‘Top secret’ C.I.A. report available ‘almost anywhere’

Press, 7 August 1976, Page 7

‘Top secret’ C.I.A. report available ‘almost anywhere’

By DAVE RILEY, through NZPA Washington Captain Kidd kept the whereabouts of his treasure a secret by killing everybody who helped him bury it. So the only leaks he had to worry about were the ones in the bottom of his ship.

the ways of keeping secrets in the United States Congress are somewhat more civilized, but certainly not so effective. After all, Captain Kidd’s map did not appear in the “Villrge Voice.”

Great chunks of a report by the United States House of Representatives Intelligence Committee did. The report contained secrets about sometimes shady operations by the Central Intelligence Agency. Who leaked these secrets to Daniel Schorr, the television reporter who gave them to the New York

weekly, has become a SUSISO,OOO question. For months, investigators have been trying to identify the leaker. Four hundred interviews and SUS 150,000 later, they’ve concluded: 1. It was somebody in the Government. 2. They do not know who. Actually, there are those who say Schorr could have picked up a copy almost anywhere. There are those who swear one copy was found lining the bottom of a parrot cage at the national zoo. Others say a downtown restaurant was handing out fish and chips wrapped ip pages marked top secret. There are those who say that if the legendary Captain Kidd were running things he would have to bury half the Government to keep its secrets. He would have no help from Congressman Les Aspin. Mr Aspin loaned his copy of the Intelligence

Committee report to, of all people, the Central Intelligence Agency, and to Reuters news agency. In testimony before the House of Representatives Ethics Committee, it became clear that the secret report had attracted only slightly fewer viewers than “Gone with the Wind”. Mr Aspin’s copy, which brought the Central Intelligence Agency in from the cold, became a mother, spawning 40 more copies fathered by a duplicating machine at the agency. The Congressman shrugged off the news that his copy had a family. “Well, I guess I’m not surprised,” he said. Other Congressmen, some of them indefatigable about finding out how Schorr got his copy were not too concerned about the one that went to the agency or the several pages aides of Mr Aspin supplied to Reuters. But the House Ethics

Committee is asking each of the 16 members of the intelligence panel to say under oath whether he was the leaker. So far, nobody is taking responsibility. Meanwhile, investigators hired by the committee to find the culprit have spared no effort to round up the copies of the report, to trace their paths through the marbled hallways of the capital to examine the owner of each set of hands that touched them. The investigators found plenty of hands and plenty of copies — but some of the copies were not where they were supposed to be. For example, Congressman William Lehman said he was not even on Capitol Hill during final deliberations on the report back in February. So his copy kept shuttling back and forth between his office and the Intelligence Committee. He said it finally got lost.