CONGRESS: The Big-Mouth Problems

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Public Secrets. The week of leaks helped focus the secrecy problem as the Senate Government Operations Committee opened hearings on how to improve congressional oversight of the CIA. The Administration favors a single joint committee if only because separate House and Senate committees would double the likelihood of leaks. But congressional leaders argue that oversight might be improved if two committees were in competition.

Idaho Democrat Frank Church, who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, insisted that a congressional oversight committee must have the right to make public CIA secrets, upon a majority vote.

The Administration seems willing to keep the committees informed of CIA activities. Indeed, Ford will pledge such cooperation in a message on intelligence to Congress within the next few weeks. He will also issue a series of Executive orders that, among other things, will forbid the CIA to spy on Americans, except in defined cases involving the agency's own security, and get involved in assassination plots. In turn, the Church committee will propose that the Executive orders be written into law, so they cannot be revoked by a future President.

But the Administration adamantly opposes a proposal by Church and Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield that the oversight committees be notified before the CIA launches a covert operation—not afterward, as is now the case. The change would make it easier for Congress to veto an operation by cutting off funds, as the Senate did last December in the case of Angola. Said one White House aide: "There's a constitutional problem. The Supreme Court has held that the President is the 'sole organ' of foreign affairs. You can't have 535 Secretaries of State." There is also a practical and so far insoluble problem—those persistent leaks.