EXECUTIVE SECRETS
EXECUTIVE
SECRETS
COVERT ACTION AND THE PRESIDENCY
WILLIAM J. DAUGHERTY
Foreword by
MARK BOWDEN
Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant
from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Copyright © 2004 by The University Press of Kentucky
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Daugherty, William J., 1947–
Executive secrets : covert action and the presidency / William J. Daugherty.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8131-2334-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. United States. Central Intelligence Agency. 2. Intelligence service—United States—History—20th century. 3. Presidents—United States—History—20th century. 4. United States—Foreign relations—1945–1989. 5. United States—Foreign relations—1989– 6. Espionage—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.
JK468.I6D38 2004
327.1273—dc22
2004006073
This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting
the requirements of the American National Standard
for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Member of the Association of
American University Presses
This material has been reviewed by the CIA. That review neither constitutes CIA authentication of information nor implies CIA endorsement of the author’s views.
FOR SUSAN
CONTENTS
Foreword by Mark Bowden
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
ONE
The Role of Covert Action in Intelligence and Foreign Policy
TWO
The “Romances” of Covert Action
THREE
Covert Action Policy and Pitfalls
FOUR
The Military and Peacetime Covert Action
FIVE
The Discipline of Covert Action
SIX
Approval and Review of Covert Action
Programs in the Modern Era
SEVEN
Harry S Truman
EIGHT
Dwight D. Eisenhower
NINE
John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson
TEN
Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford
ELEVEN
Jimmy Carter
TWELVE
Ronald W. Reagan
THIRTEEN
George H.W. Bush and William J. Clinton
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
FOREWORD
Those of us who have lived long enough ought to be able to summon a sense of humor regarding the country’s current impatience with the quality of its Central Intelligence Agency. Ever since the Islamo-facist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, the nation’s attitude toward its intelligence community has been one of disappointment, if not scorn. Why didn’t we know? Why hadn’t we acted more aggressively to prevent the attacks? Why were we so unprepared to respond? Why did we lack the language skills, contacts, influence, and ability to infiltrate the deadly cells of our enemy? Just yesterday (as I write this in April 2004) George Tenet, the current besieged CIA director, provoked gasps of disbelief by stating that it will take five years for the Agency to build a global human intelligence network suitable for combating ongoing terrorist threats.
I can remember a time when the idea of expanding the CIA’s reach and power would have provoked outrage. In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate and the revelations that various presidents have spied on the American people, a venerable posse was formed that damn near lynched the entire intelligence community. The very idea of spying and acting covertly became disreputable. Conspiratorialists found evidence of CIA meddling under every rock. For most of my adult life, any mention of the spy Agency has prompted suspicion of unlawful meddling, dirty tricks, scandal, and a kind of bullet-headed redneck American approach to foreign policy.
At its height, hatred and distrust of the CIA is wildly illogical. Critics at once assault the CIA for incompetence and omnipotence. It is an Agency made up of fools who somehow manage to deviously manipulate events in every corner of the globe. You would think that it would be one or the other. I recently interviewed a fundamentalist “scholar” in Tehran who argued—with a straight face and a strong voice—that the CIA was responsible for installing and preserving the Shah, for engineering his overthrow and secretly planning his return, for propping up the provisional government that followed the coup, and for fomenting the national unrest that ultimately undermined and toppled it. And, oh yes, it was the CIA that secretly engineered the takeover of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979, which resulted in fifty-two Americans being held hostage for more than a year.
“Aren’t some of these things mutually contradictory?” I asked. “For instance, why would the CIA wish to foment trouble for a provisional government it was secretly supporting?”
The scholar smiled sweetly. It was necessary, he said, to view the world through the clear lens of Islam to see the logic of these things.
“The CIA, they just enjoy making trouble for us,” he explained.
William Daugherty has more than a passing interest in that last story in particular. As a CIA officer, he was one of those held hostage in Iran during those fourteen months. Before and after that difficult period, his one reluctant turn in the national spotlight, he served a long and distinguished career in the Agency. With this book, he has done us all a tremendous service by attempting to rescue the Agency from the myths, both well-meaning and malevolent, that shape our understanding of it. The CIA is neither an allseeing, omnipotent secret force, nor is it the blundering “rogue elephant” that was once deplored by the late senator Frank Church.
The CIA is an extremely useful, necessary tool of foreign policy and national defense in a very complex and dangerous world. The collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the cold war, by eliminating the risk of all-out nuclear war, has greatly diminished the level of danger we all face in our lives. But the resulting complexity of world affairs and the unleashing of unpredictable forces constrained by that half-century standoff have made the world feel a lot more dangerous and have made defending ourselves, in some ways, more difficult. National defense no longer rests on a cornerstone of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) and nuclear warheads; it rests on our ability to know, to understand, to predict, and—when the moment is right—to act. In the twenty-first century, intelligence needs to become as high a priority as our nuclear arsenal used to be. We are fighting enemies without a state, without an army or physical infrastructure, without even a clearly defined hierarchy of command. We need the best
global human intelligence network ever created, and we need it yesterday. We need the capability of acting in the world with an artful subtlety that matches our unparalleled brute force. Now more than ever, we need a healthy, effective CIA.
America has always had mixed feelings about covert action. It runs counter to our national ideals of openness and democracy. But from the first years of our nation, from George Washington forward, we have recognized that survival in a dangerous world requires it. Every president in our history has benefited from the ability to exert influence quietly, to throw the weight of American interest on the scale without announcing it. There are times when open American involvement can defeat a very worthy goal. Daugherty’s book provides examples of successful covert operations in the recent past. It is a useful primer to the quiet side of modern American history, from efforts to undermine the growing influence of communist political parties in Western Europe to the quiet support for the Solidarity movement in Poland.
The CIA has made mistakes, but not so many as its critics allege. Some of the most famous “sins” of the Agency are commonly presented with selective hindsight and vigorous supposition. Every action taken has consequences that cannot be foreseen—toppling Mossadeq in Iran led eventually to the Ayatollah Khomeini, and arming the mujahadeen in Afghanistan lead to Al Qaeda. But as Daugherty points out, “Presidents are not clairvoyant . . . they act on what they perceive to be the best interests for the country and the world at that time and are only able to hope that history will prove them wise.” Leaving Mossadeq alone in 1953 might have led to the flowering of democracy in Iran, or it might also have led to a growing communist influence, to the loss of sensitive monitoring bases along the Iran-Soviet border (needed to enforce SALT II), to a Soviet invasion, or even to a world war. Such possibilities, easily dismissed today but feared at the time, may have been more catastrophic than the Mullah-ocracy that has smothered freedom in Iran for a quarter of a century. Likewise, failing to help Islamic fighters against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 might have stunted the growth of Islamo-facist terrorism, but it might also have prolonged the power and influence of the Soviet state. I’ll take the threat of an occasional terrorist attack over the threat of an all-out nuclear exchange any time.
The truth is, no one can see into the future, and no one can say how history would have turned out if our nation had acted differently. In the majority of cases, as Daugherty points out, covert action has been undramatic, successful, and clearly aligned with our national values. These are not the kind of stories that make headlines, and even the stories that are newsworthy are rarely discovered and told. This book ought to dispel some of the fog that obscures our understanding of the CIA and that prompts the gigantic mood swings in our attitude toward intelligence gathering and covert actions.
We Americans are exceptionally vulnerable to spying and terrorism, but we are also exceptionally capable of swimming in those waters. We are an amalgam of every culture, every language, every religion, and every race on the planet. We are masters of telecommunications. We are rich, smart, ingenious, and brave. We are a nation founded on universal ideals that continue to inspire most of humanity. We ought to be able to penetrate, eavesdrop, analyze, and sway any state or group on this planet. Let’s get to it.
Mark Bowden
Author of Black Hawk Down:
A Story of Modern War
PREFACE
In discharging his constitutional responsibility for the conduct of foreign relations and for ensuring the security of the United States, the President may find it necessary that activities conducted in support of national foreign policy objectives abroad be planned and executed so that the role of the United States government is not apparent or acknowledged publicly.
National Security Decision Directive-286 (1987)1
Before an author writes yet another book on a subject that has already seen numerous works in print, there ought to be some justification for it. What new perspective will be explored? What new information will be shared with the reader? If the answer is little or none, pen should probably not be put to paper in the first place. Books on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in general, as well as exposés of the Agency’s controversial covert action programs in particular, are numerous and readily available to interested readers. Why, then, this volume?
The primary objective is to show definitively that covert action programs managed by the CIA since its inception in 1947 have been done so at the express direction of the presidents of the United States. Many Americans are reluctant to believe that operations they may personally find objectionable for whatever reason were in fact explicit presidential policy. These skeptics would much rather cling to the myth that the CIA runs a rogue foreign policy beyond the ken and control of the man elected to be a moral, as well as political, leader of the nation. The reluctance to accept the truth may also lie partly in the unease that citizens in liberal democracies feel over hidden policies and governmental action, preferring instead to see “overt influences” as the engine of foreign policy. Regardless of motive, willful disregard of the truth produces a distorted history of our country’s role in the world, a situation that all concerned Americans should deplore.2
It certainly isn’t as though the nature of presidential authority over the CIA and covert action programs is so obscure or hidden in secrecy that the truth is unknowable. The multiple congressional investigations of the 1970s and 1980s “should have dispelled any notion that there was no [presidential] control over covert action, but they did not.”3 Indeed, these investigations have conclusively proven that the CIA acted well within the general guidelines established by the president and the National Security Council (NSC), particularly with the most controversial activities and reversals of foreign governments—even with regard to assassination plots. Additionally, a sizeable body of declassified materials and other documentary evidence now available in open sources both confirms and reinforces the results of the congressional investigations. But there still remain not only skeptics but unrelenting critics who continue to assert—harshly, without equivocation, and despite the objective evidence—that the CIA is a body independent of the president’s control, inevitably acting in ways inimical to the interests of the United States.
Why should the unceasing harping and misrepresentations, deliberate or otherwise, put forth by critics matter? They matter greatly because the continual repetition of erroneous or misleading material, when treated as immutable fact, precludes honest answers and a fulsome understanding about how and why signal events in our nation’s life occurred, and what these events meant to our national interest.4
They matter, too, because the Soviet Union and its foreign intelligence service, the Komitet Gozudarstevennoye Bezopasnosti (KGB), waged for four decades a relentless disinformation program against the United States and the West to undermine democratic ideals and the United States’s credibility as the leader of the Free World; to discredit democratic institutions; and to promote the ideology and objectives of Communism—a decadent political system responsible for the cruel deaths of perhaps as many as one hundred million people worldwide, wherever it took root, between 1917 and 1991. The most successful of these programs (called “active measures” by the Soviets) include fabricated assertions that the CIA participated in John F. Kennedy’s assassination; that orphans in Third World countries were being used as sources of body parts for children of wealthy Americans needing transplants; that the United States was behind the assassination of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi; and that the AIDS virus was created in U.S. laboratories for use against Third World populations. The KGB’s campaign of lies, deceits, and calumnies ultimately failed in its strategic objectives, but these and other allegations, which served to make America the enemy and placed blame on America for the ills of the world, still resonate in the Third World and within those who cannot abide constitutional democracies. To the extent that Soviet disinformation has generated a mistrust in the American government
by its own citizens and created circumstances in which these citizens hold no hesitation in believing the worst about their own country, however, the KGB can indeed claim some measure of success. One result of this willingness to view the government’s actions in a negative light is that “Americans have a distorted view of covert action” as a legitimate tool of statecraft. A more serious issue is that this “distorted view” causes Americans to question their government’s activities and purposes more than is merited.5
A second objective is to present a cogent (but, I hope, a not too pedagogical) explanation of what covert action is and, as important, what it isn’t. Individuals who presume to sit in judgment of sensitive intelligence operations and those who conduct these programs should do so on an informed basis. This is especially the case when the self-proclaimed judges do so before a national audience. It’s not important whether they agree with the utility of covert action or even whether they like it, but out of respect for simple fairness and accuracy the critics should at least understand what it is they are critiquing. This is not an unreasonable demand, for there is already a plethora of erroneous material on covert action policies, programs, and methodology in the public domain, and no justification to add to it. Yet, as this work will show, there are opponents of covert action, both in and out of government, who are nonetheless unable to define covert action, outline its limits, or identify occasions when it might be appropriately and favorably used. Even less do these carpers seem aware that the history of the United States was greatly affected by covert actions undertaken by American icons such as Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. Likewise, it seems that few can name a successful covert action program (should they actually seek to find one), although the successes are more numerous than realized and the failures fewer than usually asserted.
Third, an accurate historical record of post–World War II foreign policy demands the inclusion of covert action operations, and so those writing the histories should be able to identify which presidents were successful in using covert action and which weren’t. Several chief executives relied on covert action as a mainstay of their foreign policy programs—among them Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Reagan, with varying degrees of success—and full comprehension of American foreign policy must recognize the contributions of covert action. During these administrations, CIA covert action contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war nuclear nightmare, while enabling millions of oppressed ethnic and religious minorities to sustain their cultural identities under Soviet domination through means such as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the publication of written materials for infiltration behind the Iron Curtain. There was also assistance to Western European trade unions and political parties to counter Soviet-supported political parties, as well as the extensive publication of literary and political journals, and sponsorship of dozens of conferences to undermine the supposed attractions of the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s hard to imagine any American being upset over these actions of the CIA, which were undertaken in response to the policies and directives of the president of the United States.
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