COMING HOME TO ROOST: TACTICS OF U.S. INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES AGAINST FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC THREATS, 1964-1974 Item Type text; Electronic Thesis Authors GOODRICH, DERRICK IAN Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 30/09/2021 07:49:31 Item License http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/190420 COMING HOME TO ROOST TACTICS OF U.S. INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES AGAINT FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC THREAT, 1964-1974 By Derrick Ian Goodrich A Thesis Submitted to The Honors College In Partial Fulfillment of the Bachelor’s degree With Honors in Political Science THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA MAY 2008 Thesis Advisor Dr. Wendy Theodore Africana Studies Program 1 Currently, major reforms are being instituted in how the United States intelligence community operates and agencies interact with one another. The historic separations of authority bestowed upon two of the primary agencies of U.S. intelligence, the CIA and FBI, are now being removed by government officials citing their harmful constraints on the mission to protect the country. Once separated the spheres of international and domestic operations are now being blurred. This paper analyzes the dangers posed by these new reforms and the ability for the harsh practices employed abroad by the CIA with finding their duplication being used domestically by the FBI. Illustrate this point, the paper will present an earlier example of the occurrence of when this did take place in U.S. intelligence operations by presenting, through comparative analysis, two case studies transpiring between 1964-1974; CIA covert operations in Chile between 1964 and 1974 focusing on the candidacy and eventual presidential administration of Salvador Allende and his political party Unidad Popular; and the FBI’s operations to quell Black Nationalist sentiment inside the United States within this same time period, in particular, activities aimed at the Black Panther Party, The United State’s National Security Act of 1947 demarcated international and domestic intelligence operations into two distinct spheres and assigned agencies to oversee those operations. 1 In the international sphere the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sits as the primary actor with a relative free hand to accomplish its missions abroad. Domestically the task of internal intelligence is that of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) which operates under stricter guidelines in its domestic operations. Under the original intentions of the 1947 Act there was to be a clear separation between the two spheres, as the Act states the CIA “shall have no police, subpoena, or law enforcement powers or internal security functions.” 2 This grounding principle of two, distinct spheres has undergone changes over the years but it has generally remained intact. However, following the attacks of September 11, 2001 government officials and scholars have published works calling for fundamental 1 National Security Act of 1947, Pub. L. No. 80-235, 61 Stat. 496 (1947). 2 Ibid.; Theoharis, Athan, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), p 5; Mike McConnell, “Overhauling Intelligence,” Foreign Affairs 86 (2007): 52; Amanda Anderson, LTC U.S. Army, “What Role for DOD Intelligence in Support of the Homeland Security Mission?” USAWC Strategy Research Project (2005): 3. 2 reform and the integration of these two spheres with joint efforts on the part of the CIA and FBI so as to better fight the new War on Terrorism. 3 This thesis will argue that the integration of the two spheres that is now being instituted by the U.S. intelligence community and backed by scholars in the field will greatly enhance the opportunities for interflow to transpire between the two spheres and, thereby, the institution of aggressive practices that violate the civil liberties of U.S. citizens. 4 Interflow, as it will be used in this paper, describes the phenomenon by which practices and methods employed solely in the international sphere of intelligence operations percolate into the domestic sphere creating the dangerous conditions the 1947 Act sought to prevent from occurring. The thesis will present an earlier example of the occurrence of interflow in U.S. intelligence operations by presenting, through comparative analysis, two case studies transpiring between 1964-1974; CIA covert operations in Chile between 1964 and 1974 focusing on the candidacy and eventual presidential administration of Salvador Allende and his political party Unidad Popular ; and the FBI’s operations to quell Black Nationalist sentiment inside the United States within this same time period, in particular, activities aimed at the Black Panther Party (BPP). This thesis will examine and compare the methods used by both the CIA and FBI during their respective operations. The methods, for analytical purposes, have been broken down into four main factors and will serve as the framework for the comparative analysis: 3 For examples, see Raymond Wannall, “Undermining Counterintelligence Capability,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 15 (2002): 321-329; Deborah Barger, “It is Time to Transform, Not Reform, U.S. Intelligence,” SAIS Review 24 (2004): 23-31: Mike McConnell, “Overhauling Intelligence,” Foreign Affairs 86 (2007): 49-58. Todd Masse, “Domestic Intelligence in the United Kingdom: Applicability of the MI-5 Model to the United States,” Congressional Research Service (2003). The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, The 9/11 Report: The Complete Investigation, New York Times edition (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2004). 4 Interflow is terminology used in hydrology describing the lateral movement of water between the soil water above ground and the groundwater below the vadose zone. 3 molding public perceptions, finding conduits, economic constriction, and use of violence. The CIA and FBI attempts at molding public perceptions entails propaganda campaigns to strip their targets of popular support and to radicalize the targets’ opposition. Finding conduits pertains to the powerful allies that the agencies attempt to incorporate into their overall mission in order to achieve mission objectives. Economic constriction covers both agencies’ endeavors to disrupt and cutoff the designated target’s financial resources. The fourth factor is the use of violence which concerns CIA and FBI efforts to forcibly remove (i.e. kidnapping) or intentionally cause physical harm to members associated with the targeted groups or individuals viewed as blocking the mission. In order to facilitate the discussion, the thesis is divided into five sections. The first section is a review of the literature that has been done that discusses the covert operations of the CIA and FBI and the separation between international and domestic spheres. Section two provides the historical context for each of the cases in order to detail the factors leading to the emergence of Allende and the BPP. The third section takes each of the four methods and compares how they were applied in each case: CIA involvement in Chilean politics between 1964 and 1974; and FBI involvement in domestic Black Nationalist politics inside the same time frame. Each of the four factors are examined in turn across both cases. The last section briefly recounts the parallels between the CIA and FBI during this period and offers a future analytical framework for potential use in the study of other cases involving CIA or FBI covert operations. REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE The scholarly literature on the subject of U.S. intelligence and the concept of international and domestic spheres can be divided, for the most part, between pre-9/11 4 literature and post-9/11 literature in how most authors approach the subject. Scholarship dating before the momentous events of September 11 th differs amongst each other towards agreeing on the proper roles of the FBI and CIA in the security of the country, but prevailing through each is a consistent devotion to spending significant time illustrating the past historic abuses committed by the CIA and FBI that went beyond their legal authority.5 The acknowledgement of an abusive past on the part of the intelligence community acts to ground the policy recommendations offered by these authors from investing too much power with the intelligence community. Following the events of 9/11 sufficient attention on the abuses of the past appears to be lacking in much of the work offered by officials and scholars in the field of intelligence. 6 In the wake of 9/11, some authors have announced the need for a total break from past guidelines that act to constrain intelligence operations such as Lieutenant Colonel Amanda Anderson, whose study for the Pentagon’s Strategy Research Project asserts simply, “In times of war, government grows and liberty yields.” 7 There are notable exceptions such as author Loch Johnson where, in his 2004 article, he offers a detailed account of intelligence abuses which were revealed as a result of the 5 For example, see Richard Morgan, Domestic Intelligence: Monitoring Dissent in America (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1980), specifically chapter three, “The FBI in