Inside the CIA

by Kessler, Ronald

  The same kind of problem occurred in Operation Phoenix, a program run by William Colby during the Vietnam War to identify Vietcong hidden within the South Vietnamese population. Both American and South Vietnamese intelligence agencies collected the intelligence, then turned the information over to the South Vietnamese. In most cases, the South Vietnamese incarcerated and questioned the Vietcong, but in some cases they killed them. As a result, the operation developed a reputation as an assassination squad, even though that was not its intent. Moreover, casualties that arose from military actions were often attributed to the program.

  More recently, in Suriname, Casey decided the CIA should overthrow Désire D. Bouterse as the leader of the South American country because the government was killing opposition leaders and permitting the country to be used as a transshipment point for cocaine. This plan, too, never got off the ground after it hit opposition both in Congress and the administration.

  “We were worried about what was going on there,” McMahon said. “The question was, should we do it militarily or do it ourselves? We tried to round up enough people to go carry it out. It did fall by the wayside, and I don’t think it was just because of the House or Senate. There were a lot in the administration who had some misgivings on it. But the agency gave it a college try and started drawing up plans on how to go about it.”

  Today, only a dozen covert action programs are carried out each year. Some of them are broad strategies that may be undertaken in a number of countries. Most of them are low-level propaganda efforts or innocuous aid to countries fighting terrorism or narcotics. For example, at the request of these countries, the CIA may provide weapons, vehicles, training, and data bases for checking on travelers going through customs. The only reason the funding is covert is that the countries themselves do not want their own people to know the United States is helping to combat narcotics or terrorism.

  The CIA’s propaganda efforts usually consist of printing books for distribution in the former Soviet Union or planting articles favorable to the United States or American ideals in countries where the media is anti-American.

  During the Vietnam War, “we would present anything that made the Soviets or North Vietnamese look bad,” a former CIA officer said. “It may not necessarily be untrue, or it might be facts that otherwise might not get into print. The Soviets do that all the time. Truth is generally thought to be a better weapon [in propaganda efforts]. In a lot of places, you can’t get anything in the paper that is pro-American. Everything is pro-Soviet, so they only know that side.”

  In contrast to the days before the Church Committee hearings, the CIA today tends to be reluctant to undertake covert action.

  “It has to be done on a case-by-case basis,” a former National Security Council aide said. “There have been cases where it has been extremely effective. There are others where it didn’t make any difference at all. In some cases, it probably was counterproductive. That depends on what is being implemented, how it is implemented, and what your goals and policies are.”

  Virtually every covert action eventually becomes public, often creating more harm than good because of the poor image it projects of the U.S.

  “I would estimate that well over half of the covert action programs on the books have, at least in a general sense, been identified in the press in some fashion—not all the details and all the methods,” according to Russell J. Bruemmer, a former CIA general counsel under William Webster. “Probably almost all of the controversial ones have been identified.”27

  The cumulative effect of CIA covert action over the years has been that when anything negative happens, the CIA is blamed. Thus after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi by a female South Asian suicide bomber in May 1991, leading Indian newspapers and government officials—perhaps unwilling to blame themselves—became firmly convinced that the CIA had ordered him killed.

  “It is a difficult opinion to explain or refute since it seems to arise not from evidence or even coherent speculation, but from a deep-seated emotional conviction,” according to a Washington Post news analysis from New Delhi.28

  “Why do people find it easy to believe Dave Phillips killed Kennedy? I knew Dave well. There is not one chance that he ever would have been involved with such a thing. Yet he was a division chief, so he was an obvious target for that kind of accusation. People believe it because he was CIA,” former CIA officer Simmons said.

  At the same time, covert action, more than anything else, has tarnished the image of the CIA at home, making it more difficult to recruit the best personnel and to obtain the best consultants from the academic world.

  “The negative attitude toward intelligence within academic circles I think has to do with tying the intelligence community to the failures of covert action,” Russell J. Bowen, a retired CIA analyst who continues to consult for the agency, said. “We’ve had a tremendous amount of exposure to questionable covert action. That overshadows what is done positively by the analytical side of the house.”29

  “In principle, I think we ought to discourage the idea of fighting secret wars or even initiating most covert operations,” George W. Ball, undersecretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, has said. “When the United States violates those principles—when we mine harbors in Nicaragua—we fuzz the difference between ourselves and the Soviet Union.”

  In the last analysis, covert action has contributed very little to strengthening the national security of the U.S. If an action is worth taking, it should be done openly, as the U.S. did in driving Iraq from Kuwait during the Persian Gulf War. In pursuing covert action, the U.S. perpetuates the myth that its clandestine activities will remain secret, while avoiding asking itself the tough questions it would normally ask before taking action in the open. Those questions frequently lead to the conclusion that the action is not worth the risk. Like an elephant crapping during a circus, covert action is a sideshow to the CIA’s main activities—one that grabs all the attention and in the long run, does more harm than good.

  In contrast, intelligence gathering, the bread and butter of the CIA, is a relatively benign activity. While it entails breaking the espionage laws of other countries, it does not as a rule lead to violence or intervention in the affairs of other countries. By finding out more about each other, countries such as the U.S. and the former Soviet Union promote peace by preventing the kind of paranoia that might lead to a first strike. For that reason, no CIA activity has been so important to U.S. security as finding out what is going on inside the Soviet Union.

  6

  Weather Balloons

  FOR FORTY YEARS, THE CIA’s PRIMARY TARGET WAS THE Soviet Union, and with good reason. After World War II, Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader, declared the Soviet Union a denied area and began building up the country’s military. In speeches, he implied that war was inevitable between capitalist and communist countries. In 1944, the Soviets overran Hungary. By 1947, the Soviets had taken over in Poland and Romania. In 1948, a communist coup succeeded in Czechoslovakia, and Soviet harassment of Western traffic into Berlin had become a blockade. Finally, in 1950, North Korea, supported by Communist China, invaded the South. To suppress dissent at home, the Soviets established a secret police—the forerunner of the KGB—that brutally repressed the populace at home and became an effective and fearsome intelligence threat abroad. The U.S. government was convinced the Soviets would attack Western Europe next, and even America.

  If it was a life—or—death struggle, it was also a frustrating one because it was so difficult to find out what was going on behind what Winston Churchill had dubbed the Iron Curtain. The Soviets declared their country closed. Without spy satellites or high-flying planes such as the U-2, the CIA knew virtually nothing about what was happening inside the Soviet Union. In the absence of knowledge, fear took over.

  “Even the most elementary facts were unavailable—on roads and bridges, on the location and production of factories, on city plans and airfields,” according to Harry Rositzke,
a former CIA officer in charge of operations against the Soviet Union in the 1940s and 1950s. “Scores of Air Force researchers were compiling Soviet bombing target dossiers from out-of-date materials in the Library of Congress.”30

  “The first real big question we had which came out of the Korean War was how big is the Soviet Union,” a former CIA Soviet analyst said. “We had identified our enemy as the Soviet Union. But we didn’t know anything about it. They had stopped any information. There was a great experiment, a new system. We didn’t know if it was working or not. How big were they relative to us in terms of their GNP? Were they growing rapidly or were they standing still?”

  The CIA asked those few travelers who were allowed into the Soviet Union to look for missile sites. They never found any. The agency tried to piece together captured German aerial photographs of Soviet territory. It showed where construction had started on military installations but was out of date.

  In desperation, the CIA began parachuting agents from airplanes behind Soviet lines. Because they had no diplomatic immunity, they could be executed if caught. Because of the rigid control the Soviets maintained over their society, it was virtually impossible to infiltrate foreigners into the country. As far as the CIA knows, all the “illegals” were caught.

  Another CIA ploy was to send reconnaissance balloons equipped with cameras fifty thousand feet over the Soviet Union and Communist China, hoping that some would drift to the other side of the country and bring back photos of military installations or factories. To give them the appearance of weather balloons, the CIA outfitted them with signs in Russian asking for their return for meteorological research. Based on estimates of how long the balloons would take to cross Asia, a timer unfurled a parachute that would float the film to earth. Following a radio signal, Air Force planes could intercept the package and retrieve it. If they missed, a transmitter continued to signal the location of the package for twenty-four hours.

  The Soviets shot down some of the balloons, while others fell inside Soviet territory or landed in Poland. In all, 516 balloons were launched. Of these, 40 returned 13,813 photos of Soviet and Communist Chinese territory, covering about 8 percent of their land mass. The U.S. stopped the program after the Soviets held a press conference and displayed 50 of the captured balloons.31

  The CIA’s most immediate concern was developing some system for detecting an imminent attack. In that event, steam locomotives would have to be fired up, and flat cars would be needed to ship tanks. So the CIA recruited people in railroad dispatchers’ offices. The agency knew where the railroad cars were located and what their normal travel patterns were. The CIA also debriefed defectors and other émigrés. A former prostitute told the agency about the location of a missile site near Moscow. According to her, she could see the missiles while on the way to her assignations in military barracks.

  The CIA’s first major recruitment of a Soviet intelligence operative came in 1952 when Lt. Col. Peter Popov of the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency, offered in Vienna to spy for the agency. Besides giving away identities of Soviet intelligence officers, Popov delivered, according to William Hood, his case officer, one of the Pentagon’s highestpriority targets—a copy of the 1947 Soviet army field regulations.32

  The following year, the CIA built the Berlin Tunnel, which tapped into Soviet telephone calls in East Germany. The tunnel was six hundred yards long, six feet high, and fifteen feet underground. The lines—432 in all—connected the Soviet high command in East Berlin to the General Staff and foreign office in Moscow and all major Red Army units in East Germany, Soviet diplomatic installations, and Soviet intelligence headquarters in East Berlin. The interceptions provided the CIA with the complete order of battle of the Soviet Group of Forces in East Germany, as well as comments of Soviet officers about their troops in the field.33

  In 1961, Col. Oleg Penkovskiy, a Soviet GRU officer, approached the British in Moscow. When he next visited London the following year, he began spying for the West. For sixteen months, he provided MI-6 and the CIA with running accounts of Soviet military strategies, the capabilities of the missiles that touched off the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, and details of KGB and GRU operations targeted against the U.S.34 In addition, he gave the CIA a series of articles from a “top secret” military magazine that had asked Soviet military leaders to express their views on policy. The articles provided insight into the Soviet military mind.

  Penkovskiy had initially approached a CIA officer in Moscow, but the CIA, thinking he was a Soviet plant, rejected him.35 After another unsuccessful attempt with a Canadian, he eventually approached Greville Wynne, a former British intelligence officer, who was visiting Moscow on business. Wynne introduced the GRU officer to the British MI-6. The CIA then agreed jointly to finance and run the operation with the British.

  The CIA’s initial rejection of Penkovskiy illustrates how effectively the Soviets protected their citizens from recruitment by the CIA. Almost any Soviet could be a potential KGB informer, and the CIA was constantly on the lookout for provocations that would result in expulsions of CIA officers assigned to Moscow. Today, the CIA recognizes that it is better to err on the side of accepting an agent, even if it means a CIA officer will occasionally be expelled because of a provocation.

  In trying to penetrate the Soviets, the CIA’s Directorate of Operations had to rely almost entirely on Soviets who volunteered to spy, either as recruitments-in-place or as defectors.

  “With Soviets, they mostly fall into your hands. You don’t recruit them,” a former operations officer said.

  At any given time, the CIA had no more than two dozen assets or agents in the Soviet Union. One of the most important was Adolf G. Tolkachev, a Soviet scientist whose information saved the U.S. Navy billions of dollars by providing the CIA with information that showed that the United States and its allies were moving in the wrong direction in developing systems for detecting and combating Soviet submarines. For many years, Tolkachev left photographs of Soviet military technical plans and specifications every two months in ever-changing CIA drop sites in Moscow. Typically, the film was concealed in fake rocks or dog droppings containing secret compartments ingeniously fashioned by the CIA’s Office of Technical Service.

  Other key recruitments were Victor I. Sheymov and Aleksandr D. Ogorodnik. Sheymov worked in the KGB’s Eighth Chief Directorate, which handles communications intelligence. He defected in 1980 after working for several years as a CIA agent or recruitment-in-place. Ogorodnik, a Soviet diplomat, reported on internal Soviet deliberations. And Vladimir I. Vetrov—who had the cryptonym FAREWELL—reported to Western intelligence services that the Soviets had placed bugs on the printers used by the French intelligence service for communications. That led to closer examination of typewriters used to write sensitive memos at the American embassy in Moscow and the discovery of the same kinds of bugs.

  Many other agents recruited by the CIA among Soviets either retired in place or defected without any publicity.

  Because it is so difficult to move in Moscow without being detected, CIA officers assigned to Moscow station rarely recruit agents. Instead, they service dead drops for agents who were previously recruited when they traveled overseas or who volunteered while in Moscow. For example, Ogorodnik was enlisted to spy for the CIA when he was based in Venezuela. CIA officers who pick up film or leave money or equipment in dead drops in Moscow often are not the officers assigned to the case. Rather, they are the personnel who seem least subject to Soviet surveillance that day.

  When the Cold War was at its peak, the Soviet/East Europe Division may have seemed to be the most prestigious place to be assigned. But without agents to recruit, CIA officers in Moscow often came out looking second best.

  While CIA officers there are merely picking up documents from agents recruited by others, “another guy is recruiting in Africa as if he’s picking bananas off a tree. So all these guys are rated in competition with each other. You look and say you have to recruit ag
ents,” a former operations officer said.

  “The press thinks SE [Soviet/East Europe] Division is more elite,” a former officer assigned to the division said. “But there’s usually no scramble to join it because of the drawbacks. Most of what [CIA officers do in Moscow] isn’t spectacular. They’ll service dead drops and walk miles to locate sites.”

  In most parts of the world, CIA officers use the State Department’s political, consular, or economic sections as cover. But to make the KGB’s surveillance job more difficult in Moscow, CIA officers are spread through more government agencies there. In Moscow, CIA officers may use as cover the military or the U.S. Information Agency, for example.

  The State Department’s laxity in maintaining security at the American embassy in Moscow has contributed to the problem. Because the State Department shipped typewriters to the old embassy on Soviet trains and allowed them to remain in Soviet warehouses, the KGB was able to implant bugging devices that transmitted the contents of classified memos to a nearby KGB listening post. The bugs in the typewriters were secreted in a horizontal aluminum bar in the typewriters’ casings. The bar had been sliced in half and then resealed so the seam was barely visible. Because the devices were roughly the same density as the typewriters’ casings, ordinary X-rays could not detect them.

  Routine electronic sweeps of the embassy had not detected the bugs either. The bugs stored data and transmitted it only intermittently. The Soviets controlled when the bugs “dumped” or transmitted information, and they could turn them off when a sweep might be in progress. Moreover, the coded signals used the same frequency as a Moscow television station. When the bugs transmitted, viewers heard momentary static. Since the signals were on the same wavelength as the television station, sweeps of the embassy detected nothing. The Americans found the bugs only by using highly sophisticated scanning devices that bombard material with neutrons.