Congressional Record: May 1, 1997 (Senate)
Page S3891-S3894
GROWING INTELLIGENCE BUDGETS
Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, recently our colleague, Senator Moynihan,
secured, or maybe not so recently, his FBI file, and it is interesting
that in 1961, in a memorandum suggesting a meeting between himself and
a then very youthful Daniel Patrick Moynihan, J. Edgar Hoover wrote,
"I am not going to see this skunk."
Now, the Senator from New York has been called many things, as we all
have in the course of our careers, but after considerable amount of
reflection I concluded that the only way in which this moniker could
stick would clearly be in a way that J. Edgar Hoover did not intend,
and that is that the distinguished Senator from New York has long and
often been a skunk at the garden party of the intellectually
comfortable, challenging our thinking about the status quo.
Most recently, he has brought this very considerable skunk-like
presence to the matter of America's intelligence bureaucracy in the
post-cold-war era. He has asked why it is that our vast intelligence
apparatus, built to sustain America in the long twilight struggle of
the cold war continues to grow at an exponential rate? Now that that
struggle is over, why is it that our vast intelligence apparatus
continues to grow even as Government resources for new and essential
priorities fall far short of what is necessary? Why is it that our vast
intelligence apparatus continues to roll on even as every other
Government bureaucracy is subject to increasing scrutiny and, indeed,
to reinvention?
Our colleague's answer is an important one for all of us to reflect
on. The answer is secrecy and bureaucracy. It is secrecy that conceals
structure, budgets, functions, and critical evaluation from the public,
the executive branch and most Members of Congress, including those on
appropriate oversight committees. It is bureaucracy, the nature of the
self-perpetuating institution like any of our intelligence agencies,
that leads to an ongoing redefinition of purpose and ongoing creation
of redundant systems and ongoing expansion of scope.
The first component, secrecy , means that the normal active tools of
democracy, that is, press scrutiny, public debate, and appropriate
oversight from executive and the congressional branches, are absent.
And the second component, bureaucracy, means that reform, downsizing,
reorganization, and elimination of redundancies cannot come from within
because, as the Senator from New York demonstrates, our intelligence
apparatus is merely following the norms of all agencies.
This suggests that the intelligence bureaucracy will not, indeed
cannot, change until we act on the cultural barriers to reform.
I ask unanimous consent that excerpts of the remarks of our
colleague, the senior Senator from New York, at Georgetown University's
Marvin H. Bernstein Lecture be printed in the Record. I commend this
important commentary on the problems of bureaucracy and secrecy to all
of my colleagues.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
Secrecy as Government Regulation
(By Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan)
Marver Bernstein was a scholar of great range and
authority, but his primary work concerned government
regulation, notably his celebrated editorship of Volume 400
of The Annals: The Government as Regulator. In that
tradition, I would like to consider secrecy as a form of
government regulation.
If at times my account appears more anecdotal than
analytic, I plead that data is the plural of anecdote.
And so we begin of a morning early in January, 1993, when I
paid a farewell call at the White House on George Bush, a
fine friend and a fine President. As I was leaving the Oval
Office, his redoubtable Chief of Staff James A. Baker, III
ran into me, and asked if I might wait for him in his office
until he had finished some business with the President. I
went down the hall, was served coffee, and awaited his
pleasure.
In time he returned to his office, went out, and came back
with a small stack of what seemed like magazines. Baker
wanted to show me what had become of the morning intelligence
summary.That is to say, the National Intelligence Daily, or
"NID", which the Central Intelligence Agency had begun back
in 1951. It used to be ten or twelve pages long, plain cover,
Top Secret. Some three hundred copies were printed. The real
stuff, Baker now showed me half a dozen national intelligence
dailies from half a dozen national intelligence agencies.
Some had photographs on the cover, just like the Washington
Post. Some were in color, just like the Washington Times. The
Chief of Staff explained it was necessary for him to arrive
at dawn to read them all, try to keep in mind what he had
already read in the press or seen on television, and prepare
a summary for POTUS. As Paul C. Light would have it,
government had thickened and heightened; someone now had to
summarize the summations.
I left musing about this. I had a passing acquaintance with
public administration theory, having been patiently
instructed by James Q. Wilson and Stephen Hess. I knew
Anthony Downs. Had even spoken to Luther C. Gulick as he
approached his 100th birthday in a hamlet on the banks of the
St. Lawrence River. I was beginning to be familiar with the
new "institutional sociologists" such as Paul DiMaggio,
Walter Powell, Howard Aldrich. I had read with great profit
the works of Suzanne Weaver and Robert A. Katzmann in the
M.I.T. series on Regulatory Bureaucracy. And a common theme
was emerging. To cite DiMaggio and Powell, "Organizations
are still becoming more homogeneous and bureaucracy remains
the common organizational form."
Light calls this "isomorphism," In a 1978 lecture drawing
on Wilson, and through him on to the 19th century German
sociologist Simmel, I had propounded "The Iron Law of
Emulation." Organizations in conflict become like one
another. (Simmel had noted that the Persians finally figured
out it was best to have Greeks fight Greeks.) The United
States Constitution assumed conflict
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among the three branches of government; I traced conflict
techniques among them ranging from office buildings to
personal staffs to foreign travel. Now, however, one's
attention was directed to conflict techniques employed by
agencies within one branch, the Executive.
The intelligence community called out for attention.
Perhaps it was the room I had just left, this southwest
corner room in the White House . I was there on the early
afternoon of November 22, 1963, awaiting news from Dallas.
The door burst open; in rushed Hubert H. Humphrey. "What
have they done to us?" he gasped. By "they" we all knew;
the Texans, the reactionaries. Later in the day one learned a
suspect had been arrested; associated with Fair Play for
Cuba. At midnight I met the cabinet plane that had been
halfway to Japan. I sought out the Treasury official in
charge of the Secret Service. We must get custody of Oswald,
I pleaded. Else he will never get out of that jail alive.
After Oswald was shot, I went round in the company of John
Macy, head of the Civil Service Commission, pleading that an
investigation had to look into the jaws of hell, else we
would be living with a conspiracy theory the rest of our
lives. I carried with me a recently reprinted book of the
post-Civil War era which "proved" that the Jesuits
assassinated Lincoln:
"Booth was nothing but the tool of the Jesuits. It was
Rome who directed his arm, after corrupting his heart and
damning his soul."
And, of course, today something like half of all Americans
think the CIA was involved in the assassination of President
Kennedy. There is even a Hollywood movie to prove it.
Nor can the historians disprove it. The records are sealed.
We have an Assassination Records Review Board that lets some
things out; not much. Recently, an eminent author wrote to
tell me of a meeting with some CIA officials a few years ago
in an effort to get some information on how the agency
handled the aftermath of the assassination:
"Surely, I said, the agency has an interest in countering
such a widely shared conspiracy theory with the truth. I got
. . . blank stares."
In his classic study, The Torment of Secrecy , which
appeared in 1956, Edward A. Shils defined secrecy as "the
compulsory withholding of information, reinforced by the
prospect of sanctions for disclosure." But secrets are
disclosed all the time, and sanctions for disclosure are rare
to the point of being nonexistent. (In the eighty years since
the Espionage Act of 1917, only one person has been sent to
prison simply for revealing a secret, as against passing
material to a foreign power.) In 1995, I was asked to write
an introduction to a paperback edition of Shils' work, and
came up with the thought that secrecy is a form of government
regulation. If this were so, we could look for the patterns
those institutional sociologists keep coming up with.
Begin with Max Weber and his chapter, "Bureaucracy" in
Wirschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society), published
after his death in 1920, but most likely written in part
prior to World War I. He writes:
"Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of
the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and
inventions secret. Bureaucratic administration always tends
to be an administration of 'secret sessions' in so far as it
can, it hides its knowledge and action from criticism.
"The pure interest of the bureaucracy in power, however,
is efficacious far beyond those areas where purely functional
interests make for secrecy . The concept of the 'official
secret' is the specific invention of bureaucracy, and nothing
is so fanatically defended by the bureaucracy as this
attitude, which cannot be substantially justified beyond
these specifically qualified areas. In facing a parliament,
the bureaucracy, out of a sure power instinct, fights every
attempt of the parliament to gain knowledge by means of its
own experts or from interest groups. The so-called right of
parliamentary investigation is one of the means by which
parliament seeks such knowledge. Bureaucracy naturally
welcomes a poorly informed and hence a powerless parliament--
at least in so far as ignorance somehow agrees with the
bureaucracy's interests."
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is nearest the "ideal
type" of such a bureaucracy, and has the longest experience
of the secrecy system that developed in the United States
from the moment of our entry into the First World War and the
enactment of the Espionage Act of 1917. The system began as a
mode of defense against foreign subversion, frequently
exploiting the divided loyalties of recent immigrants, and
not infrequently stigmatizing an entire class of perfectly
loyal citizens. This pattern persisted through the inter-war
period, the Second World War, and onto the Cold War. From
eminences such as Theodore Roosevelt who in 1917 sounded the
warning against "the Hun within," on to the obscenities of
the McCarthy era, down to the present when, if I do not
mistake, Islamic Americans are going to find themselves under
surveillance, as it were.
I offer this proposition. The attempts at subversion were
real, but never of truly serious consequence. The one
exception was the atomic espionage at Los Alamos. But even
that was temporary. Soviet scientists would have developed an
atom bomb on their own; as they did a hydrogen bomb.
Espionage is intriguing, but data analysis is more rewarding.
One thinks of the poster in the headquarters of the Internal
Revenue Service. "It Took an Accountant to nail Al Capone."
The problem is that in this, as in much else, the American
public, and the Congress at time, were led to believe that it
took the more secretive FBI.
It happens this is not true, but heaven help anyone who
suggested otherwise at mid-century. Or such was my
experience. As an aide to Governor Averell Harriman of New
York in the 1950s. I became interested in the subject of
organized crime after a State Trooper came upon an
extraordinary assembly of mob leaders from around the nation
that convened in the hamlet of Apalachin in the Southern Tier
of New York. I became peripherally involved as a Senate
staffer with Robert F. Kennedy, who was pursuing the subject.
In July, 1961, I published an article in the Reporter
magazine entitled, "The Private Government of Crime," in
which I argued that from its roots in prohibition, which was
a large scale manufacturing and marketing activity, that
there was something that could reasonably be termed organized
crime, that it was serious, and that we had not found a way
of dealing with it. Why, I asked, did American government
have so little success in dealing with this phenomenon? My
general thesis was that there was insufficient organizational
reward. Almost in passing, I noted that the FBI, which had
"not hesitated to take on the toughest problems of national
security . . . has successfully stayed away from organized
crime." It got you nothing but institutional trouble.
By now I had joined the Kennedy administration as an aide
to then-Secretary of Labor Arthur J. Goldberg. In a matter of
weeks from the publication of the article, the Department of
Labor building on Constitution Avenue was literally raided by
G-Men. They hit the Secretary's floor in unison, went door to
door, told everyone save the hapless author but including the
Secretary himself, that a dangerous person had infiltrated
their ranks with the clear implication that he should go. I
can't demonstrate this but offer the judgment that at this
time in Washington at any other department the person in
question would have gone. Hoover had files on everyone, or so
it was said. He and Allen Dulles at the CIA were JFK's first
announced appointments, rather reappointments.
The Department of Labor was different only insofar as
Arthur J. Goldberg was different. On August 2, C.D. "Deke"
DeLoach had informed the Secretary that "it would appear to
be impossible to deal with Moynihan on a liaison basis in
view of his obvious biased opinion regarding the FBI." The
Secretary called me in, said: "Pat, you have a problem. Go
and explain your point of view to the Director." The next
day, DeLoach agreed to see me, but made plain he could barely
stand the sight. There is a three-page, single-space
memorandum of the meeting in my FBI file, sent to the
Director through John Mohr. It concluded:
"Moynihan is an egghead that talks in circles and
constantly contradicts himself. He shifts about constantly in
his chair and will not look you in the eye. He would be the
first so-called "liberal" that would scream if the FBI
overstepped its jurisdiction. He is obviously a phony
intellectual that one minute will back down and the next
minute strike while our back is turned. I think we made
numerous points in our interview with him, however, this man
is so much up on "cloud nine" it is doubtful that his ego
will allow logical interpretation of remarks made by other
people."
The Director appended a handwritten notation, "I am not
going to see this skunk."
I survived: in part, I think, because the agency had no
fall-back position. One raid had always done the trick; no
Secretary ever asked that a 34-year-old get in to see the
Director.
Organizational maintenance is nowhere more manifest, and at
times ruinous, than in matters of national security. Hoover
was present at this creation during the war hysteria of 1917
and 1918 and the anti-radical rumpus that followed, including
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's celebrated raids. The
FBI was on to Communist activities fairly early on, and not
about to cede territory. Richard Gid Powers has related the
struggle with the Office of Strategic Services during World
War II--Hoover wanted to go overseas. There were social
tensions, as Powers records. "Oh So Social," for the Office
of Strategic Services; "Foreign Born Irish," for the FBI.
However, there is another perspective, perhaps best evoked
by the tale of British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin,
sometime head of the Transport and General Workers Union, on
his return from the 1945 Potsdam conference. What, he was
asked, were the Soviets like? "Why," he replied, "they're
just like the bloody Communists!" By contrast, it is quite
possible that Harry S. Truman had never met a Communist until
he sat down with Stalin at the same conference. Similarly,
Hoover may never have met a Communist in his own circles. It
was a matter of regionalism, in what was then a much more
regional nation. The clandestine activities of the Communist
Party of the United States of America were common knowledge
within political and intellectual circumstances of Manhattan
in the 1930s. They were a given. Such urbanity, if that is
not an offensive phrase, was unknown to the ward politics of
Kansas City, and equally to the Protestant churches in young
Hoover's Seward Square on Capitol Hill.
[[Page S3893]]
In this sense, it was as easy for Harry S. Truman to
believe that there were no Communists in government as for J.
Edgar Hoover to believe they were everywhere. Neither had
any experience with a political community in which some
persons were Communists, some had been, some had nuanced
differences, some implacable hostility. The world, you
might say, of Whittaker Chambers. Or, for that matter, the
late Albert Shanker, President of the American Federation
of Teachers. His February 1997 obituary records his
struggle with Communists in the teachers' unions of New
York City in the 1950's. Thus: "The anti-Communist
Teachers Guild was a weak group of 2,400 members."
In the tumult and torment that followed World War II, it
would appear that at first Hoover tried to "warn" Truman of
suspected Communists in or about the American government. We
have in the Truman Library a four-page letter of May 29,
1946, from the Director to George E. Allen, then head of the
Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and a friend of the
President, concerning "high Government officials operating
an alleged espionage network in Washington, D.C., on behalf
of the Soviet Government." Almost everyone of consequence
was implicated. First of all, "Under Secretary of State Dean
Acheson," "Former Assistant Secretary of War John J.
McCloy," "Bureau of the Budget--Paul H. Appleby." It
happens I had a slight acquaintance with McCloy, rather more
with Acheson, and was close to Appleby. Anyone with the least
sense of the Marxist mindset would instantly understand that
such men lived in a wholly different world.
There now commenced a tragedy of large consequence and
continued portent. On December 20, 1946, Meredith Gardner of
the Army Signal Agency across the Potomac "broke" the first
of the coded VENONA dispatches sent mainly by the KGB from
New York to Moscow. It was dated December 2, 1944. There were
names of the principal nuclear physicists working at Los
Alamos. Treason most vile had indeed taken place, was still
going on, was indeed occurring, even as Acheson and Newman
and Marks and others worked at establishing some kind of
international post-war regime to control the bomb. They knew
well enough that the bomb would not remain a secret long.
Science does not keep secrets. But they did not know that the
Soviets had got hold of our plans, and in consequence, would
get their own bomb two to three years sooner than otherwise,
and hence would want no part of an international regime.
They did not know because J. Edgar Hoover did not tell
them.
Army Signals decrypted the cables, leaving it to the FBI to
identify the individuals designated by code words. Julius
Rosenberg was LIBERAL. Another atomic spy, the 19-year-old
Harvard graduate Theodore A. Hall, was MLAD (Russian for
"youngster").
The National Security Agency has now made public the VENONA
decryptions.\8\ We never broke more than perhaps 10 percent
of the traffic, such is the impenetrability of one-time pads.
But all of a sudden, in 1995, the American public learned
what we had known.
The awful truth, however, is that when the President of the
United States needed to know this, which is to say Harry S
Truman, he was not told.
As best we know, and we never will know until the FBI opens
its own files, President Truman was never told of VENONA. Nor
it would appear, was Attorney General Tom Clark.
The consequences for American foreign policy were almost
wholly negative. The realism about the Soviet Union
exemplified by George Kennan, and embodied in the policies of
such as Acheson and McCloy, gave way to an agitated anxiety,
rhetorically on the part of Republicans, but as a matter of
practice and policy on the part of Democrats. A realist view
would have seen the Soviet Union as an absurdly overextended
colonial colossus which would collapse one day, essentially
along ethnic lines. (What, after all, had happened to the
other European empires in the second half of the 20th
century!) Instead, Democrats, launched an invasion of Cuba,
bringing the world close to a nuclear exchange, and leaving
an absurd problem with us to this day. Off we went to
Vietnam, quite oblivious to the Russian-Chinese hostilities
that broke out at the same time. And so on. In 1974, Donald
L. Robinson described this as "The Routinization of Crisis
Government." After all, regulatory regimes seek routine!
Part of this disorder may be ascribed to the development of
a vast culture of secrecy within the American government
which hugely interfered with the free flow of information.
The Central Intelligence Agency came into being, rather to
the annoyance of the FBI which was slow to cooperate with it.
(For that matter, it was not until 1952 that the Pentagon
felt comfortable enough with the CIA to share the VENONA
decryptions.) Scientists such as Frederick Seitz protested
secrecy, but with small success. The problem was that the
secrecy was secret. No one knew what was in the NID. And so
matters of large import were never really debated.
The most important area was that of the Soviet economy.
From the mid-1960s on, the intelligence community perceived
the Soviets growing at a considerably greater rate than the
United States. Inevitably, a "crossover" point would come
when the GDP of the USSR would exceed that of the United
States. In fairness, in the early years there were outside
economists who seemed to agree, notably Samuelson. But
this fell off. In the summer of 1990, Michael J. Boskin,
then-chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers,
testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on
this matter. He estimated that Soviet GNP came to "only
about one-third of the GNP of the U.S." He volunteered
that "as recently as a few years ago, the CIA estimates
were at 51 percent." In a question, I noted that the
highest published figure was 59%, but that the secret
estimates were even higher. It is hard not to conclude
that the Agency had simply acquired an institutional
interest in the view that the Soviets were gaining on us.
We will debate for some time--say a century--whether the
arms build-up, begun by President Carter in the Cold War
mode, but continued for some time by President Reagan,
somehow "bankrupted" the Soviet Union. But the Cold War
did end, and the West did prevail. There cannot be too
much fault to be found with this outcome. But surely there
are lessons.
The first lesson is that a culture of secrecy kept the
nation from learning the extent of Communist subversion in
the 1930s and 1940s. (Subversion was present from the first.
John Reed was a paid Soviet agent. But it didn't much matter
until World War II came in sight.) Unlike the anti-German
hysteria of the First World War, and the anti-Japanese
hysteria of the Second, concern with Communist subversion
from the 1930s into the Cold War was entirely appropriate.
Even so, the Soviet success was limited, and was waning by
the time we began to be aware of it. (The Soviet threat was
another matter; an adversary with nuclear weapons, comething
wholly new to the human condition.) "The American visage
began to cloud over," Shils wrote:
"Secrets were to become our chief reliance just when it
was becoming more and more evident that the Soviet Union had
long maintained an active apparatus for espionage in the
United States. For a country which had never previously
thought of itself as an object of systematic espionage by
foreign powers, it was unsettling."
The larger society, Shils continued, was "facing an
unprecedented threat to its continuance." In
these circumstances, "The phantasies of apocalyptic
visionaries now claimed the respectability of being a
reasonable interpretation of the real situation." A
culture of secrecy took hold within American government
which abetted a form of threat analysis which led to all
manner of misadventure.
The permanent crisis perceived in Washington was surely
overdone.
I offer what follows somewhat as conjecture, but with a
measure of conviction. The Soviet Union never intended to
invade Western Europe, or generally speaking, engage in a
third World War with the West. The leaders in Moscow were,
for a while there at least, Marxist-Leninists. That doctrine
decreed that class revolution would come regardless. It had
been hoped for in 1919-20, again in 1945-48. It hadn't
occurred, but it surely would. In the meantime, build
socialists at home. Early in the Cold War the United States
developed surveillance techniques, beginning with the U-2
"spy plane" and leading on to satellite imagery of today's
National Reconnaissance Office.
I conjecture that this technology, and associated
underwater devices, gave us first of all the security of
knowing we would get a heads up on any serious Soviet
preparations for an attack. Not, perhaps, a spasmodic nuclear
strike by a crazed commander but anything approaching
mobilization of the sort that said to have triggered World
War I. (Once one side starts, the other must start, else a
five-day advantage prove decisive, etc., etc.)
Similarly, in time, the Soviets had their own satellites:
could track NATO forces, the various U.S. Fleets, our bombers
and so forth. We never planned to invade the Soviet Union. We
were obsessive about the Western Hemisphere: nothing new
since Monroe's time. And seemingly incapable of understanding
that when an idea dies in Madrid, it takes two generations
for word to reach Managua. But never warlike as regards the
Soviet Union itself.
A second lesson is less sanguine. The Cold War has
bequeathed us a vast secrecy system, which shows no sign of
receding. It has become our characteristic mode of governance
in the Executive Branch. Intelligence agencies have
proliferated; budgets continue to grow, even as the military
subsides. Every day we learn of some new anomaly. As, for
example, the Commerce Department employee who took his Top
Secret clearance with him to the Democratic National
Committee. (Look for the day when it is a mark of
institutional prestige to have an honest-to-goodness spy
discovered within one's ranks!) In 1995, there were 21,871
"original" Top Secret designations and 374,244
"derivative" designations. Madness.
In the meantime, as old missions fade, the various
intelligence agencies seek new ones.
This has been painful to observe. I cannot say I could wish
for the return of J. Edgar Hoover, as he thought I was a
skunk. But someone needs to learn from Hoover's caution about
taking on problematic missions. For example, keep the CIA out
of drug trafficking. Stick to terrorism and weapons
technology, including, of course, biological weapons. Same
for most of the other agencies that now fill up our
embassies, turning our ambassadors into room clerks.
And so to sum up. The twentieth century saw the rise of the
administrative state.
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Government regulation has become the norm. However, we have
developed not one, but two regulatory regimes. The first is
public regulation for which we developed all manner of
disclosure, discovery, and due process. This regime is under
constant scrutiny. Thus, the 104th Congress enacted the
Congressional Review Act which establishes a sweeping
procedure whereby Congress, with Presidential approval, can
nullify regulations.
There is, however, a second regulatory regime concealed
within a vast bureaucratic complex. There is some
Congressional oversight: some Presidential control. Do not
overestimate either. Not that the public is excluded
altogether, save as bureaucracies or bureaucrats think it to
their advantage to make some things pubic. As, for example,
it being budget time, we find on the front pages the report
that:
"The Central Intelligence Agency has severed its ties to
about 100 foreign agents because they committed murder,
torture and other crimes. . . ."
This is surely a welcome development. Although it could be
asked why in the first instance public monies were disbursed
to murderers, torturers and sundry criminals.
This second regime is in need of radical change. We have
sensed this for some time. But I now submit that change will
only come if we recognize it as a bureaucratic regime with
recognizable and predictable patterns of self-perpetuation
which will never respond to mere episodic indignation.
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