Even when you are strong, it is bad strategy to let yourself appear weak. This can lead to a dangerous miscalculation on your adversary’s part. The 1961 Vienna Summit between Khrushchev and Kennedy led to such a miscalculation. Perhaps Kennedy was confident of his own resolve, but he did not project that confidence to Khrushchev. As James Reston has since written, “Kennedy went there shortly after his spectacular blunders at the Bay of Pigs, and was savaged by Khrushchev. . . . “I had an hour alone with President Kennedy immediately after his last meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna at that time,” Reston reported. “Khrushchev had assumed, Kennedy said, that any American President who invaded Cuba without adequate preparation was inexperienced, and any President who then didn’t use force to see the invasion through was weak. Kennedy admitted Khrushchev’s logic on both points.”
Khrushchev later called Kennedy’s hand by putting missiles into Cuba. A dangerous confrontation with nuclear overtones resulted, one that could have been prevented had Kennedy’s conduct in Vienna given Khrushchev a greater impression of strength and determination.
In 1973, when the United States and the Soviet Union were roughly equal in nuclear capability, Brezhnev demanded that the United States join the Soviet Union in sending troops into the Mideast during the Arab-Israeli war. This would have created a potentially explosive situation. And Brezhnev threatened that if we did not agree to joint action, he would send in Soviet forces unilaterally.
When we ordered a military alert Brezhnev backed down. The alert might not have had this effect had Brezhnev not concluded from his conversations with me in June of that year, and also from the strong actions we had taken to protect our interests in Vietnam in 1972, that I might back up my strong words with strong actions. He was not willing to take that risk.
In 1979 the Carter administration’s relatively mild reaction to previous Soviet moves may well have led Brezhnev to conclude that he could send the Red Army into Afghanistan without provoking a strong U.S. response.
Public statements that we will not let the Russians push us around are not effective. They dismiss these as bravado, primarily because they engage in that sort of bluster so much themselves. They must always have very serious questions about what a President will do. For example, we should not make statements that we will never launch a preemptive strike. Whether or not we would ever exercise that option, we should always leave open the possibility that in extreme circumstances we might.
The demonstrated will, nerve, and unpredictability of the President become even more important in a period when the Soviet Union moves from inferiority to superiority in nuclear arms. If the Soviets fear that the President might react strongly, they will be less likely to put him to the test. If they conclude that they can predict his response, and that it will be a weak one, they will test him. Then, if they turn out to be right, they will win. If they turn out to be wrong, they will have made the kind of miscalculation that could lead to a major conventional or even nuclear war. The lesson of history is that wars more often than not come from this kind of miscalculation.
The Uses of Secrecy
Secrecy is a sine qua non in the conduct of international relations, whether dealing with allies or with adversaries. Without privacy—and the assurance of privacy—there is little hope of accomplishing anything.
The freedom a leader feels to exchange information and ideas candidly with his allies is in direct ratio to the faith that he has in their ability to keep what he tells them confidential. American Presidents have generally had exceptionally open relationships with their British counterparts, and one of the reasons is that the British keep a confidence. I never knew of an occasion in which any of my private discussions with British leaders was leaked. The same has been true of some of our other allies. Unfortunately, it has not been true of all, and even where it has been true of personal talks between the heads of government, it has not always been true of discussions at other levels.
I was able to have very candid discussions with Charles de Gaulle when he was President of France, but only when we were alone, with just an interpreter present. It even mattered who the interpreter was. De Gaulle talked freely in the presence of his own personal interpreter, but not with the interpreter from our State Department, whom he did not know. However, when I brought my old friend General Vernon G. Walters, who not only is one of the world’s most skilled interpreters but also was personally known and trusted by de Gaulle, de Gaulle was delighted and again spoke freely.
Where we have not felt free to share critically important items of information with allies, the damage to our relationships has sometimes been severe. This has been true even where the fear of leaks was indirect, where we could not tell one without telling another.
The announcement on July 15, 1971, that I was going to visit China stunned Japan; it was described as a “Nixon shock.” The Japanese thought, quite reasonably, that as our principal ally in Asia they should at least have been informed that such a momentous policy shift was under way. They should have been, and in an ideal world they would have been. But if word of the move had leaked, it might have jeopardized the whole China initiative. Thus we could not risk informing any ally that might leak it, and if we informed one without informing others, and this became known subsequently, it would have been bitterly resented.
We can share particularly sensitive information with allies only when we have confidence that they will not leak it; conversely, they can share sensitive information with us only when they have confidence that we will not leak it.
Secrecy is particularly important in dealing with the leaders of communist countries. They are products of a system that values secrecy, which is why I could talk so candidly with the Chinese—they never leak. By the same token, they expect us to keep secrets. If we fail to do so, the chances for negotiating with them in any meaningful way will be substantially reduced and may be totally destroyed.
Unfortunately for the nation, breaches of security created especially difficult situations during my administration. The most dramatic of these came in June 1971, when the so-called Pentagon Papers were suddenly made public. These were 7,000 pages of classified documents relating to the Vietnam War, including material that was still sensitive not only for the United States but also for a number of our allies. They had been leaked to the New York Times months earlier. The Times went to extravagant lengths to keep an absolute lid of secrecy on the fact that it had them, until it was ready to spring them on us—without even a moment’s advance notice, and without giving any responsible official a chance to read them, much less to advise the Times on what parts might be particularly sensitive. I have always had great respect for the New York Times as one of the world’s finest newspapers, and I still do. But I considered this one of the grossest acts of journalistic irresponsibility I had encountered in a quarter century of public life. In his dissenting opinion in the Pentagon Papers case Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote of the Times’ failure to consult the government:
To me it is hardly believable that a newspaper long regarded as a great institution in American lives would fail to perform one of the basic and simple duties of every citizen with respect to the discovery or possession of stolen property or secret government documents. . . . This duty rests on taxi drivers, justices, and the New York Times.
The next month, on July 23, the morning before we were to present our formal, opening position at the SALT talks in Helsinki, the New York Times carried a front-page story detailing what was allegedly our fallback position.
These events took place just as Kissinger was making his first secret trip to Peking, the SALT talks were starting, and the war in Vietnam was at a critical juncture. By fall the CIA reported that we were in the midst of the worst outbreak of leaks in nearly twenty years, since 1953. Trying to conduct effective international relations in such an atmosphere, much less to lay the cornerstone for a durable structure of peace, was a nightmare and threatened to become an impossibility.
When I m
ade my trip to Peking in 1972 the Chinese leaders were particularly concerned about the possibility of leaks. In December 1971, during the war between India and Pakistan, columnist Jack Anderson published verbatim minutes of a high-level discussion of our policy with regard to the war. Referring to the Anderson leak, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai commented to me that “the records of three of your meetings were made public because all sorts of people were invited.” He was politely suggesting that he would not like to see the transcripts of our talks suffer the same fate. This was not a farfetched possibility. In the course of tracking down the Anderson leak we discovered that a memo of Kissinger’s conversation with Zhou during his first secret trip to Peking had been copied and passed along to others who, fortunately, had not made it public. But the danger remained. I sensed clearly that unless the Chinese were assured that our talks would be kept in confidence they would be hesitant about revealing how far they might be willing to go to reach an accommodation with us. I assured Zhou that where the fate of our two countries—and possibly the fate of the world—was involved, we would be able to talk in complete confidence. Only then were we able to make progress in our negotiations.
In retrospect I am sure that the opening to China in 1972 and the development of our relationship since could not have been achieved had there not been absolute secrecy both in setting up the trip to Peking and in the conduct of our talks there.
A nation unable to protect its own vital secrets will certainly not be trusted with another nation’s crucial information. As Cord Meyer has pointed out, “Even the most friendly ally must hesitate to cooperate with the United States if it has to fear exposure of its sources.” The Western alliance weakens as a result, with no member losing more than the United States.
“Freedom of information” has become a sacred cow. Secrecy is considered sinister and wrong. Yet common sense ought to tell us that publicity that leads to bad results is not necessarily good, and that secrecy that leads to good results is not necessarily bad. We need more effective legal sanctions to discourage harmful disclosures. Even more important, we must quit making national heroes out of those who illegally disclose top-secret information. Our Presidents want publicity, but above all, they want results. We should applaud rather than condemn them when they resist the insatiable demands of the media in order to do the job they were elected to do.
The “Black Arts”
The kinds and quality of intelligence information available to a President can be crucial to success or failure in his role as world leader. So, too, is the availability of means short of war to project American power or advance American interests in volatile and threatening situations—and this often means the use of covert action.
There has always been a strong ambivalence in American attitudes toward intelligence. When Americans do not feel threatened, they tend to regard such activities as immoral or un-American. When they do feel threatened, they wonder why we do not have better intelligence. During all our wars we built up excellent intelligence services, only to dismantle them as soon as the war ended. Today our leaders have to make almost instant decisions, often for extremely high stakes. If they have no warning of impending dangers, they will be far less likely to make the right decisions.
Espionage and covert operations are as old as mankind. Both have existed alongside the system of international law as long as there has been a system of international law. All nations, with the possible exception of some of our modern mini-states, have engaged in them; only the United States has adopted the curious doctrine that they should be performed in public. In Great Britain, where modern democracy began, even publishing the name of the head of the Intelligence Service can land a citizen in jail. Acts that Americans insist on protecting under the banner of freedom of speech would, in such other democracies as Sweden or Switzerland—neither of which bears the world responsibilities the United States does—result in long prison sentences.
In this country we seem to have evolved the strange doctrine that it is the duty of government to keep its secrets, and the equally sacred duty of the media to expose them. For the future we must find an accommodation between freedom of the press and the requirements of national survival in a threatened and uncertain world—in a way that enhances survival.
Failures of intelligence can be disastrous. In the 1960s and early 1970s, for eleven years in a row, the Central Intelligence Agency underestimated the number of missiles the Russians would deploy; at the same time the CIA also underestimated the totality of the Soviet strategic program effort and its ambitious goals. In 1976 the CIA estimates of Russian military spending for 1970-1975 were doubled overnight as errors were discovered and corrected. Throughout the critical period of the mid-1960s, when McNamara decided to curtail unilaterally U.S. nuclear programs and the Russians moved massively to catch up, and in the early 1970s, when the first concrete steps toward arms control were taken, American Presidents were being supplied by the CIA with figures on Russian military spending that were only half of what the agency later decided spending had been. Thanks in part to this intelligence blunder we will find ourselves looking down the nuclear barrel in the mid-1980s.
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The real question before the American people is this: Can we afford to stumble like a blind and deaf giant into the last twenty years of this century, until one day we face the alternative of surrender or total destruction? If we lack proper intelligence, we will, as former Marine Corps Commandant General David M. Shoup has said, “be in the ring blindfolded.”
There is a vast difference between the quantity and quality of information readily available from the closed Soviet society and from our open one. The Soviet military budget is announced in one figure and eight words, and the Soviets reveal nothing of the debates that produce that budget. If they published only the equivalent of the annual unclassified report of our Department of Defense, and if it were equally reliable, we would know far more than we do about Soviet military programs. Beyond this, congressional hearings multiply greatly the amount of useful information we give the Soviets free of charge, detailing not only the extent of opposition to particular arms programs but also the nature of the uncertainties in our defense posture. Soviet embassy personnel can sit in on those hearings; we have no such privileges in Moscow.
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We also depend on our intelligence agencies for covert, or hidden, operations that are meant to help one’s friends or make the task of one’s enemies more difficult. Here too Americans have had ambivalent feelings. Since the beginning of history almost every country has sought to influence events in other countries in ways favorable to its own interests. This is accepted practice. Countries tolerate propaganda from abroad through publications, radio broadcasts, and even television appearances by foreigners.
A fundamental purpose of every embassy in the world is to influence events in the host country in ways favorable to the country the embassy represents. Today the Soviet Union subsidizes and controls local Communist parties all over the world, which give Moscow an often powerful means of exercising pressure within other countries.
Even more serious have been the arms, training, and supplies of all kinds that the Soviet Union regularly sends to support so-called people’s wars of liberation, a euphemism for the establishment of pro-Soviet control of a country. To the Soviets, intervening in another country to bring about the triumph of their friends is a holy duty. We must have the means to help our friends in other countries where their freedom is under attack and their survival is threatened.
Here again, the issue is not the simple moralistic one, “Is it right to interfere in the internal affairs of another country?” Rather, it is whether the United States will have the ability to help its friends in another country resist an armed threat to their freedom by means short of intervening with our armed forces. Without such means, we would have no options between a diplomatic protest and the direct use of our armed forces. Our friends must not be left with the assumption that rega
rdless of what the enemies of freedom may do, we shall offer them no help. Improved covert capabilities could also help in combating some forms of terrorism, and might give us additional options in case the rights of the United States and its citizens are again flagrantly violated as they were in the hostage seizure in Iran.
Most covert actions are not armed actions. Many times they consist only of helping a democratic newspaper to survive economic action against it, support for cultural activities, or paying the fares of young people to some world gathering so that they can speak out for freedom.
The Soviets suffer no qualms about the morality of their actions. They use the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as an instrument for subversion, then deny government responsibility, even though the Communist Party and the Soviet government are virtually one and the same. We do not have that option. But what we can do is to give covert support to indigenous political organizations that support our position and oppose a communist takeover.
The scope for covert action in peacetime is more restricted than it is in wartime, the need for it is not so unambiguous, but the payoffs may be just as large. Unless we restore the covert capabilities of the CIA we are going to get rolled by the Soviets in country after country. The proportion of the CIA’s budget that goes for covert actions has fallen from over 50 percent to less than 5 percent. In an effort to clean up abuses—and alleged abuses—we have come close to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The Freedom of Information Act lets anyone—including enemy intelligence agents—rummage through CIA and FBI files at taxpayer expense. According to CIA officials, the agency has spent more man-hours filling Freedom of Information requests than “on any one of several areas of key intelligence interest.” In addition, opening these files has a chilling effect on those who would be ready to risk their lives and their reputations to help the United States in sensitive areas or operations. With the CIA reporting its covert activities to eight separate committees whose members comprise one third of Congress, as well as the staff members, we might as well send out news releases to our opponents. This requirement restricts the CIA, as Senator Daniel P. Moynihan has put it, to “doing research that might as well be done in the Library of Congress.” Foreign intelligence agencies and individual agents are no longer willing to risk exposure by cooperating with the CIA—and our operations are crippled. The “black arts” should, as the London Economist puts it, “be restored to dimmer light, or to darkness, where they can thrive.”
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