Inside the CIA (45 page)

The criticism underscored the need to continue to spy on the former Soviet Union even after the cataclysmic changes that rocked that country in 1991. For regardless of whether the former Soviets are considered enemies or friends, the U.S. needs to know what is happening within a government that controls thousands of nuclear weapons. For its part, the KGB continued to spy on the U.S. after the coup much as it always had. And Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait demonstrated why the CIA is needed regardless of whether the Soviets pose a threat.

Nevertheless, some members of Congress called for a reorganization of the intelligence community. Saying one man could not do both jobs, Sen. Arlen Specter, a Republican from Pennsylvania, introduced a bill that would take away the role of the CIA director as overseer of the intelligence community. Instead, a new official would perform that function.
This was a step backward from Congress’s original intent of establishing an organization that would centralize all intelligence to prevent surprises such as the one at Pearl Harbor.

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York Democrat, introduced a bill that would abolish the CIA and transfer its duties to the State Department. According to Moynihan, this would “purge the vestiges of this struggle [the Cold War] and would establish the principle that the executive branch may not resort to illegal means in the pursuit of national security, as it did in the Iran-contra affair.”

Meanwhile, the Senate and House intelligence committees began drafting legislation that would streamline the organization of the intelligence community. As part of that review, the committees began considering whether to make public the intelligence community budget.

At about the same time, the Senate Intelligence Committee put Robert Gates, the former deputy director of Central Intelligence under Webster, through a grueling confirmation process to succeed Webster as DCI. Former CIA employees whose views had not been accepted by Gates, or who would have done his job differently if they had had it, came forward to testify that Gates had “politicized” the analytical process. In fact, Gates had frequently presided over analyses and estimates that ran directly afoul of the policies of the Reagan administration. While it was difficult to accept Gates’s claim that he knew nothing of the diversion of funds from the sale of arms to Iran to the contra rebels in Nicaragua, no clear evidence was ever presented that he did know of the diversion. While the hearings disclosed massive amounts of information about the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, in fact they produced little that would enlighten the public about the way the CIA worked or what its problems really were.

Despite Webster’s best efforts, the Office of Security is still in the Dark Ages, still prone to overlook legal niceties and to act in heavy-handed fashion. While defector handling has been improved, the CIA still has an institutional bias against defectors, considering them difficult to deal with. In contrast to the FBI, whose agents are encouraged to become friends with them, the CIA builds a wall between defectors and their
handlers, using aliases to make sure defectors never bother CIA officers at night. These negative attitudes become self-fulfilling: people who sense they are looked upon as difficult become difficult. In part, the CIA’s cold approach led to the 1985 redefection of KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko.

The agency as a whole still has difficulty separating what should legitimately be kept secret and what can be disclosed without causing damage.

“Articles from the
Times
are classified all the time,” a former operations officer said. “It’s just bureaucrats at work.”

The individual directorates still tend to go their own way sometimes and still tend to be parochial in their outlook.

“We have institutional biases that act as a wet blanket on judgment,” Thomas Polgar, a former CIA station chief, said. “If you say there is no more threat from Eastern Europe, that means somebody’s budget is going to be reduced. Self-interest enters into it.”

The CIA still reflexively thinks of the media as the enemy.

“It [the CIA] doesn’t understand Congress as well as it should; it doesn’t understand the press as well as it should,” Russell Bruemmer, the CIA’s general counsel under Webster, said. “These are the constituent agencies. To many people in the agency, even to a lot of senior managers, they are necessary evils, not something that can have positive impact.

“I believe it goes back to values that reflect what many people perceived to be the tenuousness of democracy’s hold on the world,” Bruemmer said. “The people who created the culture, the Dick Helmses of this world, they are all people for whom this really was a life-and-death struggle between democracy and communism. That kept them in the game, that kept them playing.”
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To face the latest challenges, the CIA needs to beef up human intelligence. It needs to emphasize quality over quantity. It needs to highlight regional issues more than before. And it needs to improve the way it presents information. “We publish too much intelligence of questionable relevance to policymakers,” Robert Gates said just before he became the 15th DCI. “Less and better should be the rule.”

Because the CIA’s role is so tied to changing world conditions,
its coverage must constantly be reshaped. Nor can the CIA change course overnight. Like a supertanker, the CIA is not always nimble but gets the job done. Over the years, the CIA has predicted nearly everything that it should have predicted, foreseen every weapons system that it should have foreseen, and found out most of the things that it should have found out. While it occasionally strayed into illegalities and foolish operations, it did so in virtually every case with the approval of presidents or cabinet officers.

“We’ve had our problems, disasters, horror shows. But on a day-to-day basis, we’ve been able to get the information, process it, and deliver it,” said Robert R. Simmons, a former CIA officer who later became staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “We tend to see the failures in print, not the successes. In the aggregate, I felt the CIA was successful eighty-five percent to ninety percent of the time. That ten percent to fifteen percent were big failures.”

“The mistakes get publicized. There is no Pulitzer for the guy who does excellent reports,” a former CIA operations officer said.

“I think the key thing to remember about this place is that it has constantly evolved,” Gates said in an interview after he became DCI. “There has been this preoccupation with the idea that we were stuck on the Cold War and the question of whether we could make the change at the end of the Cold War. People didn’t really realize that as part of this evolutionary process, for years we have taken on roles other than just looking at the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries. We have been doing a lot of things on a lot of subjects on the Third World, regional disputes, economic intelligence, proliferation.”

There was a certain safety in the Cold War. Each side knew its part and played it more or less consistently. Now the CIA was faced with more uncertainty.

“With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the danger of nuclear war or of a war in Europe has receded at least for the foreseeable future nearly to the vanishing point,” Gates said. “So the world in the sense of cosmic destruction is an extraordinarily safer place than it was
a year ago. That said, on a day-to-day basis, the world is as dangerous and perhaps a little more so because some of the restraints imposed by the Cold War, particularly in regional conflicts, have been lifted.”

The evolution of the former Soviet Union toward a market economy and democratic politics “is probably going to take two generations,” Gates said. “During that period, I think there will be a lot of setbacks, a lot of detours, perhaps a fair amount of violence. We will still have for another decade or more tens of thousands of nuclear weapons that we are going to have to track and somebody has to monitor. We still are going to have to see if they are implementing arms control agreements. Now we have fifteen republics and their political, economic, and social development to monitor, not just one country. We have to operate not just out of Moscow but in fifteen republics.

“We will have to devote, ironically, more attention to monitoring regional disputes,” Gates said. “Some big ones, like Afghanistan, Cambodia, Angola, and Central America, have all gone away, but India, Pakistan, the Middle East still are problems. What is happening on the Korean peninsula is not entirely clear ... So there are a lot of regional problem areas that we have watched in the past but that are going to become even more dangerous or where the political circumstances are reaching a new critical phase.”

Meanwhile, Gates said, the CIA is intensifying its efforts to track nuclear proliferation, narcotics, and terrorism.

Almost immediately upon taking over, Gates set up internal task forces to recommend change. Based on the reports of the task forces, Gates approved plans to develop an intelligence community television channel that would beam classified news to policymakers six days a week. In response to the scandal involving the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), Gates encouraged CIA employees to be on the lookout for criminal activities and to make sure that other agencies that receive CIA reports of such activities follow up on them.

Gates approved a more open policy in dealing with the press, allowing on the record interviews with officials below
the level of deputy director of Central Intelligence and expanding background briefings. He also took a number of steps that will result in declassification of agency files on older operations like the Bay of Pigs.

In a symbolic gesture, Gates said in the interview after he took over that he saw no reason why the CIA employee association should not be allowed to sell CIA mugs, a request that had stirred opposition from senior CIA officials reporting to Webster.

“If they want to sell CIA mugs, I couldn’t be more pleased,” Gates said. “They can even sell T-shirts for all I care: The mug gap.”

Today, the CIA is a very different agency from the one that created sensational headlines in the early 1970s about drug testing and domestic surveillance.

“We are in a wilderness without a single footstep to guide us. Our successors will have an easier task,” Rep. James Madison, a member of the first federal Congress, wrote to Thomas Jefferson on June 30, 1789. So it was in the CIA’s early days.

In most respects, the modern CIA is meticulous about obeying the law. Under William Webster, having a lawyer detailed to one’s program became a status symbol at the agency, demonstrating that whatever one was doing was complicated and important enough to warrant the attention of an attorney. Besides his deputy, the first slot Howard P. Hart asked for when he started the CIA’s counternarcotics center within the Directorate of Operations was a lawyer.

“Intelligence excesses are largely behind us,” Sen. Boren, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has said. “We now have a body of laws and a process of congressional intelligence oversight that aggressively seeks to insure that the CIA operates in a manner consistent with the fundamental values of the American people.”
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The CIA now looks upon Congress more as an ally than an enemy.

“When the shit hits the fan, I want to have Congress with me when people say, ‘What the hell did you do that for?’” John N. McMahon, deputy director of Central Intelligence
under William Casey, said. “It’s a way to cover your ass. But to me, it’s part of being in the United States and in a democratic society. I never want to have a handful of people deciding what is good for the United States. That’s why I want Congress involved.”
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Much of the criticism of the CIA stems from the fact that its activities are secret. The public—and particularly the media—resent being told they cannot know something. Silence is interpreted as arrogance. Moreover, when people do not know what an agency is doing, they assume that it is either doing nothing and not changing with the times, or that it is doing something wrong. In the absence of concrete information, it is human nature to accept rumor as fact. If the identity of the perceived enemy is in flux, it is assumed that the CIA officers are dinosaurs still fighting the Cold War.

Compounding the problem is widespread misunderstanding of the CIA’s role. The assumption is that with its massive resources, the agency must know everything. But the CIA has no crystal ball; it is not omniscient. Every day, the media publish or broadcast stories that are incorrect. Beyond the correction column in most newspapers, no one goes back a year later and points out that a publication incorrectly predicted an election or erroneously said that the CIA established a task force to target Saddam Hussein for assassination. But no one forgets the CIA’s mistakes.

For all the misperceptions, former U.S. government executives rate the CIA as one of the “most respected” government agencies. In a 1990 opinion poll of these executives, the agency was ranked ninth between the FBI, which came out slightly higher, and the SEC.
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The CIA today is the most powerful and effective intelligence agency in the world. While the KGB has had many successes, it never had the technical or analytical capabilities of the CIA. It never had the broad kind of intelligence coverage that the CIA enjoys. And it never was as honest in its reporting to headquarters as the CIA is.

“[The CIA], like the country it serves, has the broadest interests throughout the world, and that is reflected by this institution,” Richard J. Kerr, deputy director of Central Intelligence
under Webster, said. “There aren’t many countries whose interests are truly worldwide.”
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The CIA is one of the most important institutions in American society, one that Americans are fortunate to have. The agency has seen the country through some of the most difficult times in the nation’s history, providing information that has kept the country out of a major war with the Soviet Union and helped the U.S. to win smaller ones, including the war in the Persian Gulf. Like the FBI or the military, the CIA is an agency that is desperately needed and appreciated in times of crisis: When a child is kidnapped, the family looks to the FBI for help. When dictators such as Saddam Hussein threaten the world, it is the CIA that the U.S. government turns to for the information necessary to meet and counter the threat.