In Pursuit of Intelligence

...intelligence establishment—with, again, an emphasis on the CIA as it evolved during the aftermath of World War II pretty much up to the messy, scary present...

...CIA Director Allen Dulles handed the organizational task to one of his deputies, Richard M. Bissell Jr., who rapidly cut through what little red tape there was at the time...

...The CIA's job is to give the President the best intelligence estimates it can collect and coordinate from other sources...

...Remembering Nixon's order for secrecy, Helms said no...

...No wonder he lasted only two years on the job...

...Fifty years ago, intelligence built a better airplane...

...Odom's book is surely valuable yet also a little unsettling...

...officials most directly concerned...

...intelligence apparatus simply never noticed...

...their source was CNN, not the CIA...

...what happens next is up to the President...

...Eisenhower relished such information, but remained worried that Soviet radar would detect the overflights: "We've got to think about what our reaction would be if they did this to us...

...Although some extremely brave pilots had flown such missions, Eisenhower decided that the dangers they entailed—a downed U.S...

...Helms may still be keeping whatever secrets remain, but this famously impassive figure—narrow face, hooded eyes, slicked back hair—gets a lot off his chest...

...Unfortunately, little in this densely detailed account suggests a good reason why the CIA deserved saving, at least in the shape it was in when Colby inherited it...

...The agency received satellite images of the test site, but analysts did not pick up signs of anything unusual in the works...

...on the other hand, we want to read all about it...

...scientists did not know if a plane or its pilot could survive at an altitude of 70,000 feet, which the U-2 needed to reach if it were to have a chance of slipping by radar...

...intelligence: The job is to speak truth to power, not to advise power on what to do...

...And then, of course, came 9/11...

...It's difficult not to feel sympathy for Colby, who died in a Maryland boating accident in 1996, as he is portrayed in Lost Crusader...

...Odom's distinction between policy and structure is perfectly in keeping with a central tenet of U.S...

...Helms and Colby had much in common...

...A number of U-2s, a strange-looking modified glider with a wing span of 70 feet and a fuselage of 44, were built—early and under budget—in Southern California, flight-tested in Nevada and conveyed to an air base in West Germany with hardly any outsiders, including members of Congress, having a clue about the endeavor...

...The former Director died in October 2002...

...That question is a "policy" problem, Odom writes, and his interest rests solely on "management and structural problems...

...and Polaroid inventor Edwin H. Land, Eisenhower decided that if current planes were inadequate for the purposes of intelligence gathering the U. S. would just have to build a better one...

...He was ordered by the Nixon and then the Gerald R. Ford White House—with Henry Kissinger the common denominator—to give nothing away while being grilled and badgered on Capitol Hill as well as in the national press to display all the CIA's dirty laundry...

...In addition, he deals with matters that were not declassified until the 1990s, so the story he tells will be new—at least to readers who are not specialists in the field—and gripping in the bargain...

...As veteran agents and spy-runners in the field retired, and were either not replaced or replaced with novices, the headquarters in Langley grew cumbersome, preoccupied with rearranging the office furniture...

...It was a good question with a good answer: Secrets disclosed are no longer secret...

...His assessment of Nixon is pithier: "In effect, he wanted a claque underwriting and supporting his policies...

...They were never friends, though, and they became, in time, bitter enemies...

...This story crops up again in Lost Crusader, John Prados' book on Colby, and it is cast as an exoneration of its subject...

...This testimony ultimately brought him a Justice Department indictment...

...Taubman's account makes the invention and construction of the plane seem just that magical, particularly in view of what it would take to launch an analogous effort today...

...intelligence is incapable of forewarning us about anything, including hijacked commercial airliners ramming into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or crashing in Pennsylvania...

...One by one, the barriers moved...

...Such passages—and Prados supplies many of them—suggest that the CIA had succumbed to the bureaucratic pressures inherent in all large organizations...

...Taubman, a veteran reporter and now an editor at the New York Times, covered the intelligence beat for his paper and displays an impressive familiarity with the shadow world...

...I am not concerned here with issues that received a lot of media attention in the 1990s, like whether or not the CIA should put agents under cover as journalists...

...So in consultation with science advisers he trusted, including MIT President James R. Killian Jr...

...product (intelligence) took a back seat to process (organization...

...Prados, a senior researcher at the National Security Archive in Washington, argues that Colby, as CIA Director, did nothing he was not forced to do by impossible circumstances: "The picture that emerges showsBill Colby treading a careful path between a White House intent on preserving secrecy (bolstered by a faction within the CIA) and Congressional investigations determined to get to the bottom of alleged CIA wrongdoing, while perhaps scoring political points...

...Once more, the task was assigned to the CIA and managed by Bissell...

...Helms loyalists in the CIA have long characterized Colby as The Man Who Gave Away the Secrets...

...No coup took place, and Allende was voted into office...

...In 1970, as it became evident that Marxist candidate Salvador Allende would be elected President of Chile, Nixon, Helms writes, "ordered me to instigate a military coup in Chile" and stressed that "this directive was to be kept from the U.S...

...According to Prados: "If the White House had had its way in 1975, the CIA would have been swept away a decade later...

...Not much ofthat talk goes on these days...

...Helms served two: Lyndon B. Johnson, who appointed him, and Nixon, who fired him...

...When the CIA has made news, much of it has been bad...

...And without informing appropriate members of Congress?' ButI didno shouting...

...The technological barriers seemed immovable...

...The first U-2 flights over Soviet territory yielded pay dirt...

...When he took office in 1953, President DwightD...

...plane could conceivably trigger a nuclear exchange—outweighed any intelligence benefits they might provide...

...In the 1950s, Eisenhower used the CIA as a way to slash through red tape...

...Helms was the CIA Director from 1966 to 1973, Colby from 1973 to 1975...

...spooks weren't behind the scenes nearly everywhere, creating puppet leaders, pulling their strings, assassinating enemies and comprising a vast, hidden government...

...He has praise for the former: "Never at any time did he request or suggest that I change or moderate any estimates or intelligence reports which did not support his Administration's public evaluation of the situation in Vietnam...

...Most officials in the intelligence 'clergy' are equally clueless but reluctant to admit it...

...If Colby "saved" the CIA, as Prados contends, the result has not been reassuring...

...When some of the CIA's less savory shenanigans leaked in the late 1960s and again in the mid-1970s, members of Congress and journalists asked, in essence: How come you guys didn't tell us you were doing these things...

...His uneasiness led his science advisers to look into the possibility of putting reconnaissance satellites in orbit, a process that eventually led to another project, code named corona, intended to do just that...

...The CIA saw its work on the U-2 and spy satellites as triumphs, and Taubman agrees...

...He recalls his impatience at being grilled in Senate hearings after he left the CIA, "my ever stronger inclination to shout, 'Do you really think that CIA would undertake an operation of that importance on its own authority, and not at the direction of the President, and without the knowledge of the National Security Council...

...What better time for a book titled Fixing Intelligence: For a More Secure America (Yale, 230 pp., $24.95...

...Photoreconnaissance flights over the USSR were a possible but terribly risky solution...

...After the initial shock of those attacks came another, almost as horrifying: the press reports that the 19 terrorists on those planes, none of them U.S...

...Helms' travails evoke similar sympathy...

...But he also notes in an Epilogue that the victories came at a price: "The extraordinary advances in spying technology that began nearly 50 years ago under the direction of Dwight Eisenhower contributed in time to distortions in the nation's intelligence agencies, including an overreliance on dazzling machines and a shortage of resources in more traditional fields like the recruitment and training of spies...

...the old General believed the civilian Agency could get results faster than the military bureaucracies...

...As his argument develops, though, Odom stresses that his prescription for fixing intelligence is limited to matters of "structure, organization and management arrangements...

...Again, uh-oh...

...The new worry is that U.S...

...No single book tells the entire tale, but each, if read in a certain sequence, contributes to a broader chronological narrative, one that amounts to a peculiar variation on Aristotle's definition of dramatic plot: a beginning, a middle, and a plea for another beginning...

...The difficulties of this undertaking made the U-2 project look simple in comparison, and Taubman's account of both of them is spellbinding...

...the most advanced military aircraft of the day could fly at roughly 40,000 feet, leaving them vulnerable to new and improved Soviet jet fighters...

...The agency may not have been the "rogue elephant" its critics claimed, but it had grown elephantine nonetheless...

...still later, he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor, the failure to testify "fully and completely" before a Congressional committee...

...The next year, faulty CIA intelligence led to the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade...

...Thus it is only a matter of time before sentences like the following begin proliferating: "The signals intelligence model for distinguishing between command and operational control suggests an effective approach for cross-agency and cross-organization management of collection operations...

...he is a retired Lieutenant General and a former Director of the National Security Agency, which is primarily responsible for electronic eavesdropping and cryptography...

...How could he safeguard national security if no one could tell him what precautions were needed...

...Its author, William E. Odom, comes with impressive bona fides...

...citizens, had been living among us for multiple months, taking flying (but not landing) lessons, renting apartments, crisscrossing the country as air passengers, getting and sending money orders, laying down an extensive paper and electronic trail, and all the while hiding in plain sight...

...Odom is correct not to overstep his authority...

...Why not...

...The existence of such books points to an anomaly at the heart of the matter: clandestine activities carried out in the service of an open, democratic society...

...In 1998, Washington officials learned that India had conducted several underground nuclear tests...

...Prados writes of Colby's immediate predecessor: "Schlesinger decided to take the Special Operations Group out of the Counterintelligence Staff and relocate it in the Office of Security, a unit of the CIA's administrative directorate...

...the two values irrevocably clash...

...Eisenhower assigned the U-2 project to the CIA, with the Air Force relegated to an advisory role...

...The author can turnanicephrase, too: "Important intelligence is usually boring and not newsworthy, while newsworthy intelligence is either unimportant or destroys important sources (agents and communications...

...His unuttered shout fomis a motif throughly out Helms' book...

...Several years later, during Helms' confirmation hearings to become Ambassador to Iran, he was asked whether the CIA had plotted to prevent Allende's election by use of force...

...Most Americans, some more grudgingly than others, concede that their government and military need to know the intentions and capabilities of those who intend us harm, and that deception and secrecy are necessary tools in the gathering of this information...

...Eisenhower began worrying, far more than his smiling, grandfatherly public manner revealed, about the impossibility of assessing Soviet might and intentions...

...Philip Taubman's Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage (Simon & Schuster, 441 pp., $27.00 (concentrates primarily on the 1950s, when the CIA was young and the Soviet Union, which possessed an unknown quantity of atomic and hydrogen bombs, posed a seemingly indecipherable menace to the U.S...

...During the Congressional hearings of the 1970s and the Iran-contra scandal of the 1980s, some people wondered if U.S...

...both joined the CIA shortly after it was created in 1947 and rose steadily up the hierarchy...

...As it happens, four new works offer, if not an answer to that pressing question, an overarching and sometimes original view of the U.S...

...Thomas Powers' The Man Who Kept the Secrets (1979) provided an excellent account of Helms' CIA career, but it is interesting to see this story recast as autobiography...

...The vast, expensive U.S...

...Presto, the U-2...

...Odom can be refreshingly tart, as in this comment on a certain FBI Director: "Hoover proved a pushover for Soviet intelligence operatives, a mere amateur whose bureau was swindled, misled and thoroughly thrashed in the espionage war between the United States and the Soviet Union...

...the task now seems to be building a better labyrinth...

...intelligence organizations and activities...

...Lay readers may not feel as comforted by these remarks as Odom seems to intend...

...some 20 years afterward it seemed to be in the business of manufacturing red tape...

...There was Iran-contra during the 1980s...

...Flow charts became more important than what was moving through them...

...intelligence have shifted...

...Helms' most bitter passages are aimed at William Colby, the successor who he believes threw him to the Justice Department wolves...

...He and Colby had the bad luck to run the CIA when the Vietnam War and subsequently Watergate dealt a one-two punch to the notion that Americans could trust their government to do the right and honorable thing...

...The conflict between the ideal of governmental transparency and the necessary opacity of espionage can never be resolved to everyone's satisfaction...

...Despite his credentials as an insider, Odom does not seem particularly impressed by insider expertise: "The novices and other 'lay' readers should know that they are not alone in their ignorance of the labyrinth of U.S...

...William E. Colby helped shape the system that saved the agency...

...But Helms remained loyal to Nixon...

...Perhaps all the furniture-rearranging he proposes in Fixing Intelligence would, if adopted, bring about wonderful improvements in the gathering and coordination of information, although not many lay readers will feel themselves in a position to judge...

...James R. Schle singer provided a brief interregnum between them before President Richard M. Nixon appointed him Secretary of Defense...

...photographs showed no evidence on the ground that the Kremlin had opened a "bomber gap" against the U.S...

...In our post-9/11 world, though, public concerns about U.S...

...Cameras able to take high-resolution photographs from that distance did not exist...

...My purpose," he continues, "is to make intelligence clear to anyone who truly wants to understand it, including intelligence professionals...

...Both did World War II service in the Office of Strategic Services, a secret outfit established by the Joint Chiefs that ran spies and paramilitary operations against Hitler's forces in Europe...

...THE EXTENT to which the CIA's glitter during the 1950s tarnished over the next two decades can be seen in two new books: A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency, by Richard Helms, with William Hood (Random, 496pp., $35.00), and Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby, by John Prados (Oxford, 380 pp., $35.00...