In January Congress abolished the House Internal Security Committee which, over 45 years, had exposed dozens of top Soviet spies in the State, Treasury, and Commerce Departments, the Office of Strategic Services, and even in the White House itself. On February 13 former Senator William Fulbright urged Congress to abolish the Central Intelligence Agency.
If Congress destroys all our intelligence gathering agencies, the United States will become a blind, helpless giant. The record of history is that nations with poor intelligence lose wars and waste the lives of their young men.
A new book called THE ULTRA SECRET tells how, just prior to World War II, British intelligence obtained copies of the top secret German coding machines. The British were thus able to decode the secret orders to German planes in the Battle of Britain, to Gennan submarines in the North Atlantic, to General Rommel in North Africa, and to Ger man armies in the battles for Europe. General Dwight Eisenhower said that Ultra was “of priceless value” and had saved “thousands of British and American lives.” Winston Churchill called Ultra “my most secret source.”
Meanwhile, the German counterintelligence was grossly inferior and never discovered the Soviet spy planted on the German general staff who sent the daily battle plans of Hitler’s armies to a Soviet agent called “Lucy” in Lucerne who transmitted them by radio to Moscow.
Prior to Pearl Harbor, the United States had broken the Japanese codes and could decode them even more rapidly than the Japanese. We were surprised at Pearl Harbor, however, because, among other reasons, we had a Secretary of War who refused to read the decoded war messages, saying “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”
After Pearl Harbor, of course, our officials did read the Japanese coded messages, and this saved thousands of American lives. Japanese counterintelligence never discovered that the United States had broken the Japanese codes and was using this information to win great naval victories.
Recent evidence indicates that there is more of a need for U.S. counterintelligence than ever before. West Germany has just arrested nine Soviet spies who were stealing computer secrets from IBM and turning them over to the Soviet KGB. All Soviet citizens employed by the UN are regularly debriefed by the KGB, many are KGB agents, and Soviet Ambassador Malik plays a key role in the network.
One of our SALT negotiators has just revealed that at least one third of the Soviet SALT negotiators were actually members of the KGB busy stealing American secrets. The executive secretary of the Soviet team, Nikolai Kishilov, was a senior KGB officer who some years earlier had been thrown out of Finland after he and a woman who claimed to be his wife were running two separate spy rings in Finland. During the Helsinki SALT talks, the Soviets rented a room overlooking U.S. offices and equipped it with telescopes, antennas, and various other monitoring devices.
If Congress succeeds in abolishing all our intelligence agencies, then America will be at the mercy of the largest and most effective spy system in all history, the Soviet KGB.
