As it was 30 years ago, NSA at center of uproar over surveillance

KRT Wire | 01/08/2006 | As it was 30 years ago, NSA at center of uproar over surveillance

As it was 30 years ago, NSA at center of uproar over surveillance
BY CAM SIMPSON
Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON - A super-secret government agency is listening in on the phone calls of Americans - without warrants. Phone numbers belonging to certain people trigger special interest, because they might pose a threat to "national security."

Powerful computers at the same super-secret agency peer into many international messages sent from or through the United States each day, all thanks to a quiet deal between the government and major communications companies.

Those may sound like revelations from the current controversy unfolding in Washington over the Bush administration's use of warrantless surveillance inside the United States, but they're not - at least not exclusively. They are among the now 30-year-old findings of a handful of young congressional investigators, the first outsiders to peer into the previously hidden world of the National Security Agency.

At the time, revelations from the blandly named "Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities" shocked the nation. Findings from the panel, more commonly known as the Church Committee because its chairman was Democratic Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, also laid the foundation for today's debate over the need to balance government surveillance with the privacy rights of American citizens.

As it was in 1975-76, the hyper-secret NSA is now at center stage.

For the investigators who pieced together the report's findings on the agency, now scattered to locales such as Salt Lake City, New York and Washington, the three-decade-old investigation is reverberating anew.

"Many of us have felt like it's deja vu all over again," said Barry Carter, a lawyer who joined the Church Committee and its NSA task force, after stepping down as a Nixon administration aide to Henry Kissinger.

"Deja vu all over again - I'm sure you've heard that from everybody," said Eric Richard, another investigator on the NSA case. "You just have the feeling that no one has learned anything in 30 years."

The Bush administration and its supporters say the White House's actions - including the president's approval of warrantless wiretaps on certain international calls - are perfectly legitimate and not remotely like the abuses uncovered by the Church Committee.

That committee's area of inquiry was expansive. It stretched from Cuba and Southeast Asia, where the U.S. government was involved in covert assassination plots, to the streets of Chicago, where anti-war and black power groups were targeted for infiltration or surveillance.

In short, the committee was charged with investigating any "illegal, improper, or unethical" activities engaged in by government intelligence agencies.

By 1975 - almost 30 years after the creation of the CIA and after decades of little to no congressional oversight of the FBI - the list of questionable covert activities was both long and shameful. The committee ended up publishing 14 reports totaling more than 5,500 pages, and the staggering tales of abuse therein dominated newspaper headlines for months.

Intelligence insiders feared the revelations would destroy America's covert capabilities.

But at the outset, investigating the NSA, a quasi-military agency that almost no one had heard of, didn't seem like a very sexy Church Committee assignment, staffers recalled. The NSA's mission is to gather electronic intelligence from all over the world.

"The CIA, everybody knew something about that," said Richard, who joined the panel a few days after taking his final law school exam at Harvard in 1975. "But NSA, it was a blank slate. Nobody knew much about it."

The NSA was nicknamed "No Such Agency," and its campus in Fort Meade, Md., outside Washington was filled with the 1970s equivalent of computer geeks, hardly the stuff of cloak-and-dagger intrigue.

Almost nothing about NSA's operations was known. Congressional oversight was practically non-existent, except for lawmakers who approved appropriations. And those lawmakers would hand over vast sums of money while remaining intentionally ignorant of operations, Church investigators recalled.

"In most cases, they would say, `Don't tell us. We don't want to know,'" said Peter Fenn, another Church investigator.

Now a Democratic political strategist in Washington, Fenn came from Church's own staff.

Because of his work on Kissinger's National Security Council, Carter knew more than most about the NSA's work. But not long into the investigation, even Carter was blown away by what the investigation found.

On a secret trip to Puerto Rico, Carter and Fenn worked their way into an NSA "listening post," one piece of a vast global surveillance network capable of scooping communications from around the world out of thin air.

"This was the first time we realized there was a whole different way of collecting intelligence," said Carter, who now teaches international law at Georgetown University. "Instead of putting dog-eared clamps on telephone wires outside someone's home, or on a switching station somewhere downtown ... they just sucked it all in like a vacuum cleaner."

In a way, Carter said, "as soon as they set up the vacuum cleaner, they were listening to everything."

Beyond the communications of Americans inadvertently sucked in, international calls by U.S. citizens had been specifically targeted as early as 1962, the investigators found.

The agency created a "watch list" to automatically target the international communications of thousands of individuals, both foreigners and Americans. The FBI, Secret Service, the military and the CIA all sent names to Fort Meade for inclusion on the list, an effort that eventually became known as "Project MINARET."

Between 1967 and 1973 alone, about 1,200 American names were added, including 180 American citizens or groups active in civil rights and anti-war activities because they were viewed as threats to national security.

The FBI, especially under J. Edgar Hoover, was specifically interested in so-called "new leftists." The CIA wanted to know what American "radicals" were saying in their overseas calls.

Church investigators also stumbled on something else: For nearly 30 years, the agency, through a secret deal with three communications giants, physically picked up paper or magnetic tapes each day holding copies of telegrams sent overseas via the world's foremost telegraph companies. For years, a courier rode a train from Washington to New York and back to grab the tapes, until the NSA set up a New York office under CIA cover to make the collection easier.

Church investigators were both awed and terrified by the vastness of NSA's sweep, as was their boss.

"I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss," Church declared. "That is the abyss from which there is no return."

As Congress prepares to launch promised hearings into the program later this month, many former investigators who uncovered NSA operations and abuses are hoping the central lessons of their work are not forgotten.

"If we did anything, we established the precedent that even national security has to be subjected to the rule of law," said Richard, who lives in Maryland. "It's inevitable that any government power that is secret or unchecked by outside oversight will grow and be abused."

Michael Madigan, a Republican lawyer who served on the committee as counsel to former Sen. Howard Baker, agreed that the most significant lesson was the need to subject the intelligence community to congressional oversight and the rule of law.

But Madigan would not single out the Bush administration for criticism in the current debate.

"I think that if you want to assess blame, and I'm not sure that is the right word, for where we find ourselves today on an issue which is of critical importance to our country, it might be quite properly spread around both the executive and legislative branches of our government," said Madigan, a partner at the Washington law firm of Akin Gump Hauer Strauss & Feld.

He said lawmakers and staffers who dealt directly with the probe's fallout envisioned a fluid system of oversight in which ever-changing intelligence needs could be matched by congressional flexibility.

Madigan said increased partisanship in Washington in the last 30 years has not helped sustain such an environment, perhaps adding to the current uproar.