The Spies Who Came in From the Cold War

...When you had only nine minutes between warning and strike, they were essential-but now it’s less likely that missiles will be launched at a moment’s notice...

...thousands of nuclear weapons together with delivery ,Clark Clifford Except for the eerie emptiness of the richly decorated suite of offices, a visitor would never know that Clark Clifford has been, since BCCI, a troubled man...

...But they can give a president pause, forcing him to ask the question: “Don’t I want to hear the facts...

...After nearly a half century of looking at the world in one particular way, can such a proud institution change...

...But a purpose flies no banners and inspires no slogans...

...It means information gathered from worldwide communications in code, open text, and by word of mouth...

...Or the CIA attempt to assist Gerald Ford, then a congressman, in his campaign to impeach Justice William 0. Douglas-yet another violation of both charter and law...

...After that,” said Harry Truman, “you come in here and tell me how anybody could have read those cables and not known there was an attack coming...

...Junior analysts at the CIA say there are too many in the chain of command intent on placing their imprint on reports...

...So does he employ someone to count the visitors Tom Braden, a former Los Angeles Times columnist, was a division chief in the CIA from 1950 to 1954...

...Consider the CIA employee who has risen to the rank of station chief in Ecuador...

...It’s often a matter of how you say it,” one analyst says...

...Right now, agents are diligently typing up memos in tiny countries where even an unprovoked assault upon a small neighbor would hardly be worth waking the president from a night’s slumber...

...As these men retired or died, their successors, a somewhat less dashing breed, have been also obsessed by the menace...

...Or Operation Chaos, an attempt to spy on and embarrass American citizens opposed to the war in Vietnam, again a violation of the CIA charter and the law...

...Says Clifford of the Commonwealth, “Those governments possess systems...

...We must learn who controls them and under what conditions they are controlled...

...Without the minute-to-minute standard, having an agent’s analysis of the situation is far more important than knowing precisely where the weapons are...

...If the United States didn’t cozy up to the mullahs, the administration said, the Soviets might conceivably send their forces into Teheran...

...And it and said so, despite the derision of many of his colleagues...

...This kind of information, though the CIA considers it less important than reports on unrest in Haiti, would actually be much more useful in our struggle for global welfare...

...With Congress smacking its lips at the prospect of shrinking the CIA-and saving billions of dollars in the process-Gates (like officials at Defense, Energy, the National Security Agency [NSA], and elsewhere) is scrambling to tailor a new role for his agency...

...under Reagan and with Afghanistan, the contras, and Angola, they went up to about 20 percent of the budget...

...We must learn the names and the whereabouts of the Werner von Brauns who built them and who, even now, may be searching for employment by other nations or by terrorist organizations...

...Although the director of the CIA can say to the chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency or the head of the NSA, “I think we ought to put primary emphasis on this,” his recommendation is not binding...

...Why can’t the State department with its embassy on the spot take care of such reporting...

...There were incidents like the Bay of Pigs-illogical in attempt, atrocious in execution, and tragic in result...

...That consensus raises an obvious question: How good is the Before answering that, it’s worth briefly defining what “intelligence” means...

...Cline detected the beginnings of the Sino-Soviet split as early as 1957 confirmation hearings was . that he ordered analysts Now bearded and cheruthat charge was wrong...

...By erecting the Iron Curtain, threatening Turkey and the Balkans, and fighting the Marshall Plan, Stalin in effect founded the CIA...

...Why didn’t we know...

...The rethreaten our society as sult will be an explosion much as nuclear weapons of data so large that 5,000 do,” Colby says...

...It’s more difficult for a director to sign an analysis that grabs the president by his coat lapels and says, “Look, this is serious...

...Such a leader is more likely to have the private means or the guts to resign when he feels that a president doesn’t want to hear what he has to say, instead of being trapped into tailoring analysis to fit presidential preferences...

...There was the opening of letters addressed to American citizensa violation of the CIA’s charter and therefore illegal...

...No men or women of comparable achievement inhabit the intelligence and analysis communities of today’s CIA, which is perhaps why, in the mind of the current generation, Cline’s name has a star after it...

...Despite his confirmation, no senior analyst at the CIA seriously argues that the charge against him was wrong...

...He resigned from the CIA when he determined correctly that Nixon and was Colby, urged on by juinvestigate the crimes and misdemeanors of the CIA Kissinger were not using formation but as a secret weapon to do whatever nior officers appointed to The key charge against the CIA as a source of inRobert Gates at his in the seventies, who per- they wanted without havsonally went to the Justice ing to take responsibility...

...I’m choosing the CIA,” a recent 22-year-old recruit told The New York Times, “because the benefits are good...

...Like his successors at Langley and in Angola, India, and France, he would have been gleeful, but he ilso would have been dumbfounded, for the lisappearance of the menace leaves the CIA Nithout a cause...

...But he’ll get immediate attention when he reports what the menace is doing in Ecuador...

...If the roof is leaky, it’s wise to try to fix it before abandoning the neighborhood altogether...

...Nor did we have adequate advance information on the Kremlin coup this past August-although some might argue that it’s unfair to call that lapse a mistake...

...Clifford now says he intended that phrase to be an innocuous catch-all, but with this empowerment the agency secretly hired the paratroopers, bridge-burners, assassination-planners, dynamiters, and secondstory artists who brought it infamy...

...In the meantime, having a civilian unit-a small secret unit ready at the command of a president to assassinate or to disrupt-affords that president a constant temptation...

...How adept is the CIA at this sort of data collection and analysis...

...As a result, he escaped indictment for perjury only by pleading nolo contendre to the charge of failing to answer the Church Committee’s questions “fully, completely, and accurately as required by law...

...When the enabling legislation was being drafted, Donovan inserted a phrase giving the CIA power to “conduct subversive operations abroad...

...The worst of these operations, says Clifford, was Iran-contra, because it involved a director of central intelligence (William Casey) conducting an unconstitutional exercise without the advice and built-in safeguards of the agency under his command...

...The CIA gave no hard advance warning of the breakup of the Soviet Union nor of the dire economic straits that preceded it-despite the fact that the Soviet Union was becoming a more and more open society...

...William Colby Like Helms, who preceded him, Colby is a Donovan disciple who demonstrated an astonishing ability to triumph over adversity...

...Third, there is always the possibility that an intelligence analyst will tailor his information to fit the desires of the consumer-that is, the political party in power...

...Saddam Hussein had stationed his troops so that his Shiite population would bear the brunt of the coalition attack, and we assumed he had placed the Guard behind them...

...Who’s the audience for this multimillion-dollar project...

...But analyzing it and should be reduced...

...Today, substitute the words “He [or she] doesn’t have a Ph.D...

...Clifford thinks the CIA’s new focus should be the fundamental shifts in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the Commonwealth of Independent States, all currently in the throes of instability...

...The first secretary of defense, James Forrestal, was against it...

...Khrushchev would not station missiles in Cuba...

...But they’re down now and I hope they stay that way...

...Of course we didn’t have advance information...

...He is also remembered as the man who said no to Richard Nixon when Nixon tried to involve the CIA in the coverup of the Watergate break-in...

...You have all these countries in the Soviet Union’s land space with no clear control over the Soviet Union’s weapons...

...and you come close to the same disparagement...

...I think CIA employees would give a collective sigh of relief if “subversive operations abroad” were removed from the agency’s charter and if the ambiguous phrase “such other functions and duties” were spelled out to exclude those subversive operations...

...I asked some members of the clubmen who, because they were involved in many of the agency’s most crucial policy and operational decisions, have a strong feel for what the new CIA must become, and overcome...

...Instead of concocting operationsthe locus of the agency’s great failures (and, yes, some remarkable successes)-the CIA should concentrate on giving the president and the government accurate and up-to-date analysis...

...By the thousands each weekday morning, they’ve passed the old man’s statue in the entrance of the headquarters building in Langley, Virginia, and gone to work: analyzing the menace, tracking the agents of the menace, measuring the menace’s assets, trying to ferret out the intentions of the menace-“confounding,” as the British say in their national anthem, the menace’s “knavish tricks...

...This probably will happen-and soon...

...If the CIA were abolished, I would feel as though the house into which I was born had been demolished-not sad, but wistful...

...This, of course, was the key charge against Director of Central Intelligence Robert Gates at his confirmation hearings: that he ordered analysts to doctor their views...

...If we had had some central repository for information,” he concluded, “somebody to look at it, fit all the pieces together, and report it, there never would have been a Pearl Harbor...

...Now 75, Helms is, as he always has been, erect and laconic...

...Even the Division of Science keeping up with it is where our principal effort ought and Technology can be reduced...

...The CIA, instead of sticking by its original analysis-which estimated that there was no Soviet threat to Iran-altered its reports to fit the convictions of the policymakers...

...Any CIA director can put his signature on foggy analyses with sentences that begin: “Another possibility that cannot be overlooked...

...Truman defined it one morning in 1947 during an Oval Office chat with his aide, Clark Clifford...

...It means information gathered from books, magazines, and newspapers...

...no senior analyst at the and we have openings to societies which have been CIA argues that previously closed...

...For 45 years, nothing has mattered as much -an obsession with consequences great and small...

...He recalls how the agency’s mission, as it was being crafted under Truman, quietly drifted away from the original concept of an intelligence-coordinating agency...

...Of course, Robert Gates has been asking himself the same sort of questions as I’ve been putting to company men past and present...

...Webster says we did: “I sent memorandum after memorandum over to the White House pointing to the deterioration of the Soviet economy...

...He recently proposed setting up his own mini-CNN, a supersecret electronic information system that would flash intelligence briefings from agents around the world back to headquarters...

...intelligence effort, Iraq’s Republican Guard got away, primarily because our military wasn’t accurately informed of its position...

...It certainly deserves an asterisk...

...That requires analysts to know a fair amount about the habits and mores of those who inhabit the territory from which the information comes...

...But it keeps all this a secret...

...Now that the enemy has disappeared from the field, what is the CIA’S role...

...The reason the U.S...

...The Office of Naval Intelligence was against it...

...There are also too many station chiefs and staffs in unnecessary places...

...Brushing aside CIA intelligence reports, the administration attempted to create the impression that the Soviet Union was menacing Iran...

...Analysts who were serving under Webster at the time say they’d like to see those memoranda...

...Bill Donovan and Harry Truman, who didn’t nuch like each other, were in total agreement 3n the CIA’s purpose...

...Of course he does, mowing that headquarters is more interested n this subject than in any other...

...But Joseph Stalin outweighed them all...

...The government takes care of you...

...The most critical miss of late came during the Gulf war...

...As for covert operations, they ate up about half of the agency’s budget in the fifties...

...Hoover’s FBI was against it...

...The real possibilities of the post-Cold War CIA become clear when you think about what it could do...

...The early history of the CIA makes it clear that without The Cause-fighting the communist menace-the formation of the CIA would never have been approved by Congress...

...To do so, Kent argued, would be both irresponsible and too much of a risk...

...Ray Cline rector for intelligence from 1962 to 1967, is the agency’s own favorite son...

...I wish Donovan had been around to see the iisappearance of the menace...

...You can’t discover their abilities or their plans by technical means so you have to use spies, and with the morality of this country, you can’t give the spies cover...

...We have satellites,” ly, his ideas about the new Despite his confirmation, he says...

...In some ways, it already has...

...Yet even less sudden, more accessible changes in the Soviet Union went unrecognized...

...He was a commander of an OSS sabotage team during World War 11, a station chief in Vietnam, and, later, chief of the Phoenix program, which sought out, imprisoned, and occasionally executed alleged leaders of the Vietcong...

...Clifford deleted it, substituting a phrase empowering the agency to perform “such other functions and duties as the National Security Council may from time to time direct...

...And then there were the bungled attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, and the murder of Salvador Allende in Chile (the CIA didn’t do it, but certainly prepared the way...

...You have all these people with know-how trying to sell themselves to countries that want to beat up on their neighbors...

...When I discussed this failure with William Webster, director of the CIA at the time, he had an immediate rejoinder...

...He preached it, fought it, worried it...

...they were reduced to about 3 or 4 percent of the budget in the seventies...

...Yet Helms is also known, to crib from Thomas Powers’ book title, as “the man who kept the secrets...

...Either way, the information failed to trickle up to the White House-not an uncommon phenomenon in the intelligence community...

...So the purpose of a Central Intelligence Agency was clear...

...often the end product is mush...

...Actually, Helms didn’t exactly say no, but he stopped well short of doing what Nixon wanted done...

...Couldn’t we also use CIA satellite technology to, say, help measure the earth’s deterioration, its diminishing grasslands, forests, vegetable cover, and food supply...

...A brilliant student at Harvard and Oxford, he joined the research and analysis branch of OSS in 1942, when Donovan and his R&A chief, Harvard historian William Langer, assembled a team of scholars who would have put the faculty of any one university to shame...

...sky In all the recent flailing about, a crucial point seems lost: It’s not which toys the CIA uses that matters, it’s what the agency uses them for...

...Now] is the time to insert agents who can follow all the agreements among the republics, all disputes among the republics, and keep us fully informed...

...From Hitler’s Germany to Stalin’s Russia took him about a minute and a half...

...But what neither guessed, and what reconnaissance photos had failed to reveal, was that the Soviets had not only smuggled strategic nuclear missiles into Cuba, but that Castro planned to use them in the event of an invasion by the United States-a fact that was revealed only last month by Castro himself...

...Caught between his responsibility to keep CIA secrets and his oath to tell the truth to a Senate committee, between his disdain for dirty tricks and the table-pounding demands of both Henry Kissinger and Nixon to oust Chilean president Allende, Helms fudged...

...We ”There are obvious targets for intelligence: terrorists and drug lords who have computers...

...And, finally, there is the basic problem of bureaucracy...

...There were the experiments with mind-altering drugs conducted on innocent and unwitting Americansunlawful, of course, and also morally repugnant...

...The CIA already possesses the world’s most comprehensive collection of information on the earth’s oil supply, exploding population, ozone layer, and water supply...

...Over time he has learned that CIA headquarters will file without comment his report on Ecuador’s ancient territorial quarrel with Peru...

...Consider the actions of the CIA when the Reagan administration sought to gain the release of the hostages held in Lebanon under Iranian control...

...It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that he, and the subalterns whom he trained in his wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and who inherited his CIA, lived it...

...Fortunately, CIA director John McCone had a “sixth sense” that Kent was wrong...

...You see that, my boy,” he said to his visitor as he waved his arm at the taxicabs, trucks, and passenger cars streaming over the bridge...

...Asked about the future of CIA, Helms argues that the CIA’s mission is actually expanding in the wake of the Cold War: “With the fall of communism, the intelligence job of the CIA has increased about tenfold,” he says...

...Richard Helms The senior surviving CIA director is remembered at the agency as a spymaster who sought to remain aloof from “subversive operations abroad...

...It means information gathered from satellites...

...So what should be done with the CIA...

...There was Iran-contra, too, but why go on...

...The CIA does best, both as an intelligence arm and as a responsible representative of American public interest, when its director is a distinguished figure of national stature: an Allen Dulles, say, or a McCone...

...Only after American forces literally buried the Shiites with artillery and air bombardment did we discover that the Republican Guard was not there...

...These men who were either present at the creation of the CIA or directed its work agree, despite their political views and histories, on two things: The CIA should remain in business, and its chief business should be intelligence...

...by Tom Braden Nearing the end of his life, the founder of the Central Intelligence Agency lay in bed in his New York City apartment and looked out the window at the line of traffic entering Manhattan from the Queensborough BriGdegne-e ral William J. Donovan’s mind had been clouded by a series of strokes...

...At the end of World War 11, Bill Donovan was very good at rapid change...

...department and the acting attorney general with the bic, Cline teaches at allegation that his former under him to doctor their Georgetown, where he arboss and mentor, Richard gues that the agency’s Helms, had committed per- views for political reasons...

...it took the rest of the country six months...

...Although that resum6 does not suggest it, Colby is the only lifelong liberal to have served as director of the CIA, the only one who devoted himself to such causes as the environment and nuclear disarmament...

...The macho mentality was so pervasive that to say of a fellow employee, “The man has never jumped,” was a mildly disparaging remark...

...I For the last 19 years of his life, Bill Donovan was obsessed with the communist menace...

...My hope is that Robert Gates, even without a cause, will be good at changing too...

...we can eavesCIA differ greatly from drop on communications Helms’s...

...Yet, as Truman understood, we still need an intelligence agency-a centralized, vigilant agency-as much as a house needs a roof...

...There are indications that we are not as capable as we should be...

...Still, the new change should go beyond simply decreasing emphasis on satellites, operations, and the like...

...As for the satellites in which Cline invested so much faith, how critical are they now...

...Photographs taken later from the U-2 proved that McCone’s intuition, not Kent’s cold logic, was right...

...It was he who analyzed and brought to President Kennedy photographs that proved the Soviets had installed missiles in Cuba...

...was caught by surprise at Pearl Harbor, according to Truman, was that nobody had drawn President Franklin Roosevelt’s attention to the cables or to the enormous quantities of scrap iron that the Japanese were buying...

...Here I must confess to an old boy’s sentimental attachment to the place where I once worked...

...Yet as the wise men and the rank and file demonstrate, there is a very strong institutional pride in the CIA...

...Certainly, such operations may from time to time be crucial to the nation’s security, but such cases are rare, and we have men in the Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corps who are trained to do these types of jobs...

...But what, exactly, should we be informed about...

...As Lt...

...General Samuel Wilson, retired chief of one of the CIA’s partners, the Defense Intelligence Agency, put it recently, “All my pillars of intellectual support are pretty well gone, because the Soviet Union forces as I knew them have ceased to exist...

...Without the cause, do we need an intelligence community that costs nearly $30 billion a year and a CIA that employs tens of thousands of people and risks us deep embarrassment every four or five years...

...Those satellites are to go...

...And that’s the way it will be until somebody blows up New York...

...Yet at times even I have considered parricide, especially on those occasions when the CIA has shamed its country, its allies, even its own employees...

...A few dozen agents at Langley...

...The Army’s G-2 was against it...

...Along the same lines, I think the CIA would do better if its director were also the undisputed chief of the intelligence community, not just a board chairman...

...This, to Clifford, has been the CIA’s great failure...

...He recalls Truman’s words on the subject: “We must never again conduct the business of this country without being informed...

...Suffice it to say that every American old enough to feel responsible for his country has been embarrassed at some point by revelations concerning the CIA...

...new mission is a high-tech jury...

...The president mad been reading the cables of the last pre-war ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, and he recsmmended that Clifford read them too...

...And now that cause is gone...

...If the new CIA wants to do better than that-if it wants to find a middle ground between machismo and mediocrity, if it wants to stave off total obsolescence-it will have to change again, training those Ph.Ds on problems more complex and variegated than anything the Cold War required...

...Today, not surprising- one...

...Then why not abolish the CIA...

...spy vs...

...But Clifford, who helped draft the legislation establishing the CIA in 1947, is perfectly willing to discuss the agency, and his message, like his diction, is clear: The CIA should go back to being what Harry Truman-and for that matter, Clifford himself-envisioned...

...Neither did Gorbachev...

...Perhaps more dramatic changes are in order-including a change of personality and structure at the top...

...Although General Colin Powell praised the U.S...

...Why, for instance, must that vaunted satellite technology be used only to survey military compounds...

...Of course, such power only benefits the nation if the director knows what to emphasize, which is why the most important change in the new CIA must be not structural, but psychological: a willingness among CIA officials to liberate their minds from traditional Cold War definitions of agency work...

...In my own day, men who had parachuted behind enemy lines were in vogue...

...He gave it a cause...

...After months of retreats, conferences, and soul-searching, the director is now sending out sig-nals that he not only wants to emphasize spies, but satellites...

...They were the agency division chiefs and their assistants, and in the great expansion of the fifties they tended to hire their own kind...

...very expensive to launch and it takes a lot of people to process the information they send back...

...Or, rather, what should the CIA do...

...Of course, resignations don’t always do any good-McCone’s resignation didn’t change Lyndon Johnson...

...o the Soviet Embassy, noting the times of enry and the length of stay...

...Yet he or 6,000 people will be believes that both the size and budget of the agency hard pressed to keep up with it...

...After that, it means analysis-which means somebody reading or listening to the mass of raw information and taking an educated guess as to what it implies...