the first amendment. I think the Court would undoubtedly uphold that position.

Senator HUDDLESTON. Gentlemen, I hope we do have the benefit of your further thinking as we proceed with this process, and we would like to have an opportunity to refer questions to you from time to time for your response, if that would be agreeable to you, as we try to explore all the possible facets of this really groundbreaking legislation that we are dealing with.

Mr. EMERSON. That is quite agreeable with me, Senator, yes. Senator HUDDLESTON. We appreciate very much your appearance here today.

Mr. BORK. Thank you.

Senator HUDDLESTON. Thank you, both.

The subcommittee will be in recess subject to the call of the Chair.

[Whereupon, at 11:56 a.m., the committee recessed subject to the call of the Chair.]

TUESDAY, JULY 11, 1978

U.S. SENATE,

SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE,

Washington, D.C.

The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:21 a.m., in room 5110, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Senator Birch Bayh (chairman of the committee) presiding.

Present: Senators Bayh (presiding) and Garn.

Also present: William G. Miller, staff director and David Bushong, minority counsel.

Senator GARN. Ladies and gentlemen, we will call the committee to order. I apologize for the chairman and vice chairman. They were called to a meeting at the White House this morning that had not been scheduled, and have not returned, and rather than continue to keep all of you waiting, we will start the committee hearing.

We are happy to have you here to testify. I understand that you requested that Ethel Taylor testify first, and so we will proceed with you and happy to hear your testimony.

STATEMENT OF MS. ETHEL TAYLOR, NATIONAL COORDINATOR, WOMEN STRIKE FOR PEACE, ACCOMPANIED BY BARBARA POLLACK

MS. TAYLOR. Thank you, Senator Garn.

I am very grateful for this opportunity to speak for my organization, Women Strike for Peace, before this committee on Senate bill 2525. We feel that our credentials for testifying on this bill are impeccable. We have been spied upon by the CIA, the FBI, the DIA, the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force. Apparently the Marines were occupied elsewhere.

Women Strike for Peace is a movement which came into existence as a protest against the resumption of nuclear testing in the atmosphere by the Soviet Union and the United States. As women and mothers we were frightened by medical reports of the danger from radiation to the food our children ate and the milk they drank. We tried to alert women all over the country to work for a complete test ban treaty. Women were out on the street getting signatures to the President, distributing educational material, and urging the support of our elected representatives for such a test ban treaty. We saw a complete test ban treaty as the first important step to the ultimate goal of general and complete disarmament. It is toward disarmament that all of our energies are directed now.

Early in the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, we realized that we had to switch our main priority of disarmament to work toward ending the war and thus we came under the scrutiny of all the intelligence agencies I mentioned in the opening of my testimony.

At all times we worked in the open and sought, but did not always get, the maximum publicity. We did not know about this surveillance until we read about it in the Rockefeller Commission report on CIA activities within the United States.

I cringe with shame when I think that our Government's reaction to our lawful opposition to the war was to put spies in our midst and create dossiers on many, many women, some very involved but some as peripheral as the woman who allowed her garage to be used as a depot for a white elephant sale.

We have received our deleted CIA files, deleted in order to protect the rights of some nameless and faceless informants, for which the CIA asked $985. A great part of our dossier consists of their Xerox copies of our interorganizational memos, bulletins, letters, leaflets, et cetera. I have recently received my FBI files for $34 and discovered that I had been under surveillance since 1956 when I was involved, as I am now, in working for disarmament, which was, as it is now, the stated goal of the Government. It is obvious from my FBI files that agents, women of course, sat in on our small steering committee meetings as we planned actions against the Vietnam war, actions which we gave the fullest publicity possible.

The surveillance by the CIA took place despite the 1947 charter which explicitly limited their domestic role by prohibiting the Agency from excessive law enforcement or police powers or undertaking internal security functions. Nonetheless, they did it on the pretext that peace groups might be getting support from foreign sources. After involving all field services of the CIA clandestine service and every branch of the intelligence community over a period of a couple of years, and using the FBI as its main source of information, the CIA study showed no evidence of foreign involvement. They should have known this when they infiltrated our offices and saw that we could afford only part-time staff, if any, and our equipment was mostly second hand.

Since this hoax was not justified another tack was attempted to justify domestic surveillance. From our files, we learned that we were targeted to be infiltrated so that the Agency could get advance warning of demonstrations against their installations. The agents were instructed to "continue periodic monitoring of the following indicator organizations which are of interest to the parent organization." One such organization was Women Strike for Peace.

If the CIA can allege, as it did, that it believed that Women Strike for Peace represented a clear threat to its Langley installation, then we can truly be concerned about the reliability and value of the Agency's intelligence assessments. An intelligence agency that sees a clear threat in an organization such as Women Strike for Peace which legitimately exercises its constitutional rights should be a cause of grave concern to this committee.

We were therefore disturbed to read in section 222(b) of Senate bill 2525 the following:

Each entity of the intelligence community may collect information concerning any United States person who is reasonably believed to be engaging in any activity that poses a clear threat to the physical safety of any installation.

Since the 1947 charter clearly prohibited domestic surveillance and since the charter was violated throughout the years, what we need is a tightening of the prohibition legislatively rather than creating loopholes which legitimize the violations. We see in this bill official sanction for abuses which the bill is supposed to eliminate.

We are also concerned that groups and individuals who have been under surveillance will continue to be on record since there is no mention in S. 2525 of destruction of files, merely, termination, of collection of information.

Section 213 raises more problems than it solves. In stating that counterintelligence or counterterrorism intelligence may be collected concerning a U.S. person who is "reasonably believed" to be engaged in any clandestine intelligence outside the United States raises a great many questions. What does "reasonably believed" mean? Reasonably believed by whom? This is a vaguer standard for authorizing an investigation than the standard set up in the fourth amendment which requires "probable cause" to believe that a person has committed or is about to commit a crime.

We believe that there is no reason for surveillance of Americans abroad unless it is for criminal investigations and under the direction of the Justice Department. The excesses of the CIA in foreign countries does not inspire confidence in their judgment as to what is clandestine endeavor.

This bill requires the intelligence agencies to formulate many such judgmental decisions, often as they relate to domestic investigations. For example, section 218(a) authorizes investigation of objects of recruitment of foreign intelligence services. Women Strike for Peace since its inception has pursued a policy of friendship with foreign women of various ideologies in order to promote understanding of each other and to reduce international tensions as a way of promoting world peace. Since the CIA seems to operate on the assumption that foreign delegations often include foreign intelligence agents, would not this section authorize investigation of members of organizations such as ours when we meet with a foreign delegation?

This certainly could have a chilling effect upon open and spontaneous exchange of ideas. Furthermore, section 220 authorizes investigations of persons in contact with foreign espionage agents. This could result in investigations based on guilt by association if a member of an organization such as ours unknowingly comes into contact with such an agent.

In light of past abuses, should we authorize investigations of Americans in such a broad manner requiring numerous judgments to be made? We believe in order to prevent investigations which involve such techniques as the placement of informants within political organizations, this bill should require reasonable belief of criminal activity for initiation of all investigations. To the contrary, this bill authorizes what was done illegally in the past. Should not intelligence agencies be judged by the law as we all are? Are they above the law? For 23 years, according to the Rockefeller report, the CIA examined mail between U.S. citizens and foreign countries for the stated purpose of gathering intelligence. Three Postmasters General and one Attorney General were aware