Page 169 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 169 of 237

Whether or not Dulles' judgment held true for other budgetary matters, the eighty-three-year-old Cannon had no
great reputation on his subcommittee as a "careful watchdog" of the CIA. In fact, he was such a good friend and
great admirer of Dulles that much of the secret CIA hearings during Dulles' tenure were taken up with mutual
congratulations. CIA officials came armed with thick black volumes, but the other members of the House
Subcommittee * never had time to probe deeply into the agency's activities. Some of the members displayed
annoyance but could do little about it in view of Cannon's absolute control over the committee.

Nevertheless, Cannon once sought to have the CIA checked by the General Accounting Office. The request threw
the CIA into consternation: should it turn him down and lose a good friend or cooperate and risk the disclosure of
operational secrets? The decision was to go along with Cannon but to steer the GAO into a non-sensitive area.
The auditors were taken to the facilities of the CIA's broadcast information service which monitors the radio
programs of foreign countries, particularly the Communist bloc. The GAO spent a year at the foreign broadcast
service, but to the satisfaction of the CIA, turned in a harmless set of recommendations.

"They can't find the side of a barn," said one contented CIA man.

GAG men were not inclined to dispute the assessment. They despaired of the practicality of auditing covert
operations where, as a GAO official put it, "they payoff some guy under a rock in the desert."

Prior to 1954 the GAO kept two of its men on permanent assignment with the CIA as consultants. When a
problem arose in a non-sensitive area, the CIA accountants would ask the GAO men to judge whether they were
acting properly. Taking the facts as presented to them, the GAO men would then refer the problem to the
Comptroller General's office for approval.

Since the procedure amounted to a certification of CIA practices without the authority to investigate them, Joseph
Campbell withdrew the GAO men from the CIA when he took over as Comptroller General in 1954.

Still, the GAO continued to bump into an occasional CIA project while investigating large defense contracts. But
under the 1949 law, which removed Congress' power to audit the CIA, the GAO was prohibited from looking
further, even if it had suspicions that the contractor might be juggling non-CIA funds.

Congress' difficulties with the intelligence community have been matched by those of American ambassadors in
foreign countries. In 1959 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee compiled a booklet of anonymous quotations
from retired Foreign Service officers. One of them noted:

"Every senior officer of the Department of State and every senior officer of the Foreign Service has heard
something of CIA's subversive efforts in foreign countries and probably most of them have some authentic
information about CIA operations of this nature in some particular case. Unfortunately, most of these activities
seem to have been blundering affairs, and most, if not all of them, seem to have resulted to the disadvantage of the
United States and sometimes in terrible failure ... The situation is exacerbated by the fact that in most diplomatic
and consular establishments abroad espionage agents of the CIA are stationed masquerading as diplomatic and
consular officers." [11]

Several ambassadors complained about being used as fronts for espionage activities. But the CIA insisted that
embassy cover was essential to its work. Without the immunity accorded to diplomatic property, the CIA's codes,
files and communications would not be secure. The CIA maintains its own codes and an independent
communications system (as does the Pentagon through the Defense Communications Agency), and unless CIA
agents choose to tell an ambassador what they are up to and what they are reporting to Washington, he has no
independent means for finding out.