20 January 2002
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/20/weekinreview/20WEIN.html
The New York Times
January 20, 2002
By TIM WEINER
So the boundaries were drawn at the dawn of the cold war. The C.I.A. would
find out what was going on outside the United States — and so prevent
a second Pearl Harbor. The F.B.I. would work inside the United States to
catch criminals and foreign agents.
That once bright line has blurred since Sept. 11.
Congress has given the C.I.A. new legal powers to snoop on people in the
United States — not limited to investigating groups like Al Qaeda. It
has been granted these new powers, along with billions of dollars, without
any public post-mortem into how all these guardians of national security
failed to protect against the September attacks.
The C.I.A. is now permitted to read secret grand jury testimony, without
a judge's prior approval. It can obtain private records of institutions and
corporations seized under federal court-approved searches.
In proposed legislation circulated on Capitol Hill last month, the C.I.A.
is also seeking the power to intercept e-mail messages routed through the
United States from abroad, on the say-so of the director of central intelligence,
without a warrant. In addition, the F.B.I. would like to expand its ability
to eavesdrop on individuals in the United States.
A United States intelligence official, speaking on behalf of the C.I.A.,
points out that the agency does not seek law-enforcement powers — only
access to information. And the government argues that keeping the F.B.I.
and the C.I.A. in different rooms and locking the door will hamper investigations
into terrorist suspects.
So the door is now open.
"The case for breaking down the barriers to work against international terrorists
seeking to kill Americans is absolutely compelling," said Morton H. Halperin,
himself the target of an illegal wiretap when he worked in the Nixon White
House. After many years of court battles, he won a belated apology from his
former boss, Henry A. Kissinger.
"But the government insistently refused to limit it to that," he said. "Most
of the new authorities are directed as much at American citizens as foreigners."
The expansion of government power to spy at home is taking place in a political
environment charged by the attacks. To oppose the powers that the government
seeks, Attorney General John Ashcroft warned Congress last month, is to side
with the terrorists.
"The whole momentum has shifted because of Sept. 11, and there is far more
cooperation than before" between intelligence and law-enforcement officials,
said Kenneth C. Bass 3rd, an lawyer who oversaw foreign intelligence wiretaps
at the Justice Department from 1977 to 1981.
"These people are good soldiers and they will respond to orders," he said.
"The concerns are in the momentum: the whole thrust of being in a wartime
environment, and how one responds to that, introduces concerns with respect
to overkill. The zeal, the momentum, needs to be checked and balanced."
Zeal has been a problem in the past.
In its first quarter-century, the C.I.A. did what Truman feared: it spied
on Americans, opened their mail, tapped their phones. When those skeletons
came tumbling from the closet in the mid-1970's — and after the F.B.I.'s
illegal surveillance of real and perceived enemies of the state was revealed
— new laws took effect to guard against eavesdropping abuses by American
intelligence and security agencies.
But those laws created artificial legalistic barriers between law-enforcement
and foreign intelligence, the government now contends. The perceived problem
was succinctly stated by Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, whose wife,
Barbara, died in the plane that hit the Pentagon on Sept. 11: "The right
hand doesn't know what the left hand's doing."
With some exceptions, F.B.I. wiretap information and criminal evidence gathered
in grand jury investigations was not shared with the C.I.A. Secret intelligence
with criminal implications developed by the agency was not routinely passed
on to the bureau. Yet the once firm fire wall between the agencies was breached
well before the new laws took effect.
The F.B.I. has greatly expanded its presence overseas.
The C.I.A. has redoubled the work of its domestic stations, from New York
to Los Angeles, shifting spies from foreign bases and striving to recruit
foreigners in the United States — especially Iranians, Afghans, Iraqis
and Arabs of many lands. For example, an office in Germany that monitored
Iranians was shut down and some of its staff relocated to Los Angeles, which
has the largest Iranian population of any city outside Iran, according to
The Los Angeles Times.
Ultimately, the goal of the new laws and the proposed ones is to allow the
C.I.A. to collect more secret information, in concert with the F.B.I.
But, as every recent official study points out, American intelligence has
for years collected far more information than it can analyze in depth. That
problem may lie at the heart of the surprise achieved by the terrorists on
Sept. 11.
"They are now proposing to add e-mail communications in God knows how many
difficult languages to these cubic acres of untranslated, unread, unanalyzed,
unabsorbed information," said Thomas Powers, author of "The Man Who Kept
the Secrets: Richard Helms and the C.I.A.," whose critiques of intelligence
work are uniquely well-respected by veterans of the agency.
"The request for broader powers is the excuse of first resort of anyone who's
failed at national security or law-enforcement tasks," said Mr. Powers. "This
notion — that if we could only read every e-mail message in the universe,
that no one could cause us trouble — is a big mistake."
The bid for increased surveillance and intelligence-gathering will become
a very big mistake if Congress grants the F.B.I. and C.I.A. more power but
fails to investigate what went wrong on Sept. 11, Mr. Powers argues.
"There is a reluctance to open up an investigation," he said, because "somewhere
in the oceans of intelligence collected over the past years they will eventually
find hundreds of pieces of information that would have predicted Sept. 11.
Everybody's afraid. They know they screwed up and if you have an investigation
people will find out how."
The ranks of former C.I.A. officers who want the agency to succeed but openly
criticize it as wayward have been growing since the end of the cold war.
One, Robert D. Steele, now a consultant, says these new laws are cosmetics
that cannot conceal a "decrepit and dysfunctional" clandestine service, unable
to penetrate hostile foreign governments, much less terrorist groups.
Mr. Steele says intelligence-sharing within the government remains blocked
by "a cult of secrecy" and "bureaucratic infighting."
Outside critics, including some in Congress, say the laws that created the
present national- security structure back in 1947 need an overhaul.
But the political atmosphere today is less conducive to fixing whatever might
have been broken on the eve of Sept. 11 than to increasing the government's
power to spy in the future, abroad and at home.
As long as Al Qaeda remains a threat, Americans may take the advice of the
late John C. Stennis of Mississippi, who once beseeched his fellow senators
"to shut your eyes some and take what is coming" when it came to the C.I.A.
History suggests that in times of great fear — in wars cold and hot,
under threat by unseen forces — the tug-of-war between secrecy and democracy
in the United States has gone in the direction of the secret institutions
of the state.
As far back as 1787, during the debates on the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton
warned that a loss of liberty was a natural consequence of war. Americans
would "resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency
to destroy their civil and political rights," he wrote. "To be more safe
they, at length, become willing to run the risk of being less free."