The Sixth Estate

Cryptome has just published some interesting material on how senior officials in the Gerald R. Ford administration confronted demands by the Church Committee to investigate the world of secret intelligence during the mid-1970s. The documents show how both presidents as well as senior administration officials, such as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (winner of a Nobel Peace Prize), plotted to hold back every possible detail of their frequently illegal activities. The Church Committee was formed in response to leaks of blatantly illegal and even criminal activities by the CIA, as well as in the wake of the Watergate scandal which brought down Nixon. There are some disturbing parallels to the current response to the WikiLeaks affair.

On February 20, Kissinger met with defense secretary James Schlesinger, CIA director William Colby, and assorted underlings to consider the problems confronting the administration. Interestingly, Kissinger invoked McCarthyism, as though red-baiting and the public’s right to know are pretty much the same thing: (more…)

The longest-lived and most important international intelligence cooperation treaty is the UKUSA COMINT Agreement. Signed just after the Second World War, this agreement created a wide-open sharing arrangement between Britain and the United States, with secondary membership provided to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, in the area of signals intelligence. The National Security Agency (U.S.) is unquestionably the senior partner, but it and the Government Communications Headquarters (UK), Communications Security Establishment (Canada), Defence Signals Directorate (Australia), and Government Communications Security Bureau (New Zealand) basically grew up together.

What I didn’t expect, last year, was the decision by the British and American governments to finally open up the text of this agreement (mostly).

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