ABSTRACT
I come to the subject of national security intelligence as an outsider who has never served in any of America’s seventeen major spy agencies. I have had a rare opportunity, though, to learn much about these organizations, for I had a position as Senator Frank Church’s top staff aide during the well-known Senate inquiry of 1975–1976 conducted by the Church Committee (he served as the chairman) into alleged intelligence abuses, disclosed in a series of revelatory articles in the New York Times that preceded the investigation in the fall of 1974. From that unique vantage point, I was able to attend every meeting of the Church Committee (open and closed), as well as, to participate in many of the staff interviews with intelligence officials and the focused investigations into specific charges of abuse (such as a probe I led into the Huston Plan—an illegal master spy plan secretly ordered by President Richard M. Nixon in 1970). Furthermore, I was able to discuss with Senator Church (D-ID) and his colleagues, as well as with my staff associates and outside experts, the findings the inquiry uncovered during its sixteen-month probe. These experiences provided me a comprehensive overview of U.S. intelligence, augmented by frequent visits to the secret agencies that, all summed, provided a total immersion education into this heavily veiled government domain.
