Inside the CIA

by Kessler, Ronald

  Bruemmer left in 1990 to return to his partnership at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. To replace Bruemmer, Webster appointed Elizabeth Rindskopf. A former general counsel at the National Security Agency who had previously worked as a civil rights lawyer, Rindskopf had dealt with Webster and Bruemmer on a variety of cases while at NSA.

  Rindskopf had raised the hackles of independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh because of the way she refused to provide him with NSA information relating to the Iran-contra affair. On the other hand, while at NSA, she had sided with agency employees who had had difficulty getting their writing cleared for publication. Often, it took a year to obtain clearance, and Rindskopf took on the NSA offices that resisted changes she wanted to speed the review process.

  Today the office of general counsel has 125 employees, including 60 lawyers, compared with 14 lawyers before the Church Committee hearings. The office now details attorneys to most of the directorates, including the directorate of operations. There, eight lawyers sit in on many of the meetings held by the agency’s top spy—something that would have been bitterly resisted in earlier years.

  27

  The Future

  AS THE COLD WAR ENDED, NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES carried stories questioning the role of the CIA. Now that the Soviet threat had diminished, was it relevant? Should the agency turn its attention to economic matters? Should it emphasize analysis more than human spying? Should it emphasize human spying more than technical surveillance? Should its staff be cut? Should it be abolished?

  As with almost everything else concerning the CIA, there was a gap between the public perception and the reality. Even at the height of the Cold War, the CIA had allocated no more than 12 percent of its budget to spying on the Soviets, excluding the costs of major technical collection systems. With the exception of Great Britain, Canada, and Australia, the CIA had always spied on every country in the world. The reason was that no one knew when a country such as Iraq, which the U.S. had supported during its war with Iran, might decide to threaten U.S. interests.

  Well before the media questioning began, the CIA had started shifting its resources. Soviets were no longer the first-priority target in many stations around the world. Counter-terrorism, counternarcotics, nuclear proliferation, and economic issues assumed greater importance. When the Persian Gulf War began, the CIA reallocated money from the rest of its divisions to the Near East Division to cope with that crisis. As the Soviets released their grip on Eastern Europe, the CIA prepared to deal with friendly governments there. In one year alone, two thousand new publications sprang up in Eastern Europe, and each had to be reviewed as well. Covert action had already been cut to no more than a dozen programs a year, compared with hundreds in the 1950s and early 1960s.

  Meanwhile, the CIA began planning reductions in staff. For the past ten years, the CIA’s staff had been increasing by an average of five hundred a year. But over the next six years, Congress had mandated a 15 percent cut in personnel. Within the Directorate of Operations, this would mean a reduction of 890 positions.

  “Twenty years ago, we watched the Soviet Union,” William Webster said just before he retired in 1991 as director of Central Intelligence. “We listened for hiccups. Today, we have an entirely different picture. The Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe is gone. We have new countries seeking relationships with us. We have the Soviet Union in turmoil. It’s a different kind of instability. It [the end of the Cold War] also unlocked a lot of old rivalries and hatreds. Yugoslavia is breaking up. You have regional conflicts everywhere. We were not poised to deal with every kind of regional conflict.”301

  To deal with the future, Webster took a slot for the CIA’s executive director, a largely irrelevant position used primarily to sign off on financial matters, and used it in the fall of 1990 to create a new position—deputy director for planning and coordination. The first official in the job was Gary E. Foster, a former director of the Office of Medical Service within the CIA.

  Unlike the other deputy directors, Foster had no directorate under him. With offices on the seventh floor of the CIA’s old building, Foster had a staff of just twenty. It was his job to be a catalyst—to bring together CIA officers from each of the directorates to help chart the agency’s future.

  A short man with a salt-and-pepper beard, Foster set up twenty-four teams of officers from the relevant directorates to look into a range of issues, from counterintelligence, economics, and weapons proliferation to training, the agency’s work force, and how the CIA deals with its assets or agents. Each of the task forces produced working papers to take the CIA into the next century.

  “The key is flexibility,” Foster would say. “Each plan must be reevaluated every year.”

  Meanwhile, the CIA was buffeted by a range of criticism, much of it uninformed. Some said the agency had failed to predict the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which was not true, or that it had failed to predict that hardliners would seek to topple the government of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, as they did in August 1991. That also was not true. As Sen. David L. Boren, the Oklahoma Democrat who headed the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said just after the coup failed, “For several months now, the President and those of us in the congressional leadership have been told by the intelligence community that we had to take very, very seriously the possibility of this kind of coup.”

  The criticism underscored the need to continue to spy on the former Soviet Union even after the cataclysmic changes that rocked that country in 1991. For regardless of whether the former Soviets are considered enemies or friends, the U.S. needs to know what is happening within a government that controls thousands of nuclear weapons. For its part, the KGB continued to spy on the U.S. after the coup much as it always had. And Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait demonstrated why the CIA is needed regardless of whether the Soviets pose a threat.

  Nevertheless, some members of Congress called for a reorganization of the intelligence community. Saying one man could not do both jobs, Sen. Arlen Specter, a Republican from Pennsylvania, introduced a bill that would take away the role of the CIA director as overseer of the intelligence community. Instead, a new official would perform that function. This was a step backward from Congress’s original intent of establishing an organization that would centralize all intelligence to prevent surprises such as the one at Pearl Harbor.

  Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York Democrat, introduced a bill that would abolish the CIA and transfer its duties to the State Department. According to Moynihan, this would “purge the vestiges of this struggle [the Cold War] and would establish the principle that the executive branch may not resort to illegal means in the pursuit of national security, as it did in the Iran-contra affair.”

  Meanwhile, the Senate and House intelligence committees began drafting legislation that would streamline the organization of the intelligence community. As part of that review, the committees began considering whether to make public the intelligence community budget.

  At about the same time, the Senate Intelligence Committee put Robert Gates, the former deputy director of Central Intelligence under Webster, through a grueling confirmation process to succeed Webster as DCI. Former CIA employees whose views had not been accepted by Gates, or who would have done his job differently if they had had it, came forward to testify that Gates had “politicized” the analytical process. In fact, Gates had frequently presided over analyses and estimates that ran directly afoul of the policies of the Reagan administration. While it was difficult to accept Gates’s claim that he knew nothing of the diversion of funds from the sale of arms to Iran to the contra rebels in Nicaragua, no clear evidence was ever presented that he did know of the diversion. While the hearings disclosed massive amounts of information about the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, in fact they produced little that would enlighten the public about the way the CIA worked or what its problems really were.

  Despite Webster’s best efforts, the Office of Security is still in the Dark Ages, still prone to ove
rlook legal niceties and to act in heavy-handed fashion. While defector handling has been improved, the CIA still has an institutional bias against defectors, considering them difficult to deal with. In contrast to the FBI, whose agents are encouraged to become friends with them, the CIA builds a wall between defectors and their handlers, using aliases to make sure defectors never bother CIA officers at night. These negative attitudes become self-fulfilling: people who sense they are looked upon as difficult become difficult. In part, the CIA’s cold approach led to the 1985 redefection of KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko.

  The agency as a whole still has difficulty separating what should legitimately be kept secret and what can be disclosed without causing damage.

  “Articles from the Times are classified all the time,” a former operations officer said. “It’s just bureaucrats at work.”

  The individual directorates still tend to go their own way sometimes and still tend to be parochial in their outlook.

  “We have institutional biases that act as a wet blanket on judgment,” Thomas Polgar, a former CIA station chief, said. “If you say there is no more threat from Eastern Europe, that means somebody’s budget is going to be reduced. Self-interest enters into it.”

  The CIA still reflexively thinks of the media as the enemy.

  “It [the CIA] doesn’t understand Congress as well as it should; it doesn’t understand the press as well as it should,” Russell Bruemmer, the CIA’s general counsel under Webster, said. “These are the constituent agencies. To many people in the agency, even to a lot of senior managers, they are necessary evils, not something that can have positive impact.

  “I believe it goes back to values that reflect what many people perceived to be the tenuousness of democracy’s hold on the world,” Bruemmer said. “The people who created the culture, the Dick Helmses of this world, they are all people for whom this really was a life-and-death struggle between democracy and communism. That kept them in the game, that kept them playing.”302

  To face the latest challenges, the CIA needs to beef up human intelligence. It needs to emphasize quality over quantity. It needs to highlight regional issues more than before. And it needs to improve the way it presents information. “We publish too much intelligence of questionable relevance to policymakers,” Robert Gates said just before he became the 15th DCI. “Less and better should be the rule.”

  Because the CIA’s role is so tied to changing world conditions, its coverage must constantly be reshaped. Nor can the CIA change course overnight. Like a supertanker, the CIA is not always nimble but gets the job done. Over the years, the CIA has predicted nearly everything that it should have predicted, foreseen every weapons system that it should have foreseen, and found out most of the things that it should have found out. While it occasionally strayed into illegalities and foolish operations, it did so in virtually every case with the approval of presidents or cabinet officers.

  “We’ve had our problems, disasters, horror shows. But on a day-to-day basis, we’ve been able to get the information, process it, and deliver it,” said Robert R. Simmons, a former CIA officer who later became staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “We tend to see the failures in print, not the successes. In the aggregate, I felt the CIA was successful eighty-five percent to ninety percent of the time. That ten percent to fifteen percent were big failures.”

  “The mistakes get publicized. There is no Pulitzer for the guy who does excellent reports,” a former CIA operations officer said.

  “I think the key thing to remember about this place is that it has constantly evolved,” Gates said in an interview after he became DCI. “There has been this preoccupation with the idea that we were stuck on the Cold War and the question of whether we could make the change at the end of the Cold War. People didn’t really realize that as part of this evolutionary process, for years we have taken on roles other than just looking at the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries. We have been doing a lot of things on a lot of subjects on the Third World, regional disputes, economic intelligence, proliferation.”

  There was a certain safety in the Cold War. Each side knew its part and played it more or less consistently. Now the CIA was faced with more uncertainty.

  “With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the danger of nuclear war or of a war in Europe has receded at least for the foreseeable future nearly to the vanishing point,” Gates said. “So the world in the sense of cosmic destruction is an extraordinarily safer place than it was a year ago. That said, on a day-to-day basis, the world is as dangerous and perhaps a little more so because some of the restraints imposed by the Cold War, particularly in regional conflicts, have been lifted.”

  The evolution of the former Soviet Union toward a market economy and democratic politics “is probably going to take two generations,” Gates said. “During that period, I think there will be a lot of setbacks, a lot of detours, perhaps a fair amount of violence. We will still have for another decade or more tens of thousands of nuclear weapons that we are going to have to track and somebody has to monitor. We still are going to have to see if they are implementing arms control agreements. Now we have fifteen republics and their political, economic, and social development to monitor, not just one country. We have to operate not just out of Moscow but in fifteen republics.

  “We will have to devote, ironically, more attention to monitoring regional disputes,” Gates said. “Some big ones, like Afghanistan, Cambodia, Angola, and Central America, have all gone away, but India, Pakistan, the Middle East still are problems. What is happening on the Korean peninsula is not entirely clear ... So there are a lot of regional problem areas that we have watched in the past but that are going to become even more dangerous or where the political circumstances are reaching a new critical phase.”

  Meanwhile, Gates said, the CIA is intensifying its efforts to track nuclear proliferation, narcotics, and terrorism.

  Almost immediately upon taking over, Gates set up internal task forces to recommend change. Based on the reports of the task forces, Gates approved plans to develop an intelligence community television channel that would beam classified news to policymakers six days a week. In response to the scandal involving the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), Gates encouraged CIA employees to be on the lookout for criminal activities and to make sure that other agencies that receive CIA reports of such activities follow up on them.

  Gates approved a more open policy in dealing with the press, allowing on the record interviews with officials below the level of deputy director of Central Intelligence and expanding background briefings. He also took a number of steps that will result in declassification of agency files on older operations like the Bay of Pigs.

  In a symbolic gesture, Gates said in the interview after he took over that he saw no reason why the CIA employee association should not be allowed to sell CIA mugs, a request that had stirred opposition from senior CIA officials reporting to Webster.

  “If they want to sell CIA mugs, I couldn’t be more pleased,” Gates said. “They can even sell T-shirts for all I care: The mug gap.”

  Today, the CIA is a very different agency from the one that created sensational headlines in the early 1970s about drug testing and domestic surveillance.

  “We are in a wilderness without a single footstep to guide us. Our successors will have an easier task,” Rep. James Madison, a member of the first federal Congress, wrote to Thomas Jefferson on June 30, 1789. So it was in the CIA’s early days.

  In most respects, the modern CIA is meticulous about obeying the law. Under William Webster, having a lawyer detailed to one’s program became a status symbol at the agency, demonstrating that whatever one was doing was complicated and important enough to warrant the attention of an attorney. Besides his deputy, the first slot Howard P. Hart asked for when he started the CIA’s counternarcotics center within the Directorate of Operations was a lawyer.

  “Intelligence excesses are la
rgely behind us,” Sen. Boren, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has said. “We now have a body of laws and a process of congressional intelligence oversight that aggressively seeks to insure that the CIA operates in a manner consistent with the fundamental values of the American people.”303

  The CIA now looks upon Congress more as an ally than an enemy.

  “When the shit hits the fan, I want to have Congress with me when people say, ‘What the hell did you do that for?’” John N. McMahon, deputy director of Central Intelligence under William Casey, said. “It’s a way to cover your ass. But to me, it’s part of being in the United States and in a democratic society. I never want to have a handful of people deciding what is good for the United States. That’s why I want Congress involved.”304

  Much of the criticism of the CIA stems from the fact that its activities are secret. The public—and particularly the media—resent being told they cannot know something. Silence is interpreted as arrogance. Moreover, when people do not know what an agency is doing, they assume that it is either doing nothing and not changing with the times, or that it is doing something wrong. In the absence of concrete information, it is human nature to accept rumor as fact. If the identity of the perceived enemy is in flux, it is assumed that the CIA officers are dinosaurs still fighting the Cold War.

  Compounding the problem is widespread misunderstanding of the CIA’s role. The assumption is that with its massive resources, the agency must know everything. But the CIA has no crystal ball; it is not omniscient. Every day, the media publish or broadcast stories that are incorrect. Beyond the correction column in most newspapers, no one goes back a year later and points out that a publication incorrectly predicted an election or erroneously said that the CIA established a task force to target Saddam Hussein for assassination. But no one forgets the CIA’s mistakes.