Inside the CIA

by Kessler, Ronald

  “Dickie Bissell was confident the agency could do anything,” John A. Bross, a longtime CIA hand, said.66

  “In the old days, if something was doable, it often was tried. Short-term success was all they looked for,” Russell J. Bowen, a retired CIA analyst who continues to consult for the agency, said. “The fact short-term success could be long-term failure was not important to them. Guatemala was touted as a success. But Guatemala has had an unstable government ever since.”67

  As might be expected, CIA officers were stung by the investigations and resented them. To many CIA officers involved in the abuses, William Colby was a traitor for helping to make the “jewels” public.

  “It had always been our understanding,” Helms said, “that as long as we were testifying properly and in detail to the oversight committees, that this stuff would remain secret. So when the Church Committee hearings came along, it seemed to many of us that this was a betrayal of the understanding we had.”

  “Some people disagreed with my handling of it,” Colby later recalled. “Some think it was the only way. A lot of people wish it hadn’t happened. So do I,” Colby said, meaning he wished the CIA had never engaged in the activities he felt he had to bring to light.68

  “‘The CIA’s activities ten or twenty years earlier were being judged by the Church Committee based on criteria established ten or twenty years later in a political atmosphere,” Edward W. Proctor, a former CIA deputy director for intelligence, said. “Church was running for president, the House committee staff was a bunch of clowns. The Senate staff had some good people who were looking for the truth, while others were looking to make a name for themselves.”69

  “It [the CIA] becomes a very tight, small family,” Robert Simmons, a former CIA officer who later became staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said. “When you go overseas, you’re in a hardship post at risk. You value the support you get from your own people. So you develop an ‘us against them’ mentality. When you see Church holding up a pistol and saying, ‘Look at what the CIA is doing,’ you say, ‘Screw him.’”70

  What most infuriated CIA officers was Church’s assertion—later retracted—that the agency was a “rogue elephant.” They pointed to the fact that nearly all the abuses had been approved by presidents or cabinet officers at the time. Moreover, most of the abuses had been stopped by the time of the committee hearings. The picture that most sticks in people’s minds is a photo of Church grimly holding up a poison-dart gun found at the CIA. The fact that it had never been used and had been brought to the attention of the committee by the CIA after it had been found never caught up with the picture. And because it appeared in CIA files, a description of an Army experiment to see how fast poison would spread in the New York City subway system created the impression the CIA had been running through the subways spreading poison.71

  “I never believed it was a rogue elephant,” William G. Miller, who was staff director of the Church Committee and later of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said. “We had a dispute about that. Church was convinced it was. I did not. I felt White Houses knew this [the abuses] all the way through.

  “He came to a judgment before all the evidence was in,” Miller said. “He made that comment after looking at several crazy cases, in which there were runaway characters. But that wasn’t the general pattern. In a sense he is right, because there were cases where cowboys ran things and were out of control. But there were very few.”

  As for the fact that most of the abuses had stopped, “that was not the issue, at least not for me or for most of the senators,” Miller said. “The question was how to prevent it. What were the results, what should we do for the future?”72

  In contrast to the attitudes of those involved in the abuses, CIA officers in today’s agency for the most part condemn the abuses of the past as being both unnecessary and foolish. Even when they were going on, most CIA officers were not involved in them and knew nothing about them.

  Citing the plan to portray an image of Christ over Cuba, Herbert Saunders, a former CIA officer, said, “I suppose there have always been crackpots around who think good intelligence work consists of some puerile attempts to embarrass Castro. However, I don’t think that anybody would give you two cents for that approach now. In the modern world of intelligence, there is less interest in gimmicks and more in painstaking intelligence work by the traditional methods. It’s a matter of being confident in your ability.”

  “The agency became very depressed because the information within the agency became public,” John McMahon, a former CIA deputy director of operations under Casey, said. “It was the first time a lot of the employees knew some of the things that the agency did. This . . . screwing around with the drugs just everybody abhorred.

  “The agency deserved to be chastised over that crap,” McMahon said. “Even though it was just a handful of people in the agency who did it, and they’re a bunch of jerks, the fact is that the atmosphere permitted it. That’s why I’m a great proponent of oversight. Oversight is the greatest protection for the agency because it precludes these things from happening.”

  As one might expect, most of the abuses had occurred in the Directorate of Operations, the clandestine service devoted to breaking the laws of other countries. This raised the question of whether people who choose to be spies could ever be trusted to obey the law in this country.

  “Evangelists do not necessarily do well in the CIA,” Saunders said. “The nature of the work may require that you go overseas and break the law—foreign law, not American law. You may have to cheat and steal and tell some lies about working for some funky organization other than the CIA. It can be a pretty schizophrenic existence, and not everyone can keep their marbles rolling right.”

  But the best officers keep it all in perspective.

  “They may spend the good part of the day trying to figure out how to spirit the code cards out of the local Soviet embassy, but when the sun goes down, they punch out and take the wife and kids to the movies,” Saunders said. “Those who don’t punch out sometimes find it is more than they can handle.73

  “I don’t think anybody in the CIA ever had a problem with responsible scrutiny and regulation,” Saunders said. “The problem is irresponsible scrutiny. The winks and nods and tacit approvals: ‘I don’t want to hear these things. Don’t tell me this. I need to deny any knowledge.’ Yet when an operation goes awry, these very same people turn on you.”

  Despite all the abuses, “probably the CIA as an organization has fewer criminal indictments than any other branch of the government, certainly fewer than Congress,” Thomas Polgar, a former CIA officer, said. “Day in and day out, the level of morality in the agency, particularly in the clandestine service where there are opportunities to do otherwise, has been quite high.”74

  Simmons, the former staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and a former CIA officer himself, said the CIA never was a rogue elephant.

  “What you had was an elephant taking orders from the White House,” he said. “The president and his men were instructing the elephant. The CIA also generated ideas. If a clandestine organization is tasked by the president to come up with a solution to a problem, there is a tendency to say, ‘Let’s do something.’”

  For most Americans who lived through the hearings in 1975 and 1976, the revelations of assassination plots and attempts to remove Castro’s beard are their only picture of the CIA and what it is all about. Because the agency operates in secret, they have no way of knowing of the changes that have taken place.

  “I think the first thing that’s important to recognize is the generational change in the agency,” said Robert M. Gates, deputy director of Central Intelligence under Webster and Casey and later director of Central Intelligence. “The bulk of the people that founded the agency and were around for its so-called halcyon days for the most part had retired by the mid to late 1970s.

  “The result is that today only a quarter o
f the agency worked there before the Church Committee. So what you have is a whole new generation of employees and managers who have grown up in the agency in an atmosphere of both intense public scrutiny of the agency and an environment of congressional oversight. I think this group of people has grown up very much accepting of congressional oversight,” Gates said.75

  Today, as a result of the Church Committee hearings, the CIA and other intelligence organizations come under the jurisdiction of House and Senate select committees on intelligence. The Senate committee has fifteen members and forty staff members, including twenty-five professionals, who concentrate on particular subjects or geographic areas. The majority and minority members have access to the same information and the same staff members.

  Staff members receive briefings from CIA officers in room SH 219 of the Hart Office Building, around the corner from the committee. An unmarked door opens into a foyer guarded by a member of the Capitol Hill police. Only members or staff of the committee are allowed any farther. If they bring visitors, the visitors must sign in.

  Inside is one of the most secure installations in the U.S. government—a bugproof, soundproof chamber that would give the wiliest KGB bugging expert a run for his money. Protected by vaulted doors, it is a room within a room, raised so that all sides can be inspected for bugs. Made of steel, the room prevents any electromagnetic waves from entering or leaving. Even the electrical supply is filtered electronically to prevent any signal emanations.

  The inner room is divided into smaller rooms where CIA and National Security Agency briefers drop the biggest secrets in Washington. There is also a hearing room where the senators take closed testimony. It has mauve chairs and a map of the world over the horseshoe-shaped desk where the senators sit.

  The witness desk is outfitted with a public address system, but it was not loud enough to make former CIA director William J. Casey’s muttering audible, so the committee installed a separate system just for Casey. It allowed senators to plug in earphones and turn up the volume. But it did no good—those who knew him say Casey was perfectly understandable, but only when he wanted to be heard—and the system is not now used.

  The House committee is largely a mirror image of the Senate committee, except that it has a staff for the minority party and one for the majority party. The House committee has nineteen members and twenty-two staff members, including fourteen professionals. In addition to passing on everything the Senate committee approves, the House committee approves the budget for tactical intelligence and related activities by the military. Known as TIARA, this amounts to $11 billion a year.

  The committees receive all of the CIA’s finished products such as the National Intelligence Estimates and the National Intelligence Daily. Occasionally, staff members visit Langley to look at raw files, as the Senate committee did during an investigation of the CIA’s activities in El Salvador. The Senate committee has three certified public accountants who examine the books of the agencies.

  Generally, the Senate committee holds as many as eighteen budget hearings each year on what is known as the national foreign intelligence budget—some $18.3 billion a year. Of that sum, the CIA receives $3.2 billion. The greatest allocation—$6.2 billion—goes to the National Reconnaissance Office, which is in charge of developing satellites. The next highest sum of $3.9 billion goes to NSA. Together with tactical collection, the total spent for intelligence by the U.S. government is $29.3 billion a year.76

  In addition to budget hearings, the committees hold hearings on subjects like the Soviet Union or particular problems, such as the poor security at the old American embassy in Moscow. Sometimes, the committees’ best information comes from the press, as happened when Al Shiraa, a Lebanese magazine, reported on November 3, 1986, that then national security adviser Robert McFarlane had accompanied a shipment of U.S. arms to Iran, opening up the Iran-contra scandal.

  Under the 1974 Hughes-Ryan Amendment, a presidential finding declaring it is in the national interest had to precede any covert action. Each covert action had to be reported in “timely fashion” to the Senate and House committees. In 1980, Congress amended the National Security Act of 1947 to add a new section on oversight of intelligence activities. Under that section, the CIA had to keep the two intelligence committees informed of “significant anticipated intelligence activity,” which would include any unusual and especially sensitive intelligence gathering in friendly countries. In 1991, Congress passed new legislation that added more precise definitions and safeguards to the reporting requirements. It also broadened the requirements to cover any U.S. government entity, including the National Security Council.

  In practice, the CIA informs the committees of any important events—covert action and unusual intelligence operations—within forty-eight hours. Most spying in friendly countries is not considered unusual and therefore is not reported. Only rarely do congressional committees learn identities of assets or agents, and then it is usually when one has gone bad and created problems.

  Until William Webster became director of Central Intelligence, the committees rejected a covert action at least once a year, usually when it had something to do with supporting candidates in elections in foreign countries. One or both of the committees then wrote a letter to the president. If the president insists on going ahead with a plan, either of the committees can stop the funding for the project. More recently, the committees—while never enthusiastic about covert action—have almost never rejected a proposal.

  Looking into requests for covert action takes up 30 percent to 40 percent of the time of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, according to former staff director Robert R. Simmons.

  “Covert action is a high-profile item for congressional oversight,” he said. “Does that mean mistakes can’t be made? No. But it is politically charged. It is budgeted on a line-item basis.”

  When Casey was director of Central Intelligence, the CIA engaged in covert action without obtaining a presidential finding in order to carry out the Iran-contra scheme. A year after arms had been shipped to Iran, Casey, at the insistence of his deputy, John McMahon, asked President Reagan to issue a finding. That finding authorized the sales retroactively. The finding specified that Congress was not to be told about it. John Poindexter, the national security adviser at the time, testified that he destroyed the only copy of the December 1985 finding, to save the president political embarrassment.77

  The CIA had come full circle from the days of the Church Committee hearings. Again it had violated the law by acceding to pressure from the White House. Again it had gotten itself into trouble by not informing Congress of its activities.

  “In intelligence, you have to lie, cheat, and steal to get the truth,” Simmons, the former staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said. “The reason is it is for your national security. But it must stop when you are dealing with your own government. Sometimes it didn’t. Some of them treated Congress as they would a foreign country.78

  “If you read the Constitution, which many of those people have never done, they would find the founding fathers described the powers of the legislature first,” Simmons said.

  But this time, there was a difference. In the Iran-contra affair, Congress was not at fault for not wanting to hear about it. And this time the CIA’s role in the arms sales and the diversion of profits to the contra rebels was that of expediter. Both Casey and Oliver North knew that they could not get the CIA itself to arrange and carry out the operations. The CIA could be pushed only so far, and setting up proprietaries—companies owned by the CIA as a cover—and arranging the details of arms shipments was the most it would do. That was why Oliver North had to arrange for the operation to be carried out by a self-financed arm of the National Security Council.

  “It shows Casey could not use the agency, even though he was an aggressive director,” Miller, the former staff director of the Church Committee, said.

  But there is another side to the story, one that rarely co
mes out. That is the pressure that members of Congress sometimes bring to bear on the agency to violate its own rules. Sometimes the pressure is to buy from constituents, to reinstate security clearances for employees whose clearances have been revoked, or to locate buildings in home districts of members of Congress—a rather routine occurrence in government. But at times the pressure takes a more unusual turn.

  In May 1990, the CIA invited Rep. Bud Shuster, a Pennsylvania Republican and a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, to speak at the agency’s training center at Camp Peary in Virginia. The CIA said the agency would fly him down for the talk on a Thursday and fly him back the same day. Shuster agreed to do it, but asked to be flown back instead to Hagerstown, Maryland, not far from Chambers-burg, Pennsylvania, at the center of his district.

  Since Hagerstown is 60 miles beyond Washington, the CIA’s plane would have had to travel an extra 120 miles to accommodate Shuster. The agency told him it would be against government regulations to fly him the extra distance.

  Shuster said he was going to his home state for legitimate business. But that made no difference to the CIA. As a member of Congress, Shuster had an official allowance to cover trips. If he went beyond that allowance, he was personally liable for them. Under the complex rules that bind government agencies, the CIA could only pick up and return Shuster to his office in Washington.

  Infuriated, Shuster refused to give the talk, and on May 8, 1990, he wrote an angry letter to William Webster. Likening the CIA’s decision to “risk aversion” in the intelligence business, Shuster said the symbol of the intelligence community had become a turtle with its head pulled in. He called the agency’s officials “Lilliputians”—small-minded, petty people.

  “Judge, you’ve got a problem. We’ve got a problem. I fear for the security of my country,” he wrote.79

  Instead of Congress’s berating the CIA for breaking the law, a member of Congress was now berating the agency for refusing to go against government regulations. Like the agency when it broke the law, Shuster was using the rubric of national security to justify his own ill-advised actions.