Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans

I. Introduction And Summary

The resolution creating this Committee placed greatest emphasis on whether intelligence activities threaten the “rights of American citizens.”

The critical question before the Committee was to determine how the fundamental liberties of the people can be maintained in the course of the Government’s effort to protect their security. The delicate balance between these basic goals of our system of government is often difficult to strike, but it can, and must, be achieved. We reject the view that the traditional American principles of justice and fair play have no place in our struggle against the enemies of freedom. Moreover, our investigation has established that the targets of intelligence activity have ranged far beyond persons who could properly be characterized as enemies of freedom and have extended to a wide array of citizens engaging in lawful activity.

Americans have rightfully been concerned since before World War II about the dangers of hostile foreign agents likely to commit acts of espionage. Similarly, the violent acts of political terrorists can seriously endanger the rights of Americans. Carefully focused intelligence investigations can help prevent such acts. But too often intelligence has lost this focus and domestic intelligence activities have invaded individual privacy and violated the rights of lawful assembly and political expression. Unless new and tighter controls are established by legislation, domestic intelligence activities threaten to undermine our democratic society and fundamentally alter its nature.

We have examined three types of “intelligence” activities affecting the rights of American citizens. The first is intelligence collection—such as infiltrating groups with informants, wiretapping, or opening letters. The second is dissemination of material which has been collected. The third is covert action designed to disrupt and discredit the activities of groups and individuals deemed a threat to the social order. These three types of “intelligence” activity are closely related in the practical world. Information which is disseminated by the intelligence community or used in disruptive programs has usually been obtained through surveillance. Nevertheless, a division between collection, dissemination and covert action is analytically useful both in understanding why excesses have occurred in the past and in devising remedies to prevent those excesses from recurring.

A. Intelligence Activity: A New Form of Governmental Power to Impair Citizens’ Rights

A tension between order and liberty is inevitable in any society. A Government must protect its citizens from those bent on engaging in violence and criminal behavior, or in espionage and other hostile foreign intelligence activity. Many of the intelligence programs reviewed in this report were established for those purposes. Intelligence work has, at times, successfully prevented dangerous and abhorrent acts, such as bombings and foreign spying, and aided in the prosecution of those responsible for such acts.

But, intelligence activity in the past decades has, all too often, exceeded the restraints on the exercise of governmental power which are imposed by our country’s Constitution, laws, and traditions.

Excesses in the name of protecting security are not a recent development in our nation’s history. In 1798, for example, shortly after the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution, the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed. These Acts, passed in response to fear of pro-French “subversion”, made it a crime to criticize the Government. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus. Hundreds of American citizens were prosecuted for anti-war statements during World War I, and thousands of “radical” aliens were seized for deportation during the 1920 Palmer Raids. During the Second World War, over the opposition of J. Edgar Hoover and military intelligence, 120,000 Japanese-Americans were apprehended and incarcerated in detention camps.

Those actions, however, were fundamentally different from the intelligence activities examined by this Committee. They were generally executed overtly under the authority of a statute or a public executive order. The victims knew what was being done to them and could challenge the Government in the courts and other forums. Intelligence activity, on the other hand, is generally covert. It is concealed from its victims and is seldom described in statutes or explicit executive orders. The victim may never suspect that his misfortunes are the intended result of activities undertaken by his government, and accordingly may have no opportunity to challenge the actions taken against him.

It is, of course, proper in many circumstances—such as developing a criminal prosecution—for the Government to gather information about a citizen and use it to achieve legitimate ends, some of which might be detrimental to the citizen. But in criminal prosecutions, the courts have struck a balance between protecting the rights of the accused citizen and protecting the society which suffers the consequences of crime. Essential to the balancing process are the rules of criminal law which circumscribe the techniques for gathering evidence the kinds of evidence that may be collected, and the uses to which that evidence may be put. In addition, the criminal defendant is given an opportunity to discover and then challenge the legality of how the Government collected information about him and the use which the Government intends to make of that information.

This Committee has examined a realm of governmental information collection which has not been governed by restraints comparable to those in criminal proceedings. We have examined the collection of intelligence about the political advocacy and actions and the private lives of American citizens. That information has been used covertly to discredit the ideas advocated and to “neutralize” the actions of their proponents. As Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone warned in 1924, when he sought to keep federal agencies from investigating “political or other opinions” as opposed to “conduct . . . forbidden by the laws”:

When a police system passes beyond these limits, it is dangerous to the proper administration of justice and to human liberty, which it should be our first concern to cherish.

There is always a possibility that a secret police may become a menace to free government and free institutions because it carries with it the possibility of abuses of power which are not always quickly apprehended or understood.

Our investigation has confirmed that warning. We have seen segments of our Government, in their attitudes and action, adopt tactics unworthy of a democracy, and occasionally reminiscent of the tactics of totalitarian regimes. We have seen a consistent pattern in which programs initiated with limited goals, such as preventing criminal violence or identifying foreign spies, were expanded to what witnesses characterized as “vacuum cleaners”,” sweeping in information about lawful activities of American citizens.

The tendency of intelligence activities to expand beyond their initial scope is a theme which runs through every aspect of our investigative findings. Intelligence collection programs naturally generate ever-increasing demands for new data. And once intelligence has been collected, there are strong pressures to use it against the target.

The pattern of intelligence agencies expanding the scope of their activities was well described by one witness, who in 1970 had coordinated an effort by most of the intelligence community to obtain authority to undertake more illegal domestic activity:

The risk was that you would get people who would be susceptible to political considerations as opposed to national security considerations, or would construe political considerations to be national security considerations, to move from the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line.

In 1940, Attorney General Robert Jackson saw the same risk. He recognized that using broad labels like “national security” or “subversion” to invoke the vast power of the government is dangerous because there are “no definite standards to determine what constitutes a ‘subversive activity’, such as we have for murder or larceny.” Jackson added:

Activities which seem benevolent or helpful to wage earners, persons on relief, or those who are disadvantaged in the struggle for existence may be regarded as ‘subversive’ by those whose property interests might be burdened thereby. Those who are in office are apt to regard as ‘subversive’ the activities of any of those who would bring about a change of administration. Some of our soundest constitutional doctrines were once punished as subversive. We must not forget that it was not so long ago that both the term ‘Republican’ and the term ‘Democrat’ were epithets with sinister meaning to denote persons of radical tendencies that were ‘subversive’ of the order of things then dominant.

This wise warning was not heeded in the conduct of intelligence activity, where the “eternal vigilance” which is the “price of liberty” has been forgotten.

B. The Questions

We have directed our investigation toward answering the following questions:

Which governmental agencies have engaged in domestic spying?

How many citizens have been targets of Governmental intelligence activity?

What standards have governed the opening of intelligence investigations and when have intelligence investigations been terminated?

Where have the targets fit on the spectrum between those who commit violent criminal acts and those who seek only to dissent peacefully from Government policy?

To what extent has the information collected included intimate details of the targets’ personal lives or their political views, and has such information been disseminated and used to injure individuals?

What actions beyond surveillance have intelligence agencies taken, such as attempting to disrupt, discredit, or destroy persons or groups who have been the targets of surveillance?

Have intelligence agencies been used to serve the political aims of Presidents, other high officials, or the agencies themselves?

How have the agencies responded either to proper orders or to excessive pressures from their superiors? To what extent have intelligence agencies disclosed, or concealed them from, outside bodies charged with overseeing them?

Have intelligence agencies acted outside the law? What has been the attitude of the intelligence community toward the rule of law?

To what extent has the Executive branch and the Congress controlled intelligence agencies and held them accountable?

Generally, how well has the Federal system of checks and balances between the branches worked to control intelligence activity?

C. Summary of the Main Problems

The answer to each of these questions is disturbing. Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and to much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power. The Government, operating primarily through secret informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as wiretaps, microphone “bugs”, surreptitious mail opening, and break-ins, has swept in vast amounts of information about the personal lives, views, and associations of American citizens. Investigations of groups deemed potentially dangerous—and even of groups suspected of associating with potentially dangerous organizations—have continued for decades, despite the fact that those groups did not engage in unlawful activity. Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed—including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths. Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials. While the agencies often committed excesses in response to pressure from high officials in the Executive branch and Congress, they also occasionally initiated improper activities and then concealed them from officials whom they had a duty to inform.

Governmental officials—including those whose principal duty is to enforce the law—have violated or ignored the law over long periods of time and have advocated and defended their right to break the law.

The Constitutional system of checks and balances has not adequately controlled intelligence activities. Until recently the Executive branch has neither delineated the scope of permissible activities nor established procedures for supervising intelligence agencies. Congress has failed to exercise sufficient oversight, seldom questioning the use to which its appropriations were being put. Most domestic intelligence issues have not reached the courts, and in those cases when they have reached the courts, the judiciary has been reluctant to grapple with them.

Each of these points is briefly illustrated below, and covered in substantially greater detail in the following sections of the report.

1. The Number of People Affected by Domestic Intelligence Activity

United States intelligence agencies have investigated a vast number of American citizens and domestic organizations. FBI headquarters alone has developed over 500,000 domestic intelligence files, and these have been augmented by additional files at FBI Field Offices. The FBI opened 65,000 of these domestic intelligence files in 1972 alone. In fact, substantially more individuals and groups are subject to intelligence scrutiny than the number of files would appear to indicate, since typically, each domestic intelligence file contains information on more than one individual or group, and this information is readily retrievable through the FBI General Name Index.

The number of Americans and domestic groups caught in the domestic intelligence net is further illustrated by the following statistics:

-- Nearly a quarter of a million first class letters were opened and photographed in the United States by the CIA between 1953-1973, producing a CIA computerized index of nearly one and one-half million names.

-- At least 130,000 first class letters were opened and photographed by the FBI between 1940-1966 in eight U.S. cities.

-- Some 300,000 individuals were indexed in a CIA computer system and separate files were created on approximately 7,200 Americans and over 100 domestic groups during the course of CIA’s Operation CHAOS (1967-1973).

-- Millions of private telegrams sent from, to, or through the United States were obtained by the National Security Agency from 1947 to 1975 under a secret arrangement with three United States telegraph companies.

-- An estimated 100,000 Americans were the subjects of United States Army intelligence files created between the mid 1960’s and 1971.

-- Intelligence files on more than 11,000 individuals and groups were created by the Internal Revenue Service between 1969 and 1973 and tax investigations were started on the basis of political rather than tax criteria.

-- At least 26,000 individuals were at one point catalogued on an FBI list of persons to be rounded up in the event of a “national emergency”.

2. Too Much Information Is Collected For Too Long

Intelligence agencies have collected vast amounts of information about the intimate details of citizens’ lives and about their participation in legal and peaceful political activities. The targets of intelligence activity have included political adherents of the right and the left, ranging from activists to casual supporters. Investigations have been directed against proponents of racial causes and women’s rights, outspoken apostles of nonviolence and racial harmony; establishment politicians; religious groups; and advocates of new life styles. The widespread targeting of citizens and domestic groups, and the excessive scope of the collection of information, is illustrated by the following examples:

(a) The “Women’s Liberation Movement” was infiltrated by informants who collected material about the movement’s policies, leaders, and individual members. One report included the name of every woman who attended meetings, and another stated that each woman at a meeting had described “how she felt oppressed, sexually or otherwise”. Another report concluded that the movement’s purpose was to “free women from the humdrum existence of being only a wife and mother”, but still recommended that the intelligence investigation should be continued.

(b) A prominent civil rights leader and advisor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was investigated on the suspicion that he might be a Communist “sympathizer”. The FBI field office concluded he was not. Bureau headquarters directed that the investigation continue using a theory of “guilty until proven innocent:”

The Bureau does not agree with the expressed belief of the field office that - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - is not sympathhetic to the Party cause. While there may not be any evidence that - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - is a Communist neither is there any substantial evidence that he is anti-Communist.

(c.) FBI sources reported on the formation of the Conservative American Christian Action Council in 1971. In the 1950’s, the Bureau collected information about the John Birch Society and passed it to the White House because of the Society’s “scurillous attack” on President Eisenhower and other high Government officials.

(d) Some investigations of the lawful activities of peaceful groups have continued for decades. For example, the NAACP was investigated to determine whether it “had connections with” the Communist Party. The investigation lasted for over twenty-five years, although nothing was found to rebut a report during the first year of the investigation that the NAACP had a “strong tendency” to “steer clear of Communist activities.” Similarly, the FBI has admitted that the Socialist Workers Party has committed no criminal acts. Yet the Bureau has investigated the Socialist Workers Party for more than three decades on the basis of its revolutionary rhetoric-which the FBI concedes falls short of incitement to violence-and its claimed international links. The Bureau is currently using its informants to collect information about SWP members’ political views, including those on “U.S. involvement in Angola,” “food prices,” “racial matters,” the “Vietnam War,” and about any of their efforts to support non-SWP candidates for political office.

(e) National political leaders fell within the broad reach of intelligence investigations. For example, Army Intelligence maintained files on Senator Adlai Stevenson and Congressman Abner Mikva because of their participation in peaceful political meetings under surveillance by Army agents. A letter to Richard Nixon, while he was a candidate for President in 1968, was intercepted under CIA’s mail opening program. In the 1960’s President Johnson asked the FBI to compare various Senators’ statements on Vietnam with the Communist Party line and to conduct name checks on leading antiwar Senators.

(f) As part of their effort to collect information which “related even remotely” to people or groups “active” in communities which had “the potential” for civil disorder, Army intelligence agencies took such steps as: sending agents to a Halloween party for elementary school children in Washington, D.C., because they suspected a local “dissident” might be present; monitoring protests of welfare mothers’ organizations in Milwaukee; infiltrating a coalition of church youth groups in Colorado; and sending agents to a priests’ conference in Washington, D.C., held to discuss birth control measures.

(g) In the, late 1960’s and early 1970s, student groups were subjected to intense scrutiny. In 1970 the FBI ordered investigations of every member of the Students for a Democratic Society and of “every Black Student Union and similar group regardless of their past or present involvement in disorders.” Files were opened on thousands of young men and women so that, as the former head of FBI intelligence explained , the information could be used if they ever applied for a government job.

In the 1960’s Bureau agents were instructed to increase their efforts to discredit “New Left” student demonstrators by tactics including publishing photographs (“naturally the most obnoxious picture should be used”), using “misinformation” to falsely notify members events had been cancelled and writing “tell-tale” letters to students’ parents.

(h) The FBI Intelligence Division commonly investigated any indication that “subversive” groups already under investigation were seeking to influence or control other groups. One example of the extreme breadth of this “infiltration” theory was an FBI instruction in the mid-1960’s to all Field Offices to investigate every “free university” because some of them had come under “subversive influence. “

(i) Each administration from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s to Richard Nixon’s permitted, and sometimes encouraged, government agencies to handle essentially political intelligence. For example:

-- President Roosevelt asked the FBI to put in its files the names of citizens sending telegrams to the White House opposing his “national defense” policy and supporting Col. Charles Lindbergh.

-- President Truman received inside information on a former Roosevelt aide’s efforts to influence his appointments, labor union negotiating plans, and the publishing plans of journalists.

-- President Eisenhower received reports on purely political and social contacts with foreign officials by Bernard Baruch, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

-- The Kennedy Administration had the FBI wiretap a Congressional staff member, three executive officials, a lobbyist, and a Washington law firm. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy received the fruits of a FBI “tap” on Martin Luther King, Jr. and a “bug” on a Congressman both of which yielded information of a political nature.

-- President Johnson asked the FBI to conduct “name checks” of his critics and of members of the staff of his 1964 opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater. He also requested purely political intelligence on his critics in the Senate, and received extensive intelligence reports on political activity at the 1964 Democratic Convention from FBI electronic surveillance.

-- President Nixon authorized a program of wiretaps which produced for the White House purely political or personal information unrelated to national security, including information about a Supreme Court justice.

3. Covert Action and the Use of Illegal or Improper Means

(a) Covert Action.—Apart from uncovering excesses in the collection of intelligence, our investigation has disclosed covert actions directed against Americans, and the use of illegal and improper surveillance techniques to gather information. For example:

(i) The FBI’s COINTELPRO—counterintelligence program—was designed to “disrupt” groups and “neutralize” individuals deemed to be threats to domestic security. The FBI resorted to counterintelligence tactics in part because its chief officials believed that the existing law could not control the activities of certain dissident groups, and that court decisions had tied the hands of the intelligence community. Whatever opinion one holds about the policies of the targeted groups, many of the tactics employed by the FBI were indisputably degrading to a free society. COINTELPRO tactics included:

-- Anonymously attacking the political beliefs of targets in order to induce their employers to fire them;

-- Anonymously mailing letters to the spouses of intelligence targets for the purpose of destroying their marriages;

-- Obtaining from IRS the tax returns of a target and then attempting to provoke an IRS investigation for the express purpose of deterring a protest leader from attending the Democratic National Convention;

-- Falsely and anonymously labeling as Government informants members of groups known to be violent, thereby exposing the falsely labelled member to expulsion or physical attack;

-- Pursuant to instructions to use “misinformation” to disrupt demonstrations, employing such means as broadcasting fake orders on the same citizens band radio frequency used by demonstration marshalls to attempt to control demonstrations, 60 and duplicating and falsely filling out forms soliciting housing for persons coming to a demonstration, thereby causing “long and useless journeys to locate these addresses”;

-- Sending an anonymous letter to the leader of a Chicago street gang (described as “violence-prone”) stating that the Black Panthers were supposed to have “a hit out for you”. The letter was suggested because it “may intensify . . . animosity” and cause the street gang leader to “take retaliatory action”.

(ii) From “late 1963” until his death in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to “neutralize” him as an effective civil rights leader. In the words of the man in charge of the FBI’s “war” against Dr. King, “No holds were barred.”

The FBI gathered information about Dr. King’s plans and activities through an extensive surveillance program, employing nearly every intelligence-gathering technique at the Bureau’s disposal in order to obtain information about the “private activities of Dr. King and his advisors” to use to “completely discredit” them.

The program to destroy Dr. King as the leader of the civil rights movement included efforts to discredit him with Executive branch officials, Congressional leaders, foreign heads of state, American ambassadors, churches. universities, and the press.

The FBI mailed Dr. King a tape recording made from microphones hidden in his hotel rooms which one agent testified was an attempt to destroy Dr. King’s marriage. The tape recording was accompanied by a note which Dr. King and his advisors interpreted as threatening to release the tape recording unless Dr. King committed suicide.

The extraordinary nature of the campaign to discredit Dr. King is evident from two documents:

-- At the August 1963 March on Washington, Dr. King told the country of his “dream” that:

all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I’m free at last.”

The Bureau’s Domestic Intelligence Division concluded that this “demagogic speech” established Dr. King as the “most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.” Shortly afterwards, and within days after Dr. King was named “Man of the Year” by Time magazine, the FBI decided to “take him off his pedestal”, “reduce him completely in influence,” and select and promote its own candidate to “assume the role of the leadership of the Negro people.”

-- In early 1968, Bureau headquarters explained to the field that Dr. King must be destroyed because he was seen as a potential “messiah” who could “unify and electrify” the “black nationalist movement”. Indeed, to the FBI he was a potential threat because he might “abandon his supposed ‘obedience’ to white liberal doctrines (non-violence).” In short, a non-violent man was to be secretly attacked and destroyed as insurance against his abandoning non-violence.

(b) Illegal or Improper Means—The surveillance which we investigated was not only vastly excessive in breadth and a basis for degrading counterintelligence actions, but was also often conducted by illegal or improper means. For example:

(1) For approximately 20 years the CIA carried out a program of indiscriminately opening citizens’ first class mail. The Bureau also had a mail opening program, but cancelled it in 1966. The Bureau continued, however, to receive the illegal fruits of CIA’s program. In 1970, the heads of both agencies signed a document for President Nixon, which correctly stated that mail opening was illegal, falsely stated that it had been discontinued, and proposed that the illegal opening of mail should be resumed because it would provide useful results. The President approved the program, but withdrew his approval five days later. The illegal opening continued nonetheless. Throughout this period CIA officials knew that mail opening was illegal, but expressed concern about the “flap potential” of exposure, not about the illegality of their activity.

(2) From 1947 until May 1975, NSA received from international cable companies millions of cables which had been sent by American citizens in the reasonable expectation that they would be kept private.

(3) Since the early 1930’s, intelligence agencies have frequently wiretapped and bugged American citizens without the benefit of judicial warrant. Recent court decisions have curtailed the use of these techniques against domestic targets. But past subjects of these surveillances have included a United States Congressman, a Congressional staff member, journalists and newsmen, and numerous individuals and groups who engaged in no criminal activity and who posed no genuine threat to the national security, such as two White House domestic affairs advisers and an anti Vietnam War protest group. While the prior written approval of the Attorney General has been required for all warrantless wiretaps since 1940, the record is replete with instances where this requirement was ignored and the Attorney General gave only after-the-fact authorization.

Until 1965, microphone surveillance by intelligence agencies was wholly unregulated in certain classes of cases. Within weeks after a 1954 Supreme Court decision denouncing the FBI’s installation of a microphone in a defendant’s bedroom, the Attorney General informed the Bureau that he did not believe the decision applied to national security cases and permitted the FBI to continue to install microphones subject only to its own “intelligent restraint”.

(4) In several cases, purely political information (such as the reaction of Congress to an Administration’s legislative proposal) and purely personal information (such as coverage of the extra-marital social activities of a high-level Executive official under surveillance) was obtained from electronic surveillance and disseminated to the highest levels of the federal government.

(5) Warrantless break-ins have been conducted by intelligence agencies since World War II. During the 1960’s alone, the FBI and CIA conducted hundreds of break-ins, many against American citizens and domestic organizations. In some cases, these break-ins were to install microphones; in other cases, they were to steal such items as membership lists from organizations considered “subversive” by the Bureau.

(6) The most pervasive surveillance technique has been the informant. In a random sample of domestic intelligence cases, 83% involved informants and 5% involved electronic surveillance. Informants have been used against peaceful, law-abiding groups; they have collected information about personal and political views and activities. To maintain their credentials in violence-prone groups, informants have involved themselves in violent activity. This phenomenon is well illustrated by an informant in the Klan. He was present at the murder of a civil rights worker in Mississippi and subsequently helped to solve the crime and convict the perpetrators. Earlier, however, while performing duties paid for by the Government, he had previously “beaten people severely, had boarded buses and kicked people, had [gone] into restaurants and beaten them [blacks] with blackjacks, chains, pistols.” Although the FBI requires agents to instruct informants that they cannot be involved in violence, it was understood that in the Klan, “he couldn’t be an angel and be a good informant.”

4. Ignoring the Law

Officials of the intelligence agencies occasionally recognized that certain activities were illegal, but expressed concern only for “flap potential.” Even more disturbing was the frequent testimony that the law, and the Constitution were simply ignored. For example, the author of the so-called Huston plan testified:

Question. Was there any person who stated that the activity recommended, which you have previously identified as being illegal opening of the mail and breaking and entry or burglary—was there any single person who stated that such activity should not be done because it was unconstitutional?

Answer. No.

Question. Was there any single person who said such activity should not be done because it was illegal?

Answer. No.

Similarly, the man who for ten years headed FBI’s Intelligence Division testifed that:

... never once did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the question: “Is this course of action which we have agreed upon lawful, is it legal, is it ethical or moral.” We never gave any thought to this line of reasoning, because we were just naturally pragmatic.

Although the statutory law and the Constitution were often not “[given] a thought”, there was a general attitude that intelligence needs were responsive to a higher law. Thus, as one witness testified in justifying the FBI’s mail opening program: