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Although Operation CHAOS' official purpose—keeping track of U.S. radicals' overseas contacts—fell well within the CIA charter, some of its activities were illegal. On a number of occasions, agent recruits who had infiltrated dissident groups to establish cover before going abroad reported improperly on radicals' domestic activities. Such reporting, when warranted, is the legal province of the FBI. Further, the CIA used one agent to report on major domestic demonstrations in 1969, and another to obtain information about the leaders of an unnamed group in the U.S. The agency questioned still a third agent about dissidents in 1971 and passed his answers on to the FBI. Helms told the commission that he was unaware of the domestic use of agents—one of the rare instances in which a CIA director claimed ignorance of abuses turned up by the panel.
In another operation, the CIA'S office of security paid about a dozen agents a monthly retainer of $100 or less in 1967-68 to infiltrate several activist organizations in the Washington area, including the Women's Strike for Peace and the Congress of Racial Equality. The ostensible purpose was to keep the CIA informed of plans for demonstrations that might endanger its employees, buildings or operations. To that end, the office compiled a weekly situation report and calendar of planned demonstrations that was shared with the Secret Service. That office also maintained files on as many as 800 dissenters.
But the CIA also used its agents to ferret out information about the organizations' financing and to photograph their leaders and determine their attitudes and home addresses. When the Washington police department organized a similar undercover operation, the CIA stopped its own project as unnecessary. Still the commission concluded that the CIA operation "went far beyond steps necessary to protect the agency's own facilities, personnel and operations, and therefore exceeded the CIA'S statutory authority."
SECURITY INVESTIGATIONS. By law the CIA is responsible for investigating breaches of its own security. The commission found that some of the methods used by the CIA to scrutinize the activities of its employees have been illegal or at the least of questionable propriety. For example, the commission turned up twelve break-ins, the last in 1971; 32 domestic wiretaps, the last in 1965; and 32 instances of bugging, the last in 1968. In a footnote, however, the report warned that "there may actually have been more 'mike and wire' operations than the commission has otherwise been able to document." In one case in the late 1940s and early '50s, the CIA used agent surveillance, wiretaps and bugs to keep tab for eight years on an employee who was suspected of having contacts with Communist sympathizers; he eventually was fired. In the late 1960s the CIA cut through the walls of an employee's apartment to plant seven microphones; no evidence of disloyalty was found.