Reed Irvine - Editor
It seems sometimes that almost anything Senator Edward M. Kennedy does makes news. He was in the headlines again recently when the leading Canadian news magazine, MacLean's, carried a story alleging that an affair between the Massachusetts senator and Margaret Trudeau, the wife of Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, had been a factor in the Trudeaus' separation. Although this was headline news in many papers, it was not so treated in Washington. The Star ignored it, and the Post buried it deep in the second section of the paper. Suspicious Washingtonians wondered if this was another proof of Kennedy family influence within the Washington press.
Perhaps reflecting that influence, Ted Kennedy's most significant action in his new post as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee has gone unreported. Senator Kennedy killed the last remnant of the once potent Senate Internal Security Subcommittee when he took over the reins of the Judiciary Committee from Senator Eastland of Mississippi, who had retired. The subcommittee had been responsible for some of the most important exposures of the individuals and organizations that the Soviet Union had used to influence American public opinion and U.S. policies. Its most monumental investigation was the 1951 exposure of Communist domination of the influential Institute of Pacific Relations. Those hearings, under the chairmanship of Senator Pat McCaFran (D.-Nev.), provided perhaps the best study in existence of the way agents of influence of the Soviet Union carried out their work in this country.
Under the relentless attack of those who think that the United States Congress ought not to be concerned with threats to our internal security, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee was reduced to a unit of the Subcommittee on Criminal Laws and Procedures in 1977, but with no reduction of staff. It continued to do excellent work, and at the end of 1978 it issued an explosive 179-page report showing that the internal security apparatus of the United States has suffered an almost total collapse. This report shows that freedom of information and privacy legislation, an anti-intelligence hysteria, restrictions on surveillance, and legal actions directed against police agencies by left-wing groups are moving the U.S. into the status of a "zero-security" society.
The report illustrated the danger of this trend by citing the failure of the Washington, D.C. police to prevent the occupation of the headquarters of the D.C. government and the B'nai B'rith headquarters by the Hanafi Muslims in 1977. It pointed out that the D.C. police intelligence unit had once had an informant in the Hanafi group and had kept files on its members and activities. The D.C. city council, under the spell of the anti-intelligence mania, ordered the disbanding of the intelligence unit, the destruction of its files and an end to the use of informants in extremist organizations. "Stripped of intelligence capabilities," the report said, "there was absolutely no way in which the Washington police could have foreseen the incident or could have acted to prevent it." The result: one person killed, one paralyzed for life, and hundreds more subjected to the traumatic experience of being held hostage for 39 hours.
In his introduction to the final report of the Internal Security Unit, Senator Jaines Eastland (D.-Miss.) charged that the news media had been indifferent to "the entire subject of the erosion of law enforcement intelligence" and to the hearings on this subject that the Internal Security Unit had conducted. The report itself discussed the "adverse effects which the generally negative attitude of the media are having on law enforcement." It cited the testimony of Glen King, Executive Director of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, who had pointed out that the press can often demoralize an agency by subjecting it to harassment and invalid charges. He had pointed out that press leaks concerning ongoing intelligence operations, whether true or false, can jeopardize the effectiveness of a surveillance program.
Senator Eastland's criticism of media indifference to the serious problem of internal security was fully borne out by the treatment the news media gave to the final report of the Internal Security Unit and to the throttling of the unit by Senator Kennedy. Edward O'Brien did an excellent series of articles on the report for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, but this was a lonely exception. Big media were simply not interested in telling the public of the somber warnings of Senator Eastland and his expert staff. Nor were they interested in telling the people that Senator Kennedy had killed the last committee on Capitol Hill specializing in the vital matter of internal security. The House Internal Security Committee had been finessed out of existence in 1974 in a reorganization that avoided a recorded vote.
It might be argued that many Senate committee reports go unnoticed by the media and that the fact that there was no great tolling of bells when the Internal Security Unit died at Senator Kennedy's hands explained the silence of the press. However, the media were recently given a second chance to cover this story, and they blew it again.
On March 16, 1979, the Coalition for Peace Through Strength, which numbers among its members many senators, congressmen, generals, admirals and distinguished citizens, sponsored a press conference to discuss "Our Domestic Intelligence Crisis." The conference featured Senator Orrin Hatch (R.-Utah), Laurence Silberman. former Deputy Attorney- General, and a representative of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
The facts about the sad state of our internal security defenses were laid out bluntly, as we shall show. Recommendations for specific remedial action were made. And the news media ignored it all.
Senator Hatch, who is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and who had participated in some of the Internal Security Unit's hearings, made these significant charges:
1. "Our law enforcement agencies have been stripped of much of their ability to deal with domestic subversion, espionage, and terrorism, and with the depredations of organized crime. 2, "The Secret Service... receives only one quarter the amount of intelligence it used to receive and has had to recommend that the President not visit certain cities. 3. "The Federal Employee Security Program has for all practical purposes been nullified. Known members of subversive organizations cannot today be denied federal employment, even in sensitive positions. 4. "In the private sector, too, effective background checks have become impossible in every sphere, from hospitals to nuclear power plants."
Senator Hatch listed the four main causes of the erosion of law enforcement intelligence which expert witnesses had oiled. These are: [1] the general anti-intelligence hysteria of the post-Watergate period: [2] the general hostility of the media to all intelligence operations, domestic or foreign: [3] the rash of recent privacy legislation. in particular the Freedom of Information Act, the Privacy Act and the Fair Credit Reporting Act: and [4] the epidemic of civil suit filed against federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.
The Utah senator noted that intelligence units at state and local levels had been wiped out or reduced to a custodial level. He said that informants, once a prime source of information on extremist organizations, are on the verge of becoming an extinct species because of the fear that their names will be disclosed as a result of Privacy Act or Freedom of Information Act petitions.
Law enforcement agencies now find it difficult to obtain access to bank records and other third-party records that are useful in tracing criminal activity. Moreover. in many localities police intelligence files have been destroyed or impounded. In those cities where the files have not been wiped out there has been a 90 percent reduction in the available intelligence because of the rule that no intelligence entry can be made or maintained unless there has been an indictment or a conviction.
Senator Hatch added: "To compound the damage, law enforcement agencies no longer send information to Washington, or else send very little, because of the fear that the information will be released in response to Freedom of Information or Privacy Act petitions. Federal agencies, in turn, send out very little intelligence to state and local agencies because of the fear that they may be found in violation of the Privacy Act or may be targets for civil suits."
The Federal Employee Security Program, which was instituted in the 1950's as a reaction to the discovery that the Federal Government had been penetrated by such Soviet agents as Alger Hiss in the State Department, Harry Dexter White in the Treasury, and Laughlin Currie in the White House, has been "completely dismantled," Senator Hatch declared. He pointed out that applicants for federal employment cannot be asked if they are, or have been, members of the Communist Party or other extremist organizations. Furthermore, if such information is volunteered to a government investigator, the information cannot even be recorded in the government's files unless the applicant has against him an indictment or conviction directly related to such membership.
Senator Hatch said that the Civil Service Commission tells its investigators that "if an applicant for employment is, expected of being a member of an organization which has bombed an ROTC building, they may ask questions about the applicant's possible involvement in the bombing, but they may not ask questions about his membership in the organization. "Under the existing Civil Service rules, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and Lauchlin Currie could not be denied employment in those high positions in the federal government if an informant, such as Whittaker Chambers, were to reveal that he had regularly collected Communist Party dues from them. Indeed, that information could even be entered into the government's files, unless it was accompanied by evidence that they had committed some crime related to their Communist Party membership.
In response to a question from Accuracy in Media, the Department of State admitted several months ago that there was nothing that would bar an avowed Marxist from employment at the State Department. However, they added that all employees had to meet their exacting loyalty-security requirements. Under further questioning, a lawyer for the Department conceded that those exacting loyalty-security requirements would not bar from employment anyone for "mere membership" in groups such as the Communist Party or even the Weather Underground.
The Department also described as a trusted and valued employee on its Policy Planning Staff one Richard Feinberg, who had resigned his position at the Treasury Department soon after top officials at Treasury learned that his name had appeared in the "Leteljer papers." One of the letters found in the briefcase that the paid Cuban agent, Orlando Letelier, was carrying at the time of his assassination in Washington was from Elizabeth Farnsworth of the North American Congress on Latin America, a radical, Castroite group. She informed LetelJer that Richard Feinberg was collaborating with her in writing a paper on Chile. She added: "Do not tell anyone else that he is working on the project, please. It wouldn't help his work at Treasury (obviously)." It is an interesting sidelight on the sad state of our internal security that the FBI did not promptly inform Treasury about this letter. Only after the Letelier papers leaked to the press did this information reach the Secretary of the Treasury, who then had to prod the Justice Department for confirmation. Soon after, Mr. Feinberg left Treasury and joined the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department.
Recently three former intelligence officials, Lt. Gen. Daniel Graham, former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, John Maury, former Assistant Director of the CIA and John Warner, former general counsel of the CIA, appeared on a Washington radio talk program. One of the questions asked of them was whether or not they thought there was a "mole," a secret KGB agent, inside the CIA. They thought that this was unlikely, partly because the CIA is empowered to use lie detectors to test its employees. General Graham pointed out that this was not true in the Defense Intelligence Agency, where many of the employees were under Civil Service. In response to a question phoned in, General Graham also conceded that the top secret material generated by the CIA and other intelligence agencies went to the State Department, the White House and other agencies where, as we have seen, membership in a party that is controlled by Moscow is no barrier to employment, even in sensitive positions.
Indeed, Senator Hatch at his news conference cited testimony to the effect that applicants for the super-sensitive job of protecting our military computer systems against hostile penetration could not be rejected simply because they did not meet Army security standards. The jobs were under Civil Service, and therefore the Civil Service rules applied to them, not the Army standards.
Under these conditions, the KGB and other foreign intelligence agencies would have to be totally incompetent not to have succeeded in placing their moles throughout the federal government. Their primary task would be to influence governmental policy, and only secondarily to engage in espionage. That was true of Hiss, White and Currie.
Senator Hatch and the Coalition for Peace Through Strength thought that the American people ought to be alerted to this danger. They made a powerful presentation of the case on March 16. But our news media ignored it all. Perhaps the reporters and editors in Washington believe that the KGB has no interest in taking advantage of our "zero security" state and would not bother to plant moles in our government. Or perhaps they simply do not want to see anything done that might molest the moles.
A PRE-EMPTIVE STRIKE BY CBS NEWS
Two days after Senator Hatch made his forceful case for the need to repair the grave damage that has been done to our internal security defenses, CBS News replied on "60 Minutes" with an attack on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. The excuse was to note the 25th anniversary of an attack on McCarthy by Edward R. Murrow over CBS. But it appeared to be a pre-emptive strike to crush the movement to reverse the drift toward a zero-security society. Dan Rather, who a few years ago was helping to promote the Progressive. the magazine that is fighting in court for the right to publish the secrets of the hydrogen bomb, set the tone. Speaking of the 1950s, he said: "Under the impact of the Cold War between America and Russia, loyalty and security investigations operated everywhere. What papers did you read? Which books did you buy? Who were your friends? What organizations did you join? What did you think about this, that and the other, today, yesterday, twenty years ago? It was, perhaps, the most frightened period in American history."
Rather then introduced a portion of that Murrow "See It Now" broadcast of 25 years ago, which he described as a "case history of a McCarthy investigation." It was portions of a hearing of the Investigations Subcommittee of the Government Operations Committee held on March 11, 1954. The witness being examined was Annie Lee Moss, a black woman who had been suspended from her job at the Pentagon because of a charge that she had belonged to the Communist Party in the 1940s.
There were two serious flaws in the CBS presentation. One was that their editing of the film of the hearing outrageously distorted what had actually transpired.
The other was that in February 1959, five years after the hearing, new evidence was disclosed which confirmed the charge that the witness had been a Communist Party member, but CBS neglected to mention this. The viewers were given the impression from the carefully edited film that the charge was without the slightest foundation, perhaps stemming from a case of mistaken identity. Of course, if the 1959 evidence had been brought up, CBS could not have replayed Murrow's film to attack McCarthy. It would have been necessary for them to admit that Ed Murrow had been wrong in the use he made of the Annie Lee Moss case.
The printed transcript of the hearing in the case of Annie Lee Moss ran 1,111 lines. Only 180 of those lines, widely scattered, were used in the CBS film of the hearing. The viewers were not told that the film had been severely edited. What they saw was an apparently uneducated, barely literate black who denied that she had ever subscribed to the Communist Party paper, the Daily Worker, and who claimed that she had never talked to a Communist in her life. She was shown saying that there were three Annie Lee Mosses, implying that the whole thing was simply a case of mistaken identity.
However, Mr. Murrow's editing of the film carefully left out testimony by Annie Lee Moss that contradicted this picture. For example, while CBS showed Mrs. Moss categorically denying that she had ever subscribed to the Daily Worker, they omitted her testimony that the Daily Worker had come to her home by mail, addressed to her. Nor did they show her saying that Robert Hall, a leading Communist in the District of Columbia, had asked that her son sell the Daily Worker and had brought copies of the Daily Worker to her house.
Murrow also left out all the testimony about a friend of Mrs. Moss named Hattie Griffinf Roy Cohn, the committee counsel, stated that Hattie Griffin was an active member of the Communist Party and that party meetings were held in her house. Mrs. Moss testified that she had lived with Hattie Griffin for two weeks, but she denied knowing that she was a Communist. She said she did not know that Robert Hall was a Communist, even though he asked her son to sell the Communist paper and had brought copies of it to her home. She denied knowing that the Daily Worker was a Communist paper.
CBS also omitted testimony that showed that this seemingly barely literate woman had passed a Civil Service examination that apparently qualified her for a job that involved transmitting coded messages at the Pentagon. The CBS film did bring out that she was working with coded messages, but it left out her statement that they were all classified and her admission that some of them were not in code.
The results of this hearing were far from clear-cut. With Mrs. Moss denying that she had even heard about communism prior to 1948 and implying that the party member must have been some other Annie Lee Moss, at least two senators appeared to believe that a mistake had been made. Senator McCarthy had said at the outset that the objective of the hearing was to find out how someone with a record of Communist connections could have gotten a job in the Pentagon code room. That objective got lost when Mrs. Nl,)ss successfully shifted the focus to the question of to whether or not she had been a communist. Despite her denials, the picture portrayed by CBS News of Mrs. Moss as a near illiterate who had not even heard of communism at the time she was supposed to have belonged to the party was not consistent with her entire testimony.
Five years after this hearing, the Subversive Activities Control Board issued a report which dealt with the validity of the charges against Annie Lee Moss. This resulted from efforts made by the Communist Party to discredit the informant. Mary Markward, who had testified that Annie Lee Moss was a member of the Communist Party.
The SACB report states: "The situation that has resulted on the Annie Lee Moss question is that copies of the Communist Party's own records, the authenticity of which the Party has at no time disputed, were produced to it (A. G. Exs. 499 to 511, inc.) and show that one Annie Lee Moss, 72 R Street, S.W., Washing- ton, D.C., was a Party member in the mid-1940's. Yet, on several occasions before the Court of Appeals and the Board, the Party charged that witness Markward had committed perjury before the Defense Department in the Moss Security Hearing in testifying to what the Party's own records showed to be the fact. We conclude that upon production of the documents demanded by respondent, the Communist Party's charge that Markward gave perjurious testimony was not substantiated."
The Annie Lee Moss who was called before the McCarthy committee had lived at 72 R Street, S.W.. Washington. D.C. in the mid-1940's, and so the mistaken identity gambit was exploded by this evidence. Ed Murrow, of course, did not have this evidence when he made his film in 1954. But CBS News has no excuse for now ignoring evidence that has been in the public record for 20 years. But even though the facts were called to the attention of CBS News in a letter from AIM dated March 21 and in a phone call on March 23, there was no correction of this serious distortion on the next "60 Minutes" on March 25, when comments on the previous week's program were aired.
CBS News has a duty to correct the record in the case of Annie Lee Moss and to report what Senator Eastland, Senator Thurmond, Senator Hatch and many others have said about the dangerous deterioration in our internal security. We suggest that you write to Richard S. Salant, President, CBS News, 524 West 57th Street, New York, N.Y. 10019, asking that this be done.
NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF By Reed Irvine
SUPPLEMENT AIM Report April A 1979
OUR ACCURACY IN MEDIA COLUMN APPEARED ON THE OP-ED PAGE OF THE WASHINGTON STAR on March 22 and March 25. We bought the space to run them there. One of the columns also appeared in The Washington Post on March 21. We will reproduce one of these columns on the other side of this page. Both columns dealt with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission action in ordering five East Coast nuclear power plants shutdown because of concern that some of their piping systems might not meet the NRC's standards for resistance to earthquakes.
I CERTAINLY HAVE NO QUARREL WITH THE DESIRE OF THE NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION to insure that nuclear power plants are safe. However, we felt that it was important to make a point that the press in general had ignored. The changes in the piping systems of the five nuclear plants could have been made at relatively little cost if the NRC had been willing to wait until the plants closed down for refueling, which they must do about once a year. Since all five were located in areas where there had not been a serious earthquake in recorded history, the risk of delaying the modifications was minuscule. It was our feeling that the NRC had acted abruptly, taking a decision that was very costly to the customers of those five power plants, perhaps because the commissioners feared that they would be clobbered by the news media when it became known that they had been willing to tolerate, even for a short period of time, a slight deviation from their high safety standards.
OUR COLUMNS IN THE TWO WASHINGTON DAILIES AND IN THE NEW TABLOID, THE WASHINGTON WEEKLY, attracted a lot of attention and even stirred things up at the NRC, we hear. When the second column ran in The Star there appeared on the same page a cartoon that carried a similar theme. It showed three officials of the NRC talking. One was saying, "Isn't it time to shut down a couple of power plants for a week or so to demonstrate our vigilance?"
EVEN THOUGH YOU MAY NOT LIVE IN AN AREA AFFECTED BY THE CLOSURE OF ANY OF THESE five nuclear power plants, this action may be important to you. This country is going to have to develop nuclear power plants if we are to avoid serious shortages of electric power and the costly pollution caused by dirty fossil fuels in the future. But costly, capricious action by those responsible for regulating nuclear plants is discouraging utilities from investing in these facilities. The sad fact is that there are nuclear power plants that were scheduled to be in operation six years ago that are not yet generating power. Some 40 units that were originally scheduled for operation in 1978 were not operating as of January 1979. If these 40 plants were in operation, they would be saving us 1,160,000 barrels of oil per day, an amount that is nearly double the number of barrels per day that we imported from Iran in 1978.
I WANT TO INVITE ALL OF YOU TO JOIN ME IN THANKING AMBASSADOR SHELBY CULLOM DAVIS for his recent grant of $40,000 to Accuracy in Media. This is the largest single grant that AIM has received, breaking the previous record of $30,000. That was the amount that Ambassador Davis gave to AIM last year. Accuracy in Media came to the attention of Mr. Davis back in 1972 through an article I wrote criticizing an ABC documentary called "Arms and Security: How Much Is Enough?" He was then serving as Ambassador to Switzerland. We are deeply indebted to him for the generous support he has given us ever since. It is this that enables us to buy those ads in the Star and Post.
Accuracy In Media
Nuclear Regulatory Commission Clobbers Consumers
WASHINGTON -- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave no thought to the heavy costs it was imposing on consumers already groaning under rising utility bills when it ordered five nuclear power plant to close down on March 12. The reason for the sudden shutdown was that it had been discovered that some of the pipes in the cooling systems of the plants might be subject to rupture in the event of an earthquake. Officials of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission were unable to tell us when the last recorded earthquake occurred near any of the five plants, which are located in Maine, New York. Pennsylvania and Virginia The New York Times noted that the East Coast of the United States is not considered an earthquake zone.
SenatorJ Bennett Johnston (D-La.) said that the NRC had told him that the chances of an earthquake in the area of the five plants was one in 10,000 to1 million years He described the decision to close the plants "absolutely asinine" Senator Johnston. who chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Energy Conservation and Regulation, estimated that electric rates in the areas served by the five plants would probably double if the closures were allowed to stand.
Harold Denton, Director of the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation at the NRC, estimated that the cost of the shutdown would run between $300,000 and $500,000 per day for each of the five plants He had no idea how long the Commission would keep the plants out of operation, since it was not clear what would have to be done to make them invulnerable to that one earthquake that might occur sometime in 10,000 to I million years. Asked if the NRC had weighed the very heavy cost of the shut- down against a near zero risk of an earthquake, Mr. Denton said that the Commission was concerned only with safety, not with costs.
No news report that we saw pointed out that with a little patience the NRC could achieve the safety that it demands without burdening the consumers with the tremendous costs that they now face Nuclear power plants have to shut down once a year for refueling and maintenance. If the Com- mission were willing to run the minuscule risk that a major earthquake will not strike Maine, New York, Pennsylvania or Virginia during the coming twelve months the earthquake-proofing of the pipes could be done during the period when the nuclear plants- are being refueled.
This approach would not only save the heavy financial cost of the shutdown, but it would also save the country approximately 150,000 barrels of oil per day, the amount that will have to be used to supply the power that the nuclear plants were generating. At a time when the Department of Energy is warning that we face a serious shortage of oil, which may require closure of service stations on Sunday or compulsory limits on heating and air- conditioning buildings and homes, this forced increase in oil consumption is going to cause pain it increases by 30% the shortfall that we are already experiencing in oil supplies as a result of the reduction m imports from Iran.
It is inconceivable that the consumers who are going to have to bear the burden of the increased electricity rates and the additional curtailment of oil supplies would not have preferred to gamble that the East Coast will not suffer an earthquake in the next twelve months. That is not much of a gamble.
So why didn't the NRC take this sensible course? It could have, but it is certain that two of the five members of the commission would have voted against it. These two commissioners are opposed to nuclear power and regularly vote to hamstring its development If the other three members had voted to permit the five plants to make the necessary modifications during their refueling shutdown periods, charges that the NRC was recklessly endangering the lives of millions would have quickly found their way to the press Rather than be clobbered by the press, the NRC clobbered the consumer
You can read Reed Irvine's column regularly in Washington Weekly, together with other columnists not carried in the Washington dailies such as WRC talk show hosts Pat Buchanan and Victor Lasky. Washington Weekly, a new tabloid, is available on most newsstands in the Washington area. For more in-depth reporting on news media errors and suppression, you must read the AIM Report, published twice monthly by the nation's nonprofit media watchdog. Subscribe to the AIM Report for S15 a year. Mention this ad with your subscription and we will send you a FREE book. Choose either Dr. Petr Beckmann's The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear, (retails for $5.95) OR Victor Lasky's bestseller, It Didn't Start with Watergate ($2.25 retail). Offer is good for a limited time only.
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