The Limits of Intelligence
GEWEN, BARRY
Writers & Writing THE LIMITS OF INTELLIGENCE BY BARRY GEWEN There is good reason to approach Stansfield Turner's Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition (Houghton Mifflin, 304 pp., $16.95)...
...Its subject is the murkiest, most controversial department in the United States government...
...Readers wishing a more reliable opinion on so arcane a topic are advised to turn to Arkady N. Shevchenko's Breaking with Moscow...
...In fact, Corson and Crowley are not especially concerned about scholarship...
...When the authors declare that it is" not very stylish" to speak of Russian labor camps, purge trials and official murders, one can only wonder if they have listened to the President lately, or read Solzhenitsyn (who appears neither in their text or bibliography...
...Concerned that the Russian might be a double agent, Angleton had him placed in solitary confinement in an eight-foot windowless cell...
...His position might not satisfy a seminar of philosophy students...
...In the Introduction, he asks his readers to ponder the difficulty of deciding the amount of information a congressional oversight committee requires "to be sure nothing illegal or immoral is being done...
...But without solid evidence a book that purports to be a scholarly study should err on the side of caution...
...His qualities come through almost immediately...
...How much of this should we trust...
...Finally, despite the increased danger of leaks, it allows the director to assert stronger control over his notoriously independent agency: Any operative who deceives his superiors now runs the risk of being forced to appear before Congress under oath...
...Inadequate food rations left Nosenko feeling constantly hungry...
...The other—the " quiet revolution"—is the growth of technological information-gathering, made possible by recent developments in computers and microprocessors...
...The new KGB of the title is an organization that, according to the authors, has seized power in the Kremlin...
...As a man who has watched the Reagan Administration undo many of what he believes to have been his accomplishments at the CIA, he repeatedly criticizes both the President and the current director, William Casey (whose censors demanded over 100 deletions before this book could be published...
...These are the views of an admirable patriot, whose loyalty is to what his nation stands for, not to the fact simply that it is...
...Turner, the director of Central Intelligence from 1977-81, certainly has his axes to grind...
...Few people can claim genuine knowledge of its activities...
...Thus, theauthorssaythat"forevery success in thwarting the Soviets' industrial-scientific-technological espionage campaign against the West, 25-30 illegal shipments elude detection ." They do not tell us how they keep count of something that eludes detection...
...Here and elsewhere in the book, Turner insists on adherence to a code of ethics that grounds our statutes, and our society, in virtue...
...He argues that the test of intelligence operations is whether they can be defended in public, should the necessity arise...
...Writers & Writing THE LIMITS OF INTELLIGENCE BY BARRY GEWEN There is good reason to approach Stansfield Turner's Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition (Houghton Mifflin, 304 pp., $16.95) with skepticism...
...Lacking the necessary information, we are thrown back for our opinions about U. S. intelligence on our estimates of those individuals who are in a position to know...
...Rasher still is their unequivocal assertion that "the attempt on John Paul II [was] carried out by the Bulgarian surrogates of the KGB...
...Oversight, Turner says, is one of the two "virtual revolutions" that have transformed U.S...
...For if we cannot gauge the veracity of this memoir, we can read between the lines to assess the character of its author, and the Stansfield Turner who emerges from these pages seems to me an exemplary public servant...
...No doubt he would have made a good Roman...
...The whole procedure," Turner writes, "was a travesty of the rights of the individual under law.' The issue is how far the CIA—or any Federal agency, for that matter—can be permitted to go in the name of "national security.' Angleton's thinking on this question came to light after President Nixon commanded the CIA to destroy all its stocks of toxic poison...
...The key words, presented quite casually, are "illegal or immoral...
...He was often drugged and was interrogated regularly...
...As an admiral and former commander in chief of nato's Southern Flank, he rails at the unmilitary obstructionism he feels he encountered from the bureaucracy he was supposed to manage...
...And as one of the top insiders in the Carter White House on national security issues, he adds his name to the growing list of those who found National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski a scheming infighter nearly impossible to work with...
...He maintains that no damage was done to national security, but of course a reader, no matter how well-informed, cannot make a judgment about this...
...The overseers should be so convinced of the importance of the actions that they would accept any criticism that might develop if the covert actions did become public, and could construct a convincing defense of their decisions...
...sometimes 24 hours straight...
...He speaks of obeying the spirit as well as the letter of the law, and admonishes the Reagan CIA for failing to do so when it included only one sentence about the mining of Nicaragua's harbors in an 84-page report...
...Yet I, for one, closed it accepting most of Turner's j udgments...
...Nevertheless, it is the expression ofade-voted democrat, the kind of person to whom we can entrust our vast spying apparatus without worrying that we might one day discover a bug under the bed...
...This Soviet-style treatment went on for three-and-a-half years...
...Their evidence for this mainly involves the rise of Yuri V. Andropov—now dead...
...Adopting the stance of a born cabalist (or KGB man), he declared: "It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government.' Turner strongly disagrees...
...Even its budget is kept hidden from the public...
...Ultimate power in the USSR unquestionably belongs to the Party...
...At present, Washington has the capability to detect a significant military buildup anywhere in the world...
...It follows from Turner's democratic ethos that he is a firm believer in congressional oversight (and distressed at the present CIA's efforts to circumvent it...
...Despite its 70 pages of citations, The New KGB is primarily a polemic, delivering the message that the security organs oftheUSSR have pursued a consistent course since 1917...
...This manner of doing history gives the book a pounding repetitiveness, not to mention a partisan shrillness...
...The Walker spy case scarcely inspires confidence, yet as they say in Yiddish, "for example is no proof...
...Nowhere does he spell out his ethical principles, but his temper-ateness, his emphasis on balance and nonpartisanship, his antipathy to deviousness, his commitment to personal integrity shading toward a kind of stoicism suggest old-fashioned military ideals...
...While heading the Agency, Turner was accused of overemphasizing technology and, somewhat testily, he devotes an entire chapter to explaining his reasons for reducing the espionage wing by 820 positions in what became known as the "Halloween Massacre...
...The closest he comes to explicitness is in a comparison between his notion of intelligence work and that of James Angleton, the former head of the CIA's counterespionage unit...
...In 1964, Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer, defected to the U.S...
...He offers several arguments in its favor...
...A major effect of this change is to diminish the importance of the CIA's most prestigious sector, its espionage branch...
...It is not unthinkable that the Kremlin was behind the foiled assassination...
...It may even be probable...
...It is equally hopeless to try to evaluate Turner's statement that the American record in counterintelligence is "exceptionally good...
...It is on this basis that Secrecy and Democracy seems as trustworthy a volume about the CIA as we are likely to see...
...Turner is capable of feeling "shame" at some of the things his government has done in the name of justice, and at the CIA he instituted classes in the moral dilemmas of espionage...
...Laymen, therefore, can never be entirely confident that they possess enough facts to judge whether any book about the CIA is fundamentally accurate or merely self-serving...
...Their history of Soviet intelligence is brimming over with the kind of undocumented certainties that raise questions instead of answering them...
...intelligence activities during the last few years...
...Oversight helped restore the CIA's public image, tarnished by the abuses the Church Committee uncovered in the mid-70s...
...Moreover," we are approaching a time when we will be able to survey almost any point on the earth's surface with some sensor, and probably with more than one...
...When Congress learned that the order had not been obeyed, Angleton was called to testify...
...Angleton, a legend in his profession, was the mastermind behind a case that continues to haunt Turner...
...It forces intelligence officers to exercise greater judiciousness, and to maintain a healthy connection tothenationaltemper...
...The highest ranking Soviet official ever to defect to the West writes: "I do not see how military or security men—influential as they are—could usurp the primacy of the Party...
...Since there is no way of knowing, Secrecy and Democracy must be considered guilty until proven innocent...
...Adam Ulam, Richard Pipes and George F. Kennan, among others, will be interested to learn that Corson and Crowley's "view of Soviet history, and our analysis of Soviet behavior, are sharply at odds with the traditional academic positions held by many American scholars who, to maintain their access to the USSR, have had to temper their critical instincts or risk being denied visas by Moscow...
...The Civil War, nep, Lenin's ideology, Stalin's terror, World War II and the Cold War, de-Stalinization, Brezhnev's military expansion, and so forth are all made to revolve around the constant of the secret police...
...A similar comment could not be made about William R. Corson and Robert T. Crowley's The New KGB: Engine of Soviet Power (Morrow, 560 pp., $19.95...
Vol. 68 • August 1985 • No. 10
