INTELLIGENCE: NSA: Inside the Puzzle Palace

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The watch lists covered four basic areas. One was international drug traffic. Another was keeping track of potential presidential assassins. The other two areas were terrorism and possible foreign support for civil disturbances. Cryptically, Allen told the Senators that the watchlist monitoring had prevented "a major terrorist act" in an American city. The episode apparently involved a plan by Arab terrorists to hide explosives in a car parked on a New York City street and detonate them when Israeli Premier Golda Meir, who was visiting the city, passed by.

The monitoring of U.S. dissidents began with Lyndon Johnson's anxiety that foreigners were financing and organizing antiwar groups seeking to drive him from office. The FBI and CIA submitted watch lists. The Defense Intelligence Agency had the NSA monitor the foreign communications of about 20 Americans who were traveling to North Viet Nam.

The legality of the operations is questionable. The committee arranged for Attorney General Edward Levi to appear this week to discuss the matter. Allen admitted that the NSA had obtained no warrants for any of the monitoring and that the agency had never sought a legal opinion on the subject from the Attorney General or the White House. He did point out that Defense Secretary Melvin Laird had known what was going on, as had two Attorneys General, John Mitchell and Richard Kleindienst, before a third, Elliot Richardson, had finally called off the monitoring in 1973, on grounds of dubious legality.

ACLU Suit. The committee was not alone in its attentions to the NSA last week. In Washington's U.S. district court, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a $500 million class-action suit charging the NSA ,and CIA with running a large and illegal spying campaign against antiwar elements in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The suit was brought on behalf of 7,200 individuals and 1,000 groups on which the two agencies supposedly kept files, monitored calls and cables and opened mail. Among the defendants are four communications companies—RCA Global Communications, ITT World Communications, Western Union and American Cable and Radio Corp.—that allegedly cooperated with the agencies by helping them monitor communications. Of course it was the U.S. Government that persuaded the companies years ago to cooperate with the intelligence gathering, and, congressional staff members point out, the companies agreed as a matter of patriotic duty.