INVESTIGATIONS: Rocky's Probe: Bringing the CIA to Heel

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3) The functions of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, now a toothless body of distinguished citizens, should be expanded to include full oversight of the CIA. To do the job, the board should be given a full-time chairman and a full-time staff.

The report also recommended a number of changes that would tighten internal controls over employees. Among them were proposals to add a second deputy director for administration and to expand the role of the CIA's inspector general to include investigation of reports by employees that the agency was violating the law.

But the commission found no way to shield the CIA director from improper White House pressures in the future, other than to admonish both Presidents and directors to adhere strictly to the CIA charter. The exhortations struck many experts as worthless. As one Rockefeller commission staff member put it: "You need oversight of the presidency more than you need oversight of the CIA." Ray Cline, a former CIA official and director of intelligence for the State Department who knew both Johnson and Nixon, noted: "They were very strong-minded men. A director of Central Intelligence who said, 'Go to hell' to one of them would not have been director of Central Intelligence next day." As one solution to the problem, Church favors fines or prison sentences for CIA directors if they violate the law, reasoning that penalties would give them a much stronger case for resisting a President's improper blandishments.

SENATE INQUIRY. That doubtless will be one of the Church committee's recommendations when it completes its investigation of the CIA at the end of the year. Another probe of the agency was to begin in the House last week but broke down because of a prolonged controversy over the admission by the investigating committee's chairman, Lucien Nedzi, that he had been briefed by the CIA in 1973 about its involvement in assassination plans and domestic espionage. Because of the seeming conflict of interest—the committee might have to investigate Nedzi's failure to act on the matter—five of his six Democratic colleagues insisted that he resign. Nedzi did so last week. The squabble virtually ensured that the main investigation will be left to the Church committee.

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