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THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE

NINE: Intelligence and Policy

Policy must be based on the best
estimate of the facts which can
be put together. That estimate
in turn should be given by some
agency which has no axes to grind
and which itself is not wedded to
any particular policy.
-- ALLEN DULLES

WORKMEN had already started to put the White House
Christmas decorations in place on a December day in 1969 when
the President met in the Cabinet room with the National Security
Council. The (
DELETED
) out to the interested parts of the federal
government the previous April, bureaucrats had been writing position
papers to prepare their chiefs for this meeting. There was
sharp disagreement within the government on how hard a line the
United States should take with the (
DELETED
) Now the time for decision-making was at hand,
and those present included the Vice President, the Secretaries of
State and Defense, the Under Secretaries of State and Commerce,
the Director of Central Intelligence, a representative of the National
Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA), the Assistant to the
President for National Security Affairs, and the Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff.*
The President opened the session by stating that the NSC had
before it some very complex problems-complex not only in the
usual foreign-policy sense but also in a moral context which, the
President noted, concerned a large portion of the American population.
Nixon then turned to his DCI, Richard Helms, and said, "Go
ahead, Dick."
The NSC meeting had officially begun, and, as was customary,
• Admiral Thomas Moorer, the newly named Chairman of the lCS, was
attending his first NSC meeting in this capacity. The President noted the
occasion by introducing him to all assembled as "Admiral Mormon."
Intelligence and Policy 293
Helms set the scene by giving a detailed briefing on the political
and economic background of the countries under discussion. Using
charts and maps carried in by an aide, he described recent developments
in southern Africa. (His otherwise flawless performance
was marred only by his mispronunciation of "Malagasy" [formerly
Madagascar], when referring to the young republic.)
Next, Henry Kissinger talked about the kind of general posture
the United States could maintain toward the ( DELETED )
and outlined the specific policy options open to the President. In
the case of (
DELETED
*
* Some of the statements were quite revealing. Early in the meeting Secretary
of State William Rogers jokingly pointed out, to general laughter
in the room, that it might be inappropriate for the group to discuss the sub294
THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
DELETED
) the United States to do so. To what extent
Helms' arguments played a part in the presidential decision can
be answered only by Richard Nixon himself. But, the following
year, at the request of the British, the United States did end its (
DELETED
ject at hand, since some of those present had represented southern African
clients in earlier law practices. Vice President Spiro Agnew gave an im·
passioned speech on how the South Africans, now that they had recently
declared their independence, were not about to be pushed around, and he
went on to compare South Africa to the United States in its infant days.
Finally, the President leaned over to Agnew and said gently, "You mean
Rhodesia, don't you, Ted?"
Intelligence and Policy 295
DELETED
) was such an established
factor that it was not even under review at the NSC meet-
Ing.
It was quite extraordinary for Helms to speak out to the NSC
about the detrimental effect his agency would suffer if the (
DELETED ) since the DCI's normal
role at these sessions is limited to providing the introductory background
briefing. As the President's principal intelligence advisor,
his function is to supply the facts and the intelligence community's
best estimate of future events in order to help the decision-makers
in their work. What Helms was saying to the NSC was entirely
factual, but it had the effect of injecting intelligence operations
into a policy decision. In theory at least, the decision-makers are
supposed to be able to choose the most advantageous options with
the benefit of intelligence-not for the benefit of intelligence.
Analysis v. Operations
Many, but by no means all, intelligence professionals agree that
the primary and, indeed, paramount purpose of the intelligence
process is to produce meaningful, timely information on foreign
developments after a careful analysis of secret and open sources.
The finished product should be balanced in perspective and
objective in presentation. Under no circumstances is intelligence
supposed to advise a particular course of action. The intelligence
function, when properly performed, is strictly an informational
serVIce.
This is the theory, but in actual practice the U.s. intelligence
community has deeply intruded-and continues to-into the policymaking
arena. Perhaps it is unrealistic to expect that a $6 billion
activity with more than 150,000 employees working in over 100
countries would do otherwise. Nevertheless, it should be understood
that when someone like Richard Helms publicly declares, as
he did in 1971, "We make no foreign policy," he may be technically
correct in the sense that CIA officials must receive approval from
the White House for their main programs; but he is absolutely
296 • THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
incorrect in leaving the impression that the intelligence community,
apart from supplying information, does not have a profound determinative
effect on the formulation and carrying out of American
foreign policy.
The very existence of the CIA as an instrument for secret intervention
in other countries' internal affairs changes the way the
nation's highest leaders look at the world. They know that if open
political or economic initiatives fail, they can call on the CIA to
bail them out. One suspects that the Eisenhower administration
might have made more of an effort during its last ten months to
prevent relations with Cuba from reaching the breaking point if the
President had not already given his approval to the clandestine
training of a refugee army to overthrow the Castro regime.
The extreme secrecy in which the CIA works increases the
chances that a President will call it into action. He does not have
to justify the agency's activities to Congress, the press, or the
American people, so, barring premature disclosure, there is no
institutional force within the United States to stop him from doing
what he wants. Furthermore, the secrecy of CIA operations allows
a President to authorize actions in other countries which, if
conducted openly, would brand the United States as an outlaw
nation. International law and the United Nations charter clearly
prohibit one country from interfering in the internal affairs of another,
but if the interference is done by a clandestine agency whose
operations cannot readily be traced back to the United States, then
a President has a much freer hand. He does not even have to worry
about adverse public reaction at home or abroad. For example,
after Salvador Allende had been elected President of Chile in 1970,
President Nixon was asked at a press conference why the United
States was willing to intervene militarily in Vietnam to prevent a
communist takeover but would not do the same thing in Chile to
prevent a Marxist from taking power; he replied 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 President failed to mention that he had approved
( DELETED
Intelligence and Policy 297
DELETED
) but by keeping his action secret, he was able to
avoid-at least for the time being-the "adverse political reaction"
which he feared. If there had been no CIA to do the job covertly,
the U.S. government almost certainly would not have tried to
involve itself in the Chilean elections, since it was obviously not
willing to own up to its actions.
Clandestine operations can appear to a President as a panacea, as
a way of pulling the chestnuts out of the fire without going through
all the effort and aggravation of tortuous diplomatic negotiations.
And if the CIA is somehow caught in the act, the "deniability"
of these operations, in theory, saves a President from taking
any responsibility--or blame. Additionally, the CIA is equipped
to act quickly in a crisis. It is not hindered nearly as much by a
cumbersome bureaucracy as is the Pentagon, and it has proved its
ability to move with little advance notice, as it did in the Congo
during the early 1960s, to put an "instant air force" into action.
And the agency's field personnel do not demand the support
facilities of their military colleagues. In Laos forty or fifty career
CIA officers assisted by several hundred contractees ran an entire
"secret war," whereas the Pentagon, given the same mission, probably
would have set up a military-assistance command with thousands
of personnel (as it did in Vietnam), at a much greater cost to
the United States. Also, CIA operators are much less likely than
the military to grouse publicly that political restrictions are forcing
them to fight "with one arm tied behind our back," and this
makes the agency attractive to a President who has no desire to
engage in a running battle with his generals over the tactics to be
used in a particular situation.
The CIA does not originate an American commitment to a
country. The President and the State Department do that. But
once CIA operations are started in a foreign land, the U.S. stake
in that nation's future increases. Certainly the American interest
would be even larger if the President decided to send in combat
troops instead of his covert warriors, but such open intervention
would have to be justified publicly. In the 1950s and early 1960s
neither President Eisenhower nor President Kennedy wanted to
298 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
make suoh a commitment in Vietnam or Laos. Yet, by using
foreign-aid funds and heavy doses of covert operations, they were
able to create and then keep alive anti-communist governments
in both countries. When these palliatives proved insufficient later
in the 1960s, President Johnson chose to send American ground
troops into Vietnam and to begin the systematic bombing of Laos
by the U.S. Air Force. It might be argued that the CIA's covert
operations put off the day when more massive amounts of American
power would be needed, but it also might be said that if the
agency had not managed to keep the governments in Saigon and
Vientiane functioning for such a long time, the United States
would never have intervened openly at all.
In neither Vietnam nor Laos was the CIA acting without the
approval of the nation's highest policy-makers. Indeed, all the
agency's major covert-action operations are approved by the 40
Committee, and the President himself closely reviews this committee's
decisions. But even approved clandestine activities have
a way of taking on a life of their own, as field operatives loosely
interpret the general guidelines that come down from the White
House through Langley. By not closely supervising CIA covert
operations, the nation's highest leaders have allowed the agency
to affect foreign policy profoundly. For example, during the CIA
revolt against the leftist Guatemalan regime in 1954, an agency
plane bombed a British freighter which was suspected of carrying
arms to. the embattled government troops. In fact the ship was
loaded with coffee and cotton, and, fortunately, no one was injured
when only one of the bombs exploded. Richard Bissell admilted
to the New York Times on April 28, 1966, ~hat the attack
on the British vessel was a "sub-incident" that "went beyond the
established limits of policy." Bissell continued, "You can't take on
operations of this scope, draw boundaries of policy around them
and be absolutely sure that those boundaries will not be overstepped."
The CIA got involved in another "sub-incident" while it was
training Cuban exiles at secret bases in Guatemala for an invasion
of their homeland. In November 1960 a rebellion broke out
against ~he Guatemalan government which had been so gracious
Intelligence and Policy 299
in allowing the agency to use its territory as the jumping-off point
for the Cuban operation. The CIA returned the favor by sending
its B-26 bombers to help crush the insurgency. It is not clear
whether White House permission was given for these attacks, but
there was no question that the CIA had again interfered in Guatemalan
internal politics-this time to make sure that no new
Guatemalan government would oust it from its secret bases. Once
embarked on the attempt to overthrow Castro, the agency had
become involved in a chain of events which forced it to intervene
militarily in a second country to protect its operation against
Cuba. The President may have set the original policy, but there
was no way he could have known that simply by approving an
attack on Cuba he would set in motion agency paramilitary activities
against Guatemala.
CIA operations can have another unforeseen effect on American
foreign policy: they can subject the country to blackmail if
something goes wrong. For instance, within five days after the CIA
pilot was shot down and captured by Indonesia in 1958, the U.S.
government approved the sale for local currency of 37,000 tons of
American rice and lifted an embargo on $1 million in small arms
and other military equipment. Considering that at that moment the
CIA was actively backing an anned revolution against the Sukamo
regime, these would have been strange actions indeed for the
U.S. government to take if it were not extremely concerned about
saving the captured pilot.
A somewhat similar incident occurred in Singapore in 1960
after a CIA lie-detector expert was flown into the city to make sure
that a locally recruited agent was trustworthy. When the agency
technician plugged in his polygraph machine in a hotel room, he
blew out all the fuses in the building. * The lie-detector man, a .(
DELETED
300 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
CIA case officer, and the local agent were soon under arrest. The
Singapore government and the British, who were in the process
of granting Singapore its independence, were both disturbed by
the incident. Negotiations then ensued to secure the men's release.
According to Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, the U.S.
government offered $3.3 million to get them out. Lee claimed
that he wanted ten times as much and consequently took nothing.
In any case, the two CIA officials were subsequently freed, and the
newly installed Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, wrote a secret
letter of apology to the Singapore leader. In a 1965 speech
Lee mentioned the affair as an example of the type of activity
engaged in by the CIA. The State Department issued a routine
denial furnished by the CIA-State's press office not realizing the
truth of Lee's charges. Lee reacted by publicly producing Rusk's
letter of apology, and State was forced to retract its original statement,
although it still maintained that no ransom had ever been
offered. As well as embarrassing the U.S. government and making
headlines around the world, the incident caused the State Department
to revamp its internal system for making announcements
about intelligence matters. (
DELETED
)
In general the presence of American intelligence facilities in a
foreign country can have an important effect on American policy
toward that country, especially in the Third World. Closely aligned
countries, such as (
DELETED
DELETED
Intelligence and Policy • 301
DELETED
) But to the less developed countries, the
presence of an American installation is both a threat and an opportunity.
The threat comes from domestic opposition forces who
look on the base as an example of "neo-colonialism" and use it as
a weapon against those in power. The opportunity arises out of the
fact that the United States will pay dearly for the right to install
its eavesdropping equipment and keep it in place-as (DELETED
) discovered.
(
DELETED
) Both host governments have been severely criticized
by internal forces and neighboring countries for giving the
United States a foothold in their nations, but both have been handsomely
rewarded in American military and economic assistance
well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. While comparatively
modest amounts of aid would probably have been supplied even
if there had been no bases, the large size of the programs represented,
in effect, a direct payment for the intelligence facilities.
Similarly, from 1956 until the end of 1969 the U.S. Air Force
operated a huge base near Peshawar in Pakistan which was
primarily an intelligence facility. For several years before Francis
Gary Powers' abortive flight over the Soviet Union in 1960, the
CIA's U-2 planes used Peshawar as a principal takeoff point for
reconnaissance flights over and along the edges of the Soviet Union.
In addition, (
DELETED
) From the early days of the Eisenhower administration,
the United States had allied itself more closely with Pakistan than
with India in those two countries' continuing struggle. Yet at least
some experts on the region believe that an important factor in the
American "tilt" toward Pakistan, at least until the late 1960s, was
the desire to hold on to the base at Peshawar.
Another site of large American technical espionage installations
is the island of Taiwan. In this instance the United States did
302 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
not have to provide the Nationalist Chinese government with much
inducement to allow the construction of the facilities, since they
were aimed against the Nationalists' archenemy on the mainland
and some of the information gathered was shared with the Chiang
Kai-shek government. Furthermore, in the fifteen or so years after
the Nationalists' expulsion from China, the CIA closely cooperated
with Chiang's intelligence service to run covert missions against
the mainland, and the Nationalists were so dependent on the
United States for their very existence that they were in no position
to extract a large payment from the United States for the intelligence
bases. Yet, by giving the CIA and the other agencies a free
hand to build virtually any kind of facility they chose, the Chiang
government made it much more difficult for the United States to
disengage from Taiwan and build better relations with China. Many
of the most important installations for the surveillance of the mainland
are located on the island, and they represent an investment
valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. All American military
forces, including those engaged in intelligence work, will have to be
removed from Taiwan before the United States meets the Chinese
conditions for complete normalization of relations between the
two countries.
Recent history is full of other examples of technical espionage
programs having a profound effect on U.S. foreign policy. The
shoot-down of the U-2 over the Soviet Union in 1960 caused the
cancellation of the Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit meeting. The
spy ship Liberty, while trying to monitor the action during the 1967
Six Day War, moved in too close (because a "warning" message
from Washington was misrouted) and was shot up by Israeli planes
and boats. Thirty-four Americans were killed. As a result, according
to former DIA and CIA staffer Patrick McGarvey in his book
CIA: The Myth and the Madness, the Joint Chiefs of Staff "proposed
a quick, retaliatory air strike on the Israeli naval base which
launched the attack." The Chief's recommendation was turned
down. McGarvey continues:
The next year the North Koreans seized a similar ship, the
Pueblo, and interned its crew. Again we were on the brink
Intelligence and Policy 303
of war because of intelligence, the supposed secret arm of
government. The JCS again recommended an air strike. The
Pueblo incident was followed by the shoot-down of a United
States reconnaissance plane [a Navy EC-121] off the coast of
North Korea a little over a year later. And again JCS
wanted to mount an air strike.
There have been other disastrous reconnaissance flights-these
over China-that have gone virtually unreported in the American
press. Some of these have been mentioned by the New China News
Agency, but have apparently been dismissed in the West as communist
propaganda. They include the shooting down of several
CIA U-2 planes flown by Nationalist pilots and even more U.S. Air
Force pilotless "drone" aircraft (the Chinese claim nineteen downed
between 1964 and 1969) over the Chinese mainland. American
SR-71s also flew regularly over China (and continue to do so
over North Korea) until all reconnaissance flights were stopped as
a result of Henry Kissinger's first trip to Peking in 1971.
At the very time in October 1969 when the United States was
trying to resume diplomatic contact with the Chinese, Air Force Intelligence,
with the approval of the 40 Committee, sent a drone
over southern China. On October 28 the New China News Agency
reported the downing of "a U.S. imperialist, pilotless, high altitude
plane," but (
DELETED
)
Another extremely provocative drone flight was proposed by
the Pentagon in the period after the American invasion of Cambodia
in 1970. The mission was approved by the 40 Committee
over the strong objections of the State Department which estimated
that roughly one in three of these aircraft would be shot down. (
DELETED
304 • THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
DELETED
)
The official justification for all the espionage missions carried out
by intelligence planes and ships is to gather intelligence which
helps to protect the national security of the United States. But with
literally hundreds of flights and cruises scheduled each month along
the borders of and over unfriendly countries, inevitably there are
embarrassing failures. That these abortive missions on occasion
cause international crises is understood by the policy-makers who
rather routinely give their approval, and is presumably' figured in
as one of the costs of acquiring the intelligence. Yet it is frightening
to realize that some of these spying forays could have led-and
could in the future lead-to armed conflict. Missions that violate
the territorial integrity of foreign countries are clear violations of
sovereignty, and any country that shoots at an intruder inside its
borders is completely within its legal rights.
While Allen Dulles professed to believe that U.S. foreign policy
should be based on intelligence estimates developed by an agency
with "no axes to grind and . . . itself . . . not wedded to any particular
policy," his actions were not always true to these words.
Consequently, he made possible the Bay of Pigs-the classic case
of what can happen when intelligence is misused in the carrying
out of a clandestine operation.
The problem started on the eve of Fidel Castro's triumphant
march into Havana in January 1959 while CIA analysts were preparing
a report for the White House stating that the rebels' success
was due largely to the corruption of the Batista regime and the
resulting popular disgust among the Cuban people. Allen Dulles
Intelligence and Policy • 305
personally intervened in the intelligence process and rewrote this
report to suit his own political biases. In Dulles' view, Castro's victory
was not a natural development that could have been expected
in light of the faults of Batista. Dulles' Calvinistic mind may well
have seen the hand of the Devil at work, and he predicted that there
would be a slaughter in Havana which would put the French Revolution
to shame. "Blood will flow in the streets," he wrote passionately
in the CIA report to the White House.
For the most part, however, the agency's analysts took a more
moderate tone in the months that followed. They stressed that
Castro's Cuba, while something of an annoyance, was in no way a
direct threat to the security of the United States. The Intelligence
Directorate also tried to explain that Castro, despite his socialistic
leanings, was fiercely independent and a devout nationalist, much
like Indonesia's Sukarno, Egypt's Nasser, and Ghana's Nkrumahall
opponents of Western domination of the Third World but certainly
not agents of any international communist conspiracy. Most
important for future events, the analysts wrote that, regardless of
the emotional reports flowing from Cuban refugees concerning political
unrest on the island, Castro appeared to have general support
of the populace.
Dulles did not accept this finding of his intelligence analysts, nor
did he promote their point of view at the White House. Instead, he
seized upon the reporting of the Clandestine Services as more truly
reflective of· events in Cuba. Dulles had always believed that the
field operator was a more reliable judge of events than the intelligence
analyst back at headquarters. Prior to Castro's takeover,
there had not even been a full-time CIA analyst of Cuban problems
in the Intelligence Directorate, and the two that were added
after January 1959 never really won Dulles' trust. He preferred to
read the assessments of the Clandestine Services' officers, who did
their own evaluation of the clandestine reports received from
secret agents.
Sometime during late 1959 Dulles decided that the best solution
for the Cuban problem would be to invade Cuba with an army of
Cuban refugees and to overthrow Castro. He was unquestionably
influenced by the reports of the Clandestine Services, which, unlike
306 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
those of the Intelligence Directorate, stressed the unpopularity of
the Castro regime, its internal frictions, and its economic troubles.
In March 1960, President Eisenhower, at Dulles' urging and with
Dulles' facts at hand, gave his approval for the CIA to start recruiting
and training the ill-fated invasion force. Robert Amory,
the Deputy Director of Intelligence, was never officially told that
the invasion was in the works so that his experts could analyze the
chances of success. Dulles was convinced that Cuba was ripe for
an invasion, and as he was the President's chief intelligence
advisor, that was that.
When the CIA's military force failed to topple Castro in the
spring of 1961, the agency's Intelligence Directorate temporarily
gained equal footing with the Clandestine Services. This did not
occur because there was any newfound appreciation of the analysts'
work but rather because the operators were in a general state of
disgrace after the Bay of Pigs. John McCone took over as Director
in November 1961, and after rising above his initial distrust of the
entire organization, he ultimately saw the need for and the value of
high-quality national intelligence.
(
DELETED
) * Castro, whose secret agents had penetrated
* Assassination of Castro seemed to have been a recurrent idea in the CIA
during these years. E. Howard Hunt claims to have recommended it before
the Bay of Pigs, only to be turned down. In November of 1961, President
Kennedy mentioned the idea in a private chat with Tad Szulc, then of the
New Yark Times. Kennedy asked the newsman, "How would you feel if
the United States assassinated Castro?" When Szulc said he thought it was
a very poor idea, Kennedy said, "I'm glad you feel that way because suggestions
to that effect keep coming to me, and I believe very strongly the
United States should not be a party to political assassination." Lyndon
Johnson told his former aide Leo Janos, as recounted in a July 1973
Atlantic article, "We had been operating a damned Murder, Inc. in the
Caribbean." Janos elaborated, "A year or so before Kennedy's death a CIAbacked
assassination team had been picked up in Havana. Johnson specuIntelligence
and Policy 307
the CIA's operations long before the Bay of Pigs, knew perfectly
well what the CIA was doing, and the ongoing American attacks
against his rule may well have been an important factor in his
decision in the spring of 1962 to allow the Soviet Union to install
offensive nuclear weapons in his country.
The Cuban missile crisis that developed as a result produced one
of the finest hours for the CIA and the intelligence community, although
the last National Intelligence Estimate, prepared by the CIA
a little over a month before President Kennedy went on nationwide
television to announce the Cuban "quarantine," declared that it
was unlikely that the Soviets would install nuclear-tipped missiles
on the island. The fact remains, however, that the CIA and the
other intelligence agencies did discover the Soviet missiles in time
for the President to take action, and they presented the facts to
Kennedy with no policy recommendations or slanting which could
have limited his options. This was how the intelligence process was
supposed to work.
The affair started in the late spring of 1962 when CIA analysts
noted that the Soviets were sending an increased amount of military
assistance to Cuba. These shipments were not viewed with particular
alarm in the agency, since there was still much to be done in
the Soviet re-equipping of the Cuban army forces, which was then
under way. Furthermore, the CIA had ways of keeping track of
what arms flowed into Cuba.
Since January 1961, when the Eisenhower administration had
broken diplomatic relations with the Castro regime, there had been
no agency operators working out of an American embassy in
Havana, but the (
DELETED
) Additionally, a steady flow of refugees
was arriving in Miami and being debriefed by agency officers permanently
assigned there. As was true before the Bay of Pigs, the
stories told by many of these refugees were hysterical but oclated
that Dallas had been a retaliation for this thwarted attempt, although
he couldn't prove it."
308 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL ~ I G ENe E
casionally some valuable nugget of information would 'be gleaned
from their tales.
Based on President Kennedy's request, the USIB had set Cuba
as a Priority National Intelligence Objective (PNIO), and the various
military intelligence agencies had been assigned extensive
collection requirements by the USIB. New requirements were almost
continually levied in response to the specific needs of the analysts.
The Air Force and the Navy carefully watched the shipping lanes
and photographed Soviet ships destined for Cuba. Surveillance was
provided by the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, by the Atlantic
fleet (which even had a listening post at Guantanamo Bay inside
Cuba), and by the Air Force. U.S. intelligence photographed ship
movements and listened in electronically on Cuban communications.
The National Security Agency tuned its huge antennae in on
Soviet shipping and Cuban communications. ITT had operated
much of the Cuban communications system before Castro's nationalizations,
and the company worked closely with the CIA and
NSA to intercept messages. Much of the old equipment was still in
use, and the NSA was collecting large amounts of information.
Finally, the CIA was flying two U-2 missions each month over
Cuba, and the photographs taken by these spy planes were quickly
turned over to the analysts.
So while Soviet military (and economic) assistance to Castro was
on the upswing in the late spring of 1962, there seemed little cause
for alarm in the CIA or elsewhere in the U.S. government. Moscow
had recently eased tensions in Berlin, much to the relief of Washington
policy-makers, whose strong stand in that divided city appeared
to have paid off. But still there were a few ominous signs.
The CIA leamed that Soviet military personnel were being secretly
used in combat roles as submarine crews in Indonesia and as
bomber crews in Yemen, a drastic departure from previous Soviet
practice. Then, by July the analysts noted further increases in the
arms being shipped to Cuba, along with the arrival of a large
number of young men from the Soviet Union-who Moscow
claimed were technical advisors to assist in economic development
programs. The CIA doubted this, for, among other reasons, all the
"civilians" were young, seemed to have a military bearing, and
Intelligence and Policy 309
wore only two kinds of sport shirt. It was becoming clear that the
Soviets were supplying too much military equipment for the Cuban
armed forces to absorb. A small group of CIA analysts, expert in
deciphering the ways Moscow and its allies conducted their foreign
aid programs, became convinced that an unprecedented military
build-up was occurring in Cuba. Their efforts during August to
alert top U.S. officials to this threat were hampered, surprisingly,
by military intelligence agencies, namely the DIA and the NSA,
which viewed the intensified Soviet activity on the island as mostly
economic assistance. Perhaps it was because the CIA had performed
so poorly with its inaccurate reporting on Cuba as a prelude to the
Bay of Pigs that even the hawkish U.S. military establishment was
now leery of the agency's ability to assess the Cuban situation. In
any event, both the DIA and the NSA saw fit to counter the CIA
intelligence reports with rebuttals in late August 1962.
The basic reason that the CIA analysts were able to monitor the
Soviet arms build-up more closely than the other intelligence
agencies, which had essentially the same information available, was
the more refined technique that the CIA had developed, including
a special analytical tool known as "crate-ology"-a unique method
of determining the contents of the large crates carried on the decks
of the Soviet ships delivering arms. With a high degree of accuracy,
the specialists could look at photographs of these boxes, factor in
information about the ship's embarkation point and Soviet military
production schedules, and deduce whether the crates contained
transport aircraft or jet fighters. While the system was viewed with
caution by many in the intelligence community, CIA Director John
McCone accepted its findings, and his confidence in the technique
proved to be justified.
Nevertheless, the CIA's analysts did not spot the first shipments
of Soviet offensive missiles, which arrived in Cuba during the early
part of September. The Soviets escaped the scrutiny of the "crateologists"
by sending the weapons in the holds of huge_freighters,
not in crates carried on deck as had been their usual practice when
delivering bulky military equipment. On September 19, the USIB
approved the National Intelligence Estimates which, while noting
the disturbing Soviet arms build-up, declared it unlikely that the
310 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
Russians would bring in nuclear-tipped missiles. During this period
McCone personally suspected the worst of the Soviets, but, to his
credit, he did not put his private views forward as the CIA position
since, as he would later say, it was based on "intuition," not "hard
intelligence." Nevertheless, he did urge the White House to approve
an increased schedule of U-2 flights. The President agreed in early
October, but, at Defense Secretary McNamara's urging, responsibility
for the reconnaissance missions was turned over from the
CIA to the Air Force because of the danger that Soviet SAMs
(surface-to-air missiles) posed to more frequent flights.*
On October 14 an Air Force U-2 brought back photographs
of six medium-range ballistic-missile sites which were nearing
operational readiness and four intermediate-range sites in the early
stage of construction. CIA analysts were able to verify these pictures
indisputably with the help of information previously provided
by satellite surveillance of similar installations in the U.S.S.R. and
from documents supplied by Penkovsky, and also by comparing
the (
DELETED
) And thus the Cuban missile crisis began.
By the end of October, Nikita Khrushchev had been outmaneuvered
by Kennedy and he promised to withdraw his country's offensive
weapons from Cuba, in return for an American pledge not
to invade the island. (This was a pledge that the CIA, with White
House approval, seems to have violated systematically by continuing
its guerrilla raids on Cuba until the late 1960s.) The CIA
and several military intelligence agencies maintained their surveillance
of Cuba to make sure the withdrawal was complete. It was,
despite persistent rumors in the press that the Soviets had hidden
some of the missiles in caves. The CIA even noted that a group of
* Just as the new wave of U-2s was starting surveillance of Cuba, on
October 9, 1962, the mainland Chinese used a SAM to bring down a CIA
U-2 flown by a Nationalist Chinese pilot. A SAM of the same model had
knocked Francis Gary Powers out of the air over the Soviet Union two
years earlier and would down an Air Force plane over Cuba late in
October at the height of the missile crisis.
Intelligence and Policy 3I1
IL-28 jet bombers had been removed from a hiding place which
the agency had (unknown to the Soviets) previously discovered.
President Kennedy chose later to view the missile crisis as a
nearly disastrous intelligence failure, since the CIA had been
unable to give early warning of the Soviet offensive build-up and
had predicted in its last estimate the unlikelihood of Soviet missiles
being placed on the island. He was not willing to concede that the
agency's warning of heavily increased Soviet military activity on
the island during the summer months (when military intelligence
was claiming otherwise) compensated for the CIA's inability to
predict that nuclear-missile sites would be constructed--even though
it was as a direct result of the agency's warning that surveillance of
the island was intensified and ultimately led to the discovery of the
missiles. To what extent the President still mistrusted the CIA for
its Bay of Pigs blunder is unclear, but Kennedy obviously expected
better information.
The Cuban missile crisis illustrated the inherent limitations of
intelligence, among the most important of which is that certain
events simply cannot be predicted with accuracy or confidence.
Khrushchev's decision to install nuclear missiles in Cuba was not
knowable until the Soviets had actually embarked on that course of
action. Careful psychological studies of Khrushchev's character
could provide suppositions that he might act in an unpredictable
way, but to have known exactly what he would do would have
required divine analytical wisdom or spies in the inner reaches of
the Kremlin-neither of which the CIA possessed. As for those
people in the intelligence community whose visceral feelings led
them to expect the worst of Khrushchev and Castro before either
had contemplated the missile gamble-to have accepted their
speculations as intelligence would have been the height of irresponsibility.
Allen Dulles and his Clandestine Services lieutenants had
had their own gut reactions to events in Cuba nearly two years
earlier, and when their "feelings" were presented to the nation's
leaders as intelligence, the outcome was the Bay of Pigs. John
McCone proved himself a much more responsible intelligence
officer than his predecessor when, unlike Dulles, he refused to impose
his own suspicions upon the President. Hindsight may in312
THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
dicate that the Dulles technique, employed by McCone, would
have had more favorable results-but hindsight is too easy.
The CIA and the rest of the intelligence community conducted
extensive post-mortems of the missile crisis. They found that
enough bits and pieces of information and other tenuous evidence
had been available to have warranted an earlier judgment that the
Soviets were installing their missiles. Bureaucratic entanglements
and frictions, coupled with some degree of human imperfection,
however, prevented even the most astute intelligence officers from
determining the true purpose of Khrushchev's actions. Yet intelligence
seems to have done the best it could in the existing circumstances;
the one or two accurate agent reports picked up during
September were buried among thousands of useless, inaccurate, or
misleading ones. The collection of huge amounts of secret information
from a multitude of sources and the availability of analytical
staffs even larger than those available at the time are by themselves
no guarantee that the CIA and the intelligence community
will produce correct predictions. Intelligence is in essence a guessing
game, albeit one that is grounded in fact, logic, and experience.
It can be a useful tool to the policy-makers, but it is not, even in
its purest form, a magic art.
Abusing the Product
Unfortunately, intelligence reports are often sent to the nation's
leaders in a far from pure form, especially when the subject is
Soviet military capabilities. Yet, estimating the quantity and quality
of Soviet weapons is probably the intelligence community's most
important task, since the Soviet Union, on a strategic basis, is the
only country in the world that offers a real threat to the security of
the United States. (The Chinese strategic threat is more potential
than real.) Every President since World War II has wanted to
know about any dangerous imbalances between American and
Soviet forces, and presidential decisions on whether or not to go
ahead with the development of new and expensive weapons systems
Intelligence and Policy • 313
have been based, to a great extent, on intelligence estimates of how
strong the Russians are (although domestic political considerations
and the views of America's allies also playa large role).
The Pentagon knows all too well that to justify its constant demands
for new weapons and larger forces, intelligence must show
that the Soviets are moving into a position of strength. * To support
a request for additional ships, the Navy will often magnify an increased
threat from the Soviet fleet. The Air Force can much more
easily obtain funds for a new bomber if it can show that the Soviets
are developing one. Similar justifications can be-and have beenmade
for missiles, tanks, and even the continuance of American
programs for chemical and biological warfare. Military analysts
have tended to take a "worst case" view of the Soviets, from which
they predict the most dire possible consequences from Soviet actions.
Major General Daniel Graham, formerly chief of estimates
at the DIA, described the process in an April 1973 article in Army
Magazine: "To put it bluntly, there is a considerable body of
opinion among decision-makers, in and out of DOD [Department
of Defense], which regards threat estimates prepared by the military
as being self-serving, budget oriented, and generally inflated."
While Graham conceded that the lack of confidence in military estimates
is "fully understandable," stemming "from a series of bad
overestimates, later dubbed 'bomber gap,' 'missile gap,' and 'megaton
gap,' " he asserted that military intelligence has now vastly
improved and is capable of making objective estimates. While most
observers of the intelligence community would agree with his
assessment of the military's bad record in estimates, few outside
the Pentagon would accept his assertion that objectivity has returned
to the Pentagon's appraisals of the Soviets, although these
appraisals are unquestionably closer to reality than they were ten
years ago.
Graham illustrated another basic point that "is beginning to be
understood in military planner circles." He stated:
• Senator Stuart Symington has pointed out that scare stories about Soviet
military strength appear at congressional budget time in springtime Washington
as regularly as the cherry blossoms.
314 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
Estimates of future enemy forces and hardware are by nature
of intent-not just capability. The old arguments about "capability
versus intent" are heard less now in DOD. It remains
true that intelligence should emphasize capability in descriptions
of current and near-future enemy forces. But the minute
you tackle the usual problem of estimating enemy forces (or
hardware) a year or so into the future, you have entered the
realm of intent. For example, since World War II the Soviets
have never to our knowledge deployed forces of fielded hardware
as fast as their total capability permitted. To estimate
that they would do so with regard to some weapon system or
type of force in the future would make little sense .... It is
remarkable how long it has taken some of our military users to
wise up to it.
As a result of the military's propensity to overestimate, the CIA
(usually supported by the State Department) is almost always suspicious
of Pentagon positions. Thus, the agency tends to resist and
counter military judgments, which in turn has led to CIA underestimation.
In the national-security bureaucracy, the agency's
tendency to be wrong on the low side, while occurring far less
frequently than the Pentagon's errors, is considered more serious,
since if estimates of Soviet capabilities run too high, that provides
a margin for safety to the military planners, who may well spend
billions of dollars reacting to a non-existent threat but who at
least do not endanger the country by developing too few weapons.
This continuing conflict between the military agencies and the
civilians in the intelligence community was most evident in the
preparation of the National Intelligence Estimates (NIBs), which
until 1973 were considered the highest form of national intelligence.
In the internal CIA reshuffling begun by James Schlesinger during
his short stay at the agency and continued by present Director
Colby, the twelve-to-fourteen-man Board of National Estimates and
its staff of forty to fifty specialists have been largely phased outalong
with the production of thoroughly researched and wellthought-
out community-wide NIEs. These documents, long the
Intelligence and Policy 315
epitome of finished intelligence production, were found to be inadequate
for the more immediate foreign-policy purposes of Henry
Kissinger and the Nixon administration. Thus, the BNE has been
replaced by a group of eight senior officers known as National
Intelligence Officers who on short notice produce brief (no more
than ten- or twelve-page) assessments of whatever international
situation is of immediate concern to Kissinger's NSC staff.
The net result of this change has been that long-term estimates
on broad subjects (e.g., the Outlook on Latin America Over the
Next Decade, Soviet Strategic Strike Capabilities for the Next Five
Years, etc.) have given way to short-term predictions which are
little more than extensions of current intelligence analysis. But the
intelligence system is the servant of the policy-maker and must
meet his needs and demands. Even so, the CIA's new estimating
system has failed to satisfy the NSC staff and the White House. The
tactical approach to world problems has proved to be of no more
value-and probably less-than the traditional strategic view.
In the past, while the majority of the fifty or more NIEs written
each year dealt with political matters, both the CIA and the
Pentagon devoted the most work and attention to estimates that
dealt with foreign military capabilities-especially the Soviet
Union's. These NIEs, on such subjects as Soviet strategic strike
forces, air defense forces, and general-purpose forces, influenced
large decisions about the American military budget, and each
branch of the service as well as the DIA (representing the Defense
Department) as a whole would fight fiercely to have its point of
view included.
For example, in the 1963-to-1965 period when the Pentagon
was seeking funds to build an anti-ballistic-missile (ABM) system,
the military services joined together to promote the idea that
Moscow was in the process of deploying its own ABM which
would nullify the offensive nuclear threat of American strategic
forces. Thus, the Pentagon reasoned, the United States would no
longer have the power to stop the Soviets from taking bold
initiatives in Western Europe and the Third World, and the
security of the United States itself would be threatened. Although
the military may have believed sincerely that the Soviets were
316 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
outdistancing the United States and that Moscow would go on the
offensive once it had an advantage, the benefits to be received
by the armed services through an ABM system were still tremendously
large. The Army stood to receive billions of dollars to
build the system (and, not incidentally, get itself into the strategicmissile
field, which the Air Force and Navy had managed to
pre-empt). The Air Force could justify its requests for more longrange
missiles in order to overcome the Soviet ABM defenses,
and the Navy, on similar grounds, could ask for additional funds
for its missile-equipped submarines.
The CIA and the State Department, on the other hand, did not
see the Soviet ABM construction to be such a large threat to the
United States. Neither ascribed such hostile intentions to the
Soviets as the Pentagon did, and many analysts were not even
convinced that any sort of ABM could ever be developed which
could effectively stop the other side's intercontinental missiles. (In
fact, quite a few cynical observers of the 1972 S.A.L.T. agreements
believe that the reason the American and Soviet governments
agreed to a limitation of two ABM sites each was that neither
country had real confidence that its own ABM would work
properly and thus was just as happy to be able to divert the money
into other sorts of weaponry.)
While the ABM debate was raging within the intelligence community,
both the civilian and the military analysts had access to
the same fragmentary information about what the Soviets were
doing in the field. There was tremendous pressure for additional
intelligence and the USIB was frequently setting new collection
requirements. Overt sources such as U.S. diplomats and Soviet
periodicals produced some data, and Air Force spy planes flying
along the fringes of the Soviet Union picked up more. Huge radars
and other electronic sensors located in ( DELETED )
also made a contribution. And the most valuable information was
supplied by the photographic satellites.
Yet, the overall picture on the Soviet ABM was incomplete,
and the analysts were forced to make conclusions without having
all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle before them. Often they turned
Intelligence and Policy • 317
to experts at the private "think tanks" for advice. They also consulted
with American corporations-especially Bell Laboratoriesthat
were performing research and development for the U.S. ABM
in the hope that some of the fragmentary data amassed would make
sense to the people working on similar systems at home.
Both the civilian and the military analysts agreed that the
Soviets were constructing some sort of new defense system at
Leningrad, and something else at Moscow. Most of the civilians
believed that the Leningrad system was aimed against American
bombers, and that the Moscow system was probably an ABM
defense still undergoing research and development. The military
claimed that the Leningrad site was actually an ABM, and that
research had been completed for a more advanced ABM system
which would be constructed around Moscow.
In those years from 1963 to 1965 the military entered footnote
after footnote in the NIEs, and the views of a divided community
went forward to the White House. The Johnson administration
made hundreds of millions of dollars of development funds
available to the Army for the American ABM, although the
Pentagon would have liked even more money to speed up development.
Several years later, intelligence learned that the
Leningrad system was indeed aimed against planes, not missiles
(although the military quickly maintained-and still do todaythat
the Leningrad site could be quickly "upgraded" to have ABM
capability), but that at Moscow the Soviets were building a true
but limited ABM. The civilian estimate had been much closer to
the truth than the military's, but the Pentagon got the funding it
wanted from the Johnson and the Nixon administrations to proceed
with the deployment of an ABM system.
These intelligence wars are not just fought out in the privacy of
the intelligence community. All the members have on occasion
selectively disclosed secret data to the press and to members of
Congress in support of their budgetary requests. But as columnist
Joseph Kraft has written, " ... far, far more than the civilians in
the government, the uniformed military are in the habit of leaking
318 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
information to serve their own interests." The sanctity of classified
information seems to fall apart when fights for additional funds are
under way in Congress. Former Assistant CIA Director for Research
Herbert Scoville, Jr., was absolutely correct when he told
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 28, 1972, that
"the history of the past twenty years is dotted with example after
example of intelligence being misused to promote within the
Congress the programs of individual organizations or even of the
administration as a whole."
Newsmen friendly to the Pentagon, such as Joseph Alsop (who
helped promote the Pentagon's mythical bomber, missile, megaton,
and ABM gaps, and is currently pushing the military's latest fright
gimmick, the "technological" gap), and William Beecher, * have
long received leaks of material marked HIGHER THAN TOP SECRET
to buttress the military's case in a particular dispute. Included have
been numerous reports based on satellite photography and communications
intercepts--collection methods so sensitive that the
overwhelming majority of government employees with security
clearances are not authorized access to the information received.
Then Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and other Defense
officials publicly quoted and leaked such one-sided intelligence
during the 1969 congressional debate over the ABM that someone-
probably in the CIA or the State Department--countered by
providing the New Yark Timt;s with the draft of a USIB estimate
that refuted most of the Pentagon arguments about the danger
posed by the Soviet ABM. In 1971 the Defense Department passed
satellite-photo-based material concerning alleged Soviet construction
of a new and larger type of missile to military-spending
* Beecher, for many years the New York Times' Pentagon correspondent.
left the paper in early 1973 to become a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense
for Public Affairs. Ironically, his 1969 story about the secret American
bombing of Cambodia and his 1971 piece on the classified American bargaining
position at the S.A.L.T. talks have been credited by the Nixon administration
as being among the principal reasons. along with the more
important leak of the Pentagon Papers. for the formation in June 1971 of
the so-called White House plumbers to stop unauthorized disclosures in
the press.
Intelligence and Policy 319
champion Senator Henry Jackson. Calling the development
"ominous indeed," Jackson warned the country on March 7 about
what the Soviets were supposedly doing, at the same time that
Congress was considering the military budget. Melvin Laird corroborated
Jackson's disclosure three days later in a television
interview, and on April 22 cited fresh intelligence "confirming the
sobering fact that the Soviet Union is involved in a new-and apparently
extensive-ICBM construction program." Additionally,
the threat described by Jackson and Laird was made even more
vivid by a spate of unattributed supporting leaks.
Finally, an anonymous CIA employee struck back at the
Pentagon. He knew that the agency had concluded that the Soviets
were only "hardening" their missile sites rather than deploying
a huge new missile system, and that over two thirds of the excavations
mentioned by Jackson and Laird were intended for an
older and relatively small ICBM. So this CIA man publicly disclosed
the agency's secret finding, according to the New York
Times of May 26, 1971, through "non-government arms control
experts" and "Senate Republican sources." Even though the CIA
appraisal turned out to be much closer to the truth than the Pentagon's
gloomy version, at least for another year, no one in the U.S.
intelligence community knew for sure what the Soviet missile
builders were really doing. In the meantime, the military scare
stories--offset to some extent by the CIA's counter-leak-undoubtedly
had a psychological effect on the Congress, which in
1971, as usual approved almost the whole Pentagon budget request.
The tragedy of all this maneuvering is that, despite the $6
billion paid out each year for intelligence, neither the Congress
nor the public receives a true or worthwhile picture of Soviet
military capabilities. Intelligence professionals explain that the
sensitivity of the sources and methods involved in collecting this
information makes the high degree of secrecy necessary, and they
have resisted congressional attempts to create a regular procedure
for sharing data with the legislative branch. Yet the professionals
do not hesitate to leak the most highly classified intelligence when
it serves their departmental interests. Moreover, the intelligence
320 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
community regularly provides friendly foreign countries with detailed
estimates of Soviet military strength, and during the S.A.L.T.
talks the nation's negotiators even told their Soviet counterparts
how much the United States really knew about Soviet missiles. *
Yet, the American Congress, which has the constitutional responsibility
to approve funds for the military budget, cannot get the same
information.
Congress, however, has always had the legislative power to
insist that the CIA and the rest of the community share with it
information on Soviet military capabilities-or any other subject,
for that matter. Yet, to date, Congress as a whole has refused
to take such action, despite the loud protests of a vocal minority.
And Congress' unwillingness to take even so small a step to make
itself better informed about the data used to justify military spending
is symptomatic of the legislative branch's much larger failing:
its refusal to exercise any degree of meaningful control over American
intelligence activities.
* In fact, the American S.A.L.T. negotiators were so explicit in their
descriptions of Soviet capabilities that at one point, according to John Newhouse's
account in his book Cold Dawn, the ranking Soviet general took
an American military man aside and asked that the U.S. not give the Soviet
civilian negotiators such detailed information on Soviet missiles.

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