The power of secrets
America has long grappled with citizen surveillance in the face of security anxieties. In 1975, the Senate Intelligence Committee under Frank Church began looking into potential abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies, beginning with a request in the 1940s from the Army Security Agency to read all overseas cables sent by embassies, commercial firms, and private citizens through the Western Union Telegraph Co. The secretary of defense had assured the leery firm that this request "constituted a matter of great importance to national security." Later, the effort was expanded to include monitoring overseas phone calls when the Army requested that the National Security Agency root out possible foreign influences on Vietnam War protesters. In the face of what he believed to be impertinent--not to mention annoying--questions, James Jesus Angleton, chief of CIA counterintelligence from 1954 to 1974, was indignant. "It is inconceivable," he remarked in what he believed to be an off-the-record moment, "that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government." He was eventually forced into retirement.
To spy or not to spy. America grappled with the same collision of personal liberties and national security in May 2002, when the secret spy court at the Department of Justice, which rules on FBI wiretapping requests, took Attorney General John Ashcroft to task for improperly trying to broaden the FBI's spying abilities. Up to that point, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had never turned down an FBI wiretapping request. But Ashcroft appealed the decision based on the U.S.A. Patriot Act, and, in November, the court overturned its original ruling, paving the way for the considerable expansion of wiretapping--and removing a wall that had previously prevented criminal and counterintelligence investigators from collaborating. Fears of citizen surveillance also provoked robust cries of outrage when Terrorism Information and Prevention System advocates proposed enlisting the aid of telephone repairmen, truck drivers, and mail carriers in reporting the suspicious activities of customers, clients, and neighbors. The plan was stricken from the Homeland Security Act after comparisons were made to certain communist dictatorships.
Some would argue that the all-hands-on-deck approach, in the wake of a terrorist attack, has its place. Certainly, they argue, there are consequences to complacency. Gene Poteat, president of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, lays blame for some of the biggest intelligence failures of the 20th century on a cavalier attitude toward clandestine self-protection. "We got out of the intelligence business" in World War I, he says. "[President Woodrow] Wilson claimed that if we needed intelligence, we could get it from our allies, the French and the English." But did that leave the United States vulnerable? Certainly the release of the Venona papers in 1995, detailing spy cables from the Soviet Union and intercepted by the United States in the 1940s, showed that a great deal had gone undetected. There were at least 240 Soviet agents who penetrated the U.S. government from 1935 to 1945--who were, in fact, spies, says David Major, former director of counterintelligence programs for the National Security Council. Witch-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy, he says, "was right for the wrong reasons." Oleg Kalugin, a former major general in the KGB, argues that McCarthyism brought America to its senses: "It has often been betrayed as an evil, but on the other hand, it was an awakening of America," he says, only a bit ruefully. "Not to condone McCarthy, but it was a more realistic approach."
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