THE VILLAGE VOICE
The Pike Papers: Highlights from the suppressed House Intelligence Committee Report
A 24-Page Special Supplement
February 16, 1976
The Pike Papers: An Introduction by Aaron Latham
These are not the Pentagon Papers, but there are points of similarity. For, once again, an American president has set himself against the publication of a government study of dangerous government adventures. Once again the White House is seeking to protect the American people from a reading of a part of their own history.
The history in this case was written by the House Select Committee on Intelligence, which is chaired by New York Congressman Otis Pike. The committee’s report was finished on January 19, 1976, but ten days later the House of Representatives voted not to release it until it is censored by the executive branch. Since the report details at great length all the obstacles which the executive branch put in the way of the Pike committee from the beginning of its work to the end, the White House would not seem the ideal, unbiased expurgator.
If the executive branch “sanitized” the report the way it sanitized many of the documents it turned over to the committee, little would remain. For, according to the report, “sanitized” quite often turned out to be “merely a euphemism for blank sheets of paper with a few scattered words left in, often illegible, sometimes misleading, and usually inconclusive. One page was blank except for the following: “3/ND/DOLL-VNM/T-0144-6SG TRANSLATED DECRYPT UNJAC/VN NR I Y 30/300G FM IJB TO CQ INFO BBM STOP CNMB 30119 5610M Tol: 30JA68/10/22 300.” Another page was blank except for the “TOP SECRET” stamp.
At the moment, the White House and the House are stalemated. Perhaps this unofficial publication of the Pike Papers will moot that stalemate. The reports are now in the custody of Carl Albert, the Speaker of the House, who must decide what the House’s next move will be. One Congressional source says that Albert plans simply to sit on the report until the press prints it. Then he will be able to move to make it public officially.
The Pike committee report is divided into three sections: (I) “The Select Committee’s Oversight Experience”… (II) “The Select Committee’s Investigative Record”… and (III) “Recommendations.” In the text which follows this introduction, we are printing only the second section and even here some of the footnotes have had to be trimmed for space reasons. (As a result, the footnotes are not numbered consecutively; we have followed the committee report’s numbering throughout.) We chose to omit the first section because it is primarily a record of the committee’s frustrations rather than its findings. We had no choice but to leave out the third section, the recommendations section, since, as we went to press, these had not yet been written.
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