The Family Jewels by John Prados Read Free Book Online Page A

“technically impossible to separate.” It was supposedly “too random for warrants.” By that point, however, Congress had already taken the testimony of a senior Pentagon official who affirmed that the NSA had supplied Project Chaos with many hundreds of pages of communications intelligence. 33
    This history is not well known. But what has never been reported is what transpired inside the Ford administration. Late the previous year Attorney General Saxbe had been pressing for
new
permission for foreign intelligence surveillance. On September 18 Director Colby had concurred—siding with NSA advocates of “surveillance which requires installation of a microphone by trespassory means.” Colby had added that CIA would conduct no electronic surveillance within the United States without prior personal approval of the attorney general. 34 Deputy National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft had counseled President Ford to go slow—even a Republican congressional task force on privacy had objections. In late December Ford had nevertheless renewed his authorization. But Scowcroft was right. By May 1975, two months before the Shamrock-Minaret revelations,
a dozen
bills had already been introduced in Congress aiming to restrict electronic surveillance even for national security purposes. The CIA protested that no “probable cause” standard would work, because the utility of an intercept could not be discerned in advance, and it objected to courts “introjecting” themselves. The agency wanted a free hand and recommended Ford stand on his “inherent foreign intelligence gathering powers.” 35
    Then, on June 23, 1975, in another federal case (
Zweibon v. Mitchell
, D.C. Circuit No. 73–1847), the Court of Appeals reversed a lower court decision favoring the government. The court ruled that prior warrants must be obtained “even if the surveillance is installed under Presidential directive in the name of foreign intelligence gathering for protection of the national security.” 36 Within days the Church Committee raised questions with the Department of Justice, the CIA, and NSA. By July 1975 it was clear that President Ford’s own approval of eavesdropping, barely six months old, required revision. The matter had become a high-profile political issue. White House lawyer Philip Buchen advised Attorney General Levi to refuse to discuss eavesdropping when he appeared before the Church Committee on July 16. Levi took that advice, but it remained clear that the administration had to respond. Buchen assembled a working group from Justice,CIA, NSA, FBI, and the State Department to cobble together an agreed joint briefing to which all could adhere. It was following Levi’s refusal to comment on government eavesdropping that the leak of Project Shamrock occurred.
    Once Director Colby had been mousetrapped into open admission of warrantless NSA eavesdropping, there could be no question but that the congressional inquisitors would follow the threads. At the Church Committee, staffers divided the turf so that Britt Snider took the lead on Shamrock while Peter Fenn looked into Minaret. Late in August Snider, who had been stymied by stonewalling at Fort Meade, was suddenly asked to NSA for a Shamrock briefing, delivered by a clean-cut, earnest agency man. The agency admitted that it had access to most cables moving through New York, that a courier went to the city every day to bring back the latest, and that the system had long been in place. The code name was Shamrock. The briefer reported it had been terminated on orders from Secretary Schlesinger, but attributed this to a sense Shamrock produced little, not to the fact it had been discovered. The NSA briefer punted on whether Fort Meade had been reading Americans’ private messages, claiming analysts had their hands full merely with official cables. The briefer could not—or would not—say how long Shamrock had been