Love/hate at the CIA

Folks who run the Central Intelligence Agency love publicity when their projects turn out well. When the CIA overthrew left wing leaders in Guatemala and Iran a half-century ago, they loved getting credit for Cold War coups.

But when the regimes they installed in those two countries (and several others) turned sour, the CIA objected to news stories that told the facts of U.S. intervention.

And they hated it even more when news reporters or congressional investigators broke the stories like the secret bombing of neutral Cambodia in the Vietnam War and the CIA’s plot to kill Fidel Castro by setting fire to his beard. When the Bay of Pigs invasion ended in humiliating disaster, they wanted a new law to permit prosecution of those who had said it was coming.

Some facts are off limits, of course. News organizations hold back when they learn in advance about troop movements or ship sailings in wartime. They reported not a word when they learned that Canadians had helped some American hostages escape when Iranian mobs surrounded the American embassy in Teheran.

More often, as President John Kennedy said after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the public and the press should know more rather than less about such ventures. With more public discussion, the Bay of Pigs adventure might have been called off.

You may have missed it in the blizzard of political news on the eve of the election, but President Clinton vetoed a bill that would have imposed drastic new criminal sanctions on the leaking or publication of any “properly classified” information. The bill was based solely on secret testimony by CIA officials and railroaded through without public hearings, without debate on the floor of the House of Senate, and without roll-call votes.

The CIA, the Pentagon, the Justice Department and some White House advisers urged approval. Among those who urged the veto was R. James Woolsey, director of the CIA from 1993 to 1995. He recalled James Madison’s warning in the 51st Federalist Paper that the framers “must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” Mr. Woolsey said that in this case the government was in danger of forgetting Madison’s second dictum.

If new secrecy legislation is needed, let it be carefully drawn, let it be debated publicly, and let it respect the American tradition of an informed public that knows what its employees are up to.