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US intelligence Community
The end of the Cold War has reopened the debate on the relative importance of intelligence and operations. This discussion has been carried on intermittently over the past decades and has produced several proposals to reform US intelligence by reducing covert operations and increasing intelligence research and analysis.
The end of the Cold War has made it possible to consider even more fundamental reforms of the US intelligence community, not least because it has allowed the deeply rooted US mistrust of government secrecy to re-emerge. This traditional resentment joined forces with a new awareness that there is a need to re-examine how intelligence should be defined in the ‘information age.’ In view of the proliferation of information processing throughout the government and society as a whole, it seems questionable whether it makes sense still to understand intelligence as it commonly is conceived, namely, as all the information necessary for the decision-maker.
There were commendable efforts launched during the decade of the 1990s to come to terms with the changes that had beset the world of intelligence since the collapse of the Soviet Union. These included the 1996 report of the Aspin-Brown Commission, established by Congress to review the entire mandate of the US intelligence community. Aspin-Brown was the largest and most significant public investigation of its kind since the end of the Cold War.
A mechanism for accountability to a body outside the executive branch was evolved, the long-term impact of the committees has been marginal at best. From the beginning, their impact on the intelligence community was severely limited by restrictions on their power, and by the 1980s, both committees were best known as “partners of the executive branch, ” advocating for the interests of the intelligence community.
Controlling Authority and Responsibilities of FBI
The Bureau’s counterintelligence efforts against a limited set of targets (in FBI parlance, “White Hate Groups” and the “New Left”) between 1964 and 1971. This limited scope is strategic and somewhat artificial; in no way the 1960s were the only period in which the FBI engaged in counterintelligence activities against “subversive” threats, nor that its COINTEL program was the sole source of state repression during this period, nor that right-wing white supremacist groups and student antiwar protestors were the only victims of repressive activity.
Instead, the FBI is largely independent of the efforts of other federal and local policing agencies has engaged in a continuous intelligence mission augmented by sporadic sustained counterintelligence activities throughout its century-long history. COINTELPRO provides an exceptionally clear window on the Bureau’s overall repressive efforts, allowing us to examine how state agencies mobilize such activities against perceived threats.
It goes almost without saying that the 1960s were an extremely tumultuous time politically: a rare confluence of political and cultural events brought together masses of people, many of them young, with designs on ending particular forms of injustice and, among the more ambitious and idealistic participants, creating new ways to live together. Indeed, for a brief time, the possibility of these masses intersecting in revolutionary ways seemed real, and thus an unprecedented number of activists, especially but not exclusively those on the left—became imbued with exceptionally “subversive” potential in the eyes of the FBI.
A consequence of this revolutionary zeitgeist was the expansion of existing frameworks for dealing with dissidence in American society: the actions carried out through COINTELPRO were different in scope (if not in-kind) from other periods. While the findings presented here are specific to the FBI, the general analytic strategy a focus on organizational processes within state agencies themselves is generalizable to future studies of state repression across a wide range of regimes and historical eras.
Past studies of the FBI commonly have viewed its repressive activities as a product of the idiosyncratic concerns of longtime Director J. Edgar Hoover, but both the emergence and shape of these activities are more complex. The FBI, according to its organizational mission, seeks to protect the nation from threats to political and economic equilibrium. Since a shaky early period that was consumed largely with rehabilitating an image tied to corruption and scandal, its intelligence mandate has been consistent and sustained, following directly from this mission. In short, Bureau agents need to react to illegal and politically illegitimate (e.g., threatening the status quo) activities, as well as to anticipate potential illegal or illegitimate threats.
Hoover, during his path-breaking forty-eight-year tenure as Director, engineered an FBI equipped to engage in a variety of information-gathering techniques, including physical and electronic surveillance, surreptitious examination of mail and trash, burglaries, interviews, and informant infiltration. This aspect of the FBI’s mission, however, clearly transcends Hoover, and the FBI’s intelligence activities have continued largely unabated under several FBI Directors since Hoover’s death in 1972.
At times, these intelligence activities have been reactive, responding to illegal or politically extreme actions or rhetoric, but more often, agents have monitored targets for their perceived potential to engage in such dissident activity. In this way, the Bureau has fashioned a mission that stresses agents’ ability to anticipate future threats, often indiscriminately targeting suspects for their ostensible hidden activities. From the FBI’s perspective, certain political groupings—including “anarchists, ” “communists, ” and “terrorists” are subversive and are therefore legitimate intelligence targets, even in the absence of visible challenges to the state precisely because they represent a broader, invisible conspiracy.
The logic of conspiracy is insidious and self-reinforcing: the continued investigation of targets is justified whether or not agents uncover evidence of actual insurrectionary activities, as a lack of such evidence merely signals a deeper conspiracy that can be exposed only through still more intensive investigation. The result is that the FBI’s intelligence activities were ever necessary, as threats and therefore intelligence targets—were as likely to exist in times of quiescence as in those of outward tumult. Information gathered through such investigations served two distinct ends, as the raw material either for building prosecutable cases in response to illegal activity or for justifying the use of counterintelligence techniques to neutralize politically illegitimate actions.
The latter activity, in contrast to the sustained intelligence mission against both criminal and political targets, has been initiated sporadically by the Bureau and only against targets perceived to be politically subversive (rather than criminal). In essence, the FBI has gone beyond the passive monitoring of dissidents whenever threats to the status quo have intensified. The COINTELPRO era was certainly not the only period in which FBI agents attempted to disrupt particular targets.
Such activities tend to be initiated systematically during periods of political instability in reaction to perceived political crises. Why? The waxing and waning of counterintelligence activities have less to do with the FBI’s restraint during less tumultuous periods than with the Bureau’s sensitivity to its own public image and the consequent self-regulation undertaken to maintain the organization. Such concerns create strong disincentives against politically unpopular repression in the absence of precipitating events that mobilize public fears.
Indeed, the history of the FBI shows that counterintelligence campaigns are preceded by the mobilization of public hysteria over conspiracy-based threats posed by anarchists, fascists, communists, or terrorists that serve to insulate the Bureau from external regulation or oversight. The practical result of this dynamic is that significant counterintelligence activity emerges only in response to visible threats to the status quo, though its proximate cause is the loosening of the external regulation that otherwise keeps the Bureau in check.
While agents’ anticipation of perceived threats and reaction to publicly defined crises explain, respectively, the existence of the FBI’s intelligence and counterintelligence missions, such factors tell us little about the frequency, severity, or types of activities employed by the Bureau within particular campaigns. Previous attempts to explain the patterning of repressive actions have generally relied on so-called rationalist or realist models that view repression as a predictable response to threat. Within this framework, the frequency and severity of repressive activity increase with the size (or, more accurately, the perceived size) of challenges posed to the status quo.
In contrast, I argue here that to understand the allocation of repression within COINTELPRO. We need to focus on organizational processes within the FBI itself, specifically those that shape the construction of viable classes of subversive targets and the repertoire of actions designed to neutralize these targets.
Indeed, the unique structure of the Bureau profoundly shapes its response to political challengers. During the COINTELPRO era, the FBI consisted of fifty-nine field offices throughout the country and a centralized national headquarters in Washington, DC. While headquarters unquestionably was the site of authority within the Bureau—Hoover and a small number of associates (which I later refer to as the directorate) needed to sign off on all COINTELPRO actions proposed by agents in field offices—the field offices served as the FBI’s all-important.
Such a view implies that field office agents, if not limited by headquarters, would have much more aggressively pursued potential terrorist threats. But there is, in fact, little evidence to support this claim, either in recent FBI history or from the COINTELPRO era. In chapter 3, I discuss how the directorate’s imposition of organizational controls created the basis for a consistent allocation of repressive activity.
The vast majority of these controls created strong incentives for offices to initiate more proposals, and in several cases, the Director threatened harsh reprisals if SACs didn’t take COINTELPRO “more seriously. ” Likewise, despite talk about the need for field office agents to autonomously open cases, much of the pre–September 11 story regarding terrorism involved field agents’ ineffectiveness in pursuing terrorist leads.
In March 2000, the FBI’s counterterrorism unit held a meeting for all fifty-six SACs to review and coordinate their approaches. At that meeting, several senior officials were “startled to learn how little some Bureau offices around the country, operating independently of headquarters, had done to investigate terrorism. Even after the meeting, in the months before September 11, senior agents at headquarters were reduced to repeatedly cajoling the special agents in charge of the field offices to work harder on counterterrorism inquiries. They even threatened to withhold managers’ raises and bonuses if they did not pay more attention to the problem. ”
Perhaps most surprisingly, the urgency of the post–September 11 climate has not, in itself, led to more aggressive action initiated at the field office level. In November 2002, the Bureau’s second-highest official stated in an internal memorandum that he was “amazed and astounded” by the lack of initiative shown by field offices in their anti-terrorism efforts and began to demand that field supervisors submit weekly briefings from their counterterrorism squads.
Now, as then, it appears that activity against perceived threats is largely driven by headquarters, making it a doubtful proposition that increased autonomy in the field will have a significant impact on increasing the level of quality of the counterterrorist activity. In sum, the essential paradox of the FBI’s structure is that its centralized decision-making authority tends to hinder expeditious action while ensuring that consistent attention (both over time and across field offices) is given to perceived national security threats.
Given these competing ends, what about specific cases, like the Moussaoui investigation, in which, as Rowley argues, it may be true that “careerist” supervisors at headquarters tend to be timid about initiating particular types of investigations for fear of overstepping the FBI’s legal bounds? The popular answer is to remove external constraints on action, to prevent Congressional watchdog committees from aggressively pursuing mistakes. In reality, such external oversight is quite rare, and the reprisals feared by Bureau officials instead result from an internal culture that has become increasingly less tolerant of the potential for highly public Bureau scandals.
Though the Church and Pike Committee inquiries into COINTELPRO activities uncovered hundreds of illegal and otherwise inappropriate acts, they did not result in any convictions or other penalties for Bureau agents. (W. Mark Felt and Edward Miller were later convicted of authorizing illegal burglaries during the Weather Underground investigation, but these actions occurred after COINTELPRO had ended, and both men were then pardoned by President Reagan in 1981.)
Later inquiries focused on well-publicized incidents in Waco and Ruby Ridge, as well as the campaign against CISPES, each of which involved allegations of sustained, major abuses of constitutional rights not at all in line with the minor risk associated with pursuing the type of investigation suggested by Kenneth Williams. To reduce the cautious atmosphere within the Bureau the perception that, as a retired senior FBI official stated, “if you make a mistake and it blows up in your face, then your career is shot because basically it’s one strike and you are out of the FBI” 21 requires a shift in the Bureau’s internal system for promoting and disciplining its agents, rather than more latitude from external oversight committees.
This internal culture needs to be overcome in other ways as well. In the 1990s, FBI Director Louis Freeh hired a number of analysts and linguists, but their role was minimized, largely because of the Bureau’s widely cited “macho culture,” which rewards action rather than analysis. This culture has a long history; even prior to the COINTELPRO era, Bureau clerks tended to be looked down upon, even after they advanced to be special agents.
Then, as now, many of those working at headquarters were also perceived negatively, namely as “desk-bound pencil-pushers,” who, in Colleen Rowley’s words, were often “failures as street agents. ” To put it plainly, any “new” Bureau must overcome the bias against those who analyze intelligence data instead of collecting it. Beyond staffing the FBI with analysts, their work needs to be valued and utilized in investigations, something that is less likely to occur in a climate where, as one former Justice Department official put it, “the analysts were not the heroes of this agency. Nobody wanted to be one. Nobody wanted to listen to them.”
Works Cited
Adams, John P. 1 “AIM, the Church and the FBI: The Douglass Durham Case. ” The Christian Century 975.
Avorn, Jerry L., with Andrew Crane, Mark Jaffe, Oren Root Jr., Paul Starr, Michael Stern, and Robert Stulberg. Up against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis. New York: Atheneum 1968.
Balbus, Isaac D. The Dialectics of Legal Repression: Black Rebels before the American Criminal Courts. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. 1973.
Becker, Elizabeth. “Long History of Intercepting Key Words. ” New York Times 2000.
Benford, Robert D., and David A. Snow. “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment. ” Annual Review of Sociology 26: 611–39, 2000.
Berlet, Chip. “Understanding Political Repression, the FBI, and the Right-Wing: An Historical Perspective. ” Police Misconduct and Civil Rights Law Report 2, 10: 114–20, 1988.
Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.
Burnham, David. 1985. “Foes of Reagan Latin Policies Fear They’re under Surveillance. ” New York Times, II, 20.
Cagin, Seth, and Philip Dray. We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi. New York: Bantam. 1988.
Chartrand, Sabra. “Clinton Gets a Wiretapping Bill That Covers New Technologies. ” New York Times, 27 1994.
Churchill, Ward, and Jim VanderWall. Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Boston: South End Press, 1988.
Cole, David, and James X. Dempsey. Terrorism and the Constitution. New York: The New Press 2002.
“Committee Chair Questions FBI Powers. ” 2002. New York Times.
Cunningham, David. “Organized Repression and Movement Collapse in a Modern Democratic State. ” Ph. D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 2000.
C. D. Ameringer, U. S. Foreign Intelligence: The Secret Side of American History (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1990), p. 396.
Minutes of Cabinet Meeting, 1958. ” Also reprinted in Churchill and VanderWall (1990, 40–41).
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