Investor's Business Daily, June 22nd, 2007
Spying: They call it the CIA's "dirty laundry": declassified documents on assassination plots, domestic surveillance, abductions and the like. But those fighting the terror war can't win without getting their hands dirty.
In announcing the public release of nearly 700 pages detailing controversial CIA activities over the quarter century preceding the mid-1970s, the agency's director, Gen. Michael Hayden, remarked that it provided "a glimpse of a very different time and a very different Agency."
But if America is to combat the elusive terrorist enemies we face today, our intelligence agencies may well have to return to some of their aggressive practices of yesteryear.
It seems odd for the CIA to be flagellating itself, exposing the decades-old "skeletons" in its closet, at a time when espionage is indispensable in preventing Islamofascists from filling our cities with the corpses of innocent Americans.
Among activities revealed in the so-called CIA "family jewels" that critics consider illegal or in violation of the agency's charter:
Opening mail from the Soviet Union and Red China during the Cold War -- including four letters sent to actress Jane Fonda.
CIA agents posing as members of Soviet-influenced or financed pacifist groups and journeying abroad to identify foreign contacts. Names of more than 9,900 Americans were compiled.
Surveillance of the Washington Post's national security reporter after he wrote a story based on an intelligence leak. Other journalists staked out included the late columnist Jack Anderson and his then-assistant Brit Hume, now with Fox News.
The two-year confinement in Washington-area safe houses of a Soviet defector suspected of faking his defection.
Break-ins of homes of CIA personnel suspected of misusing classified documents.
Attorney General Bobby Kennedy's management of the attempted assassination of Communist Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, and CIA involvement in the 1961 assassinations of Congo Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo.
Many will conclude that U.S. intelligence agencies are natural hazards to liberty -- "rogue elephants" as the late Democratic Sen. Frank Church infamously called them. The committees he chaired in the 1970s went a long way toward crippling the CIA.
But the job of the CIA is not to make public confessions, or -- as we have seen all too much of in recent years -- undercut White House anti-terror policies.
They should be monitoring and infiltrating our 21st century enemies and those who help them in the same way our Communist enemies were helped in the last century. At times even killing their leaders.
