I was just forced to defend myself from the accusation, from an 11-year old, that I am a nerd for reading Church Committee transcripts when I am bored. In the process of explaining myself, I showed him the Huston Plan, and I guess I’ll show to all of you, too.
There is a method to my madness, and it starts with having a sharper than average acquaintance with our nation’s political history. Not too many people bother to read 30 year-old Congressional testimony unless they are working on a doctoral dissertation. But, I admit, I am obsessed with the history of our foreign policies and intelligence services. That history is why I have such a strong libertarian streak, and also why I am more of an isolationist than most people on the left.
For me, the best defense of liberty does not come in outlawing trans-fats and nicotine. It comes in a much more restrained foreign policy that does not inspire enemies to target us. Once we become a target, our liberties are endangered.
Gen. Tommy Franks said in an interview with the lifestyle magazine Cigar Aficionado that if another terrorist attack occurs in the United States “the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government” The stunning revelation is the headline story on the right-wing news site NewsMax for Friday. Franks said that another terrorism attack will result in “… the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we’ve seen for a couple of hundred years…” He indicated that if another terrorism attack occurs Bush will likely declare martial law and the Constitution will apparently be “discarded”.
Go below the fold for an excerpt on the Huston Plan.
Richard M. Nixon won his first Presidential election in 1968 by less than one percent of the total popular vote. The Presidential campaign that year had been accompanied by some of the most violent street demonstrations in the history of American elections.
His first year in office provided the President with ample further evidence of the mood of revolt in the country. In March and April 1969, student riots erupted in San Francisco, Cambridge, and Ithaca; and in Chicago, ghetto blacks battled the police in the streets. By October and November, the anti-war movement was sufficiently well organized to bring to the nation’s capital the largest mass demonstrations ever witnessed in the United States. The magnitude of the unrest was immense and, just as the nation was obsessed by Vietnam, so, too, the White House grew increasingly preoccupied with the wave of domestic protest sweeping the countryside.
Presidential assistant Tom Huston and others in the White House believed that better intelligence on the plans of domestic protesters would enable the President to take more decisive action against violence-prone dissenters. In their view, serious deficiencies in intelligence collection had resulted from the decision in the mid-1960s by J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to curtail certain collection techniques (particularly surreptitious entry and electronic surveillance). This view was shared widely by intelligence officers throughout the Government. Hoover went so far as to sever formal liaison ties between the FBI and the CIA in March 1970 and later with the other intelligence agencies, adding further to the widespread disenchantment with his leadership in the intelligence area.
Tom Huston grew more frustrated by the inability of the White House to anticipate the plans of domestic dissenters. He was also encouraged by William C. Sullivan, Assistant Director for Domestic Intelligence, FBI, to help remove Hoover’s restraints on intelligence collection. By the spring of 1970, Huston decided to urge senior White House personnel to have the President request a thorough review of intelligence collection methods. The President, himself greatly concerned about domestic unrest, agreed to the proposal.
On June 5, 1970, President Nixon held a meeting in the White House with the leaders of the intelligence community. The purpose of the meeting was to establish a special committee which would review methods for improving the quality of intelligence particularly on the New Left and its foreign connections. Specifically this Interagency Committee on Intelligence (Ad Hoc) was charged with the preparation of a report for the President on existing intelligence gaps, how to close them, and how to enhance coordination among the intelligence agencies.
Assigned a tight deadline, the Ad Hoc Committee staff prepared the study in a fortnight. The final report was entitled “Special Report Interagency Committee on Intelligence (Ad Hoc)” and, on June 25, 1970, it received the signatures of the four top intelligence directors: Hoover (FBI), Helms (CIA), Bennett (DIA) and Gayler (NSA).
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The enterprise was unique. It pooled the resources of the foreign-oriented CIA, DIA, and NSA with those of the domestic-oriented FBI. Many of the participants endorsed the enterprise enthusiastically, not because of an interest in better data on the New Left but because they sensed an opportunity to remove various restrictions on the collection of strictly foreign intelligence. Others participated only hesitantly and briefly, fearful of breaking through the membranes of law and propriety.
Drawing upon the Special Report, Tom Huston prepared a memorandum in early July for Presidential advisor H. R. (Bob) Haldeman under the heading “Operational Restraints on Intelligence Collection.” In this memorandum Huston, who had been the White House representative at the Ad Hoc Committee meetings, recommended that the President select for implementation those options in the Special Report which would have relaxed dramatically the current restrictions on intelligence collection. The set of options recommended by Huston is defined in this particular report known as the Huston Plan, although the phrase has been generally applied to the Special Report from which Huston selected his options.
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Presidential approval of the options recommended by Huston would have given intelligence and counterintelligence specialists within the intelligence community authority to:
(1) monitor the international communications of U.S. citizens;
(2) intensify the electronic surveillance of domestic dissenters and selected establishments;
(3) read the international mail of American citizens;
(4) break into specified establishments and into homes of domestic dissenters; and,
(5) intensify the surveillance of American college students.Thus, in the summer of 1970, Tom Charles Huston believed the law had to be set aside in order to combat forces which seemed to be threatening the fabric of society. Apparently the President agreed, for on July 14, 1970, Haldeman wrote a memorandum back to Huston to inform him the President had approved his options to relax collection restraints. This decision later formed the core of Article 11 in the Impeachment Articles framed by the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives in 1974.
To implement the presidential decision, Huston next wrote a memorandum to each of the intelligence agency directors, dated July 23rd, informing them that certain restraints on intelligence collection were being removed. Writing under the heading “Domestic Intelligence,” Huston invoked the authority of the President and outlined exactly which restrictions were to be lifted. This document is the second version of the Huston Plan and is similar to the first sent to the President for his approval via Haldeman in early July.
Four days later on July 27th, the Huston Plan sent to the intelligence directors was recalled by the White House “for reconsideration.”
Most of these bare facts have been in the public domain since 1973, when the Senate Watergate investigation first brought to light the history of the Huston Plan. What is new as a result of this inquiry conducted by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is the discovery of a much more extensive degree of impropriety in the intelligence community than was initially revealed in 1973. Moreover, the Committee found instances of duplicity between the intelligence agencies and the President, and among agencies themselves.
Despite the request of the President for a complete report on intelligence problems, the Special Report of June 1970 failed to mention an ongoing CIA program that involved opening the international mail of American citizens or an on-going NSA program to select from intercepted international communications of American citizens contained on “watch lists” submitted by other agencies. The CIA mail program was clearly illegal, and the NSA program was of questionable lawfulness. Not only were laws violated, but the President was asked to consider approving the CIA mail opening program apparently without ever being told of its existence.
Furthermore, despite the ultimate decision by the President to revoke the Huston Plan, several of its provisions were implemented anyway. The intelligence agencies contributed an increasing number of names of American citizens to the NSA “watch list” so that NSA would provide the contents of any intercepted international communications of those citizens to the other intelligence agencies.
The number of Americans on this watch list expanded to a high point in 1973. The CIA continued its illegal program of mail opening. After the Huston Plan, the FBI lowered the age of campus informants, thereby expanding surveillance of American college students as sought through the Plan. In 1971, the FBI reinstated its use of mail covers 3b and continued to submit names to the CIA mail program. In December 1970, the intelligence community established — at the request of the White House — a permanent interagency committee for intelligence evaluation called the Intelligence Evaluation Committee (IEC), an entity highly comparable to one outlined in the Special Report. Finally, several of the principals involved in the Huston Plan episode continued to seek the full implementation of its provisions. Admiral Gayler and Richard Helms, for instance, urged Attorney General Mitchell on March 22, 1971, to relax the restrictions on key intelligence collection operations previously barred by the President in his ultimate rejection of the Huston Plan.
Placed in perspective, the Huston Plan must be viewed as but a single example of a continuous effort by counterintelligence specialists to expand collection capabilities at home and abroad often without the knowledge or approval of the President or the Attorney General, and certainly without the knowledge of Congress or the people. As a commentary on accountability, the lesson of the Huston Plan is obvious: often there was no accountability at all, beyond the intelligence agencies themselves. The result was a neglect of civil liberties by the intelligence collectors.
Obviously I feel like the potential target of unwarranted surveillance. Given the eerie familiarity to our current situation, reading about the Huston Plan makes me nervous. The main difference is a lack of civil distrurbance. But everything else is about the same. And if we don’t change our foreign policies we will get hit again, and we will lose our liberties. That’s what motivates me.
