On January 20 I walked into Fritz Schwarz's section of the auditorium. As he
spoke into the telephone, he motioned me to sit down. As usual, his desk
overflowed with papers and on the floor a leather briefcase bulged at the seams
as documents pushed out of its top. Crumpled yellow legal paper filled the trash
can and spilled onto the floor. Schwarz sprawled in his chair, his long legs
stretched out. Blue semicircles spread out under his tired eyes, and his pin-
striped suit was rumpled. The chief counsel looked as if he had just detrained
from the Trans-Siberian Express.

"What's new?" I asked as he hung up the receiver.

"Well, for one thing, I just informed Senator Church that we could not
possibly finish the committee's work by February 29th," Schwarz replied.
"Maybe by March 15th."

No wonder Schwarz looked battered. I could imagine how Church had
taken that bit of news.

"What did he have to say?" I inquired.

"He was not pleased." Schwarz managed a grin.

I asked him what he thought of the staff work on oversight so far, since
the next day the Ribicoff committee would begin its hearings on a proposal to
establish a permanent oversight committee for intelligence policy. As Senator
John Glenn (Democrat, Ohio), a member of the Ribicoff panel, would put it
during the hearings: "It is now the responsibility of the Committee on Govern-
ment Operations to go forth with the recommendations and to try to solve
problems brought to our attention by the Select Committee." ¹

Schwarz was unimpressed and uninterested in this aspect of the committee's
work. "Oversight is overrated," he replied. "I fear that the creation of a new
permanent intelligence committee will only serve to isolate intelligence in the
Congress." He envisaged the eventual displacement of intelligence oversight
responsibilities from other committees in the Senate (Appropriations, Foreign
Relations, Armed Services, Judiciary) to a single new committee, which would
then be highly vulnerable to manipulation and perhaps complete cooptation by
the intelligence community. His prognosis was glum, but plausible. The old
system of dispersed oversight authority, though, had failed to work very well.

-172-