McCarthy’s ghost stalks Capitol Hill

Press, 9 May 1981, Page 14

McCarthy’s ghost stalks Capitol Hill

By

PETER PRINGLE

in Washington

The 30-year old ghost of the witch-hunting Joe McCarthy briefly stalked the corridors of the United States Senate last month. On the sixth floor of the Dirksen Senate office building, the ghost hovered outside room 6226 and smiled approvingly as he heard the voice of the newly elected senator from Alabama, Mr Jeremiah Denton. “The deepest purpose of this and our subsequent hearings is the preservation and support of freedom,” Mr Denton declared. “There are those in the world whose avowed purpose is to destroy, or overthrow, and recast our Government in a form barren of the freedoms which we deeply cherish. If we continue to ignore the threat. . . the sand in which we bury our heads will inevitably bury our nation.” Then the ghost was gone. At least that is how it seemed as the Republicans in the Senate, flexing their newfound leadership muscles, started to reopen the doors of McCarthy’s old internal security sub-committee. Setting out for the first time to explore the link between international terrorism and the Kremlin, the seven-and-a-half hour hearing

was so badly presented, however, that some of the liberals who were expecting to spend most of the time poised on the edge of their seats, went to sleep. Their deep anxieties about more domestic witchhunting were allayed, if briefly. Of the witnesses, only one, the former C.I.A. director, Mr William Colby, sounded at all authoritative. He tended to play down the over-dramatic evidence of the others, especially of two American journalists. Arnaud de Borchgrave, an ex-“ Newsweek” reporter, and Claire Sterling, who has just published a controversial book called “The Terrorist Network.” In their evidence, both de Borchgrave and Sterling sought to give the impression of a “circuitry of terrorism,” as Mr Denton puts it, including the Italian Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Basque terrorists, the 1.R.A., the P.L.0., and the Turkish Leftists. The witnesses claim each group is being nurtured and supplied with arms from the Kremlin. Mr Colby, while acknowledging such well-known terrorist training camps as Cuba and Czechoslovakia, is more cau-

tious about the Kremlin's influence. “There is a feeling,” he warns, “that there is a central war room with flashing lights and red arrows on the wall, but that is not the way terrorism works. Russia provides them with a capability and then allows it to be used in a decentralised manner.” None of this made much of a headline and Mr Denton surely disappointed his Moral Major-

ity constituents. The senator himself spent an inordinate amount of time rambling on about his own rather simplistic thoughts on the world. At one point, he went into a 10-minute soliloquy about the use of television pictures in war. "What would have happened in August. 1914,” he mused, “if there had been TV in Britain and France and all citizens were exposed to the slaughter that took place? The war would have ended that month." Like many hawks who served in Vietnam. Mr Denton blames the American press for “letting the side down” in portraying the full horror of the war, while the Vietnamese propaganda showed victorious armies to tiie embattled citizenry of Hanoi. “It hurt,” he said, “for the Vietnamese to be seeing all the glory of it and ■the Americans to be seeing the hell of it. We must get our perspective back. The dominoes are falling so thunderously fast we can't hear ourselves argue whether the domino (theory) is correct.” This kind of uncontrolled outburst suggests that Mr Denton lacks the coolness needed to run an internal security committee successfully in Republican terms. One of the Democratic senators did not

turn up, reportedly because he thought the best way of sinking Mr Denton was to ignore him. Also. Mr Denton is already at odds with the committee counsel, a methodical ex-F.8.1. agent named Mr Joel Lisker. who some months ago made Billy Carter register as a foreign agent with the Libyans. Mr Lisker told the “Washington Post" that Mr Denton’s subcommittee had a “secret agenda," but at the hearing Mr Denton angrily denied it. "I don't know what he (Lisker) is talking about,” snapped Mr Denton. "I have never heard of it. I mean he doesn’t set the hearings up. I do." Mr Denton promises more hearings this month with the witnesses still to be named. Those seeking guidance on what the agenda might be have looked more closely at Mr Denton’s Vietnam experience. It was undoubtedly a considerable ordeal; he was, he says, tortured to the point of losing consciousness. But Mr Denton, who is a Roman Catholic, was also helped by an extraordinary experience. “At the time my cellmate and I were in irons, it was a terribly painful thing. . . and silently I began to wonder, ‘Lord, will we ever get out of here?’ At 1.30 in the afternoon I

was praying very hard. . . I was seeking the’ Lord when suddenly a strong clear voice said to me, 'Say: Sacred Heart of Jesus. I give myself to Thee.’ The words were said in suchan assuring way that I knew it was an exhortation from the Lord.” Mr Dehton says he asked his celimate if he had heard the voice, but he had not. His religious zeal to “do something about Communism” is considerable. “A lot of people say to me. 'Relax, go fishing and take it easy the rest of your life, you've lived through enough trauma.' But I can't turn away from trying to do something about our ‘one nation under God’ becoming one nation under materialists or one nation under secular humanism. Our nation is facing an identity crisis individually, nationally and internationally." At 56, Mr Denton, with his craggy face and bushy eyebrows, does not show any physical scars from his Vietnam ordeal. In fact, he appears remarkably healthy and vigorous. And for as long as Mr Haig is Secretary of State, it seems he has a buddy in the Administration who might be very important to his committee.—Copyright, London Observer Service.