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THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE

TWO: The Clandestine Theory

For some time I have been
disturbed by the way CIA
has been diverted from its
original assignment. It
has become an operational
arm and at times a policymaking
arm of the Government.
-- PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN
December 1963

( DELETED
) Henry Kissinger made that
statement not in public, but at a secret White House meeting on
June 27, 1970. The country he was referring to was Chile.

In his capacity as Assistant to the President for National Security
Affairs, Kissinger was chairman of a meeting of the so-called 40
Committee, an interdepartmental panel responsible for overseeing
the CIA's high-risk covert-action operations. The 40 Committee's
members are the Director of Central Intelligence, the Under Secretary
of State for Political Affairs, the Deputy Secretary of Defense,
and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (At the time of the
Chilean meeting, Attorney General John Mitchell was also a member.)
It is this small group of bureaucrats and politicians-in close
consultation with the President and the governmental departments
the men represent-that directs America's secret foreign policy.
On that Saturday in June 1970, the main topic before the 40
Committee was: (
) The Chilean election was scheduled for
the foUowing September, and Allende, a declared Marxist, was one
of the principal candidates. Although Allende had pledged to maintain
the democratic system if he was elected, the U.S. ambassador
to Chile (
DELETED
)
Most of the American companies with large investments in Chile
were also fearful of a possible Allende triumph, and at least two
of those companies, the International Telephone and Telegraph
The Clandestine Theory IS
Corporation (ITT) and Anaconda Copper, were spending substantial
sums of money to prevent his election.
Ambassador Korry's superiors at the State Department in
Washington (
DELETED
)
Richard Helms, then director of the CIA, represented a some·
what divided (
DELETED
) press-perhaps with help
from the Soviet KGB-or by American reporters, and that such
disclosures would only help Allende.
Helms' position at the 40 Committee meeting was influenced by
memories of the Chilean presidential election of 1964. At that
time he had been chief of the Clandestine Services and had been
actively involved in planning the CIA's secret efforts to defeat
Allende, who was then running against Eduardo Frei. * * Frei had
* The official name for this part of the CIA is the Directorate of Operations
(until early 1973 the Directorate of Plans), but it is more appropriately
referred to within the agency as the Clandestine Services. Some members of
Congress and certain journalists call it the "Department of Dirty Tricks," a
title never used by CIA personnel.
**Nine years later Laurence Stern of the Washington Post finally exposed
the CIA's massive clandestine effort in the 1964 Chilean election. He quoted
a strategically placed U.S. intelligence official as saying, "U.S. government
16 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
won the Presidency, but now, six years later, he was constitutionally
forbidden to succeed himself, and Allende's candidacy therefore
seemed stronger than before.
Anti-American feeling had grown in Chile since 1964, and one
reason was widespread resentment of U.S. interference in Chile's
internal affairs. The Chilean leftist press had been full of charges
of CIA involvement in the 1964 elections, and these reports had not
been without effect on the electorate. Additionally, in 1965 the
exposure of the Pentagon's ill-advised Project Camelot had further
damaged the reputation of the U.S. government. Ironically,
Chile was not one of the principal target countries of the Camelot
project, a multimillion-dollar social-science research study of possible
counterinsurgency techniques in Latin America. But the
existence of Camelot had first been made public in Chile, and
newspapers there-of all political stripes-condemned the study
as "intervention" and "imperialism." One paper said, in prose
typical of the general reaction, that Project Camelot was "intended
to investigate the military and political situation prevailing
in Chile and to determine the possibility of an anti-democratic
coup." Politicians of both President Frei's Christian Democratic
Party and Allende's leftist coalition protested publicly. The final
result was to cause Washington to cancel first Camelot's limited
activities in Chile, and then the project as a whole. While the CIA
had not been a sponsor of Camelot, the project added to the fears
among Chileans of covert American intelligence activities.
In 1968 the CIA's own Board of National Estimates, after
carefully studying the socio-political problems of Latin America,
had produced a National Intelligence Estimate on that region for
the U.S. government's planners and policy-makers. The central
conclusion had been that forces for change in the developing
Latin nations were so powerful as to be beyond outside manipulation.
This estimate had been endorsed by the United States
intervention in Chile was blatant and almost obscene." Stern reported that
both the State Department and the Agency for International Development
cooperated with the CIA in funneling up to $20 million into the country,
and that one conduit for the funds was an ostensibly private organization
called the International Development Foundation.
The Clandestine Theory • 17
Intelligence Board, whose members include the heads of the
government's various intelligence agencies, and had then been
sent to the White House and to those departments that were
represented on the 40 Committee.
The 1968 estimate had in effect urged against the kind of intervention
that the 40 Committee was in 1970 considering with
regard to Chile. But as is so often the case within the government,
the most careful advance analysis based on all the intelligence
available was either ignored or simply rejected when the time came
to make a decision on a specific issue. (
DELETED
)
Henry Kissinger, the single most powerful man at the 40 Committee
meeting on Chile, (
DELETED
18 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
DELETED
)
During the next two months, before Allende was officially endorsed
as President by the Chilean congress, (
DELETED
)
Some months afterward President Nixon disingenuously explained
at a White House press conference: "As far as what happened
in Chile is concerned, we can only say that for the United
States to have intervened in a free election and to have turned it
around, I think, would have had repercussions all around Latin
America that would have been far worse than what happened in
Chile."
The following year, in the fall of 1972, CIA Director Helms,
while giving a rare public lecture at Johns Hopkins University, was
asked by a student if the CIA had mucked about in the 1970
Chilean election. His response: "Why should you care? Your side
won."
Helms was understandably perturbed. Columnist Jack Anderson
had only recently reported "the ITT story," which among other
things revealed that the CIA had indeed been involved in an effort
to undo Allende's victory-even after he had won the popular
vote. Much to the agency's chagrin, Anderson had shown that
during September and October 1970, William Broe, chief of the
Western Hemisphere Division of the CIA's Clandestine Services,
had met several times with high officials of ITT to discuss ways
to prevent Allende from taking office. (The ITT board member
who later admitted to a Senate investigative committee that he had
played the key role in bringing together CIA and ITT officials
was John McCone, director of the CIA during the Kennedy administration
and, in 1970, a CIA consultant.) Broe had proposed
The Clandestine Theory 19
to ITT and a few other American corporations with substantial
financial interests in Chile a four-part plan of economic sabotage
which was calculated to weaken the local economy to the point
where the Chilean military authorities would move to take over
the government and thus frustrate the Marxist's rise to power.
ITT and the other firms later claimed they had found the CIA's
scheme "not workable." But almost three years to the day after
Allende's election, at a time when severe inflation, truckers' strikes,
food shortages, and international credit problems were plaguing
Chile, he was overthrown and killed in a bloody coup d'etat carried
out by the combined action of the Chilean armed services and
national police. His Marxist government was replaced by a military
junta. What role American businesses or the CIA may have
played in the coup is not publicly known, and may never be. ITT
and the other giant corporations with investments in Chile have
all denied any involvement in the military revolt. So has the U.S.
government, although CIA Director William Colby admitted in
secret testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee (revealed
by Tad Szulc in the October 21, 1973, Washington Post)
that the agency "had some intelligence coverage about the various
moves being made," that it had "penetrated" all of Chile's major
political parties, and that it had secretly furnished "some assistance"
to certain Chilean groups. Colby, himself the former director
of the bloody Phoenix counterintelligence program in Vietnam,
also told the Congressmen that the executions carried out by the
junta after the coup had done "some good" because they reduced
the chances that civil war would break out in Chile-an excellent
example of the sophistry with which the CIA defends its strategy of
promoting "stability" in the Third World.
Even if the CIA did not intervene directly in the final putsch,
the U.S. government as a whole did take a series of actions designed
to undercut the Allende regime. Henry Kissinger set the tone of
the official U.S. position at a background press conference in September
1970, when he said that Allende's Marxist regime would
contaminate Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru-a stretch of the geopolitical
imagination reminiscent of the Southeast Asian domino
theory. Another measure of the White House attitude-and an
20 THE C J A AND THE C U L T 0 F J N TEL L J G ENe E
indication of the methods it was willing to use-was the burglarizing
of the Chilean embassy in Washington in May 1972 by some
of the same men who the next month staged the break-in at the
Watergate. And the U.S. admittedly worked to undercut the Allende
government by cutting off most economic assistance, discouraging
private lines of credit, and blocking loans by international organizations.
State Department officials testifying before Congress after the
coup explained it was the Nixon administration's wish that the Allende
regime collapse economically, thereby discrediting socialism.
Henry Kissinger has dismissed speculation among journalists
and members of Congress that the CIA helped along this economic
collapse and then engineered Allende's downfall; privately he has
said that the secret agency wasn't competent to manage an operation
as difficult as the Chilean coup. Kissinger had already been
supervising the CIA's most secret operations for more than four
years when he made this disparaging remark. Whether he was
telling the truth about the CIA's non-involvement in Chile or was
simply indulging in a bit of official lying (called "plausible denial"),
he along with the President would have made the crucial decisions
on the Chilean situation. For the CIA is not an independent agency
in the broad sense of the term, nor is it a governmental agency out
of control. Despite occasional dreams of grandeur on the part
of some of its clandestine operators, the CIA does not on its own
choose to overthrow distasteful governments or determine which
dictatorial regimes to support. Just as the State Department might
seek, at the President's request, to discourage international aid
institutions from offering loans to "unfriendly" governments, so
does the CIA act primarily when called upon by the Executive. The
agency's methods and assets are a resource that come with the
office of the Presidency.
Thus, harnessing the agency's clandestine operators is not the
full, or even basic, solution to the CIA problem. The key to the
solution is controlling and requiring accountability of those in
the White House and elsewhere in the government who direct or approve,
then hide behind, the CIA and its covert operations. This
elusiveness, more than anything else, is the problem posed by the
CIA.
The Clandestine Theory 21
Intelligence Versus Covert Action
The primary and proper purpose of any national intelligence organization
is to produce "finished intelligence" for the government's
policy-makers. Such intelligence, as opposed to the raw information
acquired through espionage and other clandestine means, is
data collected from all sources-secret, official, and open-which
has been carefully collated and analyzed by substantive experts
specifically to meet the needs of the national leadership. The process
is difficult, time-consuming, and by no means without error. But it
is the only prudent alternative to naked reliance on the unreliable
reporting of spies. Most intelligence agencies, however, are nothing
more than secret services, more fascinated by the clandestine operations-
of which espionage is but one aspect-than they are concerned
with the production of "finished intelligence." The CIA,
unfortunately, is no exception to this rule. Tactics that require the
employment of well-placed agents, the use of money, the mustering
of mercenary armies, and a variety of other covert methods designed
to influence directly the policies (or determine the life-spans) of
foreign governments-such are the tactics that have come to
dominate the CIA. This aspect of the modern intelligence business
-intervention in the affairs of other countries-is known at the
agency as covert action.
The United States began engaging in covert-action operations in
a major way during World War II. Taking lessons from the more experienced
British secret services, the Office of Strategic Services
(aSS) learned to use covert action as an offensive weapon against
Germany and Japan. When the war ended, President Truman
disbanded the ass on the grounds that such wartime tactics as paramilitary
operations, psychological warfare, and political manipulation
were not acceptable when the country was at peace. At the
same time, however, Truman recognized the need for a permanent
organization to coordinate and analyze all the intelligence available
to the various governmental departments. He believed that if there
had been such an agency within the U.S. government in 1941, it
22 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
would have been "difficult, if not impossible" for the Japanese to
attack Pearl Harbor successfully.
It was, therefore, with "coordination of information" in mind
that Truman proposed the creation of the CIA in 1947. Leading
the opposition to Truman's "limited" view of intelligence, Allen
Dulles stated, in a memorandum prepared for the Senate Armed
Services Committee, that "Intelligence work in time of peace will
require other techniques, other personnel, and will have rather
different objectives .... We must deal with the problem of conflicting
ideologies as democracy faces communism, not only in the
relations between Soviet Russia and the countries of the west but
in the internal political conflicts with the countries of Europe, Asia,
and South America." It was Dulles-to become CIA director six
years later-who contributed to the eventual law the clause enabling
the agency to carry out "such other functions and duties
related to intelligence as the National Security Council may from
time to time direct." It was to be the fulcrum of the CIA's power.
Although fifteen years later Truman would claim that he had
not intended the CIA to become the covert-action arm of the U.S.
government, it was he who, in 1948, authorized the first postwar
covert-action programs, although he did not at first assign the
responsibility to the CIA. Instead he created a largely separate
organization called the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), and
named a former OSS man, Frank G. Wisner, Jr., to be its chief.
Truman did not go to Congress for authority to form OPC. He did it
with a stroke of the presidential pen, by issuing a secret National
Security Council Intelligence directive, NSC 10/2. (The CIA provided
OPC with cover and support, but Wisner reported directly to
the secretaries of State and Defense.) Two years later, when
General Walter Bedell Smith became CIA director, he moved to
consolidate all major elements of national intelligence under his
direct control. As part of this effort, he sought to bring Wisner's
operations into the CIA. Truman eventually concurred, and on
January 4, 1951, OPC and the Office of Special Operations (a
similar semi-independent organization established in 1948 for
covert intelligence collection) were merged into the CIA, forming
The Clandestine Theory 23
the Directorate of Plans or, as it became known in the agency, the
Clandestine Services. Allen Dulles was appointed first chief of the
Clandestine Services; Frank Wisner was his deputy.
With its newly formed Clandestine Services and its involvement
in the Korean war, the agency expanded rapidly. From less than
5,000 employees in 1950, the CIA grew to about 15,000 by 1955
-and recruited thousands more as contract employees and foreign
agents. During these years the agency spent well over a billion
dollars to strengthen non-communist governments in Western
Europe, to subsidize political parties around the world, to found
Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty for propaganda broadcasts
to Eastern Europe, to make guerrilla raids into mainland China, to
create the Asia Foundation, to overthrow leftist governments in
Guatemala and Iran, and to carry out a host of other covert-action
programs.
While the agency considered most of its programs to have been
successful, there were more than a few failures. Two notable
examples were attempts in the late 1940s to establish guerrilla
movements in Albania and in the Ukraine, in keeping with the then
current national obsession of "rolling back the Iron Curtain." Almost
none of the agents, funds, and equipment infiltrated by the
agency into those two countries was ever seen or heard from again.
In the early 1950s another blunder occurred when the CIA
tried to set up a vast underground apparatus in Poland for
espionage and, ultimately, revolutionary purposes. The operation
was supported by millions of dollars in agency gold shipped into
Poland in installments. Agents inside Poland, using radio broadcasts
and secret writing techniques, maintained regular contact
with their CIA case officers in West Germany. In fact, the agents
continually asked that additional agents and gold be sent to aid
the movement. Occasionally an agent would even slip out of
Poland to report on the operation's progress-and ask for still
more agents and gold. It took the agency several years to learn
that the Polish secret service had almost from the first day co-opted
the whole network, and that no real CIA underground operation
existed in Poland. The Polish service kept the operation going
24 THE C (A AND THE C U L T 0 F (N TEL L ( G ENe E
only to lure anti-communist Polish emigres back home-and into
prison. And in the process the Poles were able to bilk the CIA of
millions of dollars in gold.
One reason, perhaps the most important, that the agency tended
from its very beginnings to concentrate largely on covert-action
operations was the fact that in the area of traditional espionage
(the collection of intelligence through spies) the CIA was able to
accomplish little against the principal enemy, the Soviet Union.
With its closed society, the U.S.S.R. proved virtually impenetrable.
The few American intelligence officers entering the country were
severely limited in their movements and closely followed. The
Soviet Union's all-pervasive internal security system made the
recruitment of agents and the running of clandestine operations
next to impossible. Similar difficulties were experienced by the CIA
in Eastern Europe, but to a lesser degree. The agency's operators
could recruit agents somewhat more easily there, but strict security
measures and efficient secret-police establishments still greatly
limited successes.
Nevertheless, there were occasional espionage coups, such as the
time CIA operators found an Eastern European communist
official able to provide them with a copy of Khrushchev's 1956
de-Stalinization speech, which the agency then arranged to have
published in the New York Times. Or, from time to time, a higWy
knowledgeable defector would bolt to the West and give the agency
valuable information. Such defectors, of course, usually crossed
over of their own volition, and not because of any ingenious
methods used by CIA. A former chief of the agency's Clandestine
Services, Richard Bissell, admitted years later in a secret discU5sionwith
selected members of the Council on Foreign Relations:
"In practice however espionage has been disappointing. . .. The
general conclusion is that against the Soviet bloc or other sophisticated
societies, espionage is not a primary source of intelligence,
although it has had occasional brilliant successes."*
It had been Bissell and his boss Allen Dulles who by the mid-
* This and all subsequent quotes from the Bissell speech come from the
official minutes of the meeting. The minutes do not quote Bissell directly
but, rather, paraphrase his remarks.
The Clandestine Theory 25
1950s had come to realize that if secret agents could not do the
job, new ways would have to be found to collect intelligence on the
U.S.S.R. and the other communist countries. Increasingly, the CIA
turned to machines to perform its espionage mission. By the end
of the decade, the agency had developed the U-2 spy plane. This
high-altitude aircraft, loaded with cameras and electronic listening
devices, brought back a wealth of information about Soviet defenses
and weapons. Even more important was communications
intelligence (COMINT), electronic transmissions monitored at a
cost of billions of dollars by the Defense Department's National
Security Agency (NSA).
Both Bissell and Dulles, however, believed that the successful
use of human assets was at the heart of the intelligence craft. Thus,
it was clear to them that if the Clandestine Services were to survive
in the age of modern technical espionage, the agency's operators
would have to expand their covert-action operations-particularly
in the internal affairs of countries where the agency could operate
clandes tinely.
In the immediate postwar years, CIA covert-action programs
had been concentrated in Europe, as communist expansion into
Western Europe seemed a real threat. The Red Army had already
occupied Eastern Europe, and the war-ravaged countries of the
West, then trying to rebuild shattered economies, were particularly
vulnerable. Consequently, the CIA subsidized political parties,
individual leaders, labor unions, and other groups, especially in
West Germany, France, and Italy. It also supported Eastern
European emigre groups in the West as part of a program to
organize resistance in the communist countries. "There were so
many CIA projects at the height of the Cold War," wrote columnist
Tom Braden in January 1973, "that it was almost impossible for a
man to keep them in balance." Braden spoke from the vantage
point of having himself been the CIA division chief in charge of
many of these programs. By the end of the 1950s, however, pro-
American governments had become firmly established in Western
Europe, and the U.S. government, in effect, had given up the idea
of "rolling back the Iron Curtain."
Thus. the emohasis within the Clandestine Services shifted to26
THE C J A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
ward the Third World. This change reflected to a certain extent
the CIA's bureaucratic need as a secret agency to find areas where
it could be successful. More important, the shift came as a result
of a hardened determination that the United States should protect
the rest of the world from communism. A cornerstone of that policy
was secret intervention in the internal affairs of countries particularly
susceptible to socialist movements, either democratic or
revolutionary. Years later, in a letter to Washington Post correspondent
Chalmers Roberts, Allen Dulles summed up the prevailing
attitude of the times. Referring to the CIA's coups in Iran
and Guatemala, he wrote: "Where there begins to be evidence
that a country is slipping and Communist takeover is threatened
... we can't wait for an engraved invitation to come and give aid."
The agency's orientation toward covert action was quite obvious
to young officers taking operational training during the mid-1950s
at "The Farm," the CIA's West Point, located near Williamsburg,
Virginia, and operated under the cover of a military base called
Camp Peary. Most of the methods and techniques taught there
at that time applied to covert action rather than traditional
espionage, and to a great extent training was oriented toward such
paramilitary activities as infiltration/ exfiltration, demolitions, and
nighttime parachute jumps. Agency officers, at the end of their
formal clandestine education, found that most of the job openings
were on the Covert Action Staff and in the Special Operations
Division (the CIA's paramilitary component). Assignments to
Europe became less coveted, and even veterans with European
experience were transferring to posts in the emerging nations,
especially in the Far East.
The countries making up the Third World offered far more
tempting targets for covert action than those in Europe. These
nations, underdeveloped and often corrupt, seemed made to order
for the clandestine operators of the CIA, Richard Bissell told the
Council on Foreign Relations: "Simply because [their] governments
are much less highly organized there is less security consciousness;
and there is apt to be more actual or potential diffusion of power
among parties, localities, organizations, and individuals outside the
central [!overnment." And in the freauent Dower stru{JlJleswithin
The Clandestine Theory 27
such goverments, all factions are grateful for outside assistance.
Relatively small sums of money, whether delivered directly to
local forces or deposited (for their leaders) in Swiss bank accounts,
can have an almost magical effect in changing volatile
political loyalties. In such an atmosphere, the CIA's Clandestine
Services have over the years enjoyed considerable success.
Swashbucklers and Secret Wars
During the 1950s most of the CIA's covert-action operations were
not nearly so sophisticated or subtle as those Bissell would advocate
in 1968. Nor were they aimed exclusively at the rapidly increasing
and "less higWy organized" governments of the Third World.
Covert operations against the communist countries of Europe and
Asia continued, but the emphasis was on clandestine propaganda,
infiltration and manipulation of youth, labor, and cultural organizations,
and the like. The more heavy-handed activities-paramilitary
operations, coups, and countercoups-were now reserved for the
operationally ripe nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Perhaps the prototype for CIA covert operations during the
1950s was the work of Air Force Colonel Edward Lansdale. His
exploits under agency auspices, first in the Philippines and then in
Vietnam, became so well known that he served as the model for
characters in two best-selling novels, The Ugly American by
William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, and The Quiet American
by Graham Greene. In the former, he was a heroic figure; in the
latter, a bumbling fool.
Lansdale was sent to the Philippines in the early 1950s as advisor
to Philippine Defense Minister (later President) Ramon
Magsaysay in the struggle against the Huks, the local communist
guerrillas. Following Lansdale's counsel, Magsaysay prompted
social development and land reform to win support of the peasantry
away from the Huks. But Lansdale, backed up by millions of
dollars in secret U.S. government funds, took the precaution of
launching other, less conventional schemes. One such venture was
the establishment of the Filipino Civil Affairs Office, which was
made responsible for psychological warfare.
28 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
After a 1972 interview with Lansdale, now living in quiet retirement,
journalist Stanley Karnow reported:
One [Lansdale-initiated] psywar operation played on the
superstitious dread in the Philippine countryside of the asuang,
a mythical vampire. A psywar squad entered an area, and
planted rumors that an asuang lived on where the Communists
were based. Two nights later, after giving the rumors
time to circulate among Huk sympathizers, the psywar squad
laid an ambush for the rebels. When a Huk patrol passed, the
ambushers snatched the last man, punctured his neck vampirefashion
with two holes, hung his body until the blood drained
out, and put the corpse back on the trail. As superstitious as
any other Filipinos, the insurgents fled from the region.
With Magsaysay's election to the Philippine Presidency in 1953,
Lansdale returned to Washington. In the eyes of the U.S. government,
his mission had been an unquestioned success: the threat of
a communist takeover in the Philippines had been eliminated.
A year later, after Vietnam had been provisionally split in
two by the Geneva Accords, Lansdale was assigned to South
Vietnam to bolster the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. He quickly became
involved in organizing sabotage. and guerrilla operations
against North Vietnam, but his most effective work was done in the
South. There he initiated various psychological-warfare programs
and helped Diem in eliminating his political rivals. His activities,
extensively described in the Pentagon Papers, extended to pacification
programs, military training, even political consultation:
Lansdale helped design the ballots when Diem formally ran for
President of South Vietnam in 1955. He used red, the Asian goodluck
color, for Diem and green-signifying a cuckold-for Diem's
opponent. Diem won with an embarrassingly high 98 percent of
the vote, and Lansdale was widely credited within American
government circles for having carried out another successful operation.
He left Vietnam soon afterward.
Meanwhile, other agency operators, perhaps less celebrated than
Lansdale, were carrying out covert-action programs in other
countries. Kermit Roosevelt, of the Oyster Bay Roosevelts, masterThe
Clandestine Theory 29
minded the 1953 putsch that overthrew Iran's Premier Mohammed
Mossadegh. The Guatemala coup of 1954 was directed by the CIA.
Less successful was the attempt to overthrow Indonesian President
Sukarno in the late 1950s. Contrary to denials by President Eisenhower
and Secretary of State Dulles, the CIA gave direct assistance
to rebel groups located on the island of Sumatra. Agency
B-26s even carried out bombing missions in support of the insurgents.
On May 18, 1958, the Indonesians shot down one of
these B-26s and captured the pilot, an American named Allen
Pope. Although U.S. government officials claimed that Pope was
a "soldier of fortune," he was in fact an employee of a CIA-owned
proprietary company, Civil Air Transport. Within a few months
after being released from prison four years later, Pope was again
flying for the CIA-this time with Southern Air Transport, an
agency proprietary airline based in Miami.
As the Eisenhower years came to an end, there still was a
national consensus that the CIA was justified in taking almost any
action in that "back alley" struggle against communism-this
despite Eisenhower's clumsy effort to lie his way out of the U-2
shootdown, which lying led to the cancellation of the 1960 summit
conference. Most Americans placed the CIA on the same abovepolitics
level as the FBI, and it was no accident that President-elect
Kennedy chose to announce on the same day that both J. Edgar
Hoover and Allen Dulles would be staying on in his administration.
It took the national shock resulting from the abortive Bay of
Pigs invasion in 1961 to bring about serious debate over CIA
operations-among high government officials and the public as a
whole. Not only had the CIA failed to overthrow the Castro
regime, it had blundered publicly, and the U.S. government had
again been caught lying. For the first time, widespread popular
criticism was directed at the agency. And President Kennedy, who
had approved the risky operation, came to realize that the CIA
could be a definite liability-to both his foreign policy and his
personal political fortunes-as well as a secret and private asset
of the Presidency. Determined that there would be no repetition
•""'--v~~•."r.hT mnvP.n ouicklv to tighten White House
30 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." But the President's
anger was evidently more the result of the agency's failure to overthrow
Castro than a reaction to its methods or techniques. While
neither agency funding nor operations were cut back in the aftermath,
the Bay of Pigs marked the end of what was probably the
CIA's Golden Age. Never again would the secret agency have so
totally free a hand in its role as the clandestine defender of American
democracy. Kennedy never carried through on his threat to
destroy the CIA, but he did purge three of the agency's top officials,
and thus made clear the lines of accountability. If Allen
Dulles had seemed in Kennedy's eyes only a few months earlier
to be in the same unassailable category as J. Edgar Hoover, the
Bay of Pigs had made him expendable. In the fall of 1961 John
McCone, a defense contractor who had formerly headed the
Atomic Energy Commission, replaced Dulles as CIA Director;
within months Major General Marshall "Pat" Carter took over
from Major General Charles Cabell as Deputy Director, and
Richard Helms became chief of the Clandestine Services in place
of Richard Bissell.
Kennedy also ordered General Maxwell Taylor, then special
military advisor to the President and soon to be Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, to make a thorough study of U.S. intelligence.
Taylor was joined by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Dulles,
and Naval Chief Admiral Arleigh Burke. The Taylor committee's
report was to a large extent a critique of the tactics used in-not
the goals of-the Bay of Pigs operation. It did not call for any
fundamental restructuring of the CIA, although many outside
critics were urging that the agency's intelligence-collection and
analysis functions be completely separated from its covert-action
arm. The committee's principal recommendation was that the
CIA should not undertake future operations where weapons larger
than hand guns would be used.
Taylor's report was accepted, at least in principle, by the Kennedy
administration, but its primary recommendation was disregarded
almost immediately. CIA never shut down its two
anti-Castro operations bases located in southern Florida, and
The Clandestine Theory • 31
into the mid-1960s, albeit on a far smaller scale than the Bay of
Pigs. The agency also became deeply involved in the chaotic
struggle which broke out in the Congo in the early 1960s. Clandestine
Service operators regularly bought and sold Congolese
politicians, and the agency supplied money and arms to the supporters
of Cyril Adoula and Joseph Mobutu. By 1964, the CIA
had imported its own mercenaries into the Congo, and the agency's
B-26 bombers, flown by Cuban exile pilots--many of whom were
Bay of Pigs veterans--were carrying out regular missions against
insurgent groups.
During these same years American involvement in Vietnam expanded
rapidly, and the CIA, along with the rest of the U.S.
government, greatly increased the number of its personnel and programs
in that country. Among other activities, the agency organized
guerrilla and small-boat attacks on North Vietnam, armed and
controlled tens of thousands of Vietnamese soldiers in irregular
units, and set up a giant intelligence and interrogation system which
reached into every South Vietnamese village.
In neighboring Laos, the CIA actually led the rest of the U.S.
government-at the White House's order-into a massive American
commitment. Although the agency had been carrying out largescale
programs of political manipulation and other covert action
up to 1962, that year's Geneva agreement prohibiting the presence
of foreign troops in Laos paradoxically opened up the country to
the CIA. For almost from the moment the agreement was signed,
the Kennedy administration decided not to pull back but to expand
American programs in Laos. This was justified partly because
the North Vietnamese were also violating the Geneva
Accords; partly because Kennedy, still smarting from his Cuban
setback, did not want to lose another confrontation with the communists;
and partly because of the strategic importance placed on
Laos in the then-fashionable "domino theory." Since the United
States did not want to admit that it was not living up to the
Geneva agreement, the CIA-whose members were not technically
"forf~ilJn trooOS"-l!ot the job of conducting a "secret" war. The
32 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
other Lao mountain tribesmen were recruited into the CIA's
private army, L'Armee Clandestine; CIA-hired pilots flew bombing
and supply missions in the agency's own planes; and, finally, when
L'Armee Clandestine became less effective after long years of war,
the agency recruited and financed over 17,000 Thai mercenaries
for its war of attrition against the communists.
By the late 1960s, however, many CIA career officers were expressing
opposition to the agency's Laotian and Vietnamese programs-
not because they objected to the Indochina wars (few did),
but because the programs consisted for the most part of huge, unwieldy,
semi-overt paramilitary operations lacking the sophistication
and secrecy that most of the agency's operators preferred. Furthermore,
the wars had dragged on too long, and many officers viewed
them as unwinnable messes. The agency, therefore, found itself
in the awkward position of being unable to attract sufficient volunteers
to man the field assignments in Vietnam. Consequently, it
was forced to draft personnel from other areas of its clandestine
activity for service in Southeast Asia.
Covert-Action Theory
It was in such an atmosphere of restiveness and doubt, on a
January evening in 1968, that a small group of former intelligence
professionals and several other members of the cult of intelligence
met to discuss the role of the CIA in U.S. foreign policy, not at
CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, but at the Harold Pratt
House on Park Avenue-the home of the Council on Foreign
Relations. The discussion leader was investment banker C. Douglas
Dillon, previously Under Secretary of State and Secretary of
the Treasury; the main speaker was Richard Bissell, the former
chief of the agency's Clandestine Services, still a consultant to the
CIA, and now a high-ranking executive with the United Aircraft
Corporation. Like most other former agency officials, Bissell was
reluctant to make his views on intelligence known to the public,
and the meeting was private.
In 1971, however, as part of an anti-war protest, radical stuThe
Clandestine Theory 33
houses Harvard University's Center for International Affairs. Once
inside, the protesters proceeded to barricade the entrances and
ransack the files of faculty members who worked there. Discovered
among the papers belonging to Center associate William Harris
were the confidential minutes of the January 8, 1968, meeting at
the Pratt House. Harris admitted privately a year later that the
document in his files had been partially edited to eliminate particularly
sensitive material. Even so, the purloined version was
still the most complete description of the CIA's covert-action
strategy and tactics ever made available to the outside world.
Aside from a few newspaper articles which appeared in 1971,
however, when it was reprinted by the African Research Group,
the Bissell paper attracted almost no interest from the American
news media.
Among the CIA's senior Clandestine Services officers, Richard
Bissell was one of a very few who had not spent World War II in
the ass; in all other respects, he was the ideal agency professional.
A product of Groton and Yale, he had impeccable Eastern
Establishment credentials. Such a background was not absolutely
essential to success in CIA, but it certainly helped, especially during
the Allen Dulles years. And Bissell also had the advantage of
scholarly training, having earned a doctorate in economics and
then having taught the subject at Yale and MIT. He joined the
CIA in 1954 and immediately showed a great talent for clandestine
work. By 1958 Dulles had named Bissell head of the Clandestine
Services.
At the beginning of the Kennedy administration, Bissell was
mentioned in White House circles as the logical candidate to
succeed Dulles, who was then near seventy. Brilliant and urbane,
Bissell seemed to fit perfectly, in David Halberstam's phrase, the
"best and the brightest" image of the New Frontier. But Bissell's
popularity with the Kennedy administration was short-lived, for it
was Bissell's Clandestine Services which planned and carried out
the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961. Bissell's oper-
.., .. "_:1_-1 +1-.0" llTPrp. not even successful in invent34
THE C J A AND THE C U L T 0 F J N TEL L J GENe E
which every covert operation is supposed to have and which might
have allowed the Kennedy administration to escape the blame.
Fidel Castro had told the truth to the world about American intervention
in Cuba while the U.S. Secretary of State and other administration
officials had been publicly caught in outright lies
when their agency-supplied cover stories fell apart. So Kennedy
fired the CIA officials who had got him into the Bay of Pigs,
which he himself had approved; Bissell was forced out along with
Dulles and Deputy Director Charles Cabell.
Bissell's replacement, Richard Helms, despite having been
second in command in the Clandestine Services, had managed to
stay remarkably untouched by the Bay of Pigs operation. Years
later a very senior CIA official would still speak in amazement of
the fact that not a single piece of paper existed in the agency
which linked Helms to either the planning or the actual execution
of the Bay of Pigs. This senior official was not at all critical of
Helms, who had been very much involved in the overall supervision
of the operation. The official simply was impressed by
Helms' bureaucratic skill and good judgment in keeping his
signature off the documents concerning the invasion, even in the
planning stage.
Helms took over from Bissell as Clandestine Services chief on
February 17, 1962, and Bissell was awarded a secret intelligence
medal honoring him for his years of service to the agency. But
Bissell remained in close touch with clandestine programs as a
consultant; the CIA did not want to lose the services of the man
who had guided the agency into some of its most advanced techniques.
He had been among the first during the 1950s to understand
the hopelessness of spying against the Soviets and the
Chinese with classic espionage methods, and hence had pushed
the use of modern technology as an intelligence tool. He had been
instrumental in the development of the U-2 plane, which had been
among CIA's greatest successes until the Powers incident. Bissell
had also promoted, with the technical help of Kelly Johnson and
the so-called Skunk Works development facilities of Lockheed
Aircraft Corp., the A-II, later known as SR-71. ~ ~n" nl"na tl.nt
The Clandestine Theory 35
could fly nearly three times the speed of sound at altitudes even
higher than the U-2.
Moreover, Bissell had been a driving force behind the development
of space satellites for intelligence purposes-at times to the
embarrassment of the Air Force. He had quickly grasped the
espionage potential of placing high-resolution cameras in orbit
around the globe to photograph secret installations in the Soviet
Union and China. And due in great part to the technical advances
made by scientists and engineers working under Bissell, the CIA
largely dominated the U.S. government's satellite reconnaissance
programs in the late 1950s and well into the 1960s. Even today,
when the Air Force has taken over most of the operational aspects
of the satellite programs, the CIA is responsible for many of the
research and development breakthroughs. At the same time that
Bissell was sparking many of the innovations in overhead reconnaissance,
he was guiding the Clandestine Services into increased
emphasis on covert-action programs in the Third World. It was
Bissell who developed and put into practice much of the theory
and technique which became standard operating procedure in the
CIA's many interventions abroad.
Bissell spoke mainly about covert action that January night in
1968 at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and the
minutes provide a virtual textbook outline of covert operations.
Among his listeners were former CIA officials Allen Dulles and
Robert Amory, Jr., former State Department intelligence chief
Thomas Hughes, former Kennedy aide Theodore Sorensen, columnist
Joseph Kraft, and fourteen others. * All those present were
men who had spent most of their lives either in or on the fringes
of the government. They could be trusted to remain discreet about
what they heard.
Speaking freely to a friendly audience, the former Clandestine
Services chief said:
* A complete listing of the participants, as well as the available minutes
36 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
Covert action [is] attempting to influence the internal affairs
of other nations-sometimes called "intervention"-by covert
means .
. . . the technique is essentially that of "penetration," including
"penetrations" of the sort which horrify classicists of
covert operations, with a disregard for the "standards" and
"agent recruitment rules." Many of the "penetrations" don't
take the form of "hiring" but of establishing a close or friendly
relationship (which mayor may not be furthered by the provision
of money from time to time).
Bissell was explaining that the CIA needs to have its own agents
on the inside-i.e., "penetrations"-if it wants to finance a political
party, guide the editorial policy of a newspaper, or carry off
a military coup. CIA clandestine operators assigned overseas are
called case officers, and they recruit and supervise the "penetrations."
Their tours of duty are normally two to three years, and
most serve with false titles in American embassies. Some live
under what is called "deep cover" in foreign countries posing as
businessmen, students, newsmen, missionaries, or other seemingly
innocent American visitors.
The problem of Agency operations overseas [Bissell continued]
is frequently a problem for the State Department. It
tends to be true that local allies find themselves dealing always
with an American and an official American-since the cover
is almost invariably as a U.S. government employee. There
are powerful reasons for this practice, and it will always be
desirable to have some CIA personnel housed in the Embassy
compound, if only for local "command post" and communications
requirements.
Nonetheless, it is possible and desirable, although difficult
and time-consuming, to build overseas an apparatus of unofficial
cover. This would require the use or creation of private
organizations, many of the personnel of which would be non-
U.S. nationals, with freer entry into the local society and less
The Clandestine Theory • 37
Whatever cover the case officer has, his role is to find agents
willing to work with or for the CIA. His aim is to penetrate the
host government, to learn its inner workings, to manipulate it for
the agency's purposes.
But for the larger and more sensItIve interventions [Bissell
went on], the allies must have their own motivation. On the
whole the Agency has been remarkably successful in finding
individuals and instrumentalities with which and through
which it could work in this fashion. Implied in the requirement
for a pre-existing motivation is the corollary that an
attempt to induce the local ally to follow a course he does not
believe in will at least reduce his effectiveness and may destroy
the whole operation.
Covert action is thus an exercise in seeking out "allies" willing
to cooperate with the CIA, preferably individuals who believe in
the same goals as the agency; at the very least, people who can
be manipulated into belief in these goals. CIA case officers must
be adept at convincing people that working for the agency is in
their interest, and a good case officer normally will use whatever
techniques are required to recruit a prospect: appeals to patriotism
and anti-communism can be reinforced with flattery, or sweetened
with money and power. Cruder methods involving blackmail and
coercion may also be used, but are clearly less desirable.
For covert action to be most effective, the recruitment and penetration
should be made long before an actual operation is scheduled.
When the U.S. government secretly decides to provoke a coup
in a particular country, it is then too late for CIA case officers to
be looking for local allies. Instead, if the case officers have been
performing their jobs well, they will have already built up a network
of agents in that country's government, military forces, press,
labor unions, and other important groups; thus there is, in effect,
a standing force in scores of countries ready to serve the CIA when
the need arises. In the interim, many of these agents also serve
thp :HJpncv hv turninl! over intelligence obtained through their of38
THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
CIA in determining local political power structures and calculating
where covert action would be most effective. Again, Bissell:
[There is a] need for continuing efforts to develop covertaction
capabilities even where there is no immediate need to
employ them. The central task is that of identifying potential
indigenous allies-both individuals and organizations-making
contact with them, and establishing the fact of a community
of interest.
This process is called, in intelligence parlance, "building assets"
or developing the operational apparatus. It is a standard function
of all CIA clandestine stations and bases overseas. And when a
case officer is transferred to a new assignment after several years
in a post, he passes on his network of agents and contacts to his
replacement, who will stay in touch with them as well as search
out new "assets" himself.
Depending on the size and importance of a particular country,
from one to scores of CIA case officers may operate there; together,
their collective "assets" may number in the hundreds. The
planners of any operation will try to orchestrate the use of the
available assets so as to have the maximum possible effect. Bissell:
Covert intervention is probably most effective in situations
where a comprehensive effort is undertaken with a number of
separate operations designed to support and complement one
another and to have a cumulatively significant effect.
In fact, once the CIA's case officers have built up their assets,
whether or not the United States will intervene at all will be based
in large part on a judgment of the potential effectiveness, importance,
and trustworthiness of the CIA's agents or, in Bissell's
word, "allies." Yet only case officers on the scene and, to a lesser
extent, their immediate superiors in the United States are in a
position to make this judgment, since only the CIA knows the
identity of its agents. This information is not shared with outsiders
The Clandestine Theory 39
by code names even in top-secret documents. Thus, while the
political decision to intervene must be made in the White House,
it is the CIA itself (through its Clandestine Services) which supplies
the President and his advisors with much of the crucial information
upon which their decision to intervene is based.
Even if the CIA's reputation for honesty and accurate assessment
were unassailable (which it is not), there would still be a
built-in conflict of interest in the system: the CIA draws up the
intervention plans; the CIA is the only agency with the specific
knowledge to evaluate the merits and the feasibility of those plans;
and the CIA is the action arm which carries out the plans once
they are approved. When the CIA has its assets in place, the inclination
within the agency is to recommend their use; the form of
intervention recommended will reflect the type of assets which
have been earlier recruited. Further, simply because the assets are
available, the top officials of the U.S. government may well rely
too heavily on the CIA in a real or imagined crisis situation. To
these officials, including the President, covert intervention may
seem to be an easier solution to a particular problem than to allow
events to follow their natural course or to seek a tortuous diplomatic
settlement. The temptation to interfere in another country's
internal affairs can be almost irresistible, when the means
are at hand.
It is one of the contradictions of the intelligence profession, as
practiced by the CIA, that the views of its substantive expertsits
analysts-do not carry much weight with the clandestine
operators engaging in covert action. The operators usually decide
which operations to undertake without consulting the analysts.
Even when pertinent intelligence studies and estimates are readily
available, they are as often as not ignored, unless they tend to
support the particular covert-action cause espoused by the operators.
Since the days of the ass, clandestine operators-especially in
the field-have distrusted the detached viewpoint of analysts not
directly involved in covert action. To ensure against contact with
the analysts (and to reduce interference by high-level staff mem-
- •• L --~ ;n th •• ()ffi~p. of the Director) the operators usually
40 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L 1GENe E
-and to bureaucratic deceptions when developing or seeking approval
of a covert-action operation. Thus, it is quite possible in the
CIA for the intel1igence analysts to say one thing, and for the
covert-action officers to get the authorization to do another. Although
the analysts saw little chance for a successful rebellion
against President Sukarno in 1958, the Clandestine Services supported
the abortive coup d'etat. Despite the analysts' view that
Castro's government had the support of the Cuban people, the
agency's operators attempted-and failed-at the Bay of Pigs to
overthrow him. In spite of large doubts on the part of the analysts
for years as to the efficacy of Radio Free Europe and Radio
Liberty, the CIA continued to fund these propaganda efforts until
1971, when forced by Congress to withdraw its support. Although
the analysts clearly indicated that the wars in Laos and Vietnam
were not winnable, the operational leadership of the CIA never
ceased to devise and launch new programs in support of the local
regimes and in the hope of somehow bringing about victory over
the enemy. The analysts had warned against involvement in Latin
American politics, but covert action was attempted anyway to
manipulate the 1964 and 1970 Chilean presidential elections.
In theory, the dichotomy that exists between the analytical and
clandestine components of the CIA is resolved at the top of the
agency. It is at the Director's level that the CIA's analytical input
is supposed to be balanced against the goals and risks of the covertaction
operation. But it does not always, or even often, work that
way. Directors like Allen Dulles and Richard Helms, both longtime
clandestine operators, tended to allow their affinity for secret
operations to influence their judgment. Even a remote chance of
success was enough to win their approval of a covert-action proposal.
The views of the analysts, if requested at all, and if they
survived the bureaucratic subterfuge of the clandestine operators,
were usually dismissed by the agency's leadership on the grounds
that they were too vague or indecisive for the purposes of operational
planning.
Still, regardless of the preference of the Director of Central Intelligence,
it is the President or his National Security Advisor who
The Clandestine Theory • 41
any significant covert-action program undertaken by the CIA. Often
in proposing such a program the agency's operators are responding
solely to a presidential directive or to orders of the National Security
Council. And always when a CIA covert-action proposal is
submitted for approval, the plans are reviewed by the 40 Committee,
the special interdepartmental group chaired by the President's
National Security Advisor. Thus, the desire of the President
or his advisor to move secretly to influence the internal events of
another country is frequently the stimulus that either sparks the
CIA into action or permits its operators to launch a dubious operation.
Only then does the apparatus get into motion; only then do
the analysts become meaningless. But "only then" means "almost
always."
Tactics
In his talk at the Council on Foreign Relations, Bissell listed eight
types of covert action, eight different ways that the CIA intervenes
in the domestic affairs of other nations:
( 1) political advice and counsel; (2) subsidies to an individual;
(3) financial support and "technical assistance" to
political parties; (4) support of private organizations, including
labor unions, business firms, cooperatives, etc.; (5) covert
propaganda; (6) "private" training of individuals and exchange
of persons; (7) economic operations; and (8) paramilitary
[or] political action operations designed to overthrow
or to support a regime (like the Bay of Pigs and the program
in Laos). These operations can be classified in various ways:
by the degree and type of secrecy required by their legality,
and, perhaps, by their benign or hostile character.
Bissell's fifth and eighth categories-covert propaganda and
- --- ~~ bro" so important, that they
42 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
The first three categories-political advice and counsel, subsidies
to an individual, and financial support and technical assistance to
political parties-are usually so closely related that they are nearly
impossible to separate. (
DELETED
) The reporters who covered that affair on April
10, 1971, apparently failed to notice anything unusual about the
guests. Seated in the State Dining Room at long white tables forming
a large E was the usual assortment of foreign dignitaries, high
U.S. government officials, and corporate executives who have become
fixtures at such occasions during the Nixon years. The guest
list supplied by the White House press office gave the titles and
positions for almost all the diners. (
DELETED
The Clandestine Theory 43
) years later, he was elected
mayor of West Berlin. Throughout this period, (
DELETED
) He was a hard-working politician in Alliedoccupied
Berlin, and his goal of making the Social Democratic
party a viable alternative to communism (
DELETED
) And that evening after dinner,
singer Pearl Bailey entertained the White House crowd in the East
Room. The Washington Post reported the next day that she had
"rocked" the White House. (
DELETED
44 • THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
DELETED
)
In certain countries where the CIA has been particularly active,
the agency's chief of station (cas) maintains closer ties with the
head of state than does the U.S. ambassador. Usually, the ambassador
is kept informed of the business transacted between the
cas (who is officially subordinate to the ambassador) and the
head of state (to whom the ambassador is officially accredited as
the personal representative of the President of the United States).
But Bissell mentioned cases in which the CIA's relationship with the
local head of state was so special that the American ambassador
was not informed of any of the details, because either the Secretary
of State or the head of the host government preferred that the
ambassador be kept ignorant of the relationships. (
DELETED
The Clandestine Theory 45
DELETED
)
Still another example of a country where the CIA enjoys a
special relationship is Nationalist China. In Taiwan, however, the
CIA's link is not with President Chiang Kai-shek, but with his son
and heir apparent, Premier Chiang Ching-kuo. One former CIA
chief of station, Ray Cline, until late 1973 the State Department's
Director of Intelligence and Research, became something of a
legend within the Clandestine Services because of his frequent allnight
drinking bouts with the younger Chiang. (
DELETED
)
In South Vietnam, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker insisted on
personally conducting all important meetings with President Thieu;
46 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L 1G ENe E
sometimes Bunker was accompanied by the CIA chief when there
was agency business to be discussed. But there has been another
CIA officer in Saigon who has known Thieu for many years and
who has retained access to the Vietnamese President. According
to a former assistant to Ambassador Bunker, this CIA officer has
served as conduit between Thieu and the American government
when a formal meeting is not desired or when Thieu wishes to
float an idea. (
DELETED
The Clandestine Theory 47
DELETED
) Each man has been thought by the agency
to represent a strong anti-communist force that would maintain
stability in a potentially volatile country.
Generally speaking, the CIA's ties with foreign political leaders
who receive advice and money from the agency are extremely
delicate. The CIA is interested in moving the leader and, through
him, his party and country into policies to the advantage of the
United States. In most countries of the Third World, the United
States policy is usually to maintain the status quo, so most subsidies
are designed to strengthen the political base of those in power. The
foreign leader who receives money from the CIA is typically furthering
both his own career and, presumably, what he believes are
the legitimate aims of his country. But even that presumption is
shaky; any politician's ability to rationalize his actions probably
increases once he has made the decision to accept such funds.
Extensive CIA involvement with private institutions at home and
overseas (Bissell's fourth category of covert-action tactics) is one
of the few aspects of the agency's covert-action effort to have
received a good deal of public attention. The 1967 expose by
Ramparts magazine of the CIA's clandestine connections with the
National Student Association was quickly followed by a flurry of
articles in the press concerning agency subsidies to scores of other
organizations. Some of these institutions, particularly those used
as conduits for covert funds, were under direct CIA control. Others
simply were financed by the agency and steered toward policies that
48 THE C I A AND THE C V L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
it favored through the manipulation of only a few of the organization's
key personnel. Sam Brown, a former head of the National
Student Association's National Supervisory Policy Board and later
a leader in the 1968 McCarthy campaign and in the anti-war movement,
told David Wise and Thomas B. Ross that in the case of the
NSA, the CIA would select one or two association officers as its
contacts. These officers were told that they should be aware of
certain secrets and were asked to sign an oath pledging silence.
"Then," Brown said,
they were told, "You are employed by the CIA." At that
point they were trapped, having signed a statement not to
divulge anything .... This is the part of the thing that I found
to be most disgusting and horrible. People were duped into this
relationship with the CIA, a relationship from which there
was no out.
Not all the student leaders recruited over the years by the CIA,
however, were displeased with the arrangement. Some later joined
the agency formally as clandestine operatives, and one rose to become
executive assistant to Director Richard Helms. It was this same
man who sometimes posed as an official of the Agency for International
Development to entrap unsuspecting NSA officers, revealing
his "cover" only after extracting pledges of secrecy and even NSA
commitments to cooperate with specific CIA programs.
Tom Braden, who headed the CIA's International Organizations
Division from 1950 to 1954 when that component of the Clandestine
Services was responsible for subsidizing private organizations,
described his own experiences in a 1967 Saturday Evening Post
article entitled "I'm Glad the CIA Is 'Immoral' ":
It was my idea to give the $15,000 to Irving Brown [of the
American Federation of Labor). He needed it to payoff his
strong-arm squads in Mediterranean ports, so that American
supplies could be unloaded against the opposition of Communist
dock workers .... At [Victor Reuther's] request, I
went to Detroit one morning and gave Walter [Reuther]
The Clandestine Theory • 49
$50,000 in $50 bills. Victor spent the money, mostly in West
Germany, to bolster labor unions there ....
I remember the enormous joy I got when the Boston Symphony
Orchestra won more acclaim for the U.S. in Paris than
John Foster Dulles or Dwight D. Eisenhower could have
bought with a hundred speeches. And then there was Encounter,
the magazine published in England and dedicated to the
proposition that cultural achievement and political freedom
were interdependent. Money for both the orchestra's tour and
the magazine's publication came from the CIA, and few outside
of the CIA knew about it. We had placed one agent in a
Europe-based organization of intellectuals called the Congress
for Cultural Freedom. Another agent became an editor of Encounter.
The agents could not only propose anti-Communist
programs to the official leaders of the organizations but they
could also suggest ways and means to solve the inevitable budgetary
problems. Why not see if the needed money could be
obtained from "American foundations"? As the agents knew,
the CIA-financed foundations were quite generous when it
came to the national interest.
The CIA's culture-loving, optimistic, freewheeling operators,
however, made serious tactical errors in funding these "private"
institutions. Over the years, the agency became involved with so
many groups that direct supervision and accounting were not always
possible. Moreover, the agency violated a fundamental rule of
intelligence in not carefully separating the operations of each organization
from all the others. Thus, when the first disclosures of CIA
involvement were published early in 1967, enterprising journalists
found that the financing arrangements and the conduit foundations
were so intertwined and overused that still other groups which
had been receiving CIA funds could be tracked down. Bissell
acknowledged this sloppiness of technique when he said, " ... it
is very clear that we should have had greater compartmenting of
operations."
In the aftermath of the disclosures, President Johnson appointed
a special committee consisting of Under Secretary of State Nicholas
50 • THE C I A AND THE C U L T °FIN TEL L I G ENe E
Katzenbach as chairman, CIA Director Richard Helms, and HEW
Secretary John Gardner to study the CIA's relationship with private
organizations. On March 29, 1967, the committee unanimously
recommended-and the President accepted as the national policy
-that: "No federal agency shall provide any covert financial
assistance or support, direct or indirect, to any of the nation's
educational or private voluntary organizations." The report said
that exceptions to this policy might be granted in case of "overriding
national security interests," but that no organizations then
being subsidized fitted this category. The Katzenbach committee
noted that it expected the CIA largely, if not entirely, to terminate
its ties with private organizations by the end of 1967.
Yet, a year later Richard Bissell told the Council on Foreign Relations:
If the Agency is to be effective, it will have to make use of
private institutions on an expanding scale, though those relations
which have "blown" cannot be resurrected. We need to
operate under deeper cover, with increased attention to the use
of "cut-outs" [Le., intermediaries]. CIA's interface with the
rest of the world needs to be better protected. If various
groups hadn't been aware of the source of their funding, the
damage subsequent to disclosure might have been far less
than occurred. The CIA interface with various private groups,
including business and student groups, must be remedied.
Bissell's comments seemed to be in direct contradiction to the
official U.S. government policy established by the President. But
Bissell, no longer a CIA officer, wasn't challenging presidential
authority, and his audience understood that, just as it understood
what, indeed, the Katzenbach committee had recommended. Bissell
was merely reflecting the general view within the CIA and the cult
of intelligence that President Johnson had been pressured by
liberals and the press into taking some action to reduce the agency's
involvement with private groups; that by naming Katzenbach (then
considered by the CIA to be a "friend") as chairman of the comThe
Clandestine Theory • 51
mittee and by making CIA Director Helms the second of its three
members, the President was stacking the deck in the CIA's favor;
that the agency certainly could be criticized for its lack of professional
skill in so sloppily funding the private groups; but that,
essentially, the President did not wish to change appreciably the
CIA's covert-action programs.
Once the Katzenbach report appeared, the CIA arranged secret
exceptions to the much-heralded new policy. Two CIA broadcasting
stations, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which together
received more than $30 million annually in CIA funds, were
immediately placed outside the restrictions of the presidential order.
And the CIA delayed withdrawing its support for other organizations
whose agency ties had been exposed until new forms of
financing them could be developed. Thus, as late as 1970 the CIA
was still subsidizing a major international youth organization
through a penetration who was one of the organization's officers.
In some cases, "severance payments" were made that could keep
an organization afloat for years.
Although the CIA had been widely funding foreign labor unions
for more than fifteen years and some of the agency's labor activities
were revealed in Tom Braden's Saturday Evening Post article, the
Katzenbach committee did not specify unions as the type of organizations
the CIA was barred from financing. At the 1968 Council
on Foreign Relations meeting at which Bissell spoke, Meyer Bernstein,
the Steelworkers Union's Director of International Labor
Affairs, commented:
the turn of events has been unexpected. First, there hasn't
been any real problem with international labor programs. Indeed,
there has been an increase in demand for U.S. labor programs
and the strain on our capacity has been embarrassing.
Formerly, these foreign labor unions knew we were short of
funds, but now they all assume we have secret CIA money,
and they ask for more help.
Worse yet, Vic Reuther, who had been alleging that others
were receiving CIA money, and whose brother's receipt of
52 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
$50,000 from CIA in old bills was subsequently disclosed by
Tom Braden, still goes on with his charges that the AFL-CIO
has taken CIA money. Here again, no one seems to listen.
"The net result has been as close to zero as possible. We've
come to accept CIA, like sin." So, for example, British
Guiana's [Guyana] labor unions were supported through CIA
conduits, but now they ask for more assistance than before.
So, our expectations to the contrary, there has been almost no
damage.
In Vietnam, enthusiastic officials of the U.S. embassy in Saigon
were fond of saying during the late 1960s that Tran Ngoc Buu was
the Samuel Gompers of the Vietnamese labor movement. They
did not say-and most probably did not know-(
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)
Bissell also identified" 'private' training of individuals and exchange
of persons" as a form of covert action:
Often activities have been initiated through CIA channels because
they could be started more quickly and informally but do
not inherently need to be secret. An example might be certain
exchange-of-persons programs designed to identify potential
political leaders and give them some exposure to the United
States. It should be noted, however, that many such innocent
programs are more effective if carried out by private auspices
than if supported officially by the United States Government.
They do not need to be covert but if legitimate private entities
such as the foundations do not initiate them, there may be no
way to get them done except by covert support to "front"
organizations.
He was referring to the so-called people-to-people exchange
programs, most of which are funded openly by the State Department,
the Agency for International Development, the U.S.
The Clandestine Theory 53
Information Agency, and various private organizations and foundations.
But the CIA has also been involved to a lesser extent, and
has brought foreigners to the United States with funds secretly
supplied to conduit organizations. On occasion, the agency will
sponsor the training of foreign officials at the facilities of another
government agency. A favorite site is AID's International Police
Academy in Washington. The academy is operated by AID's
Public Safety (police) Division, which regularly supplies cover
to CIA operators all over the world. And the CIA takes advantage
of exchange programs to recruit agents. While a systematic
approach is not followed, the agency considers foreigners visiting
the United States to be legitimate targets for recruitment.
The CIA has undertaken comparatively few economic covertaction
programs (Bissell's seventh category) over the years, preferring
the more direct approach of paramilitary operations or
propaganda. And those economic programs attempted by the
agency have not been notably successful. During the rnid-1960s
Japanese investors were used in an effort to build up the South
Vietnamese economy, because American companies tended to shy
away from making substantial investments in Vietnam. The U.S.
government hoped that the Japanese would fill the void at least
partially, and eventually lighten U.S. aid requirements. Thus, CIA
representatives promised certain Japanese businessmen that the
agency would supply the investment capital if the Japanese would
front for the operation and supply the technical expertise for large
commercial farms. After long and detailed negotiations, the deal
faltered and then failed.
A few years earlier the CIA had tried to disrupt Cuba's sugar
trade as part of its program to undercut Fidel Castro's regime. At
one point the Clandestine Services operatives proposed that the
CIA purchase large amounts of sugar and then dump it in a certain
foreign country so as to destroy the market for Cuban sugar. This
plan also fell through, but a more serious attack on Cuban sugar
occurred in August 1962 when a British freighter under lease to
the Soviets docked in Puerto Rico for repairs. The freighter,
54 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
carrying Cuban sugar destined for the Soviet Union, was placed in
a bonded warehouse while the ship was in dry dock. CIA agents
broke into the warehouse and contaminated the sugar with a nonpoisonous
but unpalatable substance.
As pointed out earlier, one of the advantages a secret agency like
the CIA provides to a President is the unique pretext of being
able to disclaim responsibility for its actions. Thus, a President
can direct or approve high-risk clandestine operations such as a
manned overflight of the Soviet Union on the eve of a summit conference,
a Bay of Pigs invasion, penetration and manipulation of
private youth, labor, or cultural organizations, paramilitary adventures
in Southeast Asia, or intervention in the domestic politics
of Chile without openly accepting the consequences of these decisions.
If the clandestine operations are successful-good. If they
fail or backfire, then usually all the President and his staff need do
to avoid culpability is to blame the CIA.
In no instance has a President of the United States ever made a
serious attempt to review or revamp the covert practices of the
CIA. Minor alterations in operational methods and techniques
have been carried out, but no basic changes in policy or practice
have ever been demanded by the White House. And this is not
surprising: Presidents like the CIA. It does their dirty work-work
that might not otherwise be "do-able." When the agency fails or
blunders, all the President need do is to deny, scold, or threaten.
For the CIA's part, being the focus of presidential blame is an
occupational hazard, but one hardly worth worrying about. It is
merely an aspect of the cover behind which the agency operates.
Like the other aspects of cover, it is part of a deception. The CIA
fully realizes that it is too important to the government and the
American political aristocracy for any President to do more than
tinker with it. The CIA shrugs off its blunders and proceeds to
devise new operations, secure in the knowledge that the White
House usually cannot resist its offerings, particularly covert actioncovert
action that dominates, that determines, that defines the shape
and purpose of the CIA. America's leaders have not yet reached the
The Clandestine Theory • 55
point where they are willing to forsake intervention in the internal
affairs of other countries and let events naturally run their course.
There still is a widely held belief in this country that America has
the right and the responsibility to become involved in the internal
political processes of foreign nations, and while faith in this belief
and that of doctrinaire anti-communism may have been somewhat
shaken in the last decade (
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)

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