The Soviet embassy premises in Teheran made a great impression on me when I saw them a few years ago. They took up a whole city block, were surrounded entirely by high walls, guarded at all vulnerable points—in short, a real fortress. And the Soviets like to house as many as possible of their own personnel within their embassies so that they can keep good watch on them.
I would not emulate all such security precautions of the Soviets, and we have no need to turn our embassies into fortresses or to segregate within embassy premises all of our personnel. But in many instances behind the Iron Curtain we make too much use of local personnel, something the Soviets would never think of doing. This was pointed up in the report made to Parliament in 1963 by the tribunal appointed under the Inquiry Act of 1921 to look into the Vassall case. This tribunal was also headed by Lord Radcliffe, whose earlier report on the Lonsdale affair I have mentioned above.5
5 The two Radcliffe reports referred to in this chapter are of interest to those who deal with security matters. The first, published in a Parliamentary paper in April 1962 (cmnd. 1681), followed the Lonsdale spy ring case (the British call it the Portland case) and the Blake case. It proposed some tightening up of British security practices and also dealt with the problem of security and press relations. The second Radcliffe report, published in April 1963 (cmnd. 2009), was that of a tribunal established under the Tribunals of Inquiry Act of 1921 and a Parliament resolution of November 14, 1962. Viscount Radcliffe was the Chairman of the earlier committee and of the tribunal. The tribunal’s report was limited to a judicial investigation of the circumstances of the Vassall case. It is an interesting contribution but, being a legal judgment, it naturally tends to stress the question as to whether there were or were not clear-cut derelictions of duty. Hence it is not so useful in trying to determine the wisdom of the judgments reached by Vassall’s superiors in the years prior to his arrest in the light of all our present knowledge of the sinister character of Soviet penetration techniques.
The British embassy in Moscow during the days that Vassall was in the Naval Attaché’s office there employed a factotum named Mikhailski, a Pole described in the Radcliffe report as an “agent of the Russian secret service who was the instrument by which they secured their hold on Vassall.” He acted, the report states, “as an assistant in the administrative section of the Embassy” and “made himself useful to the Embassy staff as an interpreter and local agent for arranging such matters as helping with Russian servants, travel facilities” and the like. In this capacity, he was “of real importance in contributing to the ease and convenience of the British staff, particularly with the language difficulty between English and Russian, and somehow they must be provided for in the general interests of staff morale.” The Radcliffe report recognized that this constituted “a fixed security risk” and so it proved to be in the Vassall case. While the Radcliffe report tends to exonerate the employment of the man because of the great convenience it represented, I must say that I think such a practice behind the Iron Curtain is dangerous and one to be discouraged. Certainly security should take precedence over convenience, and we would do better in these countries to man all our sensitive missions, diplomatic and military, with American personnel from top to bottom.
Actually the United States and Britain are not alone in requiring and using the services of local personnel in Moscow. Each foreign country, including the Soviet satellites, which maintains an embassy there—with the notable exception of the Communist Chinese—hires native help for jobs such as chauffeurs, cleaners, purchasing agents and the like. By bringing all their own personnel along down to the lowliest charwoman, the Chinese in Moscow enjoy the same improved security that the Soviets maintain in all their own installations abroad.
The business of providing sufficient housekeeping personnel to meet the needs of the many foreign embassies in Moscow is such a large one that the Soviet government has a special bureau, a kind of employment office, called BUROBIN, which supplies the needed help on request. This is obviously a highly organized KGB-controlled clearing house for agents who are trained to make the most of their jobs in foreign installations. BUROBIN will assign English-speaking chauffeurs or cleaning women on its roster to the British or Americans when the latter ask for personnel, French-speakers to the French, and so on. A chauffeur of the American Embassy, a Soviet national, incidentally played a mysterious role in the frame-up of Professor Barghoorn in Moscow in the fall of 1963.
The fact that in recent times the Western world has turned up a large number of Soviet espionage operations should not necessarily lead us to the conclusion that our security services are ineffective. On the contrary, it is the best evidence we could have that our counterintelligence, which is the offensive arm of our security, is strong. Thanks to it we are now uncovering Soviet penetrations that have gone undetected for many years. Although some embarrassment on our side is unavoidable, the Soviets are the ones who have received the rudest shock, and they may be forced as a result to overhaul many of their espionage techniques. At the same time, these belated discoveries of Soviet agents in our midst should serve as a warning to us of the depth and sophistication of the Kremlin’s espionage effort and should make us more understanding of the need to tighten our own security practices in order to prevent the possibility of such penetrations in the first place.
16
The Intelligence Service and Our Freedoms
From time to time the charge is made that an intelligence or security service may become a threat to our own freedoms, that the secrecy under which such a service must necessarily operate is in itself vaguely sinister and that its activities may be inconsistent with the principles of a free society. There has been some sensational writing about the CIA’s supposedly supporting dictators, making national policy on its own and playing fast and loose with its secret funds. Harry Howe Ransom, who has written a study on Central Intelligence and National Security, puts the issue this way:
CIA is the indispensable gatherer and evaluator of worldwide facts for the National Security Council. Yet to most persons CIA remains a mysterious, super-secret shadow agency of government. Its invisible role, its power and influence, and the secrecy enshrouding its structure and operations raise important questions regarding its place in the democratic process. One such question is: How shall a democracy insure that its secret intelligence apparatus becomes neither a vehicle for conspiracy nor a suppressor of the traditional liberties of democratic self-government?1
1 Central Intelligence and National Security (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958).
It is understandable that a relatively new organization in our government’s structure like the CIA should, despite its desire for anonymity, receive more than its share of publicity and be subject to questioning and to attack. In writing this analysis of intelligence, I have been motivated by the desire to put intelligence in our free society in its proper perspective. As I have already indicated, CIA is a publicly recognized institution of government. Its duties, its place in the official hierarchy and the controls surrounding it are set forth partly by statutes, partly by National Security Council directives. At the same time, as is true for other departments of government, some of its work must be kept secret.
I have already pointed out that in both Czarist and Soviet Russia, in Germany under Hitler, in Japan under the war lords and in certain other countries where dictators ruled, security services that exercised some intelligence functions were used to help a tyrant or a totalitarian society suppress freedoms at home and carry out terrorist operations both at home and abroad.
Moreover, as I have already suggested, there have been many instances—most conspicuously in Latin America—in which dictators have converted authentic intelligence services into private gestapos for maintaining their rule.
This warped use of the intelligence apparatus and the wide notoriety it has obtained have tended to confus
e many people about the true functions of an intelligence service in a free society.
Our government in its very nature—and our open society in all its instincts—under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights automatically outlaws intelligence organizations of the kind that have developed in police states. Such organizations as Himmler’s Gestapo and the Kremlin’s KGB could never take root in this country. The law which set up CIA specifically provides “that the Agency shall have no police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers, or internal security functions.” Furthermore, it is the servant, not the maker, of policy. All its actions must stem from and accord with settled national policy. It cannot act without the authority and approval of the highest policymaking organizations of the government.
The legislation, which was adopted with bipartisan support, also threw other legal and practical safeguards around the work of the CIA. These accorded for the most part with the safeguards that protect any democracy.
The Central Intelligence Agency is placed directly under the National Security Council and is, therefore, immediately under the President. Thus it is the Chief Executive himself who has the final responsibility for overseeing the operations of the CIA.
The National Security Council directives are issued under the authority of the National Security Act of 1947, which provides that, in addition to the duties and functions specifically assigned under law, the CIA is further empowered to
perform for the benefit of the existing intelligence agencies such additional services of common concern as the National Security Council determines can be more efficiently accomplished centrally . . . and perform such other functions and duties relating to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.
It is the President who selects, and the Senate which confirms, the Director and the Deputy Director of the Agency, and this choice is no routine affair. In the fifteen years since the Agency was created, it has had four Directors: (1) Rear Admiral Roscoe Henry Hillenkoetter, who had distinguished service in the Navy and in Naval Intelligence; (2) General Walter Bedell Smith, who, in addition to an outstanding military career, for almost three years was American Ambassador to the Soviet Union before he was Director and, afterward, Under Secretary of State; (3) the writer—and here any comment by me would be out of place, except at least to mention a long period of government service and many years in intelligence work; and (4) John A. McCone, who before being named Director in 1961 had done outstanding service in both the Truman and the Eisenhower administration in many important government posts—as a member of the President’s Air Policy Commission, as a Deputy to the Secretary of Defense, as Under Secretary of the Air Force, and then as Chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission.
The law provides that a civilian must be in the position of either Director or Deputy Director. While, theoretically, it is possible to have both of these jobs in civilian hands, military men cannot fill both positions as the law now stands. (The practice over the past decade has been to split them between a military man and a civilian.) The last two Directors, both civilians, have had highly experienced military men for Deputy Directors—General Charles Pearre Cabell during my tenure, and Lieutenant General Marshall S. Carter under John McCone.
From my own experience in the Agency, under three Presidents, I can say with certainty that the Chief Executive takes a deep and continuing interest in its operations. During eight of my eleven years as Deputy Director and Director of the CIA, I served under President Eisenhower. I had many talks with him about the day-to-day workings of the Agency, particularly concerning the handling of its funds. I recall his instructing me that we should set up procedures in the Agency for the internal accounting of unvouchered funds, i.e., funds appropriated by Congress and expendable on the signature of the Director, which would be even more searching, if that were possible, than those of the General Accounting Office. This was done.
While obviously many expenditures must be kept secret as far as the public is concerned, the CIA always stands ready to account to the President, to the responsible appropriations subcommittees of the Congress and to the Bureau of the Budget for every penny expended, whatever the purpose.
During the earlier years of the Agency, there was a series of special investigations of its activities. I myself, as I have mentioned, was the head of a committee of three that in 1949 reported to President Truman on CIA operations. There were also studies made under the auspices of two Hoover Commissions, one in 1949 and one in 1955. These dealt with the organization of the executive branch of government and included studies on our intelligence structure. The survey conducted in 1955, during my directorship, included a report prepared by a task force under the leadership of General Mark W. Clark; at about the same time, a special survey of certain of the more secret operations of the Agency was prepared for President Eisenhower by a task force under General James Doolittle. It is interesting to note that General Clark’s task force, expressing concern over the dearth of intelligence data from behind the Iron Curtain, called for “aggressive leadership, boldness and persistence.” We were urged to do more, not less—the U-2 was already on the drawing boards and was to fly within the year.
One of the recommendations that emerged from the Hoover Commission survey in 1955 called for establishing a permanent Presidential civilian board, often called a watchdog committee. This would take the place of ad hoc investigative committees. I discussed with President Eisenhower how this could best be done. Personally, I strongly favored the idea. He appointed a “President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities,” which for some time was chaired by the distinguished head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, James R. Killian, Jr. President Kennedy, shortly after he took office, reconstituted this Presidential committee with a slightly modified membership and again under the chairmanship of Dr. Killian. In April, 1963, Dr. Killian resigned, and an eminent lawyer and expert in government, Clark Clifford, succeeded him as chairman. The files, the records, the activities, the expenditures of the Central Intelligence Agency are open to this Presidential committee, which meets several times a year.
The other recommendation of the Hoover Commission, that a Congressional watchdog committee should also be considered, had a somewhat more stormy history.
In 1953, even before the Hoover recommendations, Senator Mike Mansfield had introduced a bill to establish a joint Congressional committee for the CIA, somewhat along the lines of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. On August 25, 1953, he wrote me a letter to inquire about CIA’s relations with Congress and asked the Agency’s views on the resolution he had submitted. In my absence abroad, General Cabell, my deputy, replied that “the ties of the CIA with the Congress are stronger than those which exist between any other nation’s intelligence service and its legislative body.” In fact, I can state with assurance that CIA is today the most “watched over” intelligence organization in the world.
A few years later this issue came to a vote in the Senate in the form of a concurrent resolution sponsored by Senator Mansfield. It had considerable support, as thirty-five Senators from both parties were cosponsors, and the resolution had been reported out favorably by the Senate Rules Committee in February of 1956, but one vote of strong dissent came from Senator Carl Hayden, who was also the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Senator Hayden’s viewpoint was supported by Senator Richard Russell, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and by Senator Leverett Saltonstall, the senior Republican member of that committee. In April, after a most interesting debate, the Senate voted against the watchdog committee resolution by a surprisingly large majority. In opposing the resolution, Senator Russell said: “Although we have asked him [Allen W. Dulles] very searching questions about some activities which it almost chills the marrow of a man to hear about, he has never failed to answer us forthrightly and frankly in response to any questions we h
ave asked him.” The issue was decided when this testimony was supported by former Vice President (then Senator) Alben Barkley, who spoke from his experience as a member of the National Security Council. He was joined in opposition by Senator Stuart Symington, who had intimate knowledge of the workings of the Agency from his days as Secretary of the Air Force. On the final vote of 59 to 27, ten of the measure’s original cosponsors reversed their positions and joined with the majority to defeat the proposal. They had heard enough to persuade them that the measure was not needed.
During the debate it was pointed out with a great deal of emphasis that procedures serving the intended end had already been set up and had been functioning well for some years.
Any public impression that the Congress exerts no power over CIA is quite mistaken. Control of funds gives a control over the scope of operations—how many people CIA can employ, how much it can do and to some extent what it can’t do. Even before a Congressional subcommittee sees the CIA budget, there is a review by the Bureau of the Budget, which must approve the amount set aside for CIA, and this, of course, includes Presidential approval. Then the budget is considered by subcommittees of the Appropriations Committees of the House and of the Senate, as is the case with other executive departments and agencies. The only difference in the case of the CIA is that the amount of its budget is not publicly disclosed, except to these subcommittees.
The chairman of the House subcommittee for many years and until his death in 1964 was Clarence Cannon, and a more careful watchdog of the public treasury could hardly be found. This subcommittee is entitled to see everything it wishes to see with regard to the CIA budget and to have as much explanation of expenditures, past and present, as it desires.
The Craft of Intelligence Page 33
