[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 78 (Thursday, May 11, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6560-S6562]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


   NOMINATION OF JOHN M. DEUTCH, OF MASSACHUSETTS, TO BE DIRECTOR OF 
                          CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I thank my gallant friend from 
Nebraska. I rise in support of the position he has taken and also that 
of the distinguished chairman of the committee, the Senator from 
Pennsylvania.
  In the 103d Congress and then the 104th, I offered legislation that 
would basically break up the existing Central Intelligence Agency and 
return its component parts to the Department of Defense and the 
Department of State. This in the manner that the Office of Strategic 
Services was divided and parceled out at the end of World War II.
  I had hoped to encourage a debate on the role of intelligence and of 
secrecy in American society. That debate has taken place. Some of the 
results, I think, can be seen in the nomination of a distinguished 
scientist and public servant, John Deutch, to this position.
  This could not have been more clear in his testimony. He made a 
point, self-evident we would suppose, but not frequently to be 
encountered in a pronouncement of a potential DCI. He said:

       Espionage does not rest comfortably in a democracy. 
     Secrecy, which is essential to protect sources and methods, 
     is not welcome in an open society. If our democracy is to 
     support intelligence activities, the people must be confident 
     that our law and rules will be respected.

  It may have come as a surprise--although it ought not to have--in 
recent months and weeks, to find how many persons there are in this 
country who do not have confidence that our laws and rules will be 
respected; who see the Government in conspiratorial modes, directed 
against the people in ways that could be of huge consequence to 
Americans.
  Richard Hofstadter referred to this disposition when he spoke of 
``The Paranoid Style in American Politics.'' Thus, for example, the 
widespread belief that the CIA was somehow involved in the 
assassination of President Kennedy.
  It is important to understand how deep this disposition is in our 
society. In 1956, even before Hofstadter spoke of it, Edward A. Shils 
of the University of Chicago--a great, great, social scientist, who has 
just passed away--published his book, ``The Torment of Secrecy,'' in 
which he wrote:

       The exfoliation and intertwinement of the various patterns 
     of belief that the world is dominated by unseen circles of 
     conspirators, operating behind our backs, is one of the 
     characteristic features of modern society.

  Such a belief was very much a feature of the Bolshevik regime that 
took shape in Russia in 1917 and 1918. Hence the decision to help found 
and fund in the United States a Communist Party, part of which would be 
clandestine. The recent discovery in the archives in Moscow that John 
Reed received a payment of 1,008,000 rubles in 1920. As soft money, 
that would be a very considerable sum today.
  It is said that organizations in conflict become like one other. 
There is a degree to which we have emulated the Soviet model in our own 
intelligence services. A very powerful essay on this matter has just 
been written by Jefferson Morley in the Washington Post under the 
headline ``Understanding Oklahoma'' in an article entitled ``Department 
of Secrecy: The Invisible Bureaucracy That Unites Alienated America in 
Suspicion.''
  I would refer also to Douglas Turner this weekend in the Buffalo 
News. I spoke of these concerns in an earlier statement on the Senate 
floor entitled ``The Paranoid Style in American Politics,'' which I ask 
unanimous consent be printed in the Record.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (See exhibit 1.)
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, what we have today is so much at 
variance with what was thought we would get. Allen Dulles was very much 
part of the foundation of postwar intelligence, having been in the OSS, 
serving with great distinction in Switzerland during World War II. 
Peter Grose, in his new biography, ``Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen 
Dulles,'' recounts the testimony Dulles gave before the Senate Armed 
Services Committee on April 25, 1947, as we were about to enact the 
National Security Act of 1947 which created a small coordinating body, 
the Central Intelligence Agency.


[[Page S6561]]

       Personnel for a central intelligence agency, he argued, 
     ``need not be very numerous * * *. The operation of the 
     service must be neither flamboyant nor overshrouded with the 
     mystery and abracadabra which the amateur detective likes to 
     assume.'' In a lecturing tone, he tried to tell the Senators 
     how intelligence is actually assembled.
       ``Because of its glamour and mystery, overemphasis is 
     generally placed on what is called secret intelligence, 
     namely the intelligence that is obtained by secret means and 
     by secret agents. * * * In time of peace the bulk of 
     intelligence can be obtained through overt channels, through 
     our diplomatic and consular missions, and our military, naval 
     and air attaches in the normal and proper course of their 
     work. It can also be obtained through the world press, the 
     radio, and through the many thousands of Americans, business 
     and professional men and American residents of foreign 
     countries, who are naturally and normally brought in touch 
     with what is going on in those countries.
       ``A proper analysis of the intelligence obtainable by these 
     overt, normal, and aboveboard means would supply us with over 
     80 percent, I should estimate, of the information required 
     for the guidance of our national policy.''

  Mr. President, that did not happen. Instead, we entered upon a five-
decade mode of secret analysis, analysis withheld from public scrutiny, 
which is the only way we can verify the truth of a hypothesis in 
natural science or in the social sciences.
  The result was massive miscalculation. Nicholas Eberstadt in his 
wonderful new book, ``The Tyranny of Numbers,'' writes ``It is probably 
safe to say that the U.S. Government's attempt to describe the Soviet 
economy has been the largest single project in social science research 
ever undertaken.'' He said this in 1990, in testimony before the 
Committee on Foreign Relations. ``The largest single project in social 
science research ever undertaken,'' It was a calamity.
  No one has been more forthright in this regard than Adm. Stansfield 
Turner in an article in Foreign Affairs at about that time. He said 
when it came to predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 
corporate view of the intelligence community missed by a mile.
  I can remember in the first years of the Kennedy administration 
meeting with Walt Rostow, chairman of the policy planning staff in the 
Department of State. As regards the Soviet Union, he said he was not 
one of those ``6 percent
 forever people.'' But there it was, locked into our analysis. That is 
what the President knew.

  In Richard Reeves' remarkable biography of John F. Kennedy, he 
records that the Agency told the President that by the year 2000 the 
GNP of the Soviet Union would be three times that of the United States. 
Again, that is what the President knew. Any number of economists might 
have disagreed. The great conservative theorists, Friedman, Hayek, 
Stigler, would never have thought any such thing. Important work done 
by Frank Holzman, at Tufts, and the Russian Research Center at Harvard 
disputed what little was public. But to no avail. The President knew 
otherwise, and others did not know what it was he knew.
  The consequence was an extraordinary failure to foresee the central 
geo political event of our time. A vast overdependence on military and 
similar outlays that leave us perilously close to economic instability 
ourselves.
  I would like to close with a letter written me in 1991 by Dale W. 
Jorgenson, professor of economics at the Kennedy School of Government, 
in which he said:

       I believe that the importance of economic intelligence is 
     increasing greatly with the much-discussed globalization of 
     the U.S. economy. However, the cloak-and-dagger model is even 
     more inappropriate to our new economic situation than it was 
     to the successful prosecution of the Cold War that has just 
     concluded. The lessons for the future seem to me to be rather 
     transparent. The U.S. Government needs to invest a lot more 
     in international economic assessments. * * * (I)t should 
     reject the CIA monopoly model and try to create the kind of 
     intellectual competition that now prevails between CBO and 
     OMB on domestic policy, aided by Brookings, AEI [American 
     Enterprise Institute], the Urban Institute, the Kennedy 
     School, and many others.

  That is wise counsel. I have the confidence that John Deutch, as a 
scientist, will understand it. I am concerned, however, that the 
administration will not.
  Mancur Olson, in his great book, ``The Rise and Decline of Nations'', 
asked: Why has it come about that the two nations whose institutions 
were destroyed in World War II, Germany and Japan, have had the most 
economic success since? Whereas Britain, not really much success at 
all; the United States--yes, but. He came up with a simple answer. 
Defeat wiped out all those choke points, all those rents, all those 
sharing agreements, all those veto structures that enable institutions 
to prevent things from happening. And we are seeing it in this our own 
Government today, 5 years after the Berlin wall came down. Nothing 
changes, or little changes.
  Recall that 3 years before the wall came down the CIA reported that 
per capita GDP was higher in East Germany than in West Germany. I hope 
I take no liberty that I mentioned this once to Dr. Deutch and added, 
``Any taxi driver in Berlin could have told you that was not so.'' Dr. 
Deutch replied, ``Any taxi driver in Washington.'' A most reassuring 
response.
  Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Texas for her graciousness 
for allowing me to speak when in fact in alternation it would have been 
her turn.
                               Exhibit 1

             [From the Congressional Record, Apr. 25, 1995]

                The Paranoid Style in American Politics

       Mr. Moynihan. Mr. President, as we think and, indeed, pray 
     our way through the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, 
     asking how such a horror might have come about, and how 
     others might be prevented, Senators could do well to step 
     outside the chamber and look down the mall at the Washington 
     Monument. It honors the Revolutionary general who once 
     victorious, turned his army over to the Continental Congress 
     and retired to his estates. Later, recalled to the highest 
     office in the land, he served dutifully one term, then a 
     second but then on principle not a day longer. Thus was 
     founded the first republic, the first democracy since the age 
     of Greece and Rome.
       There is not a more serene, confident, untroubled symbol of 
     the nation in all the capital. Yet a brief glance will show 
     that the color of the marble blocks of which the monument is 
     constructed changes about a quarter of the way up. Thereby 
     hangs a tale of another troubled time; not our first, just 
     as, surely, this will not be our last.
       As befitted a republic, the monument was started by a 
     private charitable group, as we would now say, the Washington 
     National Monument Society. Contributions came in cash, but 
     also in blocks of marble, many with interior inscriptions 
     which visitors willing to climb the steps can see to this 
     day. A quarter of the way up, that is. For in 1852, Pope Pius 
     IX donated a block of marble from the temple of Concord in 
     Rome. Instantly, the American Party, or the Know-Nothings 
     (``I know nothing,'' was their standard reply to queries 
     about their platform) divined a Papist Plot. An installation 
     of the Pope's block of marble would signal the Catholic 
     Uprising. A fevered agitation began. As recorded by Ray Allen 
     Billington in The Protest Crusade, 1800-1860:
       ``One pamphlet, The Pope's Strategem: ``Rome to America!'' 
     An Address to the Protestants of the United States, against 
     placing the Pope's block of Marble in the Washington Monument 
     (1852), urged Protestants to hold indignation meetings and 
     contribute another block to be placed next to the Pope's 
     `bearing an inscription by which all men may see that we are 
     awake to the hypocrisy and schemes of that designing, crafty, 
     subtle, far seeing and far reaching Power, which is ever 
     grasping after the whole World, to sway its iron scepter, 
     with bloodstained hands, over the millions of its 
     inhabitants.'''
       One night early in March, 1854, a group of Know-Nothings 
     broke into the storage sheds on the monument grounds and 
     dragged the Pope's marble off towards the Potomac. Save for 
     the occasional ``sighting'', as we have come to call such 
     phenomena, it has never to be located since.
       Work on the monument stopped. Years later, in 1876, 
     Congress appropriated funds to complete the job, which the 
     Corps of Engineers, under the leadership of Lieutenant 
     Colonel Thomas I. Casey did with great flourish in time for 
     the centennial observances of 1888.
       Dread of Catholicism ran its course, if slowly. (Edward M. 
     Stanton, then Secretary of War was convinced the 
     assassination of President Lincoln was the result of a 
     Catholic plot.) Other manias followed, all brilliantly 
     describe in Richard Hofstadter's revelatory lecture ``the 
     Paranoid Style in American Politics'' which he delivered as 
     the Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford University within days 
     of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Which to this day 
     remains a fertile source of conspiracy mongering. George Will 
     cited Hofstadter's essay this past weekend on the television 
     program ``This Week with David Brinkley.'' He deals with the 
     same subject matter in a superb column in this morning's 
     Washington Post which has this bracing conclusion.
       ``It is reassuring to remember that paranoiacs have always 
     been with us, but have never defined us.''
       I hope, Mr. President, as we proceed to consider 
     legislation, if that is necessary, in 
     [[Page S6562]] response to the bombing, we would be mindful 
     of a history in which we have often overreached, to our cost, 
     and try to avoid such an overreaction.
       We have seen superb performance of the FBI. What more any 
     nation could ask of an internal security group I cannot 
     conceive. We have seen the effectiveness of our State 
     troopers, of our local police forces, fire departments, 
     instant nationwide cooperation which should reassure us 
     rather than frighten us.
       I would note in closing, Mr. President, that Pope John Paul 
     II will be visiting the United States this coming October.
     

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