April 18, 1975: CIA Manager Says Agency Does Not Spy on Americans

Testifying before the Rockefeller Commission on the CIA’s activities in the US, the CIA’s Assistant Deputy Director for Operations David Blee indicates the agency does not spy on Americans. “We have always said that we did not operate that way [spying on the US’s own citizens], but that we went about it much more inefficiently, which is by penetrating the foreign government or foreign subversive operation and finding if that led us to an American, rather than trying to see what Americans were doing, and seeing if they were in touch with those groups,” he tells the commission. “In this, we operate very differently from practically all of the other security and intelligence services, which typically watch their own citizens to see what they are doing.” [US Congress, 4/13/1976]