Legacy of Ashes (The History of the C.I.A.)

by Tim Weiner

  Continuing failures in the field also sapped the CIA’s spirit in 1976. Among the biggest was in Angola. Two months after the fall of Saigon, President Ford approved a big new operation to secure Angola against communism. The country had been Portugal’s biggest prize in Africa, but Lisbon’s leaders had been among the worst of the European colonialists, and they sacked Angola as they withdrew. The country was coming apart as rival forces went to war.

  The CIA shipped $32 million in cash and $16 million worth of weapons to Angola through the agency’s great ally, President Mobutu of the Congo. The weapons went to an unruly gang of anticommunist guerrillas, commanded by Mobutu’s brother-in-law and aligned with the white South African government. The program was aided by President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, a genial leader who had long received under-the-table support from the United States and the CIA. It was coordinated at Kissinger’s State Department by a talented young diplomat—Frank G. Wisner, Jr., the son and namesake of the late chief of covert operations.

  “We had been forced out of Vietnam,” Wisner said. “There was a real concern on the part of the Administration that the United States would now be tested” by the forces of communism across the world. “Were we going to see a new seemingly communist-led offensive move in, take over oil-rich Angola and begin to carry the Cold War into southern Africa, or were we going to try to stop it?”

  “We weren’t going to be able to walk down to Congress, in the aftermath of Vietnam, and say, ‘Look, let’s send American military trainers and equipment over there to Mobutu,’ so Kissinger and the President made the decision to go to the Agency,” Wisner said. But the CIA-backed troops in Angola faltered, and their enemies, strongly supported by Moscow and Havana, took control of the capital. Kissinger ordered up another $28 million in secret support. There was no money left in the CIA’s contingency budget. Early on in Bush’s short year at the CIA, Congress publicly banned covert support for the Angolan guerrillas and killed the operation while it was in progress. Nothing of the kind had ever happened before. “The CIA was cut off, and we were driven back,” Wisner said.

  “I FEEL LIKE I HAVE BEEN HAD”

  On the bicentennial day of July 4, 1976, Bush prepared to meet the governor of Georgia at a hotel in Hershey, Pennsylvania. He had been extraordinarily responsive when Jimmy Carter requested intelligence briefings from the CIA even before winning the Democratic presidential nomination. No candidate had ever made such a request so early in the game. Bush and his national intelligence deputy, Dick Lehman—who had grown so frustrated watching Allen Dulles hefting reports instead of reading them—found Carter extremely interested. Their discussion ranged from spy satellites to the future of white minority rule in Africa. They agreed that the briefings could continue later in July at Carter’s home in the hamlet of Plains, Georgia.

  The director had a hard time getting there. The CIA’s Gulfstream jet could not handle the sod airstrip in Plains. The agency sought logistical help from the Pentagon and learned that Bush would have to take a helicopter to Peterson Field. The CIA aircrew checked their maps. Where the hell was Peterson Field? Another phone call to Plains and they understood: “Peterson’s field” was some farmer’s forty acres on the edge of town.

  The six-hour session touched on Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Rhodesia, and Angola. China took thirty minutes. The Soviet Union took ten times as long. The CIA’s men talked all afternoon and into the evening. Carter, who had been a nuclear engineer in the navy, grasped the arcane details of the American strategic arsenal. He was particularly interested in the evidence spy satellites obtained about Soviet weapons, and he understood that the intelligence they gleaned would play a vital role in arms control. He learned that the Soviets would never show their hand with an accurate statement of the size of their nuclear forces; the American side had to come to the negotiating table and tell the Soviets how many missiles they had and how many we had. This gave Carter pause: the notion that the Soviets lied seemed to be a new idea to him.

  Bush assured him that the photographs provided by the first generation of spy satellites had provided Presidents Nixon and Ford with the information they needed to pursue SALT, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, with the Soviets, and to keep a close eye on whether the Soviets would abide by their agreements. A new generation of satellites was coming on line that summer. Code-named Keyhole, they provided real-time television images instead of slow-to-develop photos. The CIA’s science and technology division had been working on Keyhole for years, and it was a great breakthrough.

  Carter’s running mate, Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota, asked about covert action and the agency’s liaisons with foreign intelligence services. Mondale had been a member of the Church Committee, the Senate panel that investigated the CIA. Its final report had come out two months before. The committee is remembered today chiefly for its chairman’s statement that the agency had been “a rogue elephant”—a pronouncement that badly missed the point by absolving the presidents who had driven the elephant. Bush, infuriated by the very existence of the Church Committee, refused to answer Mondale’s questions.

  Eight CIA officers joined Bush in Plains two weeks later, sitting in a circle in Carter’s family room as his daughter and her cat wandered in and out. To their surprise, Carter seemed to have a highly nuanced understanding of the world. When Carter and Ford went head-to-head in the first televised presidential debates since Kennedy and Nixon, the governor cleaned the president’s clock on foreign policy. He also took a hard swipe at the agency, saying: “Our system of government—in spite of Vietnam, Cambodia, CIA, Watergate—is still the best system of government on Earth.”

  On November 19, 1976, there was one final, awkward meeting between Bush and President-elect Carter in Plains. “Bush wanted to be kept on” at the CIA, Carter remembered. “If I had agreed to that, he never would have become President. His career would have gone off on a whole different track!”

  Bush’s memo of the meeting shows that he revealed a handful of ongoing operations to the president-elect, including the CIA’s financial support for heads of state such as King Hussein of Jordan and President Mobutu of the Congo and strongmen such as Manuel Noriega, the future dictator of Panama. Bush observed that Carter seemed strangely turned off. His impression was correct. The president-elect found the CIA’s subsidies for foreign leaders reprehensible.

  By the end of 1976, Bush was in bad odor with some of his former fans at the agency. He had made a baldly political decision to let a team of neoconservative ideologues—“howling right-wingers,” Dick Lehman called them—rewrite the CIA’s estimates of Soviet military forces.

  William J. Casey, the most vociferous member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, had been talking with some of his friends and associates in the intelligence community. They were convinced that the CIA was dangerously underestimating Soviet nuclear strength. Casey and his fellow members of the advisory board pressed President Ford to let an outside group write their own Soviet estimate. The team, whose members were deeply disenchanted with détente and handpicked by the Republican right, included General Daniel O. Graham, America’s leading advocate of missile defense, and Paul Wolfowitz, a disillusioned arms-control negotiator and a future deputy secretary of defense. In May 1976, Bush approved “Team B” with a cheery scribble: “Let her fly!! O.K. G.B.”

  The debate was highly technical, but it boiled down to a single question: what is Moscow up to? Team B portrayed a Soviet Union in the midst of a tremendous military buildup—when in fact it was cutting military spending. They dramatically overstated the accuracy of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. They doubled the number of Backfire bombers the Soviet Union was building. They repeatedly warned of dangers that never materialized, threats that did not exist, technologies that were never created—and, most terrifying of all, the specter of a secret Soviet strategy to fight and win a nuclear war. Then, in December 1976, they selectively shared their findings with sympathetic re
porters and opinion columnists. “The B Team was out of control,” Lehman said, “and they were leaking all over the place.”

  The uproar Team B created went on for years, fueled a huge increase in Pentagon weapons spending, and led directly to the rise of Ronald Reagan to the top of the list of front-runners for the 1980 Republican nomination. After the cold war was over, the agency put Team B’s findings to the test. Every one of them was wrong. It was the bomber gap and the missile gap all over again.

  “I feel like I have been had,” Bush told Ford, Kissinger, and Rumsfeld at the last National Security Council meeting of the outgoing administration.

  Intelligence analysis had become corrupted—another tool wielded for political advantage—and it would never recover its integrity. The CIA’s estimates had been blatantly politicized since 1969, when President Nixon forced the agency to change its views on the Soviets’ abilities to launch a nuclear first strike. “I look upon that as almost a turning point from which everything went down,” Abbot Smith, who ran the agency’s Office of National Estimates under Nixon, said in a CIA oral history interview. “The Nixon administration was really the first one in which intelligence was just another form of politics. And that was bound to be disastrous, and I think it was disastrous.” John Huizenga, who succeeded Smith in 1971, put it even more bluntly to the CIA’s historians, and his thoughts rang true in decades to come, into the twenty-first century:

  In retrospect, you see, I really do not believe that an intelligence organization in this government is able to deliver an honest analytical product without facing the risk of political contention. By and large, I think the tendency to treat intelligence politically increased over this whole period. And it’s mainly over issues like Southeast Asia and the growth of Soviet strategic forces that were extremely divisive politically. I think it’s probably naïve in retrospect to have believed what most of us believed at one time…that you could deliver an honest analytical product and have it taken at face value…. I think that intelligence has had relatively little impact on the policies that we’ve made over the years. Relatively none. In certain particular circumstances, perhaps insights and facts that were provided had an effect on what we did. But only in a very narrow range of circumstances. By and large, the intelligence effort did not alter the premises with which political leadership came to office. They brought their baggage and they more or less carried it along. Ideally, what had been supposed was that…serious intelligence analysis could…assist the policy side to reexamine premises, render policymaking more sophisticated, closer to the reality of the world. Those were the large ambitions which I think were never realized.

  These thoughts did not trouble the director of central intelligence and the future president of the United States.

  “THE GREATNESS THAT IS CIA”

  In his farewell to the employees at CIA headquarters, Bush delivered a fond thank-you note, as was his wont. “I hope I can find some ways in the years ahead to make the American people understand more fully the greatness that is CIA,” he wrote. He was the last director of central intelligence who received something approaching full support from his troops at headquarters. In their eyes, it was to his great credit that he had tried to save the clandestine service. But to his shame, in the end, he had let the CIA be cowed by politics.

  “I find no degradation in the quality of intelligence analysis,” Kissinger said at their last meeting before the inauguration of Jimmy Carter. “The opposite is true, however, in the covert action area. We are unable to do it anymore.”

  “Henry, you are right,” said George Herbert Walker Bush, one of the greatest boosters the CIA had ever had. “We are both ineffective and scared.”

  PART

  FIVE

  Victory Without Joy

  The CIA Under Carter, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush

  1977 to 1993

  36. “HE SOUGHT TO

  OVERTHROW THEIR

  SYSTEM”

  Running for president, Jimmy Carter had condemned the CIA as a national disgrace. Once in power, he wound up signing almost as many covert-action orders as Nixon and Ford. The difference was that he did it in the name of human rights. The problem was harnessing the agency’s atrophied powers to that new mission.

  His search for a new director of central intelligence went poorly. Thomas L. Hughes, the former chief of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, declined the honor. The nomination went instead to the Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen. “Somewhat to my surprise, Carter called me and asked me if I would come on down to Plains,” Sorensen recounted. “I had a brother who had worked for CIA undercover for years. I went down there and I had a brief conversation with Carter and the very next day he presented me with the job.” But he had been a conscientious objector in World War II, and his nomination died, the first time such a thing had happened in the history of the CIA. “Carter failed to give me any support while I was dangling there,” Sorensen remembered bitterly.

  On the third try, the new president selected a near stranger: Admiral Stansfield Turner, commander of the southern flank of NATO, based in Naples, Italy. Turner would be the third admiral in the history of the agency who found the CIA a hard vessel to handle. He was the first to admit his unfamiliarity with the agency. But he was quick to assert his authority.

  “THAT WAS NOT THE RIGHT WAY TO PLAY THE GAME”

  “Lots of people think President Carter called me in and said, ‘Clean the place up and straighten it out.’ He never did that,” Turner said. “From the very beginning he was intensely interested in having good intelligence. He wanted to understand the mechanisms from our satellites to our spies to our methods of analyzing what was happening. He was extremely supportive of the intelligence operations. At the same time I knew full well just from his character that we were to operate within the laws of the United States of America. I knew also that there were ethical limits as to what President Carter would want us to do and whenever I came close to questioning whether we were close to those limits I went to him and I got his decisions on it. Almost always those decisions were to go ahead.

  “The Carter administration had no bias against covert action,” Turner said. “The CIA had a problem with covert action itself because it was in this state of shock from the criticisms it had gone through.”

  Early on, the clandestine service presented Turner with a life-and-death dilemma. “They came to me and said: ‘We have an agent almost inside this terrorist organization, but they’ve asked him to do one more thing to prove his bona fides. He’s to go out and murder one of the members of the government. Do we permit him to do that?’ And I said: ‘No, we pull him out.’ You know, it’s a trade-off. Maybe he could have saved some lives. But I was not going to have the United States party to a murder in order to take that chance. This was a real life right now and this was the reputation of our country. And I thought that was not the right way to play the game.”

  Turner quickly grasped the basics of the tug-of-war between spies and gadgets. He pulled for machines over men, spending much of his time and energy trying to improve the global coverage of American reconnaissance satellites. He tried to organize the “intelligence community” into a confederation, creating a coordinating staff and a unified budget. Those who served the cause were appalled at the disarray. “I was in charge of human intelligence collection,” remembered John Holdridge, who had been Bush’s deputy chief of mission in Beijing before joining the intelligence community staff. “I would look at these pie-in-the-sky operations which were presented to me and wonder who in the dickens dreamed these up. They seemed to be so dreadfully impractical and unworkable.”

  Nor did the analysts receive high marks. President Carter pronounced himself puzzled at the fact that the CIA’s daily brief recapitulated what he read in the newspapers. He and Turner wondered why the agency’s estimates seemed shallow and irrelevant. The agency was off to a rocky start with the new president.

  “CARTER HAD CHANGED
THE LONG-STANDING RULES”

  Carter’s new national-security team had five ranking members with four different agendas. The president and vice president dreamed of a new American foreign policy founded on the principles of human rights. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance thought arms control was paramount. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown tried to produce a new generation of military and intelligence technology for a few billion dollars less than the Pentagon planned. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was the hawk among these owls and doves. Centuries of Warsaw’s woes at the hands of Moscow shaped his thinking. He wanted to help the United States win hearts and minds in Eastern Europe. He harnessed this ambition to the president’s foreign policy and tried to hit the Soviets where they were weakest.

  President Ford and the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, had signed an agreement in Helsinki in 1975 endorsing “the free movement of people and ideas.” Ford and Kissinger saw it as window dressing. But others were dead serious: a generation of dissidents in Russia and Eastern Europe fed up with the evil banality of the Soviet state.

  Brzezinski ordered—and Carter approved—an array of CIA covert actions aimed at Moscow, Warsaw, and Prague. They commanded the agency to publish books and to subsidize the printing and distribution of magazines and journals in Poland and Czechoslovakia, to help distribute the written work of dissidents in the Soviet Union, to back the political work of Ukrainians and other Soviet ethnic minorities, to place fax machines and tape cassettes in the hands of free-minded people behind the iron curtain. They wanted to subvert the control of information that was the foundation of repression in the communist world.