Congress Should Closely Analyze Hayden, NSA

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DANIEL SCHORR reporting:

Let's take a trip down memory lane a generation ago when intelligence agencies were being taken to the cleaners.

MELISSA BLOCK host:

NPR senior news analyst Daniel Schorr.

SCHORR: That was when the National Security Agency was revealed to be maintaining a watch list of 1700 anti-war dissidents. It was when President Nixon tried to institute a kind of police state, combining intelligence agencies, but what blocked by J. Edgar Hoover.

Those were the days when the new CIA director James Slessinger circulated a memo asking employees to report any cases of wrongdoing and was answered with an inspector general's report listing 693 items. The Family Jewels, it was called and it included discussions of previous plans to assassinate Fidel Castro and third world leaders.

Nothing on that order could be expected a generation later, but the hearings on confirmation of General Michael Hayden, our CIA director, offers a chance to review both persons and policies. The agency's number three, executive officer Kyle Foggo, quit three days after his mentor, director Porter Goss. Foggo is now under investigation by three federal agencies in connection with a bribery case involving contracting. In the 60 years of a mainly professional intelligence agency, I don't know when I have known agency assignments to be handed out as political and personal plums. The Senate committee has every opportunity to question CIA employment practices.

The hearings will also provide a venue for bringing to a head the controversy over electronic surveillance. Part of that issue is about how many members of Congress should be kept apprised of incidents of surveillance. That is, how many members can be safely trusted? That appears to be on its way to compromise.

The stickier issue is how to maintain legality without going through the courts. Judiciary committee chairman Arlen Specter is reportedly close in negotiating a compromise with conservatives that would permit some form of review by the secret intelligence court.

A generation ago President Nixon tried in vain to get the CIA to take the wrap for Watergate. Today, with a Republican controlled Congress, it is not likely that there will be any upheaval in the intelligence community.

This is Daniel Schorr.

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