FBI: Close, but--

When word first leaked out about the FBI’s surveillance of Americans critical of the Reagan Administration’s Central America policies, the temptation was to think that, despite its promises to reform, the FBI was up to its old tricks.

But in the past couple of days it has become clear that the bureau’s 1983-85 runaway investigation of the Committee in Solidarity With the People of El Salvador (CISPES), while objectionable, was not in the same league with a notorious program that disgraced the FBI a decade ago--COINTELPRO, for counterintelligence program.

In COINTELPRO the bureau for nearly 20 years targeted civil-rights activists and opponents of the Vietnam War, then used every device in its black bag--illegal wiretaps, blackmail, extortion, anonymous letters, forgery, incitement to violence, harassment--to discredit them. The campaign was a vendetta by the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover against Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others whom he considered “subversives.”

The whole lurid mess was laid bare by congressional investigations. In the late 1970s the FBI adopted internal guidelines that supposedly prevented it from using the threat of terrorism or subversion to justify the monitoring of Americans’ legitimate political activities. Congressional watchdog committees were established. A respected jurist, William H. Webster, was named director of the FBI.

The current furor over the CISPES investigation may be overblown, but it suggests that the reforms did not go far enough, that voluntary guidelines are insufficient. This time there was no vendetta, no apparent desire to hound government critics, just overzealousness on the part of FBI agents in the field--and a seeming inability on the part of FBI headquarters and the Justice Department to control them.

The CISPES case began in 1983 with tips to the FBI that the organization might be aiding the chief guerrilla organization in El Salvador, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, in violation of U.S. laws. FBI headquarters warned its agents to limit their inquiry to allegations of terrorist activities.

But, in the field, the investigation soon got out of hand, as the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights complained last week when it released some of the 1,200 pages of documents about the CISPES probe that it had obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

The documents show that hundreds of U.S. citizens were swept up in the FBI’s widening net. More than 100 organizations--among them the New York Council of Churches, the United Auto Workers and the Roman Catholic Sisters of Charity--were monitored on the suspicion that they might be “front organizations” for CISPES. FBI agents photographed demonstrations against U.S. involvement in Central America, tailed protesters, monitored university seminars.

As the current FBI director, William S. Sessions, acknowledged in a press conference this week, the CISPES probe “was not properly controlled” at the field level, but he shied away from any direct criticism of Webster, now the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, who approved the project.

Sessions also noted that the CISPES investigation was dropped in 1985, after it became clear that the organization was “involved in political activities involving First Amendment rights and not international terrorism.” And, with some pride, he pointed out that the Justice Department’s own Office of Intelligence Policy and Review shut down the operation.

Both Sessions and Webster appear to be more sensitive than Hoover to the threat posed to First Amendment rights by surveillance of political activities. But the agents in the field are not.

Clearly the voluntary guidelines adopted a decade ago to keep the FBI away from constitutionally protected activities--guidelines that are still secret, in part--need rethinking. Congress ought to look closely at legislation first suggested in the 1970s by Sen. Frank Church of Idaho that would require the FBI to have reasonable suspicion of criminal activity before initiating or continuing an investigation. And the lawmakers ought to consider putting further muscle behind a new law by making FBI agents civilly liable to citizens whose rights they infringe.