by Tim Weiner
The political warfare that Jimmy Carter waged opened a new front in the cold war, said the CIA’s Bob Gates, then serving as a Soviet analyst on Brzezinski’s National Security Council staff: “Through his human rights policies, he became the first president since Truman to challenge directly the legitimacy of the Soviet government in the eyes of its own people. And the Soviets immediately recognized this for the fundamental challenge it was: they believed he sought to overthrow their system.”
Carter’s aims were more modest: he wanted to alter the Soviet system, not abolish it. But the clandestine service of the CIA did not want to take on the task. The White House faced resistance to the stepped-up covert-action orders from the chiefs of the Soviet/East Europe division. They had a reason: they had a prized agent to protect in Warsaw, and they did not want the White House’s ideals about human rights to threaten him. A Polish colonel named Ryszard Kuklinski was giving the United States a long hard look at the Soviet military. He was the highest-ranking source that the agency had behind the iron curtain. “Colonel Kuklinski was himself never in a strict sense a CIA agent,” Brzezinski said. “He volunteered. He operated on his own.” He had secretly offered his services to the United States during a visit to Hamburg. Keeping in touch with him was difficult; six months at a stretch went by in silence. But when Kuklinski traveled through Scandinavia and Western Europe, he always left word. During 1977 and 1978, until he began to fall under suspicion and surveillance in Warsaw, he delivered information that revealed how the Soviets would put all the armies of Eastern Europe under the Kremlin’s control if war came. He told the agency how Moscow would run that war in Western Europe; its plans provided for the use of forty tactical nuclear weapons against the city of Hamburg alone.
Freed from the paranoia of the Angleton era, the Soviet division was beginning to recruit real spies behind the iron curtain. “We had moved away from all the grand and glorious traditions of the OSS and become an espionage service, dedicated to gathering foreign intelligence,” said the CIA’s Haviland Smith. “By God, we could go over to East Berlin and not get caught. We could recruit Eastern Europeans. We were going after and recruiting Soviets. The only thing missing is—we don’t have anything on Soviet intentions. And I don’t know how you get that. And that’s the charter of the clandestine service. If we had been able to recruit a member of the Politburo, we would have had everything.”
The Politburo of the late 1970s was a corrupt and decrepit gerontocracy. Its empire was dangerously overextended, dying from within. The politically ambitious Soviet intelligence chief, Yuri Andropov, had created a false image of the Soviet Union as a superpower for his doddering superiors in the Kremlin. But the Soviets’ Potemkin village fooled the CIA as well. “We were appreciating as early as ’78 that the Soviet economy was in serious trouble,” Admiral Turner said. “We didn’t make the leap that we should have made, I should have made, that the economic trouble would lead to political trouble. We thought they would tighten their belt under a Stalin-like regime and continue marching on.”
Jimmy Carter’s instinctive decision to assert the principles of human rights as an international standard was seen as an act of piety by many members of the clandestine service. His modest mobilization of the CIA to probe that weak chink in the armor of the iron curtain was a cautious challenge to the Kremlin. Nevertheless, he hastened the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. “Carter had, in fact, changed the long-standing rules of the Cold War,” Bob Gates concluded.
“FROM A BLACK-WHITE CONFLICT INTO A
RED-WHITE CONFLICT”
President Carter also tried to use the CIA to undermine apartheid in South Africa. His stance changed the course of thirty years of cold-war foreign policy.
On February 8, 1977, in the White House Situation Room, the president’s national-security team agreed that it was time for the United States to try to change the racist South African regime. “The possibilities are there to change this from a black-white conflict into a red-white conflict,” Brzezinski said. “If this is the beginning of a long and bitter historical process, it is in our interest to accelerate this process.” It was not about race but about getting on the right side of history.
The acting director of central intelligence, Enno Knoche, said: “We are seeking changes in their fundamental attitudes. This will require very close observation.” In other words, the United States was going to have to start spying on South Africa. On March 3, 1977, at a full-dress National Security Council meeting, Carter commanded the CIA to explore how to bring economic and political pressure to bear on South Africa and its racist ally, Rhodesia.
The problem was that “nobody wanted to pay attention to Africa,” said Carter’s deputy director of central intelligence, Frank Carlucci. “We were very much focused on the Soviet Union. One of the main purposes of having people in stations in Africa was to try and recruit the Soviets who were stationed there. That was the number-one priority.”
The Soviets supported the strongest enemy of apartheid, the African National Congress. The ANC’s leader, Nelson Mandela, had been arrested and imprisoned in 1962, thanks in part to the CIA. The agency had worked in the closest harmony with the South African BOSS, the Bureau of State Security. The CIA’s officers had stood “side-by-side with the security police in South Africa,” said Gerry Gossens, a station chief in four African nations under Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter. “The word was that they had fingered Mandela himself.”
In 1977, Gossens went to work on the hard-core white supremacist Ian Smith, who ruled in Rhodesia, as well as the pro-American Kenneth Kaunda, the president of Zambia. As station chief in the capital, Lusaka, Gossens met regularly with President Kaunda and his security service. He began to develop a picture of the black and white armed forces arrayed against one another throughout southern Africa: “We needed to know how many Soviets and Czechs and East Germans and North Koreans were providing arms and training. Could they overwhelm the Rhodesians? We needed human penetrations into the frontline governments.”
Then, in 1978, Gossens became the new station chief in Pretoria. His orders from Washington were to spy on the white government of South Africa. Now the CIA was part of an ambitious American effort to push the Soviets out of southern Africa while winning support from black African governments.
“For the first time in history,” he said, “I was instructed to begin unilateral operations against BOSS. I got in new people who were undeclared to the government. I got new targets in the South African military, their nuclear program, and their policy vis-à-vis Rhodesia. The Embassy was full-bore on the question: what is the South African government up to?” For two years, the CIA started gathering intelligence on the apartheid regimes. Then the secret police in Rhodesia arrested three CIA officers who had bungled their way into a trap. South African intelligence betrayed a fourth. Frank G. Wisner, Jr., came out to Zambia as the new American ambassador, where he remembered: “My greatest single crisis, my most difficult moment, came as the result of a spy scandal with a CIA officer.”
Panicked by the blown missions, agency headquarters started shutting down operations and pulling out its spies. The CIA’s efforts to fulfill the human-rights policies of the president came up short.
“THEY’RE A UNIQUE CULTURE”
The morals of the Carter administration were not good for morale at CIA headquarters. Admiral Turner tried to hew to Carter’s pledge about never lying to the American people. This was a dilemma for the chief of a secret intelligence service, whose operators depended on deceit to succeed. What little confidence Turner had in the clandestine service was constantly chiseled away by acts of subversion.
In 1978, the American ambassador in Yugoslavia, Lawrence Eagleburger, who later served as secretary of state in the first Bush administration, came across a directive from the clandestine service at headquarters to every station chief in the world. Behind Turner’s back, someone very senior had sent instructions to keep major operations secret from ambassadors
everywhere abroad. The message was in direct violation of standing presidential orders going back seventeen years.
“I asked my station chief if it were true,” Eagleburger said. “He said, yes, it was true. I said, ‘Fine, I want you to send a message back to Admiral Turner.’” It was succinct: “You are out of business in Yugoslavia until such time as that order is rescinded. I mean by that, you’re not to come into the office, and you’re not to conduct any business in Belgrade or in Yugoslavia: you are simply to close up shop.”
Turner was a Christian Scientist who drank hot water with lemon instead of coffee or tea. The old boys preferred whisky in their water. They scorned Turner in word and deed. Turner wrote years later that his enemies within the clandestine service tried to discredit him with disinformation campaigns—“one of their basic skills.” Chief among these was a story that has persisted for a quarter century: that Turner was single-handedly responsible for the gutting of the clandestine service in the 1970s. The first deep cuts had been ordered by Nixon. One thousand covert operators had been let go by James Schlesinger. George Bush, under Ford, had chosen to ignore a recommendation from his own covert-action chief that 2,000 more should depart. Turner wound up cutting precisely 825, starting with the bottom 5 percent on the performance charts. He had the president’s support. “We were aware that some of the unqualified and incompetent personnel whom he discharged were deeply resentful, but I fully approved,” Jimmy Carter said in a letter to the author.
The old boys fought hard against Turner when he selected John McMahon to lead the clandestine service. McMahon was not one of them. He had started out carrying Allen Dulles’s suitcases and now ran the agency’s directorate of science and technology, the branch that produced the hardware and software of espionage. He told Turner: “No, I’m the wrong guy for it. They’re a unique culture. They work best with their own and you have to understand how they think. My last exposure to them was back in the early fifties over in Germany. And times have changed.”
In January 1978, after resisting for half a year, McMahon became the third chief of the clandestine service in eighteen months. Three weeks after he took over, he was called to appear at the first meeting of the new House intelligence oversight committee. The clandestine service rebelled. “Talk about apoplexy—they went bonkers,” McMahon said. “But what I knew was that the congressmen didn’t understand CIA or clandestine operations. And I was going to go down there and educate them.” He gathered up a shopping bag of spy gear and gadgets—miniature cameras and audio bugs and the like—and went up to the Hill. “I said: ‘Let me tell you what it’s like to operate in Moscow.’” McMahon had never been to Moscow in his life. “I said, ‘Now, here is some of the equipment we use.’ And I started passing it out. And they looked at all these gadgets…and they were just mesmerized.” The spellbound committee gave the spies a far bigger budget than the president had requested. The rebuilding of the clandestine service, ravaged and demoralized by cuts going back to the Nixon years, began then and there, in the fall of 1978.
But the mood remained grim at the citadel of American intelligence. “In spite of its current (and worsening) morale problems CIA will still come up with some imaginative ideas, I suspect,” Brzezinski’s liaison to the agency advised him on February 5, 1979. “We must not deceive ourselves, however: the capabilities that used to exist in CIA are very thin right now and there are very few officers disposed to take risks of the kind that used to be routinely taken to get things done.”
That same week, the world started falling in on the CIA.
“A SPECTATOR SPORT”
On February 11, 1979, the army of the shah collapsed and a fanatic ayatollah took control in Tehran. Three days later, a few hundred miles to the west, came a killing that would come to bear the same heavy weight for the United States.
The American ambassador in Afghanistan, Adolph “Spike” Dubs, was snatched off the streets of Kabul, kidnapped by Afghan rebels fighting the pro-Soviet puppet regime, and killed when Afghan police—accompanied by Soviet advisers—attacked the hotel where he was held. It was a clear sign that Afghanistan was spinning out of control. The Islamic rebels, supported by Pakistan, were gearing up for a revolution against their godless government. The geriatric leaders of the Soviet Union looked south in fear. More than forty million Muslims lived in the Soviet republics of central Asia. The Soviets saw the flames of Islamic fundamentalism burning toward their borders. At an extended Politburo meeting that began on March 17, the Soviet intelligence chief, Yuri Andropov, declared that “we cannot lose Afghanistan.”
Over the next nine months, the CIA failed to warn the president of the United States of an invasion that changed the face of the world. The agency had a fair grasp of Soviet capabilities. It understood nothing of Soviet intentions.
“The Soviets would be most reluctant to introduce large numbers of ground forces into Afghanistan,” the CIA’s National Intelligence Daily, its top secret report to the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department, confidently stated on March 23, 1979. That week, thirty thousand Soviet combat troops began to deploy near the Afghan border in trucks, tanks, and armored personnel carriers.
In July and August, the Afghan rebels’ attacks grew, Afghan army garrisons began to mutiny, and Moscow flew a battalion of airborne combat units into the Bagram air base outside Kabul. Prompted by Brzezinski, President Carter signed a covert-action order for the CIA to provide the Afghan rebels with medical aid, money, and propaganda. The Soviets sent thirteen generals to Kabul, led by the commander of Soviet ground forces. Still, the CIA assured the president on August 24 that “the deteriorating situation does not presage an escalation of Soviet military involvement in the form of a direct combat role.”
On September 14, Admiral Turner told the president that “Soviet leaders may be on the threshold of a decision to commit their own forces to prevent the collapse of the regime” in Afghanistan—but only bit by bit, with small groups of military advisers, and some few thousands of troops. Unsure of that assessment, the CIA gathered all its expertise and every element of American military intelligence, electronic-eavesdropping transcripts, and spy-satellite reconnaissance together for a full-dress review of the evidence. On September 28, the experts unanimously concluded that Moscow would not invade Afghanistan.
The Soviet troops kept coming. On December 8, a second airborne battalion landed at Bagram. The National Intelligence Daily assessed their presence as a move to beef up defenses against rebel attacks at the air base. The next week, the CIA station chief in Kabul reported secondhand sightings of Soviet special-forces commandos on the streets of the city.
On Monday morning, December 17, Admiral Turner went to a White House meeting of the president’s most senior aides, the Special Coordination Committee. Among those present were Vice President Walter Mondale, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, and the deputy secretary of state, Warren Christopher. Turner told them that there were now 5,300 Soviet soldiers at the Bagram air base and two new Soviet command posts just north of the Afghan border. Then he said: “CIA does not see this as a crash buildup.” It was “perhaps related to Soviet perceptions of a deterioration of the Afghan military forces and the need to beef them up at some point.” The word invasion did not cross his lips.
The CIA’s best Soviet analysts—among them Doug MacEachin, later the deputy director for intelligence—worked around the clock to marshal their knowledge for the president. On December 19, they issued their final formal judgment. “The pace of Soviet deployments does not suggest…urgent contingency,” they said. “Anti-insurgent operations on a countrywide scale would require mobilization of much larger numbers of regular ground forces.” In short, the Soviets did not intend to attack.
Three days later, Vice Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, the director of the National Security Agency, the American electronic-eavesdropping empire, got a flash message from the field: the invasion of Afghanistan was imminent. In fact, it was under way. More
than a hundred thousand Soviet troops were seizing the country. Carter immediately signed a covert-action order for the CIA to begin arming the Afghan resistance, and the agency began to build a worldwide arms pipeline to Afghanistan. But the Soviet occupation was an accomplished fact.
The CIA not only missed the invasion, it refused to admit that it had missed it. Why would anyone in his right mind invade Afghanistan, graveyard of conquerors for two thousand years? A lack of intelligence was not the cause of the failure. A lack of imagination was.
So the Soviet invasion became “a spectator sport” for the United States, the agency’s star analyst Doug MacEachin wrote more than twenty years later. “The U.S. could make a lot of noise from the stands, but could not have much impact on the playing field. That would have to wait until the next round of the Great Game.”
37. “WE WERE JUST
PLAIN ASLEEP”
Ever since the CIA secured his throne in 1953, the shah of Iran had been the centerpiece of American foreign policy in the Middle East. “I just wish there were a few more leaders around the world with his foresight,” President Nixon reflected in April 1971. “And his ability to run, basically, let’s face it, a virtual dictatorship in a benign way.”
Nixon may not have intended to send a message by sending Richard Helms out as the American ambassador to Iran in 1973. But he did. “We were amazed that the White House would send a man who, after all, had such associations with the CIA, which was deemed by every Iranian responsible for the fall of Mossadeq,” said Henry Precht, the American embassy’s chief political officer. “It seemed to us to abandon any pretense of a sort of a neutral America and to confirm that the shah was our puppet.”