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General’s office. The agency instituted more than a dozen measures to prevent the IG from going too far, and created an ombudsman to handle the cases of officers who felt the IG had dealt unfairly with them. It is noteworthy that the inquiry began when the Inspector General delivered an opinion that CIA’s destruction of evidence of illegal methods in prisoner interrogations might constitute an obstruction of justice. This sally constituted a disturbing shot acrossthe bow. The conclusion must be that the effectiveness of CIA Inspectors General remains limited.
    Meanwhile, the technology continued to advance. In the mid-1960s telephone electronic switching came into widespread use, supplanting older manual systems and greatly improving the speed and convenience of phone service. More and more communications began to move by these means, to include both the phone and written communications—in the form of cables and telexes—that passed by wire or microwave. In the United States it is the National Security Agency (NSA) that has responsibility for this intelligence work. The NSA, too, had its domestic programs—ones revealed only in the heat of the Year of Intelligence. To put that differently, NSA domestic intrusions would have evaded any accountability at all but for the fact that U.S. intelligence was already under scrutiny. Of all the investigations of this season of inquiry,
only
those on electronic monitoring led to new law to regulate intelligence activity.
    Actually the National Security Agency had
two
major programs. The first was known at Fort Meade, NSA headquarters, as Project Shamrock. It had been born in the fires of World War II when the United States was anxious to learn what German, Italian, and Japanese representatives in the U.S. were reporting home. Intelligence officers simply went to the major companies and asked that extra copies of cables be made for authorities. Following the war the United States persisted. So Project Shamrock had been underway even before the National Security Agency existed. Created in 1952, the NSA inherited Project Shamrock.
    The transmission companies—Western Union International, RCA Global Communications, and ITT World Communications—continued to participate. Literally millions of private communications changed hands. Like tamperingwith U.S. mail, accessing these cables was a criminal offense. The companies were assured by senior Pentagon officials in 1947 and again in 1949 that they were in no legal jeopardy from their participation. Under the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S. Code §605, and 18 U.S.C. §952), the cable companies, as common carriers, had a duty to protect traffic, and federal employees who furnished or published any code or material between a foreign government and its diplomatic mission in the United States were also subject to criminal penalties. Congress had made an exception for demands from lawful authority, but this was never defined to include NSA codebreakers, and the law had never been clarified by court case.
    After the war the U.S. government actually considered seeking amendment of Section 605, but avoided this until 1968, when an exception was written into the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act (18 U.S.C. §2511 (3)). NSA lawyers gave congressional staff their opinions when lawmakers were drafting this legislation. In addition, in 1950 the United States enacted amendments to the Espionage Act (18 U.S.C. §798) that recognized communications intelligence as a government activity—but that statute merely provided for punishing individuals who divulged information, remaining silent on the legality of this type of intelligence collection per se. Thus, for most of this period Project Shamrock proceeded secretly and on shaky legal grounds. The ITT company actually dropped out of the program in 1969. The FBI involved itself too—“G-men” physically carried the telegrams starting in 1963.
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