

Source

The Alien and Sedition Acts were certainly used to attack political opponents, highlighting the danger of political definitions of threats, but at the same time, terror attacks and subversive information war present a threat as well. Where should the line be drawn?

The saying, “The Constitution is not a suicide pact” is most linked to Supreme Court Justice Jackson”
“The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”
(TERMINIELLO v. CITY OF CHICAGO)

In conclusion, the Church Committee brought about several things, while signifying others:

• A shift in management of the IC towards a leftist political class
• A restriction on IC ability to defend the country
• A reflection of change in American political culture
• A traditional failure to define “threat” as a basis of existence

REFERENCES:

Andrew, C. (1995) For the President’s Eyes Only. New York. Harper-Collins Publishers Inc.

Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector general. (2014). Unclassified summary of information handling and sharing prior to the April 15, 2013 Boston marathon bombings. Retrieved from https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2014/s1404.pdf

Elliff, J. (1979). The reform of FBI intelligence operations. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Examiner Editorial: How the FBI was blinded by political correctness. (2013, April 25). Retrieved October 30, 2019, from Washington Examiner website: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/examiner-editorial-how-the-fbi-was-blinded-by-political-correctness

Johnson, L. (2004). Congressional Supervision of America’s Secret Agencies: The Experience and Legacy of the Church Committee. Public Administration Review, 64(1).

Hoover, J. E. (1969). Study in Marxist Revolutionary Violence: Students for a Democratic Society, 1962-1969, A. Fordham L. Rev., 38, 289.

Kittrie, N. N., & Wedlock, E. D. (Eds.). (1998). The tree of liberty: A documentary history of rebellion and political crime in America (Rev. ed). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Palmer, A. M. (1920, February). Political speech and sedition. The Forum. Retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2182266

Powers, R. G. (1987). Secrecy and power: The life of J. Edgar Hoover. New York; London: Free Press ; Collier Macmillan.

Powers, R. G. (2004a). A Bomb with a LONG FUSE: 9/11 and the FBI “reforms” of the 1970s. American History, 39(5), 42–47.

Powers, R. G. (2004b, November). Stunned Guns. The Washington Monthly, 36(11), 37–43.

Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics. (2008, July 11). Retrieved February 19, 2017, from Isegoria website: http://www.isegoria.net/2008/07/robert-conquests-three-laws-of-politics/

Samuels, D. (2019, October 24). The Codevilla Tapes. Retrieved October 25, 2019, from Tablet Magazine website: https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/culture-news/292763/angelo-codevilla

Sullivan, W. C., & Brown, B. (1979). The Bureau: My thirty years in Hoover’s FBI. New York: Ishi Press.

Congressional Supervision of America’s Secret Agencies: The Experience and Legacy of the Church Committee. (n.d.).

Miller, R. A. (2008). US National Security, Intelligence and Democracy: From the Church Committee to the War on Terror. Routledge.

Comments

• There is just too much out there for any one person to know it all. That's the great thing about this environment, every resource leads to a new source!
  For me, the development and employment of the OSS is an under-studied area. The closest I came was trying to decide whether the Halloween Massacre of 1977 targeted the OSS veterans in the CIA, particularly in DDO.
  I never built my Utopian IC, but I think I would have to error on the side of centralization, with each agency that had it's own intelligence components (stressing DOD here) pushing raw data up the chain while performing analysis for their own purposes on their level. The coordinating agency would then generate analysis and IRs to push back down as required.
  I spent more time trying to come up with a good method of legally and objectively establishing threat; so many points for ideology, so many points for commitment to violence, so many points for propaganda effort, so many points for association with other threats, etc etc. It's a field ripe for abuse, though.

…

• The Patriot Act is an excellent choice to discuss for several reasons:
  1- it highlights a tendency in American security history to cycle through over-reaction/under-reaction. As an example, we over-reacted to the abuses of the IC revealed by the Church Committee, went back into a period of complacency until, 9/11, and over-reacted again
  2- bringing me to HOW we over-reacted. Instead of deciding on who was and wasn't a threat to the country, and directing intelligence efforts at those individuals, ideologies, and states, we took on mass surveillance of ourselves as a whole. Clarke (2013) quotes an Arkansas fusion center director who said that “they spy not on Americans, just on anti-government Americans” . Perhaps the director would also be correct if he changed “anti-government” to “anti-American”. The concept of protecting America goes beyond the concept of protecting it's government.
  3- This violation of civil liberty has been so extreme that Jim Sensenbrenner,the author of the PATRIOT Act , had this to say about it, “I stand by the Patriot Act and support the specific targeting of terrorists by our government, but the proper balance has not been struck between civil rights and American security” (Kravets, 2013)

REFERENCES:
Clarke, D. A. (2013, September). Making U.S. security and privacy rights compatible (Thesis). Monterey California. Naval Postgraduate School. https://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/37603

Kravets, D. (2013, September 5). Patriot Act author says NSA is abusing spy law. Wired Magazine. http://www.wired.com/2013/09/nsa-abusing-patriot-act/

…

• Good point about information sharing. I do think there is a balance between sharing and security, especially when dealing with foreign and/or civilian partners. When we share data outside of our secure environment, we don't have full control over where that data ends up. While we do have a lot of say in granting clearances to American private partners, we don't get that chance to vet foreign participants.
  In addition, sharing data can reveal methods and sources we would just as soon keep to ourselves.
  However, I think you are right in emphasizing that data must be shared with partners; I just wanted to stress that we need to be careful in doing so
  …

Notes

why this and not reorg 1947 or reagan reauth EO? Executive Order (E.O.) 12333

Keep things smoothly, Exec does exec function ,and congress uses it’s power to stop exec thru budget or impeachment… burrocratic mess

bogus seperation between foreign or domestic threats (hybrid Gangs linked to cartels

lesson wrong on one aspect

  Bukarin, Oleg A. 2007. "The Cold War Atomic Intelligence Game, 1945-70: From the Russian Perspective." Studies in Intelligence CSI Publications 48, no. 2. (April 14). Accessed August 10, 2014. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol48no2/article01.html

  Finnegan, John Patrick. 1985. Military Intelligence. Government Printing Office.
   
  Federation of American Scientists. 1996. Appendix A to Preparing for the 21st Century: An Appraisal of US Intelligence: The Evolution of the U.S. Intelligence Community-An Historical Overview. Washington DC.  http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/int022.html

McWilliams, John C. 1991. Covert Connections: The FBN, the OSS, and the CIA. Historian 53, no. 4: 657-678. Hoboken, NJ. http://web.ebscohost.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/ehost/detail?vid=5&hid=8&sid=929a9b2f-0720-4047-8d57-38a15ebf2984%40sessionmgr4&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d)

Moynihan, Mark F. 2000. The Scientific Community and Intelligence Collection. Physics Today 53, no. 12: 51-56. College Park, MD. http://web.ebscohost.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/ehost/detail?vid=8&hid=8&sid=929a9b2f-0720-4047-8d57-38a15ebf2984%40sessionmgr4&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=aph&AN=3835549
Naylor, Roger. 2015. "Pearl Harbor Spy Was Detained at Triangle T Ranch." The Arizona Republic. (July 16). http://www.azcentral.com/story/travel/local/history/2015/07/17/pearl-harbor-spy-detained-triangle-t-ranch/30153079/.
Office of Strategic Services: Secret intelligence branch. 2009. US Fed News Service, Including US State News, Dec 10. http://search.proquest.com/docview/471872018?accountid=8289.
Perloff, James. 2016. "Pearl Harbor: Hawaii Was Surprised; FDR Was Not." The New American (December 7). http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/4740-pearl-harbor-hawaii-was-surprised-fdr-was-not

  Richelson, Jeffrey T. 2011. A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century. Oxford University Press.
  "The Evolution of the U.S. Intelligence Community-An Historical Overview.” February 1996. http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/int022.html
  Tidd, John M. 2008. From revolution to reform: A brief history of U.S. intelligence. The SAIS Review of International Affairs 28, no. 1: 5-24, http://search.proquest.com/docview/231350775?accountid=8289.
  Walker, David A. 1987. OSS and Operation Torch. Journal of Contemporary History 22, no. 4:  667-679.  Thousand Oaks,  Ca. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/260815?uid=3739664&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=55945679903
   
  Wortman, Marc. 2016. 1941 Fighting the Shadow War: A Divided America in a World At War. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.

ME: Bureau of Intelligence Reforms/corrupion
Index of communists
leftist anarchist terrorism
Fear of a secret police

ME: constituion is not a suicide pact

• Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community. 2006. "Appendix A: The Evolution of the U.S. Intelligence Community-An Historical Overview," A1-A25. In Preparing for the 21st Century: An Appraisal of U.S. Intelligence. Government Printing Office.