Playing Games

CONGRESSIONAL, statute requires the CIA "to keep the Select Committee on Intelligence of the Senate and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence of the House of Representatives fully and currently informed of all intelligence activities..." But CIA chief William Casey and ranking Senator on the Intelligence Committee Barry Goldwater (D-Ariz) seem recently to have taken this to mean a game of twenty questions, in which the listener. If he prefers not to know the answer, doesn't ask the right questions.

The CIA was required to keep both the Senate and the House committees informed of its Nicaraguan activities, which are now well-known to the public. These operations began as far back as Sept. 8 of last year with the CIA-backed bombing of Corinto, and continued until early this year with the CIA-run mining of major Nicaraguan ports. Although both the Senate and the House committees were not directly informed of activities by the CIA at any time, the House Committee began "asking the right questions" sometimes in early January, while the Senate delayed their enquiry until March 8 for reason that remain a mystery. CIA requests for money in early January should have signalled the committee of the need for a meeting, but ranking majority member Senator Goldwater agreed to postpone the meeting first until late February and then until March 8, when the issue of the minings was somehow passed over. When Goldwater recently discovered what it seems the House knew ever since January that CIA agents were mining the harbors, not American-backed Contras--he wrote a letter to CIA chief William Casey saying that he, Goldwater, was "pissed off" that he hadn't been informed.

Now, there's certainly more that's strange here than meets the eye. First of all, Goldwater: why did he allow the CIA to postpone meetings on two different occasions and then not focus debate in the March 8 meeting on the mining issue, which must have been in his newspaper by then? Why, further, has Senator Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) resigned in protest at not having been told about the mining? Such a resignation hardly seems an apt way to protest failure on the part of a subsidiary body to conform to rules set for it. But strangest of all, don't the House and Senate intelligence committees share information? It seems patently ludicrous that Senator Goldwater should not have known something about the mining if the House knew about it already. And above it all the horrible sphinx, William J. Casey, sits grinning: "I don't have to answer questions I'm not asked."

Clearly there's something strange about Goldwater's conduct, just as there is something strange about the CIA, whose actions throughout the year seem to have been in direct contradiction of the laws that supposedly bind it. The CIA is carrying on what amounts to a war with Nicaragua, without regulation, without government input other than the interests of the executive, and with what seems to be a tacit understanding between the bureau head and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Conspiracy theories are a thing of the past--the new game governments play is incompetence--and the Senate Committee chairman probably didn't know about the CIA's activities. The CIA also probably assumed that they must not have been interested in hearing what they had not asked for. But whatever the case, it is awfully disconcerting to discover that such inept monitors stand between the CIA and Nicaragua. The president says we are fighting a war to protect democracy, but even our own checks and balances are being flaunted by the executive and scattered by the Congress.

Perhaps the most important message to take away from this whole mess is a sense of warning. In Nicaragua, it is reported, citizens wait on our election year with baited breath. Professors who spend Sundays at war and the rest of the week with their work preface their books with notes about who will win, while television stars plan their careers around whether or not their show's political content will survive a Reagan election. In the tiny town of San Juan Del Norte, one of the few the Reagan CIA contras hold, a guard now stops journalists from entering. AP reported last week that the guard, who is a member of the "Democratic Revolutionary Alliance," said he had orders from his commander not to allow any journalists to pass through to the Nicaraguan port, because it is being bombed by the Sandinista's air force and he could not guarantee their safety. That is a tale we've heard before, not so long ago.