National Security Intelligence

by Loch K. Johnson

  The DI/DA

  Back at CIA Headquarters, analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence (DI, now known as the Directorate of Analysis or DA) interpret the “raw” (unanalyzed) information gathered by operations officers and their assets, as well as by America's spy satellites and other machines. The CIA has the largest number of all-source analysts in the government. The job of the analysts – the Agency's intellectuals – is to provide insight into what the information means, and especially how it may affect the security and global interests of the United States.

  The DS&T and the DS

  The Directorate of Science and Technology (DS&T) is the home of the CIA's “Dr. Q” scientists (a species of intelligence officer made famous by James Bond movies) and assorted other “techno-weenies” who develop equipment to aid the espionage effort, from wigs and other disguises to tiny listening devices and exotic weaponry. The Directorate of Support, or DS (known until recently as the Directorate of Administration or DA), is where the Agency's day-to-day managers reside. They meet payrolls, keep the hallways clean and hang art in the corridors at Langley, conduct polygraph tests on new recruits and (periodically) on employees, and maintain Headquarters security. Both the DS&T and the DS offer technical and security support to the Agency's operations abroad as well. During the Cold War, the Directorate of Administration also engaged improperly in spying against anti-Vietnam War protesters, triggering the Operation CHAOS scandal in 1974 and major investigations into the operations of the CIA and the other intelligence agencies.

  Intelligence centers and task forces

  To help overcome the fragmentation of America's intelligence apparatus, DCIs and now D/CIAs (Directors of the CIA) and DNIs have resorted to the use of “centers,” “task forces,” and “mission managers” that focus on particular topics and are staffed by personnel from throughout the Intelligence Community. For example, DCI John Deutch (1995–96) created an Environmental Intelligence Center to examine how intelligence officers and private-sector scientists could work together on the security and ecological implications of global environmental conditions, using spy satellites to examine such matters as the depletion of rain forests in Brazil, river water disputes in the Middle East, and the extent of melting ice floes in the Arctic Circle.16 The year 2016 was the hottest in the history of recorded temperatures. The Environmental Intelligence Center would want to learn more about the effects of high temperatures on U.S. security and, more generally, on world affairs. Another DCI, William H. Webster (1987–91), established a special Iraqi Task Force to focus on the intelligence support needed for the First Persian Gulf War in 1990–91. More recently, DNI James R. Clapper, Jr. (2010–17) has relied on an Open Source Center (located at Langley, but reporting to the ODNI) to help integrate facts and figures available in the public domain with secret information acquired overseas.

  Intelligence oversight boards

  As Figure 1.2 displays, the Intelligence Community also has two prominent oversight boards: the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB, shortened after the 9/11 attacks to the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, or PIAB), and the Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB). Since its creation in the 1950s, PFIAB/PIAB has had among its dozen or so members (the numbers vary from administration to administration) several prominent security, foreign policy, and scientific experts. The latter have given the panel a special niche: helping the President improve the science of espionage. Edward Land, the inventor of the Polaroid camera, is an example of a much-valued PFIAB member during the Eisenhower Administration. He significantly advanced the capabilities of America's spy cameras in space. Some presidents, however, have used membership on the Advisory Board not so much as a means for monitoring and improving U.S. intelligence but as a prestigious White House payoff to political allies who contributed money to their election campaign – a corruption of the original intent for the panel's existence.

  The IOB, now folded into the PIAB as a subcommittee, is small, with only three or four members. Occasionally it has conducted a serious inquiry into charges of intelligence improprieties (such as the NSA metadata collection program); but it, too, has become largely an honorific assignment, more cosmetic than effective as a vigilant protector against the abuse of secret power. Not displayed in Figure 1.2, but nonetheless an integral part of the Intelligence Community, are the House and Senate intelligence committees, known more formally as the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI, pronounced “hip-see”) and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI or “sis-see”). Their vital role in the Intelligence Community is examined in Chapter 5.

  An iron pentagon

  Added to this official complex of organizations are a plethora of smaller intelligence units in the federal government, as well as many private institutions that are hired by the U.S. intelligence agencies to help them with their missions – the “outsourcing” of intelligence. A special Washington Post inquiry in 2010 discovered the existence of 1,271 government organizations involved in intelligence work of one type or another, and an additional 1,931 private companies.17 The most notorious example of the latter in recent years was the Blackwater firm (renamed Xe Services in 2009, then Academi in 2011), based in North Carolina. This group of security experts and paramilitary officers provided protection to American intelligence officials and diplomats in Iraq and Afghanistan during the recent U.S. interventions in those countries, among other locations. Blackwater reportedly even entered into the CIA's plans for executing terrorist leaders around the world – an idea that was scrubbed when this organization developed a reputation for overzealous operations overseas. For example, in 2007, Blackwater guards armed with machine guns and grenade launchers killed seventeen Iraqi civilians at Nisour Square in Baghdad.

  In his famous farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the American people about a “military–industrial complex” – an expression of his concern that defense contractors might gain “unwarranted influence” over lawmakers, providing them with campaign contributions in exchange for appropriations to build an endless supply of new weaponry. Political scientists speak of this alliance as an “iron triangle” comprised of interest groups, bureaucrats, and politicians. In Eisenhower's description, the points of the triangle were the weapons manufacturers (Boeing, for instance), admirals and generals in the Pentagon, and key lawmakers on the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees. The alliance produced profits for the manufacturers; new planes, ships and tanks for the military brass; and defense jobs back home for the lawmakers. Presidents would come and go, but the iron triangle persisted – and often defied presidential leadership.

  In more recent years, added to this venerable triangle are two more geometric points in the security establishment: outsource groups like Xe Services and the nation's weapons laboratories (where weapons systems are developed). This “iron pentagon” represents an even more potent and sophisticated security coalition than the triangle that Eisenhower found disconcerting in 1959. Accompanying the old lobbying efforts on behalf of new weaponry is an added corporate interest in lucrative intelligence dollars appropriated by Congress for spy platforms, such as the expensive satellites used by the NGA, the NRO, and the NSA, and the mass production of drones for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. In addition, Xe Services and its proliferating counterparts, all with a lobbying staff, are attracted to funding for security, counterintelligence, and covert action support.

  A flawed plan for U.S. intelligence

  Like the intelligence organizations of other nations, the American espionage system has been built without any grand design, in response to a series of pressures: national emergencies; new technological developments (better eavesdropping capabilities, for example, have led to a greater emphasis on – and a larger staff and building for – sigint); the priorities of intelligence leaders (Allen Dulles in the 1950s concentrated on his favorite method of spying, human intelligence – the traditional use of agents recruited locally to spy on
behalf of the United States); and the lobbying skills of bureaucrats (the master, J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, built “the Bureau” into one of the most highly regarded – some would say feared and dangerous – organizations in Washington). The haphazard evolution of spy organizations in the United States can be seen in the history that led to the birth of the CIA in 1947.

  The creation of the CIA: a Faustian bargain

  The searing memory of one violent shock, and the potential for yet more violence, contributed to the establishment of the CIA. The initial shock occurred in 1941, when the Japanese attack against Hawaii pulled the United States into the Second World War. A potential for further violence loomed immediately after the end of the global war when, as early as 1945, the Soviet Union showed signs that it might attempt an armed expansion into Western Europe and Asia that could jeopardize America's global interests.

  On December 7, 1941, Japanese warplanes swooped down on the U.S. Pacific Fleet anchored in Pearl Harbor at Oahu. In two waves of strafing and bombing just after sunrise, 350 planes from six Japanese carriers located north of Hawaii managed to demolish 187 aircraft on the ground, as well as eight battleships (five sank), three cruisers, three destroyers, and four auxiliary ships in the harbor. The assault killed 2,403 American service personnel, mostly Navy, and wounded another 1,178. One hundred civilians also died. In an address to Congress, President Franklin Roosevelt declared that the day of the attack would “live in infamy.”

  Eight separate panels of inquiry examined why the United States had been taken by surprise at Pearl Harbor. None of the investigations clearly fixed blame for the disaster, but one conclusion was indisputable: America's intelligence apparatus had failed to warn President Roosevelt that a Japanese war fleet was sailing toward Hawaii. Indeed, it was the most damaging intelligence failure in the nation's history, and would remain so until the horrific Al Qaeda terrorist attacks against New York City and Washington, DC in 2001.

  In the lead-up to the Pearl Harbor tragedy, the fragments of data available here and there in the bureaucracy about the impending outbreak of war in the Pacific were never assembled, subjected to all-source analysis, and forwarded to the White House in a timely manner – the basics of what is known as the “intelligence cycle” (discussed in Chapter 2). This sequestering of information resulted in part from the intention of some intelligence officers to keep the existence of “MAGIC” (the breaking of the Japanese communications codes) carefully compartmented and secure. MAGIC might be compromised, they reasoned, if information from this source was shared outside the confines of a few Navy intelligence personnel. Yet, in concealing the secret decoding breakthrough from the Japanese, they managed to hide it from the President of the United States and his aides.

  As a U.S. Senator from Missouri, Harry S. Truman was well aware of the significant loss of lives and matériel that had resulted from America's poor intelligence performance in 1941. During his three-month tenure as Vice President and upon becoming President with Roosevelt's death in April 1945, Truman experienced further dissatisfaction with the lack of coordination among America's few intelligence services throughout the remaining months of the Second World War. As one of Truman's top aides, Clark Clifford, recalled: “By early 1946, President Truman was becoming increasingly annoyed by the flood of conflicting and uncoordinated intelligence reports flowing haphazardly across his desk.”18 On January 22, 1946, he signed an executive order that created a Central Intelligence Group (CIG) for the express purpose of achieving a “correlation and evaluation of intelligence relating to the national security.” The order allowed the CIG to “centralize” research and analysis and “coordinate all foreign intelligence activities.”19

  Truman's original intent was, in his own words, to avoid “having to look through a bunch of papers two feet high.” Instead, he wanted to receive information that was “coordinated so that the President could arrive at the facts.”20 Yet the President never saw his objective fulfilled. From the beginning, the CIG proved weak. One of its primary tasks was to put together the Daily Summary, the precursor to today's President's Daily Brief. Intelligence units in the various departments balked, however, at handing over information to the CIG.

  A central intelligence agency

  Frustrated, the Truman Administration turned to the idea of establishing a strong, statutory espionage organization: a Central Intelligence Agency. It soon became evident to President Truman, however, that the creation of a truly focused intelligence system would come at too steep a price, in light of an even more urgent goal he desired: military consolidation. The Second World War had been rife with conflict between the U.S. military services, often interrupting the pursuit of battlefield objectives. Clifford remembered how the Administration had to slow down intelligence reform in favor of settling the “first order of business – the war between the Army and the Navy.” The “first priority,” he continued, “was still to get the squabbling military services together behind a unification bill.”21

  The creation of a new Department of Defense would provide an umbrella to bring the services closer together. The President wished to avoid complicating this core objective by carrying out at the same time a quest for intelligence consolidation that was bound to roil the military brass, who viewed a powerful new CIA as a threat to their own confederal and parochial approach to intelligence. As a top Agency official recalled, “The one thing that Army, Navy, State, and the FBI agreed on was that they did not want a strong central agency controlling their collection programs.”22 So Truman and his aides entered into a compromise with the armed services, in the hope that this would produce the desired goal of military unification. They tried to improve intelligence coordination to some extent, but without letting that sensitive subject anger the Pentagon and erase its support for the higher goal of military unity.

  The result was a series of retreats from centralized intelligence, as exhibited in the diluted language on the CIA and the DCI in the National Security Act of 1947. This law provided for only an enfeebled DCI, along with a CIA that was hard to distinguish from the failed CIG. As Clifford conceded in understatement, the effort fell “far short of our original intent.”23 In this sense the Agency was from the beginning, as intelligence scholar Amy B. Zegart has remarked, “flawed by design.”24 The landmark National Security Act would mainly address the issue of military unification, and even on that subject with only moderate success. In the new law, the subject of intelligence was sharply downgraded.

  The 1947 statute did set up a Central Intelligence Agency, at least in name; but it left the details vague on just how this new, independent organization was going to carry out its charge to “correlate,” “evaluate,” and “disseminate” information to policymakers when confronted with the powerful grip that extant departments held over their individual intelligence units. The portion of the 1947 law dealing with intelligence represented a delicate attempt to establish a CIA that, in the view of historian Michael Warner, would have to “steer between the two poles of centralization and departmental autonomy.” As a result, the CIA “never quite became the integrator of U.S. intelligence that its presidential and congressional parents had envisioned.”25

  The rhetoric of “intelligence coordination” expressed in the law had a pleasant ring to it, but the reality of bringing about true jointness was another matter altogether. Genuine integration of the intelligence agencies required a strong DCI, with full budget and appointment powers. The word “community” was clearly a euphemism, coined in 1952 to describe America's loose aggregation of “stovepiped” espionage agencies, each with its own program director (a “gorilla,” in intelligence slang) and allegiance to its own cabinet secretary (at Defense, Justice, and State). The powers of the DCI enumerated in the National Security Act of 1947 remained at best merely suggestions, leaving the spymaster in a position of having to cajole, persuade, plead, even beg for intelligence coordination, rather than demand unity through the threat of budget and personnel retaliation against th
e “gorillas in the stovepipes” who failed to comply with the Director's directives. As Warner concludes: “…a powerful statutory CIA never had a chance. From Day One, War and Navy leaders strenuously opposed such a scheme. With no political capital to spare, the President went along.”26

  A DCI without authority

  When Truman authorized the creation of the CIG by executive order in 1946, the Group's chief counsel, Lawrence R. Houston, soon complained that “we are nothing but a stepchild of the three departments [Defense, Justice, and State] we are supposed to coordinate.”27 Matters did not improve much with the more formal, statutory establishment of a CIA in the next year. Even twenty years after its creation, one of the Agency's deputy directors, Admiral Rufus Taylor (1966–69), referred to the Intelligence Community as still little more than a “tribal federation.”28

  An important aspect of U.S. intelligence history since the Truman Administration has been the series of efforts since 1947 to overcome the flaw in the CIA's original design: that is, to strengthen the DCI and the Agency in their roles as collator and disseminator of intelligence for the entire “Community.” A series of commissions have all suggested the need for a more authoritative DCI to integrate the nation's fragmented intelligence agencies.29

  The steam went out of each of these efforts, however, as soon as they confronted resistance from the community's gorillas, especially the 800-pound King Kong in the DoD – the Secretary of Defense, the DCI's rival over leadership of the eight military intelligence units and a cabinet secretary with redoubtable allies on the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees.30 Nor were the other cabinet secretaries with a security portfolio exactly pushovers. “For the duration of the Cold War, the White House kept nudging successive Intelligence Directors to provide more leadership for the intelligence community,” historian Warner writes. But a towering obstacle persisted: “Cabinet-level officials…saw no reason to cede power to a DCI.”31