Senator MONDALE, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I think we must be very clear about what we are dealing with here, because the record shows that, contrary to the Constitution, contrary to the laws, contrary to the authority of Congress, for many years and in many different ways, our intelligence agencies in the foreign field started wars without our knowledge and without authority, and subverted foreign governments without our knowledge. Indeed, there was evidence that we received that they decided to assassinate foreign leaders without our knowledge and without our approval, and, indeed, in some instances, without the knowledge of some people high in Government.

They pursued a course really of a private foreign policy, often based on violence, without the authority or knowledge of Congress.

If that can happen, then it seems to me that we have fundamentally undermined the accountability provisions of the Constitution. If uncorrected, then we will have conceded a vast area of authority to the Executive in a way that would have been abhorrent to the framers of our Constitution.

Similarly, at home, there has been a pattern of conduct by our intelligence agencies who illegally and often unconstitutionally infringed upon the rights of the American people, once again without the knowledge of the Congress, and also without the knowledge of persons higher up in the executive.

Since I have been chairman of the Domestic Task Force of the Senate Select Committee, I would just like to give a few examples of what was going on.

Practically every telegram that Americans sent overseas was picked up in the sweep and was reported to many agencies of the Government. Mail was read illegally.

The statute on mail reading is very, very clear. You must have a warrant, according to Supreme Court decisions.

Nevertheless, knowing that it was illegal, for years thousands of letters were read-I mean everybody's letters-Richard Nixon, Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Burns, Frank Church-no one's mail was free from reading. And all of it was illegal.

Thousands of tax returns were reviewed in circumstances where there was no tax-related investigation whatsoever. Tax investigations were started against Americans who were guilty of nothing, but it was thought if they were intimidated that way, maybe it would chill them. from political conduct someone did not like.

It not only involved tax investigations. It was also through activities such as COMINFIL, which stands for "Communist infiltration," and also through COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program where the Bureau decided, for whatever reason, that they had the authority to seek out and punish Americans to neutralize, or to "knock them off their pedestal," outside the law, and outside the courts, simply because the FBI thought they had the authority to play God in American society. The program was directed against Americans who had not violated the law, who were not thought to be violating the law, but who were considered to be dangerous by someone in the Bureau.

The classic case is Dr. Martin Luther King. He was visited with a host of intrusive and often illegal and unwarranted surveillance tech

niques. Fifteen hotel rooms he went into were bugged. Telephone calls he made were tapped. And that was not all.

When it was heard that he was going to be seen by the Pope, efforts were made to try to stop that visit.

When he was going to get doctorate degrees from some universities in our country, efforts were made to stop him from receiving those. Senator GRIFFIN. May I interrupt?

Could you put a time frame around this?

You mentioned Mr. Nixon. Are you talking just about the Nixon administration?

Senator MONDALE. No, no, no.

I want to make that very clear-if you let the police secretly play God, I think it is inevitable that every administration, regardless of political party, will use it.

Our report will make the time frame clear. The blame for some of these abuses runs over many administrations and both political parties. I want to make it clear that this is not a partisan thing.

The thing that, above all, the constitutional framers feared was abuse of governmental power and secret police. That is the thing that they were afraid of above all.

The CHAIRMAN. Senator Mondale, I think everyone agrees that abuses have taken place.

Now, the question is, how do you correct it?
Senator MONDALE. That is correct.

The CHAIRMAN. It seems to me it is sort of a knee-jerk reaction to say: "OK. Let us form a new committee to do this."

We have a lot of committees. We have committees that have jurisdiction in these areas and have expertise in these areas.

Is not the way we normally proceed if we find abuses in the welfare program or Internal Revenue Service or the Department of Agricul ture, that we go to the established committees and tighten up when the abuses exist rather than immediately have a knee-jerk reaction and say let us go back and form a new committee to get back into the same area?

Senator MONDALE. The reason I recite this history is that it is an exceedingly grievous one that occurred over many years and under many different administrations. It occurred while sitting committees had jurisdiction to oversee and prevent this from happening.

I am not visiting blame on anyone, because I was in the Congress during a good part of this time. But I think the risk of abuse of constitutional power, and the risk of the abuse of the rights of the American people, and the risk that is attendant upon chilling, uninhibited political conduct and debate in this society is such that it makes sense to have a doubly protective system in the Congress. In addition to establishing new guidelines by law, which we must, it seems to me that we must also correct. what has been the lack of oversight by the Congress.

The best way we can do that, in my opinion, is to establish an oversight committee which, in the domestic area, has concurrent jurisdic tion. It should not be exclusive-I would not take that power from the Judiciary Committee-but this committee must have concurrent legislative authority over domestic functions.

I understand the key argument made by those who oppose it is that there is no way of separating domestic intelligence from law enforcement. In fact, it would be far more difficult to try to combine them than to keep them separate.

The record shows domestic intelligence can be separated out for budget purposes.

I ask that there be placed in the record the organizational chart of the FBI, which shows a separate Intelligence Division, and also a part of our subcommittee's transcript which shows that they can separate the budget.

[The excerpts from the transcript follow. But because of technical difficulty of reproducing the FBI organization chart in the printed hearing, it has not been included here. It has been made a part of the committee files on S. Res. 400.]

EXCERPTS FROM TESTIMONY OF GLEN E. POMMERENING, ASSISTANT ATTORNEY GENERAL FOR ADMINISTRATION, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, BEFORE THE SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE, FEBRUARY 3, 1976

Answer. In developing the 1976 fiscal year budget, it was necessary that we return to individual organizations, including such law enforcement organizations as the FBI, DEA, and the Immigration Service, and ask them . . . [for] further information and data . . . as to the resources which they would require to achieve certain objectives which they identified in the budget process.

Question. Could you give us some examples of how that would have worked with respect to the Bureau's intelligence division?

Answer. Yes, I can. For instance, in 1976, the way the Federal Bureau of Investigation broke down-we're talking fiscal years-their intelligence operation, they had devoted or were planning to devote 3,470 man-years and $90,031,000, and this was one of their programmed areas.

Question. Which was what, intelligence?

Answer. Intelligence. As sub-elements of that program, they further broke down those expenditures into six categories: internal security investigations, counterintelligence investigations, internal security intelligence, counterintelligence intelligence, organized crime intelligence, and general crimes intelligence, and in each of those categories separated out the man-years of effort and the dollars to be expended.

Answer. I think that the four initial elements largely comprise the total activity of the Intelligence Division of the FBI. . . .

Question. You would get roughly $77 million or $78 million or thereabouts for the internal security and counterintelligence related programs.

Answer. It would be about $79 million is roughly, looking at these figures. Senator MONDALE. The issuance of guidelines reflects that domestic intelligence is a separate function and that it is outside the normal criminal law process.

People are trained to deal with it, and to say that it cannot be separated is to ignore, that it has been separated from the beginning, and that it would be more difficult to unseparate it, to put it back together. And, for all of these reasons, and because the potential for abuse is so profound and the need for effective oversight so clear, I think the creation of a Select Committee with oversight jurisdiction is essential. Senator CHURCH. May I also address your question, because it is a very central question?

The CHAIRMAN. Yes.

Senator CHURCH. I agree with what Senator Mondale has said.

I have tried to conduct an investigation that would reflect credit on the Senate. We have done it without leaks. We have demonstrated

it can be done in a responsible way. So I think I am at least in a position here to argue the case that the Committee concluded was necessary, the case that underlies and underscores the need for a special permanent oversight committee.

The problem is, Mr. Chairman, that there are several committees, depending on how you want to count them-quite a few that have a little bit of the action.

That is not the way the executive department organizes and runs the intelligence community as it relates to strategic or national intelligence. We are not attempting to reach tactical military intelligence directly related to the uninformed services or anything of that kind. There is such a thing as the national intelligence community, and it is composed of a number of different agencies. The Congress has no unified place to look at that community the way the executive looks at it and controls it. And that is the reason why the present arrangement has so conspicuously failed in the past, and thus permitted abuses which, if they had ever been brought to the knowledge of any one of these committees, would have been strenuously objected to.

Let me say one other thing.

The present law is chaos if you want to keep secrets and you want to conduct covert operations. It cannot be done.

If this information is to be scattered among six or eight different committees of the Congress, composing half of the membership of the Congress, now, if that is the purpose, then it will be better served through the establishment of a permanent oversight committee which would be the principal depository of information of that kind. And unless such a committee is formed, I see no prospect that the HughesRyan amendment would be amended.

Therefore, we have proceeded, in collaboration with the executive branch, in what we thought was a responsible manner to determine how this present chaotic condition could be regularized and how we might deal with a twin problem which is: one, how to keep legitimate secrets secret; and, two, how to reveal to the public abuses of power and illegal actions which must be revealed if they are to be corrected. We think this can be best accomplished through the establishment of this oversight committee.

We think the status quo, based upon 25 years of history, will not work. And every one of the Directors of the CIA came before our committee and testified, approved in principle, the establishment of an oversight committee that would have sufficient reach and expertise and time to do this job.

The CHAIRMAN. I think you were here yesterday during part of the testimony; I am not sure you were here when Senator Stennis pointed out the fact that the Armed Services cannot operate in a vacuum. cannot make the determination on the budgets and their requirements without having the proper input from the intelligence side of the arena, and so when you say that this committee would be able to hold tightly the information, I think you are just saying that one more committee should be in on the act, and the Director of Central Intelligence pointed out yesterday that they have been having to respond to 11 different subcommittees and/or committees or agencies in addition to the 8 that normally assert some jurisdiction in this area.

Senator CHURCH. Mr. Chairman, first of all we recognize and have tried to take into full account the legitimate need of other committees for intelligence activity.

The Foreign Relations Committee gets a full briefing from the CIA. Obviously the Armed Services has received that kind of information in the past as well and would get it in the future.

It is possible that in the wisdom of the members of the Rules Committee, a provision could be worked out that would assure such committees as the Judiciary, Armed Services, and Foreign Relations of the necessary access to intelligence information in order for them to adequately perform their own principal tasks, but if you are going to endeavor to find a solution to the present dilemma, even the executive, even the Directors of the CIA have said this, that it can only be found through the establishment of a permanent oversight committee that can handle the extremely sensitive matters to which there would be an affirmative duty laid out to make disclosures in a sufficiently timely way and where the budget would come through the CIA and the other elements that compose the national intelligence community.

I am sure the jurisdictional problems can be worked out, but I know that without this permanent oversight committee, Mr. Chairman, the status quo, the existing chaotic condition of the law cannot be corrected and it is that which has produced the problems concerning the leaking-not from our committee, but in the Congress as a whole, the leaking of highly sensitive information.

I cite to you that the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy has a remarkable record of maintaining secure sensitive information in the nuclear field. I know that an intelligence committee, properly composed, could do likewise.

This resolution also sets out a means for dealing with the problem of how to disclose information when it is the judgment of the majority of the committee that such information should be disclosed.

We are not talking about identifying agents in the field or sources or methods. Everybody recognizes those are legitimate secrets and must be kept. We are talking about quite a different matter-improper conduct of the kind we have revealed. Wait until you see the full report of the extent of the abuse that has gone on. When that kind of information comes to the attention of the committee, the committee under the proposed resolution has the authority by a majority vote to make a public disclosure. If we were to accept Mr. Bush's argument that classified information may not be disclosed by the Congress without the consent of the President, then of course we have taken the fateful step of subordinating the Congress to the Presidency. Classified information is not classified by the President in the first place, but by thousands of executive agents. If Congress cannot disclose wrongful conduct because it has been classified without the President's consent, then it is subservient to the executive branch.

Senator GRIFFIN. You said the resolution would give the committee the power to make public classified information by majority vote. Do you recognize now, that the committee under the present rules of the Senate does not have that authority, or do you contend that a committee does have that authority?

Senator CHURCH. It is my understanding that the committees normally do have that authority under our present rules. That is the interpretation that I place on Rule XXXVI.