With an incomplete account of CIA misdeeds in its first quarter century from the so-called family jewels, released this week with many redactions, and a presumably even more incomplete knowledge of the spy agencies' actions since 2001, such a comparison is inevitably flawed. But it is also irresistible. And it raises a provocative question: Do the actions of the intelligence agencies in the era of al-Qaida, which include domestic eavesdropping without warrants, secret detentions and interrogations arguably bordering on torture, already match or even eclipse those of the Vietnam War period?
At both times, Americans faced a hostile global ideology - communism then, violent Islamic jihadism today - and feared cells hidden in their midst. In the face of such a threat, it might be no surprise that secret agencies, wielding powerful technology and with the formidable backing of a president, sometimes come into conflict with democratic ideals. On Tuesday, the CIA director, Gen.
Hayden, tried to pre-empt such comparisons in a message to agency employees that was part cheerleading and part explanation of why the agency had finally released the documents, first requested in 1992 under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. "We will find in the press coverage of today's release reminders of some things the CIA should not have done," Hayden wrote. But he added: "I firmly believe that the improved system of intelligence oversight that came out of the 1970s gives the CIA a far stronger place in our democratic system.
What we do now to protect Americans we do within a powerful framework of law and review." Some Cold War activities exposed over the years went beyond those detailed in the 700 pages of documents released Tuesday, including failed plots to assassinate foreign leaders and mind-control experiments on unwitting Americans and foreign agents. Still, independent historians of the agency did not see the sharp contrast between past and present that Hayden described.
"We don't know everything that's going on today," said David M. Barrett, a political scientist at Villanova University. "But it seems to me there's already enough evidence to conclude that things are not so different today.
" Barrett, the author of a 2005 book on the CIA and Congress in the 1940s and 1950s, said the notion that the CIA was once lawless but now meticulously follows the law is simply wrong. Lawrence Houston, the agency's general counsel for its first 26 years, "signed off on a lot of things that were of questionable legality," Barrett said. And while the agency now has far more lawyers, they, too, have approved actions that some independent legal experts consider illegal or improper, he said, from kidnapping terrorists in foreign countries to using the simulated drowning technique called waterboarding.
James Bamford, whose books on American intelligence cover the period from the Korean War to the Iraq war, took a similar view. He said the scale of the National Security Agency's interception of phone calls and e-mail messages of Americans and others in the United States in recent years - which prompted a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union in which Bamford is a plaintiff - almost certainly dwarfs the electronic surveillance and the review of mail carried out by the NSA and the CIA in the 1960s. If the "family jewel" collection details government spying on anti-Vietnam War protesters, it has a contemporary echo in the Pentagon's admission that a database called Talon improperly recorded the activities of anti-Iraq war protesters, he said.
"These documents are supposed to show the worst of the worst back then," Bamford said. "But what's going on today makes the family jewels pale by comparison." The controversial activities of the campaign against terrorism took place despite the changes enacted after the scandals of the 1970s.
Return to Top With an incomplete account of CIA misdeeds in its first quarter century from the so-called family jewels, released this week with many redactions, and a presumably even more incomplete knowledge of the spy agencies' actions since 2001, such a comparison is inevitably flawed.
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