>>20416120
In sum, the excerpts of the House panel’s
report describe the American intelligence
community as often inept, not out of control
(as has often been charged), anti as
frequently considering itself beyond the laws
of the land.
For instance, then-president Johnson in •
1967 blocked the CIA from offering further
covert assistance to educational or other
private voluntary institutions, after
disclosures that the CIA had been sneaking
money to the National Students Association
See CIA, A8, Col. 1
CIA, From A1
The Village Voice excerpts
quote CIA deputy director
Carl Duckett as testifying that
the CIA still maintains covert
contracts with “a small
number of universities.”
The report talks of most of
the CIA’s covert activities as
haphazard and in effect
lacking any master plan
saying that “the overall
picture . . . does not support
the contention that covert
action has been used in fur-
therance of any particular
principle, form of govern-
ment, or identifiable national
interest.”
“Instead,” the report
continues, “the record in-
dicates a general lack of a
long-term direction in U.S.
foreign policy. Covert actions,
as the means for im-
plementing a policy, reflected
this Band-aid approach,
substituting short-term
remedies for problems which
required long-term cures.”
Yet at another point the
f report claims that “all
•- evidence m hand suggests that
the CIA, far from being out of
» control, has been highly
responsive to the instructions
; of the President and the
y assistant to the President for
national security affairs.”
g What is absent, the report
g suggests, is any kind of con-
s' trols on the CIA and its fellow
intelligence-gathering
agencies.
The report makes much of
the fact that the intelligence
community has never been
frank about how much it
spends, which the committee
j claims is “at' Least three to
four times . the amount
reported to Congress.”
That means it all costs about
— .. jmi, aays me
report, with almost no con-
trols, no checks, no balances
. As a result, says the com-
mittee, the CIA has been able
to do some unusual things with
the taxpayers’ money, in-
cluding developing “a huge
arsenal of weapons and access
to ammunition . . . giving it a
capability that exceeds most
armies of the world,” having
put at least $75 million into
Italian politics, and serving in
effect as a discount shopper
for some foreign officials.
{i Hie CIA s budget, it says
appears as only a single line -
item” in the budget, giving the
agency “an unusual ad-
vantage” in its ability to
transfer money from area to’
area unimpeded.
The committee points out
that the General Accounting
Office, because of the CIA’s
penchant for secrecy, cannot
even balance the CIA’s books,
, let alone analyze its ef-
ficiency,” and that last year
the CIA, National Security
Agency and Defense .
Intelligence Agency all
refused information the GAO
was seeking.
At the Office of
Management and Budget,
only six employees work full-
time on foreign intelligence,
three of those are former CIA
employees, and the CIA’s
budget head recently tran-
sferred there from the OMB,
the report said.