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With a paranoid compulsion, the agencies developed lists of troublesome or potentially troublesome Americans. These included members of organizations on the right (the John Birch Society, Ku Klux Klan) as well as the left (the Socialist Workers Party, Students for a Democratic Society). The FBI kept handy a list of people—26,000 strong at one point—who were to be detained during a national emergency (including Novelist Norman Mailer). The Army accumulated the names of 100,000 people who were involved, even tangentially, in political protest activities (including Illinois Senator Adlai Stevenson III, who made the list for merely attending a peaceful political rally watched by the service's agents). The CIA surpassed everyone, maintaining a catchall index of 1.5 million names taken from the 250,000 letters opened and photographed by the agency. Noted the Senate report: "Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies, and too much information has been collected."
Looking for leads, the organizations would infiltrate almost anything. The
FBI dutifully investigated women's liberation groups and decided to keep up the surveillance, even though they appeared to be concerned just with freeing "women from the humdrum existence of being only a wife and mother." In 1941, the FBI began an intensive probe of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, after 15 black mess stewards in the Navy protested against racial discrimination. For 25 years, the bureau hunted for signs of Communist influence in the N.A.A.C.P., although a report in the first year of the investigation said the organization had a "strong tendency" to "steer clear of Communist activities." There were more chilling examples of excesses by the FBI. Operation COINTELPRO (counterintelligence program), which sought to disrupt dissident groups, tried to get members of the Black Panthers and a black activist group based in California, US, Inc., to kill one another. The cold-eyed crusade against Martin Luther King Jr.—"the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country"—included not only the familiar taping of his bedroom activities but also plans to harass his widow after his assassination.
In the past year and a half, the U.S. intelligence community has taken a number of steps to correct its faults. The CIA has severely limited its activities at home. U.S. Attorney General Edward Levi has laid down some strict ground rules for the FBI. Even so, the Senate committee was unappeased. It recommended 96 steps to make sure that the domestic intelligence apparatus would concern itself only with the legitimate goals of catching spies and stopping crime, including acts of terrorism.
The committee urged the passage of laws limiting intelligence probes to terrorist action and hostile foreign espionage when there was a clear-cut and immediate danger, and the threat is certainly there. Of the 1,079 Soviet officials assigned to the U.S. in 1975, more than 60% were intelligence agents according to the FBI.
Own Airlines. The committee recommended that wiretapping, bugging and break-ins occur only after proper court orders. Within the U.S., the CIA would be permitted to act only to protect its own employees or infiltrate a domestic group to establish "cover" for a foreign intelligence mission.