INVESTIGATIONS: Making a Splash, Missing the Point

Chairman Otis Pike was piqued. His House Select Committee on Intelligence had subpoenaed an internal State Department memo, and Secretary Henry Kissinger had refused to hand it over. Convinced that the Secretary was covering up, Pike pressed his committee to cite Kissinger for contempt of Congress.

Then Robert McCloskey, the State Department's liaison man with Capitol Hill, swung into action. He persuaded House leaders that such a contempt citation would badly damage Kissinger's prestige abroad. Thereupon, these men mounted a quiet campaign of friendly persuasion among committee members. The result: Pike's colleagues overruled him and voted 8 to 5 merely to invite Kissinger to explain in person why he refused to release the memo.

Protecting Dissent. Last week Kissinger reiterated to Pike's panel that he was not suppressing any embarrassing information, but trying to maintain State Department morale and efficiency. At issue was a memo written by a desk officer criticizing U.S. policy in Cyprus. Kissinger argued persuasively that lower-level policy recommendations should not be turned over to Congress with the names of the authors attached. Reason: State Department staffers might then hedge their recommendations for fear that they could be dragged before Congress to justify them—as happened in the Joe McCarthy era. Kissinger again offered to supply summaries of dissenting recommendations; the authors could testify about facts, but not about their advice. The effort at compromise resumes this week.

The scrap with Kissinger was important for another reason. It typified the way in which congressional committees investigating the U.S. intelligence community have diverted themselves from their objective: to find methods to better watch over the CIA, FBI and similar agencies. Both the House committee and its Senate counterpart headed by Frank Church have been on the job since early this year, and both have spent too much time battling the Administration or grabbing for headlines by concentrating on flashy issues. One motive: peppery and aggressive Pike yearns to run for the Senate in 1976, and Church may well announce his candidacy for President by year's end.

The House committee has been less effective than the Senate's. True enough, it has learned a good deal about the sub rosa financing arrangements enjoyed by intelligence agencies: that the General Accounting Office, which is supposed to monitor federal spending, keeps its hands off the CIA; the CIA alumni in the Office of Management and Budget handle the purse strings of their alma mater.