Loss of US Civil Liberties

After the failure of the US federal government under the Articles of Confederation, the men working to shape the new American government—later termed the “Founders”—determine that the new government must have a president with power equal to that of Congress and the Supreme Court. The federal government itself has far more power under the new Constitution than it had under the Articles, but many Founders worry that the government will have, or take upon itself, the power to constrain or even destroy individual rights and freedoms. The government, therefore, will have strict limitations on its functions, and will be divided into three co-equal branches. Debate over whether the new government should have a single president or an executive council rages, but eventually the Founders decide that a single president could best act decisively in times of crisis. However, Congress has the strength to curtail presidential power via legislation and oversight. One of the Founders’ most crucial decisions is to give Congress, not the president, the power to declare war and commit military troops to battle. Congress must also authorize any military actions that fall short of actual war, the creation and maintenance of armies, and exercise control over how the president can call on the armed forces in emergencies. Finally, the Founders, all too aware that until the English Revolution of 1688, the King of England could use his “prerogative powers” to dispense with a law that he felt unnecessary, move to ensure that the US president cannot use a similar usurpation of power to override Congressional legislation, writing in the Constitution that the president must “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” In 2007, reporter Charlie Savage, drawing on James Madison’s Federalist Papers, will write: “Knowing that it was inevitable that from time to time foolish, corrupt, or shortsighted individuals would win positions of responsibility in the government, the Founders came up with a system that would limit anyone’s ability to become a tyrant or to otherwise wreck the country. And over the next century and a half, the system worked as the Founders had designed it to work.” [Savage, 2007, pp. 14-16]

Entity Tags: James Madison, Charlie Savage

Category Tags: Expansion of Presidential Power

James Madison, one of the founders of the American system of constitutional government (see 1787), writes of the importance of Congress, not the president, retaining the power to send the nation to war. “Those who are to conduct a war cannot, in the nature of things, be proper or safe judges,” he writes, “whether a war ought to be commenced, continued, or concluded. They are barred from the latter functions by a great principle in free government, analagous to that which separates the sword from the purse, or the power from executing from the power of enacting laws.” [Savage, 2007, pp. 19]

Entity Tags: James Madison

Category Tags: Expansion of Presidential Power

During the Mexican-American War, Army General Winfield Scott forms a military commission to try 42 Irish-born deserters from the US military who had joined their fellow Roman Catholics in the Mexican army. All 42 are convicted. Twenty-seven are executed, 14 are flogged and branded, and one is pardoned. [USA Today, 11/15/2001]

Entity Tags: Winfield Scott

Category Tags: Court Procedures and Verdicts, Expansion of Presidential Power, Other Legal Changes

President Abraham Lincoln, responding to a Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in South Carolina, does not wait for Congress to begin its next session to make his response. Instead, Lincoln, wielding powers that the Constitution does not grant him and without a formal declaration of war, drastically enlarges the Union’s army and navy, blockades Southern ports, spends money not appropriated by Congress, and arrests Northern citizens suspected of being Confederate sympathizers. All of these steps exceed his authority under the Constitution and under federal law. Lincoln addresses Congress as soon as it reconvenes, admitting that he has exceeded his authority (see 1787 and 1793), and refusing to argue that his actions are lawful based on any “prerogative of power” inherent to the presidency. Instead, he explains that he felt he had to respond immediately to the sudden crisis, and asks Congress to retroactively authorize his emergency actions. He says, “These measures, whether strictly legal or not, were ventured upon under what appeared to be a popular demand and a public necessity, trusting then, as now, that Congress would readily ratify them.” Congress gives Lincoln the retroactive authorization he seeks. [Savage, 2007, pp. 16-17]

Entity Tags: Abraham Lincoln

Category Tags: Expansion of Presidential Power

During the Civil War, some 13,000 soldiers and civilians are tried before 5,000 military commissions. Among them are eight civilians with ties to the Confederacy. President Andrew Johnson, President Lincoln’s successor, signs the order for the commissions based on the recommendation of Attorney General James Speed, who argues that Lincoln’s assassination was an act of war against the US’s commander in chief. Historian Edward Steers will later argue that Johnson wants a military trial to avoid a jury of potential Confederate sympathizers drawn from the Washington, DC, populace. A panel of seven generals and two colonels finds all eight of the civilians with Confederate ties guilty of conspiring to assassinate Lincoln. Four are executed and four are jailed for lengthy prison terms. The proceedings are swift; the hangings take place less than three months after Lincoln’s assassination. Historian James Hall will later say of the commissions: “That’s the beauty of the thing… from the government’s perspective. Things move quickly, and from a legal standpoint it’s all self-contained.” [USA Today, 11/15/2001]

Entity Tags: Andrew Johnson, James Speed, James Hall, Edward Steers

Category Tags: Court Procedures and Verdicts, Expansion of Presidential Power, Other Legal Changes

In the case of Ex parte Milligan, the Supreme Court strikes down a military tribunal used by former President Lincoln to prosecute Northern civilians, ruling that the Constitution limits a president’s power even during times of emergency. “The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people,” the Court writes, “equally in war and peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism.” The defendants, the Court rules, must be tried in civilian courts. [Coleman, 2005 ; PBS, 12/2006; Savage, 2007, pp. 17]

Entity Tags: Abraham Lincoln

Category Tags: Expansion of Presidential Power

President Theodore Roosevelt, wielding what will become known as the theory of inherent power, declares that the presidency has a “residuum of powers” to do anything not specifically forbidden by the Constitution. Without asking Congress for its approval, Roosevelt launches the project to build the Panama Canal, sends the US Navy around the world, and sends US troops to the Dominican Republic. In 2009, reporter and author Charlie Savage will write, “Roosevelt’s views… contained the seeds of the imperial presidency that would arise during the first decades of the Cold War.” Roosevelt’s successor, future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Howard Taft, will disagree, and Taft’s presidency will restore some of the limits on presidential power removed by Roosevelt. [Savage, 2007, pp. 17-18]

Entity Tags: William Howard Taft, Charlie Savage, Theodore Roosevelt

Category Tags: Expansion of Presidential Power

Franklin D. Roosevelt ushers in a massive expansion and reorganization of the federal government under his “New Deal,” in an attempt to counter the lasting effects of the Great Depression that began in 1929. Passed by Congress, the New Deal legislation greatly expands the federal bureaucracy (see September 8, 1939), and gives sweeping new powers over domestic issues to agencies contained within the executive branch and not always subject to Congressional oversight. The Supreme Court rules that many of these actions are unconstitutional, but when Roosevelt threatens to “pack” the Court by expanding its size and then appointing sympathizers to vote his way, the Court capitulates and upholds the New Deal legislation. In 2009, reporter and author Charlie Savage will write that the Court’s decision “enabl[ed] the rise of the modern administrative state inside the executive branch.” [Savage, 2007, pp. 18]

Entity Tags: Charlie Savage, Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Category Tags: Expansion of Presidential Power

The Supreme Court rules in United States v. Curtiss-Wright, a case revolving around Curtiss-Wright’s illicit sale of machine guns to Bolivia in violation of a joint resolution passed by Congress. The Court finds that Congress did not cede undue powers to the president in the resolution, and that the president has a wide array of powers in the area of foreign policy making that he does not have in the domestic arena. Justice George Sutherland, who writes the majority opinion, notes the distinctions between foreign and internal affairs, arguing that because “the president alone has the power to speak or listen as a representative of the nation,” Congress may provide the president with a special degree of discretion in external matters which would not be afforded domestically. In an aside to the decision, Sutherland notes what he calls the “plenary and exclusive power of the president as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations,” a power which, if correctly cited, gives the executive branch sole authority to conduct foreign relations in everything from treaties and trade agreements to launching and conducting wars. However, Sutherland’s statement is written as an adjunct to the majority opinion, or dicta, and therefore has no legal stature. In later examinations of Sutherland’s work, many legal scholars will determine that Sutherland is misquoting his original source, the Supreme Court’s first Chief Justice, John Marshall, who as a House member argued that the president has the duty to carry out the nation’s treaty obligations and is the exclusive channel for diplomatic communications. Marshall did not argue that the legislative or judicial branches had no authority over foreign policy, and never espoused that argument once ascending to the high court. Many advocates of the so-called “unitary executive theory” of presidential power will cite Sutherland’s erroneous dicta in making their own arguments for untrammeled presidential power. [Savage, 2007, pp. 141; Oyez (.org), 6/2007]

Entity Tags: George Sutherland, Curtiss-Wright, John Marshall, Roosevelt administration, US Supreme Court

Category Tags: Court Procedures and Verdicts, Expansion of Presidential Power

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 8248, reorganizing the Executive Office of the President. According to the order, “There shall be within the Executive Office of the President the following principal divisions, namely: (1) The White House Office, (2) the Bureau of the Budget, (3) the National Resources Planning Board, (4) the Liaison Office for Personnel Management, (5) the Office of Government Reports, and (6) in the event of a national emergency, or threat of a national emergency, such office for emergency management as the President shall determine.” The order creates the Office of Emergency Management (OEM), a civil defense unit responsible for protecting government functions in the event of a disaster. The President’s Secretary declares that in times of national emergency, “it has always been necessary to establish administrative machinery in addition to that required for normal work of the government.… Although these management facilities need be brought into action only when an emergency or serious threat of emergency exists, they must function in an integral relationship to the regular management arms of the President.” [Executive Order 8248, 9/8/1939; New York Times, 9/10/1939; New York Times, 3/28/1941; New York Times, 4/20/1941]

Entity Tags: Office of Emergency Management, Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Category Tags: Continuity of Government

President Franklin D. Roosevelt asks that Congress amend the Neutrality Acts to allow the US to send military aid to European countries locked in battle against Nazi Germany. Roosevelt tells Congress that America’s neutrality laws might actually be giving passive “aid to an aggressor” while denying help to friendly nations victimized by the Nazis. Roosevelt has already overseen the shipment of arms and other materiel in violation of the Neutrality Acts, but, unlike some of his successors, he does not claim he has an inherent right as commander in chief to violate or ignore laws. In November, Congress will agree to Roosevelt’s request. [Savage, 2007, pp. 18; History (.com), 2008]

Entity Tags: Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Category Tags: Expansion of Presidential Power

Director of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover orders the bureau to begin preparing a list of individuals to be closely monitored and/or detained in the event of a national emergency or war. The list is to be comprised of persons considered to have strong “Nazi” and “Communist tendencies.” The FBI is ordered to collect information on suspected individuals from employment records, school records, newspapers, and “confidential sources of information.” The list will become part of the FBI’s Custodial Detention Program in 1940 (see November 1940-1943). [New York Times, 10/23/1975; Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 5/1976, pp. 412]

Entity Tags: J. Edgar Hoover, Federal Bureau of Investigation

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Detainments in US

The FBI maintains a list of individuals that are to be closely monitored and/or detained in the event of a national emergency or war. The index of names, known officially as the “Custodial Detention Program,” is spawned from a list established in 1939 by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (see November 1939). The updated list is composed of persons thought to have a “Communistic, Fascist, Nazi, or other nationalistic background.” The list includes individuals that distribute “literature and propaganda favorable to a foreign power and opposed to the American way of life,” as well as “agitators who are adherents of foreign ideologies.” The names on the list are divided into two categories: those who are to be immediately detained in the event of war and those who are to be subject to close surveillance in the event of war. The program will be criticized for being unreliable and potentially illegal (see 1943). [Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 5/1976, pp. 417]

Entity Tags: J. Edgar Hoover, Federal Bureau of Investigation

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Detainments in US

President Roosevelt signs the US declaration of war with Japan. [Source: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum]President Roosevelt, recognizing that Congress has the Constitutional authority to declare war (see 1787 and 1793), asks the legislature for a declaration of war against Japan in retaliation for the Japanese air attack against US naval forces at Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt calls the date of the Pearl Harbor attack, December 7, 1941, “a day which will live in infamy.” He says, “I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.” With a single exception—Representative Jeannette Rankin (R-MT)—every member of the House and Senate votes to authorize war against Japan. The next day, the US will declare war against Germany and Italy as well. [Savage, 2007, pp. 18; Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum, 2/10/2008]

Entity Tags: Jeannette Rankin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Category Tags: Expansion of Presidential Power

President Roosevelt, using what he calls his inherent power as commander in chief, creates a military commission to try eight Nazi saboteurs captured inside the US in the case of Ex parte Quirin. The eight are quickly found guilty and sentenced to death. The Supreme Court later backs Roosevelt’s authority to have them tried by a commission. The Court’s decision is unusually hasty, and several of the justices who voted in Roosevelt’s favor later express regret for their approval. Roosevelt himself is unsure of the procedure’s legality, the Court’s decision and his own powers as president notwithstanding. When more Nazi saboteurs are captured later in the war, they are tried in criminal courts. [Savage, 2007, pp. 136]

Entity Tags: US Supreme Court, Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Category Tags: Court Procedures and Verdicts, Expansion of Presidential Power

Attorney General Francis Biddle abolishes the FBI’s Custodial Detention Program, which is designed to round up suspected dissidents in times of national emergency or war (see November 1940-1943). However, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover secretly re-establishes the list under a new name: the Security Index (see Early 1943-1971). Biddle clearly informs the FBI: “There is no statutory authorization or other present justification for keeping a ‘custodial detention’ list of citizens.… [I]t is now clear to me that this classification system is inherently unreliable.” The attorney general comments: “The evidence used for the purpose of making the classifications was inadequate; the standards applied to the evidence for the purpose of making the classifications were defective; and finally, the notion that it is possible to make a valid determination as to how dangerous a person is in the abstract and without reference to time, environment, and other relevant circumstances, is impractical, unwise, and dangerous.” But Hoover does not comply with the attorney general’s order. He instead changes the name of the list from the Custodial Detention Program to the Security Index. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will later report, “The attorney general and the Justice Department were apparently not informed of the FBI’s decision to continue the program.” FBI headquarters informs its field offices, “The fact that the Security Index and Security Index Cards are prepared and maintained should be considered strictly confidential, and should at no time be mentioned or alluded to in investigative reports, or discussed with agencies or individuals outside the bureau other than duly qualified representatives of the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Military Intelligence Division, and then only on a strictly confidential basis.” [Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 5/1976, pp. 420-421]

Entity Tags: J. Edgar Hoover, Francis Biddle, Office of Naval Intelligence, Senate Intelligence Committee, US Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Detainments in US

The FBI maintains a “Security Index” of US citizens that are to be targeted for surveillance and/or detention in the event of a national emergency or war. The list is carried over from the FBI’s Custodial Detention Program, which was abolished by the attorney general in 1943 (see 1943 and November 1940-1943). A government source tells the New York Times that the purpose of the Security Index is to “assist in rounding up people who might commit sabotage or espionage” in the event of a disaster. The index is at first composed mostly of suspected communists, but is later expanded to include a wide range of political groups. By the 1960s, names on the list include professors, teachers, labor union organizers, authors, journalists, doctors, scientists, and clergymen. The names on the Security Index are broken down into three categories: leaders of “subversive” groups, supporters of such groups, and supporters of such groups considered to be violent. At its peak in the late 1960s, the FBI’s Security Index reportedly lists more than 26,000 citizens. FBI Special Agent M. Wesley Swearingen will later say the number is actually much higher, claiming 50,000 people are on the list in Chicago alone. Sources will later tell the New York Times that the list includes several people who pose “no genuine internal security threat.” The list is utilized by the FBI’s secret COINTELPRO program, which is used to discredit anti-war and other “New Left” groups. The Security Index will be transferred to the Administrative Index within the FBI in late 1971 (see Late 1971). [New York Times, 8/3/1975; New York Times, 10/23/1975; New York Times, 4/29/1976; Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 5/1976, pp. 420-421; Chicago Tribune, 3/2/1986]

Entity Tags: M. Wesley Swearingen, Federal Bureau of Investigation

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Detainments in US

The NSA, working with British intelligence, begins secretly intercepting and reading millions of telegraph messages between US citizens and international senders and recipients. The clandestine program, called Operation Shamrock and part of a larger global surveillance network collectively known as Echelon (see April 4, 2001 and Before September 11, 2001), begins shortly after the end of World War II, and continues through 1975, when it is exposed by the “Church Committee,” the Senate investigation of illegal activities by US intelligence organizations (see April, 1976). [Telepolis, 7/25/2000] The program actually predates the NSA, originating with the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA) then continuing when that turned into NSA (see 1952). [Pensito Review, 5/13/2006] The program operates in tandem with Project Minaret (see 1967-1975). Together, the two programs spy on both foreign sources and US citizens, especially those considered “unreliable,” such as civil rights leaders and antiwar protesters, and opposition figures such as politicians, diplomats, businessmen, trades union leaders, non-government organizations like Amnesty International, and senior officials of the Catholic Church. The NSA receives the cooperation of such telecommunications firms as Western Union, RCA, and ITT. [Telepolis, 7/25/2000] (Those companies are never required to reveal the extent of their involvement with Shamrock; on the recommendations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and presidential chief of staff Dick Cheney, in 1975 President Ford extends executive privilege to those companies, precluding them from testifying before Congress.) [Pensito Review, 5/13/2006] In the 1960s, technological advances make it possible for computers to search for keywords in monitored messages instead of having human analysts read through all communications. In fact, the first global wide-area network, or WAN, is not the Internet, but the international network connecting signals intelligence stations and processing centers for US and British intelligence organizations, including the NSA, and making use of sophisticated satellite systems such as Milstar and Skynet. (The NSA also builds and maintains one of the world’s first e-mail networks, completely separate from public e-mail networks, and highly secret.) At the program’s height, it operates out of a front company in Lower Manhattan code-named LPMEDLEY, and intercepts 150,000 messages a month. In August 1975, NSA director Lieutenant General Lew Allen testifies to the House of Representatives’ investigation of US intelligence activities, the Pike Committee (see January 29, 1976), that “NSA systematically intercepts international communications, both voice and cable.” He also admits that “messages to and from American citizens have been picked up in the course of gathering foreign intelligence,” and acknowledges that the NSA uses “watch lists” of US citizens “to watch for foreign activity of reportable intelligence interest.” [Telepolis, 7/25/2000] The Church Committee’s final report will will call Shamrock “probably the largest government interception program affecting Americans ever undertaken.” [Church Committee, 4/23/1976] Shortly after the committee issues its report, the NSA terminates the program. Since 1978, the NSA and other US intelligence agencies have been restrained in their wiretapping and surveillance of US citizens by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (see 1978). Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who will become the NSA’s director in 1977, and who testifies before the Church Committee as director of Naval Intelligence, will later say that he worked actively to help pass FISA: “I became convinced that for almost anything the country needed to do, you could get legislation to put it on a solid foundation. There was the comfort of going out and saying in speeches, ‘We don’t target US citizens, and what we do is authorized by a court.’” [Pensito Review, 5/13/2006] Shamrock is considered unconstitutional by many US lawmakers, and in 1976 the Justice Department investigates potential criminal offenses by the NSA surrounding Shamrock. Part of the report will be released in 1980; that report will confirm that the Shamrock data was used to further the illegal surveillance activities of US citizens as part of Minaret. [Telepolis, 7/25/2000]
After 9/11, the NSA will once again escalate its warrantless surveillance of US citizens, this time monitoring and tracking citizens’ phone calls and e-mails (see September 13, 2001). It will also begin compiling an enormous database of citizens’ phone activities, creating a “data mine” of information on US citizens, ostensibly for anti-terrorism purposes (see October 2001).

Entity Tags: Western Union, Pike Committee, National Security Agency, Bobby Ray Inman, Church Committee, International Telephone and Telegraph, Radio Corporation of America

Category Tags: Privacy, Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Government Acting in Secret, Government Classification, Other Surveillance

President Harry Truman signs the National Security Act of 1947, reorganizing the military and overhauling the government’s foreign policy-making bureaucracy. The act gives birth to three major organizations: the Department of Defense (DOD), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Council (NSC). The DOD unifies the three branches of the military—the Army, Navy and Air Force—into a single department overseen by a secretary of defense. The act establishes a separate agency, the CIA, to oversee all overt and covert intelligence operations. The act forms the NSC to directly advise the President on all matters of defense and foreign policy. In addition, the act establishes the National Security Resources Board (NSRB) to advise the President “concerning the coordination of military, industrial, and civilian mobilization” in times of war. Should the nation come under attack, the NSRB will be in charge of allocating essential resources and overseeing “the strategic relocation of industries, services, government, and economic activities, the continuous operation of which is essential to the Nation’s security.” [US Congress. House. Senate., 7/26/1947; Trager, 11/1977]

Entity Tags: National Security Act of 1947, Harry S. Truman, National Security Council, US Department of Defense, National Security Resources Board, Central Intelligence Agency

Category Tags: Continuity of Government

A B-29 bomber similar to the one that crashed in Georgia. [Source: Global Security (.org)]A test flight for the Air Force’s Project Banshee, located at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia, is set for 8:30 a.m. Banshee is an attempt begun in 1946 to develop and deploy a long-range missile ahead of both the Soviet Union and rival US military branches. The airplane used in the test flight crashes less than an hour into its flight, killing 9 of the 13 aboard.
Maintenance Problems - The plane assigned for the flight is a B-29 Stratofortress, a bomber made famous by its delivery of the atomic bombs to Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. B-29s are notoriously difficult to fly and maintain: their four wing-mounted engines almost routinely overheat and catch fire, causing engine shutdowns, sudden drops in altitude, and, often, crashes. The engines’ eighteen cylinders lack sufficient airflow to keep them cool, and the overheating often causes the crankcases, made of light but highly flammable magnesium, to burst into flames. Like so many of its brethren, the plane has suffered its share of maintenance issues, and is flying without numerous recommended maintenance and repair tasks being performed. Just five days before, it had been designated “red cross”—grounded and unfit for service. It was allowed to fly through an “exceptional release” signed by the squadron commander.
Crew Difficulties - The flight is moved back to the afternoon after some crew members fail to show up on time, and to allow last-minute repairs to be made. By takeoff, the flight crew is assembled: Captain Ralph Erwin; co-pilot Herbert W. Moore; flight engineer Earl Murrhee; First Lieutenant Lawrence Pence, Jr, the navigator; Sergeant Walter Peny, the left scanner; Sergeant Jack York, the right scanner; Sergeant Melvin Walker, the radio operator; and Sergeant Derwood Irvin, manning the bombsight and autopilot. The crew is joined by civilian engineers assigned to Banshee: Al Palya and Robert Reynolds from RCA, William Brauner and Eugene Mechler from the Franklin Institute, and Richard Cox from the Air Force’s Air Materiel Command. In violation of standard procedure, none of the crew or the civilians are briefed on emergency procedures, though Murrhee will later say that the crew were all familiar with the procedures; he is not so sure about the civilians, though he knows Palya and Reynolds have flown numerous test flights before. In another violation of Air Force regulations, none of the flight crew have worked together before. As author Barry Siegel will note in 2008, “The pilot, copilot, and engineer had never shared the same cockpit before.”
Engine Fire and Crash - Less than an hour into the flight, one engine catches fire and two others lose power, due to a combination of maintenance failures and pilot errors. The civilians have some difficulty getting into their parachutes as Erwin and Moore attempt to regain control of the aircraft. Four of the crew and civilians manage to parachute from the plane, but most remain on board as the airplane spirals into the ground on the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp, near Waycross, Georgia. Crew members Moore, Murrhee, and Peny survive, as does a single civilian, Mechler. Four others either jump at too low an altitude or die when their chutes foul the airplane; the other five never manage to leave the plane and die on impact.
Widows File Suit - Several of the civilians’ widows will file suit against the US Air Force, asserting that their husbands died because of Air Force negligence (see June 21, 1949). Their lawsuit will eventually become US v. Reynolds, a landmark Supreme Court case and the underpinning for the government’s claims of state secrets privilege (see March 9, 1953). [Siegel, 2008, pp. 3, 14-17, 33-49]

Entity Tags: Derwood Irvin, Barry Siegel, US Department of the Air Force, Walter Peny, William Brauner, Air Materiel Command, Richard Cox, Ralph Erwin, Robert Reynolds, Al Palya, Radio Corporation of America, Eugene Mechler, Earl Murrhee, Franklin Institute, Project Banshee, Melvin Walker, Lawrence Pence, Jr, Herbert W. Moore, Jr, Jack York

Category Tags: Expansion of Presidential Power, Government Acting in Secret, Government Classification, State Secrets

Initial Associated Press reports of a crash in Georgia of a B-29 that had been on a test flight for the Air Force’s secret Project Banshee (see October 6, 1948) acknowledge that “the plane had been on a mission testing secret electronic equipment which RCA developed and built under an Air Force contract… Full details of the plane’s mission were not disclosed.… The Air Force would say only that the bomber was engaged in ‘electronic research on different types of radar…’” Local papers have a bit more detail, with survivor accounts hinting at confusion and some contradictions between their versions of events and that being given out by official Air Force spokesmen. Later reports from the Air Force will downplay the B-29’s involvement in Project Banshee. [Siegel, 2008, pp. 56-58]

Entity Tags: Associated Press, US Department of the Air Force, Radio Corporation of America, Project Banshee

Category Tags: Expansion of Presidential Power, Government Acting in Secret, Government Classification, State Secrets

The Army Air Force’s Air Materiel Command receives the initial report on an investigation of a B-29 crash in Georgia (see October 6, 1948). Perceptions of the crash are colored by the fact that the bomber was carrying equipment from Project Banshee, a secret Air Force missile development initiative. The initial report is meticulously factual, providing an almost minute-by-minute account of the events preceding the crash as told by the four survivors and intensive examination of the debris. The report concludes that it would benefit future B-29 pilots to have more training on flying the plane when it has lost both engines on one wing, and a general recommendation that the pilot and crew should give civilian passengers better instruction in emergency procedures. Though the report is circumspect in the extreme in finding fault with the pilot and military personnel for the crash, and gives only vague and generalized recommendations to help prevent future crashes, the Air Force will heatedly deny that the pilots or crew could have been in any way responsible for the crash. In 2008, reporter Barry Siegel will write, “Years later, this particular claim, in fact Air Materiel Command’s entire position, would cause various veteran aviators to hoot.” Pilot error causing the crash is obvious, they will conclude. [Siegel, 2008, pp. 62-65]

Entity Tags: US Department of the Air Force, Barry Siegel, Air Materiel Command, Project Banshee

Category Tags: Expansion of Presidential Power, Government Acting in Secret, Government Classification, State Secrets

Frank Folsom, the executive vice president of the Radio Corporation of America’s RCA Victor Division, writes a letter to General Hoyt Vandenberg, the commander of the US Air Force. Folsom is inquiring about the deaths of two RCA employees in a recent B-29 crash in Georgia (see October 6, 1948). The plane had been on a secret test mission for the Air Force’s Project Banshee, a missile development project in which RCA is heavily involved. Folsom believes that the Air Force is downplaying the likelihood that pilot error caused the crash (see October 18, 1948), and tells Vandenberg that “certain steps will [need to be taken] if we are to participate in the future in Air Force flight test programs.” Folsom wants more pay and compensation for RCA employees participating in Air Force test programs, as well as newer and safer airplanes to be used in the test flights and a higher caliber of test pilots and crew members. Perhaps the portion of the letter that causes the most consternation among Air Force officials is Folsom’s request to read over the official accident reports. “When a crash has occurred, a copy of the official report… must be made available promptly to us,” he writes. “Needless to say, the report will not be disclosed except to those who are directly concerned.” Folsom’s letter will spark a new round of Air Force investigations into the crash, in hopes of mollifying Folsom. However, the report from this investigation will be classified at the highest level of security and not provided to RCA. Additionally, though the second investigation will find a strong likelihood of pilot error causing the crash, the Air Force will not admit any such findings to RCA. [Siegel, 2008, pp. 65-80] These accident reports will play a key role in the lawsuit filed against the US government by three widows of killed crew members (see June 21, 1949 and August 7-8, 1950).

Entity Tags: Hoyt Vandenberg, Frank Folsom, Project Banshee, Radio Corporation of America, US Department of the Air Force

Category Tags: Expansion of Presidential Power, Government Acting in Secret, Government Classification, State Secrets

The National Security Resources Board (NSRB) adopts a national censorship plan designed to restrict the free flow of information to the public in the event of a national emergency or war. The government assumes the power to censor communications and suspend freedoms of the press. An NSRB document outlining the program says censorship may be activated in a “time of war or of national emergency proclaimed by the president and found by him to arise from the use or threat of force by a foreign power.” The new NSRB plan is an extension of a program established during World War II. Author Ted Galen Carpenter will later comment: “Although advocates of censorship habitually insisted that it would only by invoked during wartime, the guidelines contained no such limitation. A declaration of war was not required; merely a declaration of emergency arising from a perceived foreign menace.” [Carpenter, 1995, pp. 112-113]

Entity Tags: National Security Resources Board, Ted Galen Carpenter, Office of Censorship

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Continuity of Government

Phyllis Brauner and Elizabeth Palya, who both lost their husbands in the “Project Banshee” B-29 crash (see October 6, 1948), file a civil action lawsuit against the US government in regards to the crash. The lawsuit claims that the US Air Force, in the person of the pilot and military crew members of the B-29, caused the deaths of their civilian husbands by “the negligence and wrongful acts and omissions of the officers and employees” of the US. The widows’ lawyer, Charles Biddle, asks the government for $300,000 per family. A third widow, Patricia Reynolds, will join the lawsuit in September 1949. One of the biggest issues surrounding the case is the lawsuit’s request that Biddle and his lawyers be given access to the official accident reports, which the government will claim cannot be revealed because they may contain classified information (see October 18, 1948 and August 7-8, 1950). Biddle’s promise that no one else will see the reports makes no impression on the government’s lawyers. [Siegel, 2008, pp. 100-101]

Entity Tags: Elizabeth Palya, Charles Biddle, Patricia Reynolds, Phyllis Brauner, US Department of the Air Force, Project Banshee

Category Tags: Expansion of Presidential Power, Government Acting in Secret, Government Classification, State Secrets

The FBI, led by director J. Edgar Hoover, begins to “accumulate the names, identities, and activities” of American citizens who are regarded as suspect. The information is gathered in a “security index,” which rapidly expands. In a letter to the White House during the Truman administration, Hoover will state that in the event of certain emergency situations, suspect individuals would be held in detention camps overseen by “the National Military Establishment.” By 1960, a congressional investigation will later reveal, the FBI list of suspicious persons will include “professors, teachers, and educators; labor-union organizers and leaders; writers, lecturers, newsmen, and others in the mass-media field; lawyers, doctors, and scientists; other potentially influential persons on a local or national level; [and] individuals who could potentially furnish financial or material aid” to unnamed “subversive elements.” [Radar, 5/2008]

Entity Tags: Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover

Category Tags: Database Programs, Privacy

With the approval of President Harry S. Truman, the US government constructs a massive 200,000-square-foot underground facility along the Maryland-Pennsylvania border, about seven miles north of Camp David and about 65 miles north of Washington, DC. Site-R at Raven Rock, officially known as the Alternate Joint Communications Center, is one of 96 bunkers being assembled around the nation’s capital in preparation for a potential nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union (see 1950-1962). Site-R is designed to serve as a complete backup to the Pentagon in times of war and is complete with state-of-the-art technology, alternate command posts, war rooms, and living spaces for top officials. The subterranean fortress resembles a small city, with all the basic necessities for sustaining a population in the thousands for months at a time. The site is equipped with its own self-generating power supply, offices, medical clinic, fire department, mail service center, dining halls, and dormitories. The facility is said to have its own a chapel, two fishing lakes, a barbershop, a drug store, and even a bowling alley. There are also rumors that an underground tunnel connects Site-R to Camp David less than 10 miles to the south. Decades later, Vice President Dick Cheney and other high-ranking officials will relocate to Site-R in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (see (11:00 a.m.) September 11, 2001 and September 12, 2001-2002). [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 8/7/1985; Washington Post, 5/31/1992; New York Times, 12/2/2000; Gannett News Service, 6/25/2002; Knight Ridder, 7/20/2004]

Entity Tags: Harry S. Truman, Site R, Camp David

Category Tags: Continuity of Government, Government Acting in Secret

Fears of a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union inspire the US government to construct a network of 96 nuclear-resistant fallout shelters around Washington, DC. The underground “Federal Relocation Centers,” collectively known as the “Federal Relocation Arc,” are designed to serve as both living quarters and command bunkers for a post-nuclear government. The underground installations will later be described as the “backbone” of the ultra-secretive Continuity of Government (COG) program, which is meant to keep the government functioning in times of national emergency. Under Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, the US government spends billions of dollars carving out caves and assembling the underground fortresses in preparation for nuclear war. Upon completion, the bunkers are said to resemble small cities, each capable of sustaining a population in the thousands for months at a time. Each facility is equipped with its own self-generating power supply, fresh water source, living quarters, food rations, command posts, telecommunications equipment, and other requirements for housing officials and running the federal government from deep underground. In the event of a crisis, high-ranking officials, most notably the president and those in the presidential chain of command, are to be secretly whisked away to the underground installations in order to ensure the continuation of government functions. Some of the known underground locations include Mount Weather, fortified within the Blue Ridge Mountains about 50 miles west of Washington, DC (see 1952-1958); Site R, along the Maryland-Pennsylvania border near Camp David (see 1950-1954); and the Greenbrier, underneath a hotel resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia (see 1959-1962). [Progressive, 3/1976; Time, 12/9/1991; Washington Post, 5/31/1992; Time, 8/10/1992; New York Times, 12/2/2000; Gannett News Service, 6/25/2002]

Entity Tags: Dwight Eisenhower, Mount Weather, Site R, Harry S. Truman, Greenbrier

Category Tags: Continuity of Government, Government Acting in Secret

President Harry Truman, without the approval of Congress, sends US troops to fight in the Korean War. Unlike his predecessor (see December 8, 1941), Truman asserts that he has the inherent right to do so as the commander in chief (see 1787 and 1793). Truman bases his decision in part on a UN Security Council resolution passed three days before—at the US’s behest—approving military aid to South Korea, which was invaded by North Korean troops on June 25. In 2007, reporter and author Charlie Savage will write: “But the permission of foreign states was irrelevant to the domestic legal issue of who got to decide whether the United States would go to war. No president had ever before launched anything on the scale of the Korean War without prior permission from Congress, as the Constitution requires.” Savage will explain why Congress allows Truman to usurp its prerogatives: “[M]embers of Congress, eager to appear tough against Communism and to support a war effort, did nothing to block Truman.” [Savage, 2007, pp. 19; Truman Library, 3/2008]

Entity Tags: Harry S. Truman, United Nations Security Council, Charlie Savage

Category Tags: Expansion of Presidential Power

A federal judge orders the Air Force to turn over copies of its classified accident reports about a B-29 crash (see October 6, 1948) as part of a lawsuit filed by three of the widows of crew members killed in the crash (see June 21, 1949). Claiming that the reports may contain classified information about a secret missile development project, Project Banshee, the Air Force not only refuses to turn over the accident reports to the widows’ lawyer, it refuses to allow even the attorney general to view the documents (see August 7-8, 1950). The lawyer for the widows, Charles Biddle, will continue to press for the release of the accident reports. [Siegel, 2008, pp. 120-123]

Entity Tags: Charles Biddle, Project Banshee, US Department of the Air Force

Category Tags: Expansion of Presidential Power, Government Acting in Secret, Government Classification, State Secrets

The Air Force refuses to meet the court-imposed deadline to turn over accident reports of a 1948 B-29 crash in Georgia (see October 6, 1948) to the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the government (see July 26, 1950). Instead, the Justice Department argues before the court that because the accident reports might contain “state secrets” that might imperil “national security” if made available to anyone outside the Air Force, the reports cannot be made available. “[T]he aircraft in question, together with the personnel on board, were engaged in a highly secret mission of the Air Force,” the government lawyers argue. “The airplane likewise carried confidential equipment on board and any disclosure of its mission or information concerning its operation or performance would be prejudicial to this department and would not be in the public interest.” Such a claim—that the production of the reports would “seriously hamper national security”—renders the reports “beyond judicial authority,” the Justice Department lawyers claim. [Siegel, 2008, pp. 124-126]

Entity Tags: US Department of the Air Force, US Department of Justice

Category Tags: Expansion of Presidential Power, Government Acting in Secret, Government Classification, State Secrets

Weeks after the Justice Department refused to make accident reports of a 1948 B-29 crash (see October 6, 1948) available to the plaintiffs in an ongoing wrongful death lawsuit against the government (see July 26, 1950) because the reports are so highly classified that their disclosure might “seriously hamper national security” (see July 26, 1950 and August 7-8, 1950), the Air Force, in a routine review, drastically lowers the classification of the accident reports from top-level “Secret” to third-level “Restricted.” Whereas “Secret” documents supposedly contain information that “might endanger national security” if revealed, “Restricted” documents are “for official use only” and should not be disclosed “for reasons of administrative privacy.” The Air Force apparently no longer considers the documents a threat to national security. However, neither the plaintiffs’ lawyers, the judge hearing the lawsuit, or even the Justice Department lawyers are aware of the reports’ reduction in status. They continue to argue the merits of releasing the reports as if they are still highly classified. [Siegel, 2008, pp. 133]

Entity Tags: US Department of the Air Force, US Department of Justice

Category Tags: Expansion of Presidential Power, Government Acting in Secret, Government Classification, State Secrets

Federal judge William H. Kirkpatrick rules that the US government must turn over the disputed, and supposedly highly classified (see September 14, 1950), accident reports from a 1948 B-29 crash (see October 6, 1948)—not to the plaintiffs in the lawsuit over the crash (see July 26, 1950), but to Kirkpatrick himself. He wishes to review the reports to determine if they contain any information that might threaten national security, and, before turning the documents over to the plaintiffs’ lawyers, will personally remove that information. In mid-October, when the government again refuses to turn over the documents, Kirkpatrick will find in favor of the plaintiffs (see October 12, 1950). [Siegel, 2008, pp. 133-134]

Entity Tags: US Department of Justice, William H. Kirkpatrick

Category Tags: Court Procedures and Verdicts, Expansion of Presidential Power, Government Acting in Secret, Government Classification, State Secrets

Federal judge William H. Kirkpatrick rules in favor of the plaintiffs in a wrongful death lawsuit against the US government (see October 6, 1948, June 21, 1949, and July 26, 1950), after the government refuses to turn over classified accident reports that have a direct bearing on the plaintiffs’ case (see September 21, 1950). Judge Kirkpatrick orders the government to pay the plaintiffs, three widows who lost their husbands in a 1948 plane crash, a total of $225,000. The plaintiffs’ lawyer, Charles Biddle, expects the government to balk at paying out the money, and to instead continue to challenge the court’s attempt to compel it to turn over the accident reports (see October 19, 1951). [Siegel, 2008, pp. 134-139]

Entity Tags: Charles Biddle, William H. Kirkpatrick

Category Tags: Court Procedures and Verdicts, Expansion of Presidential Power, Government Acting in Secret, Government Classification, State Secrets

President Harry S. Truman signs Executive Order 10186, shifting many responsibilities of the National Security Resources Board (NSRB), which oversees federal emergency planning, to a new civil defense organization, the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA). The FCDA is placed within the Office of Emergency Management (OEM), an agency established as part of the Executive Office of the President years earlier by President Franklin Roosevelt (see September 8, 1939). The purpose of the FCDA, according to President’s Truman’s order, “shall be to promote and facilitate the civil defense of the United States in cooperation with several States.” [Executive Order 10186, 12/1/1950] The Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950 will be signed into law weeks later, establishing the FCDA as an independent agency and detailing the organization’s responsibilities (see January 12, 1951)

Entity Tags: Federal Civil Defense Administration, Harry S. Truman, Office of Emergency Management

Category Tags: Continuity of Government

President Harry S. Truman signs Executive Order 10193, establishing the Office of Defense Mobilization (ODM) within the Executive Office of the President. The ODM is granted a wide range of emergency powers in order to mobilize civilians, industries and government agencies to defend the country during a crisis. As part of a broad “mobilization” effort, President Truman calls for increasing the number of total armed forces, increasing defense spending, and expanding the economy to increase war production. President Truman declares a national emergency and delegates many of his war powers to the head of the ODM. According to the New York Times, “President Truman proclaimed a state of emergency this morning and delegated many of his own war powers to Charles E. Wilson, the new mobilization director.” Citing the threat of “Communist imperialism,” President Truman “signed the proclamation of emergency, which unleashed scores of additional executive powers, and issued an executive order granting virtually blanket authority to Mr. Wilson to carry out all aspects of war production and economic control he deemed necessary.” According to the order, the mobilization director “shall on behalf of the president direct, control, and coordinate all mobilization activities of the executive branch of the government, including but not limited to production, procurement, manpower, stabilization, and transport activities.” [Executive Order 10193, 12/16/1950; New York Times, 12/16/1950, pp. 1; New York Times, 12/16/1950, pp. 1]

Entity Tags: Office of Defense Mobilization, Charles E. Wilson, Harry S. Truman

Category Tags: Continuity of Government

President Harry S. Truman signs the Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950. The Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA), established weeks earlier within the Executive Office of the President (see December 1, 1950), is transformed into an independent agency headed by a presidential appointee. The FCDA is placed in charge of providing emergency aid and assistance to local communities affected by disasters. The act also provides special emergency powers to the FCDA and the President in the event of a national crisis. According to President Truman, the act establishes a “basic framework for preparations to minimize the effects of an attack on our civilian population, and to deal with the immediate emergency conditions which such an attack would create.” According to the New York Times, “The measure directs the Federal Government to provide leadership to states and communities in developing arrangements to protect civilian life and property in the country’s 150 critical target areas against possible enemy attack by atomic bombs, biological or bacteriological warfare or any other technique.” The new civil defense plans are estimated to cost $3.1 billion. The FCDA will distribute brochures and produce television and radio segments aimed at preparing the general public for a nuclear attack. The FCDA will also stage drills and exercises to test public and government readiness for such a disaster. The agency will become infamous for encouraging civilians to “duck and cover” in the event of a nuclear strike. [Statement by the President Upon Signing the Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950, 1/12/1951; New York Times, 1/12/1951, pp. 7; Slate, 2/20/2003; Henry B. Hogue and Keith Bea, 6/1/2006, pp. 10 ]

Entity Tags: Harry S. Truman, Federal Civil Defense Administration

Category Tags: Continuity of Government

J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), tells the House Appropriations Committee that the FBI is prepared to arrest 14,000 purported communists inside the US in the event of war with Russia. James M. McInerney, assistant attorney general, refuses to provide the committee with details regarding those on the list, but says they are “either out-and-out Communists” or are “sympathetic toward the Communist cause.” The officials are apparently referring to the FBI’s Security Index, which was established in 1943 (see 1943 and Early 1943-1971). [New York Times, 4/28/1951]

Entity Tags: Federal Bureau of Investigation, House Committee on Appropriations, J. Edgar Hoover, James M. McInerney, US Department of Justice

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Detainments in US

The government, represented by a team of Justice Department lawyers, appeals the recent ruling against it in the ‘Banshee’ B-29 plane crash lawsuit (see June 21, 1949). In the Third US Circuit Appeals Court, the government argues that the lower court had no business demanding that the Air Force turn over classified accident reports about the crash, because the reports may contain information that would potentially compromise national security (see October 12-18, 1948 and September 14, 1950). The government had twice defied court orders to produce the documents, and as a result had lost the lawsuit (see October 12, 1950). The Justice Department’s arguments come down to the assertion that the judiciary has no constitutional right to compel the executive branch to turn over documents it considers privileged. In 2008, author Barry Siegel will write, “For the first time in the B-29 litigation, the government directly argued that the judiciary could not review [the government’s] claim of privilege.” The lawyer for the plaintiffs, Charles Biddle, counters that the executive branch has no such sweeping claim of privilege, and that a judge should be allowed to review documents in dispute to determine both their bearing on a case and the possibility that releasing those documents could jeopardize national security (see September 21, 1950). Three weeks later, the appeals court will rule unanimously against the government (see December 11, 1951). [Siegel, 2008, pp. 149-153]

Entity Tags: US Department of Justice, Charles Biddle, Barry Siegel

Category Tags: Expansion of Presidential Power, Government Acting in Secret, Government Classification, State Secrets

A three-judge federal appeals court unanimously rejects the government’s claim of unfettered executive privilege and secrecy in regards to classified documents (see October 19, 1951). In an opinion written by Judge Albert Maris, the court finds that the government’s claim that the judiciary can never compel the executive branch to turn over classified documents to be without legal merit. The plaintiffs in the case, three widows who lost their husbands in the crash of a B-29 bomber carrying classified materials (see June 21, 1949), had a compelling need for the documents in question, the downed B-29 accident reports, to further their case, Maris writes (see October 12, 1950).
No Legal Basis for Claim of Privilege - Maris goes further than the parameters of the single lawsuit, writing: “[W]e regard the recognition of such a sweeping privilege… as contrary to a sound public policy. The present cases themselves indicate the breadth of the claim of immunity from disclosure which one government department head has already made. It is but a small step to assert a privilege against any disclosure of records merely because they might prove embarrassing to government officials. Indeed, it requires no great flight of imagination to realize that if the government’s contentions in these cases were affirmed, the privilege against disclosure might gradually be enlarged… until as is the case in some nations today, it embraced the whole range of government activities.… We need to recall in this connection the words of [Revolution-era jurist] Edward Livingston: ‘No nation ever yet found any inconvenience from too close an inspection into the conduct of its officers, but many have been brought to ruin, and reduced to slavery, by suffering gradual imposition and abuses, which were imperceptible, only because the means of publicity had not been secured.’” He also quotes Revolutionary War figure Patrick Henry, who said, “[T]o cover with the veil of secrecy the common routine of business is an abomination in the eyes of every intelligent man and every friend to his country.”
Rejecting Claim of 'State Secrets' - Maris is even less respectful of the government’s claim of a “state secrets” privilege. He notes that the government did not make that claim until well into the lawsuit proceedings (see October 19, 1951), indicating that it was a “fallback” argument used after the original government arguments had failed. Maris is also troubled, as author Barry Siegel later writes, in the government’s “assertion of unilateral executive power, free from judicial review, to decide what qualified as secret.” The lower court judge’s ruling that he alone should be given the documents for review adequately protected the government’s security interests, Maris writes: “[But] the government contends that it is within the sole province of the secretary of the Air Force to determine whether any privileged material is contained in the documents and that his determination of this question must be accepted by the district court without any independent consideration.… We cannot accede to this proposition. On the contrary, we are satisfied that a claim of privilege against disclosing evidence… involves a justiciable question, traditionally within the competence of the courts.… To hold that the head of an executive department of the government in a [law]suit to which the United States is a party may conclusively determine the government’s claim of privilege is to abdicate the judicial function to infringe the independent province of the judiciary as laid down by the Constitution.”
Fundamental Principle of Checks and Balances - Maris continues: “The government of the United States is one of checks and balances. One of the principal checks is furnished by the independent judiciary which the Constitution established. Neither the executive nor the legislative branch of the government may constitutionally encroach upon the field which the Constitution has reserved for the judiciary.… Nor is there any danger to the public interest in submitting the question of privilege to the decision of the courts. The judges of the United States are public officers whose responsibilities under the Constitution is just as great as that of the heads of the executive departments.”
Government Appeal - The Justice Department will appeal the ruling to the US Supreme Court (see March 1952 and March 9, 1953). [Siegel, 2008, pp. 153-156]

Entity Tags: Albert Maris, US Department of Justice, Barry Siegel, US Supreme Court

Category Tags: Expansion of Presidential Power, Government Acting in Secret, Government Classification, State Secrets

The National Security Agency (NSA) is founded. It is the successor to the State Department’s “Black Chamber” and other military code-breaking and eavesdropping operations dating back to the earliest days of telegraph and telephone communications. It will eventually become the largest of all US intelligence agencies, with over 30,000 employees at its Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters. It focuses on electronic surveillance, operating a large network of satellites and listening devices around the globe. More even than the CIA, the NSA is the most secretive of US intelligence organizations, [New York Times, 12/16/2005] The agency will remain little known by the general public until the release of the 1998 film Enemy of the State, which will portray the NSA as an evil “Big Brother” agency spying on Americans as a matter of course. [CNN, 3/31/2001] After it is disclosed during the 1970s that the NSA spied on political dissenters and civil rights protesters, the NSA will be restricted to operating strictly overseas, and will be prohibited from monitoring US citizens within US borders without special court orders. [New York Times, 12/16/2005]

Entity Tags: US Department of State, Central Intelligence Agency, George W. Bush, National Security Agency

Category Tags: Government Acting in Secret, NSA Wiretapping / Stellar Wind, Other Surveillance

A roughly 200,000-square-foot facility known as Mount Weather, codenamed “Operation High Point,” is constructed deep within an isolated strip of the Blue Ridge Mountains, approximately 50 miles west of Washington, DC. The installation, finished in 1958 at the cost of more than $1 billion, will serve as the flagship of a secret network of nuclear resistant shelters currently being constructed around the nation’s capital (see 1950-1962). Mount Weather is designed to be the headquarters of a post-nuclear government in the event of a full-scale war with the Soviet Union. Construction of the facility is authorized under the highly classified Continuity of Government program, meant to ensure the survival of the federal government in times of extreme emergency. The enormous complex resembles a miniature city, capable of supporting a population in the thousands for months at a time. Mount Weather is equipped with its own streets and sidewalks, dormitories, offices, a hospital, television and radio studios, reservoirs of drinking and cooling water, dining halls, stockpiles of food, a power plant, a sewage treatment plant, a crematorium, government and military command posts—everything needed to sustain and run an underground government during and after a nuclear war. A parallel executive branch will be stationed at Mount Weather to take over the functions of the federal government in the event of a disaster (see March 1976). In the 1960s and 1970s Mount Weather will develop a “Civil Crisis Management” program, designed to monitor and manage potential resource shortages, labor strikes, and political uprisings (see 1967-1976). Mount Weather will be accused in the 1970s of spying on US citizens (see September 9, 1975). In December 1974, a passenger airliner will crash into the mountainside, drawing public attention to the secret installation for the first time (see 11:10 a.m. December 1, 1974). [Progressive, 3/1976; Emerson, 8/7/1989; Time, 12/9/1991; Time, 8/10/1992]

Entity Tags: Mount Weather

Category Tags: Continuity of Government, Government Acting in Secret

The Justice Department appeals the ruling of the US Appeals Court in the B-29 “Banshee” case (see December 11, 1951). The appellate judges found that the executive branch of government could not unilaterally refuse to hand over classified documents requested during the course of a trial, and justify its decision merely by its own say-so (see October 12, 1950). Solicitor General Philip Perlman argues that the appellate ruling erroneously interprets the law “so as to permit encroachments by the judiciary on an area committed by the Constitution to executive discretion.” The claim of “state secrets,” “executive privilege,” and, ultimately, “national security” must trump judicial concerns, Perlman argues, and he goes on to say that the judiciary should not be allowed to “substitute its judgment for the judgment of the executive.” The case will be labeled United States of America v. Patricia Reynolds, Phyllis Brauner, and Elizabeth Palya, and will usually be shortened to the more colloquial US v. Reynolds.
The Vinson Court - In 2008, author Barry Siegel, in his book Claim of Privilege, will note that the recent ascension of Fred Vinson as the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice does not bode well for the plaintiffs in the case. President Truman placed Vinson, whom Siegel calls Truman’s “poker and drinking buddy,” as Chief Justice to try to achieve consensus between the two contentious blocs of justices on the Court. Siegel notes that Vinson is widely considered an intellectual and legal lightweight, with a tendency to take the side of the government on issues in which he lacks a full understanding. Siegel will write that in many instances, Vinson functions “as part of the executive branch.”
'Dennis' Case Preview of Court's Tendency to Favor Executive Branch - Vinson had written the opinion in a 1951 ruling, Dennis et al v. United States, where the Court had upheld a lower court ruling that twelve acknowledged American Communists were sent to jail under the Smith Act—not for breaking the law, but for “teaching and advocating,” in the words of the original indictment. Siegel will call that ruling “the nadir of the Vinson Court.” According to Siegel, the Dennis ruling showed the Court’s predisposition to give the government, and particularly the executive branch, plenty of leeway in its findings in subsequent cases such as Reynolds. [Siegel, 2008, pp. 157-162]

Entity Tags: Fred Vinson, Elizabeth Palya, US Supreme Court, US Department of Justice, Barry Siegel, Harry S. Truman, Phyllis Brauner, Philip Perlman, Patricia Reynolds

Category Tags: Expansion of Presidential Power, Government Acting in Secret, Government Classification, State Secrets

President Harry S. Truman signs Executive Order 10346, ordering the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) to coordinate “continuity” plans within the federal government. The plans will be designed to ensure the continuation of essential government functions in the event of a major disaster, such as a nuclear attack on Washington DC. According to the order, “each Federal department and agency shall prepare plans for maintaining the continuity of its essential functions at the seat of government and elsewhere during the existence of a civil-defense emergency.” In addition to the FCDA, the National Security Resources Board (NSRB), established by the National Security of Act of 1947, (See July 26, 1947), is to play an advisory role in the emergency plans. [Executive Order 10346, 4/17/1952]

Entity Tags: Harry S. Truman, National Security Resources Board, Federal Civil Defense Administration

Category Tags: Continuity of Government

The US Supreme Court rules that the federal government cannot seize the nation’s steel mills. In April, President Truman, fearing a nationwide strike that could impact the US war effort in Korea, ordered the seizure of all US steel mills; the lawsuit that resulted, Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, quickly made its way to the Supreme Court.
Rejection of 'Inherent Powers' Claim - During oral arguments, the justices grilled Acting Attorney General Philip Perlman, demanding to know what statutes he had relied on for his arguments and asserting that the president had limitations both on his emergency wartime powers and on his ability to claim that he is the “sole judge” of the existence of, and remedies for, an emergency. The justices are not convinced by the government’s arguments for the president’s “inherent powers.” They are also troubled by repeated refusals of the government to provide facts and documentary backing for its legal arguments, and its reliance instead on claims of “national security.” The attorney for the steel industry, John Davis, quoted Thomas Jefferson in his argument: “In questions of power, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” Justice William O. Douglas noted that if the government’s claims were valid, there would be “no more need for Congress.”
Court Rejects Argument - In a 6-3 vote, the Court rules that the president has no inherent power to seize the steel mills. Writing for the majority, Justice Hugo Black states: “In the framework of our Constitution, the president’s power to see that the laws are faithfully executed refutes the idea that he is to be a lawmaker.… The founders of this nation entrusted the lawmaking power to the Congress alone in both good and bad times.… This is a job for the nation’s lawmakers.” In a concurring opinion, Justice Robert Jackson writes, “No penance would ever expiate the sin against free government of holding that a president can escape control of executive powers by law through assuming his military role.” In his dissent, Chief Justice Fred Vinson (see March 1952) argues that “the gravity of the emergency” overrides the Constitutional arguments accepted by the majority of the Court. “Those who suggest that this is a case involving extraordinary powers should be mindful that these are extraordinary times. A world not yet recovered from the devastation of World War II has been forced to face the threat of another and more terrifying global conflict.” [Savage, 2007, pp. 123; Siegel, 2008, pp. 163-164] In 2007, reporter and author Charlie Savage will observe that the Youngstown decision “turned out to be only a pause in the movement toward an increasingly authoritarian presidency.” [Savage, 2007, pp. 19]

Entity Tags: William O. Douglas, John Davis, Hugo Black, Charlie Savage, Fred Vinson, Harry S. Truman, Philip Perlman, US Supreme Court

Category Tags: Court Procedures and Verdicts, Expansion of Presidential Power, Government Acting in Secret, Government Classification

Lawyers make their opening arguments before the Supreme Court in the case of US v Reynolds, the lawsuit that finds the government had no overarching right to unilaterally refuse to deliver classified documents in the course of a wrongful death lawsuit against the government (see December 11, 1951). The government has appealed the appellate court ruling to the Supreme Court (see March 1952). Because four of the nine justices had voted not to hear the case—in essence to let the appellate court ruling stand—the defense is cautiously optimistic about the Court’s decision.
Judiciary Has No Right to Interfere with Powers of the Executive, Government Argues - Acting Solicitor General Robert Stern tells the Court that the appellate judges’ decision, written by Judge Albert Maris, “is an unwarranted interference with the powers of the executive,” and that the decision forced the government to choose “whether to disclose public documents contrary to the public interest [or] to suffer the public treasury to be penalized” (a reference to the decision to award the plaintiffs monetary damages—see October 12, 1950). The judiciary “lack[s] power to compel disclosure by means of a direct demand [as well as] by the indirect method of an order against the United States, resulting in judgment when compliance is not forthcoming.”
Executive Has No Right to Unilaterally Withhold Information, Defense Counters - Stern’s arguments are countered by those of the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Charles Biddle, who writes, “We could rest our case with confidence on the clear opinion of Judge Maris,” but continues by arguing that if the government asserts a claim of executive privilege on the basis of national security, it must make the documents available to the Court for adjudication, or at least provide enough information for the Court to judge whether the documents present in fact a threat to national security if disclosed. This is particularly true, Biddle argues, “where there is no showing that the documents in question contain any military secret” (Biddle is unaware that the documents’ classification status had been reduced two years before—see September 14, 1950). “The basic question here is whether those in charge of the various departments of the government may refuse to produce documents properly demanded… in a case where the government is a party (see June 21, 1949), simply because the officials themselves think it would be better to keep them secret, and this without the Courts having any power to question the propriety of such decision.… In other words, say the officials, we will tell you only what we think it is in the public interest that you should know. And furthermore, we may withhold information not only about military or diplomatic secrets, but we may also suppress documents which concern merely the operation of the particular department if we believe it would be best, for purposes of efficiency or morale, that no one outside of the department, not even the Court, should see them.”
No Basis for Claims of Military Secrets - Biddle argues that because of responses he has received to his demands over the course of this lawsuit, he is relatively sure there are no military secrets contained within them. “[T]he proof is to the contrary,” he says, and goes on to say that had the Air Force disclosed from the outset that the plane crash, the fatal accident that sparked the original lawsuit (see October 6, 1948), was probably caused by pilot error and not by random chance, the plaintiffs may have never needed to ask for the disclosure of the documents in question, the accident reports on the crash (see October 18, 1948). “The secretary [of the Air Force]‘s formal claim of privilege said that the plane at the time was engaged in a secret mission and that it carried confidential equipment,” Biddle says, “but nowhere was it asserted that either had anything to do with the accident. The whole purpose of the demand by the respondents was for the purpose of finding out what caused the accident.… They were not in the least interested in the secret mission or equipment.” [Siegel, 2008, pp. 165-170]

Entity Tags: US Supreme Court, Albert Maris, Robert Stern, US Department of the Air Force, Charles Biddle

Category Tags: Expansion of Presidential Power, Government Acting in Secret, Government Classification, State Secrets

In their regular Saturday conference, the nine Supreme Court justices discuss the issues and arguments surrounding US v Reynolds (see October 21, 1952). According to the notes from the discussion, Chief Justice Fred Vinson, a strong advocate for expansive executive powers (see March 1952), says the case “boils down to Executive Branch determine privilege.” Other notes by Justice William O. Douglas suggest that Vinson isn’t convinced that the US must “be forced to pay for exercising its privilege” (see October 12, 1950). A straw vote taken at the end of the discussion shows five justices in favor of the government’s position to unilaterally withhold classified documents—overturning the appellate court decision (see December 11, 1951), and four in favor of allowing the decision to stand. [Siegel, 2008, pp. 171]

Entity Tags: Fred Vinson, US Supreme Court, William O. Douglas

Category Tags: Expansion of Presidential Power, Government Acting in Secret, Government Classification, State Secrets

Chief Justice Fred Vinson. [Source: Kansas State Historical Society]The US Supreme Court upholds the power of the federal government’s executive branch to withhold documents from a civil suit on the basis of executive privilege and national security (see October 25, 1952). The case, US v Reynolds, overturns an appellate court decision that found against the government (see December 11, 1951). Originally split 5-4 on the decision, the Court goes to 6-3 when Justice William O. Douglas joins the majority. The three dissenters, Justices Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, and Robert Jackson, refuse to write a dissenting opinion, instead adopting the decision of the appellate court as their dissent.
'State Secrets' a Valid Reason for Keeping Documents out of Judicial, Public Eye - Chief Justice Fred Vinson writes the majority opinion. Vinson refuses to grant the executive branch the near-unlimited power to withhold documents from judicial review, as the government’s arguments before the court implied (see October 21, 1952), but instead finds what he calls a “narrower ground for defense” in the Tort Claims Act, which compels the production of documents before a court only if they are designated “not privileged.” The government’s claim of privilege in the Reynolds case was valid, Vinson writes. But the ruling goes farther; Vinson upholds the claim of “state secrets” as a reason for withholding documents from judicial review or public scrutiny. In 2008, author Barry Siegel will write: “In truth, only now was the Supreme Court formally recognizing the privilege, giving the government the precedent it sought, a precedent binding on all courts throughout the nation. Most important, the Court was also—for the first time—spelling out how the privilege should be applied.” Siegel will call the Reynolds ruling “an effort to weigh competing legitimate interests,” but the ruling does not allow judges to see the documents in order to make a decision about their applicability in a court case: “By instructing judges not to insist upon examining documents if the government can satisfy that ‘a reasonable danger’ to national security exists, Vinson was asking jurists to fly blind.” Siegel will mark the decision as “an act of faith. We must believe the government,” he will write, “when it claims [the accident] would reveal state secrets. We must trust that the government is telling the truth.”
Time of Heightened Tensions Drives Need for Secrecy - Vinson goes on to note, “[W]e cannot escape judicial notice that this is a time of vigorous preparation for the national defense.” Locked in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and fighting a war in Korea, the US is, Vinson writes, in a time of crisis, and one where military secrets must be kept and even encouraged. [U. S. v. Reynolds, 3/9/1953; Siegel, 2008, pp. 171-176]
Future Ramifications - Reflecting on the decision in 2008, Siegel will write that while the case will not become as well known as many other Court decisions, it will wield significant influence. The ruling “formally recognized and established the framework for the government’s ‘state secrets’ privilege—a privilege that for decades had enabled federal agencies to conceal conduct, withhold documents, and block civil litigation, all in the name of national secrecy.… By encouraging judicial deference when the government claimed national security secrets, Reynolds had empowered the Executive Branch in myriad ways. Among other things, it had provided a fundamental legal argument for much of the Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Enemy combatants such as Yaser Esam Hamdi (see December 2001) and Jose Padilla (see June 10, 2002), for many months confined without access to lawyers, had felt the breath of Reynolds. So had the accused terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui when federal prosecutors defied a court order allowing him access to other accused terrorists (see March 22, 2005). So had the Syrian-Canadian Maher Arar (see September 26, 2002), like dozens of others the subject of a CIA extraordinary rendition to a secret foreign prison (see After September 11, 2001). So had hundreds of detainees at the US Navy Base at Guantanamo Bay, held without charges or judicial review (see September 27, 2001). So had millions of American citizens, when President Bush, without judicial knowledge or approval, authorized domestic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency (see Early 2002). US v. Reynolds made all this possible. The bedrock of national security law, it had provided a way for the Executive Branch to formalize an unprecedented power and immunity, to pull a veil of secrecy over its actions.” [Siegel, 2008, pp. ix-x]

Entity Tags: William O. Douglas, Zacarias Moussaoui, US Supreme Court, Yaser Esam Hamdi, Robert Jackson, Jose Padilla, Felix Frankfurter, Bush administration, Fred Vinson, Barry Siegel, George W. Bush, Hugo Black, Maher Arar

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Court Procedures and Verdicts, Expansion of Presidential Power, State Secrets, Government Classification

Reorganization Plan No. 3 of 1953 is signed into law, restructuring the Office of Defense Mobilization (ODM) within the Executive Office of the President. The ODM, originally created by President Harry S. Truman in December of 1950 (see December 16, 1950), will incorporate the responsibilities of the National Security Resources Board (NSRB), which shares similar objectives. The purpose of the ODM is to ensure the continuation of essential government and industry functions, particularly during times of crisis. President Dwight D. Eisenhower says merging the ODM and the NSRB will “enable one Executive Office agency to exercise strong leadership in our national mobilization effort, including both current defense activities and readiness for any future national emergency.” [New York Times, 4/3/1953, pp. 1; US Congress. House. Senate., 6/12/1953]

Entity Tags: Office of Defense Mobilization, National Security Resources Board, Dwight Eisenhower

Category Tags: Continuity of Government

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, attempting to protect government files from Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI)‘s anti-Communist “witch hunts” and to prevent government officials from being forced to testify at the Army’s hearings on McCarthy, cites a never-before-used phrase, “executive privilege,” to resist giving over information or allowing aides to testify. While presidents have withheld information from Congress before in narrow and defined circumstances—in 1792, George Washington refused to allow Congress and the courts to obtain information about a disastrous military expedition against Native Americans along the Ohio River, for example—Eisenhower is the first to assert that the executive branch has the right to withhold any internal documents or block officials from giving testimony to other branches or agencies of the government. In 2007, reporter and author Charlie Savage will write that Eisenhower’s actions “creat[ed] a potentially boundless new category of government information a president could deny to Congress.” [Savage, 2007, pp. 20; National Public Radio, 6/28/2007]

Entity Tags: Joseph McCarthy, Dwight Eisenhower, Charlie Savage

Category Tags: Expansion of Presidential Power

President Dwight D. Eisenhower appoints CBS executive Theodore F. Koop, who served as deputy director of the Office of Censorship during World War II, to head a new, secret, 26-member emergency censorship board. The group is placed in charge of developing plans to restrict the free flow of information to the public in the event of a national emergency or war. The plans were first adopted in 1949 (see 1949). Approximately 40 “civilian executives” agree to work for the standby censorship unit should a crisis lead to its activation. [Prescott Courier, 10/1/1970; Time, 8/10/1992; Carpenter, 1995, pp. 112-113]

Entity Tags: Dwight Eisenhower, Theodore F. Koop

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Media Freedoms, Continuity of Government

Reorganization Plan No. 1 of 1958 is signed into law, merging the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) and the Office of Defense Mobilization (ODM) into a single agency, the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization (OCDM). The OCDM will be responsible for ensuring the continuation of essential government and industry functions in the event of a national emergency. President Dwight D. Eisenhower submitted the reorganization plan to Congress in April 1958 with the intention of establishing a “single pattern with respect to the vesting of defense mobilization and civil defense functions.” In addition to merging the civil defense agencies, the reorganization plan transfers to the president the authorities previously delegated to the FCDA and the ODM (see December 1, 1950 and December 16, 1950). [Message of the President, 4/24/1958; US Congress. House. Senate., 7/1/1958]

Entity Tags: Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, Federal Civil Defense Administration, Office of Defense Mobilization, Dwight Eisenhower

Category Tags: Continuity of Government

The Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950 is amended, redefining the role played by the federal government in civil defense plans. Prior to the amendment, civil defense was primarily the responsibility of state and local authorities. The amendment, according to the New York Times, “sets forth a broadened program of Federal responsibility in support of local defense efforts.” The plan places the federal government in charge of providing “direction, coordination, guidance, and assistance to the states in administering and financing their civil defense effort.” Although programs set forth in the amendment will not be funded for several years, the legislation will eventually lead to the creation of a nationwide civil defense cadre. As a result, civil defense offices are established in counties, towns, cities, and states across the country. [New York Times, 11/9/1958, pp. 1; B. Wayne Blanchard, 2/5/2008, pp. 11, 12]

Category Tags: Continuity of Government

From 1959 to 1962, beneath a hotel resort known as the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, the government secretly constructs an installation to shelter leaders of Congress in times of national emergency. The massive facility is equipped with diesel generators, food stocks, drinking water, living spaces, luxury rooms, dining halls, state-of-the-art computers and telecommunications equipment, a television studio, and an incinerator. The shelter contains chambers for the House and Senate, as well as a larger room for joint sessions. The bunker is just one of nearly 100 shelters being constructed for government officials in preparation for a potential nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union (see 1950-1962). The facility would not be able to sustain a direct nuclear strike, but could shelter VIPs from radioactive fallout. The relocation center is operated by Forsythe Associates, which will later be described by the Washington Post as an “obscure company ostensibly based in Arlington.” Although designed for Congress, few members of the House and Senate will ever be told of the shelter’s existence. The Washington Post will later note: “Just how Congress was expected to reach the Greenbrier is unclear. It is at least a five-hour drive from the Capitol… an hour’s flight from Washington. And because very few members of Congress have been aware that the facility exists, it would take far longer than that to round them up.” [Washington Post, 5/31/1992] A report published by the Washington Post in May 1992 will expose the site to the public and lead to its official decommissioning in 1995 (see May 31, 1992-July 31, 1995).

Entity Tags: Forsythe Associates, Greenbrier

Category Tags: Continuity of Government, Government Acting in Secret

President John F. Kennedy signs Executive Order 10952, calling for a nationwide fallout shelter program. According to the New York Times, “President Kennedy today put the Pentagon in charge of a greatly increased [shelter] program to protect American civilians against the effects of nuclear attack.” The New York Times reports the program will “concentrate on public and quasi-public buildings—factories, office buildings, churches—where basements and other protected areas could be easily made into shelters for large numbers of persons.” The fallout shelters are expected to cost approximately $300 million. The plan is largely the creation of Frank B. Ellis, the new director of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization (OCDM). The White House reorganizes civil defense responsibilities within the federal government. The OCDM is renamed the Office of Emergency Planning (OEP) and several of the organization’s responsibilities are shifted to the Office of Civil Defense (OCD), a new organization established within the Department of Defense. [Executive Order 10952, 7/20/1961; New York Times, 7/21/1961, pp. 1; New York Times, 8/2/1961, pp. 1; New York Times, 8/31/1961, pp. 17]

Entity Tags: Office of Emergency Planning, Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, Office of Civil Defense, Frank B. Ellis, John F. Kennedy

Category Tags: Continuity of Government

Mount Weather, a secret underground government installation located about 50 miles west of Washington, DC (see 1950-1962), maintains a “Civil Crisis Management” program aimed at monitoring and managing civil emergencies, such as resource shortages, labor strikes, and political uprisings. The installation is a key component of the highly classified Continuity of Government (COG) program, which is meant to ensure the survival of the federal government in times of national emergency. “We try to monitor situations and get them before they become emergencies,” says Daniel J. Cronin, assistant director of the Federal Preparedness Agency (FPA), which is responsible for managing parts of the facility and program. As part of the program, Mount Weather collects and stores data regarding military and government installations, communications, transportation, energy and power, food supplies, manufacturing, wholesale and retail services, manpower, medical and educational institutions, sanitary facilities, population, and stockpiles of essential resources. The Progressive reports in 1976, “At the heart of the Civil Crisis Management program are two complicated computer systems called the ‘Contingency Impact Analysis System’ (CIAS) and the ‘Resource Interruption Monitoring System’ (RIMS).” The complex systems apparently interpret crisis situations, predict future outcomes, and provide possible solutions for emergencies. According to a 1974 FPA report obtained by The Progressive, CIAS and RIMS are used in close cooperation with private US companies “to develop a range of standby options, alternative programs… to control the economy in a crisis situation.” The Civil Crisis Management program is put on standby during several national anti-war demonstrations and inner city riots in 1967 and 1968. The program is activated during a 1973 Penn Railroad strike and is put to use again in 1974 when a strike by independent truckers threatens food and fuel shipments. By March 1976, the Civil Crisis Management program is being used on a daily basis to monitor potential emergencies. Senator John Tunney (D-CA) will claim in 1975 that Mount Weather has collected and stored data on at least 100,000 US citizens (see September 9, 1975). [Progressive, 3/1976]

Entity Tags: Federal Preparedness Agency, Mount Weather, John V. Tunney

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Privacy, Continuity of Government, Government Acting in Secret, Database Programs, Other Surveillance

US intelligence agencies, including the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI, run a clandestine and highly illegal surveillance operation called Project MINARET that uses “watch lists” to electronically and physically spy on “subversive” activities by civil rights and antiwar leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, Jane Fonda, Malcolm X, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and Joan Baez—all members of Richard Nixon’s infamous “enemies list.” [Patrick S. Poole, 8/15/2000; Pensito Review, 5/13/2006] MINARET operates in tandem with a much more extensive electronic surveillance operation, SHAMROCK, run by the NSA (see 1945-1975). Almost 6,000 foreigners and nearly 1,700 organizations and US citizens are monitored as part of MINARET. In August 1975, NSA director Lew Allen testifies before the Senate’s investigative commission on US intelligence activities, the Church Committee (see April, 1976), that the NSA has issued over 3,900 reports on the US citizens on MINARET’s watch lists, and the NSA’s Office of Security Services has maintained reports on at least 75,000 citizens between 1952 and 1975, reports that later became part of MINARET’s operations. MINARET, like SHAMROCK, will be terminated shortly after the Church Committee goes public with its information about the illegal surveillance program. [Bamford, 1983; Pensito Review, 5/13/2006]

Entity Tags: Malcolm Little, Central Intelligence Agency, Church Committee, Lew Allen, National Security Agency, Martin Luther King, Jr., Office of Security Services, Joan Baez

Category Tags: Privacy, Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Government Acting in Secret, Government Classification, Other Surveillance

In the wake of anti-war demonstrations and urban rioting in several US cities, the Pentagon establishes a set of civil disturbance plans designed to put down political protests and civil unrest. Conducted under the codename Operation Garden Plot, the new program significantly increases the role of the military in training for and intervening in social uprisings. The Pentagon develops contingency plans for every city considered to have potential for uprisings by students, minorities, or labor unions. Each area of the country follows a subplan of Operation Garden Plot. Operation Cable Splicer, for instance, covers the states of California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona (see May 1968, February 10, 1969, March 1969, and May 1970). Each region will conduct exercises and war games to practice and develop its individual plans. To oversee the operations, the Pentagon establishes the Directorate of Civil Disturbance and Planning Operations. The directorate will operate from the basement of the Pentagon in what becomes known as the “domestic war room” (see April 1968). [New Times, 11/28/1975; Salon, 3/15/2002; U.S Army, 8/18/2009]

Entity Tags: Directorate of Civil Disturbance and Planning Operations, US Department of Defense

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms

The NSA launches the first of seven satellites, code-named “Canyon,” that can pick up various types of voice and data traffic from Earth orbit. Canyon will lead to a more sophisticated satellite intelligence system, code-named “Rhyolite” (later “Aquacade”—see Early 1970s). [Federation of American Scientists, 7/17/1997]

Entity Tags: Rhyolite, National Security Agency, Canyon

Category Tags: Government Acting in Secret, Government Classification, Other Surveillance

The government establishes the Directorate of Civil Disturbance and Planning Operations within the Department of Defense. The directorate will oversee civil disturbance operations, such as Garden Plot and Cable Splicer (see Winter 1967-1968), and conduct surveillance on US citizens in search of possible security threats. The directorate is headquartered in the basement of the Pentagon in what will become known as the “domestic war room.” The center utilizes a massive computer system to monitor “all public outbursts and political dissent” within the United States. New Times magazine will describe the war room as follows: “Surrounded by acetate map overlays, a fulltime staff of 180, including around-the-clock ‘watch teams,’ [uses] teletype machines, telephones, and radios to keep in constant communication with every National Guard headquarters and all major military installations in the continental United States.” Seven Army infantry brigades totaling 21,000 troops are at the directorate’s disposal. [New Times, 11/28/1975]

Entity Tags: US Department of Defense, Directorate of Civil Disturbance and Planning Operations

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Privacy, Database Programs

Military and law enforcement officials gather at the California National Guard’s training center for a workshop seminar on civil disturbance control. The program, known as Cable Splicer I, is designed to prepare officials for a future exercise, Cable Splicer II, which will be conducted in March 1969 (see February 10, 1969 and March 1969). Operation Cable Splicer is a subplan of Operation Garden Plot, a national program established by the Pentagon to quash political uprisings and social unrest (see Winter 1967-1968). The subplan is designed to cover the states of California, Washington, Oregon, and Arizona. [New Times, 11/28/1975]

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Continuity of Government

The Office of Emergency Planning, which is responsible for parts of the federal government’s civil defense and continuity of government plans, is renamed the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP). Federal agencies responsible for emergency planning have undergone several duty and title changes over the past two decades (see December 1, 1950, December 16, 1950, June 12, 1953, July 1, 1958, and July 20, 1961). The changes, the New York Times notes, have created a “tale of more names than even government civil servants care to remember.” The latest change is largely superficial and comes as the result of Public Law 90-608, which was drafted and presented to Congress by President Johnson. [New York Times, 12/14/1968, pp. 19]

Entity Tags: Office of Emergency Preparedness (1968-1973), Office of Emergency Planning, Lyndon B. Johnson

Category Tags: Continuity of Government

As President-elect Nixon’s staffers set up shop in the White House, one of Nixon’s aides, John Ehrlichman, is visited by an old college classmate, outgoing Deputy Attorney General Warren Christopher. Ehrlichman later recalls the visit: “He arrived in my office with a big package of documents and suggested we keep them at hand all the time. They were proclamations to be filled in. You could fill in the name of the city and the date and the president would sign it and declare martial law.” [Reeves, 2001, pp. 14]

Entity Tags: John Ehrlichman, Warren Christopher, Richard M. Nixon

Timeline Tags: Nixon and Watergate

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Government Acting in Secret

California Governor Ronald Reagan, along with a variety of other local, state, and federal officials, kicks off a regional exercise known as Cable Splicer II at the Governor’s Orientation Conference. Operation Cable Splicer is part of Operation Garden Plot, a program established by the Pentagon to monitor and put down civil unrest (see Winter 1967-1968). Cable Splicer is a subplan designed to cover the states of California, Washington, Oregon, and Arizona. Governor Reagan addresses an audience of approximately 500 Army officials and troops, local and state police officers, military intelligence personnel, private executives, and state legislators. “You know,” he says, “there are people in the state who, if they could see this gathering right now and my presence here, would decide that their worst fears and convictions had been realized—I was planning a military takeover.” According to New Times magazine, Chief Deputy Attorney General Charles O’Brien speaks bluntly about constitutional rights, “arguing at one point that if the Constitution prevents the police from gathering political intelligence, then the Constitution goes too far.” O’Brien continues: “This is a revolution, and anything goes. A civil disturbance anywhere in this state is an attack on the state itself.” Deputy Attorney General Buck Compton argues that “free speech, civil rights, [and] rights to assembly” have all become “clichés.” Congressman Clair Burgener attends the conference, but is only vaguely aware of the scope of the upcoming exercise and emergency plans. He is later surprised to learn of the conference’s true nature. He will later tell New Times magazine, “If this was going on in this spirit, they were certainly pulling the wool over the eyes of the invited guests.” After reviewing the plans, he will say: “Well, I’ll be damned! This is what I call subversive.” The Cable Splicer II exercise will be conducted a month later (see March 1969). [New Times, 11/28/1975]

Entity Tags: Charles O’Brien, California National Guard, Ronald Reagan, US Department of Defense, Clair Burgener

Category Tags: Freedom of Speech, Impositions on Rights and Freedoms

A large exercise, codenamed Cable Splicer II, is conducted in California to test and develop the ability of local, state, and federal officials to deal with political protests and urban rioting. Operation Cable Splicer is a regional subplan of the Pentagon’s Operation Garden Plot (see Winter 1967-1968). A month earlier, Governor Ronald Reagan and other officials ceremoniously kicked off the war game (see February 10, 1969). The exercise, which simulates a variety of civil disturbances, is spread across 23 political jurisdictions and includes National Guard officers, Army advisers, senior police and sheriff officers, and private executives. According to New Times magazine, “over 1,200 preplanned intelligence reports on supposedly imaginary events, people, and organizations” are pasted on index cards and handed to the participants to help “generate the make-believe war.” The magazine will later report: “The players listen to a special intelligence summary, learning the background of the civil disturbance that has led to the current ‘emergency.’ At that point, the ‘controllers’—usually senior National Guard officers and their Army advisers—begin play, feeding the IBM-card preplanned intelligence reports of dissident activity to the players. Seated at rows of desks dotted with telephones, facing a ‘situation map’ of their community, the players respond to the unfolding scenario.”
Storyline - In the first phase of the exercise, an arrest and shooting “provoke crowd unrest and threats against public officials.” Fourteen simulated hours later, rioters attack a police car and injure an officer. A member of a minority group is killed and two others are wounded. There are threats of retaliation against police officers. Mock intelligence reports suggest widespread rioting is likely, as dozens of apparent radicals are flown in on a “chartered flight” and picked up at the airport by 20 separate vehicles. The second phase of the exercise begins with “the ambush of several police cars, the attempted assassination of the mayor, the bombing of local armories, the destruction of vehicles and ammunition stocks, and the gathering of thousands of people in the streets.” The exercise participants call in police from outside jurisdictions and cities, but they are unsuccessful at quelling the violence. In the third phase of the exercise, according to New Times, “intelligence reports pouring into the Emergency Operations Center disclose more fire bombings, attempted assassinations of public officials, hoarding of water in certain areas, and sniping of fire trucks. The streets remain filled with thousands of people, and the National Guard is called to active duty.” As the crowd turns increasingly violent, the Army is called upon to take over for the National Guard. The crowd is finally dispersed, although the details of exactly how are unknown. “At their disposal,” New Times reports, “there are heavy artillery, armor, chemical and psychological warfare teams, and tactical air support.” The third phase concludes with a few “loose militants” unable to gain popular influence. [New Times, 11/28/1975]

Entity Tags: California National Guard, US Department of Defense

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms

Henry Kissinger. [Source: Library of Congress]Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, determined to prove to President Nixon that news stories about the secret Cambodian bombings are not being leaked to the press by liberals in the National Security Council offices, urges FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap several of Nixon’s top aides, as well as a selection of reporters. Kissinger will later deny making the request. [Werth, 2006, pp. 169] In March 1973, W. Mark Felt, the deputy director of the FBI and Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward’s famous “Deep Throat” background source, will confirm the wiretappings, saying: “In 1969, the first targets of aggressive wiretapping were the reporters and those in the administration who were suspected of disloyalty. Then the emphasis was shifted to the radical political opposition during the [Vietnam] antiwar protests. When it got near election time [1972], it was only natural to tap the Democrats (see Late June-July 1971 and May 27-28, 1972). The arrests in the Watergate (see 2:30 a.m.June 17, 1972) sent everybody off the edge because the break-in could uncover the whole program.” [Bernstein and Woodward, 1974, pp. 271] Felt will tell Woodward that two of the reporters placed under electronic surveillance are Neil Sheehan and Hedrick Smith. Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg will leak the Defense Department documents to Sheehan (see March 1971). Eventually, future FBI director William Ruckelshaus will reveal that at least 17 wiretaps are ordered between 1969 and 1971. The logs of those wiretaps are stored in a safe in White House aide John Ehrlichman’s office. In all, 13 government officials and four reporters are monitored. [Bernstein and Woodward, 1974, pp. 313] The FBI will send Kissinger 37 letters reporting on the results of the surveillance between May 16, 1969 and May 11, 1970. When the surveillance is revealed to the Senate Watergate Committee, it will be shown that among those monitored are Nixon speechwriter and later New York Times columnist William Safire; Anthony Lake, a top Kissinger aide who will later resign over the secret bombings of Cambodia; and the military assistant to Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, whom Kissinger regards as a political enemy. [Woodward, 2005, pp. 21-22]

Entity Tags: Richard M. Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, Henry A. Kissinger, Hedrick Smith, Anthony Lake, Melvin Laird, Neil Sheehan, William Safire, W. Mark Felt, National Security Council, William Ruckelshaus

Timeline Tags: Nixon and Watergate

Category Tags: Government Acting in Secret, Other Surveillance

The New York Times reveals the secret bombings of Cambodia, dubbed “Operation Menu” (see February 23-24, 1969 and March 15-17, 1969). National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger is apoplectic in his anger: shouting to President Nixon, “We must do something! We must crush those people! We must destroy them!” Kissinger is not only referring to the Times, but Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and Secretary of State William Rogers, whom he believes leaked the information to the Times in order to discredit him. (Nixon has an unproductive phone conversation with Laird before his meeting with Kissinger; Nixon opened the phone call by calling Laird a “son of a b_tch,” and Laird hung up on the president.) Nixon suggests Kissinger’s own staff may be the source of the leaks. He is most suspicious of Kissinger’s aide Morton Halperin. By lunch, Kissinger has talked to the FBI about wiretapping suspected leakers. By dinner, Halperin’s phone is tapped. The next day, Kissinger’s military aide Alexander Haig has the FBI tap three more men “just for a few days,” warning the FBI not to keep any records of the wiretaps. The three targets are Kissinger’s aides Helmut Sonnenfeldt and Daniel Davidson, and Laird’s military assistant, Robert Pursley (who will again be wiretapped several months later—see May 2, 1970). At the same time, White House aide Jack Caulfield (see April 2, 1969) arranges for a wiretap on a private citizen, syndicated columnist Joseph Kraft. While the FBI wiretaps are legally questionable, Caulfield’s tap is unquestionably illegal. Caulfield has the director of security for the Republican National Committee, former FBI agent John Ragan, personally install the wiretap in Kraft’s home. The tap on Kraft produces nothing except the conversations of housekeepers, as Kraft and his wife are in Paris. Nixon has the French authorities wiretap Kraft’s Paris hotel room. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 75-76]

Entity Tags: Richard M. Nixon, William P. Rogers, Robert Pursley, Republican National Committee, Morton H. Halperin, Melvin Laird, Daniel Davidson, Alexander M. Haig, Jr., ’Operation Menu’, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, Henry A. Kissinger, John J. ‘Jack’ Caulfield, John Ragan, Joseph Kraft, New York Times

Timeline Tags: Nixon and Watergate

Category Tags: Government Acting in Secret, Other Surveillance

Abe Fortas. [Source: US Senate]Abe Fortas resigns from the Supreme Court under pressure. Fortas, a liberal Democrat and political crony of outgoing president Lyndon Johnson, was originally chosen by Johnson to replace retiring Chief Justice Earl Warren, but conservatives in the Senate blocked Fortas’s confirmation (see June 23, 1969). President Nixon intended to fill the Court with as many of his choices as possible, and he, along with conservative Republicans and Democrats who do not agree with Fortas’s liberal stance on civil rights, targeted Fortas for a smear campaign designed to force him off the bench. Nixon used what White House counsel John Dean will later call “an ugly bluff” against Fortas: He has Attorney General John Mitchell inform Fortas that he intends to open a special probe into Fortas’s dealings—while on the bench—with a financier already under investigation. Mitchell insinuates that he will put Fortas’s wife, herself an attorney and partner at Fortas’s former law firm, and other former partners of Fortas’s on the witness stand. Whether Fortas actually had any direct illegal dealings with this financier is unclear—certainly his dealings had such an appearance—but the bluff worked; Fortas agreed to retire early, thus clearing a position on the Court for Nixon to fill. Nixon will find it difficult to replace Fortas with one of the Southern conservatives he wants on the Court; Senate Democrats will lead successful efforts to block the nomination of two of Nixon’s nominees, the respected, moderately conservative Clement Haynsworth, and the virulently racist G. Harrold Carswell, himself recommended by Mitchell’s assistant, William Rehnquist. (Carswell’s failed nomination will produce a memorable statement from Senator Roman Hruska (R-NE), who, in defense of Carswell, tells the Senate: “Even if he is mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance?”) Nixon will use the defeats to make political hay in the South by claiming that Senate Democrats do not want a Southerner on the bench. [Dean, 2007, pp. 127-129]

Entity Tags: Richard M. Nixon, US Supreme Court, William Rehnquist, Roman Hruska, Lyndon B. Johnson, John Mitchell, G. Harrold Carswell, John Dean, Clement Haynsworth, Earl Warren, Abe Fortas

Timeline Tags: Nixon and Watergate

Category Tags: Other Legal Changes

Two National Security Council assistants, Richard Moose and Richard Sneider, are wiretapped by the FBI as part of President Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s attempt to seal media leaks (see May 1969). [Reeves, 2001, pp. 86]

Entity Tags: Richard Sneider, Richard Moose, Richard M. Nixon, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Henry A. Kissinger

Timeline Tags: Nixon and Watergate

Category Tags: Government Acting in Secret, Other Surveillance

The FBI wiretaps Sunday Times reporter Henry Brandon. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover decides to wiretap Brandon after President Nixon, looking for National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, finds him at Brandon’s home. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 86]

Entity Tags: Henry A. Kissinger, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Richard M. Nixon, Henry Brandon, J. Edgar Hoover

Timeline Tags: Nixon and Watergate

Category Tags: Government Acting in Secret, Other Surveillance

The New York Times breaks the story of secret negotiations with Japan for the return of Okinawa to Japanese control. The story, by Times reporter Hedrick Smith, reveals details from a secret National Security Council memo that includes plans to announce the turnover as well as the plans to remove all US nuclear weapons from Okinawa. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger orders the FBI to wiretap Smith’s telephone. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 86]

Entity Tags: New York Times, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Henry A. Kissinger, Hedrick Smith

Timeline Tags: Nixon and Watergate

Category Tags: Government Acting in Secret, Other Surveillance

Warren Burger. [Source: US Government]Former appellate judge Warren Burger begins his term as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Burger was named months before by newly elected president Richard Nixon after two earlier candidates, former Eisenhower attorney general Herbert Brownell and former GOP presidential candidate Thomas Dewey, turned down the job. Supreme Court Associate Justice Abe Fortas was to be Chief Justice as one of then-president Lyndon Johnson’s last acts, but Senate Republicans, supported by conservative Senate Democrats who oppose Fortas’s civil rights rulings, successfully filibustered Fortas’s nomination and actually forced Fortas’s premature resignation (see May 14, 1969). The blocking of Fortas has an additional element: in June 1968, Chief Justice Earl Warren announced that he would step down, giving Johnson ample time to place Fortas in the position. However, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon wanted to name the Chief Justice himself, if he won the national election. To that end, Nixon sent word to Congressional Republicans to block Johnson’s naming of a replacement for Warren. Senate Republicans launched the filibuster after being given information that intimated Fortas had received an inordinately large honorarium for teaching a course at American University, a sum said to have been raised by one of his former law partners. [Dean, 2007, pp. 127-128]

Entity Tags: Herbert Brownell, Earl Warren, Thomas Dewey, Warren Burger, Abe Fortas, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, US Supreme Court

Category Tags: Other Legal Changes

President Nixon signs Executive Order 11490, updating the nation’s secretive Continuity of Government (COG) plans. Under the vague title, “Assigning Emergency Preparedness Functions to Federal Departments and Agencies,” the order directs government leaders to ensure the continuation of “essential functions” in the event of a crisis. The order grants a wide range of emergency powers to the executive branch. It directs department heads to have emergency plans for succession of office, predelegation of authority, safekeeping of records, alternative command facilities, and other “emergency action steps.” The plans are to be overseen by the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP). Conservative writer Howard J. Ruff will express concern over the scope of the order. “The only thing standing between us and a dictatorship,” Ruff writes, “is the good character of the president and the lack of a crisis severe enough that the public would stand still for it.” In 1984, Attorney General William Smith will object to attempts by the Reagan administration to expand the powers granted in the order (see August 2, 1984). President Reagan will officially update the plans in 1988, replacing and expanding Executive Order 11490 with Executive Order 12656 (see November 18, 1988). [Executive Order 11490, 10/28/1969; Reynolds, 1990]

Entity Tags: Richard M. Nixon, Office of Emergency Preparedness (1968-1973)

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Continuity of Government

The Nixon administration revamps the Bureau of the Budget into the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). In 2007, author Charlie Savage will describe the first OMB as “a brain trust of political loyalists who helped the president to manage the sprawling federal bureaucracy so that he would bend its work to his agenda.” By President Nixon’s second term, his top officials are dissatisfied with the results, and decide to take stronger steps. According to administration memos, the new strategy is, as Savage will write, “to politicize the bureaucracy by purging it and then restocking it with ‘Nixon loyalists’ who would ‘retake the departments.’ Agency heads were to send regular reports to Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, about their progress in ‘gaining control of the bureaucracy.’” The efforts will bear little fruit after the Watergate scandal derails the idea. [Savage, 2007, pp. 304] The Reagan administration will revive the scheme (see February 1981 and After).

Entity Tags: Nixon administration, Charlie Savage, Office of Management and Budget, H.R. Haldeman, Richard M. Nixon

Category Tags: Expansion of Presidential Power

Louis O. Giuffrida, a colonel in the US Army who will later head the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) under President Reagan (see May 18, 1981), writes a paper while at the US Army War College advocating martial law in the event of a militant uprising by African Americans. The Miami Herald will later report that Giuffrida’s paper calls for the roundup and transfer of at least 21 million “American Negroes” to “assembly centers or relocation camps” in the event of an emergency or uprising by black citizens. The paper will resemble martial law plans later drafted by FEMA while Giuffrida is the agency’s director (see June 30, 1982). [Miami Herald, 7/5/1987]

Entity Tags: US Army War College, Louis Giuffrida

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Detainments in US, Continuity of Government

The NSA, following up on its successful pilot program of satellite-based intelligence gathering called “Canyon” (see 1968), develops a much more sophisticated satellite surveillance program called “Rhyolite.” Rhyolite, later renamed “Aquacade,” is a breakthrough in the world of signal intelligence (sigint). Most importantly, it can monitor microwave transmissions, used extensively by the Soviet Union for its most secure transmissions. Its possibilities, says one insider, are “mind-blowing.” Britain’s own security agency, GCHQ, is a full party to Rhyolite/Aquacade. Former Army sigint officer Owen Lewis recalls in 1997, “When Rhyolite came in, the take was so enormous that there was no way of handling it. Years of development and billions of dollars then went into developing systems capable of handling it.” The NSA will pass much of the information it gathers to the GCHQ for transcription and analysis. Subsequently, the NSA will deploy new and even more sophisticated surveillance systems, code-named “Chalet” and “Vortex.” In doing so, it constructs numerous listening stations on friendly foreign soil, including the Menwith Hill facility that will later become a linchpin of the satellite surveillance program known as Echelon (see February 27, 2000). The new programs will revitalize the lapsed sigint alliance between the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (see July 11, 2001). [Federation of American Scientists, 7/17/1997]

Entity Tags: National Security Agency, Echelon, Rhyolite, Chalet, Government Communications Headquarters, Owen Lewis, Canyon

Category Tags: Government Acting in Secret, Government Classification, Other Surveillance

Participants in a California civil disturbance exercise, codenamed Cable Splicer III, hold an “After Action Conference” to discuss the results. The exercise was designed to pracitce Operation Cable Splicer, a regional subplan of the Pentagon’s Operation Garden Plot (see Winter 1967-1968). The participants, which include Army officials, local police officers, and private executives, spend much of the conference pronouncing their disgust for leftists and other activists. According to New Times magazine, speakers at the conference condemn “university administrators who demur at giving the police free rein on the campuses; parents of ‘would-be revolutionaries’ who support their children; and legislators who investigate police actions.” Political demonstrators are referred to as “guerrillas,” “modern day barbarians,” “Brown Shirts,” “kooks,” and “VC.” Los Angeles Police Department Inspector John A. McAllister gives a lecture listing activities that “require police action,” including “loud, boisterous, or obscene” behavior on beaches, “love-in type gatherings in parks where in large numbers they freak out,” disruptions by “noisy and sometimes violent dissidents,” peace marches and rock festivals where “violence is commonplace and sex is unrestrained,” and “campus disruptions—which in fact are nothing more than mini-revolutions.” [New Times, 11/28/1975]

Entity Tags: John A. McAllister, Los Angeles Police Department

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms

When the press reports the secret US-led invasion of Cambodia (see April 24-30, 1970) and the subsequent massive air strikes in that country, Alexander Haig, the military aide to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, notes that New York Times reporter William Beecher has been asking some suspiciously well-informed questions about the operation. Beecher’s latest story also alerts Defense Secretary Melvin Laird to the bombings (Laird, whom Kissinger considers a hated rival, has been kept out of the loop on the bombings). Haig tells the FBI he suspects a “serious security violation” has taken place, and receives four new wiretaps: on Beecher; Laird’s assistant Robert Pursley; Secretary of State William Rogers’s assistant Richard Pederson; and Rogers’s deputy, William Sullivan. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 212]

Entity Tags: Melvin Laird, Alexander M. Haig, Jr., Federal Bureau of Investigation, Henry A. Kissinger, William Sullivan, Richard Pederson, William P. Rogers, William Beecher, Robert Pursley

Timeline Tags: Nixon and Watergate

Category Tags: Government Acting in Secret, Other Surveillance

President Nixon meets with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, CIA Director Richard Helms, and the heads of the NSA and DIA to discuss a proposed new domestic intelligence system. His presentation is prepared by young White House aide Tom Charles Huston (derisively called “Secret Agent X-5” behind his back by some White House officials). The plan is based on the assumption that, as Nixon says, “hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans—mostly under 30—are determined to destroy our society.” Nixon complains that the various US intelligence agencies spend as much time battling with one another over turf and influence as they do working to locate threats to national security both inside and outside of the country. The agencies need to prove the assumed connections between the antiwar demonstrators and Communists. The group in Nixon’s office will now be called the “Interagency Committee on Intelligence,” Nixon orders, with Hoover chairing the new ad hoc group, and demands an immediate “threat assessment” about domestic enemies to his administration. Huston will be the White House liaison. Historian Richard Reeves will later write: “The elevation of Huston, a fourth-level White House aide, into the company of Hoover and Helms was a calculated insult. Nixon was convinced that both the FBI and the CIA had failed to find the links he was sure bound domestic troubles and foreign communism. But bringing them to the White House was also part of a larger Nixon plan. He was determined to exert presidential control over the parts of the government he cared most about—the agencies dealing with foreign policy, military matters, intelligence, law, criminal justice, and general order.” [Reeves, 2001, pp. 229-230]

Entity Tags: Richard Reeves, Tom Charles Huston, Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard M. Nixon, Richard Helms, National Security Agency

Timeline Tags: Nixon and Watergate

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Government Acting in Secret, Other Surveillance

President Nixon approves the “Huston Plan” for greatly expanding domestic intelligence-gathering by the FBI, CIA and other agencies. Four days later he rescinds his approval. [Washington Post, 2008] Nixon aide Tom Charles Huston comes up with the plan, which involves authorizing the CIA, FBI, NSA, and military intelligence agencies to escalate their electronic surveillance of “domestic security threats” in the face of supposed threats from Communist-led youth agitators and antiwar groups (see June 5, 1970). The plan would also authorize the surreptitious reading of private mail, lift restrictions against surreptitious entries or break-ins to gather information, plant informants on college campuses, and create a new, White House-based “Interagency Group on Domestic Intelligence and Internal Security.” Huston’s Top Secret memo warns that parts of the plan are “clearly illegal.” Nixon approves the plan, but rejects one element—that he personally authorize any break-ins. Nixon orders that all information and operations to be undertaken under the new plan be channeled through his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, with Nixon deliberately being left out of the loop. The first operations to be undertaken are using the Internal Revenue Service to harass left-wing think tanks and charitable organizations such as the Brookings Institute and the Ford Foundation. Huston writes that “[m]aking sensitive political inquiries at the IRS is about as safe a procedure as trusting a whore,” since the administration has no “reliable political friends at IRS.” He adds, “We won’t be in control of the government and in a position of effective leverage until such time as we have complete and total control of the top three slots of the IRS.” Huston suggests breaking into the Brookings Institute to find “the classified material which they have stashed over there,” adding: “There are a number of ways we could handle this. There are risks in all of them, of course; but there are also risks in allowing a government-in-exile to grow increasingly arrogant and powerful as each day goes by.” [Reeves, 2001, pp. 235-236] In 2007, author James Reston Jr. will call the Huston plan “arguably the most anti-democratic document in American history… a blueprint to undermine the fundamental right of dissent and free speech in America.” [Reston, 2007, pp. 102]

Entity Tags: US Department of Defense, Tom Charles Huston, James Reston, Jr, Internal Revenue Service, Brookings Institute, National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, Ford Foundation, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Richard M. Nixon

Timeline Tags: Nixon and Watergate

Category Tags: Freedom of Speech, Privacy, Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Expansion of Presidential Power, Government Acting in Secret, Other Surveillance

After President Nixon approves of the so-called “Huston Plan” to implement a sweeping new domestic intelligence and internal security apparatus (see July 14, 1970), FBI director J. Edgar Hoover brings the plan’s author, White House aide Tom Charles Huston (see June 5, 1970), into his office and vents his disapproval. The “old ways” of unfettered wiretaps, political infiltration, and calculated break-ins and burglaries are “too dangerous,” he tells Huston. When, not if, the operations are revealed to the public, they will open up scrutiny of US law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and possibly reveal other, past illegal domestic surveillance operations that would embarrass the government. Hoover says he will not share FBI intelligence with other agencies, and will not authorize any illegal activities without President Nixon’s personal, written approval. The next day, Nixon orders all copies of the decision memo collected, and withdraws his support for the plan. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 236-237] W. Mark Felt, the deputy director of the FBI, later calls Huston “a kind of White House gauleiter over the intelligence community.” Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward will note that the definition of “gauleiter” is, according to Webster’s Dictionary, “the leader or chief officoal of a political district under Nazi control.” [Woodward, 2005, pp. 33-34]

Entity Tags: W. Mark Felt, Tom Charles Huston, J. Edgar Hoover, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency, Richard M. Nixon

Timeline Tags: Nixon and Watergate

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Government Acting in Secret, Other Surveillance

Press reports and freedom of information advocates expose details regarding the government’s secret plans to censor public information in the event of a national emergency or war. In the event of a declared emergency, the Office of Censorship, led by a 26-member board of “executive reservists,” would be in charge of restricting virtually all public information. The unit was established in 1949 as a reincarnation of a censorship office created during World War II (see 1949). The board was apparently put in place to oversee the unit in 1958 (see 1958). The unit is currently being operated out of the Office of Emergency Preparedness. In an article published in the Prescott Courier, Sam Archibald, director of the Freedom of Information Center, writes, “The government has set up a ‘Stand-by Voluntary Censorship Code’ and has planned all the bureaucratic trappings necessary to enforce the code.” Archibald says the plan would “become effective either in wartime or in some undefined ‘national emergency.’” The plans, he writes, are ready to be applied in “all kinds of less than war situations.” In the event of a crisis, members of the standby censorship office would be dispatched throughout the country to monitor and censor all channels of communication, from private letters and telephone calls to public radio and television broadcasts. According to Archibald, only five of the 26 board members are working newsmen. “The rest are public relations men, businessmen, government employees, college professors, or are listed merely as ‘retired.’” CBS executive Theodore F. Koop, who served as deputy director of the Office of Censorship during World War II, is revealed as the head of board. Archibald reports that Koop took up the position in the mid-1960s. Later reports will suggest President Eisenhower appointed Koop to head the censorship board in 1958 (see 1958). [Prescott Courier, 10/1/1970; New York Times, 10/9/1970; St. Petersburg Times, 10/25/1970; Carpenter, 1995]

Entity Tags: Office of Emergency Preparedness (1968-1973), Freedom of Information Center, Office of Censorship, Sam Archibald, Theodore F. Koop

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Media Freedoms, Continuity of Government

In the wake of reports exposing government plans to censor public information in the event of a crisis (see October 1970), the Nixon administration changes the title of the secretive Office of Censorship to the Wartime Information Security Program (WISP). The WISP agency is run out of the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP), which is responsible for the highly classified Continuity of Government (COG) program (see October 21, 1968). The number of board members within the WISP unit, originally set at 26 (see 1958), is scaled down to just eight. The agency maintains the same basic objective of censoring public information in the event of a crisis. Author Ted Galen Carpenter will later report that “virtually nothing” changes in regards to the censorship plans. In the event of a national emergency, “press censorship would go into effect and several thousand ‘executive reservists’ would report to locations across the country to censor all mail, cables, telephone calls, and other communications (including press dispatches) entering or leaving the United States.” Under the WISP program, the government would not only censor information that may help an enemy, but also any data that “might adversely affect any policy of the United States.” Time magazine will later summarize, “Press reports in 1970 exposed the existence of a standby national censor and led to the formal dissolution of the censorship unit, but its duties were discreetly reassigned to yet another part of what an internal memo refers to as the ‘shadow’ government.” [Time, 8/10/1992; Carpenter, 1995, pp. 114]

Entity Tags: Office of Censorship, Nixon administration, Wartime Information Security Program, Office of Emergency Preparedness (1968-1973)

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Media Freedoms, Continuity of Government

California Governor Ronald Reagan establishes the California Specialized Training Institute (CSTI) to oversee disaster training and exercises for the state. The CSTI, which will serve as a branch of the governor’s Office of Emergency Services, will prepare emergency personnel for a variety of scenarios ranging from terrorist attacks, to environmental hazards, to civil disturbances. The creation of the institute was recommended by participants in the exercises Cable Splicer II and Cable Splicer III (see March 1969 and May 1970). The facility, built with a $425,000 grant from the Federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, is meant to duplicate the functions of the Senior Officers Civil Disturbance Course (SEADOC) in Fort Gordon, Georgia. The CSTI will be criticized for training police officers to use military-style tactics in domestic law enforcement situations. It will teach a controversial program known as the Civil Emergency Management Course (see September 1971). Reagan appoints Louis O. Giuffrida, a US Army colonel, to head the CSTI. A year earlier, Giuffrida wrote a paper advocating martial law and the emergency roundup of 21 million “American Negroes” to “assembly centers or relocation camps” in the event of a militant uprising by African Americans (see 1970). Giuffrida will later be appointed to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) during Reagan’s presidency (see May 18, 1981). [New Times, 11/28/1975; California Specialized Training Institute, 11/28/1975 ; Reynolds, 1990]

Entity Tags: Louis Giuffrida, Federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, Senior Officers Civil Disturbance Course, California Specialized Training Institute, Ronald Reagan

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms

Congress revokes emergency detention provisions within the 1950 Subversive Activity Control Act in an attempt to ban the FBI’s controversial “Security Index” program. The decades-old Security Index lists thousands of citizens that are to be targeted for surveillance and/or detention in the event of a national emergency or war (see Early 1943-1971 and 1943). The FBI will still maintain the list in anticipation of the program’s reactivation. The FBI and the Justice Department will evade the Congressional ban by allowing the FBI to reestablish the list under a new name in late 1971 (see Late 1971). [New York Times, 8/3/1975]

Entity Tags: Federal Bureau of Investigation

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Detainments in US

The Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, chaired by Senator Sam Ervin, uncovers the existence of a sophisticated computer system used by the Department of Defense to monitor US citizens suspected of “subversive” activities. The system is operated from the military’s “domestic war room,” overseen by the Directorate of Civil Disturbance and Planning Operations in the basement of the Pentagon (see April 1968). It is designed to keep track of “all public outbursts and political dissent” inside the United States. The Senate subcommittee uncovers a database of thousands of US citizens labeled as possible threats to national security. According to New Times magazine, the subcommittee discovers “computerized files on 18,000 of the celebrated to obscure, on people such as Senator George McGovern and former Massachusetts Gov. Francis Sargent down to ordinary citizens who had, sometimes unknowingly, become ‘associated with known militant groups.’” [New Times, 11/28/1975]

Entity Tags: Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, Directorate of Civil Disturbance and Planning Operations, George S. McGovern, Francis Sargent, US Department of Defense, Sam Ervin

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Privacy, Continuity of Government, Database Programs

President Nixon, regretting his removal of the secret tape recorders in the White House left behind by former president Lyndon Johnson, orders the installation of a sophisticated, secret taping system in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room, which will, when activated, record every spoken word and telephone conversation in either chamber (see July 13-16, 1973). The Oval Office’s microphones will be voice-activated; the Cabinet Room’s with a switch. Nixon orders his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman to see to the installation, and to keep it extremely quiet. Haldeman delegates the installation to aides Lawrence Higby and Alexander Butterfield. Haldeman decides the Army Signal Corps should not install the system because someone in that group might report back to the Pentagon; instead he has the Secret Service’s technical security division install it. The work is done late at night; five microphones are embedded in Nixon’s Oval Office desk, and two more in the wall light fixtures on either side of the fireplace, over the couch and chairs where Nixon often greets visitors. All three phones are wiretapped. By February 16, the system in both chambers is in place. All conversations are recorded on Sony reel-to-reel tape recorders, with Secret Service agents changing the reels every day and storing the tapes in a small, locked room in the Executive Office Building. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 305]

Entity Tags: Lyndon B. Johnson, Alexander Butterfield, Richard M. Nixon, H.R. Haldeman, US Army Signal Corps, Secret Service

Timeline Tags: Nixon and Watergate

Category Tags: Government Acting in Secret, Other Surveillance

Documents from the FBI describing extensive domestic surveillance of college students, minorities, and war protesters are anonymously mailed to several major newspapers and members of Congress. The records are sent to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Senator George S. McGovern, and Representative Parren J. Mitchell. According to the New York Times, “The documents suggest that FBI surveillance of dissenters on the political left has been far more extensive than was generally known.” The papers “show that the subjects of inquiries include obscure persons marginally suspected of illegal activity.” The files describe attempts to infiltrate colleges, student unions, minority groups, and political organizations. According to the documents, the FBI is under orders to investigate all students, teachers, and scientists that travel to the Soviet Union. The documents show that the FBI has gone as far as investigating a Boy Scout trip to the Soviet Union. The papers also reveal that the FBI is under orders to monitor all student groups that are “organized to project the demands of black students.” The files also state that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover approved plans for the recruitment of informants as young as 18 years old. [New York Times, 3/25/1971]

Entity Tags: George S. McGovern, Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Parren Mitchell, Washington Post

Category Tags: Freedom of Speech, Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Government Acting in Secret, Other Surveillance

Frederick LaRue. [Source: Spartacus Educational]Two White House aides, Frederick LaRue and G. Gordon Liddy, attend a meeting of the Nixon presidential campaign, the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), where it is agreed that the organization will spend $250,000 to conduct an “intelligence gathering” operation against the Democratic Party for the upcoming elections. [Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007] The members decide, among other things, to plant electronic surveillance devices in the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters (see April-June 1972). LaRue is a veteran of the 1968 Nixon campaign (see November 5, 1968), as is Liddy, a former FBI agent. [Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007; Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007] LaRue decides to pay the proposed “Special Investigations Unit,” later informally called the “Plumbers” (see Late June-July 1971), large amounts of “hush money” to keep them quiet. He tasks former New York City policeman Tony Ulasewicz with arranging the payments. LaRue later informs another Nixon aide, Hugh Sloan, that LaRue is prepared to commit perjury if necessary to protect the operation. A 1973 New York Times article will call LaRue “an elusive, anonymous, secret operator at the highest levels of the shattered Nixon power structure.” [Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007] The FBI will later determine that this decision took place between March 20 and 30, 1972, not 1971 (see March 20-30, 1972). In this case, the FBI timeline is almost certainly in error, since the “Plumbers” break-in of the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist came well before this date (see September 9, 1971).

Entity Tags: Hugh Sloan, Tony Ulasewicz, Frederick LaRue, ’Plumbers’, Committee to Re-elect the President, Democratic National Committee, G. Gordon Liddy

Timeline Tags: Nixon and Watergate

Category Tags: Government Acting in Secret, Other Surveillance

At the behest of President Nixon (see June 15, 1971), the Justice Department files a motion with the US District Court in New York requesting a temporary restraining order and an injunction against the New York Times to prevent further publication of articles stemming from the “Pentagon Papers” (see June 13, 1971). The landmark case of New York Times Company v. United States begins. The government’s argument is based on the assertion that the publication of the documents jeopardizes national security, makes it more difficult to prosecute the Vietnam War, and endangers US intelligence assets. The Times will base its defense on the principles embodied in the First Amendment, as well as the argument that just because the government claims that some materials are legitimately classified as top secret, this does not mean they have to be kept out of the public eye; the Times will argue that the government does not want to keep the papers secret to protect national security, but instead to protect itself from embarrassment and possible criminal charges. The court grants the temporary restraining order request, forcing the Times to temporarily stop publishing excerpts from the documents. [Herda, 1994; Moran, 2007]

Entity Tags: New York Times, Richard M. Nixon, US Department of Justice

Timeline Tags: Nixon and Watergate

Category Tags: Court Procedures and Verdicts, Government Classification

The Supreme Court rules 6-3 not to permanently enjoin the New York Times and other press organs from publishing articles derived from the Pentagon Papers (see June 26, 1971). Three justices, William O. Douglas, Hugo Black, and Thurgood Marshall, insist that the government can never suppress the publication of information no matter what the threat to national security; the other three in the majority, Potter Stewart, Byron White, and William Brennan, use a more moderate “common sense” standard that says, though the government can suppress publication of sensitive information under circumstances of war or national emergency, this case did not meet the criteria for such suppression. Chief Justice Warren Burger is joined by Harry Blackmun and John Harlan in dissenting; they believe that the president has the unrestrained authority to prevent confidential materials affecting foreign policy from being published. The Times’s lawyer says that the ruling will help ensure that a federal court will not issue a restraining order against a news outlet simply because the government is unhappy with the publication of a particular article. [Herda, 1994]

Entity Tags: Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun, Byron White, Hugo Black, John Harlan, New York Times, Potter Stewart, William O. Douglas, Warren Burger, William Brennan, US Supreme Court

Timeline Tags: Nixon and Watergate

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Court Procedures and Verdicts, Government Classification

Jack Caulfield’s White House ID card. [Source: Watergate.com]A staff aide to President Nixon, former New York City police detective Jack Caulfield, develops a broad plan for launching an intelligence operation against the Democrats for the 1972 re-election campaign, “Operation Sandwedge.” The original proposal, as Caulfield will later recall, is a 12-page document detailing what would be required to create an “accurate, intelligence-assessment capability” against not just the Democrats but “also to ensure that the then powerful anti-war movement did not destroy Nixon’s public campaign, as had been done to Hubert Humphrey in 1968” (see November 5, 1968). Sandwedge is created in anticipation of the Democrats mounting their own political espionage efforts, which Caulfield and other Nixon aides believe will use a private investigations firm, Intertel, headed by former Justice Department officials loyal to former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Caulfield will later recall, “Intertel represented, in my opinion, the potential for both formidable and sophisticated intelligence opposition tactics in that upcoming election campaign.” Sandwedge is turned down by senior White House aides in favor of the “Special Investigation Unit” (see March 20, 1971 and September 29, 1972) headed by G. Gordon Liddy. Caulfield resigns from the White House shortly thereafter. He will later call the decision not to implement “Sandwedge” a “monumental” error that “rapidly created the catastrophic path leading directly to the Watergate complex—and the president’s eventual resignation.” Caulfield has little faith in Liddy, considering him an amateurish blowhard with no real experience in intelligence or security matters; when White House counsel John Dean asks him for his assessment of Liddy’s ability to run such an operation, he snaps, “John, you g_ddamn well better have him closely supervised” and walks out of Dean’s office. Caulfield later writes, “I, therefore, unequivocally contend that had there been ‘Sandwedge’ there would have been no Liddy, no Hunt, no McCord, no Cubans (see 2:30 a.m.June 17, 1972) and, critically, since I had personally decided to negate, while still on the White House staff, a developing intelligence interest by Dean in the Watergate’s Democratic National Committee offices, seven months prior to the break-in! NO WATERGATE!” [John J. 'Jack' Caulfield, 2006; Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007]

Entity Tags: Robert F. Kennedy, John J. ‘Jack’ Caulfield, Hubert H. Humphrey, John Dean, G. Gordon Liddy, Richard M. Nixon

Timeline Tags: Nixon and Watergate

Category Tags: Government Acting in Secret, Government Classification, Other Surveillance

The California Specialized Training Institute (CSTI) begins teaching a program known as the Civil Emergency Management Course. The course teaches a variety of controversial methods for dealing with public uprisings and civil unrest. According to New Times magazine, techniques taught include “press manipulation, computerized radical spotting, logistical support from other agencies, [and] martial rule.” The program will be attended by thousands of “officials from the National Guard, the Army, local police forces, fire services, city government, courts, legislatures, utilities, prisons, and private corporations.” It involves three days of training, followed by a day-long exercise, a critique of the exercise, and another work session. A final day is “highlighted by discussion of ‘reduced lethality weapons’ and student movement infiltrators.” [New Times, 11/28/1975]

Entity Tags: California Specialized Training Institute

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms

The FBI, acting against the will of Congress, maintains a secret list of citizens to be monitored and/or detained in the event of a national emergency. Congress recently attempted to ban the FBI’s secret “Security Index” by revoking the Emergency Detention Act of the 1950 Subversive Activity Control Act (see 1971). The FBI, in an apparent attempt to subvert the repeal, changes the title of the detention list to the “Administrative Index,” or “ADEX” for short. A source from the FBI will say the change is in “name only.” Another FBI official acknowledges that the new index could be “interpreted as a means to circumvent [the] repeal of the Emergency Detention Act.” The Justice Department secretly decides that Congress has not restricted the FBI’s authority. In a memo to J. Edgar Hoover, Attorney General John N. Mitchell says the repeal by Congress does “not alter or limit” the FBI’s authority to “record, file, and index” names of purportedly subversive individuals. According to Mitchell, the FBI maintains plans for a national emergency that are “prepared on the basis of authority other than” the provisions revoked by Congress. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will later report that the FBI “continued to evade the will of Congress, partly with Justice Department approval, by maintaining a secret administrative index of suspects for round-up in case of a national emergency.” The FBI will maintian control of the list until 1985, when it will be transferred to FEMA (see Late 1971-1985 and 1985). [Associated Press, 12/18/1975; New York Times, 4/29/1976; Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 5/1976, pp. 542-548; Chicago Tribune, 3/2/1986]

Entity Tags: John Mitchell, J. Edgar Hoover, Senate Intelligence Committee, Federal Bureau of Investigation

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Detainments in US

The FBI maintains a list of individuals to be closely monitored and possibly detained in the event of a national emergency. The list, known as the Administrative Index, or “ADEX,” is a continuation of the FBI’s Security Index, which was banned by Congress in 1971 (see 1971 and Late 1971). FBI Director Clarence M. Kelley says the index is a “readily available and up-to-date list of individuals deemed dangerous to the internal security and who would be afforded priority investigative coverage in the event of a national emergency.” The list is updated monthly and contains thousands of names of dissidents, anti-war protesters, and others considered to be potential risks in times of emergency. Sources tell the New York Times the index lists background information, history, and “nationalistic tendencies” of each subject. Kelley assures members of Congress that the list includes “only those individuals who pose a realistic, direct, and current danger to the national security.” The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reports in April 1976 that the FBI abolished the index, but reports will later claim that the list is kept by the FBI well into the 1980s and transferred to the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 1985 (see 1985). [New York Times, 10/25/1975; Associated Press, 12/18/1975; Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 5/1976, pp. 542-548]

Entity Tags: Clarence M. Kelley, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Senate Intelligence Committee

Category Tags: Impositions on Rights and Freedoms, Detainments in US

The Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) becomes law. The act is designed to regulate the operation of advisory committees, and includes an open meeting requirement. [Roberts, 2008, pp. 10] The idea behind the law is to curtail the back-room decision-making that has become a hallmark of recent presidencies. [US Congress, 1994; Federal Interagency Databases Online, 2008]

Entity Tags: Federal Advisory Committee Act

Category Tags: Other Legal Changes, Government Acting in Secret

Deputy Attorney General William Rehnquist is sworn in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, replacing the retiring John Harlan. Rehnquist was active in the Arizona Republican Party, and became well-known in the state as a conservative activist who, among other things, opposed school integration. Rehnquist befriended fellow Phoenix attorney Richard Kleindienst, who, after becoming attorney general under Richard Nixon, brought Rehnquist into the Justice Department. Rehnquist faced little difficulty in his confirmation hearings in the Democratically-led Senate Judiciary Hearings. [Oyez (.org), 9/3/2005] Rehnquist may have perjured himself during those hearings. He was confronted with charges that, as a Republican Party attorney and poll watcher, he had harassed and challenged minority voters in Arizona during the 1962, 1964, and 1966 elections. Rehnquist swore in an affidavit that the charges were false, even though the evidence available to the Senate showed Rehnquist did take part in such activities, which were legal in Arizona at the time. (Rehnquist will again deny the charges in 1986, when he is nominated for chief justice—see September 26, 1986). Former Nixon White House counsel John Dean will observe: “After reading and rereading his testimony, it appears to me that what he was really saying to the Senate [in 1971] was that he was not quite sure himself of his behavior, but he could not bring himself to tell the truth. Thus, his blanket 1971 denial forced him to remain consistent to that denial in 1986, and since his blanket denial was a lie, he had to continue lying. His false statement to Congress in 1971 was a crime, but the statute of limitations had passed. His false statement to Congress in 1986, however, was pure perjury.” [Dean, 2007, pp. 129-137]

Entity Tags: US Supreme Court, John Dean, Richard Kleindienst, William Rehnquist, John Harlan, US Department of Justice

Category Tags: Other Legal Changes

Gemstone file envelope. [Source: MedLibrary.org]“Plumber” G. Gordon Liddy lays out an elaborate $1 million proposal for a plan for political espionage and campaign “dirty tricks” he calls “Operation Gemstone” to Attorney General John Mitchell. Mitchell is preparing to leave his post to head the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP—see March 1, 1972). “Gemstone” is a response to pressure from President Nixon to compile intelligence on Democratic candidates and party officials, particularly Democratic National Committee chairman Lawrence O’Brien. Liddy gives his presentation with one hand bandaged—he had recently charred it in a candle flame to demonstrate the pain he was willing to endure in the name of will and loyalty. Sub-operations such as “Diamond,” “Ruby,” and “Sapphire” engender the following, among other proposed activities:
disrupt antiwar demonstrators before television and press cameras can arrive on the scene, using “men who have worked successfully as street-fighting squads for the CIA” [Reeves, 2001, pp. 429-430] or what White House counsel John Dean, also at the meeting, will later testify to be “mugging squads;” [Time, 7/9/1973]
kidnap, or “surgically relocate,” prominent antiwar and civil rights leaders by “drug[ging” them and taking them “across the border;”
use a pleasure yacht as a floating brothel to entice Democrats and other undesirables into compromising positions, where they can be tape-recorded and photographed with what Liddy calls “the finest call girls in the country… not dumb broads but girls who can be trained and photographed;”
deploy an array of electronic and physical surveillance, including chase planes to intercept messages from airplanes carrying prominent Democrats. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 429-430]
Dean, as he later testifies, is horrified at the ideas. [Time, 7/9/1973] Mitchell seems more amused than anything else at Liddy’s excesses, he merely says that “Gemstone” is “not quite what I had in mind.” He tells Liddy and Liddy’s boss, CREEP deputy director Jeb Stuart Magruder, to come back with a cheaper and more realistic proposal. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 429-430]

Entity Tags: John Mitchell, John Dean, Committee to Re-elect the President, G. Gordon Liddy, Jeb S. Magruder, Lawrence O’Brien, Richard M. Nixon

Timeline Tags: Nixon and Watergate

Category Tags: Government Acting in Secret, Other Surveillance

According to the FBI’s Watergate investigation, John Mitchell, the director of the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), and his aide Jeb Stuart Magruder discuss the proposal made by G. Gordon Liddy to plant electronic surveillance devices on the phone of the chairman of the Democratic Party, Lawrence O’Brien (see March 20, 1971). Magruder telephones President Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, and Haldeman confirms that Nixon wants the operation carried out. [Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007] On March 30, in a meeting held in Key Biscayne, Florida, Mitchell, the former Attorney General (see March 1, 1972), approves the plan and its budget of approximately $250,000. [O.T. Jacobson, 7/5/1974 ] Other sources list this decision as coming almost a year earlier (see March 20, 1971). In this case, the FBI timeline is almost certainly in error, since the “Plumbers” break-in of the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist came well before this date (see Late June-July 1971 and September 9, 1971).

Entity Tags: Jeb S. Magruder, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Committee to Re-elect the President, G. Gordon Liddy, H.R. Haldeman, Lawrence O’Brien, Richard M. Nixon, John Mitchell

Timeline Tags: Nixon and Watergate

Category Tags: Government Acting in Secret, Other Surveillance

President Richard M. Nixon reorganizes the Office of Civil Defense (OCD), which is responsible for parts of the federal government’s emergency civil defense and continuity of government plans, into a new organization within the Department of Defense called the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency (DCPA). The DCPA, according to the Department of Defense, “will provide preparedness assistance planning in all areas of civil defense and natural disasters. The goals of the DCPA are to provide an effective national civil defense program and planning guidance to state and local governments in their achievement of total disaster preparedness.” [Virgin Islands Daily News, 5/9/1972, pp. 6; B. Wayne Blanchard, 2/5/2008]

Entity Tags: Office of Civil Defense, Richard M. Nixon

Category Tags: Continuity of Government