The CIA & American Democracy

THE CIA AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

THE CIA AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

THIRD EDITION

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones

Copyright © 1989 by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones.

Preface to the Third Edition and Prologue copyright © 2003 by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones.

All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2002114384

ISBN: 978–0-300–09948-5

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

For my daughters

Gwenda and Rowen

CONTENTS

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

PROLOGUE: 9/11 AND THE POST-COLD WAR CIA

INTRODUCTION

1. THE LESSONS OF AMERICAN HISTORY

2. THE BIRTH OF THE CIA

3. THE MISTS OF BOGOTA: EXPANSION AND OBFUSCATION

4. SURVIVING MCCARTHY: A WEAKNESS FOR IMMUNITY

5. THE GOLDEN AGE OF OPERATIONS

6. INTELLIGENCE IN THE GOLDEN AGE: THE FIGHT FOR CREDIBILITY

7. PRESIDENTIAL SHAKE-UP: KENNEDY AND THE BAY OF PIGS

8. PRESIDENTIAL NEGLECT: LBJ AND THE CIA TO JUNE 1966

9. HELMS, JOHNSON, AND COSMETIC INTELLIGENCE

10. NIXON, KISSINGER, AND THE FRUITS OF MANIPULATION

11. DEMOCRACY’S INTELLIGENCE FLAP: TOWARD A NEW LEGITIMACY

12. RESTRAINED INTELLIGENCE AND THE HALF-WON PEACE

13. IGNORING THE CREDIBLE: THE CIA IN THE 1980s

CONCLUSION

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

In the late 1930s Tom Jones, who had been Prime Minister Lloyd George’s right-hand man, decided to help those who were fleeing Hitler’s tyranny. To this end he worked with the Pilgrim Trust, a private group whose objective hitherto had been the promotion of better understanding between Britain and the United States. In 1938 a Jewish couple, Fritz and Lily Pincus, fled Germany and through Tom Jones were dispatched to Harlech, a village in Wales where, at that time, my mother was organizing the reception facilities for refugees.

Life was hard for the new arrivals. Fritz had been a banker, but in Harlech he tried working as a motor mechanic. All thumbs and no fingers, he was kept on only through the kindness of the garage proprietor. By the war’s end he and Lily had moved to London. Fritz worked for the BBC and as a translator. After humble beginnings, Lily found work as a psychologist. A longtime friend of the theologian Paul Tillich, she converted to Christianity. Then she became my godmother, so we were regularly in touch and she proved an inspirational if slightly inquisitorial figure. What was it about my personality, she asked, that made me write about spies?

Lily co-founded the Tavistock Institute for Marital Studies in London, and in later years, she began to write about her psychoanalytical work and became a celebrity: one of her better-known books is Secrets in the Family (1978). Finally, and she told me that this step cost her dearly in terms of emotional stress, she decided to revisit Germany and give a series of radio broadcasts on her life experience since leaving Carlsbad, where she had been born in 1898 (Carlsbad, or Karlovy Vary, was in the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia that Hitler annexed in 1938). Her objective in giving the autobiographical broadcasts, published as Verloren-gewonnen: Mein Weg von Berlin nach London (1980), was to help Germany achieve closure on the Hitler tragedy.

One day, not long after the Syrian-Egyptian Yom Kippur attack on Israel in 1973, Lily expressed to me privately her deep worries about Israel, a nation that she visited regularly and to which she was powerfully attached. The dreadful hostility that Israel endured from its neighbors was, she felt, in good measure owing to Israel’s own bad treatment of the Palestinians. The solution lay in moderation and generosity, not in enmity and repression, and it upset her deeply to see fellow-Jews acting in such a ruthless and inhumane manner. She felt that her views were widely shared by Jews in Britain and in the United States, where her brother had settled. Some time later, when she had became well known, I asked her, Are you tempted to rally this strain of Jewish opinion to bring pressure to bear on Israel? The facial lineaments I had grown to love stiffened. I could not possibly, she said, I just couldn’t.

I have narrated this microcosmic illustration of international complexity to show what the CIA is up against. The analysis of foreign affairs is never a simple matter, and no amount of secret probing can reduce to mere logic the complex emotions and feelings of those who influence governments. To expect the director of the CIA to be a Mr. Know It All or a Mr. Fix Everything is to expect too much.

Yet, when dire events like those of September 11, 2001, take place, this is precisely what occurs. The widespread instinct is to point an accusing finger at the CIA, and to demand reform no matter how many dollars it costs, on the assumption that the Agency should be able to wave a magic wand.

This third edition of The CIA and American Democracy attempts to make sense of the relationship between the CIA and 9/11. The original edition took the history of the CIA up to the late 1980s. Since then, communism has collapsed in Europe and the Cold War has ended, but new threats have developed. A new prologue therefore addresses the history of the post-Cold War CIA. In it I ask whether the Agency, when it lost its prime mission of watching the Soviet Union, lost its hold on public esteem, leading to poor morale and possibly to mistakes. The prologue focuses, however, on a more recent and pressing concern, the intelligence dimensions of the terrorist attacks of 9/11.1 suggest that we expected too much of the CIA, but also that we can expect more than we got from it.

PROLOGUE

September II and the Post-Cold War CIA

The attack on the World Trade Center on September 11 , 2001, was one of the most distressing events of modern times. To the perpetrators of the deed, it was a blow struck at the heart of American capitalism. To the vast majority of others, it was a dastardly attack on what amounted to a people’s palace set in a much-loved city. My own experience of the World Trade Center is typical. On August 6, 1991,1 took my two little girls up to the top of one of the towers to enjoy the view of the vast, teeming democracy unfolding far below. A decade later, it was Rowena, the younger of the two and now a grown woman, who phoned me in a state of shock to tell me of the attack. Millions of others will likewise remember for the rest of their lives what they were doing on that day and how they learned the news.

When an event has been seared into one’s mind in such a manner, it is important to stand back and try to be objective. My purpose in this prologue is to discuss the intelligence aspects of 9/11, with particular reference to the subject of this book, the CIA. The strike against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had far-reaching consequences for the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community. It invited fresh thinking on the purpose of secret intelligence. Perhaps in the heat of emotion it induced new intelligence distortions just as old mistakes were being laid bare. But most conspicuously the strike prompted a debate about what had gone wrong with American intelligence to make it so blind to the 9/11 plot. Had it been starved of funds or overfed with dollars that made it fat and sleepy? Was the CIA hampered by the requirement that it should cooperate with scheming plodders in the FBI, or should it have operated in closer tandem with the Bureau? Were America’s counterspies too politically correct and soft on Arabs, or linguistically negligent, paying too little heed to languages and cultures that spawned hatred of America?

All this relates to the argument in this book, that the CIA’s ability to do its job depends, to a great degree, on its standing. If the powers that be are willing to listen to you, you stand a better chance of conveying to them the information that is vital to the nation’s security. Various factors affected that standing in the years from the Agency’s founding in 1947 to the last phase of the Cold War. But what happened to the Agency’s standing after the collapse of the Soviet Union? By the 1990s, did Washington perceive the CIA as essentially a spent force, a Cold War agency that had little purpose? Had the CIA lost its way by the time the terrorists struck in 2001?

The Post-Cold War CIA

A review of the debate on the CIA in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union upholds that view to a certain extent, but not conclusively. For if the Agency fell, it also rose again.

In December 1989, General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union and President George Bush met on the island of Malta to declare the Cold War formally at an end, and it soon became evident that American intelligence was entering into a difficult period. The CIA’s critics included former intelligence officials like Vincent Cannistraro, journalists like Flora Lewis (New York Times) and Mary McGrory (Washington Post), and prominent legislators like Senator Daniel P. Moynihan, who recommended the dissolution of the Agency. In part, these critics were motivated by hopes of a peace dividend, with taxpayers’ money being diverted from defense and intelligence to other programs. But they also criticized the Agency’s past performance. Richard Pipes, a specialist in Russian history at Harvard University, joined Moynihan in charging that the CIA had failed in its predictive task. Former president Gerald Ford claimed that the CIA had overestimated the Soviet threat in the 1960s. Several critics maintained that the Agency had exaggerated the economic and military strength of the Soviets in the 1970s, adding that it had also failed to predict the fall of Gorbachev in 1991. Others argued that senior Agency officials like Robert Gates had known that the Soviet Union was weakening but had twisted their intelligence output to exaggerate the Communist threat and belittle Gorbachev’s reforms, thus helping to fool the American people into accepting President Reagan’s expensive strategic plans.

Acting Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Richard Kerr and former DCIs Richard Helms, James Schlesinger, and Robert Gates came to the Agency’s defense. They insisted that the CIA should be left intact and that the nation’s intelligence budget should be maintained or even increased. They invented new roles for the Agency, arguing that the evaporation of the Soviet threat made the world more complex and therefore more dangerous. Weapons proliferation was one area that suggested a need for vigilance. There was also a need for an intelligence agency that would address economic, health, environmental, and narcotics problems. With the object of rebutting the critics’ charges, former CIA analyst Bruce D. Berkowitz published extracts from CIA documents purporting to show that the Agency had warned of the collapse of the Soviet economy, of the probable fall of Gorbachev, and of the likely disintegration of the Soviet Union.

The CIA’s defenders pointed with pride to the Agency’s role in Reagan’s plan to destroy the evil empire of Soviet Communism. Reagan’s CIA had sapped the strength of the Reds by means of a variety of secret operations. For example, the CIA supplied Stinger ground-to-air missiles to the opponents of the Moscow-backed government in Afghanistan, enabling them to shoot down the regime’s Soviet-supplied helicopter gunships and prolong the war at great cost to the Communists (little did they realize that in arming the Taliban they were fueling a future threat to the United States). Similarly, with the help of the Vatican, the Catholic DCI William Casey (1981–87) injected money into Solidarity, the movement that brought down the Communist government in the pope’s mother country, Poland. Just as shrewd, the defenders claimed, was Reagan’s effort to increase U.S. military spending to a level that would demoralize the Soviets and force them into an emulative expenditure pattern they could ill afford. National security directive NSDD-75 (1983) outlined a plan to bankrupt the Moscow regime. The then-secret document called for internal pressure on the USSR to weaken the sources of Soviet imperialism.

Vigorous though it was, this defense of the CIA was not strong enough to prevent the controversy from rumbling on. The effectiveness of the CIA’s past covert operations was open to question. Had they in the long run shortened the Cold War and brought it to a successful conclusion, or were they one of the principal causes of the Cold War and a provocation that gave the Communists an excuse to cling to power? It is doubtful that objective historians outside the United States will give any prominence to U.S. secret operations and grand deception in their accounts of the changes in the former Soviet Union. John Gooding’s respected book Rulers and Subjects (1996) is typical of non-U.S. studies in that it makes no reference to the United States or the CIA in its analysis of the second Russian revolution. The critics’ counterarguments were given new life by a series of further disclosures. Here are some examples, given in order of disclosure rather than occurrence, as it was their disclosure that affected the standing of the CIA. In 1993, evidence obtained by the CIA’s archrival, the FBI, led to the arrest of Aldrich H. Ames. Ames had served as head of the Soviet section of CIA counterintelligence. In 1984, he began to sell U.S. secrets to the KGB. The treason led to the deaths of several of America’s secret agents. It also enabled Moscow to feed disinformation to the United States: Senate Select Intelligence Committee chair Arlen Specter stated that, because of the KGB penetration, the CIA sent the White House and Pentagon 35 questionable reports. Far from deceiving the Russians, the Americans would appear to have been the victims of a Muscovite deception that caused the Defense Department to waste money on unnecessary projects.

The year 1995 was an embarrassing one for the Agency. R. James Woolsey, DCI since 1993, was forced to resign because he had not disciplined those within the CIA who had failed to root out Ames. In further episodes, the CIA was caught in the act of running economic espionage against two of America’s most valued allies, France and Japan. It also emerged that in Guatemala a CIA operative had murdered one American citizen and the husband of another.

The next year was scarcely better. In 1996 it was charged that the CIA’s activities in support of the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s had been partly financed by the proceeds of crack cocaine sales in inner-city Los Angeles. Although the evidence was inconclusive, the story followed in the wake of an exposé of the Tuskegee experiment, in which 399 African American men suffering from syphilis had been left untreated in order for researchers to study the full course of the disease. Fears of genocide were in the air, and the Congressional Black Caucus demanded an inquiry.

The embarrassments continued in 1997. It emerged that during the Gulf War in 1991, the CIA had kept the U.S. military in the dark about the contents of a storage bunker in Khamisiyah; when bombed by American planes, the bunker released a plume of sarin gas and toxic agents that endangered the health of U.S. soldiers. As if that were not enough, details also emerged of the recent and bloody failure of a CIA-funded coup attempt against Saddam Hussein as well as of CIA assassination plans in 1950s Guatemala, where an Agency handbook had explained how to purify a room of a dozen people within twenty seconds.

This tale of woe needs to be placed in perspective. In some cases, the CIA would appear to have been the scapegoat for military and presidential errors. Further, it is axiomatic that a secret agency cannot boast about its successes without betraying its method of operation, so its mistakes tend to hit the headlines to a disproportionate degree. Finally, the history of the CIA suggests an inverse relationship between Cold War intensity on one hand and scrutiny of the Agency’s affairs by Congress and the media on the other. It would appear that the press savaged the CIA in the 1990s partly because, in the post-Cold War era, journalists were no longer governed by the imperatives of patriotic loyalty to national-defense institutions. The CIA had become the victim of its own claim to have played a role in the winning of the Cold War.

In spite of these qualifying perspectives, it is plain that the CIA’s standing was impaired, and to a measurable degree. Such were the perils of the job that the Agency ran through five directors in the 1991–97 period. In a series of turf wars, the Department of Defense attempted to dominate the national intelligence effort. Meanwhile, the FBI was challenging the CIA’s foreign domain: drawing on a 58 percent budget increase between 1993 and 2001, the Bureau had agents permanently positioned in forty-four countries by the eve of 9/11.

These events occurred against a background of overall intelligence cuts in the early 1990s. Until 1997 the national intelligence budget was kept secret, but it was thought to have reached a peak, in the late 1980s, of between $30 and $36 billion. The official figure released in 1997 was substantially smaller at $26.6 billion. This meant sacrifices: in 1993–94, DCI Woolsey reduced personnel in the CIA by 24 percent. Following these cuts, journalist Tim Weiner noted that morale at the Agency was lower than Death Valley (New York Times, Jan. 1, 1995).

Upsetting though they were to intelligence officials, these changes did not spell the end of the CIA. For one thing, its budgetary cuts were made from a high base. The new funding levels seemed to be low only when compared with the spending peaks of the late 1980s. Even allowing for inflation, they were not dramatically different from the $20 billion spent in 1981. In light of the potential results of the collapse of the primary enemy, the 1990s cuts were modest.

Even before the Soviet collapse, the American public had shown signs of being open to the idea that the CIA might operate independently of the imperatives of the Cold War. The reception of spy fiction is an indicator of the reading public’s readiness to accept diversification of mission. Tom Clancy’s Cold War novel The Hunt for Red October (1984) sold well, but its highest position on the New York Times best-seller list was number three. In contrast, Clancy’s Clear and Present Danger (1989) hit the number one spot. This tale of the CIA’s anti-narcotics operations in Colombia was actually the best-selling novel of any type in the 1980s. By the 1990s, it seemed both evident and acceptable to Clancy fans that the Agency had moved on from its former Cold War concerns. The public’s receptiveness to new dangers is underlined in a further best-selling Clancy novel, a work of tragic prescience. In Debt of Honor (1994), an enraged pilot crashes his fuel-laden airliner into a joint session of Congress with huge loss of life.

With an eye to increasing its public acceptability, the CIA made a number of changes. DCIs Gates and John M. Deutch (1995–96) advocated more openness and allowed the declassification of carefully selected historical documents. This policy did not satisfy the document-hungry historical profession but was sufficient to provoke DCI George J. Tenet to declare, in his confirmation hearings in 1997, that openness had been carried too far. Nevertheless, Tenet went on to end the secrecy over the Agency’s budget. Other reforms, such as cutbacks in the expensive spy satellite program and in covert operations, also commanded respect. Less well received was the attempt, in 1996, to make the CIA director the budgetary and managerial tsar of the entire intelligence community.

While the Agency reformed itself and prepared to fight back against its critics, the moderates in the nation’s capital steered a course between the abolitionists and the boosters, devising an approach that would ensure public backing for the continuation of the CIA. By 1992, David L. Boren and David McCurdy, chairs of the Senate and House intelligence oversight committees, respectively, had articulated a case for the continuation of a reformed CIA. A sharp increase in congressional oversight in 1992–93 encouraged a sense of shared responsibility for the CIA, thus reducing the possibility of its becoming a sacrificial symbol of the Cold War’s end.

In the wake of his accession to the presidency in 1993, Bill Clinton at first seemed to take little interest in the Agency. Like many presidents, he was initially preoccupied by domestic policy. But he had never been anti-CIA; indeed, as long ago as 1969 he had demonstrated his faith in its powers by appealing to the Agency’s Richard Stearns for help in avoiding the draft at the time of the Vietnam War. While today it might seem natural to assume that conservative presidents champion the CIA, there is ample evidence to show that liberals had promoted it for decades. Clinton was to be no exception. In 1994, he appointed a presidential commission on intelligence. Under the chairmanship first of Les Aspin and then of Harold Brown, the commission undertook America’s biggest-ever single inquiry into secret intelligence. In 1996, the commission recommended that the CIA should continue to function as an independent Agency, that it should reform itself in some respects, and that it should abandon the intelligence tsar idea. The report of the Aspin/Brown commission, which had the president’s backing, gave the moderates’ seal of approval to the CIA.

So the end of the Cold War and the rash of criticism that followed did not fatally injure the CIA. But it must be conceded that, at the time of George Tenet’s confirmation in 1997, there was still some doubt about the Agency’s standing. The factors undermining the CIA included lingering doubts about the need for a major post-Cold War intelligence agency and concerns about trustworthiness following the Ames case. But some of the detrimental factors-nagging doubts about the CIA’s predictive and analytical performance, continuing concern about its covert operations, and worries about the threat it posed to democracy, especially when the rights of Americans were affected—were less acute than chronic and were rooted in earlier decades. In these concerns, it is possible to see elements of continuity between the pre-1989 and post-1989 history of the CIA, rather than an acute post-Cold War crisis.

Under Tenet, the reputation of the CIA ebbed and flowed, sometimes in ways that prefigured some of the vehement debate that took place after 9/11. There was, for example, the issue of political correctness. Discrimination against intelligence recruits on the basis of class, race, or sexual orientation was challenged on the ground that it deprived American intelligence of talented recruits and of personnel who might be native speakers of useful foreign languages. Changing cultural mores meant that a gay person was no longer vulnerable to blackmail by a foreign intelligence agency, so the politically correct demanded an end to discrimination.

In 1991, the George H. W. Bush administration had initiated a glass ceiling study that revealed widespread discontent among women in the CIA over sexual harassment and promotions denial. Four years later, the Agency reacted to a lawsuit by offering retrospective promotions to scores of women, and Nora Slatkin was appointed to the senior post of executive director. President Clinton in August 1995 issued an executive order that forbade discrimination against homosexuals in security clearance procedures, and in the next few months a group of CIA employees established ANGLE, the Agency Network of Gay and Lesbian Employees. The spirit that moved the Clinton administration to be tolerant at home affected foreign policy, too. The president instructed U.S. intelligence officials to help with international peacekeeping efforts. In keeping with this mood, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan in 2000 called for an improved U.N. intelligence capability.

Liberalism had its limits, however. In March 1999, the Taiwanese-born scientist Wen Ho Lee was charged with spying for Red China at the atomic weapons research laboratory in Los Alamos. The evidence against him was flimsy. When he was ultimately cleared, civil libertarians complained that Lee’s accusers had used racial profiling to identify him as a suspect. To these civil libertarians, he seemed to have been arrested for being Chinese while working in a laboratory, just as traditionally African Americans had been harassed for driving whilst black (Spectator, June 1, 2002).

Another factor having a bearing on the reputation of the CIA in the Tenet era was Tenet himself. The DCI’s parents came from Greece and Albania, respectively (in the 1940s, his mother had narrowly escaped the clutches of Albania’s Communist regime). Tenet had the survival instincts and faith in America of a second-generation immigrant. He was able to read the political scene in Washington. He brought to an end the rapid and demoralizing changes in leadership in the CIA by serving to the end of Clinton’s second term and then achieving reappointment by President George W. Bush.

To a certain degree, Tenet’s reappointment reflected the outlook of the Bush family. Traditionally DCIs had not been political appointees and were not supposed to receive a pink slip upon the advent of a new administration. In 1977, however, the newly elected Democratic president Jimmy Carter had released the senior George Bush, an appointee of the Republican president Gerald Ford, from his post as DCI, in a move widely perceived as political. When the Republican Bush, junior, reappointed the Democratic appointee Tenet, he was, in a significant sense, stating a point of principle. At the same time, Tenet was a consummate politician who had assiduously cultivated the Bushes, for example by throwing a lavish party for Bush senior. Moreover, he had the genuine respect of Bush junior from the beginning. He briefed the president frequently and was even dispatched to undertake a vital diplomatic mission, mediation in the Israel-Palestine conflict. There were those who complained that Tenet was too political. But if presidential access is the criterion, Tenet brought the CIA to one of its highest levels of standing and influence.

With Tenet in charge, rivalry with the ever-expanding FBI continued. But in February 2001 the FBI suffered a setback with the arrest for espionage of Robert Hanssen, a twenty-seven-year veteran of the Bureau and senior counterintelligence official who turned out to have been selling secrets to his Moscow masters since 1985. At the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, FBI Special Agent Stefan Pluta served an affidavit in support of Hanssen’s arrest warrant setting forth a catalogue of betrayals, all apparently undertaken for money—Hanssen received at least $1.4 million from the Russian intelligence services. The outlook for FBI director Louis Freeh suddenly looked bleak: Fire Freeh, screamed one headline in the Washington Post (Feb. 27, 2001). Perhaps luckily for what remained of his reputation, Freeh did quit the Bureau just in time to avoid excoriation over the cataclysm of 9/11. Thus, Hanssen promised closure on Ames. No longer could it be said that the CIA was uniquely prone to penetration.

With the arrival of Bush junior in the White House, it was immediately plain that secret intelligence would receive a high status and more money. While the CIA may have been the creation of a Democratic president (Harry Truman), it now seemed to be strongly favored by Republicans, notably conservative Republicans and especially the Bushes. Alarm bells began to ring for those who remembered past CIA excesses and who for years had campaigned for restrictions, oversight, and even abolition. But these sounds were soon drowned out by the deafening roar of 9/11.

9/11: Causes, Consequences, Politics, and Significance

The fatalities in the World Trade Center attack exceeded those in the Pearl Harbor attack. Just as Pearl Harbor had propelled the United States into a world war, so, sixty years later, 9/11 would launch the nation into a war against terrorism. Against this grim background, Americans demanded to know what had happened. The question was, How had the nation been caught unawares? To a degree not matched since the mid-1970s, attention focused on the intelligence community and its alleged weaknesses. Immediately after the attack it was assumed that Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda terrorist network were responsible for the hijackings and the suicide missions against New York and Washington. The evidence that subsequently unfolded did confirm that Al Qaeda and bin Laden’s lieutenants were responsible. But it seemed strange and distressing that intelligence already knew about bin Laden’s activities yet seemed incapable of issuing a timely warning to prevent the 9/11 attack and save all those lives.

A widespread view, and one shared by the Bush administration, was that the intelligence community failed to supply a warning of the September attacks because the community was underresourced. In approving in June 2002 the Bush administration’s plans for substantial budgetary expansion, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence maintained that, before September 2001, intelligence for too long received inadequate attention and insufficient resources.

But this claim invited the question, how much is enough? Even before the advent of Bush junior to the presidency, the U.S. intelligence budget was in its fifth successive year of expansion. The estimated 2000 intelligence budget of $30 billion was larger than all Russian military expenditures combined, and it dwarfed the puny amount Moscow spent on its relatively effective intelligence services. The United States spent five times as much on intelligence as the whole of Europe combined, and no other region of the world could begin to compete with that level of expenditure.

Against this background, some analysts identified qualitative problems with U.S. intelligence performance. In her classic work on the Pearl Harbor attack, the historian Roberta Wohlstetter had suggested that there had been a surfeit rather than a deficit of information. In consequence, U.S. signals intelligence had failed to distinguish between the huge mass of irrelevant noise and the much smaller number of significant signals. The challenge was to collect the right kind of intelligence and to analyze it properly. In similar vein, President Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleeza Rice, thought that a crucial FBI memo warning about Al Qaeda plans has been missed because there was a lot of chatter in the system (Hersh, p. 40). In the words of a popular phrase, U.S. intelligence had not connected the dots (New York Times, May 27, 2002).

Some intelligence critics ascribed the predictive incapacity to sheer analytical failure. Others discerned bureaucratic shortcomings. The intelligence community had the right signals or dots, but because of a lack of adequate centralizing procedures, they were not given to the right people, those capable of putting the clues together and interpreting them. While this was perceived to be a general problem, the FBI-CIA rivalry was singled out as a special and tragic issue. As so often in post-World War II history, lack of intelligence coordination became the inanimate villain of the day.

Socially conservative critics saw yet another failing in the system: political correctness. They alleged that this extreme version of liberalism had prevented officials from narrowing their lists of terrorist to focus on young Arab men. Far from being pernicious, racial profiling was just plain good sense if you were trying to pin down the Al Qaeda network. Journalist Mark Steyn complained that, under the guidance of misguided national security personnel, airport security and counterintelligence officials would let obvious suspects go free and even harass the innocent to show that they had clean, nondiscriminating hands. In his article Stop Frisking Crippled Nuns he wrote of the failure to arrest one would-be suicide-mission pilot: In August 2001, invited to connect the dots on the [Zacarias] Moussaoui file, Washington bureaucrats saw only scolding editorials about ‘flying whilst Arab’ (Spectator, June 1, 2002).

Just as damaging, though, was the contrasting charge that U.S. intelligence was too insular to learn about foreign languages and cultures. Notoriously, when the CIA tried to take a leading role in the effort to root out the Al Qaeda network in Afghanistan and to arrest or kill bin Laden, it turned out that the Agency had no capability in the local languages, in spite of having helped train local, Al Qaeda-sustaining Taliban fighters in the 1980s. Nor was the linguistic deficiency limited to languages spoken by relatively small groups of people. Two Arabic-language messages dated September 10, 2001, and warning of an attack the next day—Tomorrow is zero hour—were intercepted but not translated in time to be useful (Washington Post, June 19, 2002).

To a student of the history of the CIA, the foregoing discussion on causation has a sadly familiar ring. First, the very process of making a scapegoat of the intelligence community and especially of the CIA recalls political opportunism on previous occasions, notably the Bay of Pigs operation of 1961, which led to the resignation of DCI Allen Dulles. The reward of failure is similarly a repetition of history: the political leadership makes a mistake, blames it on the CIA, then calls for more money to remedy the alleged deficiency and to hush up potential critics within the intelligence community with promises of institutional cornucopia. Calls for improved centralization are nothing new—poor centralization at the time of Pearl Harbor was an oft-cited justification for the formation of the CIA. The identification of an enemy within, or Fifth Column danger, especially in ethnic or racially defined terms, is as old as the Republic and was a flourishing practice in World War II when the Japanese-American population was interned. As for lack of language proficiency, this, too, was an ancient lament. In the Factual Epilogue to their pro-CIA novel The Ugly American (1959), William Lederer and Eugene Burdick noted that fewer than three out of ten U.S. officials on duty in Asia spoke the local language, whereas nine out of ten of their Soviet counterparts did (p. 273).

In part because the litany of complaints was familiar, there was at first a certain complacency in the responses to 9/11. Just as the planning behind the Pearl Harbor attack was sometimes depicted as too ingenious to be predicted, so the Al Qaeda terrorists’ plot was portrayed as brilliant. According to the CIA’s deputy director for operations, James Pavitt, Al Qaeda’s combination of control, compartmentation, discipline, and fanaticism made it impenetrable except by means of a defection (Hersh, p. 42).

Such complacency fed on a deafening political silence that lasted for several months after the September depredations. Although the nation was deeply shocked, the president rode high in the opinion polls, and Congress and the press seemed to have dozed off. There was plenty of vituperative patriotism, but little evidence of critical appraisal of what had gone wrong. Was this unusual? After an actual or perceived intelligence disaster, there is normally a spell of bipartisan solidarity, followed after an interval by a partisan political response. This is part of the healthy, adversarial, two-party democratic system. After making a scapegoat of the CIA, an administration typically sets up a preemptive in-house inquiry. Examples given in this book are the Katzenbach probe into the 1967 revelation that the CIA had suborned the National Students’ Association and the Rockefeller investigation when it was revealed, early in 1975, that the CIA had run an assassination program. The White House would expect these in-house inquiries to take the heat out of a scandal until people had lost interest, to fend off the possibility of more aggressive congressional investigations, and then to come up with some harmless recommendations meriting just a few paragraphs on the inside pages of the newspapers. Sometimes the tactic worked—the Katzenback inquiry is one example, and the Tower investigation of Irangate (1987) is another. But sometimes it did not—the Church and Pike congressional hearings on intelligence abuses followed hard on the heels of the Rockefeller commission.

The post-9/11 silence arose partly out of the fact that America had been attacked. This is reminiscent of Pearl Harbor; while the Roberts Commission started investigating the causes of Pearl Harbor within weeks of the attack, it was not until 1945 that the administration had to face the full force of congressional investigation. Another reason why critical scrutiny of 9/11 was delayed was that Bush had only recently become president. The customary honeymoon months had not yet given way to business as usual, partisan debate. It might be added that, to the overwhelming majority of Americans, 9/11 was a shock as well as a tactical surprise. In 1941 people had known that there was a problem with Japan and war had already broken out in Europe, but in 2001 America was still basking placidly in a kind of post-Cold War Jacuzzi. Critics of the intelligence community were equipped to object to its excesses, but not to its predictive shortcomings.

In the wake of 9/11, the standing of the CIA soared to dizzying heights. People wore CIA T-shirts and applied for jobs in the Agency in the thousands. In a kind of patriotism game, politicians competed with one another to give most support to the institutions of national security. Confronted with White House demands for more money to be spent on intelligence, congressional committees for months said, yes, but please accept more money than you asked for. In a variation on previous preemptive tactics, the White House placed its trust in the activities of a joint Senate and House investigation of 9/11, trusting that the iconic status of the CIA, Republican strength in both houses of Congress, and a reluctance on the part of the CIA and FBI to hand over significant documents would combine to save the president from any embarrassment in the secret hearings. Not until May 2002 did serious criticism begin, with demands for an independent commission of inquiry similar to the Warren investigation of John F. Kennedy’s death. This belated outburst of questioning stemmed from charges that the president had received warnings of 9/11 and ignored them and that other messages had not gotten through to him, from indications that the CIA and FBI had withheld information from each other (there were bitter interagency recriminations over this), and from the approach of the midterm elections and the Democrats’ need to dent the Republican president’s popularity.

In the meantime, the Bush administration had pumped more money into the intelligence community, a move that was consistent with its pre-9/11 philosophy. Expansionism was back with a vengeance. The CIA’s Counterterrorism Center produced five hundred reports a month, and at 5 P.M. every day DCI Tenet summoned forty officials—a team irreverently known as the small group—to discuss the latest terrorism intelligence (Time, July 8, 2002).

But the president also mooted a major reform of the national security bureaucracy. In June 2002 he proposed a new Cabinet Department of Homeland Security. He said that this would be the greatest reform of its kind since the National Security Act of 1947 that had restructured the armed services and established the CIA. Bush’s June 18 press release indicated that the proposed department would complement the intelligence-gathering functions of the FBI and CIA and analyze information supplied by those agencies.

The DCI had long tried to act as this kind of leader of the intelligence community, with mixed success over the decades, as the latest rebuff by the Aspin/Brown commission had shown. Now the president proposed to create a new overlord. Perhaps the feuding baronies that made up the intelligence community would rally to the defense of their nation in its hour of need and would support a department whose novelty meant that it had no old enemies. Early reactions certainly indicated an acceptance in principle of the need for cooperation. However, there were also signs of continuing ambition for imperial co-option. In June 27 hearings on the Homeland Security bill before the Senate governmental affairs committee, the new FBI director, Robert S. Mueller, spoke of mutuality of effort, but in language that placed his bureau at the center of things: the FBI’s National Joint Terrorism Task Force would, of course, . . . include the new homeland security department, just as CIA officers have [already] joined us. Meanwhile the CIA dragged its feet over the involvement of FBI personnel in its Counterterrorism Center. The struggle for control seemed destined to continue.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were hugely significant. It is true that the depredation resulted in fewer deaths than other events, such as 1984 chemical plant explosion in Bhopal, India, or aggregated road accidents in the United States itself. But the murderous and hostile intent behind 9/11 was plain and put it into a special category. An attack of this kind on the homeland of a democracy is bound to have major consequences, as the people—the voters—will demand action. America perceived 9/11 as an affront, and that made it one.

To lay the surprise assault at the door of the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community is, however, another matter. The episode was an attack waiting to happen. American policy toward Japan had invited Pearl Harbor, and no amount of moralizing about extremists can undermine the fact that widespread terrorism reflects a deep-seated sense of injustice. American policy toward the Arab and Moslem world cannot be divorced from international terrorism and its practitioners’ choice of targets. Intelligence analysts can indicate the flow of the political river, but they cannot change it. It is up to politicians to engineer such changes.

Nor can intelligence agencies, as a general rule, predict where and when the river will burst its banks. Like generals who are good at fighting the last war, they can devise systems to cope with the previous surprise attack. But surprise attack is of its nature and by design nonsystemic. Pearl Harbor, the Yom Kippur War, and 9/11 will never be repeated. The next nasty surprise is unlikely to bear similarities with 9/11 and may have nothing to do with bin Laden and Al Qaeda. It does not take a pessimist to conjure up alternative scenarios now that eight powers can wage nuclear war and others are lining up to develop that capability.

Intelligence agencies can point to such dangers, but expectations should not be high that they can predict the sudden use of weapons of mass destruction or other nasty surprises. Like the police, who can solve only a minority of crimes but still provide a comforting illusion of protection and security, intelligence agencies have an important psychological role to play. To shower the CIA and its ilk with taxpayers’ money is to drop pennies into the wishing well—if you are superstitious, it makes you feel better.

With these dampened expectations in mind, it is still necessary to ask what lessons 9/11 holds for the conduct of American secret intelligence. The CIA has always been good at medium- and long-term prediction. That is a skill worth preserving, and here the Agency not only merits but also needs its high standing, if it is to carry its message to a listening White House. It is also possible that one day, the Agency or its siblings will break with tradition and nip a surprise attack in the bud. So there is no need for fatalism in assessing the Agency’s weaknesses.

The events of 9/11 do make it clear that the CIA was not cosmopolitan enough, and this is a severe indictment of a foreign intelligence agency. Cooperation in intelligence matters with the United Nations, the European Union, and diverse national governments would bring greater knowledge and wisdom. In dealing with fundamentally different cultures, we are in need of tolerance and understanding. They are needed in the CIA but also more broadly, for as this book argues, the CIA is an integral part of American democracy. And tolerance and understanding are qualities that money cannot buy.

INTRODUCTION

Democracy depends upon secret intelligence for its survival, yet the relationship between the two has always been controversial, and, at times, mutually harmful. The purpose of this book is to examine those factors which have increased or diminished the effectiveness of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the main national intelligence organization of the world’s leading democracy. Three groups of factors need to be considered. The first is comprised of considerations that affect intelligence work in every country—feudal tyrannies and Communist totalitarian states as much as constitutional democracies. The second group is made up of factors springing specifically from the nature of American democracy. The third group, closely connected with yet in some ways distinct from the second, consists of those elements which have favorably or adversely affected the CIA’s standing, for it is the central contention in this book that CIA successes have depended not just on the quality of its analysis but also on its power to persuade.

Uncongenial though the fact may be to ardent democrats, CIA people share certain characteristics that affect non-American intelligence agencies, too. Every prospectively successful intelligence agency, for example, needs to attract good staff. Once it has achieved this goal, it needs to offer sound tuition—as, for example, at the training camp near Williamsburg, Virginia, known as The Farm. Nor is this enough. An effective agency must, in addition to selecting good people and training them well, induce them to stay on for a substantial period of service in order to benefit from their accumulating experience, without, however, allowing an onset of intellectual, institutional, or behavioral stagnation. Even if the record is good in the foregoing respects, effectiveness will usually depend on the difficulty of the task in hand as well as the competence of the opposition at a given time. Periodic reverses may be expected, and the CIA has by no means been alone in facing the occasional necessity of boosting staff morale—good morale being another ingredient vital to the success of any intelligence agency.

Whether an intelligence organization is located in Washington or Moscow, in the twentieth century or the second, its success depends on its ability to separate analysis from policy advocacy and from action: with the best will in the world, it is difficult to give a fair hearing to reports that undermine policies and actions to which one is committed. One might argue, of course, that, here, democracies have an advantage over the Communists in being less doctrinaire or ideological. Nevertheless, the CIA has not always escaped that international intelligence disease, commitment. Nor has the Agency managed to shake itself entirely free of still another influence that has nothing to do with democracy as such: mirror-imaging, or the potentially misleading belief that other nations are likely to behave in much the same way as one’s own. Clearly, then, democracy is not responsible for all of the CIA’s problems.

It is nonetheless true that U.S. secret intelligence has in some ways been the prisoner of the very democracy whose citizens’ liberties it helps to protect. When the CIA has overstepped certain moral boundaries, domestic, politicians have called for greater restraint. At the least suggestion that the CIA is imitating its sworn enemy the KGB, there has been uproar—especially if there seems a danger that Soviet methods will be imported to the United States itself. The result has been an array of statutory limitations on the CIA’s freedom of maneuver. The seriousness of democratic restrictions on the CIA needs to be kept in perspective, it is true. For one thing, a democratic society offers an intelligence agency advantages which help compensate for that society’s sometimes constricting vigilance. Pluralism and free speech in America’s democracy have produced a rich profusion of ideas on every conceivable subject; the CIA has been able to draw on these ideas and, where appropriate, recruit their authors. Of enormous advantage, too, has been that cosmopolitanism which derives from the experience and composition of a nation of immigrants, thus leading to tolerance and understanding, as well as to expertise in the languages and customs of foreign nations. But, of course, the fact that the CIA derives such advantages from American democracy by no means invalidates the case for studying the problems which that democracy nevertheless creates for U.S. secret intelligence.

The CIA has had to operate within the context of America’s own form of democracy with its distinctive processes. Notably, the Agency has been enmeshed in presidential politics. For example, its posture on the missile gap controversy had a bearing on the 1960 presidential election, and the suppression of its Vietnam estimates influenced the outcome of the 1968 election. As CIA directors are dependent on presidential patronage, they are acutely conscious of the political sensitivity of some of their estimates, and their judgment may be affected accordingly. The presidents themselves are even more politically conscious, a fact which may induce them, in the interest of avoiding political embarrassments, to ask the wrong intelligence questions—resulting in the allocation of inappropriate tasks to the CIA. In spite of the ever-increasing importance of foreign policy, some presidents (and members of Congress, too) have furthermore behaved on the assumption that elections are won or lost primarily on domestic issues. More than one president has impatiently pushed aside foreign-intelligence reports, only then, after an error, to fudge the issue of reform by merely giving the CIA more money. Added to the fact that individual presidents have attended to intelligence problems in a spasmodic and inconsistent manner is the phenomenon of automatic quadrennial discontinuity. The occasional two-term presidency has mitigated the effects of elections on intelligence administration, but, on the other hand, the abrupt endings of the Kennedy and Nixon administrations aggravated the discontinuity in the CIA’s tasking.

Some hope for continuous and consistent guidance lay with Congress. Although it is true that many representatives serve for only a short spell, those on influential oversight committees are characteristically veterans of many years’ standing. Congress has, indeed, contributed sage advice. In the late 1940s and the