The potential of the National Security Agency (NSA) “to violate the privacy of American citizens is unmatched by any other intelligence agency,” especially as telecommunication technology advances.
Perhaps surprisingly, that warning was not issued in the wake of the cache of documents leaked by former civilian security contractor Edward Snowden to the Washington Post and the Guardian this past summer. It was made instead in the 1970s by the Senate’s Church Committee when it held hearings on the activities of the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA.
Domestic surveillance intended to protect American citizens has been a part of the fabric of American life for more than a hundred years. Yet, the massive NSA intelligence-gathering programs revealed by Snowden are unprecedented in their sheer scale, their advanced technologies, and in the legal foundation that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court offered them.
One NSA program, unofficially called 215, collected metadata from U.S. telecommunications companies, revealing the date, time, location, and recipient of phone calls across the United States. The agency also monitored foreign emails through a program called Prism, part of a larger internet collection effort called Upstream; while targeted abroad, the NSA has admitted that U.S. emails were gathered up as part of the program. One of the documents leaked to the Guardian claimed that the NSA’s tools allowed them to see “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet.”
President Barack Obama condemned Snowden for leaking, claiming there were other, official channels through which Snowden could have made known his concerns with the program. Obama presented the activities as part of a necessary activity to protect the United States from terrorism, while asserting that laws prevented the “willy-nilly” taking of private information. He promised that reforms would be made to foster greater trust in the system.
While the Snowden revelations have created tremendous controversy in the United States and around the world (as Germany’s Angela Merkel will attest), some of the questions the documents raise have been with us for at least a century.
Can an intelligence agency successfully operate within the bounds of the law and under the supervision of a democratic government? Can the United States spy on foreign targets without creating an organization able to spy domestically? Can a line be successfully drawn between domestic and foreign intelligence? Can we ensure that innocent citizens do not get caught up in the hunt for internal enemies? Who should be considered an internal enemy?
Regardless of what happens in the wake of the Snowden controversy, these tensions are not likely to evaporate as long as the United States continues to engage in any form of spying and to search domestically for enemies, both real and perceived.
Keeping Tabs on Anarchists and Bolsheviks
Before the United States worried about the threat of jihadi terrorists, the nation was gripped by a fear of anarchists.
Political terrorists had killed scores of European officials in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Even Tsar Alexander II of Russia, liberator of the serfs, had been blown up on the streets of St. Petersburg.
And the U.S. was not immune to this violence. In September 1901, U.S. President William McKinley was assassinated by anarchist Leon Czolgosz in Buffalo, New York.
Robert Pinkerton, of the famous private Pinkerton detective agency that had supplied the Union with intelligence during the Civil War and spent subsequent decades helping break labor movements, advised that radicals “should be marked and kept under constant surveillance.”
Theodore Roosevelt, who succeeded McKinley, did not immediately follow Pinkerton’s advice. In 1908, though, he directed the Attorney General, Charles Bonaparte (the great-nephew of Napoleon) to set up an investigative service within the Department of Justice. Congress, however, turned him down.
The Congressmen did not want to create a secret, internal police similar to those employed by European governments, like the Russian Okhrana. Not discouraged, Bonaparte waited until Congress adjourned and, with the approval of Roosevelt, established the Bureau of Investigation in December 1908.
Shortly thereafter, as the United States was drawn into World War I, the modest bureau expanded to meet the challenge of ensuring internal security, especially the perceived threat of Germans living in the United States. As President Woodrow Wilson began to crack down on domestic dissent with the Espionage Act, the bureau began its long career of hunting down spies and radicals.
The bureau was joined in these efforts by the Office of Naval Intelligence. The ONI had its own programs against potential domestic threats, which soon expanded beyond looking for potential foreign spies to investigating “subversive elements.”
After the war, Bolsheviks replaced Germans as the chief focus of the nascent intelligence community. A hunt for communists ensued, driven on by fear of the new Soviet regime, which emerged in November 1917.
In 1919, a series of bomb attacks on government targets convinced many Americans that threats from anarchists and Bolsheviks were clear and present. In the wake of the bombings, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched a series of raids on radicals in cities around the country, though many had no connection to any violent organization.
The First Red Scare, as it came to be known, resulted in deportations including well-known figures like Emma Goldman, and it broke the back of the Industrial Workers of the World, a prominent union.
To lead the charge against subversives, Palmer created the Radical Division of the Bureau of Investigation, and selected 24-year-old J. Edgar Hoover to lead it. Hoover assumed his new position August 1, 1919, and would spend the rest of his life, more than 50 years, directing law enforcement against communists.
When the FBI was organized from the Bureau of Investigation in 1935, Hoover became its first director. He remained a committed anticommunist. To Hoover, however, “communist” became synonymous with almost anyone on the political left. Under Hoover, various leftist organizations would be infiltrated by federal informants.
In addition to the use of informants to gather human intelligence, early electronic surveillance was used in the tapping of phones. Such tapping was deemed legal by the Supreme Court in the 1927 case Olmstead v. United States, which found that the wiretapping of phones did not violate the Fourth or Fifth Amendments. That decision would not be reversed until 1967.
Domestic surveillance continued in the 1930s, much of it legal although sometimes exceeding legal limits. At the request of Franklin Roosevelt, Hoover begrudgingly began investigations of the American fascist movement. He also monitored civil rights groups, suspecting them of communist influence.
Captain Hayne Ellis, the director of the ONI in 1931, expanded beyond communist groups to investigate pacifist organizations like the National Council for the Prevention of War and the Women’s League for Peace.
As war loomed in Europe, FDR in 1939 directed the FBI, ONI, and the Military Intelligence Division to take charge of tracking subversives in the United States.
The Cold War: The Modern Architecture of Surveillance Takes Shape
World War II witnessed, amongst other things, the birth of the first centralized U.S. intelligence organization, the Office of Strategic Services. Included in its mandate was counter-intelligence, a duty it shared with the FBI. Like the FBI, the OSS would occasionally ignore legal requirements in its pursuit of subjects, most notably when pursuing State Department leaks to the magazine Amerasia.
By the end of World War II, domestic intelligence responsibilities in the United States had grown—in fits and starts—and were now included in the purview of several government agencies under the big umbrella of “national security.” How that term was defined, and who, therefore, constituted a threat to it, was left to particular organizations and their leaders. Thus groups such as the Women’s League for Peace and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People found themselves at various times considered national security threats and placed under surveillance.
As the nation moved from World War II to Cold War, domestic security became even more a priority. The tension between the United States and Soviet Union led to a variety of activities against communist organizations in America, and organizations perceived to be affiliated with communism. This environment produced many of the secretive and shrouded security organizations we know today in the United States.
In 1947, the National Security Act established the Central Intelligence Agency. Similar to concerns over the original Bureau of Investigation, opponents warned the CIA could become a secret police force, an American Gestapo. To forestall any abuse of the intelligence system, Congress forbade the CIA from operating domestically, leaving domestic security the responsibility of the FBI.
Five years later and with considerably less publicity, the National Security Agency was founded to take responsibility for U.S. signals intelligence, guarding U.S. electronic communications and breaking the encryptions of the enemy.
Like the CIA, the NSA was directed not to spy domestically. Unlike the CIA, the NSA remained under the radar, to such an extent that its staff jokingly claimed its initials stood for “No Such Agency.”
By 1963, the NSA operated from a massive facility at Fort Meade, Maryland, and was busily at work intercepting and decrypting communications. By 1980, the NSA was classifying fifty to one hundred million reports each year, which, in an era of paper and magnetic tape records, led to a serious problem with materials storage.
The growth of the U.S. national security apparatus was matched by a growing fear within the United States of communist infiltration and subversion. However, it would be one of the older organizations, the FBI, which proved most aggressive against a perceived communist threat.
Through several turns of good fortune, the FBI was able to uncover several networks of Soviet spies in the United States. Hoover, in addition to directing the FBI’s more legitimate counter-intelligence activities, cooperated with hardcore anticommunist politicians such as Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy.
The Fine Line between Domestic and Foreign
In 1956, under the orders of Hoover and the direct supervision of the chief of research and analysis in the FBI’s Intelligence Division, William Sullivan, the first FBI Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) was launched. COINTELPRO was the next stage of evolution in the FBI’s anticommunist agenda.
While including domestic surveillance, COINTELPRO went far beyond mere monitoring. COINTELRPO sought actively to disrupt targets by spreading false information within the ranks of targeted groups—a practice that at times led some groups to retaliate violently against, and even murder, those set up to appear to be informers. A variety of COINTELPROs, each directed at a specific target, would be established by the 1970s.
The CIA did not begin domestic spying programs in the 1950s. It did, however, begin some long-lasting domestic programs at that time. Under the direction of intelligence veteran Thomas Braden, the CIA began to wage a “cultural Cold War,” funding domestic and international leftist anticommunist organizations in the hope of forming a reliable non-communist left. At home, this consisted of a variety of activities, such as supporting the work of Jackson Pollack and funding the National Student Association.
These domestic activities violated the CIA’s mandate not to operate in the United States, but they had the general approval of the president. Many of those the CIA supported did not know where their money came from.
For example, most members of the National Student Association had no idea the CIA provided them with funds. In 1964 the president of the group explained that the mysterious funds it had received came from a wealthy Greek rug merchant whom he had met on a train. The rug merchant had apparently been so moved by the organization’s activities that he generously provided money to help them meet operating costs.
The precedent for their domestic activities established, the CIA expanded those activities to include surveillance during the tumultuous 1960s. As opposition to the Vietnam War increased at home, President Johnson grew convinced that part of the problem had to be that foreign agents were aiding the antiwar effort, and also, he feared, stoking the fires of the race riots that destabilized U.S. cities during the long hot summers of the 1960s. In 1967, he directed then-CIA director Richard Helms to investigate these possibilities.
Under the codename CHAOS, the CIA infiltrated the antiwar movement. The program expanded under Nixon, who like Johnson insisted foreign elements were behind the movement, leaving Helms straining to prove a negative by widening the surveillance net on the antiwar movement.
Eventually, the CIA recruited 4,067 informers in the antiwar movement. When the program was revealed by Seymour Hersh of the New York Times in 1974, he reported that CHAOS kept 10,000 CIA files on American citizens. That, it turned out, was a low estimate. Subsequent disclosures revealed that CHAOS held an index of 300,000 names, with especially extensive files on 7,200 U.S. citizens.
The NSA also came to monitor domestic targets. Its watch list included Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, Benjamin Spock, and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others. In 1969, the NSA formalized its activities into Operation Minaret, the full details of which have only recently been revealed. The NSA spied on figures such as New York Times reporter Tom Wicker, Washington Post columnist Art Buchwald, and two antiwar U.S. senators, Frank Church and Howard Baker.
The most aggressive domestic operations remained the FBI’s COINTELPROs, which, like the CIA, expanded in the 1960s. They investigated the New Left, the civil rights movement, Black Power advocates, and the American Indian Movement.
Hoover had long been suspicious of African Americans, having investigated W.E.B. DuBois in his early days as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Convinced that King must be a communist, Hoover began monitoring him heavily, eventually running eight wiretaps and 16 bugs on King.
Hoover discovered that King engaged in occasional extramarital affairs. Sullivan, still running the broad range of COINTELRPO operations, had tapes of the affairs sent to King along with a letter urging him to commit suicide.
Ironically, documents leaked from the Soviet KGB after the Cold War revealed that the KGB was engaged in a similar operation. Convinced that America’s racial tension would ultimately lead to a U.S. collapse, the KGB were disheartened that King’s message for social justice did not advocate communism.