George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

earth-shaking and new; from the perspective of Oliver North and Admiral Poindexter we
can see in retrospect that it guaranteed nothing. A new NSC committee chaired by Bush
was entrusted with the task of giving greater central coordination to the intelligence
community as a whole. This committee was to consist of Bush, Kissinger clone William
Hyland of the National Security Council Staff, and Robert Ellsworth, the assistant
secretary of Defense for Intelligence. This committee was jointly to formulate the budget
of the intelligence community and allocate its resources to the various tasks.
The 40 Committee, which had overseen covert operations, was now to be called the
Operations Advisory Group, with its membership reshuffled to include Scowcroft of
NSC, Kissinger, Rumsfeld, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff George Brown, plus
observers from the Attorney General and the Office of Mangement and Budget.
An innovation was the creation of the Intelligence Oversight Board (in addition to the
President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board), which was chaired by Ambassador
Robert D. Murphy, the old adversary of Charles deGaulle during World War II. The IOB
was supposed to be a watchdog to prevent new abuses from coming out of the
intelligence community. Also on this board were Stephen Ailes, who had been
Undersecretary of Defense for Kennedy and Secretary of the Army for LBJ. The third
figure on this IOB was Leo Cherne, who was soon to be promoted chairman of PFIAB as
well. The increasingly complicit relationship of Cherne to Bush meant that all alleged
oversight by the IOB was a mockery. The average age of the IOB was about 70, leading
Carl Rowan to joke that it was a case of Rip Van Winkle guarding the CIA. None of the
IOB members, Rowan pointed out, was young, poor, or black.
Believe it or not, Ford also wanted a version of the Official Secrets Act which we have
seen Bush supporting: he called for "special legislation to guard critical intelligence
secrets. This legislation would make it a crime for a government employee who has
access to certain highly classified information to reveal that information improperly."
Which would have made the Washington leak game rather more dicey than it is at
present.
The Official Secrets Act would have to be passed by Congress, but most of the rest of
what Ford announced was embodied in Executive Order 11905. Church thought that this
was overreaching, since it amounted to changing some provisions of the National
Security Act by presidential fiat. But this was now the new temper of the times.
As for the CIA, Executive Order 11905 authorized it "to conduct foreign
counterintelligence activities...in the United States," which opened the door to many
things. Apart from restrictions on physical searches and electronic bugging, it was still
open season on Americans abroad. The FBI was promised the Levi guidelines, and other
agencies would get charters written for them. In the interim, the power of the FBI to
combat various "subversive" activities was reaffirmed. Political assassination was
banned, but there were no limitations or regulations placed on covert operations, and
there was nothing about measures to improve the intelligence and analytical product of
the agencies.