Making a Splash, Missing the Point

Chairman Otis Pike was piqued. His House Select Committee on Intelligence had subpoenaed an internal State Department memo, and Secretary Henry Kissinger had refused to hand it over. Convinced that the Secretary was covering up, Pike pressed his committee to cite Kissinger for contempt of Congress.

Then Robert McCloskey, the State Department's liaison man with Capitol Hill, swung into action. He persuaded House leaders that such a contempt citation would badly damage Kissinger's prestige abroad. Thereupon, these men mounted a quiet campaign of friendly persuasion among committee members. The result: Pike's colleagues overruled him and voted 8 to 5 merely to invite Kissinger to explain in person why he refused to release the memo.

Protecting Dissent. Last week Kissinger reiterated to Pike's panel that he was not suppressing any embarrassing information, but trying to maintain State Department morale and efficiency. At issue was a memo written by a desk officer criticizing U.S. policy in Cyprus. Kissinger argued persuasively that lower-level policy recommendations should not be turned over to Congress with the names of the authors attached. Reason: State Department staffers might then hedge their recommendations for fear that they could be dragged before Congress to justify them--as happened in the Joe McCarthy era. Kissinger again offered to supply summaries of dissenting recommendations; the authors could testify about facts, but not about their advice. The effort at compromise resumes this week.

The scrap with Kissinger was important for another reason. It typified the way in which congressional committees investigating the U.S. intelligence community have diverted themselves from their objective: to find methods to better watch over the CIA, FBI and similar agencies. Both the House committee and its Senate counterpart headed by Frank Church have been on the job since early this year, and both have spent too much time battling the Administration or grabbing for headlines by concentrating on flashy issues. One motive: peppery and aggressive Pike yearns to run for the Senate in 1976, and Church may well announce his candidacy for President by year's end.

The House committee has been less effective than the Senate's. True enough, it has learned a good deal about the sub rosa financing arrangements enjoyed by intelligence agencies: that the General Accounting Office, which is supposed to monitor federal spending, keeps its hands off the CIA; the CIA alumni in the Office of Management and Budget handle the purse strings of their alma mater.

But many of the House committee's charges have been inexcusably glib and unfair. The committee heard former CIA Analyst Samuel A. Adams, an outspoken critic of the CIA, charge that top U.S. officials had deliberately concealed the true strength of the Viet Cong before the Tet offensive; then Pike refused to call the accused, as well as other witnesses in a position to rebut the charge. He also concluded that the intelligence community had shown incompetence by failing to predict the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East and the Portuguese coup. But these indictments neglected to consider that the Israelis also had been caught off guard and that while the CIA should have been more aware of the power of the Portuguese Communists, it cannot watch everything or be right every time. The intelligence agencies' many successes are almost always kept secret.

In the Senate, Frank Church's committee has explored the misuse of the Internal Revenue Service by the Nixon Administration to hound its political enemies, the CIA's illegal reading of citizens' mail and other abuses. Since it discovered in February, however, that the CIA had been involved in foreign assassination plots, that subject has occupied more of the committee's time than all other topics combined. The record bulges to well over 11,000 pages. Church became fascinated with dart guns, shellfish toxins and other peripheral exotica of covert operations. But the committee was unable to pin down who was responsible for the vague plots to kill Fidel Castro, the Congo's Patrice Lumumba and lesser undesirables. Doing so, says Committee Member Walter Mondale, is like "trying to nail Jell-O to a wall."

Future Plans. Though the committee does not plan to release its report on the assassinations for another few weeks, it is already the subject of controversy. In a letter that was hand-delivered to each member, President Ford urged that it be kept secret. Church and other Democrats have accused the Administration of trying to suppress the findings, and probably no more than three of the committee's eleven members will support Ford.

On Feb. 29 the committee's mandate expires, and much remains to be done. The schedule is jammed with hearings on the CIA role in Chile, allegations of the FBI harassment of political dissidents and, finally, the peed for tighter congressional and White House control over the intelligence community. Unfortunately, there will not be nearly enough time to give the last subject the attention it deserves.

In the end the committees probably will make sound proposals for watching over the intelligence agencies and their finances: a joint congressional panel, perhaps, empowered to question intelligence officials under oath. Such a system of accountability promises to reduce future abuses. But some political leaders at home and abroad will still wonder whether that was worth bruising the prestige and credibility of the CIA and its fellow agencies.

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