As noted earlier, the most pervasive myth is that of the “rogue elephant”; and as such, it is appropriate to begin with that point: The CIA initiates and executes covert action programs according to its own agenda, without the president’s knowledge or approval, and often at cross-purposes to the president’s own foreign policy. This allegation is the most damaging and misleading of the romances, especially when discussing covert action programs after 1974. To be sure, there was an era extending from Presidents Truman to Ford in which the CIA was allowed by the president and National Security Council (NSC) to initiate and run low-level, low-cost, low-risk covert action programs as long as they were in line with established foreign policy. However, major programs—which were defined not only by cost or scope, but also by potential political consequences for the president if compromised—were closely supervised by the presidents and their most trusted aides. An exception was John F. Kennedy’s lack of close oversight of Operation ZAPATA, the Bay of Pigs, a lesson that was not lost on him and his successors.
The truth of the matter, though unacknowledged by critics, is that federal law has mandated since 1974, three decades now, that the president personally approve every covert action program and report it to Congress within forty-eight hours through a document that is known as a Presidential Finding. Even if there were not an abundance of evidence to support this basic fact—which there is, as will become clear in this work—one should consider this telling point: given the enormous amount of damage a failed or ill-advised covert action program can bring to a president’s doorstep, in terms of domestic politics and international relations, no serious observer of government can reasonably conclude or believe that a modern chief executive would allow for one minute any organization, or officers within that organization, to conduct its own foreign policy totally independent from White House control. Anyone who has worked at the mid- or senior levels in Washington’s foreign policy/national security arena has seen and understands just how jealously protective policymakers are of their prerogatives, and how unwilling they are to let others put their policies and political futures in jeopardy. Moreover, there is absolutely no record of any modern president’s willingness to accept such a situation—indeed, just the opposite has been the case.
The persistent belief that the CIA runs covert action programs without control or oversight as though it is a “rogue elephant” in foreign policy has its origins in a public statement by a senator who was by no means a fan of the Agency. During the congressional investigations of 1976 the Agency was freely accused, in the Capitol and in the media, of secretly pursuing its own policies outside the control of either of the political branches of government. The Agency was, charged Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho), a “rogue elephant.” The claim was an attention-grabbing sound bite that has lived on as the sacred shibboleth of all who view the Agency with a jaundiced eye. While heading the Senate investigation of the Agency, Church tossed this statement out at a highly publicized and well-attended press conference held early in the life of the committee, long before it had completed its investigation. Clearly, Church came to the committee chair having already prejudged the Agency as a source of governmental misconduct.
Yet when the investigators wrote their report after all the evidence was in and all the witnesses were heard, the official conclusion was just the opposite: the Church Committee had definitively determined that the CIA was not, and never had been, out of control. Indeed, the committee provided indisputable evidence that the Agency had in all events acted at the express personal command of the president. Regrettably, the senator’s acknowledgment of this fact was buried in the committee’s written report and pointedly omitted from any public statement to the media. But the damage was done: the idea of the “rogue elephant” resonates to this day in the public’s mind.3
As mentioned above, the simple fact is that while presidents have at times disingenuously denied responsibility for failed or otherwise controversial covert action programs, not one president has ever accused the CIA of acting independently or of having its own secret agenda. Bolstering this point is the fact that the two presidents who were the most critical of the CIA and the most philosophically and morally opposed to covert action—Carter and Clinton—not only continued covert action programs they inherited but also initiated new programs while in office. The programs Carter established in the last eighteen months of his presidency served as the basis for many of Ronald Reagan’s thirty-plus covert action programs, including the controversial Central American programs, although Carter rarely receives credit (or blame). It only stands to reason that if presidents of such strong character as Eisenhower, Johnson, and Nixon—or those who were as morally opposed to covert action prior to assuming office as were Carter and Clinton—ever found the CIA acting independently, they would not have hesitated to pillory the Agency or even to call for its dismantlement.
As a corollary, Agency detractors also take issue with activities of the Agency officers, alleging or implying that these intelligence professionals act on their own volition. Critics condemn CIA officers for having “propped up cruel dictators” or for “collaborating with the most degenerate governments in the Third World.”4 They seek to leave the impression that the CIA opted, through the making of its own policies, to deal with these odious governments, and that Agency officers doing so were engaged in immoral activities to the detriment of the United States. But invariably these condemnations omit reference to the Agency’s having been obliged to pursue these relationships by the direct order of the president of the United States (as recorded, since 1974, in Presidential Findings).
Also missing is any acknowledgment that the Departments of State and Defense, the Agency for International Development, and the Departments of Commerce and Agriculture were likewise directed by the president to maintain and support these governments in fulfillment of established U.S. foreign policy. Nor should it be forgotten that almost all of these policies were carried out by both Republican and Democratic presidents. Moreover, these criticisms fail to point out that the vast majority of American officials, especially including CIA officers, were as disgusted with the behavior of these regimes as the critics themselves.5 Nor is there, within the critical arguments, ever any mention of compelling national security issues at the heart of the United States’s relationships with these unsavory regimes. One example was Iran, where vital intelligence listening sites eavesdropped on the Soviet missile test ranges to collect critical intelligence on the performance characteristics of various Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles, and, later, to verify Soviet compliance (or lack thereof) with arms reduction treaties. Finally, the critics ignore—indeed, deny—the intensive and extensive congressional oversight and approval of these relationships that have existed since the early 1970s.6
One telling anecdote demonstrates that even highly educated, senior officials within a presidential administration do not understand or realize that covert action programs are truly the president’s. In the Clinton years, there was a fairly senior official who was both a lawyer and Rhodes Scholar and at the time serving, as he would extol, as “counselor” to one of the administration’s highest officials. This individual attended most interagency meetings on covert action programs as a representative of his cabinet-level superior. During one White House meeting in which a particular covert action program of very limited scope and cost was soundly disparaged by CIA and State Department officers, this individual questioned why the CIA was running the program when it was obvious that its CIA managers believed it to be ineffectual and worthless. His surprise was genuine after it was pointed out to him that the program existed because, and only because, the president of the United States directed that it be done. He had participated at interagency meetings on covert action for months and still had not realized that it was not the CIA but the president who decided what programs to run.7 (This individual later went on to an assistant secretary position at the Department of State.)
But it is not only
the presidents who know of and embrace covert action: Congress also is a willing partner in this element of foreign policy. This fact leads to the second most pervasive romance: Covert action programs are not subject to congressional oversight. This was strictly the case between 1804 and 1974, from Thomas Jefferson’s administration through Gerald Ford’s. In the early post–World War II era, members of Congress expressly wished not to be informed of these programs (see chapter 6). But for three decades now the president has been required to report every covert action program, without exception, to Congress and to provide frequent, detailed briefings to the intelligence oversight committees—the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). This requirement has been in place for so long that there is no excuse for critics not to know of it. One director of central intelligence (DCI) has stated with authority that “the CIA receives more oversight from the Congress than any other agency in the federal government.”8 But it’s much more than mere routine monitoring by Congress: “In no other country—including the parliamentary democracies of Western Europe—has intelligence been subject to so much investigation and review by the legislative branch as it has been in the United States.”9 The ink on the 1974 legislation that mandated congressional knowledge and oversight of all covert action programs, the Hughes-Ryan Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (chapter 6), was hardly dry before the DCI at the time, William E. Colby, confirmed that in just the first three months of 1975 CIA officials had already testified about covert action before eighteen congressional committees on twenty-eight different occasions. The intensity of congressional oversight is derived from “a procedural framework for monitoring Executive actions and occasionally through the adoption of specific policies.” And this level of oversight certainly includes all covert action programs.10
Yet much of the literature on covert action published since the Hughes-Ryan Amendment continues to assert that presidents are attracted to these programs because they are cleverly able to slip around the legislative branch, evading Congress’s constitutional and statutory oversight responsibilities. As such, presidents are allegedly able to avoid the “need to make messy, unsatisfying compromises” with Congress or to evade answering “hard questions” from legislators.11 On this latter point, the author’s personal observations of congressional briefings in the late 1980s and mid-1990s revealed that neither staff nor members had any hesitation or reluctance whatsoever in asking tough questions. Despite writing a full seventeen years after the requirement to report covert action programs to Congress was enacted, Christopher Hitchens, a particularly harsh critic of the Agency and covert action, claimed that the CIA is “unlawful” because it has “managed to exempt itself from all manner of scrutiny, be it from Congress, the press, or the public.” This statement is so far removed from reality that one can only speculate about ulterior motives. Writing four years earlier than Hitchens (but still more than a decade after Hughes-Ryan), Morton Halperin, a White House official under Nixon and a Defense Department official under Clinton, urged statutory action to prohibit any president from utilizing covert action in statecraft. Presidents, asserted Halperin, rely on covert action because they “become wary of all of the requirements imposed by various laws and they become reluctant to consult with Congress.” If Halperin had confined his observations to the period prior to Hughes-Ryan, he would have had a valid point; however, because the only attempt to avoid congressional consultations and other legal requirements since the passage of Hughes-Ryan was the Iran-Contra scandal—which was neither a legitimate covert action program nor a CIA program (see below)—Halperin’s claim is manifestly, egregiously, and, perhaps deliberately, inaccurate.12
In fact, covert action programs receive far more congressional scrutiny than any other CIA activity. Faultfinders inevitably overlook (deliberately or otherwise) the fact that federal law enforcement agencies refuse to tell Congress about their undercover operations. Likewise, Department of Defense (DoD) officials routinely deny their congressional oversight committees details of their “black” operations or sensitive weapons developmental programs. And Congress accepts this. But Congress does not allow the Agency such privilege when it comes to covert action.
Critics’ allegations that the CIA’s covert action programs receive no congressional scrutiny indicate either their complete lack of understanding of the import of Hughes-Ryan or that they possess a permanent (and intentional) blind eye to the post-1974 reality. Hitchens asserts that Congress “has been routinely deceived by the Agency,” but only cites the Iran-Contra scandal as evidence, adding that Iran-Contra proves that the CIA holds “unrelieved contempt for the American public.” Hitchens has conveniently ignored a particularly telling comment made by the national security advisor to the president, Vice-Admiral John Poindexter, under oath before the Congressional Select Committee investigating this disgraceful event. Poindexter, who of course was not a CIA officer but a navy vice-admiral working directly for the president as a national security advisor, stated candidly that he deliberately “excluded” Congress because he “didn’t want any interference” from that body. Arguably, it is not the CIA, but individuals like Poindexter and his Iran-Contra coconspirator Oliver North who show contempt for the American Constitution and American people.13
Critics who believe that the CIA runs covert action programs without the knowledge of the president or Congress subscribe perforce to the third pervasive myth: Covert action is illegal under American constitutional and statutory law. This allegation is as convenient to critics as it is utterly wrong.14 First, absolutely nothing in the Constitution prohibits the president from utilizing covert action as a tool of statecraft. Indeed, the history of our first presidents limns an appreciation for maneuvers that would today be termed covert action in gaining our freedom from Great Britain, sustaining our national security, and enlarging our borders. As Washington, Madison, and Monroe were all instrumental in drafting the Constitution, it reasonably follows that they would not have engaged in covert action had they believed it to be unconstitutional. Critics who argue that covert action is also “undemocratic” should remember that Jefferson—the ultimate democrat and advocate of a presidency of limited powers—was also a believer in and practitioner of covert action during his administration. If any of the early presidents were apt to question the legitimacy of covert action, it would have been he.15
Detractors point out that the Agency’s first general counsel, Lawrence R. Houston, advised DCI Roscoe Hillenkoetter in 1948 that there was “no specific statutory authority language authorizing the conduct of covert action” as proof of the illegality of the CIA’s covert action mission. The issue arose when Hillenkoetter requested a legal opinion as to whether the authority given to the CIA in the National Security Act of 1947 to “perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security that the National Security Council may direct” included covert action operations. What the critics omit is that Houston also told the DCI that “if the president, with his constitutional responsibilities for the conduct of foreign affairs, gave the Agency appropriate instructions and if Congress gave it the funds to carry them out, [then] the Agency had the legal capability of carrying out the covert actions involved.” Since then, presidents, attorneys general, DCIs, and Congress have all accepted the CIA’s legitimacy to conduct covert action.
This has especially been the case with Congress, which, had it any doubts about the legality of covert action, either would not appropriate the funds for such missions or would enact legislation explicitly denying the Agency any covert action duties.16 Too, Congress has had ample opportunity during the past fifty years “to forswear the use of covert action,” yet has never done so.17 Any lingering doubts about the legality of the Agency’s mission to conduct covert action have since been erased by congressional action via passing of the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980 and the Intelligence Authorization Act of 1991, each of which
did indeed formally recognize covert action as a proper tool for the president. Further, in the past two decades Congress has established public entities to do overtly some tasks previously done covertly by the CIA (e.g., the National Endowment for Democracy), and in doing so “has elected not to subject covert programs to the statutory constraints that govern their overt counterparts.” Thus, allegations that covert action programs are somehow “illegal” or “unlawful” under U.S. law are proof of nothing more than the ignorance of those making the allegations.18
One common romance among both critics and the general public is that the CIA exists mainly to run covert action programs and is a strong advocate for these operations. The primary missions of the CIA are the provision of strategic intelligence to policymakers through the clandestine collection of secret information and the subsequent independent, all-source analysis of that material, and counterintelligence/counterespionage. Covert action—and, now, the broader range of capabilities known as “special activities”—runs a far distant third to the two principal missions. Hence, assertions that the CIA prefers covert action to other intelligence activities, and that it urges a covert action agenda on the White House, diverge significantly from reality.19
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