Rocky's Probe: Bringing the CIA to Heel
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated... —Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
The [CIA] shall have no police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers, or internal-security functions. —National Security Act of 1947
In defiance of Constitution and statute, the Central Intelligence Agency has a sorry record of illegal snooping on Americans that stretches back more than two decades. It has burgled and bugged U.S. homes, tapped citizens' telephones and opened their mail. It has unlawfully infiltrated antiwar groups and black radical organizations and accumulated 7,200 files on those it considered to be dissidents. It has improperly, and sometimes unwittingly, allowed itself to be used by Presidents and their aides for political purposes.
Those were the main findings of an eight-member presidential commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller after a five-month investigation involving 2,900 pages of documents and testimony from 51 witnesses. Released last week by President Gerald Ford, the commission's 299-page report emphasized that "the great majority of the CIA's domestic activities comply with its statutory authority." But the panel found that on numerous occasions, the CIA has violated its charter, which restricts it for the most part to foreign operations. Congress originally set up the agency in 1947 to gather foreign intelligence. Later, as directed by the National Security Council, the CIA undertook covert operations to counter Communist influence in other countries. But the agency has always been prohibited from domestic activities, except those that supported its foreign mission.
The Rockefeller commission found that some of the CIA's illegal activities were brought about by pressure from Presidents, chiefly Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Others fell within the gray area between the CIA's legal responsibilities and activities prohibited it by law. But all of the improper activities, the commission declared, "should be criticized and not permitted to happen again—both in the light of the limits imposed on the agency by law and as a matter of public policy." To that end, the commission made 30 recommendations designed primarily to tighten presidential and congressional control over future CIA operations.
The commission's investigation largely confirmed allegations—made initially by New York Times Reporter Seymour Hersh—that the CIA had conducted a "massive" domestic intelligence operation in the U.S. during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The commission did not use the word massive, perhaps because CIA Director William Colby and his predecessors had denied that there were illegal activities of that magnitude. Colby admitted only a relative handful of CIA abuses in a report to the Senate Armed Services Committee (TIME, Jan. 27). But the commission used other words, such as "considerable," "large-scale" and "substantial," that left no doubt that its members had considered the extent of the CIA's improper or illegal activities to be as broad and disturbing as the agency's more responsible critics had claimed.