FRUS on Investigating Intelligence in the 1970s

“There is too much disclosure,” complained George H. W. Bush, then-Director of Central Intelligence, in a 1976 memo to President Gerald Ford.

“We are continually pressed by Congress, by the courts, by the Freedom of Information Act, to give up sensitive material,” DCI Bush added. “We are trying to hold the line but there is a continuous erosion which gives away classified information at home and complicates our liaison relationships abroad. I am frustrated by our inability to deal with the leaking of classified information.”

His memo to President Ford was presented (as document 78) in a fascinating new collection of executive branch documents on the investigations of U.S. intelligence agencies during the 1970s. The collection was assembled for the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series (1969-1976, volume XXXVIII, part 2), which has just been published in hardcopy. It was posted in full last December on the website of the State Department historian.

In the aftermath of the Senate Church Committee investigation, “I find no degradation in the quality of intelligence analysis,” said Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at a Top Secret meeting of the National Security Council in January 1977 (document 83 in the FRUS collection).

“The opposite is true, however, in the covert action area,” Kissinger told the NSC. “We are unable to do it anymore.”

“Many things are not even proposed these days because we are afraid to even discuss them much less implement them,” Kissinger said then.

Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr., who was the chief counsel of the Church Committee, has written a new book of his own on secrecy in the broad sweep of American history up to the present day. Democracy in the Dark: The Seduction of Government Secrecy (The New Press, 2015) was published this week. The book was welcomed by Katrina vanden Heuvel writing in the Washington Post on April 7.