Publication of the fact that the CIA had been involved in assassination plots meant that Congressional investigation of the agency was inevitable. In the wake of Watergate, it seemed to confirm the darkest fears of Americans that the agency was an undemocratic, unanswerable secret police.
For the first thirty years of its existence the agency's relationship with Congress was informal. In essence, the DCI and his close colleagues dealt personally with the chairmen of the relevant Senate and House committees (foreign affairs, appropriations, armed services), and other senators and representatives who were "friends" or who had significant political influence in areas important to the agency. This relationship worked because the agency was trusted, DCIs were respected, and the CIA was seen as one of America's principal barriers to communist world ambitions and subversion.
The warm, friendly, outgoing personality of Allen Dulles was largely responsible for helping to create this atmosphere of trust. He would appear voluntarily before a group and give a tour d'horizon that tended to blur agency activity and foreign policy. For their part, the legislators did not press the CIA for information about operations or operational plans. In fact they preferred to be able to plead ignorance of specific information not so much so that they would not find themselves compromised politically, but because they shared a view about the Soviet threat and the national security interests of the United States. Until the late 1960s, there was an effective operating consensus about secrecy and the CIA in Washington. The most sensitive discussions were reserved for one-to-one sessions between Dulles and individual committee chairmen. It was a cosy relationship which the agency's friends in Congress kept jealously to themselves because of the enormous power that accrued to them. The chairmen of the committees - Senator Richard Russell of the Senate armed services committee, Representative Carl Vinson of the House armed services committee, Representative Clarence Cannon of the House appropriations committee - and other influential people including Clark Clifford, a special adviser to Presidents Truman, Kennedy and Johnson, operated to keep Congress away from close scrutiny of the agency's activities. They believed that the agency was operating in the best interests of the United States, and so they sought to protect it.
In 1954 this cosy relationship looked threatened when the Hoover commission studying the executive branch of government recommended, with regard to the CIA, both a Congressional oversight committee drawn from both the House and the Senate, and an advisory board of the good and the great to take an overview of the agency's work and make recommendations to the President. The advisory board proposal was implemented by Eisenhower with the establishment of the President's board of consultants on foreign intelligence activities, but the Congressional oversight proposal was firmly rejected. In 1955 when Senator Mike Mansfield attempted to introduce a bill implementing Hoover's recommendations, he met with fierce opposition from Senators Russell, Hayden and Saltonstall of the armed services and appropriations committees who were reluctant to see their privileged relationship with the agency watered down. Dulles had convinced senior senators of the security dangers involved in formal oversight: too many people would know secrets; committee staffers would share information. However, a compromise was reached whereby CIA subcommittees were created in the Senate armed services and appropriations committees, and in the House armed services committee.
In 1961, after the Bay of Pigs, Senator Eugene McCarthy tried to introduce formal oversight of the CIA, but the proposal was again defeated. In the mid-1960's, as the Vietnam war intensified and as nuclear proliferation, space technology and increased international tension diverted Congressional attention away from domestic affairs, demand for inside knowledge of world affairs increased. Richard Helms responded by increasing the number of CIA briefings to committees. In 1967 seventeen congressional committees were receiving detailed briefings from the agency. By the mid-1970's the DCI or his deputy were averaging thirty to thirty-five committee appearances annually.
The agency still had its powerful friends in Congress, notably Senator Russell and Senator Henry Jackson who could be trusted to keep information to themselves and not to use it for political advantage. As a result, the agency had a much easier ride in Congress and enjoyed a much greater financial flexibility than other agencies and the armed services. While General Curtis LeMay had to account for every penny spend on the Strategic Air Command and the B-52, the CIA did not have to account in the same detail for the money it spent on the U-2, the satellites, the SR-71 or the covert operations conducted in the 1960's.
Richard Helms was the last DCI to experience this freedom and flexibility, and to maintain it he had to work harder at cultivating Congress than any of his immediate predecessors. He had to contend with ever stronger criticism, especially from Senator William Fulbright of the Senate foreign relations committee who disliked the secretive relationship between the agency and its friends in Congress. Fulbright pressed the agency on such sensitive issues as the number of agency personnel in embassy posts abroad and agency involvement with multinational corporations in Latin America.
CONGRESS
By the beginning of the 1970's a sea change had taken place in Congress. Senator Russell's death in 1971 marked the effective end of the heyday of the all-powerful committee chairmen. The mid-term elections of 1974, just after Watergate, produced a large influx of new, thrusting senators and representatives who were impatient with the traditions of seniority and who blamed the old guard, in part, for the collapse of political standards that Watergate represented. They wanted to make their reputations quickly and they demanded to know what was going on. One CIA officer who had frequently testified on the Hill observed the changed scene with regret:
"The discipline went. We never had the power to tell Congress whom we were going to talk to - they told us. And after men like Russell had gone, with Watergate a lot of glory boys saw us as their publicity."
The results of the change in Congress was evident in the Congressional investigations into the CIA. Frank Church, the chairman of the Senate select committee investigating the CIA, had ambitions to be the Democratic Presidential candidate in 1976. He saw his committee as providing him with national exposure and a major plank in his campaign. For his part, Otis Pike, the chairman of the equivalent House committee, also regarded investigating the CIA as a useful rung on the political ladder. Both committees wanted to know everything about the CIA. The issue they immediately homed in on was the Rockefeller commission report's smoking gun conclusion: the assassination plots on which President Ford had retained the evidence.
The extent of the CIA's archive (by October 1980 it amounted to 470 million pages) meant that the investigations were necessarily selective and thus the resulting reports were fundamentally impressionistic in their portraits of the agency. They focused on the drama, not the nature or purpose of the CIA.
As with the Rockefeller commission, Colby once again managed to dictate the agenda of the investigations in his effort to save the CIA from disbandment or emasculation by Congress. He telephoned Frank Church and offered him and his staff full cooperation, saying:
"I was fully available for discussion on how we could go about assisting in the comprehensive investigation he had in mind while at the same time protecting the necessary secrets of intelligence work."
As a result, Church received all the information that had been given to Rockefeller. Church also questioned DCIs and CIA officers, past and present, and despite
