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In the 103d Congress and then the 104th, I offered legislation that would basically break up the existing Central Intelligence Agency and return its component parts to the Department of Defense and the Department of State. This in the manner that the Office of Strategic Services was divided and parceled out at the end of World War II.
I had hoped to encourage a debate on the role of intelligence and of secrecy in American society. That debate has taken place. Some of the results, I think, can be seen in the nomination of a distinguished scientist and public servant, John Deutch, to this position.
This could not have been more clear in his testimony. He made a point, self-evident we would suppose, but not frequently to be encountered in a pronouncement of a potential DCI. He said:
Espionage does not rest comfortably in a democracy. Secrecy, which is essential to protect sources and methods, is not welcome in an open society. If our democracy is to support intelligence activities, the people must be confident that our law and rules will be respected.
It may have come as a surprise--although it ought not to have--in recent months and weeks, to find how many persons there are in this country who do not have confidence that our laws and rules will be respected; who see the Government in conspiratorial modes, directed against the people in ways that could be of huge consequence to Americans.
Richard Hofstadter referred to this disposition when he spoke of `The Paranoid Style in American Politics.' Thus, for example, the widespread belief that the CIA was somehow involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.
It is important to understand how deep this disposition is in our society. In 1956, even before Hofstadter spoke of it, Edward A. Shils of the University of Chicago--a great, great, social scientist, who has just passed away--published his book, `The Torment of Secrecy,' in which he wrote:
The exfoliation and intertwinement of the various patterns of belief that the world is dominated by unseen circles of conspirators, operating behind our backs, is one of the characteristic features of modern society.
Such a belief was very much a feature of the Bolshevik regime that took shape in Russia in 1917 and 1918. Hence the decision to help found and fund in the United States a Communist Party, part of which would be clandestine. The recent discovery in the archives in Moscow that John Reed received a payment of 1,008,000 rubles in 1920. As soft money, that would be a very considerable sum today.
It is said that organizations in conflict become like one other. There is a degree to which we have emulated the Soviet model in our own intelligence services. A very powerful essay on this matter has just been written by Jefferson Morley in the Washington Post under the headline `Understanding Oklahoma' in an article entitled `Department of Secrecy: The Invisible Bureaucracy That Unites Alienated America in Suspicion.'
I would refer also to Douglas Turner this weekend in the Buffalo News. I spoke of these concerns in an earlier statement on the Senate floor entitled `The Paranoid Style in American Politics,' which I ask unanimous consent be printed in the Record.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
(See exhibit 1.)
Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, what we have today is so much at variance with what was thought we would get. Allen Dulles was very much part of the foundation of postwar intelligence, having been in the OSS, serving with great distinction in Switzerland during World War II. Peter Grose, in his new biography, `Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles,' recounts the testimony Dulles gave before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 25, 1947, as we were about to enact the National Security Act of 1947 which created a small coordinating body, the Central Intelligence Agency.
Personnel for a central intelligence agency, he argued, `need not be very numerous * * *. The operation of the service must be neither flamboyant nor overshrouded with the mystery and abracadabra which the amateur detective likes to assume.' In a lecturing tone, he tried to tell the Senators how intelligence is actually assembled.
`Because of its glamour and mystery, overemphasis is generally placed on what is called secret intelligence, namely the intelligence that is obtained by secret means and by secret agents. * * * In time of peace the bulk of intelligence can be obtained through overt channels, through our diplomatic and consular missions, and our military, naval and air attaches in the normal and proper course of their work. It can also be obtained through the world press, the radio, and through the many thousands of Americans, business and professional men and American residents of foreign countries, who are naturally and normally brought in touch with what is going on in those countries.
`A proper analysis of the intelligence obtainable by these overt, normal, and aboveboard means would supply us with over 80 percent, I should estimate, of the information required for the guidance of our national policy.'
Mr. President, that did not happen. Instead, we entered upon a five-decade mode of secret analysis, analysis withheld from public scrutiny, which is the only way we can verify the truth of a hypothesis in natural science or in the social sciences.
The result was massive miscalculation. Nicholas Eberstadt in his wonderful new book, `The Tyranny of Numbers,' writes `It is probably safe to say that the U.S. Government's attempt to describe the Soviet economy has been the largest single project in social science research ever undertaken.' He said this in 1990, in testimony before the Committee on Foreign Relations. `The largest single project in social science research ever undertaken,' It was a calamity.
No one has been more forthright in this regard than Adm. Stansfield Turner in an article in Foreign Affairs at about that time. He said when it came to predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union, the corporate view of the intelligence community missed by a mile.
I can remember in the first years of the Kennedy administration meeting with Walt Rostow, chairman of the policy planning staff in the Department of State. As regards the Soviet Union, he said he was not one of those `6 percent
forever people.' But there it was, locked into our analysis. That is what the President knew.
In Richard Reeves' remarkable biography of John F. Kennedy, he records that the Agency told the President that by the year 2000 the GNP of the Soviet Union would be three times that of the United States. Again, that is what the President knew. Any number of economists might have disagreed. The great conservative theorists, Friedman, Hayek, Stigler, would never have thought any such thing. Important work done by Frank Holzman, at Tufts, and the Russian Research Center at Harvard disputed what little was public. But to no avail. The President knew otherwise, and others did not know what it was he knew.
The consequence was an extraordinary failure to foresee the central geo political event of our time. A vast overdependence on military and similar outlays that leave us perilously close to economic instability ourselves.
I would like to close with a letter written me in 1991 by Dale W. Jorgenson, professor of economics at the Kennedy School of Government, in which he said:
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I believe that the importance of economic intelligence is increasing greatly with the much-discussed globalization of the U.S. economy. However, the cloak-and-dagger model is even more inappropriate to our new economic situation than it was to the successful prosecution of the Cold War that has just concluded. The lessons for the future seem to me to be rather transparent. The U.S. Government needs to invest a lot more in international economic assessments. * * * (I)t should reject the CIA monopoly model and try to create the kind of intellectual competition that now prevails between CBO and OMB on domestic policy, aided by Brookings, AEI [American Enterprise Institute], the Urban Institute, the Kennedy School, and many others.
That is wise counsel. I have the confidence that John Deutch, as a scientist, will understand it. I am concerned, however, that the administration will not.
Mancur Olson, in his great book, `The Rise and Decline of Nations', asked: Why has it come about that the two nations whose institutions were destroyed in World War II, Germany and Japan, have had the most economic success since? Whereas Britain, not really much success at all; the United States--yes, but. He came up with a simple answer. Defeat wiped out all those choke points, all those rents, all those sharing agreements, all those veto structures that enable institutions to prevent things from happening. And we are seeing it in this our own Government today, 5 years after the Berlin wall came down. Nothing changes, or little changes.
Recall that 3 years before the wall came down the CIA reported that per capita GDP was higher in East Germany than in West Germany. I hope I take no liberty that I mentioned this once to Dr. Deutch and added, `Any taxi driver in Berlin could have told you that was not so.' Dr. Deutch replied, `Any taxi driver in Washington.' A most reassuring response.
Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Texas for her graciousness for allowing me to speak when in fact in alternation it would have been her turn.
Mr. Moynihan. Mr. President, as we think and, indeed, pray our way through the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, asking how such a horror might have come about, and how others might be prevented, Senators could do well to step outside the chamber and look down the mall at the Washington Monument. It honors the Revolutionary general who once victorious, turned his army over to the Continental Congress and retired to his estates. Later, recalled to the highest office in the land, he served dutifully one term, then a second but then on principle not a day longer. Thus was founded the first republic, the first democracy since the age of Greece and Rome.
There is not a more serene, confident, untroubled symbol of the nation in all the capital. Yet a brief glance will show that the color of the marble blocks of which the monument is constructed changes about a quarter of the way up. Thereby hangs a tale of another troubled time; not our first, just as, surely, this will not be our last.
As befitted a republic, the monument was started by a private charitable group, as we would now say, the Washington National Monument Society. Contributions came in cash, but also in blocks of marble, many with interior inscriptions which visitors willing to climb the steps can see to this day. A quarter of the way up, that is. For in 1852, Pope Pius IX donated a block of marble from the temple of Concord in Rome. Instantly, the American Party, or the Know-Nothings (`I know nothing,' was their standard reply to queries about their platform) divined a Papist Plot. An installation of the Pope's block of marble would signal the Catholic Uprising. A fevered agitation began. As recorded by Ray Allen Billington in The Protest Crusade, 1800-1860:
`One pamphlet, The Pope's Strategem: `Rome to America!' An Address to the Protestants of the United States, against placing the Pope's block of Marble in the Washington Monument (1852), urged Protestants to hold indignation meetings and contribute another block to be placed next to the Pope's `bearing an inscription by which all men may see that we are awake to the hypocrisy and schemes of that designing, crafty, subtle, far seeing and far reaching Power, which is ever grasping after the whole World, to sway its iron scepter, with bloodstained hands, over the millions of its inhabitants.'
One night early in March, 1854, a group of Know-Nothings broke into the storage sheds on the monument grounds and dragged the Pope's marble off towards the Potomac. Save for the occasional `sighting', as we have come to call such phenomena, it has never to be located since.
Work on the monument stopped. Years later, in 1876, Congress appropriated funds to complete the job, which the Corps of Engineers, under the leadership of Lieutenant Colonel Thomas I. Casey did with great flourish in time for the centennial observances of 1888.
Dread of Catholicism ran its course, if slowly. (Edward M. Stanton, then Secretary of War was convinced the assassination of President Lincoln was the result of a Catholic plot.) Other manias followed, all brilliantly describe in Richard Hofstadter's revelatory lecture `the Paranoid Style in American Politics' which he delivered as the Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford University within days of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Which to this day remains a fertile source of conspiracy mongering. George Will cited Hofstadter's essay this past weekend on the television program `This Week with David Brinkley.' He deals with the same subject matter in a superb column in this morning's Washington Post which has this bracing conclusion.
`It is reassuring to remember that paranoiacs have always been with us, but have never defined us.'
I hope, Mr. President, as we proceed to consider legislation, if that is necessary, in response to the bombing, we would be mindful of a history in which we have often overreached, to our cost, and try to avoid such an overreaction.
We have seen superb performance of the FBI. What more any nation could ask of an internal security group I cannot conceive. We have seen the effectiveness of our State troopers, of our local police forces, fire departments, instant nationwide cooperation which should reassure us rather than frighten us.
I would note in closing, Mr. President, that Pope John Paul II will be visiting the United States this coming October.
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