William J. Barnds

With the obvious exception of Viet Nam, nothing the U.S. Government has done in recent years in the field of foreign policy has created so much controversy as its intelligence operations, especially the secret subsidizing of private American institutions. The sinking of the Liberty with the loss of 34 American lives during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the capture of the Pueblo by North Korea in 1968 brought home to the American public the dangers involved in one type of intelligence collection and embarrassed an already beleaguered Administration. Of all the U.S. intelligence organizations, the Central Intelligence Agency has been the most vociferously attacked. It has been accused of perpetrating the 1967 Greek coup, arranging the death of Ché Guevara and even fanning the flames of the recent student riots in Mexico as a means of influencing the Mexican Government to adopt an anti-Castro stance in hemispheric affairs.