August 1973: CIA Director Testifies about Nixon Administration’s Domestic Surveillance Program

Former CIA director Richard Helms. [Source: Search.com]Former CIA director Richard Helms indirectly confirms the involvement of the Nixon administration in his agency’s illegal domestic surveillance operations during his testimony before the Senate Watergate investigative committee. Helms tells the committee that he was told by Nixon’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board that the CIA could “make a contribution” in domestic intelligence operations. “I pointed out to them very quickly that it could not, there was no way,” Helms testifies. “But this was a matter that kept coming up in the context of feelers: Isn’t there somebody else who can take on these things if the FBI isn’t doing them as well as they should, as there are no other facilities?” (FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s opposition to the idea of spying on US citizens for Nixon’s political purposes is well documented.) CIA officials say that, despite Helms’s testimony, Helms began the domestic spying program as asked, in the beginning to investigate beliefs that the antiwar movement was permeated by foreign intelligence agents in 1969 and 1970. “It started as a foreign intelligence operation and it bureaucratically grew,” one source says in 1974. “That’s really the answer.” The CIA “simply began using the same techniques for foreigners against new targets here.” The source will say James Angleton, the CIA’s director of counterintelligence (see 1973), began recruiting double agents inside the antiwar and civil rights organizations, and sending in “ringers” to penetrate the groups and report back to the CIA. “It was like a little FBI operation.” Angleton reportedly believes that both the protest groups and the US media are riddled with Soviet intelligence agents, and acts accordingly to keep those groups and organizations under constant watch. One source will say Angleton has a “spook mentality.” Another source will say that Angleton’s counterintelligence bureau is “an independent power in the CIA. Even people in the agency aren’t allowed to deal directly with the CI [counterintelligence] people. Once you’re in it, you’re in it for life.” [New York Times, 12/22/1974 ]