The Public Policy / Intelligence, Anyone?
Ledeen, Michael
Intelligence, Anyone? by Michael Ledeen T he Aldrich Ames affair, in which a single KGB mole wrecked as many as a hundred CIA operations and killed off many of our foreign agents, has revealed a...
...Such a project requires years of advance work, entailing intimate friendships between our people and local military leaders...
...These can hardly be provided by the State Department...
...Why pay tens of thousands of people, when policy can be conducted by a small circle...
...Woolsey has recognized that the CIA's culture must change, and if his call for a massive overhaul is approved, large-scale personnel turnover will automatically ensue...
...And all of them beat the polygraph.' Instead of going through the hard work of training individuals to ask difficult questions, the CIA placed its confidence in a machine of dubious value...
...It was these outsiders—working with other free spirits in the NSC, the Pentagon, and the State Department—that concluded the Soviet Union was in a profound crisis, a judgment Ronald Reagan used to announce that the end of the Soviet Empire was at hand...
...No one had cultivated the new breed of European Socialists, and the likes of Bettino Craxi in Italy and Felipe Gonzales in Spain were virtually unknown...
...For years, agency officers boasted that the CIA was the only major intelligence service that had not been penetrated by its enemies, and they seem to have been right...
...espionage operations in America—some against government agencies, as in the case of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, but most against American industry...
...Such penetration helps explain the CIA's many failures on the most crucial target of the postwar era: the Soviet empire...
...Only one staffer—himself outside the Near East Division—managed to get his dissenting opinion through to the White House, and that despite vigorous agency efforts to throttle him...
...More recently, we've been told we know almost nothing about the new dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong-II...
...The moles that have since been identified burrowed in after his departure...
...Just a few years ago, such a question would have been ridiculous...
...The driving force behind the creation of the agency remains valid: We don't want unpleasant and possibly fatal surprises...
...I n many ways, Casey's management technique was similar to that of both Kissinger and Baker at the State Department: Put the bureaucracy to work on less important tasks, and handle major matters in the inner sanctum...
...although defenders of the agency now say publicly that the CIA predicted the invasion, they are being disingenuous...
...He also hired outsiders to ride herd on the dispirited bureaucrats and make political assessments independent of the agency's staffers...
...they'll screw it up...
...High-ranking officials in enemy countries are not so foolish to be seen talking to our diplomats...
...Bukovsky had come to him with a proposal for some nasty deed aimed against the USSR...
...The agency needs a thorough restructuring...
...Angleton was purged after CIA Director William Colby gave an explosive scoop to Seymour Hersh of the New York Times, revealing that Angleton headed a group that was monitoring selected correspondence between Americans and certain foreign organizations and individuals...
...It also requires the ability to keep secrets, which may be beyond the capacity of the American government...
...By the time William Casey took over, the place was in bad shape...
...The NSC went with the official line anyway, and a relaxed and confident General Brent Scowcmft retired at a reasonable hour the night of the invasion...
...Meanwhile, CIA studies underestimated Soviet military spending, which we now know to have been double to quadruple the CIA estimates...
...Neither of his immediate successors—William Webster and Robert Gates—improved matters, leaving James Woolsey with an unenviable task...
...by Michael Ledeen T he Aldrich Ames affair, in which a single KGB mole wrecked as many as a hundred CIA operations and killed off many of our foreign agents, has revealed a great deal about the state of American intelligence...
...We once had this sort of access in friendly countries...
...The oversight was quickly corrected by Woolsey, who drove these bosses out of the Agency...
...Until a machine exists that can measure human will from outer space, we're going to need spies...
...It's just great," Casey told him, "but let me give you some advice: don't tell anyone in the CIA about it...
...Given the deplorable state of morale in the intelligence community, it's likely that there are other Ameses awaiting discovery...
...Some of this can be done with technology, but instruments cannot measure will and intention—the two crucial data...
...This was only one of several extremely damaging revelations in the mid-seventies...
...they require secret methods of communication, so that their treason cannot be demonstrated, or even guessed at...
...A lot of our "understanding" of how the world worked turned out to be disinformation from the double agents, who also managed to get many of our secrets from moles such as Ames...
...The United States also needs the capacity to act at a level of power somewhere between talking and waging war...
...All the handwringing over the Ames Affair, then, is largely beside the point...
...For those who have followed the demise of America's intelligence services, this is old news...
...Against this background, the Ames affair appears to have been inevitable...
...The cost was the lives of many brave agents in enemy countries...
...Casey kept operations to a minimum, except in the rare cases when he was able to assign them to someone he liked and trusted...
...Casey's attitude toward the agency was revealed by a conversation he had with Vladimir Bukovsky, the great Soviet dissident...
...Haiti is a good example...
...This community has been repeatedly penetrated by a variety of foreign powers, both hostile and friendly...
...Intelligence failures weren't limited to the Soviet bloc: CIA Arabists failed to read Saddam Hussein accurately before the Gulf conflict...
...It also overestimated Gorbachev's talents, repenredly calling him "awesome," and sometimes even "awesomely awesome," even as his regime was disintegrating...
...a generation of CIA officers grew up with the European leaders who took over after the passage of the immediate postwar generation...
...Soon we will hear a chorus wondering whether the agency can be healed, or whether, as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan has suggested, it is time for us to pull the plug on Langley...
...Some of the finest scholars—ranging from Herbert Marcuse to H. Stuart Hughes—served in the intelligence community during the war, and the CIA became a favorite instrument of such elevated intellects as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who used the agency to further the creation of center-left governments around the world...
...These moles also made it easier for the Soviets to judge whether or not the deceptions were working...
...The inward-looking culture of the agency's upper levels was so entrenched that within weeks of the reprimands that followed in the wake of the Ames affair, one person involved received an award from his superiors...
...But the Armed Forces are large, blunt instruments, often too cumbersome for the tasks at hand...
...In the early seventies, it became fashionable to criticize and even ridicule the legendary former chief of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, although there don't seem to have been any penetrations on his watch...
...Intelligence was pretty good in the post–World War II generation, and the intellectual quality at Langley was comparable to that of our best universities...
...It is obviously impossible to create a new culture at the CIA while the leadership that sowed the seeds of the Ames disaster remains in place...
...Michael Ledeen is foreign editor of The American Spectator and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...
...in The American Spectator January 1995 57...
...The popularity of the method testifies to how overstaffed such bureaucracies become...
...Since the agency is beset by general confusion, however, the matter requires a serious response...
...Instead of placing 15,000 soldiers officially and very visibly at risk, we would have been better off to have organized a seizure of power from within, led by people known to be relatively democratic, pro-American, and rational...
...Sometimes they will act out of conviction, but more often their good intentions require support from less spiritual sources—like money, friendship, sex, safety for family members, and so forth...
...Embracing the popular conviction that the CIA was one of the root causes of evil in the world, Turner drove several hundred of the most experienced clandestine operatives into early retirement, gutting the agency's covert action capacities, and sending a chilling message to the remain56 The American Spectator January 1995 ing spies...
...We know about French, Israeli, and Japanese 'For the inability of our intelligence services to catch liars, see also the Cisneros affair, in which a Cabinet nominee lied to the FBI without getting caught...
...When Jimmy Carter took office he appointed as director Stansfield Turner, who carried the foolish anti-CIA impulses of the time to their illogical conclusion...
...We have had Chinese, KGB, Czech and Romanian moles...
...For one thing, it's not hard to lie to our experts, even if they use the over-vaunted polygraph...
...The CIA grossly overestimated the health of the Soviet economy, predicting steady growth even as the empire was collapsing...
...The CIA is also needed to ferret out the deepest secrets of our enemies...
...Our words are no longer as menacing as they once were—especially under President Clinton—and thus will need to be backed up more often with power...
...And it was Casey himself, again running counter to the conclusions of his professional analysts, who predicted that Yuri Andropov would succeed Leonid Brezhnev...
...It hasn't always been this way...
...Moynihan believes information about enemies' intentions can be gathered by the Department of State, but this is incorrect...
...Such would have been the temptation at the CIA after the siege to which it had been subjected—a feeling undoubtedly reinforced under Casey...
...And we're going to have to be very patient with them overseas when they are quite young, let them grow up in the target countries, and hope that when they grow up, one or another of their friends will achieve high rank in the government, thereby giving us access...
...It is no accident, therefore, that the agency's problems began about the same time the popular culture went haywire...
...There have been moles in the CIA and DIA, the NSA and the FBI—not to mention the Departments of State and Defense...
...One may disagree with Woolsey's decision to issue reprimands in its aftermath, rather than initiate a purge, but what ails the CIA can't be cured by a quick massacre...
...They confidently told President Bush there would be no Iraqi invasion of Kuwait...
...But the drawback of this approach is that the bureaucrats are left to fester, and inevitably form a kind of syndicate of mediocrity, in which their corporate survival instincts overshadow the immediate intelligence tasks set for them by the administration...
...we already knew that in both Cuba and East Germany—prime targets for the CIA's Cold War mission—virtually all of our presumed agents turned out to be double agents of theirs...
...Once the American friends of the Adenauers, De Gasperis, and other leaders of Europe were purged by Stansfield Turner—and by the time the European wheel turned once more in the early eighties—we were very badly placed...
Vol. 28 • January 1995 • No. 1
