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Power  /  Antecedent

How Partisanship and Distrust Leave Congress Vulnerable to Hacking

Congress isn't safe from foreign interference. It never has been.
Henry Kissinger and Otis Pike shaking hands.
AP Photo

The Associated Press recently broke the news that foreign hackers have been targeting members of the Senate — and that Senate security, amazingly, is unwilling or unable to defend them.

While it might seem stunning that the most powerful nation in the world can’t protect its own legislators from other governments, this is nothing new. The technology involved has changed, but the threat of foreign interference in legislative matters dates to the beginning of the Cold War. And Congress has consistently struggled to effectively defend itself against such intrusions, in part because the legislators and committees most exposed have fraught relations with the very intelligence agencies best equipped to protect them.

Without this trust, Congress is exposed, especially in a digital era with outside governments more eager than ever to interfere in our politics.

As American activity spread to most parts of the world in the late 1940s and 1950s, foreign interests unsurprisingly sought to influence U.S. politics. Sometimes, as in the case of the “China Lobby” that advocated for Chinese interests, this activity occurred in the open. In other instances, however, attempts were more surreptitious.

For instance, allies of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo worked to win friends in high places for Trujillo’s regime. John Crimmins, a Kennedy administration diplomatic official, recalled that these forces successfully built sympathy for the Trujillo government both in Congress and in some private sectors, thanks in part to “flattery and favor.”

Trujillo’s allies focused on key members of the House and Senate Agriculture Committee, whose policy choices would safeguard Dominican access to the U.S. market. They lavished key legislators with the type of junkets that now would violate U.S. ethics laws.

In return, Trujillo received fawning support. Sen. Allen Ellender (D-La.), the longtime chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, described the Dominican dictator as the type of leader who deserved U.S. support, even if he “might have had to kill a few persons to get where he was.”

Success at boosting his standing, even if by illicit means, meant that Trujillo rarely encountered criticism from the House or Senate. In 1956, Columbia law professor Jesús Galíndez, a Trujillo critic, was kidnapped in the United States, taken to the Dominican Republic and eventually assassinated. The few members of Congress skeptical about Trujillo worked to expose his role in the plot — a clear violation of American sovereignty and law. But they got nowhere because Trujillo’s congressional allies stonewalled and refused to take them seriously.

Most other far-right governments during the Cold War era, most notoriously the Somoza government in Nicaragua, followed Trujillo’s course, cultivating allies in Congress, without blatantly intervening in U.S. politics to threaten congressional opponents.

There was, however, one major exception.

In 1972, a political-science professor named Dick Clark scored a major upset in Iowa, ousting two-term incumbent Republican Sen. Jack Miller. Clark obtained a position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and a coin flip awarded him the last subcommittee chairmanship over fellow freshman Joe Biden.

Clark took to his new role diligently, at a time of considerable domestic and international turmoil. The Hughes-Ryan Amendment of 1974 required the CIA to inform congressional committees of any new covert activities, just as civil war erupted in Angola. Clark used this new tool, plus his position as subcommittee chair, to expose a covert U.S. effort to aid the South African-backed UNITA forces in Angola. When a State Department witness unsuccessfully tried to conceal the U.S. effort, Clark rallied Senate support for what came to be known as the Clark Amendment, which cut off U.S. aid to UNITA. Shortly thereafter, the communist MPLA assumed power in Angola.

The South African government did not forget Clark’s work. The senator was favored for reelection in 1978 against a weak foe, former lieutenant governor Roger Jepsen. But in the post-Roe v. Wade era, Clark had a vulnerability with traditionally Democratic Catholic voters in eastern Iowa. And Jepsen’s campaign received overt and covert aid from the South African government.

In May 1978, a South African official traveled to Iowa, asking voters “why their senator finds South Africa such a fine platform rather than dealing with the real problems this state might have.” The State Department officially rebuked this “unwarranted intervention into a domestic American political matter.” Unknown to Clark, however, this rebuke did not stop the South African meddling.

The country’s former information secretary, Eschel Rhoodie, later produced documents showing that the South African government sent $250,000 to surreptitiously aid Jepsen’s campaign, a significant sum, considering that Jepsen raised only $728,000. But by the time Rhoodie made his revelation, it was too late for Clark: Jepsen scored one of the biggest upsets of the 1978 midterms, and Clark’s career as a public official ended.

Clark’s political demise showed the difficulty of protecting Congress from foreign intelligence activity; after all, the institution is a collection of 535 people, with differing interests and differing relationships (and levels of trust) with U.S. counterintelligence. Figures such as Clark were particularly vulnerable, as they needed to rely on assistance (in terms of counterintelligence activities) from the very U.S. intelligence agencies whose policies they were sharply criticizing, and whom they had grown to distrust. These agencies likewise harbored hostility to what they viewed as micromanaging legislators.

These tensions have periodically plagued entire congressional committees, as well. As Clark was holding hearings into Angola, Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Rep. Otis Pike (D-N.Y.) were running committees established to investigate past CIA covert operations. Neither committee had warm relations with the intelligence community; Church’s efforts were even unfairly attacked for contributing to the assassination of the CIA’s Athens station chief in December 1975.

But Pike’s dealings with the intelligence community were particularly poisonous. “It’s a delight to receive two letters from you not stamped ‘Secret’ on every page,” Pike fumed in one letter to CIA Director William Colby, whom he saw as an obstacle more than a resource. “You are concerned with the concept of ‘need to know’ and I am concerned with the concept of ‘right to know.’”

Eventually, after Pike failed to obtain clearance from the Ford administration for the release of his report, the document was leaked to the Village Voice. In an environment in which Pike was feuding with Colby and in which Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was urging the Ford administration to force the House Intelligence Committee to go to court to obtain subpoenaed documents, it would have been nearly impossible for Pike and the CIA to work cooperatively to prevent foreign targeting of U.S. officials.

And tension between Congress and the U.S. intelligence community did not abate after the Cold War ended. In addition to thwarting cooperation on programs to protect against foreign interference in our politics, these hostilities at times even produced covert activities threatening Congress from within our own intelligence apparatus.

In 2014, staffers in the Senate Intelligence Committee prepared a reportdocumenting abuses in the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program during the George W. Bush years. Unbeknown to the staffers, however, CIA personnel had spied on their computers — a flagrant violation of the separation of powers. Then-CIA Director John Brennan eventually apologized to the Senate but did not take meaningful responsibility for the agency’s actions. That Brennan has now reemerged as a hero of the anti-Trump #resistance is one of the more remarkable stories of political reinvention in U.S. politics — but also a reminder of the Senate’s inability, or unwillingness, to defend itself. Congress could have censured Brennan but chose not to do so.

In the end, the combination of the massive U.S. role in world affairs — creating numerous enemies — and the diffuse nature of the American constitutional system invites foreign interference, while creating internal tensions that constantly frustrate an effective defense.