The Trouble With Halperin

By JOSHUA MURAVCHIK
Forward, 5 November 1993

After two decades spent battling the “national security state,” Morton Halperin has been
nominated to be assistant secretary of defense. The debate over his confirmation will revolve
around three questions: What has Halperin stood for? Have his views changed? Does any of it
matter?

In the early 1970s, Mr. Halperin set aside his career as a defense specialist to become an activist
against the excesses of American intelligence agencies. The movement for reining in the
intelligence agencies had two wings — one liberal, one radical. Mr. Halperin moved easily between
the two, embodying the old united-front dictum, “no enemies on the left.”

At one time, Mr. Halperin was the director of the Washington office of the American Civil
Liberties Union, offering carefully prepared testimony to Congressional committees negotiating
with the Central Intelligence Agency itself over legislative language, compromising for the best he
could get. At another, he was chairman of the Campaign to Stop Government Spying, a coalition
boasting among its member organizations the Black Panther Party, CounterSpy, the Committee
for Justice for Huey P. Newton, the National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case, the
Puerto Rican Socialist Party (a Marxist-Leninist group) and many others of this ilk.

The Campaign’s newsletter, Organizing Notes, was filled with brief reports about the cases of
various radical defendants often followed by the names of contacts for those wishing to help them.
Among the cases championed in addition to Newton’s were those of Leonard Peltier, an Indian
activist who had been convicted of killing two agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
Sami Esmail, a Palestinian-American imprisoned in Israel as a member of the terrorist Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine, fugitive Katherine Ann Powers, who had driven the getaway
car in a bank heist in which a policeman was killed; and Vietnamese spy David Truong.

One case Mr. Halperin embraced was that of Phillip Agee, who defected from the CIA because,
as he put it to Esquire magazine, “I aspired to be a Communist and a revolutionary.” Mr. Halperin
now says that he only defended Mr. Agee’s civil liberties.

But in the maiden issue of First Principles, the bulletin of the Center for National Security Studies
of which he was director, Mr. Halperin penned an enthusiastic review of Mr. Agee’s “Inside the
Company.” Mr. Halperin wrote: “It is only by immersing oneself in the details of the book that
one can come to an understanding of what it means concretely for the United States to recruit and
send abroad a career covert intelligence service.” Among the “details” were the names of
hundreds of alleged American secret agents. Today, Mr. Halperin claims that he never condoned
Mr. Agee’s practice of exposing agents, but he gave no hint of this in the review.

No doubt Mr. Halperin’s views for have mellowed over time. Initially, he opposed not only
American covert action but also counter-intelligence, human espionage and even “electronic
intelligence-collection programs…which penetrate the air spaces or territorial waters of other
countries.” Over the years, he dropped his opposition to all but covert action. The Pentagon now
claims that he has changed even on that, but in his most recent article Mr. Halperin says: “The
United States should explicitly surrender the right to intervene in the internal affairs of other
countries by overt military means or by covert operations.”

By 1980, Congress was moving toward outlawing Mr. Agee’s and Counterspy’s practice of
exposing American agents. Mr. Halperin opposed such legislation except to penalize “the release
of names…done deliberately for the purpose of placing the life of the individual in jeopardy and
where the release of the name did, in fact, have that result,” a formulation so narrow that it
constituted no barrier at all. Eventually, Mr. Halperin agreed to support a compromise bill, but
one much narrower than Congress passed.

However much Mr. Halperin has changed, as recently as Operation Desert Storm he took
newspaper ads soliciting whistleblowers to expose executive branch misconduct in the Persian
Gulf. In 1991, he ran a conference on “Ending the Cold War at Home” whose call was still
redolent of the rhetoric of the 1960s and ’70s. This presumably is why the Nation magazine
enthused “Aspin’s hiring of Halperin…is a good sign. Maybe Halperin can reawaken the bad boy
that might still rest, however deeply, within Aspin.”

Do Halperin’s past views, reformed or not, matter? Now that the Cold War is over, he and I
agree on many things, so he told me during a recent visit. But the war of terrorists against
America is far from over. Had Halperin had his way, our intelligence services would be severely
constrained combating the likes of Sheik Rahman; indeed, they probably could not have placed in
the sheik’s group the informer who thwarted the plot to blow up much of New York.

Our limited success against Sheik Rahman depended on cooperation with Egyptian intelligence,
which means the Egyptian military, the very people in whom the assistant secretary of defense for
democracy and peacekeeping — for that would be Mr. Halperin’s title — is supposed to encourage
democratic behavior. To nudge a country like Egypt toward democracy while maintaining
cooperation against our common terrorist foes requires sensitivity to the domestic-security threats
it faces. It is hard to see the sense of assigning this task to someone whose views are so askew
that the group he directed used to call the FBI “America’s Political Police.”

Mr. Halperin is right that he and I agree on many issues today. The debate between the hawks and
doves have been replaced by one between internationalists and isolationists, and Mr. Halperin and
I are both internationalists. We also agree on the importance of promoting democracy abroad. Yet
I am not sure he is an asset to my side in these debates.

An internationalist, pro-democracy foreign policy must blend idealism with American interests —
or it will fail and deservedly. In a recent book, Mr. Halperin advocates American intervention
around the globe in disputes over self -determination under the aegis of the United Nations,
without addressing the American interest in this.

This omission is reminiscent of Mr. Halperin’s problem in the 1970s and ’80s, when his zeal for
civil liberties was combined with a blindness to the requisites of American security. Thus he could
lead a coalition against American spying that included groups that worked with the spies of hostile
countries. The times have changed and Mr. Halperin has changed, but has he gotten over the
blindness?

Mr. Muravchik is a resident scholar with the American Enterprise Institute.