Inside the CIA

by Kessler, Ronald

  Most of these actions had been approved if not ordered by the presidents at the time. Most were known to cabinet officers as well, including attorneys general. Most of the abuses had stopped by the time they were exposed. And nearly all the abuses had been uncovered by the CIA itself. James R. Schlesinger, as director of Central Intelligence, had ordered CIA employees in 1973 to report any activities that might be “outside the legislative charter of this agency.”1 The result was the “family jewels,” 693 pages of single-spaced documents that William E. Colby brought to the attention of Congress after he had been nominated as CIA director. Once he became director of Central Intelligence, Colby confirmed for Hersh the basic points of his story, giving the Times greater confidence about running it.

  To be sure, the agency reflected the prevailing norms. The FBI performed illegal break-ins and wiretaps, police departments routinely brutalized blacks, and trustees of nonprofit hospitals kept millions of dollars of hospital funds in interest-free accounts at banks where they were officers.

  But that was no excuse. The abuses were not only improper and illegal, they betrayed a lack of understanding of what America was all about. For what was the CIA for, if not to help preserve American freedoms? Aside from their impropriety, many of the abuses betrayed a dismaying lack of competence. The CIA had enlisted the Mafia to assassinate Castro, which was not only outrageous but stupid. And the agency plotted to humiliate Castro with his own people by trying to get his beard to fall off—something that only someone whose level of maturity had not advanced beyond kindergarten could have dreamed up.

  “The attempts to kill Castro were absurd, just absurd,” said John N. McMahon, deputy director of Central Intelligence under Casey. “I guess we’re embarrassed because it’s like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. But that’s bush league.”2

  The Church hearings led to tighter control of covert action by Congress and establishment of permanent intelligence committees to oversee the CIA and related agencies in 1976 and 1977. For most Americans, this was the last glimpse they would have of the CIA and what it does. CIA officers repeated their catechism: “Our failures are publicized; our successes are not.”

  The old saw happened to be correct. Like a shimmering oasis, the agency is usually not what it seems to be. Even something as basic as the CIA’s complement of employees is routinely understated in the press as 16,000. The true number—which is classified—is 22,000, not including 4,000 contract and part-time employees.

  To find out what the CIA is really like, and how CIA officers think and act, one must probe into each of the agency’s five components—four directorates and the office of the director of Central Intelligence. For each directorate has its own mission, its own culture and mores. Each reports to the director of Central Intelligence (DCI) only grudgingly, fearful that its own turf will be infringed upon or that its secrets will be shared with the other directorates.* Like opposing sports teams, each component is in silent competition with the others, certain that its work is most important, vying for available funds, attention, and status.

  It is the Directorate of Operations that does the human spying. Operations refers to covert operations. The Directorate of Science and Technology uses satellites and other technical means to spy; it also conducts research into technological innovations. The name of the directorate implies that it collects intelligence through technical means. The Directorate of Intelligence brings together all the available information—80 percent of it from overt sources such as publications—and analyzes it. The information is used to prepare memos and estimates that go to the president. The Directorate of Administration holds it all together by providing computers, security, communications, and the like.

  “The Directorate of Science and Technology feels that it collects as much intelligence and therefore is as important as the Directorate of Operations,” Herbert F. Saunders, a former CIA officer, said. “On the other hand, the Directorate of Operations, always cocky, says, ‘We got all the action. We make the world go around. Satellites can’t tell you what people are going to do.’ The logistics people in the Directorate of Administration say, ‘Without vehicles, you guys couldn’t get anything done.’ The security people say, ‘Without us, you’d have no secrets.’ The analytical people in the Directorate of Intelligence think that what it all comes down to is their work—the analysis, publication, and delivery to the consumer. And they have a point, too,” Saunders said. “They say, ‘That’s the name of the game, to bring information to the country’s leaders to let them make decisions.’”3

  Even within each directorate, there are separate components with their own unique character—the Office of Technical Service, within the Directorate of Science and Technology, which provides lock-pickers, installs bugging devices, and makes spy equipment ranging from disguises and speech-altering devices to papers used for secret writing; the Office of Security, within the Directorate of Administration, which participates in espionage investigations with the FBI and sweeps the CIA’s offices for electronic bugs; the Office of Financial Management, within the same directorate, which not only issues paychecks but launders money for clandestine operations; the Office of Logistics, also within Administration, which arranges for overseas homes for CIA officers and also buys weapons for use in faraway wars; the Counternarcotics Center, within the Directorate of Intelligence, which employs satellites to spot fields planted with coca plants and ships laden with cocaine; and the Counterterrorism Center, which traces terrorists’ bank accounts using satellites that intercept electronic bank transfers.

  Besides an original and a new building at its headquarters on Dolley Madison Boulevard in McLean, Virginia, the CIA has its own printing plant on the compound that turns out routine classified documents as well as the President’s Daily Brief, the top-secret document presented to the president every morning. The document—usually eight to nine pages—comes off the press at six A.M. A double-wrapped copy is delivered to the director’s home so he can read it on the way to the White House. A CIA briefer gives a second copy to the president around eight A.M.

  Hidden in the basement of the new building is another secret printing plant that prints forged documents—phony birth certificates, foreign passports, and driver’s licenses for use in the CIA’s clandestine work. The plant also prints books and other publications in foreign languages to be distributed abroad, and leaflets to be dropped on countries such as Iraq for their propaganda value.

  The agency maintains twenty-two other offices throughout the Washington area. One building houses the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which monitors and translates broadcasts throughout the world, including television programs in forty-seven countries. Other offices throughout Washington are leased through phony companies and used to recruit KGB officers to turn on their own country and spy for the United States. Still another building in Rosslyn, Virginia, is used by the CIA to recruit the agency’s own spies—the staff officers who will live overseas under cover and recruit agents who will risk their lives to help the U.S. For it is the CIA’s role to collect foreign intelligence, not to collect information on the U.S., and for that it maintains stations in 130 countries of the world.

  If the CIA is fascinating, it is also secretive—sometimes foolishly so. In late 1990, the members of the CIA’s Employee Activity Association decided that the group’s store on the ground floor of CIA headquarters in McLean should sell CIA commemorative mugs, T-shirts, and baseball hats. They pointed out that Cassel’s Sports & Awards a mile and a half away did a booming business in the souvenirs. Why shouldn’t CIA employees be able to buy the mugs at headquarters?

  Each of the powers at the CIA weighed in with his views. The deputy director for administration, Raymond Huffstutler, opposed the mugs. The CIA’s effectiveness depended on keeping a low profile. How could undercover officers take home CIA hats and shirts for their kids? Richard Kerr, the agency’s deputy director, had the same reservations. It went against the CIA’s grain to advertise it
self, he argued.

  Others said undercover officers should not be working for the CIA if they were dumb enough to take home CIA mementos. It was an example of CIA paranoia. Anyone could buy the items in the center of McLean, Virginia. Why all the fuss?

  The issue made its way up to what is known as the front office, where William Webster decided against selling the mugs. Webster was puzzled by the controversy. Covert employees were not supposed to take such items home anyway, and it was difficult for him to understand how CIA officers could be so insistent on remaining unseen. But Webster was also sensitive to tradition. If selling memorabilia went against past practice, it was not worth making an issue of it.

  As this vignette illustrates, the CIA would like to remain as invisible as a pane of glass. Practically everything that goes on at the agency is classified. Even newspaper clippings have been stamped “secret.” Employees must sign pledges when they begin and leave employment that anything they write about their work will be submitted first to CIA censors. Polygraph tests that are supposed to be conducted every five years act as a deterrent against secrets being revealed.

  Every employee accepts this code of silence, a pact that prohibits employees from telling even spouses what they are doing in any detail. It is a code that pervades the CIA’s environment, from the front entrance—where no signs proclaim that this is the fabled agency—to a building at the rear of the CIA’s 258-acre compound, where top-secret documents that are no longer of value are shredded and treated with chemicals to remove any writing.

  The CIA is a relatively new agency, established in 1947. Because the legislation that set it up gave it little guidance, the agency has had to invent itself along the way. There have been many false starts and many mistakes.

  Today, the CIA is a mature organization, one that is very different from the agency of just fifteen years ago. Despite the breakup of the Soviet Union, the CIA’s mission of finding out what potential adversaries are doing remains critically important, as illustrated by the agency’s role in the events leading up to the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, and America’s subsequent war against Iraq. To this day, the Russian Republic continues to spy on the U.S., and the U.S. through the CIA continues to spy on the Russian Republic. Despite its importance, the CIA to most Americans remains a perplexing cipher. To some, it represents a threat to American freedoms. To others, it is a protector of those same freedoms. Both glorified and vilified throughout the world, it is more closely identified with the United States than is any other institution.

  To separate myth from reality, one must examine each of the agency’s parts. For the modern CIA is not so much a single entity as a mosaic, each square filled with secrets.

  Director of Central Intelligence Command Responsibilities*

  PART I

  The Directorate of Operations

  1

  The Real CIA

  WHEN MOST PEOPLE THINK OF THE CIA, THEY THINK OF the Directorate of Operations, the spy side of the house that is also known as the clandestine service. Consisting of some 5,000 of the CIA’s 22,000 full-time employees, the Directorate of Operations is the most secretive CIA component and the proudest, the one that takes the greatest risks and the one that gets the CIA into the most trouble. Given its mission, this is understandable. The Directorate of Operations commits espionage in other countries, seeking out information that is usually classified.*

  By definition, it is the job of this directorate to break the laws of other countries. In that respect, the directorate’s mission differs from that of the State Department, which seeks information that is overt and can therefore be obtained legally. Moreover, it is the Directorate of Operations that undertakes covert action—attempts to influence or overthrow foreign governments or political parties or leaders through secret funding, training, paramilitary operations, and propaganda.

  Like the CIA’s other directorates, the Directorate of Operations is chauvinistic about its work, convinced that its role is the most important one.

  “The covert side is the real CIA,” a former CIA operations officer said.* “The DS and T [Directorate of Science and Technology] people are relatively new and work in research. The DI [Directorate of Intelligence] people are paper pushers.”

  “In my experience, the most important thing in intelligence is people,” Thomas Polgar, a former CIA officer, said. “There is no substitute for having your own reporting sources in the field who can tell you what is going on.”4

  People decide to join the clandestine side of the house for any number of reasons. The ones given by David D. Whipple, a former chief of station in Finland, Cambodia, Portugal, Switzerland, and the former Belgium Congo, are as representative as any.

  “It suited my spirit of adventure, I would be dedicating myself to one thing, the idea of living abroad in a very challenging situation appealed to me. As a youngster, I had a desire to experience as many things as I could before I die,” Whipple said. “Patriotism was involved. When you give something to your country, you become more attached to your country.”5

  When the CIA was started, Ivy League graduates tended to fill the top jobs. William J. Donovan, the director of the Office of Strategic Services, was a lawyer who had graduated from Columbia College and Columbia University Law School. As far back as George Washington, government officials have recruited spies from among people they know. Donovan was no different. Those he knew were the Eastern establishment. Many of the same people formed the nucleus of the CIA. But the CIA was never primarily a cloister of the Ivy League—Walter Bedell Smith, director of Central Intelligence from 1950 to 1953, never graduated from college.6

  “I went around the table at the morning meeting with twelve senior people of the agency, and I said, ‘Let’s get this straight. How many of you are Ivy League?’” William Colby, director of Central Intelligence from 1973 to 1976, recalled. “There were three. Two hadn’t gone to college.”7

  Before being sent to spy overseas, CIA operations officers—known colloquially as spies—are trained at Camp Peary, the legendary center outside Williamsburg, Virginia, whose existence is still supposed to be a secret. There, members of the Career Trainee program are given courses in the detection of explosives, surveillance and countersurveillance, how to write reports, how to shoot a variety of weapons, and how to run counterterrorism, counternarcotics, and paramilitary operations. Most important, they are taught how to recruit and run agents, the foreign nationals who provide CIA officers with secret information.

  In the spy business, the distinction between officers and agents is crucial: the CIA officers are staff employees who are patriots in their own country; the agents are the people recruited by the CIA officers to betray their own countries. Invariably, the press mixes up the two, calling anyone who works for the CIA an agent.

  Paramilitary training is conducted at Harvey Point, North Carolina, and in such places as Panama or the mountains of Arizona, where officers must hike through snake-infested swamps or freeze during overnight treks. Each year, the CIA bangs up hundreds of old cars in a defensive-driving course that teaches officers what to do if terrorists set up blockades on the road.

  The training in running agents is designed not only to teach officers tradecraft but also to make them think. For example, in one role-playing exercise, a CIA employee pretending to be an agent arranged to meet a female trainee in a movie theater. During the movie, he placed his hands on her dress and tried to kiss her. The female officer objected. The man persisted. She finally got up and left.

  A subsequent critique criticized her because she had made no plans to get in touch with the agent again. Moreover, officers are not supposed to meet agents in a movie theater. It’s dark, and an officer cannot take notes.

  In another exercise, the CIA trainees kidnap other trainees and take them to a secret location to get them to break down and confess to being CIA officers.

  “You are in your apartment at two A.M.,” a former operations officer said. “Someone knocks on your door. You
are in your pajamas. Three or four big guys grab you and wrap you in a sheet, put you in a van, take you to a site near National Airport, put you in a plane, and fly you off.”

  The trainee is untied in a cell and interrogated. Unknown to him, the questioning is done by other trainees undergoing their final exercise. Days go by, and the trainee is given little sleep. He is allowed out of his cell only to take a cold shower. Some trainees become distraught, break down, and confess they work for the CIA. Others do not. Nothing happens to those who confess: it’s just a training exercise. CIA officers are taught that faced with torture, they will eventually spill the beans anyway.

  Including assignments to different directorates to gain experience, the training takes a year.

  Usually, CIA operations officers work under government cover. Most often they pose as State Department officers. They may also masquerade as military officers or civilians or as other government employees. They never use the Peace Corps as a cover. In most cases, CIA officers have diplomatic immunity, meaning that if one of them is caught spying, he can only be declared persona non grata and expelled by a foreign government. However, host governments often rough them up before releasing them, claiming they were not aware they had diplomatic immunity.