To maintain the CIA and the other branches of the intelligence establishment, the government spends about $4,000,000,000 a year. The exact figure is one of the most tightly held secrets of the government and it appears in none of the Federal budget documents, public or private. It is unknown, in fact, even to many of the key officials in the Invisible Government. Because the intelligence community is carefully fragmented, those in one branch find it difficult to estimate the budgets of the others.
All of the budgets are pulled together by the director of the International Division of the Budget Bureau. He is assisted by four experts, each of whom handles about $1,000,000,000 of the Invisible Government's money. One assistant checks on the National Security Agency, the second on the CIA, the third on the DIA and military intelligence, and the fourth on overhead reconnaissance.
All of the Invisible Government's hidden money is buried in the Defense Department budget, mainly in the multibillion-dollar weapons contracts, such as those for the Minuteman and Polaris missiles. The Comptroller of the Pentagon knows where the money is hidden, but so carefully is it camouflaged, even his closest assistants are unable to guess at the amount.
It is not startling, then, that even those at the very center of the Invisible Government vary in their estimates of what is being spent. In a private briefing for high-ranking military men in the summer of 1963 McCone offered a figure of $2,000,000,000 [i] and estimated that 100,000 persons were involved in intelligence work.
However, McCone appeared to be limiting his estimate to the money spent by the CIA and the other agencies on the more conventional forms of intelligence work. In addition, $2,000,000,000 is spent each year on electronic intelligence (the NSA and aerial spying). When the two forms of intelligence are included, the total budget reaches $4,000,000,000 and the personnel figure amounts to about 200,000.
It is often assumed that the National Security Council controls this vast intelligence establishment. But in practice much of the activity of the Invisible Government is never examined at NSC meetings. Nor is it disclosed to the United States Intelligence Board (which, for example, was not informed in advance of the Bay of Pigs).
The important decisions about the Invisible Government are made by the committee known as the Special Group. Although the composition of the committee has varied slightly, its membership has generally included the Director of Central Intelligence, the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (or his deputy), and the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense. In the Kennedy and early Johnson Administrations, the presidential representative -- and key man -- on the Special Group was McGeorge Bundy. The others members were McCone, McNamara, Roswell Gilpatric, Deputy Secretary of Defense, and U. Alexis Johnson, Deputy Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.
The Special Group was created early in the Eisenhower years under the secret Order 54/12. It was known in the innermost circle of the Eisenhower Administration as the "54/12 Group" and is still so called by a few insiders. The Special Group grew out of the "OCB luncheon group." [ii] It has operated for a decade as the hidden power Center of the Invisible Government. Its existence is virtually unknown outside the intelligence community and, even there, only a handful of men are aware of it.
The Special Group meets about once a week to make the crucial decisions -- those which are too sensitive or too divisive to be entrusted to USIB. The more grandiose of the Invisible Government's operations have been launched in this exclusive arena. It is here in this hidden corner of the massive governmental apparatus that the United States is regularly committed to policies which walk the tightrope between peace and war.
CIA men generally have the Special Group in mind when they insist that the agency has never set policy, but has only acted on higher authority.
"The facts are," Allen Dulles has declared, "that the CIA has never carried out any action of a political nature, given any support of any nature to any persons, potentates or movements, political or otherwise, without appropriate approval at a high political level in our government outside the CIA." 1
To the average citizen, Dulles' statement might logically conjure up a picture of the Cabinet, the National Security Councilor some special presidential commission meeting in solemn session to debate the wisdom of a dangerous clandestine operation.
But, in fact, some decisions of this type have been made by the Special Group in an informal way without the elaborate records and procedures of other high government committees. And these fateful decisions have been made without benefit of outside analysis. Little detached criticism has been brought to bear on the natural human tendency of the leaders of the Invisible Government to embark upon ventures which might prove their toughness, demonstrate their vision or expand their power.
The "euphoria of secrecy goes to the head," as C.P. Snow, the English scientist-novelist. has observed, and the Special Group has operated in an atmosphere of secrecy exceeding that of any other branch of the United States Government.
It is apparent, then, that the two presidential watchdog committees, the Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities of the Eisenhower Administration and the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, have had great difficulty getting to the bottom of things. Both committees were composed of part-time consultants who met only occasionally during the year.
The original committee had, in fact, been established by Eisenhower in 1956 at least partly to head off closer scrutiny of the Invisible Government. In 1955 the full Hoover Commission had recommended that such a presidential committee be established. But it had also proposed the creation of a Joint Congressional Committee on Foreign Intelligence.
The Eisenhower Administration compromised. It complied with the first and more innocuous of the recommendations, but opposed the Joint Congressional Committee, which was anathema to the CIA.
The Hoover Commission's Intelligence Task Force, headed by General Mark W. Clark, had submitted a much stronger recommendation. It had proposed a single watchdog commission composed of senators, congressmen, and presidential appointees.
"The Task Force ... is concerned," its report stated. "over the absence of satisfactory machinery for surveillance of the stewardship of the Central Intelligence Agency. It is making recommendations which it believes will provide the proper type of 'watchdog' commission as a means of re-establishing that relationship between the CIA and the Congress so essential to and characteristic of our democratic form of government."
The Task Force was critical in tone: "There is still much to be done by our intelligence community to bring its achievements up to an acceptable level.
"The glamour and excitement of some angles of our intelligence effort must not be permitted to overshadow other vital phases of the work or to cause neglect of primary functions. A majority of the Task Force is convinced that an internal reorganization of the CIA is necessary to give assurance that each of these functions gets adequate attention without diversionary interest." 2
Earlier studies of the CIA had been less critical. The 1949 Hoover Task Force, headed by Ferdinand Eberstadt. a Wall Street broker, found the CIA "sound in principle," although it recommended that "vigorous efforts be made to improve the internal structure ... and the quality of its product." 3
In 1954 a special presidential study group, led by General James H. Doolittle, said the CIA was doing a "creditable job." But it detected "important areas in which the CIA organization, administration and operations can and should be improved." 4
Inbetween, Allen Dulles surveyed the CIA for President Truman prior to joining the agency. But his report was kept secret.
By 1954, substantial pressure had built up in Congress for a closer scrutiny of the intelligence community. Mike Mansfield, then a freshman senator from Montana, submitted a resolution that would have carried out the Hoover Commission recommendation by creating a Joint Committee on the Central Intelligence Agency. In its final form, the resolution called for a twelve-man committee, six from the Senate and six from the House, and for the appropriation of $250,000 for staff expenditures during the first year.
Thirty-four senators joined Mansfield in sponsoring the resolution. But by the time the proposal came to a vote on April 11, 1956, fourteen of these sponsors had reversed themselves, and the resolution was defeated, fifty-nine to twenty-seven. Thirteen of those who had changed their minds were Republicans evidently reflecting White House pressure. Many of the Democrats who voted against the resolution clearly were worried about disturbing Senator Richard B. Russell, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and other Democratic titans who opposed the idea.
Mansfield's language in introducing the resolution was not calculated to please the conservative inner club of the Senate, which enjoyed special relations with the Invisible Government.
"An urgent need exists" Mansfield said, "for regular and responsible Congressional scrutiny of the Central Intelligence Agency. Such scrutiny is essential to the success of our foreign policy, to the preservation of our democratic processes and to the security of the intelligence agency itself ...
"If we fail to establish some sort of permanent, continuing link between Congress and the CIA, the only result will be growing suspicion ... In the first place, the whole concept of peacetime foreign intelligence operations has been alien to the American tradition ...
"Our form of government ... is based on a system of checks and balances. If this system gets seriously out of balance at any point the whole system is jeopardized and the way is opened for the growth of tyranny ...
"CIA is freed from practically every ordinary form of Congressional check. Control of its expenditures is exempted from the provisions of the law which prevent financial abuses in other government agencies. Its appropriations are hidden in allotments to other agencies ...
"I agree that an intelligence agency must maintain complete secrecy to be effective. However, there is a profound difference between an essential degree of secrecy to achieve a specific purpose and secrecy for the mere sake of secrecy. Once secrecy becomes sacrosanct, it invites abuse.
"If we accept this idea of secrecy for secrecy's sake, we will have no way of knowing whether we have a fine intelligence service or a very poor one. Secrecy now beclouds everything about the CIA -- its cost, its efficiency, its successes and its failures." 5
As the Mansfield resolution approached a vote in April of 1956, the powers-that-be in the Senate massed their forces in a counter-attack.
"It would be more desirable," Russell declared, "to abolish the CIA and close it up, lock, stock and barrel, than to adopt any such theory as that all the members of the Congress of the United States are entitled to know the details of all the activities of this far-flung organization." 6
Senator Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky, the former Democratic Vice-President, declared: "The information I received as a member of the National Security Council, in my capacity as Vice-President, was so confidential that I would lose my right arm before I would divulge it to anyone, even to members of my own family ...
"Some of the information gathered by the Central Intelligence Agency and laid before the National Security Council itself was so confidential and secret that the very portfolios in which it was contained were under lock and key. The members of the National Security Council were not even permitted to take those folders and portfolios to their homes. They had to be unlocked in the presence of the other members ...
"To say that now we should establish a Joint Committee to pry into and look into secret documents, to submit them before the Joint Committee, and to make them public seems to me incredible." 7
Russell also raised the specter of critical national secrets leaking out of the Joint Committee. He contended that the very creation of the committee would increase "the hazards to the lives of those who work for the CIA, and dry up sources of information, which are vital to the national security." He insisted that the CIA was already subjected to adequate scrutiny by members of the Senate Armed Services and Appropriations Committees. [iii]
"Although Mr. Allen W. Dulles has been before us" Russell said, "and although we have asked him very searching questions about some activities which it almost chills the marrow of a man to hear about, he has never failed to answer us forthrightly and frankly in response to any question we have asked of him." 8
Republican Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts said the CIA subcommittee met with CIA officials "at least twice a year" [iv] and that the witnesses stated their willingness to answer all questions.
"The difficulty in connection with asking questions and obtaining information," Saltonstall remarked, "is that we might obtain information which I personally would rather not have, unless it was essential for me as a member of Congress to have it." 9
Nevertheless, Saltonstall would call his close friend, Allen Dulles, from time to time to get a personal explanation of some CIA operation.
The CIA's view on whether there should be more Congressional scrutiny was stated officially in a letter to Mansfield from General Cabell on September 4, 1953. "It is our opinion," he wrote, "that, from our point of view, the present ties with Congress are adequate."
Allen Dulles agreed: "Any public impression that the Congress exerts no power over CIA is quite mistaken. Control of funds gives a control over the scope of operations -- how many people CIA can employ, how much it can do and to some extent what it can do ...
"The chairman of the House [Appropriations] Subcommittee [on the CIA) is Clarence Cannon, and a more careful watchdog of the public treasury can hardly be found." 10
Whether or not Dulles' judgment held true for other budgetary matters, the eighty-three-year-old Cannon had no great reputation on his subcommittee as a "careful watchdog" of the CIA. In fact, he was such a good friend and great admirer of Dulles that much of the secret CIA hearings during Dulles' tenure were taken up with mutual congratulations. CIA officials came armed with thick black volumes, but the other members of the House Subcommittee [v] never had time to probe deeply into the agency's activities. Some of the members displayed annoyance but could do little about it in view of Cannon's absolute control over the committee.
Nevertheless, Cannon once sought to have the CIA checked by the General Accounting Office. The request threw the CIA into consternation: should it turn him down and lose a good friend or cooperate and risk the disclosure of operational secrets? The decision was to go along with Cannon but to steer the GAO into a non-sensitive area. The auditors were taken to the facilities of the CIA's broadcast information service which monitors the radio programs of foreign countries, particularly the Communist bloc. The GAO spent a year at the foreign broadcast service, but to the satisfaction of the CIA, turned in a harmless set of recommendations.
"They can't find the side of a barn," said one contented CIA man.
GAG men were not inclined to dispute the assessment. They despaired of the practicality of auditing covert operations where, as a GAO official put it, "they payoff some guy under a rock in the desert."
Prior to 1954 the GAO kept two of its men on permanent assignment with the CIA as consultants. When a problem arose in a non-sensitive area, the CIA accountants would ask the GAO men to judge whether they were acting properly. Taking the facts as presented to them, the GAO men would then refer the problem to the Comptroller General's office for approval.
Since the procedure amounted to a certification of CIA practices without the authority to investigate them, Joseph Campbell withdrew the GAO men from the CIA when he took over as Comptroller General in 1954.
Still, the GAO continued to bump into an occasional CIA project while investigating large defense contracts. But under the 1949 law, which removed Congress' power to audit the CIA, the GAO was prohibited from looking further, even if it had suspicions that the contractor might be juggling non-CIA funds.
Congress' difficulties with the intelligence community have been matched by those of American ambassadors in foreign countries. In 1959 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee compiled a booklet of anonymous quotations from retired Foreign Service officers. One of them noted:
"Every senior officer of the Department of State and every senior officer of the Foreign Service has heard something of CIA's subversive efforts in foreign countries and probably most of them have some authentic information about CIA operations of this nature in some particular case. Unfortunately, most of these activities seem to have been blundering affairs, and most, if not all of them, seem to have resulted to the disadvantage of the United States and sometimes in terrible failure ... The situation is exacerbated by the fact that in most diplomatic and consular establishments abroad espionage agents of the CIA are stationed masquerading as diplomatic and consular officers." 11
Several ambassadors complained about being used as fronts for espionage activities. But the CIA insisted that embassy cover was essential to its work. Without the immunity accorded to diplomatic property, the CIA's codes, files and communications would not be secure. The CIA maintains its own codes and an independent communications system (as does the Pentagon through the Defense Communications Agency), and unless CIA agents choose to tell an ambassador what they are up to and what they are reporting to Washington, he has no independent means for finding out.
Friction between Foreign Service men and CIA operatives became so pronounced by the end of the Eisenhower Administration, that President Eisenhower issued an executive order in November of 1960, stating: "The several chiefs of the United States diplomatic missions in foreign countries, as the representatives of the President and acting on his behalf, shall have and exercise, to the extent permitted by law and in accordance with instructions as the President may from time to time promulgate, affirmative responsibility for coordination and supervision over the carrying out by agencies of their functions in the respective countries."
The Eisenhower order seemed, on the surface, to re-establish the ambassador's supremacy over all United States agencies operating overseas. But many were troubled by the possibility of secret "instructions" to the CIA circumventing the ambassador's authority.
When President Kennedy entered office, he took prompt action to reaffirm the powers of the State Department and the ambassadors. On May 29, 1961, Kennedy sent a letter to all ambassadors:
You are in charge of the entire United States diplomatic mission, and I shall expect you to supervise all of its operations. The mission includes not only the personnel of the Department of State and the Foreign Service, but also the representatives of all other United States agencies which have programs or activities in [name of country]. I shall give you full support and backing in carrying out your assignment.
Needless to say, the representatives of other agencies are expected to communicate directly with their offices here in Washington, and in the event of a decision by you in which they do not concur, they may ask to have the decision reviewed by a higher authority in Washington.
However, it is their responsibility to keep you fully informed of their views and activities and to abide by your decisions unless in some particular instance you and they are notified to the contrary.
The moving force behind Kennedy's letter was Chester Bowles, then Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. In the summer of 1961 Bowles set out on a round-the-world trip to explain the new arrangement. A fifteen-man team, including leading representatives of the State Department, the CIA and the AID, accompanied Bowles to seven regional meetings with ambassadors and their staffs.
Bowles told the meetings that the ambassadors were to be kept fully informed on all CIA operations and were to receive copies of all CIA messages to Washington. At each meeting the CIA men would express skepticism: What, they asked, about situations in which ambassadors do not understand the CIA's special problems?
Let us know, Bowles replied, and we'll get new ones.
Do we tell the ambassador the sources of our information? the CIA men asked incredulously. Yes, Bowles answered, the ambassador should be in a position to cross-check information if he runs across one of the informants at a diplomatic function.
The CIA appealed for permission to circumvent the ambassador in "overriding circumstances." But Bowles said no, and a year later, when he made a check of each United States embassy, he received not a single complaint or comment from the CIA. The new system, Bowles concluded, was working well.
But a different impression was gained by a staff of experts sent on a world-wide inspection late in 1962 by the Subcommittee on National Security Staffing and Operations of the Senate Government Operations Committee. The experts concluded that the Kennedy letter was a "shadow" and had not been interpreted as covering the CIA. Ambassadors were still unable to give orders to the CIA or to stop an agency operation. The only evident change was that the ambassador now appeared to be in a better position to protest about a CIA program and delay it until a decision came back from Washington.
These conclusions were watered down in the staff report published by the subcommittee in January, 1963. But the report did point out that the military services and the CIA tend to "take a restricted view of the ambassador's right to interpose himself" between them and their superiors in Washington.
And in a cautious observation that might equally have applied to the Invisible Government's relationship with the government as a whole, the report said:
"To a degree the primacy of the ambassador is a polite fiction."
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Notes:
i. Significantly, many CIA officials estimate that the Soviet Union spends $2,000,000,000 a year on its spy apparatus. On the other hand, Soviet Secret Police Chief Alexander N. Shelepin estimated in 1959 that the CIA spent $1,500,000,000 a year and employed 20,000 persons.
ii. The OCB, the Operations Coordinating Board, was composed of the Under Secretary of State, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the President's Special Assistant (National Security Affairs ), and the directors of CIA, USIA, and the old International Cooperation Administration. They were supposed to make sure the President's decisions were carried out in their departments. The OCB was abolished by President Kennedy in his first month in office.
iii. In the 88th Congress the CIA subcommittee in the Senate was composed of Russell, Harry Flood Byrd, Virginia Democrat, John Stennis, Mississippi Democrat, and Leverett Saltonstall, Massachusetts Republican, all members of the Armed Services Committee; and Carl Hayden, Arizona Democrat and chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and Milton R. Young, North Dakota Republican and Appropriations Committee member. A. Willis Robertson, Virginia Democrat and Appropriations Committee member, joined the CIA subcommittee on occasion.
iv. In a debate on August 14, 1963, Representative Walter Norblad, the Oregon Republican, said the House Armed Services Subcommittee on the CIA (of which he was a former member) "met annually one time a year for a period of two hours in which we accomplished virtually nothing."
v. In the 88th Congress they were Democrats George Mahon of Texas and Harry R. Sheppard of California, and Republicans Gerald Ford of Michigan and Harold C. Ostertag of New York.
In the House there was also a CIA subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee. It was composed of Carl Vinson, Georgia Democrat and chairman of the Armed Services Committee; L. Mendel Rivers, South Carolina Democrat; F. Edward Hebert, Louisiana Democrat; Melvin Price, Illinois Democrat; Charles E. Bennett, Florida Democrat; George Huddleston, Jr., Alabama Democrat; Leslie C. Arends, Illinois Republican; William G. Bray, Indiana Republican; Bob Wilson, California Republican; and Frank C. Osmers, Jr., New Jersey Republican.