The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
Etzold, Thomas H.
"The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence" No recent book has received as much free advance publicity as the Marchetti-Marks expose of the CIA, with newspaper stories, columns in the New York Times Book Review, and an article in Harper's. It...
...The United States, if it wishes to live rightly, must eschew intervention and avoid influencing the internal affairs of other nations...
...The CIA...has fought long and hard—and not always ethically—first to discourage the writing of this book and then to prevent its publication...
...Curiously, although Marchetti and Marks prescribe strict nonintervention, they do not advocate an end to satellite reconaissance...
...freedom, and the democratic way...
...Perhaps they should pool their capital and form a novelty company, manufacturing and selling T-shirts, pencils, balloons, and stuffed toys imprinted with appropriate slogans: "We had a secret...
...But here one has a feeling of satisfaction, of sin found out and punished...
...On the frontispiece is the motto of the CIA, the verse from John 8: " And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.'' The authors intimate that even in this expose they are more faithful to the CIA's code than all of the agency types who have pulled the veil of secrecy fiver agency activities...
...And there is little new information—no novel or striking insight into the "intelligence problem," the paradox of secret agencies in a democratic society...
...The list could he endless, just as the point is unendingly valid: it is impossible for the United States, or any other great nation, to avoid influencing, or interfering with, the natural course of developments in other states, near and far...
...I wish now that I had walked out of the State Department the day the troops went into Cambodia...
...To them sovereignty is absolute and inviolable...
...They really seem to think the pure abstractions of treatises and textbooks pertain to international relations...
...All such activities violate the great law of nature which enjoins states to respect each other's sovereignty...
...The CIA's success in partly censoring the book, and its ability to win in court a permanent injunction against Marchetti's writingand speaking on intelligence matters without submitting his text to CIA scrutiny, rested on the government's argument that Marchetti had signed an agreement with the CIA to remain silent about his work and what he learned in the course of his employment in- the agency...
...Finally he decided to write a book that would force review and reform of the intelligence community...
...I wanted to contribute...
...For me, the last straw was the American invasion of Cambodia in April 1970...
...International law and the United Nations charter clearly prohibit one country from interfering in the internal affairs of another," they wail...
...Marks entered the Foreign Service directly from college in the mid-sixties...
...Marks agreed to work with Marchetti in the fall of 1972, when Marchetti was encountering CIA obstructions to his plans for writing a book...
...These testimonies may be the most interesting parts of the book, for there is little else in it to command the attention of a serious reader...
...They hardly write well enough to make careers as, say, contributing editors to Ramparts...
...They have managed...to achieve an unprecedented abridgement of my constitutional right to free speech...
...lfndoubtedlv Marchetti and Marks will persist...
...Once back in this country, I soon came to see that American involvement in Indochina was not only ineffective but totally wrong...
...They merely repeat jaded jeremiads about ways in which secrecy begets power and antidemocratic machiThe story opens with intense, almost religious solemnity, with a format well-suited to inspire spiritual revival in its readers...
...They have secured an unwarranted and outrageous permanent injunction against me, requiring that anything I write or say...on the subject of intelligence must first be censored by the CIA...
...It is the stuff of which bestsellers are made: intimations of inside knowledge that the powers-that-be cannot afford to have publicized, underdog authors defending the First Amendment against a power-mad government agency, and all in the name of decency...
...The volume is of poor literary quality...
...They have long since given up [heir government jobs, and even if the book sells well, as much as 50,000 to 70,000 copies, they cannot anticipate a pre-tax income of more than $65,000 to $100,000 to split between them...
...The other countries of the world have a fundamental right not to have any outside power interfere in their internal affairs...
...Whether such a hope was misguided remains to be seen...
...and no one with a secret is likely to hire them now...
...I cannot help wondering if my government is more concerned with defending our democratic system or more intent upon imitating the methods of totalitarian regimes in order to maintain its already inordinate power over the American people...
...We kiss and tell...
...Did Marchetti have, as he claims, a constitutional right to publish what he wished about the CIA, its operations, agents, fronts...
...The Penkovsky affair, now described in so many contradictory ways that hardly anyone can discover the accurate story, receives some detailed description in the book, but not it terms that square with information this reviewer has obtained from a highly reliable source (as they say in the intelligence business...
...they excel in simple-minded discussion of complicated topics...
...After relation of some of the book's defects of organization, style, and interpretation, the lesser errors of fact perhaps become insignificant...
...Lester Pearson said it quite pointedly some years ago: "No nation is truly sovereign that does not possess the atom bomb...
...Unfortunately, the forces of evil rose up against him...
...If nothing else, the authors are masters of banality...
...And without the buildup, especially without the generous cooperation of the CIA in taking Victor Marchetti to court to enjoin him from uncensored writing and speaking on intelligence matters, the authors of this volume and their publishers probably would not have made a nickel...
...If ever international law is taught in elementary school, it will probably sound something like the eternal verities and naive principles which the authors champion...
...There are a few good anecdotes, the best one describing the inability of the CIA to make the air conditioning and heating system function in its new $46 million headquarters building in Langley, Virginia...
...There remains the largest question raised by this book...
...The United States should never authorize agents to penetrate the borders, organizations, or governments of other states, nor should it send Pueblo-type ELINT (Electronic Intelligence) ships or aircraft around the world spying on friend and foe...
...The hoopla was certainly effective in calling attention to the book...
...Marchetti, formerly a highly placed and experienced CIA official, writes that in army intelligence in the early fifties the "information we collected on the enemy's plans and activities was of little significance.- When he was recruited by the CIA in 1955, "the struggle between democracy and communism seemed more important than ever, the CIA was in the forefront of that vital international battle...
...They believe that intervention is simple to define, and of course to halt...
...They take no account of the more subtle forms of intervention, or those which are incidental to decisions taken in internal affairs.As most students of international relations realize, there is a considerable range of purely domestic concerns which may well influence the well-being or thepolicies of other states...
...Still a couple should be mentioned...
...the influence of Czechoslovakian liberalism of the latter sixties on the entire Soviet bloc...
...Decisions affecting the value of the dollar, assuredly a matter of domestic American law and governance, have the most profound consequences on the economies and governments of states around the world...
...Export and import restrictions, or their removal or lack, spell the difference between prosperity or starvation for the world's hungry nations...
...I reluctantly agreed...
...After some years he was crestfallen to discover that "the CIA did not, as advertised to the public and the Congress, function primarily as a central clearinghouse and producer of national intelligence for the government...
...It is disconcerting, to say the least, when Marchetti in his opening confession complains that the CIA has been unethical in attempting to suppress his book...
...The authors attempt to account in rough proportion for the way inwhich the CIA spends its annual $700 to $750 million, mostly in an effort to demonstrate that about 90 percent of it goes for clandestine operations and about 10 percent for intelligence analysis...
...Even that was an exaggeration, for the nuclear powers are far from impervious to the internal decisions or external policies of other nations large or small...
...Their knowledge of international law is childish, at best...
...Stirring words, but hardly convincing enough to bring the present reviewer up the sawdust trail...
...In a short time the situation had become hopeless...
...Each of the authors haswritten a brief confession of previous error and a description of his conversion from benighted service of the insidious and clandestine forces of the intelligence community to more noble service ,to the nation through disclosure of CIA operations, agents, practices, and almost singlehanded defense of the First Amendment...
...The authors received some slight help from the lawyers of the American Civil Liberties Union and Knopf-Random House's corporate attorneys...
...Like all employees of the intelligence agencies Marchetti regularly, several times each year, reread and signed a digest of security rules and a pledge of secrecy...
...The courts, including the highest court in the land, have agreed that the questions involved were contractual, not constitutional, and that is likely to be the final word...
...Overflights are therefore wrong and no country, especially the United States, should engage in such information gathering...
...As befits a junior author in a writing team, John Marks writes more briefly and simply of his unwitting slide into moral turpitude and his subsequent and miraculous return to grace...
...One wonders, without undue concern, what they will do next...
...It is enough to make one wonder whether Marchetti possessed full clearance for the Penkovsky project, and it seems likely he did not...
...It would be easier to respect Marchetti and Marks despite the failings of theirbook, despite their silly-serious stand for the First Amendment and against secret sin, if they did not hope to profit by writing a potboiler...
...He took the CIA's money for fourteen years, promising discretion and reliability all that time, and then quit the agency dissatisfied...
...The CIA's twofold answer: take the contractor to court and put locking cases over each individual thermostat to prevent capricious monkeying with the system...
...They appear to have heard of international law, for instance, and they believe completely what little they have heard about it...
...These confessions are so remarkable that they deserve excerpt for the edification of all who may read this review but hesitate to part with $8.95 in pursuit of further enlightenment...
...The authors do contend with some validity that the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency cannot overcome the bureaucratic obstacles that prevent him from really co-ordinating or directing the work of the entire American intelligence community (composed of ten agencies of which the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency are the largest and most important...
...Think of the influence France exerted on the American economy by turning in dollars for gold in the mid-sixties...
...Although the authors raise several issues of general interest and importance they fail to deal withthose issues in any adequate or conclusive way...
...The twofold outcome: the contractor won because of the ridiculous withholding of information necessary for planning the system...
...In the high councils of the intelligence community, there was no sense that the intervention in the internal affairs of other countries was not the inherent right of the United States...
...His guesswork was not good enough, and soon everyone in the building was juggling his or her individual office thermostat constantly...
...My first assignment was to have been London, but with my draft hoard pressing for my services, the State Department advised me that the best way to stay out of uniform was to go to Vietnam as a civilian advisor in the so-called pacification program...
...and CIA employees, many of whom had taken a course in "locks and picks" as a part of their training, quickly picked open the boxes installed to inhibit individual manipulation of the thermostatic controls...
...Marks was assigned to the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and when he became a staff assistant, received an introduction to "the whole worldwide network of Amer-can spying...
...or more recently, the self-interested policies of oil-producing nations or the development and detonation in India of an atomic device...
...There follows a brief publisher's note to explain the setup of the volume—blank spaces where material was deleted by the CIA, boldface type where early deletions were restored with the agency's reluctant permission...
...There are tidbits of information here and there on the Bay of Pigs, the Chilean elections of 1964 and 1970, CIA contacts with and operations through front organizations within the United States as well as outside it, and other operations...
...The idea that sovereignty is absolute, that any state can he immune to outside influences, is no more than a fiction devised by theorists for theorists and undergraduate students...
...The United States, which solemnly pledged to uphold this right when it ratified the United Nations charter, should now honor it...
...We led one-and-a-half lives...
...The contractor faced an impossible task in planning the system, for the CIA with its penchant for secrecy in things great and small had refused to tell him how many people would be working in the building...
...Its basic mission was that of clandestine operations, particularly covert action—the secret intervention in the internal affairs of other nations...
...At another point in the book the authors have Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson dismantling the State Department's intelligence organization and refusing to "read other people's mail"—this in 1939, some ten years after he disbanded the group, fully six years after he left the Department...
...Then the show begins, and it is worthy of inclusion in any evangelical revivalist's repertoire...
...If everything appeared only once, and in proper sequence, length could be reduced by half...
...The likely profits of the book are too small to sustain the two of them for many years...
...The authors are terribly sorry for their sins...
...He "entered the project in the hope that what we have to say will have some effect in influencing the public and the Congress to institute meaningful control over American intelligence and to end the type of intervention abroad which, in addition to being counterproductive, is inconsistent with the ideals by which our country is supposed to govern itself...
...It has been said that among the dangers faced by a democratic society in fighting totalitarian systems, such as fascism and communism, is that the democratic government runs the risk of imitating its enemies' methods and, thereby, destroying the very democracy that it is seeking to defend...
...It abounds in repetition, a sign of poor editing as well as of authors too inexperienced to organize their material...
Vol. 8 • February 1975 • No. 5
