Secret Cold War Documents Reveal NSA Spied On Senators

During the Viet Nam war, our government spied on a couple of senators and others who were prominent in their opposition to that conflict as part of a program called “Minaret.” Other people targeted makes reading the “watch list” disturbing. The exercise has been called “disreputable if not outright illegal” as NSA documents are newly declassified.

The names of the NSA’s targets are eye-popping. Civil rights leaders Martin Luther King and Whitney Young were on the watch list, as were the boxer Muhammad Ali, New York Times journalist Tom Wicker, and veteran Washington Post humor columnist Art Buchwald. But perhaps the most startling fact in the declassified document is that the NSA was tasked with monitoring the overseas telephone calls and cable traffic of two prominent members of Congress, Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho, [pictured]) and Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tenn.). As shocking as the recent revelations about the NSA’s domestic eavesdropping have been, there has been no evidence so far of today’s signal intelligence corps taking a step like this, to monitor the White House’s political enemies…

The NSA history does not say when these seven men were placed on the watch list — or, more importantly, who decided to task the NSA to monitor their communications. But the simple fact that the NSA secretly intercepted the telephone calls and telegrams of these prominent Americans, including two U.S. senators, at the White House’s behest is alarming in the extreme. It demonstrates just how easily the agency’s vast surveillance powers have been abused in the past and can be abused even today…

Even back in those troubled days, it was highly unlikely that any federal judge would have approved any U.S. government request to wiretap the phones or intercept the cable traffic of these individuals. In most instances, there was no probable cause that these individuals had, or were, engaged in any form of criminal or seditious behavior other than exercising their constitutional rights to assembly and free speech. So the White House and the U.S. intelligence community went around this obstacle and got the compliant, unquestioning NSA to surreptitiously tap the overseas phone calls and intercept the overseas telegrams of targets, despite the fact that everything about the program, according to the NSA history, was “disreputable if not outright illegal.”

By: Cheston Catalano

Cheston Catalano is a Kentucky-based journalist whose work has been featured in the Chattanooga Times Free Press and the Clarksville Leaf Chronicle. He is a long-time contributor to Liberaland.