Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story

by Jack Devine

  * * *

  The execution of covert action has and should remain firmly in the domain of the CIA, with the military playing a supporting though often key role—and vice versa in a war zone. A variety of factors—including legal authorities, intelligence community mandates, and personal relationships—influence who controls such covert actions.

  The interplay between the CIA and the Defense Department’s intelligence agencies is often described in terms of the authorities under which each agency typically operates. Title 50 of the U.S. Code governs the execution of war and national defense and defines and describes how the government conducts covert action. Covert action, according to Title 50, is “an activity or activities of the United States Government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly in a country while deliberately obscuring the hand of the US government.”7 To execute covert action, the president must issue a “finding” authorizing the activity. Once this is accomplished, the implementing agency—to date, this has always been the CIA—and the executive branch must follow a strict set of guidelines for keeping the relevant members of Congress informed. There are specific reasons for these stipulations, the most important being that the president is on record as having explicitly authorized the operation. Others include maintaining clear oversight of covert action by the intelligence committees of the House and Senate.

  The Pentagon has undertaken more covert-style activities through what is known within Washington as “clandestine military activities.” These activities, generally authorized by Title 10 of the U.S. Code, look like covert action and are often intended to achieve similar results, but are conducted under different budgetary and oversight requirements. Under Title 10, the Defense Department must report all activities to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. With a larger number of CIA operations being conducted by Special Operations Forces and other military elements that have been seconded to the Agency, the acts themselves are rarely dramatically different. But issues of authority and oversight leave room for confusion and a tendency to zealously guard and not share information, neither of which is conducive to good policy.

  The key to cutting through potential confusion and bureaucratic competition due to overlapping authorities is concerted and clear-eyed leadership. Former CIA director Mike Hayden said of the debate over Title 50 versus Title 10 authority: “It is only about congressional oversight; it’s not about what happens on the ground. I was the director of central intelligence for thirty-one months and I never argued with anyone about this.” Hayden, the only man to head both the CIA (from 2006 to 2009) and the National Security Agency (from 1999 to 2005), added, “It was always, ‘How do you want to work this?’ I never felt like I was being wronged.”8 Even so, there is little doubt among those responsible for running operations on the ground that the roles and responsibilities of different agencies need to be streamlined and clearly defined.

  Outside active war zones, where deniability is paramount and the means and ends are more related to politics and economics than military objectives, the CIA is better positioned to oversee operations. Even outside war zones, the Defense Department has a serious and important role to play, but we need to better integrate these operations to prevent mishaps and ensure that all the instruments of U.S. power are working toward the same ends. The CIA-directed raid by U.S. Special Operations Forces that killed Osama bin Laden on May 1, 2011, is an excellent example of how military capabilities—and Special Operations Forces in particular—can be used to conduct surgical operations with the potential for deniability outside active war zones.

  On the ground overseas, the lead on intelligence activities in a foreign country should be the CIA chief of station, who typically represents both the Agency and the director of national intelligence. The chief of station is essential to coordinating the intelligence activities of all agencies, including the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and others within the Defense Department. Over the years, there have been tensions at the embassy level regarding intelligence operations. Ambassador Bill Luers, a smart and sophisticated career diplomat with whom I served in Latin America, had strong opinions about what the role of intelligence should and should not be. He had not hesitated to protest what he saw as Agency overreaching or what he considered to be the role of U.S. diplomats. Most ambassadors measure up to this standard. Ambassador Frank Wisner, a senior retired diplomat and former ambassador to Egypt and India, describes the confusion often present in U.S. embassies and the ways in which we might be able to improve intelligence operations and oversight: “It is absolutely essential that there be a senior intelligence officer in countries of importance and that they have responsibility over and an ability to deconflict all intelligence activities. If the chief of station believes an operation will endanger the U.S., he or she needs to go to the ambassador or to policy channels and appeal. It is important the chief of station is fully empowered.”9 I have to agree that while the Defense Department brings very important collection and operational capabilities to the table, someone needs to oversee all intelligence operations in a given country, and the CIA chief of station is best positioned to execute those duties.

  * * *

  Covert action is a large umbrella, covering everything from the kind of political action I was involved with in Chile to the proxy war I helped stage and manage in Afghanistan. The ability to make things happen in secret is something that presidents will always need, and when you are talking about achieving objectives outside war zones, covert action is almost always a highly effective tool. As we draw down in Iraq and Afghanistan, we will need to go back to covert action, with surrogates on our payroll—warlords in Afghanistan and tribal leaders in Iraq—and we may be better off. When you are operating under the radar, you are freer to do things such as hire tribesmen—even those who do not get along with each other—as long as their enemies are our enemies. Many past successes in Iraq and Afghanistan have had as much to do with our buying support from these local leaders as with a large military presence. There is no military unit in Iraq, Afghanistan, or frankly the world that can ever defeat U.S. forces going head to head. But we were not going to win our most recent two wars on a conventional military battlefield.

  Consistent manpower, secrecy, and a workforce groomed over time to excel at clandestine operations are essential to running effective covert operations. Retired admiral Bill Studeman, who served as deputy director of the CIA in the mid-1990s and as director of the NSA from 1988 to 1992, said that covert action depends upon a covert workforce of highly trained individuals “who are recruited and trained for their ability to recruit a foreigner to become a traitor and spy for our country against theirs. The Agency has always had the ability to attract top talent, and it’s one of the best workforces in the federal government.”10 The CIA has built an extraordinarily stable system with the necessary infrastructure and organizational experience to efficiently and discreetly execute its duties. U.S. Special Operations Forces and other parts of the military have adopted similar skills, in many cases attending CIA training courses and spending many years in the intelligence branches (as opposed to rotating in and out, as is typical in the military system). Nevertheless, the military system overall maintains a larger tail, which makes it more cumbersome to operate in secret over protracted periods of time. Of course, covert action is not historically what the military was built to do; it was built to fight overt wars against declared enemies.

  Certainly the CIA has paramilitary needs, and Special Operations Forces and other military assets should be called in or detailed to the Agency when necessary. The size of our Special Operations Forces, as I mentioned previously, should and will likely shrink considerably in the coming years as we pull back from engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan and move back toward greater clandestine activities. Special Operations Forces actually began as an offshoot of the
OSS and CIA’s Special Operations Division in the post–World War II environment. The “seconding” of military personnel and assets has almost always worked well. In fact, I would argue that when it comes to paramilitary activities outside war zones, this is the primary way the military should be operating on the ground. In places such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, we are moving toward a model in which discreet counterterrorism operations will be paired with efforts to co-opt and arm local tribes and other indigenous forces. Thus, to be effective, we will need to continue to integrate the military’s capabilities with the CIA’s tradecraft and deniability under CIA authorities. The military will continue to have a range of duties assigned to it under its own mandate, including traditional military-to-military advisory activities such as training and equipping foreign security forces. But when it comes to activities we do not want the world to know about, we should do it under CIA authorities and CIA command and control. That, along with intelligence collection and analysis, is what the CIA was built for in the first place. We need to keep those lines clear and distinct.

  The next few years in Afghanistan will be an important test case, because soon it will no longer be an active war zone but rather a country in simmering conflict with a vastly reduced U.S. and foreign presence. Because we will no longer be fighting an active ground war there, we should place the remaining limited Special Operations Forces military personnel under the CIA umbrella. This would allow the forces remaining in-country to operate under the radar and work with their partners to keep the situation under control, as well as to report through one single chain of command. I suspect something similar is already under way in Iraq, given the decision to withdraw all U.S. troops and the clear requirements both to protect U.S. political and economic interests and to limit the influence of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

  If this model is successfully implemented, there is no reason the CIA and the Defense Department should be at odds with one another in the field. Indeed, in this era of increasing interdependence, there is every reason to think that productive cooperation is ongoing and will increase, albeit more efficiently with clearly delineated roles both within and outside the war zones.

  * * *

  I remain a strong supporter of the use of drones, given their lethality, accuracy, and stealth, which has leveled the playing field against terrorism. In fact, in many ways we have trumped what was long described as the terrorists’ “asymmetrical advantage” through drone technology, which from their perspective is a terrifying and unpredictable capability. They now live in constant fear of being hit by surprise in the false safety of their environs.

  For this reason, a great deal of news is dedicated to the use of drones as weapons of attack. But drones can do other things as well, such as conduct aerial location and surveillance on a target and provide guidance to ground troops conducting a mission. Some of these are traditional intelligence missions, while others are clearly in the realm of the war fighter. At the same time, field personnel can find themselves in confusing situations, and redundancies can easily become silos if coordination is poor. If a target is identified and located, the process for approving a strike can be unnecessarily time-consuming and complex without clear lines of authority.

  As we think about the varying future uses of drones, clear lines of authority should be delineated, based on how and where the unmanned aircraft are used. The authority for deploying and using drones in war zones against enemy forces is different from that needed to oversee and conduct drone operations for surveillance purposes, or strikes against terrorist targets in areas where stealth and deniability are necessary. There are signs that the Obama administration is attempting to streamline these procedures, although unfortunately it appears to be doing so in the opposite direction—namely, putting the majority of drone operations under the auspices of the Defense Department. That does not enable such activities to be carried out below the radar and in ways that preserve some level of plausible deniability. We saw this in the case of the CIA program in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The Russians knew the United States was supporting the mujahideen, but because our support involved using surrogates, not U.S. forces, our assistance did not provoke a direct Soviet military response. The drone program has a similar requirement for nonattribution. There are benefits to being able to act without forcing a confrontation by deploying U.S. military assets on another nation’s sovereign territory.

  By dividing the responsibilities this way, we can have the best possibility of the military using drones to excel at what they do best, while the CIA can use them to maximum effect in intelligence and covert action missions. One warning with regard to using drones as weapons: intelligence is lost when we kill rather than capture and interrogate suspects. This intelligence is often critical to the capture of additional suspects and/or the thwarting of potential attacks. When possible, as recognized by most intelligence experts, we should always aim to capture rather than kill.

  The official who deserves much of the credit for the decision to invest heavily in drone research and development was James Woolsey during his tenure as DCI from 1993 to 1995. Woolsey himself, when interviewed for this book, described the circumstances under which the program began, which is particularly instructive today as we move into leaner fiscal and budgetary times.

  “If times had been flush I might have done what the Pentagon wanted to do, which was implement a several-year, multimillion-dollar research program,” he said. “But since I knew we would never get the money, instead we did the research with a very small budget and on an accelerated timeline. So, in a way, the financial problems of the early 1990s were an incentive to move very quickly at very low cost with something that we already had an airframe for.”11

  There are important lessons to be drawn from this story, not only in terms of investing in new technologies, but with regard to how organizations—and the intelligence community in particular—innovate and operate in lean times. “We in the intelligence community actually make our best decisions when we are restricted in our intention with regard to what we’re trying to do and as well as in our funding,” said Ken Minihan, who oversaw massive chunks of the intelligence community during the very lean late 1990s. “Many people think we see the most progress when funding increases, but actually we see more developments when it’s not.”12 There is certainly a danger that decreased budgets will lead to important programs being downsized or eliminated, but there is something to be said for the notion that necessity is the mother of invention.

  One way we can avoid letting impending budget cuts lead to stagnation and increased risk is to aggressively take advantage of new technologies, including those being generated in the private sector. As we saw with the Arab Awakening, we will be forced to address the impact of social media and social networking. This technology may only be in its infancy, but its impact cannot be denied, and the ability to mobilize people on short notice around important issues is something we must harness to be effective in the future.

  Social networks such as Facebook, and even Internet search engines such as Google, have profoundly changed not only the way the CIA does business but also the very meaning of that business. Part of the CIA’s traditional role has been to collect basic facts from the far corners of the globe about all the people, places, and things that matter. Now, however, a great deal of this basic information is being collected for commercial purposes, and that means that what qualifies as “intelligence” worthy of CIA collection is rapidly changing. Randall Forte, who served as assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research from 2006 to 2009, put it this way: “The rise of information searches and data aggregators like Google has led to a world where 90 percent or more of information out there is available from open sources. This dramatically restricts the areas in which clandestinely acquired intelligence is actually value-added and places the intelligence community in competition with open-sourced information. Why spend a billion dollars on a collection program that may deliver the same infor
mation as can be had for free on the Internet, only slower and with greater risks?”13

  I found during my career at the CIA that my enthusiasm for new technology was not always shared by many of my colleagues. But times have changed, and now the CIA has several very large components that focus on data aggregation, exploitation, and analysis, including finding ways to pull pertinent intelligence out of the immense volume of information collected by our rapidly expanding repertoire of platforms. Of course, this type of collection has come under significant scrutiny since Edward Snowden’s leak of sensitive NSA memos describing various surveillance platforms in the United States and abroad. With regard to collecting telephonic and Internet data abroad, this type of collection is as old as spying itself; while former Secretary of State Henry Stimson may have said that a gentleman doesn’t read another man’s mail, the truth is people have been reading one another’s mail since the beginning of time. In fact, that is a large part of what the spy business is about, and our allies, despite their objections, are well aware of this fact.