The CIA Goes P.R.
POLLOCK, RICHARD
The CIA Goes P.R. by Richard Pollock On January 4, the front page of the Los Angeles Times extolled a string of untold Cold War successes of the Central Intelligence Agency. Reporter James Risen...
...Many of the new public affairs staffers came from the Pentagon and worked with Deutch when he was undersecretary of defense, before assuming his post at the CIA...
...Last year the CIA released the VENONA papers, which show how the United States intercepted, decrypted, and translated messages from Soviet KGB and military intelligence agents to their operatives in North America from the 1940s to the 1960s...
...In particular, field agents who have worked in the Directorate of Operations object to talking publicly about secret missions Among other problems, publicity could dry up the recruitment of informants and agents...
...And the idea that 'Well, now we're in the 1990s and we're going to modernize espionage' is sort of pointless talk...
...For reasons of secrecy," he wrote, "the public has not been told about the exploits of the CIA's sewer rats...
...It was, indeed, a gripping tale...
...Former director of central intelligence Richard Helms, who spent his entire working life at the agency, summed up the problem this way: "When it comes down to it, openness and espionage are indeed a contradiction in terms, and if anybody thinks that they're going to change espionage to meet the American liberal view that such a thing shouldn't exist and therefore the public should know a lot more about it and be able to criticize it, the fact remains that there is no way to 'modernize' it or 'turn it around' or 'make it look different' or make it look 'sweet' when it's really sour...
...Within the U.S...
...Our successes can't.' That's amended to say, 'many of our successes can...
...Rather than simply manage daily crises, Boxx explained, he and his staff aimed to identify "stories that we thought told the message the American people should hear . . . These are not 'made up' things...
...and how it has helped disaster-relief workers fighting forest fires...
...How it came to be printed is an interesting story, too...
...A former senior intelligence official familiar with the operation called the disclosure "absolutely ruinous" to CIA overseas operations...
...Most everybody knows everything about our failures...
...Many former directors of central intelligence endorse the initiative...
...Risen himself dropped a hint...
...Former director Robert Gates, deputy director of the CIA under President Reagan and named to the top job by President Bush, echoed Colby...
...It is no solution for an agency like the CIA to administer carefully controlled doses of upbeat information to reporters...
...Boxx has created a "strategic planning" staff who decide which success stories can be released...
...He cited Aldrich Ames, the spy arrested in 1994 who was able to operate as a Soviet mole undetected for 10 years in the very heart of the agency's secret Directorate of Operations, and recent publicity over unsavory CIA connections in Guatemala in the 1980s...
...how the agency is sharing its "facial recognition technology" with the Immigration and Naturalization Service to help catch criminals crossing our borders...
...Honestly, I don't think I could talk to an agent-candidate today and be sure he would be safe...
...The agency disclosed how the supersecret National Reconnaissance Office handed over classified satellite photos to environmentalists at the U.S...
...This is new turf for the CIA in a lot of ways," admits Boxx...
...The main reason for openness, Deutch told me in his office at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, "is that the CIA has lost a good deal of credibility" through recent scandals...
...As one former field officer put it: "In the past, if you told an agent-candidate that you wanted a secret relationship, he'd believe you...
...In addition to those major embarrassments, Deutch mentions an even more basic challenge to the agency: "After the passing of the Cold War," he says, "people are asking themselves, 'Well, do you still need a secret foreign intelligence service?' It's a legitimate question...
...But, now, with the Cold War over, the arguments for secrecy are beginning to appear less compelling...
...Dennis Boxx, a 24-year career public affairs officer, is directing the CIA's new campaign for openness and good publicity...
...It simply makes the life of the agent, who is out there trying to do his work and recruit people, almost impossible," he said...
...It's just not to be...
...They are legitimate stories that are important to let the American people know about...
...Not everyone in the agency is enthusiastic about all the public exposure...
...And if you want the support of the American people, and support of their representatives in Congress, they have to understand how the agency operates...
...At bottom, a democratic society's requirement of governmental openness is simply at odds with its need for the dirty work of espionage...
...He might have added the agency's appalling treatment of a senior female agent, who eventually secured a $410,000 settlement of her sexual harassment suit in 1994...
...In the end, removing secrecy from intelligence gathering may be an impossible task...
...Reporter James Risen dwelt especially on one feat of "American bravery," when CIA agents installed eavesdropping equipment in tunnels and sewers below Moscow...
...Viewers of NBC Nightly News saw anchor Tom Brokaw report on the CIA's new role in combating the drug trade...
...Boxx's office tries to spark reporters' interest in covering particular stories...
...But it will also be seen by outsiders as self-serving...
...To be sure, much of what has been released recently belongs in the public domain, and its publication may deservedly raise morale at the CIA...
...The recent disclosure by the New York Times of a CIA operation targeted against the Japanese in the midst of trade talks caused an uproar in trade circles, but the worst damage might have been to CIA operatives in Asia...
...The fact is that for the last year, the CIA has been encouraging journalists to write "good" stories about the beleaguered agency...
...Spearheading the effort is no less a figure than the new director of central intelligence, John Deutch, who advocates opening up the entire intelligence community to the public and to Congress...
...And Deutch himself conducted an extraordinary CIA conference on Operation CORONA, at which Air Force and CIA reconnaissance photos taken over the Soviet Union were released...
...In recent years, the agency has quietly released an unprecedented amount of previously classified material...
...And openness can boomerang...
...Inevitably, there is some reluctance to step out...
...As much as possible," he says, "is open...
...Another potential problem is that allied intelligence services, fearful of their own secrets' becoming public, might stop sharing intelligence with the United States...
...He explains it this way: "There's a growing sense in the agency that we can no longer say, 'Well, only our failures become public...
...Geological Survey...
...So the steady stream of deliberate leaks continues...
...intelligence community, officials feel a deep and spreading frustration that the public never hears about their triumphs, only their travesties...
...Insofar as you expect Mossad [the Israeli intelligence service] or MI-6 [the British intelligence service] to share secrets with you, or insofar as you expect some renegade member of Hezbollah to agree to tell a case officer what's going on inside the organization, forget it," a former intelligence official fumed...
...The only thing we're keeping secret are our successes...
...Where we can, it's important for people to know...
...Richard Pollock is the Washington producer for ABC's Good Morning America...
...Touted as a drive for "openness," the publicity campaign appears to have a dual- not to say an ambiguous-purpose: It is both a good-faith effort to rebuild credibility damaged by the excesses of an obsolete culture of secrecy, and a standard public-relations response to the agency's very public humiliations...
...William Colby, appointed by President Nixon, feels that with the end of the Cold War, the call for secrecy ended...
...The director even posed with two of his deputies for a cover of Parade magazine...
...Implanting a new culture of openness at a spy agency may be more problematic than the current reformers think...
Vol. 1 • February 1996 • No. 20
