Volume 23, Number 9 · May 27, 1976
The Threat to the Republic
By I.F. Stone
Foreign and Military Intelligence Book I, Final Report, Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities
US Government Printing Office, 651 pp., $5.35
Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans Book II, Final Report, Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities
US Government Printing Office, 396 pp., $3.60
It can be said—but it would be unwise to dwell on it—that the Church and Pike committee reports represent the first time in history any country's legislature has ever investigated, exposed, and shamed its intelligence agencies and their 'dirty tricks.' Long before electronics, as far back as the Rome of the Caesars, a spy-haunted society feared, as Tacitus tells us, that somehow walls might have ears.[1] But a degenerate Senate, though constitutionally and nominally still all-powerful, lacked the will to do anything about it.
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