When the CIA’s Empire Struck Back

[Octafish]

Rep. Otis Pike (D-NY) wanted his colleagues in Congress to investigate the secret government and show who's boss.

Guess who won?

When the CIA’s Empire Struck Back

Exclusive: In the mid-1970s, Rep. Otis Pike led a brave inquiry to rein in the excesses of the national security state. But the CIA and its defenders accused Pike of recklessness and vowed retaliation, assigning him to a political obscurity that continued to his recent death, as Lisa Pease recounts.

By Lisa Pease
ConsortiumNews, February 6, 2014

EXCERPT...

Punishing Pike

SNIP...

Mitchell Rogovin, the CIA’s Special Counsel for Legal Affairs, threatened Pike’s staff director, saying, “Pike will pay for this, you wait and see … We [the CIA] will destroy him for this. … There will be political retaliation. Any political ambitions in New York that Pike had are through. We will destroy him for this.”

SNIP...

But what did Pike’s report say that was so important to generate such hostility? The answer can be summed up with the opening line from the report: “If this Committee’s recent experience is any test, intelligence agencies that are to be controlled by Congressional lawmaking are, today, beyond the lawmaker’s scrutiny.”

SNIP...

As Pike’s committee report stated: “These secret agencies have interests that inherently conflict with the open accountability of a political body, and there are many tools and tactics to block and deceive conventional Congressional checks. Added to this are the unique attributes of intelligence — notably, ‘national security,’ in its cloak of secrecy and mystery — to intimidate Congress and erode fragile support for sensitive inquiries.

SNIP...

The Pike report revealed the tactics that the intelligence agencies had used to prevent oversight, noting the language was “always the language of cooperation” but the result was too often “non-production.” In other words, the agencies assured Congress of cooperation, while stalling, moving slowly, and literally letting the clock run out on the investigation.

The Pike Committee, alone among the other investigations, refused to sign secrecy agreements with the CIA, charging that as the representatives of the people they had authority over the CIA, not the other way around.

CONTINUED...

https://consortiumnews.com/2014/02/06/when-the-cias-empire-struck-back/

PS: Waiting out the clock is easy to do for the well-stocked and well-greased.

[Octafish]

1. Pike asked NSA produce its charter. He was told 'It's Top Secret' & Congress was not cleared.

The first congressman to battle the NSA is dead.

No-one noticed, no-one cares.

By Mark Ames
Pando, written on February 4, 2014

EXCERPT...

It was Pike’s committee that got the first ever admission—from CIA director William Colby—that the NSA was routinely tapping Americans' phone calls. Days after that stunning confession, Pike succeeded in getting the head of the NSA, Lew Allen Jr., to testify in public before his committee—the first time in history that an NSA chief publicly testified. It was the first time that the NSA publicly maintained that it was legally entitled to wiretap Americans’ communications overseas, in spite of the 1934 Communications Act and other legal restrictions placed on other intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

It was also the first time an NSA chief publicly lied to Congress, claiming it was not eavesdropping on domestic or overseas phone calls involving American citizens. (Technically, legalistically, the NSA argued that it hadn't lied—the reason being that since Americans weren’t specifically “targeted” in the NSA's vast data-vacuuming programs in the 1970s, recording and storing every phone call and telex cable in computers which were then data-mined for keywords, that therefore they weren’t technically eavesdropping on Americans who just happened to be swept up into the wiretapping vacuum.)

Pike quickly discovered the fundamental problem with the NSA: It was by far the largest intelligence agency, and yet it was birthed unlike any other, as a series of murky executive orders under Truman at the peak of Cold War hysteria. Digging into the NSA’s murky beginnings, it quickly became clear that the agency was explicitly chartered in such a way that placed it beyond legal accountability, out of reach of the other branches of government. Unlike the CIA, which came into being under an act of Congress, the NSA’s founding charter was a national secret.

SNIP...

In early August, 1975, Pike ordered the NSA to produce its “charter” document, National Security Council Intelligence Directive No. 6. The Pentagon’s intelligence czar, Albert Hall, appeared before the Pike Committee that day—but without the classified NSA charter. Hall reminded Pike that the Ford White House had offered to show the NSA charter document to Pike’s committee just as it had done with Church’s Senate Committee members, who had agreed to merely view the charter at a government location outside of Congress, without entering the secret document into the Senate record. Officially, publicly, it still didn’t exist. Pike refused to accept that:

“You’re talking about the document that set up the entire N.S.A., it’s one which all members [of Congress] are entitled to see without shuttling back and forth downtown to look at.”

Assistant Defense Secretary Hall told an incredulous Pike that he hadn’t brought the NSA charter with him as he’d been told to, and that he couldn’t because “I need clearance” and the charter “has secret material in it.”

Pike exploded:

“It seems incredible to me, very frankly, that we are asked to appropriate large amounts of money for that agency which employs large numbers of people without being provided a copy of the piece of paper by which the agency is authorized.”

CONTINUED...

https://pando.com/2014/02/04/the-first-congressman-to-battle-the-nsa-is-dead-no-one-noticed-no-one-cares/

This history from way back when is why the in-crowd occupying Wall Street-on-the-Potomac are doing swell, while most of the rest of the country can get tossed out of their homes without anyone really doing anything about it.

[Hydra]

2. The NSA/CIA/Shadow Gov't is the definition of "Too Big to Fail"

And if we didn't have the pressures of climate change breathing down our necks, I suspect they would have continued business as usual for another 20 years at least.

They're not likely to go quietly...

[Octafish]

4. They don't have to go -- just show the books and name the accounts and account holders.

When so much is done in secrecy, the beneficiaries of government action, programs and policies often are unnamed and unknown.

Same goes for accountability. Too big to fail doesn't mean too big to jail. And that's where crooks, banksters, warmongers, war criminals and traitors belong.

You are correct, though, Hydra. These types don't leave without a fight. With planet Earth in the balance, they plan to take us with them when they go out. Not as hired help or slaves, nor as specimens for study, but merely as canaries to warn them when to turn on the A/C.

[underpants]

3. Interesting

Thanks

[Octafish]

5. Amazing history that is never mentioned in high school or on tee vee.

Where most Americans get their knowledge of the past from, unfortunately.



Interesting who has gotten the lion's share of media attention over the past 40 years: the conservative bankster warmonger or the peace maker Liberal Democrat.

The Lost Legacy of Otis Pike

Former Rep. Otis Pike died Monday at the age of 92, stirring recollections of his courageous efforts in the 1970s to expose abuses committed by the CIA, a struggle that ultimately bogged down as defenders of state secrecy proved too strong, as ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman writes.

By Melvin A. Goodman
ConsortiumNews, January 22, 2014

EXCERPT...

The Pike and Church committees were responsible for the creation of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) in 1976 and the House Permanent Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) in 1977. These committees took charge of congressional oversight of the intelligence community, which previously had been the responsibility of the Senate and House Armed Forces Committees, Foreign Relations Committees, and Appropriations Committees. Those committees had, in fact, been advocates for the intelligence community and had shown little interest in actual oversight. In 1980, the Carter administration created the Intelligence Oversight Act that gave exclusive jurisdiction for oversight to the SSCI and the HPSCI.

Pike and Church deserve special praise for exposing the covert role of the CIA in trying to assassinate Third World leaders and pursuing regime change. There were assassination plots against Fidel Castro in Cuba, Patrice Lumumba in Congo, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala, and Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam. CIA efforts were particularly clumsy in the case of political assassination, and typically other groups carried out the assassinations before the CIA could get its act together.

Like the efforts to overthrow regimes in Chile and Iran, these covert actions worsened the domestic scene in all of these target countries and created major complications in relations with the United States. Some of these complications (for example, in Cuba and Iran) are still with us.

CIA actions in Congo were directly responsible for the emergence of the worst tyrant in the history of Africa, Sese Seku Mobutu. Guatemalans continue to suffer at the hands of Guatemalan security forces created with the help of the CIA. Strategic covert failures are abundant; strategic covert success is extremely rare.

The Pike Committee also recommended the creation of a statutory Inspector General for the intelligence community, but this proposal was considered too radical at the time. In the wake of the Iran-Contra disaster, the idea of a statutory IG was revived, but CIA Director William Webster was opposed because he believed that such an office would interfere with operational activities. Senate intelligence Committee Chairman David Boren, D-Oklahoma, also was opposed because he thought the office of an IG would be a rival to his committee. Fortunately, two key members of the intelligence committee, John Glenn, D-Ohio, and Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania, believed that a statutory IG was essential, and Boren had to give in.

The CIA’s Office of the IG operated effectively until recently, when the Obama administration inexplicably moved to weaken the IGs throughout the intelligence community, particularly in the CIA. The current chairman of the congressional intelligence committees, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, and Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Michigan, apparently do not understand the importance of a fully engaged IG to their own efforts to conduct genuine oversight.

CONTINUED...

https://consortiumnews.com/2014/01/22/the-lost-legacy-of-otis-pike/

PS: You are most welcome, underpants! Thank you for remembering Otis Pike!

[Hassin Bin Sober]

7. Kick.

[Octafish]

9. Between Illegality and Incompetence: Otis Pike and Exposing the NSA

by Dr. Binoy Kampmark
Scoop (New Zealand), February 7, 2014

EXCERPT...

In his ribbing, and at times abrasive questioning, Pike sought to extract a seemingly invisible National Security Agency from the budget. “Can members of Congress find the NSA in the document you prepared?” fired Pike at James T. Lynn, director of the Office of Management and Budget. The response: “It is not to be put in the budget of the United States.” No concealment, insisted Lynn, was taking place. “This is in conformance with the law.” Pike was unrelenting: “When you can’t find it in the budget, but you tell us it is there, I submit that it is legitimate to characterize that as being concealed.”

The revelations as to what the NSA was up proved juicy – and alarming. Colby conceded under questioning by Congressman Aspin that the NSA was engaged in the tapping of Americans’ phone calls. This precipitated a remarkable move – drawing the head of the hitherto invisible NSA, Lew Allen Jr., before the committee.

Allen’s conduct provided the blueprint for subsequent NSA chiefs: mendacity under fire, hedging and hair splitting qualifications. Yes, the agency was “legally” engaged in wiretapping American communications despite legal restrictions posed by such statutes as the 1934 Communications Act. No, the it was not technically eavesdropping on domestic or overseas communications because its trawling program was not “targeted”. Ever the NSA dilemma: caught between the vice of illegality and incompetence.

Dragging the NSA from the shadows of policy and cost proved a herculean task. If we are going to split hairs using the copybook of NSA directors, we might well argue that it is an unauthorised body, the vigilante on the bloc. Pike’s efforts to get the NSA to produce its “charter” – the National Security Council Intelligence Directive No. 6 in August 1975 – showed that up all too well. Even Washington’s politicians were not privy to the contents of the agency’s governing document.

SNIP...

It made Pike a target of opprobrium. Rogovin was incandescent. “Pike will pay for this, you wait and see – we’ll destroy him for this.” And he, and various others, did. The report was quashed in the House by a mere vote, leaving it to the mercy of selective publication. (A full copy was later published in Britain.) The Committee, along with staff, was tarnished with the brush of irresponsibility, and Pike with the mantel of a manic radical hostile to institutions. This proved an odd outcome, especially for a solid conservative who had been a stickler for propriety.

CONTINUED...

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1402/S00032/between-illegality-and-incompetence-otis-pike-and-the-nsa.htm

Thank you for grokking, Hassin Bin Sober! Something I've since learned since posting the OP: Mr. Pike had a reputation in Congress more as a conservative than as a liberal Democrat.

[Hotler]

8. kicking n/t

[Octafish]

11. The People's House should outrank the intelligence community, if nothing else.

Thank you for grokking, Hotler. It's how democracy works.

Testifying for the last time before the Pike committee on 12 December, Colby stoutly defended the need for selected covert operations and warned that the United States would be in danger if the revelations of CIA misdeeds should lead to a crippling of the US intelligence Community. "I hope in the 1990s," he said, "that we will not look back at 1975 and marvel at the naivete of of the Americans of 1975 as we now marvel at the naivete of those in the 1920s." In unusually strong language for this generally soft-spoken DCI, Colby accused Congressman Pike of "frightening people" by saying that American intelligence was incapable of predicting an attack on the United States.

p. 170 http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB362/chapters_11_through_13_and_appendices.pdf

If two brains are better than one, imagine how much better it is when 310 million are in on the thinking.

[bobthedrummer]

10. That "empire" has had it's day, literally-the only power it retains is over the "captive domestic

audience" via perception management and huge $.

I started a thread about Otis Pike back in March 2008, "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now..." but much wiser Sir.
The Pike Committee (3-11-08)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2990965

K&R.

[Octafish]

12. That is a truly mighty OP and thread on Otis Pike, bobthedrummer!

People were um surprised to learn about Operation PHOENIX. Some if not most of what Mr. Colby told Congress about that was in Executive Session. He never got the opportunity to bring up his side of events for the record with his untimely demise. One army officer who knew him...

Edward Lansdale, who was the model for Graham Greene’s Quiet American, considered Colby to be the most effective American to serve in the Vietnam War.

...another wrote about his investigation into the circumstances around Mr. Colby's death. Nothing to see here, apart what he found.

WHO MURDERED THE CIA CHIEF?

William E. Colby: A Highly Suspicious Death

By Zalin Grant

This was Saturday, April 27, 1996. William Colby, a former director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, was alone at his weekend house across from Cobb Island, Maryland, 60 miles south of Washington, D.C. Colby, who was 76 years old, had worked all day on his sailboat at a nearby marina, putting it in shape for the coming summer.

After he got home from the marina, Colby called his wife, Sally Shelton, a high-ranking State Department official who was in Houston, Texas, visiting her mother. He told her that he had worked hard all day and was tired. He said he was going to steam some clams, take a shower, and go to bed.

Colby made the call at 7 p.m. He was seen a few minutes later by two sets of witnesses in his yard watering a willow tree. One of the witnesses was his gardener who dropped by to introduce his visiting sister. His two next-door neighbors saw him at the same time from their window. After he finished watering his trees, he went inside and had dinner.

The witnesses saw him at 7:15 p.m. The sun set at 7:57—42 minutes later.

When he was found dead in the water nine days later, it was said that he had gone out paddling his canoe at nightfall and drowned. I was in Paris when I read the story in the International Herald Tribune. I knew William Colby. And I didn’t believe that for one second.

CONTINUED...

http://www.pythiapress.com/wartales/colby.htm

Wish that I had read your thread on March 11, 2008. Where in heck was I?