“I never had any thought … when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment that I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role … I … would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and whatever else it can properly perform in that special field-and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere. We have grown up as a nation respected for our free society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.”
Furthermore, it’s wholly disregard for the integrity of the constitution, its murder of countless US citizens for private gain, and its service to the banking establishment has created a horrific monster of gigantic proportions that has already, taken over the country in every city, town, and hamlet.
By 1967 the CIA had offices and installations all over America. It even publicly listed them in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Miami, Pittsburgh, Houston, St. Louis, New Orleans, Denver, and Minneapolis. Many others existed under front companies and names. Gradually, a number of domestic activities and operations began to surface, and American taxpayers became aware of the range of activities that they had been unwittingly financing.
In February 1967 (the month following my piece on Vietnam), Ramparts published an article by Mike Wood (who later became NCNP’s on-site convention coordinator in Chicago), which revealed the extensive relationship between the CIA and the American academic community through a plethora of contracts and grant arrangements with American colleges, universities, and research institutes. Wood’s article focused on the infiltration of the National Student Association, but that liaison was only the tip of the iceberg which extended to faculty members and departments in dozens of institutions. Peripheral to these revelations was the occasional reference to even more deeply covert army involvement in such activity.
After Wood’s disclosures it gradually emerged that during this period the agency was involved in virtually every segment of U.S. domestic life-business; labor; local, state and national law enforcement and government; universities; charities; the print and press media; lawyers, teachers, artists, women’s organizations, and cultural groups. The publicly known list alone was staggeringly extensive. [25] Grants were given, projects were funded, covers were provided, studies were commissioned, projects were mounted, training programs were run, and books were published. The arrangements were wide and varied. In its 1976 report the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities said that by 1967 the agency had sponsored, subsidized, or produced over 1,000 books, with 200 being turned out in 1967 alone.
By 1967 the CIA was spending 1.5 billion dollars a year without any effective fiscal control over individual expenditures on operations. Covert domestic activities and operations were paid for by “unvouchered funds” (expenditures without purchase orders or receipts) .As a result of the 1949 Central Intelligence Act, Director Helms had the authority to spend money “without regard to the provisions of law and regulations relating to the expenditure of government funds.” Helms’s signature on any check, no matter how large, drawn on any CIA bank ac- count was deemed to be sufficient. Interagency cooperation, particularly with the army and/or the state department, was frequently necessary and this was accomplished through the establishment of Special Operations Groups (SOG) created for particular projects or missions.