Inside the CIA

by Kessler, Ronald

  For all the James Bond devices and the billion-dollar satellites, the CIA would be helpless if it did not have a way of bringing all the information together and making sense of it. That is the job of the Directorate of Intelligence.

  PART III

  The Directorate of Intelligence

  12

  Mirror-Imaging

  Special National Intelligence Estimate

  Dec. 4, 1941

  For the past two weeks, Japan has been warning its diplomats that war may be imminent.

  Interception of Japanese diplomatic traffic indicates the message “East wind rain” has been repeated on a regular basis. Intelligence officials believe this code means Japan has made a decision to go to war in the near future.

  In addition, there have been these other signs that Japan may be preparing to go to war:

  • On Nov. 22, Foreign Minister Togo informed Ambassador Nomura that negotiations between Japan and the United States must be settled by November 29 because after that “things are going automatically to happen. . . .”

  • For the past two weeks, the Japanese have been padding their radio messages with garbled or old messages to make decoding more difficult.

  • Three days ago, the Japanese Imperial Navy changed its ship call signs. This is an unprecedented change, since they had just been changed. Normally they are switched every six months.

  • Two days ago, the Japanese Foreign Ministry ordered its consulates in six cities—including Washington—to destroy all but the most important codes, ciphers, and classified material.

  • Three days ago, the U.S. became unable to locate previously tracked Japanese submarines.

  • Scattered, unconfirmed reports indicate naval air units in southern Japan have been practicing simulated torpedo attacks against ships there.

  These warning signs justify immediate, extraordinary steps, including placing the Pacific commands on immediate alert.93

  IF THE CIA HAD BEEN AROUND AT THE TIME, THIS IS WHAT the agency’s Directorate of Intelligence might have handed President Roosevelt three days before Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor. As Dr. Harold P. Ford, a former acting chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council, has pointed out in his book Estimative Intelligence, all of the facts listed above were known to the U.S. government—three days before the disastrous attack on Pearl Harbor. If such an intelligence estimate had been presented to the president, defensive action would almost certainly have been taken. But the government had no central agency for marshaling all the information, making sense of it, and presenting strategic assessments to the president.

  The only existing intelligence agencies at the time were those operated by the military, and they were often considered dumping grounds for the least qualified military personnel. Each of the services was at the others’ throats, and fiefdoms within the services often suppressed whatever intelligence assessments were made. The government had no tradition of assessing the intentions—as distinguished from capabilities—of other countries. Those officials who did look at the question of Japanese intentions decided that Japan would never attack, because to do so would be irrational. Yet what might seem irrational to one country may seem perfectly logical to another country that has different goals, values, and traditions. Finally, many in the government looked with disdain on Japanese capabilities. As one admiral said after the attack, “I never thought those little yellow sons of bitches could pull off such an attack, so far from home.”94

  An alert was finally sent at the very last minute on the morning of December 7, but it did not reach its destination before the attack. The Army officer given the job of notifying the command at Pearl Harbor sent the message by Western Union, instead of through Navy channels, when he found the Army’s circuits to Hawaii were down. But this was just the last in a series of bungles. The result was the Japanese sank 5 of the Navy’s 8 battleships based at Pearl Harbor, damaged 200 of the 300 aircraft based there, and killed 2,330 servicemen and 100 civilians, bringing the U.S. into World War II.

  “We just didn’t have an intelligence system,” Dr. Ray S. Cline, who was an analyst in the Navy and Office of Strategic Services before becoming deputy CIA director for intelligence, said. “Franklin Roosevelt had lots of information, but he didn’t have an intelligence system to present it to him. There was plenty of information about the attack on Pearl Harbor, but it was not handled bureaucratically in a way that would alert the armed services and the White House what was going on. There was no central system at that time.”95

  These failures led indirectly to the creation of the CIA in 1947. The idea of a CIA was the brainchild of Col. William J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan. A New York lawyer and politician, Donovan had served heroically in World War I, commanding a battalion and winning the Medal of Honor. During World War II, he headed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Back in 1941, Donovan submitted a plan to President Roosevelt outlining the need for a government-wide organization that would pool and coordinate existing intelligence. Following Donovan’s advice, Roosevelt created a Coordinator of Information as part of the Executive Office of the President in July 1941.

  After a year, the Coordinator of Information evolved into the OSS, which became the model for the CIA. During the war, OSS organized resistance movements and sabotage operations behind enemy lines. The OSS also tried unsuccessfully to centralize intelligence functions within the government through an analytical section known as Research and Analysis.

  At the end of the war, OSS was disbanded, and the State Department absorbed many of its functions. But again at Donovan’s urging, it was reconstituted when President Truman agreed to the creation first of the Central Intelligence Group and then, a year later, the CIA. The National Security Act of 1947 establishing the agency took effect on September 18, 1947, a birthday celebrated by the modern CIA with a family day. While Donovan never served as director of the CIA, the new agency absorbed the institutional values of the OSS, including the “can do, try anything” approach that Donovan had instilled.

  Both before and after Pearl Harbor, the idea of centralized intelligence drew stiff opposition from many in the War Department, who saw it as an infringement on their turf. As one general said, a central agency would be “very disadvantageous, if not calamitous” from the point of view of the Pentagon. That was why it was so important to Truman that the new intelligence agency be independent and not tied to the interests of the military. When the Defense Intelligence Agency was later created in 1961 to focus more on tactical questions, it often exaggerated Soviet prowess, reflecting biases of a military that constantly sought bigger budgets.

  This concept of a centralized intelligence agency—one that would bring together all the available information on a subject and analyze it objectively—is embodied in the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence. With three thousand employees, it is the CIA’s smallest directorate.

  The directorate is the analytical side of the house, where Ph.D.’s who could just as easily be college professors pore over all the available information and produce estimates on what they think will be the future course of events. Eggheads rather than spooks, the analysts openly identify themselves as CIA employees and contribute to academic publications and attend conferences in their field just like university professors.

  “Most of us on the estimative side had little or no knowledge of the techniques of clandestine work and were prone to scoff at the excessively tight security about operations and to sneer at the bumbling of ‘the spooks.’ They were doers, not contemplators, and they approached foreign affairs from precisely the opposite vantage point,” R. Jack Smith, a former deputy director for intelligence, said in his book The Unknown CIA. “Also, they could point to several loose-lipped indiscretions by one or more senior estimative people that they claimed had blown operations. So there was a wall between the two sides on all operational matters.”96

  Typically, the analysts want to disseminate material obtained by the operations side, and the operat
ions officers object because they are afraid it will expose a source.

  The intelligence directorate brings together information from all sources—satellites, human spies, intercepts of communications, the press, foreign broadcasts, trade publications, newsletters, computer bulletin boards, and scientific publications. That information—at least 80 percent of it from open sources—is used to prepare daily research and intelligence reports, as well as long-range analyses. In addition, the information is used by the National Intelligence Council, a component of the intelligence community that reports directly to the director of Central Intelligence, to prepare estimates of future events that are presented to the president. While each of the agencies in the intelligence community may contribute to the estimates, the most important source of information generally is the Directorate of Intelligence. Therefore, the work of the directorate is critical. The other directorates can do marvelous work, but it will languish if it is not presented to the president and policymakers. If the analysis is wrong, the foreign policy of the U.S. will suffer.

  In the early days, there were a number of failures. In Korea, despite ample evidence, the CIA did not clearly alert senior policymakers in June 1950 that North Korea was about to invade the Republic of Korea. Nor did the CIA warn that tens of thousands of Communist Chinese troops, who had been infiltrating North Korea, were about to attack U.S. and United Nations troops.

  In September 1962, the CIA said placing ballistic missiles in Cuba would not fit into the Soviet Union’s known behavior patterns, and Nikita Khrushchev “would not do anything so uncharacteristic, provocative, and unrewarding.” Prompted by contradictory and fragmentary eyewitness reports that such a deployment might be taking place, the estimate was produced just before photographs taken by a U-2 on October 14, 1962, showed conclusively that the Soviets were moving missiles into Cuba.

  This was a good example of “mirror-imaging”—assuming that another country would think the same way America thinks. While an estimate cannot predict with absolute certainty events that have not yet taken place, they can lay out the possibilities and assign probabilities. This allows smart policymakers to ready options to cope with the most likely outcomes. Yet it is not unusual for heads of state to ignore intelligence, as Joseph Stalin did in 1941 when told that the Nazis were about to invade the Soviet Union, costing the Soviets tens of thousands of lives.97

  “The most important thing was not whether we were right or wrong about the occurrence of events, but to help the people making policy decisions by giving them background information,” Edward W. Proctor, a former CIA deputy director for intelligence, said. “Sometimes you give them information that is right, and they make the wrong decisions. Sometimes you give them information that is wrong, and they make the right decisions for different reasons. Sometimes you give them information that is right, and they make the right decisions. Sometimes you make a prediction on something coming up, and the policymakers take an action which, in effect, makes your prediction wrong, but it was the right thing to do based on your prediction. The whole purpose is to help these people make better decisions.”98

  Another example of mirror-imaging occurred in 1973, when the CIA and the rest of the U.S. government failed to warn that Egypt and Syria were about to launch major attacks on Israel in what came to be known as the Yom Kippur War.

  “We did not predict it, period. We had seen the same thing occur several times before, including a year before, and nothing had happened,” Proctor, then deputy director for intelligence, said. “It was a buildup of forces and threats. We did not understand what the purpose was from the Egyptians’ point of view. They knew they couldn’t win, but it was one way of breaking the deadlock.”99

  Probably the most well-known failure came in February 1979, when the CIA did not foresee that the shah of Iran might be overthrown. In fact, in mid-August 1978, a CIA analyst reported to President Carter, “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even prerevolutionary situation.”100

  In this case, the Directorate of Intelligence disregarded reports coming in to the CIA from the operations officers in Iran, who were reporting growing opposition to the shah. The analysts assumed that the shah would crush the opposition, as he had in the past. But the shah’s bout with cancer had weakened his resolve.

  “We were aware the shah had opposition,” Stansfield Turner, who was director of Central Intelligence at the time, said. “One difficulty was it was hard to appreciate that a man with the military and SAVAK [the shah’s secret police] would be toppled by people parading in the streets. When you make an intelligence forecast, you make an assumption. We thought he would use the powers he had, but he didn’t.”101

  It is always easier, of course, to assume that the status quo will continue. Far less risk is involved. Without hard data on Mikhail Gorbachev’s intentions, for example, anyone who predicted that Gorbachev would release the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe and allow East Germany to reunite with West Germany may well have been referred to the agency’s Office of Medical Services for psychiatric consultations. Anyone who said the Soviet people would vote to change the name of Leningrad back to the original St. Petersburg would have been thought to be similarly mad.

  “There is almost never enough firm intelligence to support a solid, definitive statement,” Smith, the former deputy director for intelligence, said. “If there were, there would be no need for an estimate; the threat would be self-evident.”102

  Unless prodded from within or without, organizations tend to become more bureaucratic as they mature and Less willing to take risks. The CIA is no exception.

  “It takes more people to get things done, and they don’t do them as well,” a former CIA analyst said. “There is a concern with warm bodies, production schedules, concern with pleasing the boss and not getting out of line, a process of homogenization so strong personalities or characters get shunted aside.”

  In those cases, the former analyst said, “the going evaluation is such and such, and the head of the office and his boss has said so. Someone says, ‘This is one hundred and eighty degrees different.’ In the coming days or weeks, the situation plays out, and the dissident is shown to be right. Often, instead of being rewarded, he is put off to the side.” It is a case, the former analyst said, of causing embarrassment by being “too accurate too soon.”

  “One thread that runs through the whole story from the beginning of the CIA to the present is the gradual bureaucratization of the CIA,” Russell J. Bowen, a retired analyst who continues to consult for the CIA, said. “There is a certain momentum that carried from World War II and OSS type thinking into the early sixties. The idea was you had a job to do, and you go out and do the job, and you clean up the problems later. Now we say, ‘If we do this job, what are all the problems we might get into?’ So the motivation for go-go-go is long gone.”103

  Another perennial problem is the way CIA reports are written. Often, they do not state conclusions clearly enough to attract attention. Besides the president, the National Security Council is the CIA’s major customer. Staffers there often complain that they find CIA estimates too balanced or boring compared with those by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, a much smaller outfit that prepares analyses for the State Department. Since the State Department is engaged in making policy, its analysts tend to tailor their work to the specific needs of the moment. In effect, State has the inside track on what the president and his aides want to read—aides who are already burdened with too much material.

  “You have a super editor at State, who says, ‘These are the subjects I am interested in. The secretary of state is involved in these issues,’” an NSC staff member from the Reagan administration said. “They [the State Department] share the same short-term interests as the NSC and White House.

  “You have overload,” the former NSC staff member said. “There is a limit to what those people [at the NSC] can handle. So you go with what is really relevant. You get a mediocre report, but it’s relevant
, and you read it. If it’s a super report but not relevant, it doesn’t get read very much.”

  Because of the size of its analytical side—more than two thousand analysts—the CIA tends to have more specialists who become immersed in their subjects.

  “Steeped in the minutiae of their field, in this instance the daily flow of events in a country, they frequently mistake backpage filler items for front-page banner-headline stories,” according to Smith. “Moreover, they have a persistent tendency to believe that their sometimes arcane thought processes will be transparent to their readers.”104

  In contrast to President Reagan, President Bush read CIA reports avidly. In part, that has contributed to a sharpening of the CIA’s writing style.

  “One of the things that has changed for the better over the last several years is they write it more to the point,” said Robert Gates when he was still deputy assistant to the president for national security under Bush. “The president reads the estimates and rereads them, which is a change from the past.”105

  Still, Army General H. Norman Schwarzkopf complained to Congress after the Persian Gulf War that while intelligence during the war was excellent, the analyses on the Iraqi military had been “caveated, footnoted, and watered down” to the point that they became useless.106 He thus appeared to distinguish between the hard facts provided by intelligence and the analyses that sought to draw conclusions from the facts and predict the future. Schwarzkopf did not specify whether he was referring to CIA or military analysis.

  William Webster encountered the same problem when confronting the question of whether economic sanctions would drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. According to an aide, he had to beat the analysts into being more precise about the effect of the sanctions. The analysts were being too vague One said sanctions would cause “belt tightening.” What did that mean? Webster wanted specifics on when they would work. In six months? In a year? he wanted to know. If an estimate covers all bases, it will always be right—but also close to useless. Webster finally got what he wanted, a statement that the sanctions would take at least a year to have any chance of working.