Nonetheless, the Bush administration had enough good intelligence to ensure that the invasion of Iraq went well. Agents infiltrated Iraq to help orchestrate the betrayals and desertions that made the campaign a relatively quick and bloodless affair. It’s certain that the United States also received information about the lack of WMD from the same sources. Why didn’t the White House use the information? Because it went against the strategic plan to invade Iraq—which would “stabilize” the oil market, a central part of the Bush national security doctrine, whose main objective has been America’s status as sole superpower. Whether or not CIA Director George Tenet agreed, he did nothing about the claims because his job was at stake.
When it became clear to the public that the claims were false, was Tenet fired for providing bad information? He was not, although the CIA was criticized for that and he eventually resigned. It wasn’t Tenet who provided the claims. Instead, he served his political bosses by becoming a scapegoat for the White House, which accused the Central Intelligence Agency of the scandalous act of providing false information—about which it then did nothing. It was all a political game.
The CIA shouldn’t be blamed for the problems that beset the American occupation of Iraq soon after the spectacularly successful invasion. The fault lies with the Bush administration for making up excuses to go to war—first WMD and then the laughable “liberation” of Iraq—while failing to grasp the real sentiment among demoralized Iraqis, who of course didn’t welcome a heavy-handed occupation. The White House conducted not a liberation but a revolution—a coup—by applying external force against a sovereign state. The CIA was used as a pawn in that goal, just as it was used during the Cold War against the Soviet Union. (The KGB was no less guilty of the same political manipulation.)
How to tackle the problem now? The main lesson goes beyond the CIA or the SVR. States must somehow ensure that their intelligence services direct their activities toward achieving properly defined strategic goals instead of following their leaders’ political intentions. Aldrich Ames, for one, realized the perils of intelligence—that its priorities were dictated by the desires of its managers, who misled the public by exaggerating the Soviet threat. In fact, as I’ve stressed, during the last years of the Cold War, intelligence became a game of penetrating the adversary’s service. It was expensive and superfluous.
Which strategic goals should define current priorities? Economic development should be near the top of the list, as well as combating organized criminal activities such as drugs and human smuggling. Fighting terrorism is perhaps most important. But that goal can’t be achieved using force alone. Above all, terrorism reflects socioeconomic problems. Prosperous societies produce bad candidates for terrorism. Western states should be thinking about how to help regions in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere overcome their dire financial problems. Most important, the international community must seriously address the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. It remains a major problem, destabilizing the entire Middle East by perpetuating a Palestinian underclass.
Intelligence can help by locating and working with healthy forces in dysfunctional societies instead of solely hunting for terrorist leaders to arrest or kill. In the end, that only creates more converts to terrorism. Greater cooperation among agencies can help achieve the larger, more promising goal.
3
Russia has its own deep-seated intelligence problems. The SVR has more difficulty gathering information than did the KGB. Officers are paid on average several hundred dollars a month, providing bad motivation and boosting reasons to spy for the United States and other countries. Russia still lacks a coherent development strategy. As our people watch a handful of insiders profit from fleecing the country’s economic assets, the overriding goal of most, including SVR officers, is to take what they can grab; otherwise, someone else will. “Market economics” has taken on a distinctly criminal meaning in Russia. People are ready to do just about anything for money. But although many, including Gennady Vasilenko, now say corruption looms large in the SVR, I don’t believe all is lost.
One of the largest problems for Russian intelligence is the lack of a clear foreign policy. The government has yet to formulate a consistent set of goals beyond claiming that Russia should once again be a great country. Is NATO an enemy or a friend? Does Russia want to return to its Soviet-era opposition to the western world or become a full member of capitalist and democratic society? Those questions haven’t been fully answered. Under Putin, policy is largely based on tactics, not strategy—and contradiction is often the result. As long as the state fails to define its priorities, so will intelligence.
One hope for the SVR is to cooperate with the CIA and other agencies on mutual objectives. Russia and the United States will always retain a geostrategic opposition—that’s inevitable and natural. Some Russian politicians are heralding the likelihood of longtime instability in Iraq. While Washington wants low oil prices, Russia—which earns most of its hard currency from oil—wants exactly the opposite. Still, in the fields I’ve outlined above—terrorism, narcotics, WMD and other areas—there should be cooperation. I don’t mean simply an exchange of information, which is what often passes for cooperation now. The CIA and SVR should conduct bona fide joint operations to detect likely sources of terrorism and prevent them.
Both the CIA and the SVR/KGB have experience with terrorist groups and their predecessors. The Soviet Union backed many liberation movements in the Middle East, Latin America and Southeast Asia—before some evolved into terrorist groups. So did the CIA. One case in point is the Afghan mujahideen, which produced Osama bin Laden, American public enemy number one. Despite massive cutbacks in human intelligence following the end of the Cold War, agencies still recruit agents and generate intelligence. Much of the knowledge base remains unused. It exists in the form of retirees who, like Jack Platt, leave the CIA without so much as an exit interview to glean thirty years of accumulated experience and wisdom. But perhaps the attitudes of the younger generation are to some extent inevitable. If veterans of the CIA and the KGB know one thing in common, it’s that you can’t get around human nature.
NOTES
Chapter 2
1. Rem Krassilnikov, KGB protif MI–6, okhotniki za shpionam (Moscow: Sentrpoligraf, 2000), p. 207.
2. Oleg Penkovsky, The Penkovskiy Papers, trans. Peter Deriabin (New York: Doubleday, 1965), p. 12.
3. Krassilnikov, KGB protif MI–6, p. 211.
4. Penkovsky, Penkovskiy Papers, p. 3.
5. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic, 1999), p. 399.
6. Sydney Morning Herald, July 27, 2002.
Chapter 4
1. Pete Earley, Confessions of a Spy: The Real Story of Aldrich Ames (New York: Putnam’s, 1997), p. 120.
2. Milt Bearden and James Risen, The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown with the KGB (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 21.
3. Earley, Confessions, p. 232.
Chapter 5
1. Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic, 1999), p. 209.
2. “Oleg Kalugin: Man in the News Again,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Business Watch, April 9, 2002.
Chapter 6
1. Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew with Annette Lawrence Drew, Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage (New York: Public Affairs, 1998), p. 177.
2. Milt Bearden and James Risen, The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown with the KGB (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 46.
3. David Wise, Nightmover: How Aldrich Ames Sold the CIA to the KGB for $4.6 Million (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 127.
4. Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, p. 87.
5. Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, p. 9.
6. Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, p. 37.
7. Bear
den and Risen, Main Enemy, p. 34.
8. Pete Earley, Confessions of a Spy: The Real Story of Aldrich Ames (New York: Putnam’s, 1997), p. 151.
9. Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, p. 72.
10. Wise, Nightmover, p. 126.
11. Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, p. 80.
12. Earley, Confessions, p. 157.
13. Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, p. 121.
14. Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, p. 121.
15. William Safire, “The Farewell Dossier,” New York Times, February 2, 2004.
16. David Hoffman, “Reagan Approved Plan to Sabotage Soviets,” Washington Post, February 27, 2004.
17. Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, p. 51.
18. Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, p. 139.
19. Earley, Confessions, p. 164.
20. Earley, Confessions, p. 165.
21. James Kelly, “The Spy Who Returned to the Cold,” Time, November 18, 1985.
22. Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, p. 92.
23. Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, p. 112.
Chapter 7
1. Pete Earley, Confessions of a Spy: The Real Story of Aldrich Ames (New York: Putnam’s, 1997), p. 181.
2. Milt Bearden and James Risen, The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown with the KGB (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 46.
3. Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, p. 47.
4. Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, p. 48.
5. Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew with Annette Lawrence Drew, Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage (New York: Public Affairs, 1998), p. 248.
6. Earley, Confessions, p. 139.
7. Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, p. 120.
8. Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, p. 98.
9. In 1996, five years after I retired from the KGB, a member of President Boris Yeltsin’s Security Council asked me to help in Yeltsin’s reelection campaign. It was before the presidential elections of that year—and since I thought Yeltsin was the best candidate at the time, I agreed. I was also asked to publicize my own importance by discussing some aspects of the Ames case. He’d been arrested two years earlier and it was already known that I had something to do with his handling. Soon after, a young journalist from Nezavisimoe voennoe obozrenie (Independent Military Analysis) called and asked to interview me. When I met him, I tried to skirt talking about Ames as much as I could, but I did say that the agents he exposed shouldn’t have been executed. Then we went on to talk about Yeltsin and the elections. I said Russia needed stability—thereby indirectly supporting the incumbent. A week later, I was speaking to Security Council staff members who asked me if I knew who’d interviewed me. I didn’t—he never introduced himself and I never asked. It turned out to have been the son of Leonid Polishchuk.
10. Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, p. 30.
11. Earley, Confessions, p. 118.
12. Earley, Confessions, p. 118.
13. Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, p. 168.
14. Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, p. 155.
15. Earley, Confessions, p. 196.
16. Earley, Confessions, p. 234.
17. Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, p. 178.
Chapter 8
1. Milt Bearden and James Risen, The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown with the KGB (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 150.
Chapter 9
1. This and other information about the Robert Hanssen espionage case comes from an FBI affidavit filed in support of an application for Hanssen’s arrest warrant and subsequently made public. The document contains excerpts from correspondence between Hanssen and the KGB and details of his handling that I quote in this chapter.
2. Ronald Kessler, The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI (New York: St. Martin’s, 2002), p. 385.
3. Milt Bearden and James Risen, The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown with the KGB (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 527.
Chapter 10
1. Pete Earley, Confessions of a Spy: The Real Story of Aldrich Ames (New York: Putnam’s, 1997), p. 199.
2. Milt Bearden and James Risen, The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown with the KGB (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 180.
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