Inside the CIA

by Kessler, Ronald

  Webster also browbeat Dr. Fritz W. Ermarth, then chair man of the National Intelligence Council, over the use of the words probably, likely, and possible in estimates. Webster wanted to know what these words meant in terms of the percentage chance that certain events would occur.

  Over the years, the national estimating structure has been changed several times to try to sharpen its work. After the CIA failed to predict the North Korean invasion of the South, CIA director Walter Bedell Smith established an Office of National Estimates to focus more attention on the process. The estimates were developed collegially, based on information presented by CIA analysts and the entire intelligence community. In the fall of 1973, Colby replaced the old board with the National Intelligence Council.

  “I changed the board because I thought the estimates and analysis were much too generalized,” Colby said.

  Under the new system, each of the sixteen members of the board is called a national intelligence officer and is given responsibility for a specific issue or geographic area. The idea was to make each officer accountable for his or her area, rather than to develop estimates by consensus of the board members. There is a national intelligence officer for warning, one for nuclear proliferation, one for strategic weapons, and then one for each area of the world, such as Latin America and the Near East and South Asia. The NIO for warning, for example, has the primary responsibility for sounding the alarm if a military attack is about to take place.

  Generally, the NIO officers are veteran CIA officers, former high-ranking State Department officials, or former generals or admirals—people with enough standing to buck the bureaucracy. Typically, they serve for two-year terms to guarantee that the position will constantly be replenished with new blood. They are supposed to spend more time with policymakers than did the old members of the Office of National Estimates.

  In drawing up estimates, the NIOs rely on their own staffs and on analysis presented by the Directorate of Intelligence.107 The final draft of a National Intelligence Estimate is written by the appropriate NIO. Changes may be made all the way along the line up to the president. The chairman of the council, the DCI, and other agencies within the intelligence community can and do add their views. The council itself reports through its chairman directly to the director of Central Intelligence, who presents estimates to the president representing the collective judgment of the dozen agencies that make up the intelligence community.

  In some cases, CIA directors have disagreed with their own estimates, as John A. McCone did when he took issue with the agency’s judgments on the meaning of Soviet activity in Cuba before the Cuban missile crisis. McCone met with President Kennedy and said “something new and different was going on in Cuba.” He flatly said the Soviets were introducing offensive missiles on the island. McCone had nothing to go on except his own intuition about Khrushchev. After the CIA issued its estimate discounting the buildup, he cabled the agency while on his one-month honeymoon in Europe, urging a reassessment. By then, events had shown that McCone was right.108

  William Casey and Stansfield Turner also tended to act as analysts and offered their own opinions, which sometimes differed with what the CIA was saying. If a DCI disagrees with all or part of an estimate, he may choose to submit it anyway and signify his disagreement on the document or in a note attached to it, or he may reject it outright. Individual agencies within the intelligence community often disagree with all or part of the estimates. Their dissent is carried in the document also.

  Besides national intelligence estimates, which look at fundamental issues and often take a year to complete, the council issues special national intelligence estimates, which are generally more urgent and completed in a matter of days or weeks, as well as a variety of memos that may be completed within a few days in response to particular concerns.109 In addition, the analysts prepare hundreds of additional reports on everything from wheat harvests to the political standing of world leaders.

  In 1976, the CIA experimented with creating competing teams for developing national estimates on Soviet intentions and capabilities. In all, the CIA had six teams look at three different questions. The A teams represented the intelligence community, while the B teams were composed of a panel of outside experts. In one area—Soviet strategic intentions—the B team shone. It said the Soviet Union was seeking a first-strike capability in the 1970s, while the A team discounted the possibility. Recent Soviet statements have validated the B team’s judgment. But not all of the B teams were superior, and the CIA abandoned the system. In effect, it was like letting an outside group submit competing editorials for publication in a newspaper. If the editorials did not represent the opinion of the newspaper, their value was diminished.

  In 1980, Stansfield Turner gave the chairman of the National Intelligence Council greater authority over the individual officers to better supervise their work. In the view of Dr. Ford, a distinguished expert on estimating, this system has worked better than any previous one. With the exception of the failure of the CIA to predict sharply worsening economic conditions in the Soviet Union, there have been no significant intelligence failures since then. While the CIA reported on growing destabilization within the Eastern bloc, it would have been impossible to predict that Gorbachev would relinquish the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe before he himself had made that decision.

  Despite the occasional failures, the CIA, as the representative of the intelligence community, has registered a more than respectable batting average over the years.

  Sen. Frank Church, one of the CIA’s severest critics, acknowledged in 1975 when he became the first chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “In the last twenty-five years, no important new Soviet weapons system, from their H-bomb to their most recent missiles, has appeared which had not been heralded in advance by NIEs [National Intelligence Estimates].”

  Among other events, the CIA predicted that the Soviets would launch an earth satellite before the U.S., that the Chinese Communists would detonate an atomic bomb, and that the Soviets would produce a ballistic missile. The agency predicted the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the India-Pakistan war, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.110 Back in 1960, despite claims by James Angleton and his supporters that the split was a fraud, the CIA alerted the U.S. government to the causes and dimensions of the rift between the Soviet Union and Communist China.

  Before the U-2 and imaging satellites, the CIA tended to overestimate Soviet progress in weapons development, but not nearly as much as did the military services. Yet overestimates of military strength are always preferable to underestimates. From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, the CIA tended to underestimate the extent of the Soviet buildup, but not by enough to make an appreciable difference.111

  During the Vietnam War, the CIA repeatedly asserted that the enemy was stronger than believed within the U.S. government and that the South Vietnamese government was weaker. The agency stated that other countries would not fall to communism if the North overran the South. For example, on June 11, 1964, in answer to whether the defeat of the South Vietnamese would lead to the feared domino effect, CIA director John A. McCone wrote to McGeorge Bundy, special assistant to President Johnson for national security affairs, “We do not believe that the loss of South Vietnam and Laos would be followed by the rapid, successive communization of the other states of the Far East.”

  On May 12, 1967, in a report entitled “The Current Status of Morale in North Vietnam,” the CIA said, “With only a few exceptions, recent reports suggest a continued willingness on the part of the populace to abide by Hanoi’s policy on the war.” The report added that the mood is “one of resolute stoicism with a considerable reservoir of endurance still untapped.”

  “I remember once—in the Lyndon Johnson period—being asked by [McGeorge] Bundy to have the CIA prepare an objective analysis of the results of the U.S. Air Force bombing of North Vietnam,” Dr. Ray S. Cline, then the CIA’s deputy director for intelligence, said in his book The CIA Under Reagan
, Bush & Casey. “He said, ‘Everyone agrees your analysts are the only honest guys in town, and we need to know the truth.’ A small group of analysts went to work making such evaluations. Over a period of time, their work demonstrated that little progress was being made in slowing down the North Vietnamese infiltration of the South. The CIA was the bearer of bad tidings throughout the Vietnam War and was not very happily received by any of the policymakers who tried to make the Vietnam intervention work.”112

  Ironically, the CIA, in classified reports, was saying exactly what the antiwar demonstrators were saying on the streets of Washington. The analysts gnashed their teeth as President Johnson turned a deaf ear to their warnings, preferring—like President Nixon after him—to believe that the Soviet Union or communists were behind the antiwar sentiment.

  “The trouble was the Johnson and Nixon administrations did not really listen to intelligence,” said Thomas Polgar, who was CIA station chief in Vietnam from 1972 to 1975. “They had their own policies and preconceptions.”113

  “Johnson only wanted to hear the good points about Vietnam,” said R. Jack Smith, who was deputy director for intelligence at the end of the Johnson administration.114

  By and large, the CIA stuck to its guns and continued to report unfavorable prognoses. But when William Casey became director of Central Intelligence in 1981, the CIA faced a different problem: What happens when the director of Central Intelligence himself has a political agenda?

  13

  Trying to Cook the Books

  OVER THE YEARS, THE CIA HAS RESISTED POLITICAL PRESSURES to change its judgments. When the military pushed for higher estimates of Soviet capability, the agency stuck to lower estimates that by and large proved to be correct. While Richard Helms bowed to White House pressure to see if foreign countries were financing dissident groups, he reported to Presidents Johnson and Nixon that there was no foreign involvement in the antiwar movement. When Nixon tried to enlist the CIA to cover up Watergate, Helms refused, resulting in his removal.115

  The agency has protected the integrity of its personnel as well. In the summer of 1953, Sen. Joseph McCarthy announced he had reason to believe there were more than a hundred communists in the CIA. He aimed his sights at Cord Meyer, a CIA officer hired by Allen Dulles himself. Meyer had a liberal background; before coming to the CIA, he had headed the United World Federalists, a group opposed to national armament. McCarthy got J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to investigate Meyer and came up with lurid charges: that he was, for example, an associate of Cass Canfield, who was described in an FBI report as sympathizing with communist causes. In fact, Canfield, then the chairman of Harper and Brothers, the New York publishing firm, was a moderate Democrat who had no interest in communism.

  Dulles opposed an FBI request to interrogate Meyer and said the CIA itself would investigate the charges. On Thanksgiving Day, Dulles called Meyer at home to say he had been cleared of any security problems.116

  McCarthy also tried to railroad William P. Bundy, then assistant to the deputy director for intelligence, but Dulles repulsed those efforts as well.117 In contrast, most government bureaucrats were afraid to stand up to McCarthy for fear they would be tainted as well.

  Probably the best example of CIA independence came during the Vietnam War. When President Johnson pushed the CIA to ratify his policies in pursuing the war, the agency did just the opposite: it warned that the “domino theory,” the claim that the rest of Southeast Asia would fall to communism if the North took over South Vietnam, was fallacious, thereby undercutting one of the administration’s principal justifications for prosecuting the war. Repeatedly, the agency questioned the policymakers’ continuing reassurances that progress was being made there.

  That is why the CIA was established in the first place, to provide candid, independent, and objective information and analysis about world events. If the agency lost that reputation, it would have nothing.

  But all that began to change when William J. Casey became DCI on January 28, 1981—or so it seemed. Casey was a brilliant man, a lawyer by training and a student by avocation. From 1944 to 1945, he was chief of the Special Intelligence Branch of the OSS in the European Theater of Operations. From 1971 to 1973, he was chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 1980, Ronald Reagan asked him to head his first presidential campaign.

  A voracious reader, Casey read every book he could get his hands on about world affairs and economics. He haunted Washington bookstores, especially Sidney Kramer Books, searching for the most obscure books he could find on Soviet issues and world affairs. Mostly, it was to satisfy his intellectual curiosity. Casey bought so many books at a time that his security guards usually had to help him carry them all. One aide estimated he spent $40,000 a year on books and magazines alone.118

  “He was the brightest person I’ve ever met,” said Stanley Sporkin, who was Casey’s general counsel at the CIA and is now a federal judge in Washington. “He had a photographic memory. He didn’t tolerate fools. He couldn’t stand long meetings. He would tell people, ‘Don’t repeat things. I understand,’ and he did.”119

  But there was another side to Casey, that of the politician and policymaker, the dealmaker and ideologue. When he took the job of DCI, Casey asked President Reagan if he could have cabinet status, and Reagan agreed to give him that extra degree of prestige and clout. It was a critical break from the past, when directors of Central Intelligence were considered impartial purveyors of information. As a member of the cabinet, Casey became an integral part of the Reagan administration, responsible not only for running the CIA and presenting intelligence estimates to the president, but also for making policy.

  Casey was convinced that the Soviets were far more mendacious and powerful than the U.S. government collectively thought. In showing that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire,” he sought to outdo Ronald Reagan, to hit them where it hurt, to show them for what they were. Casey’s approach to the CIA was shaped not only by his political conservatism but also by his days in the OSS, known not only for its daring but also for its cowboylike ventures.

  While Casey was generally pleased with the work of the Directorate of Operations, he was not at all pleased with the work of the Directorate of Intelligence. To Casey, the analysts were a bunch of liberals—fuzzy-headed thinkers who did not know about the hard realities in the world and were afraid to venture opinions.

  “Casey’s first priority was to improve the estimating process,” said John A. Bross, a longtime CIA operative whom Casey brought out from retirement to be one of his assistants. “He found a very disorganized system. Estimates had gotten very thinned down. Bill’s priority was to get the estimates back into a stronger posture and let people take stronger positions.”120

  Yet the direction Casey took was always in line with his conservative worldview. Soon, he found himself colliding with the CIA’s most hallowed commandment: thou shalt not cook the books.

  To goad the bureaucracy, Casey hired Herbert E. Meyer, a thirty-six-year-old editor of Fortune whose book, War Against Progress, had been widely cited during Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. The book was an attack on opponents of real estate and technological development. At first, Meyer, a cigar-smoking, smart, cocky man, was Casey’s special assistant. In 1983, he got a much larger role as a vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the group of national intelligence officers who prepare the national intelligence estimates. In that job, Meyer helped manage production of all the CIA’s estimates. At the same time, he continued to act as Casey’s assistant.

  Meyer brought to the job both a conservative bent and a journalist’s probing mind. He decided CIA analysts were too isolated from the rest of the world, too insular in their approach. Meyer had contacts abroad with politicians, statesmen, and chief executive officers of major corporations. While it was the job of the Directorate of Operations to obtain information in the field, it seemed to Meyer that the analysts should also have their own contacts and sources.

  “
In New York, when I was at Fortune, you would walk around at lunch and pick up a book,” Meyer would say. “The people at that agency have had lunch in the executive dining room for years. That is very destructive. You don’t take an intelligence engine and put it out in the woods. It breeds ignorance, arrogance.”121

  “If you are in the business of seeing trends, of seeing the future, government is not one of the places where one would be likely to work,” he would say. “The rewards are much greater in journalism, politics, business, academia, and think tanks. The moment you start taking the C and maybe B students, they will hire other C and B students. Over time, you have an institution that is not operating the way it should. They want consensus rather than dissent. That isn’t good enough in a fast-changing world.”

  Thus when Meyer suggested exploring a new issue that happened to support his conservative worldview, it was hard for anyone to accuse him of trying to distort the estimating process. His approach was to question, to probe, and to argue. Moreover, much as his views seemed out of place with prevailing thought, he sometimes was right.

  Whether Meyer actually changed analysts’ lunch habits so they began seeing outsiders more, and whether that had any effect, is a matter that can be argued. But his feisty approach clearly produced fresh thinking.

  “He [Meyer] brought a considerable freshness as an outsider to the organization, although he probably ruffled professional feathers because of his nontraditional approach and because many people did not like his political views, which are conservative,” Graham E. Fuller, who was a national intelligence officer at the time and succeeded Meyer as a vice chairman, said. “But he did nothing but ask tough questions of people and engage them in debate. He did not dictate what our office would say. He would say, ‘Have you considered this or that?’122