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The Church Committee, the CIA, and the Intelligence Dimension of US

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The Church Committee, the CIA, and the Intelligence Dimension of US 13 Unquiet Americans: The Church Committee, the CIA, and the Intelligence Dimension of U.S. Public Diplomacy in the 1970s Paul M. McGarr On September 13, 1974, William E. Colby, the Director of U.S Central Intelligence, stood before the annual conference of the Fund for Peace, a Washington D.C. based non- profit institution, concerned with security and development in the global south. Speaking in the context of a post-Watergate political climate heavily laden with conspiracism and suspicion, Colby surprised his audience by making a case for greater “openness” and transparency on the part of the Central Intelligence Agency. Alluding to CIA-led interventions stretching back to the late 1940s, that had sought to effect regime change in Italy, Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, the Congo, and Cuba, amongst others, Colby acknowledged the Agency’s record in, “assist[ing] America’s friends against her adversaries in their contest for control of a foreign nation’s political direction.” Remarkably, America’s spymaster went on to publicly defend the utility of CIA interference in the internal affairs of independent sovereign states. “I . would think it mistaken to deprive our nation of the possibility of some moderate covert action response to a foreign problem,” Colby volunteered, “and leave us with nothing between a diplomatic protest and sending in the Marines.”1 In India, where the CIA had been under a media microscope since 1967, when the American magazine Ramparts exposed the Agency’s longstanding financial relationships with an international network of anti- communist educational and cultural bodies, Colby’s candor, in the words of U.S. ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whipped up a “wholly predictable storm.” An incensed Moynihan was left “groping” for an explanation as to why Colby had considered it necessary to openly debate the merits and morality of CIA clandestine operations. On December 3, in a stinging cable to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the ambassador asked bluntly, “Is it out of the question that some thought might be given in Washington to the effect in India of statements such as the Director has made? Is it that nobody knows? Or is it that nobody cares?”2 The global media spotlight directed upon some of the CIA’s more questionable activities in 1970s was to have a profound and enduring impact upon perceptions of the United States’ government and its external intelligence service, both at home and 30151.indb 195 05/05/2015 13:42 196 Reasserting America in the 1970s abroad. For the remainder of the twentieth century and beyond, anti-American elements within the developing world have drawn repeatedly upon the specter of CIA subversion as a means of undermining Washington’s international relations. The blanket exposure given by the world’s press to CIA indiscretions, exemplified by the media circus that developed around Congressional probes into the U.S. intelligence community in the mid-1970s, made a particularly deep psychological impression in the global south. Across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, journalists, politicians, and ordinary citizens were gripped by lurid television exposes and newspaper headlines that catalogued the CIA’s involvement in plots to assassinate global leaders and subvert national governments. In September 1975, in a statement that was to infuriate the Agency’s advocates and delight its many detractors, the chairman of one influential investigative committee, the Democratic Senator from Idaho, Frank Church, famously characterized the CIA’s activities as akin to, “a rogue elephant on a rampage.”3 Indeed, as the 1970s progressed, America’s diplomats and intelligence professionals increasingly found themselves confronted by new and unsettling public diplomacy challenges. At the time, the United States faced a collective crisis of national confidence occasioned by the end of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. Moreover, many of the early Cold War interventions that Washington had initiated in the developing world appeared to be coming home to roost. From South Vietnam to Iran, authoritarian regimes sponsored by the United States gave way to populist and invariably anti- American governments. In turn, U.S. public diplomats were compelled to shift their geographic focus away from Europe, and toward less familiar and more hostile audiences in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Orthodox approaches to U.S. public diplomacy that had become embedded in notions of Cold War conflict and the language of capitalism and communism, appeared suddenly outmoded. America’s global image problem increasingly came to be defined in terms of economic exploitation, political opportunism, and social hypocrisy. Hackneyed and hubristic East–West rhetoric became less relevant to U.S. image- makers as they struggled to stifle burgeoning North–South antagonism through more oblique and less triumphalist means. In the intelligence sphere, American efforts to recalibrate public diplomacy to better address the new challenges of the 1970s would ultimately prove frustrating, uneven and, at best, only partially successful. The public politics of secret intelligence It was William Colby’s misfortune to be appointed Director of Central Intelligence in September 1973, at a time when the CIA labored under scrutiny from a peevish Congress, a hostile domestic press, and an antagonistic White House. At the beginning of the decade, opinion amongst U.S. legislators had hardened in favor of a tougher oversight regime for the CIA following speculation that the Agency had facilitated a White House program, dubbed the “Huston Plan,” to monitor American citizens within the United States. Congressional concerns mushroomed as details emerged of a “secret” war conducted by the CIA in Laos in the 1960s, and accusations surfaced of Agency 30151.indb 196 05/05/2015 13:42 Unquiet Americans 197 complicity in the demise of Chile’s President, Salvador Allende, in the fall of 1973.4 Around the same time, the CIA’s relations with its executive patron in the White House turned sour. In 1972, the then-DCI, Richard Helms, infuriated President Nixon by refusing to embroil the Agency in the White House’s efforts to cover up the Watergate scandal.5 Prior to naming Colby as DCI, Nixon confided to his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, that the CIA was, “. primarily an Ivy League and Georgetown set, rather than the type of people we get in the services and the FBI. I want . to [know] how many people in CIA could be removed by Presidential action.”6 The extraordinary decision taken by Colby in September 1974 to openly defend U.S. covert intervention abroad, piled further pressure on the CIA. It was not only in India that Colby’s public comments attracted stinging criticism. In Mexico, the country’s Senate reacted by unanimously passing a resolution condemning “all forms of intervention by governments and by agencies connected with governments and transnational corporations in the political, economic, and social affairs of other nations.” One Senator, Alejandro Carrillo, labeled the CIA a “subversive agency” that had made a mockery of American diplomats’ affirmations of hemispheric fraternity and respect. In the Mexican chamber of deputies, a representative of the ruling centralist Institutional Revolutionary Party, Luis del Toro Calero, went further, accusing Colby of espousing an “imperialist, colonialist viewpoint, which threatened the sovereignty of any nation.” The Director of Central Intelligence, Calero suggested, had made plain that the “era of foreign intervention had not ended, that, to the contrary, national leaders must be alert to investigate and uproot energetically every attempt at intervention, from whatever source.”7 The same month, a reference to alleged CIA intervention in Chile made by President Gerald Ford amplified international reaction to Colby’s musings on covert action. Asked to comment by journalists on Congressional testimony given by Colby that suggested the CIA had, on instruction from the Oval Office, worked to destabilize the Allende government, Ford equivocated. Insisting that the U.S. government “had no involvement whatsoever in the Allende coup,” the President went on to add that Washington had, nonetheless, sought “to help and assist the preservation of opposition newspapers and electronic media [in Chile] and to preserve opposition political parties.”8 Ford’s admission that the U.S. government had indeed meddled in Chile’s internal affairs produced outpourings of anger and alarm across the developing world. In Bogota, American officials noted that the moderate Columbian press, which included newspapers normally sympathetic to the United States, such as El Tiempo, had roundly condemned the CIA’s activities in Chile. In a newspaper editorial written by a respected former Columbian president, Alberto Ileras, the United States’ government was castigated for adopting a foreign policy that was “no different than the one carried out under Mr. Dulles during the Cold War.” “Until the United States categorically renounces the use of the CIA or conventional espionage against the governments of Latin America,” Ileras signaled, “better inter-American relations” would prove impossible.9 Back in India, senior officials within the ruling Congress party reacted to confirmation of U.S. interference in Latin American politics by declaring that they 30151.indb 197 05/05/2015 13:42 198 Reasserting America in the 1970s “would not allow Delhi to be turned into Chile.”10 Following Allende’s bloody demise, India’s premier, Indira Gandhi, became convinced that she would be the next American target for regime change. The U.S. Embassy in New Delhi had previously reassured Indian government officials “that of course the U.S. had not” meddled in Chile’s internal affairs.11 In September 1974, when such claims were revealed to have been a sham, a dispirited Daniel Patrick Moynihan fumed that by handling the Chile question in such an inept manner, the United States government had done an excellent job of shooting itself in the foot. Indira Gandhi was now certain, Moynihan informed Washington, “that we would be content to see her overthrown, as we have, to her mind, been content to see others like her overthrown .
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