The Congress: Tracking the Iceberg

To its many critics, the Central Intelligence Agency is something of an iceberg in the warm estuaries of democracy. Since hermetic secrecy is an endemic and essential characteristic of espionage, the CIA is mostly invisible, largely inscrutable, and publicly unaccountable. Yet this very immunity to outside inspection has long irked William Fulbright and many members of his Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who charge that the CIA often operates independently of the Administration and on occasion even shapes U.S. foreign policy. Fulbright's committee —which has the reputation on Capitol Hill of not being able to keep any secret of its own — last week made its boldest attempt yet to win a measure of control over the world's most reviled spy network.

By a vote of 14 to 5, the Foreign Relations Committee demanded the creation of a nine-member Senate "Committee on Intelligence Operations"—in which it would participate. Under the resolution, drafted by Minnesota Democrat Eugene McCarthy with the chairman's approval, Fulbright would be empowered to add three members of his committee to the special subcommittee—presently consisting of six members of the Armed Services and Appropriations panels and chaired by Georgia Democrat Richard Russell—that is already responsible for supervising the intelligence agency.

"Sheer Poppycock." Taking the Senate floor to scuttle the scheme, Russell pooh-poohed the notion that the CIA makes U.S. foreign policy ("sheer poppycock"), warned that an enlarged committee would only increase the possibility of security leaks that could endanger the lives of the agency's "sources." What privately troubled many Senators was that the anti-Viet Nam war, power-is-arrogance clique that dominates Fulbright's committee might not be the most objective overseers of the nation's most important intelligence arm.

During the debate, Fulbright himself rose to complain that CIA Director Admiral William Raborn, when haled before his committee, had refused to answer anything but "superficial" questions. Russell, artfully invoking both his own prestige and Senate precedent, contended that 1) committees have traditionally been granted the right to "legislative oversight" of agencies that they have recommended, and 2) it was his own Armed Services Committee that had approved the birth of the CIA in 1947. "Unless the committee of which I am chairman has been derelict in its duty," the Georgian said pointedly, "there is no justification whatever for any other committee muscling in." Though a floor vote on the issue was yet to come, it seemed hardly likely that anyone would be so bold as to charge the venerable Richard Russell with dereliction.