SECURITY: Snoopers Due for Review

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"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.'" So wrote Justice Lewis Powell, a Nixon appointee, in the 1972 Supreme Court opinion that forbade the wiretapping of domestic organizations and individuals without a court warrant. Ironically, the court issued its decree just two days after the Watergate conspirators were caught with electronic surveillance equipment in the headquarters of the Democratic National Party—a legitimate political dissent organization if there ever was one.

The twin terms "domestic security" and "national security" are so broad that they can be invoked to cover a multitude of actions—many of them in violation of the Constitution. But the agencies normally responsible for protecting the nation from both foreign and internal threats (see box following page) are federal bodies sanctioned by law.

The Nixon Administration not only redefined national interest to include the personal and political aims of the party in power—but set up on its own a White House security agency that was neither established by law nor responsible to the Congress. Why did the Administration feel it necessary to form the President's own extralegal security apparatus?

The experience of Lyndon Johnson's Administration undoubtedly influenced the Nixon men. Johnson resisted the temptation to use the ever more sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment for domestic intelligence. But by the late 1960s he sought desperately for a way to cope with widespread and often simultaneous urban riots. Attorney General Ramsey Clark sent a tough memo to FBI Director J.

Edgar Hoover, urging him to use "maximum available resources" of his agency to investigate and predict riots. Angered at Johnson's refusal to allow wiretapping and electronic bugs against gangsters, Hoover balked. In fact, he proceeded to scrap many of the FBI'S more dubious but productive techniques, such as burglarizing the homes and monitoring the mail of suspected spies and criminals. Stymied by Hoover and realizing that not even the 8,700 agents of the FBI could cope with riots, the Johnson Administration turned to the U.S. Army as a tool of massive retaliation, giving it new charters to collect intelligence on civilians in the process.

When Nixon took office, he was confronted by much the same climate of urban unrest and growing racial militancy. He also had to cope with new dangers—bomb-throwing anarchists, skyjackers and an exploding drug traffic. White House officials quickly encouraged the Army to step up its domestic intelligence operations. Within two years, the Army had 25 million "personalities" on file. One of the victims, Adlai Stevenson HI, then Illinois state treasurer, was to call the operation "Kafka in khaki." The dismantling of the Army's internal counterinsurgency department was not begun until 1971, and then only in response to public outcry.