The Family Jewels by John Prados Read Free Book Online

eavesdropping was lawful. At Fort Meade the NSA performed its own review. Air force Lieutenant General Lew Allen, taking up the reins in August, huddled with NSA lawyers to pick up the pieces. The codebreakers stopped taking nominations for their watch list and halted certain support for the BNDD. Then it put Minaret reporting on hold. On September 17, Allen asked government agencies to recertify their intelligence requirements. Attorney General Elliott Richardson responded on October 1, taking the FBI out of the game and questioning the propriety of requests from the Secret Service to boot. In that letter Richardson specificallycited his need to better understand the implications of the Keith decision. Shortly thereafter General Allen terminated Minaret, except for intercepts gleaned from overseas monitoring. There is, however, some evidence from a January 1976 exchange of correspondence between the president and attorney general, by then Edward Levi, that telephone intercepts continued in the guise of the NSA monitoring
Soviet
interception of Americans’ telephone calls.
    When the Year of Intelligence began, all this NSA domestic spying remained under wraps. Therein lies a story too. Investigators for the Church Committee encountered immense difficulties in discovering anything about the NSA. The Congressional Research Service knew nothing, the Senate committee staffers with jurisdiction over the code-breakers had little more than budget information, and former NSA employees kept their comments at the level of disputes over parking spaces at Fort Meade. The investigators, L. Britt Snider and Peter Fenn, then approached General Allen and simply asked to be briefed on agency activities. Lew Allen arranged the briefings, but they were all vanilla. Meanwhile, the Rockefeller Commission had wound up its inquiry, and the Church Committee pressed for access to its documents. After weeks of appeals—and impelled in good part by intense public concerns over alleged CIA assassination plots (see Chapter 6 )—the White House handed over the records. These files included a copy of The Family Jewels. There Snider and Fenn found just two references to NSA, but each led directly to Fort Meade’s sensitive activities. One mentioned LP/Medley, the CIA’s cover office lent to NSA for Shamrock. The other concerned Project Minaret. The fat was in the fire.
    Britt Snider asked NSA for explanations. Nothing happened for weeks. Yet it was at precisely this moment, after thirty-four years, that the NSA suddenly terminated ProjectShamrock. By July 1975 a frustrated Snider made his request formal, crafting a set of written questions sent to Fort Meade as an interrogatory from Senator Church. The NSA responded that these matters were so sensitive they were willing to talk only to Frank Church and his Republican vice-chairman, Texas senator John Tower.
    But, like the White House attempting to avoid Church Committee inquiries into CIA covert operations, in the climate of 1975 there was no possibility the National Security Agency could evade investigation. Leaks followed NSA’s gambit. On July 22 the
New York Daily News
broke the story that “for at least five years” the NSA and FBI had routinely monitored commercial cable traffic to and from the United States. 32 The story hinted this practice was much older than that. Follow-up reporting in the
Daily News
forced the Church Committee into an acknowledgment that the National Security Agency had confirmed the program existed. Intelligence chief Bill Colby, testifying before the Pike Committee on August 6, found himself forced into an admission that the NSA had, in fact, monitored not only cables but phone calls. Colby attempted to get the House committee into closed session, but was repeatedly blocked from going off the record. Then Director Colby represented the activity as “incidental,” asserting that it flowed from other monitoring and had been