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Searching for Honest History: Domestic Surveillance

By S. Brian Willson

M. Palmer and his twenty-four-year-old assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, conducted in 1919 what are popularly called the "Palmer Raids" or "Red Raids," developing a database and ordering the smashing of labor union offices and headquarters of communist and socialist organizations without search warrants, concentrating on "foreigners." That December, 249 of the arrested were forced onto a ship headed for the Soviet Union. In January 1920, another 6,000 were arrested without warrants, mostly members of the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies). During one raid, 4,000 "radicals" were grabbed in a single night, and all "foreign aliens" were deported. By January 1920, Palmer and Hoover had arrested more than 10,000 Americans.

During 1917–18, as the USA entered World War I, President Wilson created the Office of Military Intelligence (OMI) in the War Department, to conduct wholesale clandestine surveillance of US citizens suspected of "disloyalty."

Before President Truman established the National Security Agency (NSA) in 1952, government cryptologists were ordered to conduct domestic spy hunts under Project SHAMROCK. This was a super-secret operation that forced private telegraph companies to turn over the telegraphic correspondence of Americans to the government. SHAMROCK began in 1947, growing out of a World War II program that conducted government censorship of international telegrams. Until the program was shut down in 1975, the three major international carriers (RCA Global, ITT World Communications, and Western Union International) delivered copies of messages on a daily basis to the NSA.

The NSA kicked its large spy campaign into high gear in the 1960s, especially under President Johnson. The FBI demanded that the NSA monitor antiwar activists, civil-rights leaders, and drug peddlers.

The FBI's secret, illegal COINTELPRO (counterintelligence program) was conducted from 1956 to 1971 against American citizens, targeting the Black Panthers, the American Indian and civil-rights movements and VVAW, among others. The FBI admitted 2,218 separate COINTELPRO actions, many involving a variety of illegal operations, such as warrantless phone taps (2,305), secret bugs against domestic targets (697), and systematic interception of mail correspondence (57,846).

In 1967, the CIA initiated Operation CHAOS (and later Project MERRIMAC and Project RESISTANCE), exceeding its statutory authority in response to a presidential request that the agency discover ties between US antiwar groups and "foreign interests." From 1967 to 1974, it indexed 300,000 names, kept 13,000 subject files, and intercepted voluminous letters and cables to compile information on domestic activities of US citizens.

However, there is evidence that Operation CHAOS began much earlier—in 1959, when President Eisenhower used the CIA to seek exiles who were fleeing Cuba after Castro's triumphant revolution. The CIA sought contacts in the exile community to recruit them for use against Castro—arguably illegal, although Eisenhower ordered FBI director Hoover to accept it as a legitimate CIA function. The CIA considered this a normal extension of its authorized infiltration of dissident groups abroad, even though the activity was taking place within the United States. Disdain for Congress permeated the upper echelons of the CIA. Congress could not hinder or regulate what it did not know about, and neither the president nor the director of the CIA told them.

The Department of Defense, the Directorate for Civil Disturbance Planning and Operations, and the US Army Intelligence Command conducted domestic surveillance on thousands of US citizens throughout the 1960s. More than 1,500 Army plainclothes intelligence agents worked out of 350 separate offices and record centers to spy on ordinary US residents. They operated without authority from Congress, the president, or the Secretary of the Army. Databanks were kept on as many as 100,000 individual entries, focusing on the feared civil-rights movement and the "New Left" anti-Vietnam War movement. The assumption was that there were foreign influences on the civil-rights and antiwar movements. During 1967 to 1974, presidents Johnson and Nixon repeated Wilson's World War I OMI activities through the Army Security Agency, which worked with other military intelligence units to illegally survey the communications and activities of US citizens who expressed opposition to the war. Called Operation MINARET, it kept a watch list of suspected Americans and collected their phone calls and telegrams made in and out of the country. The names were submitted to the NSA by other agencies, because the targets were suspected of involvement in terrorism, drug trafficking, threats to the president, and civil disturbances.

The Department of Justice's Internal Security Division, established under President Nixon, worked with a vast network of domestic intelligence agencies, including Nixon's own Huston Plan (the "White House Plumbers"), acquiring information and conducting dirty tricks on "persons and organizations not affiliated with the Department of Defense."

An intense debate erupted during the Ford administration in 1975–76 over the presidential power to eavesdrop without warrants to gather foreign intelligence using NSA. George H. W. Bush (director of the CIA), Donald Rumsfeld (Ford's chief of staff) and Dick Cheney (Rumsfeld's deputy) were involved. Bush wanted to ensure "no unnecessary diminution of collection of important foreign intelligence" under a proposal to require judges to approve "terror" wiretaps. Bush complained that some major communications companies were unwilling to install government wiretaps without a judge's approval, claiming such refusal "seriously affects the capabilities of the intelligence community." Ford supported what became the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

In 1994, President Clinton expanded the use of warrantless searches to include entirely domestic situations with no foreign intelligence value whatsoever. In a radio address promoting a crime-fighting bill, Mr. Clinton discussed a new policy to conduct warrantless searches in "violent public housing projects."

Searching for honest history enables us to possess a critical frame of reference in which to judge current policies, and in which to reevaluate the authenticity of our supposed constitutional republic.