Revelations and Resignations

Even for many officials of the Central Intelligence Agency, the activities of the Domestic Operations Division were an impenetrable secret. Few CIA employees knew more than that the DOD was set up in 1962 with the ostensible purpose of collecting foreign intelligence inside the U.S., partly through East European emigre organizations. Last week the division was accused of having had a more sinister function as well. Three former CIA employees told TIME that the DOD kept a still unknown number of Americans under covert surveillance within the U.S., sometimes at the urging of the CIA's Counter-intelligence Division, sometimes on its own initiative.

This was the latest revelation in the continuing controversy over the CIA'S domestic spying. The operation was originally thought to have been primarily conducted by Counterintelligence, which combats the activities of potential enemy agents round the world. It now appears that many of the home-front spying operations, at least in the late 1960s, were actually carried out by the shadowy DOD. An ex-CIA official told TIME Correspondent Strobe Talbott: "CounterIntelligence performed mostly a policymaking function where domestic activity was concerned, including helping to decide which groups and individuals should be watched. But it was the DOD that did the dirty work."

Spying Halt. Not even the name of the DOD's present chief is known publicly, though Watergate Burglar E. Howard Hunt claims to have been its first chief of covert action. In his book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, Victor Marchetti, a disaffected employee who left the agency in 1969, reports that the DOD at that time had a staff of a few hundred people and an annual budget of up to $10 million. It operated field offices in at least ten U.S. cities.

The furor over the domestic spying was touched off two weeks ago by the New York Times, which reported that in the 1950s and 1960s the CIA undertook wiretaps, break-ins and other covert means within the U.S. and accumulated illegal intelligence files on 10,000 Americans. These allegations were at least partially confirmed by CIA Director William E. Colby in a secret accounting to President Gerald Ford. Colby is said to have told Ford that the CIA had maintained files on thousands of Americans, although he contended that only a fraction were under active surveillance. He also is said to have insisted that when his predecessor, James Schlesinger, became director in 1973, he halted the domestic spying on U.S. citizens, which had violated the law limiting the CIA to foreign operations.

CIA Shakeup. Despite the secrecy of the DOD's domestic spying, the CIA sometimes took pains to work smoothly with other federal investigative agencies. For example, the CIA informed these agencies of its surveillance of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Representative Claude Pepper of Florida, former Representative Cornelius E. Gallagher of New Jersey and the late Senator Edward Long of Missouri. At other times, however, there was friction among the agencies. FBI agents once discovered that a Manhattan-based CIA man was in close touch with a Pittsburgh Mafia chief who was being probed by the FBI. The FBI protested so vehemently that the CIA operative was sent to Italy until FBI tempers cooled.

As more details of the domestic spying surfaced, Colby continued his shakeup of the CIA. He had forced the resignation of James Angleton, 57, Counter-Intelligence's director for 20 years. Three of Angleton's top staff members retired last week rather than face demotion and transfer. They are: Angleton's chief deputy, Raymond Rocca, Executive Officer William J. Hood and Chief of Operations Newton S. Miller.

At week's end, after meeting with Secretary of State Kissinger, President Ford announced the appointment of a blue-ribbon panel "to determine whether the CIA has exceeded its statutory authority." Among the members: Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, former California Governor Ronald Reagan, former U.S. Solicitor General Erwin N. Griswold, retired Army General Lyman L. Lemnitzer and John T. Connor, onetime Secretary of Commerce.

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