THE MYTH OF THE “ROGUE ELEPHANT”
While the most serious or persistent of the myths revolving around covert action are discussed in chapter two, it is appropriate here to highlight the most prevalent misconception about covert action: namely, that covert action is initiated in isolation by the CIA and executed without the knowledge of either the White House or Congress. Stated more vividly, the Agency is asserted to be an independent actor acting out of control, without oversight by either branch of government, a “rogue elephant,” in the (too) oft-repeated words of Senator Frank Church. At the time of this statement, Church was heading a senatorial investigation of the Agency, of which he was already a voluble critic; this particular criticism was uttered by Church at a well-attended press conference and has since been cited by a multitude of critics as evidence of Agency perfidy. It is noteworthy that Church was also a candidate for the presidency, engendering an obvious political connotation to the hearings. Unfortunately, the senator’s final conclusion, included in his committee’s written report but pointedly not broadcast to members of the media, is rarely mentioned. The CIA, Church determined, was not out of control but rather acted at the express personal command of the president. He could have added in regard to covert action—indeed, he was obligated to add, if he was concerned about airing the full truth—that the CIA had acted at presidential order even when Agency officers thought the program to be impossible, undesirable, or unwise.
Two interrelated myths allege that the CIA is enamored of covert action programs and that covert action constitutes a major portion of the Agency’s budget and mission. Nothing could be further from reality. For the most part Agency officers in the DO, who manage the covert action programs, have always shied away from this side of the business as quickly as a pony shies from a rattlesnake. While it was bad enough that covert action was never career enhancing in the DO, there was an even more problematic drawback to these programs: they were just not exciting enough to draw the average street case officer. Covert action operations involving propaganda and political action were considered too “intellectual” by many field case officers, with far too much writing and far too little street work.
As for budgetary figures, one of the harsher critics (writing a decade ago) estimated that a reported $3.5 billion CIA budget was “on the far side of conservative,” implying that it was much greater. He would be chagrined to know that his figure—wherever he found it—is much more accurate than he imagined.5
THERE IS SUCCESS, AND THEN
THERE IS SUCCESS . . .
As this work does not concern itself much with the theoretical, it delves even less into the philosophical. Yet there is one question, one notion, that begs serious consideration: What, exactly, constitutes “success” in a program? One obvious response is that a successful outcome is one in which foreign policy objectives sought by the president are obtained. Perhaps the most successful covert action program regardless of standard of measure was the support of the Polish labor organization Solidarity during the 1980s and related operations to deter Soviet intervention in Poland, which eventually led to political reforms there. The Reagan administration’s conviction that a democratic Poland would lead to a free Eastern Europe must be viewed as one of the most successful foreign policies ever, a combination of skillful overt diplomacy and methodical, resourceful, and imaginative covert action. The almost complete omission of this story in the writings of critics of covert action and the CIA is telling. Other clear successes of CIA covert action were the creation and use of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, assistance to Western European trade unions and political parties to counter Soviet-supported internal political parties, the publication and infiltration of books and magazines behind the Iron Curtin, the clandestine exfiltration of Chinese dissidents after the Tiananmen Square massacre, and the capture of major international terrorists like “Carlos” Che Guevara, and Abimael Guzman.6 Additional successes such as the destruction of several of the world’s largest and deadliest narcotics cartels and the disruption or prevention of literally hundred of acts of terrorism through the 1980s and 1990s underscore the value of sound covert action programs to policy success.
A second, more parochial definition of success is having a program that is well managed from an operational standpoint—with no compromises, no tradecraft errors—regardless of whether or not the policy objectives are obtained. Others might deem an outcome successful only after observing the long-term results after a period of years. For example, the Iran and Guatemala programs, while at first seemingly successful, to many did not appear to be so twenty years later. Former staff director of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) Mark Lowenthal wonders, in addition, whether the “human costs” of a program should be considered as a measure of success and refrains from placing time limits on the evaluation. (For example, was Guatemala an unmitigated success regardless of what occurred during the next thirty years, or did it become less so as the death toll mounted over the decades?)7
Intelligence expert Dr. Angelo Codevilla points to one other measure of success: Has covert action actually made a significant difference in shape, nature, or condition of the world? He acknowledges that “American covert action has been perhaps the most important influence in the world since 1945,” but he also asserts that “there is no evidence that, absent American covert action, the important conflicts of the 1940s and early 1950s, never mind those in subsequent years, would have turned out differently.” He argues that many of the indigenous peoples who became enmeshed with CIA programs thusly exposed themselves to their enemies and suffered for it once the Americans left. Additionally, he asserts that covert action programs “fostered the growth of political parties and elites” around the globe “who do not wish American well.”8
There is much truth to what Codevilla states, at least when the covert action programs considered are paramilitary programs. But when reviewing political action programs, the conclusions are arguably different, if for no other reason than there is no way of knowing what would have transpired had there been no American intervention. Would Italian democracy have been undermined in the 1940s and 1950s by Communist subversion if there had been no CIA counter-program? No one knows for certain, of course, and it is quite possible—even probable—that the only difference the political action operation made was to give the non-Communists a larger margin of victory. But what would have been the consequences not only for Italy but also for other European democracies with large Communist parties, such as France, had the Italian Communists in fact won either a majority or sizeable plurality? Could the United States as well as pro-democratic forces in Italy and throughout Europe have risked a Communist victory? If the United States had not supported a conservative Japanese party in the 1950s and 1960s, would a leftist government have evicted American military forces from that country? If so, what would that have meant for our defense posture in the Far East? Maybe nothing, but then again, maybe a great deal. Is that a risk the United States would or should have taken?
And consider Iran without the American intervention: would internal unrest under Mossadegh have become sufficiently severe due to the economic consequences of Britain’s oil boycott against Iran to have invited Soviet intervention in Iranian politics, if not the reoccupation of Iranian territory (which we know the Soviets desperately desired)? If the latter had occurred, what would the United States have done then? In 1952 Truman signed NSC-136 and NSC-136/1, which stated as a matter of policy that a Soviet invasion of Iran would be cause for war. Would the United States have gone to war in such an event, or would it have accepted Soviet political or military domination of Iran? In that case, would Iraq still have allied itself with the Soviet Union later in that decade, and if so, what would that have meant for the region? Most important, perhaps, what of the American intelligence sites located in Iran that enabled the United States first to monitor developments of the Soviet Strategic Missile Forces and then later to validate Soviet compliance w
ith arms limitations treaties? What difference would it have made to President Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis, and to President Nixon’s negotiations with the Soviets on the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty (SALT) if those intelligence sites and the information derived from them had not existed?
It is, one concludes, easier to argue that covert action probably has not made a difference to the world when the scope of the argument is limited to those “small wars of liberation” and similar conflicts. It is harder to make that same argument when political action programs are considered, depending on what the program was and its results. This is especially so since, as discussed, it is impossible to know how a country or region and U.S. policy toward it would have developed differently had the changes wrought by covert action not occurred. This is one reason why covert action has been and remains so controversial.
ONE
The Role of Covert Action in
Intelligence and Foreign Policy
Overt economic or military aid is sometimes enough to achieve our goals. Only a direct military intervention can do so in others. But between the two lies a vast area where the United States must be able to undertake covert actions. Without this capability, we will be unable to protect important U.S. interests.1
President Richard M. Nixon
There are three disciplines, or missions, inherent within the intelligence profession, which are separated by purpose and methodology: intelligence collection and analysis, counterintelligence/counterespionage, and covert action. To better understand the unique role of covert action within the intelligence constellation, it is useful first to define the other two disciplines, each of which possesses certain characteristics both individual and shared. With this comparison clearly in mind, the reader will more easily see how and why the general discipline of covert action is so different from the other two. A later chapter will detail the various types of operations and missions within the covert action discipline itself.
The first discipline is that of intelligence collection and analysis. Collection consists of the clandestine utilization of human or technical sources to gather privileged information that the adversary wishes to keep secret, and which cannot be acquired any other way (referred to colloquially as FI, for foreign intelligence, or as PI, for positive intelligence). The immediate resulting product, whether from one clandestine agent meeting, one satellite photograph, or one conversation acquired over a tapped telephone line, is referred to as “raw” intelligence—an unevaluated report from a single source, lacking cogent analysis as to content and circumstances, cross-checking with other information, corroboration with material from other sources, etc.
When raw intelligence, regardless of source, is melded with intelligence from multiple sources—satellite imagery, signals, or electronic intelligence; human assets; or “open source” materials—and evaluated in its totality by skilled analysts, the product is referred to as “finished” intelligence. It’s calculated that, on average, only about 8 percent of the material in finished intelligence is acquired clandestinely by human sources, while 12 percent is acquired through various clandestine technical methods. The remaining 80 percent of the finished product is from “open sources”—material available to anyone that may be found in the published reports of foreign governments, academic or scientific journals, research papers or findings, technical manuals and data, industry literature, geographic and topographic data, speeches or televised statements of foreign leaders, media reporting on foreign government or business affairs, and so forth. The finished intelligence report or assessment, often referred to as “strategic intelligence,” is then delivered to policymakers, including the president.2 Interestingly, in the last decade multisource analysis has also been employed increasingly to generate “tactical intelligence” useful to operations officers in devising surveillance detection routes, selecting meeting sites, discerning patterns of the opposition (such as foreign intelligence or security services, terrorist groups, etc.), and a host of other operational support activities.
Counterintelligence/counterespionage (CI/CE) is the second intelligence discipline. CI is the employment of clandestine operations, including those for the recruitment of hostile intelligence officers, to collect information that can then be used to neutralize the opposition’s own collection operations. CE is intended to thwart the acquisition of secrets by hostile intelligence services. CI/CE took an interesting twist in the 1980s as the CIA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) found that narcotics cartels and terrorist organizations were using many of the same defensive measures that intelligence and security services do. Specifically, these criminal organizations were employing such operational security skills as surveillance detection methodology, penetrating the “opposition” (e.g., bribing law enforcement or judicial officials) to learn what police forces knew and to acquire tip-offs of impending raids, communications security, safe houses, cut-outs, accommodation addresses, and the like. As a result, a new breed of CI officers emerged who specialized not in foreign intelligence or security services but in international criminal organizations.
An additional facet of this “new CI” was the movement of monies by narcotics traffickers and terrorist groups. Narco-traffickers are in business to generate profits, and terrorists need money to finance their activities. Thus the narcotics cartels must launder funds earned from drug sales, while the terrorist groups must generate income from legitimate front companies as well as illegal activities (narcotics, theft, etc.) and then move those funds to operational and support elements. As with the Watergate scandal—“Deep Throat” urging Woodward and Bernstein to “follow the money”—operations officers and intelligence analysts found that following the money of traffickers and terrorists served both FI and CI purposes in attacking the organizations and preventing terrorist attacks. Now, collecting intelligence from banking circles and becoming knowledgeable in such arcane areas as international financial procedures, offshore accounts, and the tricks of money laundering are as much a part of a CI officer’s job as are wiretaps and surveillance.
Both intelligence collection and counterintelligence share many operational techniques and tools and are, of necessity, purely clandestine in nature. By this, one means that the actual operations, their participants, and their results are intended to be, and to remain, hidden from view.
THE THIRD DISCIPLINE
It is the third intelligence discipline, however, that interests us here—an intelligence mission separate and distinct from the others. While opinions differ on the “correct” definition of covert action, in simplest terms covert action is influence. It is a program of multiple, subordinate, coordinated, interlocking intelligence operations, usually managed over a long period of time, intended to influence a target audience to do something or to refrain from doing something, or to influence opinion (e.g., of the general public, business elites, or political or military leadership). At times, individuals, as opposed to sovereign national governments, are worthy targets of a covert action program simply because they are the government. One needed only to influence Hitler, Stalin, or Saddam Hussein to move the entire government. Covert action programs may likewise be initiated to influence organizations such as terrorist groups or narcotics cartels, or, again, individuals in the group (to induce defections, for example).3
Influence operations may take place in peacetime, in that twilight period between peace and hostility known to the military as “preparation of the battlefield,” or in actual war. For the CIA, however, the vast majority of covert action operations are peacetime missions, conducted against either hostile audiences who stand to hinder or hurt American foreign policy interests or, more rarely, against neutral or friendly audiences who might be influenced to support our policy interests. The resultant acts are, perforce, overt and apparent in nature, for without a visible act no audience could be influenced or affected. The covert aspect is that the “sponsor” (i.e., the government behind th
e program) remains hidden, leaving observers to believe that the actors are indigenous citizens acting entirely of their own volition in events that are local in origin.
LEGAL CHARACTERIZATIONS
OF COVERT ACTION
President Ronald W. Reagan articulated in Executive Order 12333 (1981) the first official definition or explanation for covert action. Still in effect today (2003), it was eventually to serve as a guide for future congressional legislation. EO 12333 states in part that covert action is:
special activities conducted in support of national foreign policy objectives abroad which are planned and executed so that the role of the United States Government is not apparent or acknowledged publicly, and functions in support of such activities, but which are not intended to influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies, or media and do not include diplomatic activities or the collection or production of intelligence and related support functions.4
First, the Order makes it clear that “[c]overt activity is not fundamentally an intelligence activity; rather, it is a foreign policy option” that the CIA executes only after the White House initiates it.5 Traditional intelligence missions (i.e., FI and CI) and all diplomatic activities are excluded from the covert action rubric, meaning that these activities may be conducted under established routine legislative and executive authorities, and require no special authorization—the Presidential Finding—that has been a sine qua non for covert action programs since 1974. Second, the order directs the CIA to keep all elements of any covert action program focused overseas and beyond the ken of American citizens and media. (The inadvertent—and decidedly unwelcome—replay of foreign-targeted propaganda in American media is known in the parlance as “blowback.”) EO 12333 also accomplishes a third, signal task: it explicitly and unambiguously assigns all peacetime covert action missions to the CIA, unless the president specifically assigns another agency to do so. To date, no chief executive has ever officially or legally given a peacetime covert action assignment to any U.S. government agency other than the CIA.
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