International Journal of Intelligence and

CounterIntelligence

ISSN: 0885-0607 (Print) 1521-0561 (Online) Journal homepage: [Link]/journals/ujic20

Undermining Counterintelligence Capability

[Link] Wannall

To cite this article: [Link] Wannall (2002) Undermining Counterintelligence

Capability, International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, 15:3, 321-329, DOI:
10.1080/08850600290101659

To link to this article: [Link]

Published online: 10 Nov 2010.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 1088

View related articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

[Link]
International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence , 15: 321±329, 2002
Copyright # 2002 Taylor & Francis
0885-0607 /02 $12.00 + .00
DOI: 10.1080 /0885060029010165 9

W. RAYMOND WANNALL

Undermining Counterintelligence Capability

Following the Islamist al-Qaeda terrorist attack of 11 September 2001 on

the United States, the U.S. intelligence community faced a rumble of
criticism for not having forewarned the assaults. Media spokesmen raised
the question as to whether a breakdown had occurred in U.S. intelligence
and counterintelligence operations. The i ssue became a m atter of
considerable concern on Capitol Hill. But if the U.S. Senate and House of
Representatives choose to pursue the matter to its logical conclusion, their
study will discover a progressive loss of ability on the part of the intelligence
agencies to carry out their functions, particularly in the domestic aspects
of subversion and terrorism, dating back to, at the very least, the Watergate
1
event of 1972 and the congressional hearings of 1973±1975.

PERCEIVING A MOUNTING THREAT

The Cold War spawned a series of situations that foretold a potential threat
to the United States and the rest of the Western world from the Soviet Union,
which, in the aftermath of World War II, absorbed the Baltic states of Latvia,
Lithuania, and Estonia; reduced the Central and East European nations of
Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Romania to satellite status; and subverted
Czechoslovakia. As former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill put
it, the Soviets drew an ``iron curtain’’ across the face of Europe. For

W. Raymond Wannall, a retired Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of

Investigation, headed its Intelligence Division, responsible for all FBI
operations regarding intelligence, counterintelligence, counterterrorism,
security, espionage, and related matters. He also served as the Bureau’s
representative on the United States Intelligence Board. A past President and
Chairman of the Association of Former Intelligence Of®cers (AFIO), he is
the author of The Real J. Edgar Hoover: For the Record (Paducah, KT:
Turner Publishing, 2000).

321
322 W. RAYMOND WANNALL

eighteen months, beginning in April 1948, Allied forces were denied access to
Berlin, the former capital of defeated Germany, a city by then divided into
four zones: American, French, British, and Soviet. The Russians set up an
illegal blockade of the narrow corridor allowing vehicular tra c into
Berlin, forcing U.S. President Harry S Truman and the Allies to establish
an airlift of necessary supplies to both the residents of that city and to the
Western occupying forces.
In the United States, at about the same time, two Americans who had been
couriers for the Soviet intelligence services, Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker
Chambers, disclosed that the U.S. Communist Party’s members and
sympathizers had in®ltrated numerous U.S. government agencies and were
stealing information, some highly classi®ed, for the Soviets. Instilling
additional concern was the revelation in September 1949 that the Soviet
Union now had its own atomic bomb, thereby eliminating a major U.S.
military advantage.

LEGISLATIVE FOUNDATIONS OF INTELLIGENCE

The U.S. Congress took numerous legislative steps to meet the mounting
threat from Moscow. The National Security Act of 1947 created the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), with responsibility for intelligence and
counterintelligence activities outside the United States. Several new
statutory provisions enhanced the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI)
domestic investigative and intelligence responsibilities.
The Internal Security Act of 1950 (ISA 50), passed over President
Truman’s veto, required Communist-action organizations, their o cers,
and members to register with the Attorney General’s o ce as agents of
foreign powers. The bill provided for the establishment of a Subversive
Activities Control Board to determine whether an organization was or was
not a Communist-action or -front group. Title 842 of ISA 50 declared that
the Communist Party was not entitled ``to any of the rights, privileges and
immunities attendant upon legal bodies created under the jurisdiction of
the laws of the United States or any political subdivision thereof.’’
Section 811 of the same Act, bearing the caption ``Emergency Detention of
Suspected Security Risks,’’ provided for the incarceration or sequestration of
persons posing a probable security risk in the time of an emergency a€ ecting
the well-being of the United States. Under this section, the FBI conducted,
over the years, literally tens of thousands of domestic intelligence
investigations and, with the approval of the Department of Justice,
categorized those involved in accordance with the apparent degree of
threat they would pose.
The Immigration and Nationality Act, widely known as the McCarran-
Walter Act, was adopted on 27 June 1952 as 8 USC 1101 et seq. It

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTELLIGENCE

UNDERMINING COUNTERINTELLIGENCE CAPABILITY 323

provided for the exclusion of subversive aliens from the United States, and
broadened the cla ss of deportable aliens by speci®cally including
anarchists, Communists, and other totalitarians. The Act established in the
State Department a Bureau of Security and Consular A€ airs, headed by
an administrator who, with the Commissioner of Immigrat ion and
Naturalization, ``shall maintain direct liaison with the FBI and Central
Intelligence Agency’’ in order to receive intelligence information that
would assist in enforcing the act.
And a statute known as the Communist Control Act of 1954 was directed
against Communist in®ltration of trade unions. This had become a problem
of international import, leading the AFL-CIO leadership to undertake
collaborative e€ orts with the U.S. intelligence agencies and those of other
powers to hamstring e€ orts by Communist parties in many countries from
2
subverting and controlling labor organizations.
Referring to the FBI’s domestic intelligence and security investigations, the
Bureau’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, on 6 November 1958, briefed President
Dwight D. Eisenhower and his Cabinet, explaining:

The public usually associates the FBI’s internal security investigations

with Communist Party activities only. Nothing could be further from
the truth. Our investigations encompass any and all organizations
based on a creed of force and violence to determine whether they are
a threat to our internal security or whether they violated any federal
laws.
We investigate the activities of such diverse and international
or ganizations as the Marxist S ocialist W orkers P arty and the
3
Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico.

FBI investigation revealed that the Socialist Workers Party had frequent
contact with international Trotskyite groups, particularly the Fourth
International, headquartered in Belgium.
The Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico (NPPR) was charged by Puerto
Rico’s governor Luis Munoz Marin with having international Communist
connections. On 30 October 1950, members of that party instigated a
revolt in Puerto Rico in an attempt to assassinate the governor.
4
Although the attempt failed, 31 people were killed. Two days later,
NPPR members tried to shoot their way into the Blair Mansion in
Washington, where President Truman was residing while the White
House was being renovated. Their e€ ort to kill him was not successful,
but one of his bodyguards was fatally shot and two others were injured.
An NPPR member was killed and another wounded. The latter was
subsequently convicted of murder and sentenced to death. President
5
Truman later commuted his sentence to life imprisonment.

AND COUNTERINTELLIGENCE VOLUME 15, NUMBER 3

324 W. RAYMOND WANNALL

THE ANTI-INTELLIGENCE LOBBY

As suggested by President Truman’s veto of the Internal Security Act of
1950, which Congress overrode, people on the Left side of the political
spectrum generally opposed legislation which sought to expand intelligence
and counterintelligence operations, particularly those with a domestic
focus. In the 1950s an anti-intelligence lobby, supported by diverse groups
and individuals, undertook e€ orts to curtail or eliminate certain types of
intelligence functions, and questioned their overall legitimacy.
Some objections were presented in the form of the denigration or ridicule
of those legislatively authorized to carry out the statutory mandates. In
his 1962 suspense novel The Light of Day, popular author Eric Ambler
observed:
I think that if I were asked to single out one speci®c group of men, one
type, one category, as being the most suspicious , unbelieving,
unreasonable , petty, inhuman, sadistic, double-crossing set of bastards
in any language, I would say without hesitation: ``The people who run
6
counter-espionage departments.’’

According to Francis J. McNamara, a former Executive Secretary of the

Subversive Activities Control Board, the Campaign for Political Rights
(CPR), previously known as the Campaign to Stop Government Spying,
became the coordinating group for a nationwide campaign against the
FBI, CIA, and other elements of the U.S. intelligence community. It
described itself as ``a national coalition of over 80 religious, educational,
environmental, civic, women’s, black, Latino, and labor organizations’’
which ``serve s as a national information clearing-house providing
materials, organizing-assistance, press and publicity advice and speaker-
scheduling to organizers across the country .’’ This umbrella-type
organization was said to have two basic aims: (1) to end all covert actions
abroad, an d (2) to terminate what it termed ``political spying and
7
harassment in the U.S.’’
Among the CPR’s 51 member and 30 cooperating organizations were the
Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), the American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU), the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the Center for
National Security Studies (CNSS), the Federation of American Scientists
(FAS), the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), the National Organization of
Women (NOW), the Committee for Public Justice (CPJ), and the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
The forces opposing the intelligence community were successful in having
the act on ``Emergency Detention of Suspected Security Risks’’ repealed on
25 September 1971, twenty-one years after its passage. This withdrew one of
the solid bases for the FBI’s intelligence and counterintelligence e€ orts
against both subversives and domestic terrorist groups.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTELLIGENCE

UNDERMINING COUNTERINTELLIGENCE CAPABILITY 325

LOSS OF SUPPORT FOR INTELLIGENCE

The June 1972 burglary at the Democratic National Committee’s
headquarters in Washington’s Watergate complex gave impetus to a series
of policy changes instituted or supported by the anti-intelligence lobby.
These changes resulted in the elimination of certain committees and
initiat ives established to contribute to the e€ ective functioning of
intelligence and counterintelligence missions.
Between the time of the Watergate burglary and the completion in March
1976 of public hearings by the Church Committee of the U.S. Senate, three
such initiatives and a congressional committee were eliminated.
The Internal Security Division of the Department of Justice, originally
established to support the FBI and other agencies with responsibilities in
the area of internal security, was abolished. The Subversive Activities
Control Board, created by the Internal Security Act of 1950, was
disbanded. The responsibility of the Attorney General to maintain a list,
mad e avail abl e to the publi c, o f organi za tions deter mined to be
Com munis t or t otal itar ia n, w as cancelled. I n the U. S. Hous e of
Representatives, the long-standing Committee on Internal Security,
formerly known as the House Committee on Un-American Activities, was
put out of business.
Public hearings of the congressional investigatory committees, headed by
Senator Frank Church (D., Idaho) and Congressman Otis G. Pike (D.,
New York), which looked into U.S. intelligence operations, went far
toward checkmating intelligence capabilities.

ADVERSE EFFECT OF LEVI GUIDELINES

On 18 February 1976, President Gerald R. Ford Jr. issued an order directing
the Attorney General to prepare guidelines under which the FBI would carry
out its investigatory and security functions.
A decade later, in referring to this order during testimony on 20 May 1986
before the National Committee to Restore Internal Security, former
Subversive Activities Control Board director Francis J. McNamara stated:
Now, these guidelines, promulgated in March 1976 by Attorney General
Edward H. Levi, said that in conducting domestic security investigations,
the Bureau was strictly limited to investigating groups and individuals
``which involve or will involve the use of force or violence and which
involve or will involve the violation of Federal law.’’ So intelligence as
8
such was out.

Explaining the impact of the guidelines on the FBI, McNamara pointed out
that, in mid-1973, more than 21,400 domestic security matters were pending.
After the guidelines were issued, the number had been reduced to 4,868. This

AND COUNTERINTELLIGENCE VOLUME 15, NUMBER 3

326 W. RAYMOND WANNALL

number was continuously reduced under the new rules, so that by 1982, only
43 cases were being handled, 23 on organizations and 20 on individuals.
Commented McNamara, ``And this is in a nation of over 200 million
9
people that is the main target of Soviet subversion and espionage e€ orts.’’
This drastic reduction in the caseload led to the abolition of the internal
security branch of the FBI’s intelligence division in 1976.
A comparable de-emphasis on Communist matters took place in the CIA.
In 1977 President Jimmy Carter appointed Admiral Stans®eld Turner as the
new Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). He soon dismissed several
hundred of the Agency’s experts on Communism. Turner, in his memoirs,
justi®ed the reduction in sta€ by pointing to a previous study, conducted
in mid-1976 under DCI, later President, George H.W. Bush, which
recommended the abolition of 1,350 positions in the Agency’s espionage
branch. Turner claimed that, of the ®nal total of 820 positions vacated
largely by attrition, only 17 people were actually dismissed, while 147 took
10
an early forced retirement. But the CIA has never fully recovered from
the Turner-era reductions in this critical area.

CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE FBI

Outside the halls of the government, the anti-intelligence forces utilized
various publicity ploys to advance their cause. On 15 February 1977, draft
legislation, titled ``A Law to Control the FBI,’’ was unveiled at a Capitol
Hill press conference sponsored by three organizations whose supporters
comprised individuals who, for the most part, were bitterly opposed to
intelligence: the ACLU, CNSS, and the CPJ. Former Attorney General
Ramsey Clark, one of the participants in the press conference, said it was
important to control the FBI by law and to get away from the Levi
11
guidelines issued barely a year earlier.
A sectional analysis of the proposed legislation, as presented at the session,
stated in part, ``Since the FBI has been turning to existing statutes to
rationalize its domestic intelligence operations in recent years, Section 105
repeals those laws . . . ’’.
The laws named were the Riot Act, the Seditious Conspiracy statute, the
Smith Act (i.e., the Internal Security Act of 1940), the Voorhis Act, and
the Peacetime and Wartime Military Sedition acts.
During the remainder of 1977, three bills were introduced in the House of
Representatives that incorporated provisions of the externally generated
``Law to Control the FBI,’’ which, if passed, would have repealed existing
statutes: H.R. 4173, introduced by Ronald V. Dellums (D., California);
H.R. 6051, by Herman Badillo (D., New York); and H.R. 10400, by Don
Edwards (D., California). Had the Edwards bill passed, the FBI would
have been removed from both the domestic and foreign counterintelligence

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTELLIGENCE

UNDERMINING COUNTERINTELLIGENCE CAPABILITY 327

®elds. The sponsors of these bills were all members of the House’s activist
group of liberals: Dellums, a radical black member from Oakland, later
became chairman of the House Armed Services Committee; Badillo, the
®rst Puerto Rican congressman, tw o decades la ter r enounced the
Democratic party and became a Republican, losing a bid for the GOP
nomination for mayor of New York City in 2001; Edwards ultimately
became the second-ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee,
and chair of its civil liberties subcommittee. An ardent opponent of the
intelligence community, Edwards was, ironically, a former FBI agent.

REDUCTIONS IN SUPPORT
Lobbying by the anti-intelligence operations groups could not fail to have
had, in those troubled years, some impact on actions taken by the Senate
Judiciary Committee, which abolished its Subcommittee on Internal
Security once the Senate was reorganized in the aftermath of the 1978
elections. The panel had been the last Senate committee to follow such
matters over the years.
In January 1981, when the Senate was again reorganized, this time under a
Republican majority, a Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism was set up
to pursue domestic security and intelligence concerns. But, in 1987, after the
Democrats recaptured control of the body, it, too, was eliminated.
While the domestic intelligence and counterintelligence operations have
consistently been the principal targets for retrenchment or elimination,
cutbacks have also been made in the ability of U.S. intelligence agencies to
function in the foreign counterintelligence arena, commonly referred to as
FCI. For example, in January 1992, Attorney General William P. Barr
reassigned 300 FBI counterintelligence agents to the investigation of street
12
gang activities in more than three dozen U.S. communities.

AFTER 9=11: NEW STRENGTH?

The historical record over the past three decades shows clearly that the
United States’s retrenchment in intelligence and foreign counterintelligence
operations has been extensive. During that time, the U.S. intelligence
community has been under constant siege in a concentrated, and
admittedly successful, attack by its enemies at home, let alone abroad.
Since the 1970s, the intelligence community had largely failed to receive
support, from both executive and legislative branches, and from the public
at-large, for its work, particularly in the realm of combating domestic
subversion and terrorism. Proponents of civil liberties, on both the
political Left and Right, had generally been able to control the media
dialogue in ways inimical to the FBI. Had that not been the case, the

AND COUNTERINTELLIGENCE VOLUME 15, NUMBER 3

328 W. RAYMOND WANNALL

intelligence community might have been better able to give a forewarning to

the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon.
Although an arguable proposition, the fact remains that intelligence, often
described as the nation’s ®rst line of defense, has itself been placed in an
almost indefensible position by its critics.
Some relief may be in sight. President George W. Bush’s establishment of a
13
still largely symbolic O ce of Homeland Security, followed by his
commitment to improved domestic security measures, might reinvigorate
14
the FBI and the CIA. The public’s shock over last year’s successful
attacks on the U.S. mainland, and the response of the world’s security
forces to U.S. demands for collaboration in deracination of al-Qaeda and
other terrorist organizations in their own countries, may augur a new era
of respectable, responsible, and e€ ective intelligence gathering.

REFERENCES
1
``Congress Sets Inquiry on U.S. Flaws in Attack,’’ The New York Times, 12
February 2002, p. A21.
2
The collaboration of the AFL-CIO with the U.S. intelligence community,
especially the Central Intelligence Agency, in combating Communist in¯uence
in unions worldwide has been dealt with in numerous books. Among them are
Ronald Radosh, American Labor and United States Foreign Policy: The Cold
War in the Unions from Gompers to Lovestone (New York: Random House,
1969); Joseph C. Goulden, Meany: The Unchallenge d Strong Man of American
Labor (New York: Atheneum, 1972) ; and Ted Morgan, A Covert Life: Jay
Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster (New York: Random
House, 1999).
3
Socialist Workers Party et al. v. Attorney General of the United States et al., 73
Civ. 3160 (TPG). Defendants’ Exhibit QT and W. Raymond Wannall’s
testimony at pp. 7543±7547 of transcript.
4
Legislative Refererence Service, Library of Congress, World Communist
Movement: Selective Chronology, Vol II.
5
The World Almanac, 1974 (New York: Newspaper Enterprise Association, 1973),
pp. 865, 878.
6
Eric Ambler, The Light of Day (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), p. 55.
7
Periscope, o cial publication of the Association of Former Intelligence O cers,
McClean, Virginia, Vol. IV, No. 4, Fall 1979, p. 5.
8
Hearing conducted in U.S. House of Representatives O ce Building, Annex No.
1, on 20 May 1986, by the National Committee to Restore Internal Security:
subject, ``A Citizens’ Inquiry on Domestic Security,’’ testimony of Francis J.
McNamara, pp. 7, 9.
9
Ibid.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTELLIGENCE

UNDERMINING COUNTERINTELLIGENCE CAPABILITY 329

10
Stans®eld Turner, Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition (Boston:
Houghton Mi‚in, 1985), pp. 196±197.
11
``Civil Libertarians Propose Curbs on FBI,’’ The Washington Post, 16 February
1977, p. 4.
12
Sharon LaFreniere, The Washington Post, 10 January 1992, p. A3.
13
Joel Brinkley and Philip Shenon, ``Ridge Meeting Opposition From Agencies,’’
Th e N ew Y or k T im es , 7 Feb ru a ry 2 00 2, p . A 16 ; E dw ar d L. Ro wn y ,
``Homeland Defense Needs a Real Commander,’’ The Wall Street Journal, 14
February 2002, p. A20.
14
David E. Sanger, ``Bush Plans Early Warning System for Terror,’’ The New York
Times, 6 February 2002, p. A11; John Marko€ , ``Chief Takes Over at Agency To
Thwart Attacks on U.S.,’’ The New York Times, 13 February 2002, p. A27.

AND COUNTERINTELLIGENCE VOLUME 15, NUMBER 3