50 Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 215.
51 Millis, speech (see note 31). A leading expert on the NSA and sigint has noted that this agency collects from intercepted Internet traffic alone “the equivalent of the entire textual collection of the library of Congress 2,990 times every day. Of this amount, according to NSA, only 0.025 percent of the intercepted Internet material is selected for review by the agency's analysts.” Even that amount is equivalent to “119 times the size of the entire collection of the Library of Congress”: Matthew M. Aid, “Prometheus Embattled: A Post-9/11 Report Card on the National Security Agency,” in Loch K. Johnson, ed., Essentials of Strategic Intelligence (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2015), p. 436.
52 Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, “A Hidden World, Growing Beyond Control,” Washington Post (July 19, 2010), p. A1.
53 See Richard K. Betts, Enemies of Intelligence: Knowledge & Power in American National Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
54 Rusk, As I Saw It, p. 553.
55 Tenet, with Harlow, At the Center of the Storm, p. 30; the Kean quote is from Linton Weeks, “An Indelible Day,” Washington Post (June 16, 2004), p. C1.
56 Author's interview (November 19, 1984), Washington, DC.
57 A DDI study during six months in 1994–95 indicated that policymakers had asked 1,300 follow-up questions after reading a PDB. In 57 percent of the cases, the questions were answered at the time of the briefing; and in 43 percent of the cases, the CIA was queried later and provided answers within a day or two.
58 Author's interviews with Clinton Administration officials throughout 1992–97, Washington, DC.
59 Quoted in Loch K. Johnson, America's Secret Power: The CIA in a Democratic Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 90.
60 See John L. Helgerson, Getting to Know the President: CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates, 1952–1992 (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, undated – but apparently released in 1995 by the CIA).
61 Quoted by Russell, “Low-Pressure System,” p. 123.
62 Author's interview with George Tenet, Senior Director for Intelligence, National Security Council, Old Executive Office Building, Washington, DC (June 17, 1994).
63 See Tim Weiner, “C.I.A. Chief Defends Secrecy, in Spending and Spying, to Senate,” New York Times (February 23, 1996), p. A5.
64 See Loch K. Johnson, “Glimpses into the Gems of American Intelligence: The President's Daily Brief and the National Intelligence Estimate,” Intelligence and National Security 23 (June 2008), pp. 333–70.
65 Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, “United States Intelligence,” Military Review 41 (May 1961), pp. 18–22, quote at p. 20.
66 Stansfield Turner, Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), p. 243.
67 National Intelligence Council, National Intelligence Estimate, Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities (November 2007), cited by CNN News (December 2, 2007).
68 Sherman Kent, Intelligence for American World Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), pp. 64–5.
69 See Anne Hessing Cahn, Killing Détente: The Right Attacks the CIA (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).
70 Chester Cooper, retired CIA analyst, interviewed by Ron Nessen, “Intelligence Failure: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11 and Iraq” (television transcript), America Abroad Media (July 2004), p. 11.
71 For examples of DCI-penned NIEs, see the discussion of DCI Stansfield Turner in Garthoff, Directors of Central Intelligence, p. 153.
72 Gregory F. Treverton, “Intelligence Analysis: Between ‘Politicization’ and Irrelevance,” in Roger Z. George and James B. Bruce, eds., Analyzing Intelligence: Origins, Obstacles, and Innovations (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2008), p. 102.
73 Arthur S. Hulnick, review of Harold P. Ford, Estimative Intelligence: The Purposes and Problems of National Intelligence Estimating (New York: University Press of America, 1993), Conflict Quarterly 14 (Winter 1994), pp. 72–4, quote at p. 74. President Lyndon B. Johnson once vividly explained why some policymakers are reluctant to hear from intelligence officers. “When I was growing up in Texas,” he recalled at a private dinner party in Washington, DC, “we had a cow named Bessie. I'd get her in the stanchion, seat myself and squeeze out a pail of fresh milk. One day, I'd worked hard and gotten a full pail of milk, but I wasn't paying attention and old Bessie swung her s—-smeared tail through that bucket of milk. Now, you know, that's what these intelligence guys do. You work hard and get a good program or policy going, and they swing a s—-smeared tail through it”; quoted in the memoir by former DCI Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 566.
74 The metaphor comes from a CIA analyst, quoted in Johnson, The Threat on the Horizon, p. 92. See also Johnson, “Analysis for a New Age,” Intelligence and National Security 11 (October 1996), pp. 657–71. This article argues in favor of placing more intelligence liaison officers in policy departments, so the officers can return to their agencies each day to inform analysts about what topics the departments are focused on – a vital method for making intelligence more relevant to the information needs of decision-makers. Sometimes those on the policy side of the government are inclined to discount the value of the Intelligence Community and its products. Poking fun at this aspect of government – at the expense of an example drawn from the United Kingdom – a former Director of INR, Thomas Hughes, quotes an analyst in the Research Department of the British Foreign Office who served from 1903 to 1950. “Year after year the worriers and fretters would come to me with awful predictions of the outbreak of war,” said the UK analyst. “I denied it each time. I was only wrong twice.” Hughes observes that, using this methodology, the analyst “can curl up in the luxury of a freebooting negativism. No reputation is staked, no career endangered”; Thomas L. Hughes. The Fate of Facts in a World of Men: Foreign Policy and Intelligence Making. Headline Series, No. 233 (Washington, DC; Foreign Policy Association), 1976, p. 48. Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk recalls that some U.S. intelligence officers dealt with the risk of intelligence failure by forecasting danger everywhere. “The CIA predicted eight out of the last three crises,” recalled Rusk, looking back on his tenure as Secretary from 1961 to 1969; author's interview with Rusk (October 5, 1979), Athens, Georgia.
75 The author is grateful to the CIA for providing these statistics, which come independently from two different sources within the Agency.
76 The data came to the author by year, not by DCI tenure; the decision rule here was to award all of the Estimates in a given year to the Intelligence Director who served the most time in that particular year.
77 Letter from Sherman Kent to Frank Wisner (dated November 18, 1963), found by the author (October 16, 2005) in the Sterling Library Collection, Yale University, Series I, Box 18, Folder 390.
78 Sherman Kent, “Estimates and Influence,” Foreign Service Journal (April 1969), p. 17.
79 British intelligence came to the same conclusion. One of its leaders has written that “identifying Soviet strategic caution [was] perhaps the most important single judgement of the [Cold War] period”: Percy Cradock, Know Your Enemy (London: John Murray, 2002), p. 292.
80 In 1975, Senator Frank Church (D, Idaho) noted: “In the last twenty-five years, no important new Soviet weapons system, from the H-bomb to the most recent missiles, has appeared which had not been heralded in advance by NIEs”: Congressional Record (November 11, 1975), p. S35787.
81 See Loch K. Johnson, Secret Agencies: U.S. Intelligence in a Hostile World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).
82 See George and Bruce, eds., Analyzing Intelligence; James P. Pfiffner and Mark Phythian, eds., Intelligence and National Security Policymaking on Iraq: British and American Perspectives (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2008); and Robert M. Clark, Intelligence Analysis: A Target-Centric Approach, 3rd edn (W
ashington, DC: CQ Press, 2010), pp. 314–19.
83 Church (see note 80), p. S35786.
84 Richard K. Betts, “Analysis, War and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures Are Inevitable,” World Politics 31 (October 1978), pp. 61–89, quote at p. 78. See also Betts, Enemies of Intelligence.
85 Hulnick, review of Ford, Estimative Intelligence, p. 74.
86 Harold P. Ford, Estimative Intelligence: The Purposes and Problems of National Intelligence Estimating (New York: University Press of America, 1993), p. 49.
87 William E. Odom, Fixing Intelligence for a More Secure America, 2nd edn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 81.
88 Kent, “Estimates and Influence,” p. 17.
89 Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus, “Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence,” Washington Post (August 10, 2003), p. A1, quoting a senior intelligence official.
90 Gellman and Pincus, “Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence.”
91 Tenet, with Harlow, At the Center of the Storm, pp. 321–2.
92 Tenet, with Harlow, At the Center of the Storm, pp. 322–3.
93 Senator Bob Graham, with Jeff Nussbaum, Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia, and the Failure of America's War on Terror (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 180.
94 Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 487.
95 The NIE was entitled Iraq's Continuing Program for Weapons of Mass Destruction (NIE 2002–16HC). On the timing and Tenet's briefing, see Graham, with Nussbaum, Intelligence Matters, pp. 179–80.
96 Graham, with Nussbaum, Intelligence Matters, p. 187.
97 Graham, with Nussbaum, Intelligence Matters, pp. 185–9.
98 Interviewed by Wil S. Hylton, “The Angry One,” Gentleman's Quarterly (January 2007), p. 21.
99 Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, July 7, 2004), p. 14.
100 Tenet, with Harlow, At the Center of the Storm, p. 338.
101 Author's notes on remarks by Mark M. Lowenthal, Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies (CASIS) Conference, Ottawa (October 27, 2006).
102 The 80–90 percent figure comes from the author's interview with a senior CIA manager in the Agency's Intelligence Directorate, Washington, DC (August 28, 1997).
103 Lowenthal, CASIS Conference (see note 101).
104 John L. Helgerson, remarks to the author, International Symposium, The Hague, Holland (June 8, 2007).
105 Michael Bloch, Ribbentrop (London: Abacus, 2003), p. 167. At one point Ribbentrop vowed that he would personally shoot, at the person's office desk, any official who dissented from Hitler's worldview (p. xix).
106 See, respectively, Stansfield Turner, Burn before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Secret Intelligence (New York: Hyperion, 2005), p. 77; and Johnson, America's Secret Power, pp. 63–4. Mark Lowenthal, a former CIA analysis, notes that a “subtle and difficult skill to master is cultivating the intelligence consumer without politicizing the intelligence as a means of currying favor”: Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy, 6th edn (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2014), p. 161.
107 Helms, with Hood, A Look over My Shoulder, p. 318.
108 On improving analysis, see Clark, Intelligence Analysis; George and Bruce, eds., Analyzing Intelligence; Robert Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); Johnson, ed., Strategic Intelligence: Vol. 2: The Intelligence Cycle; Richard L. Russell, Sharpening Strategic Intelligence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Timothy Walton, Challenges in Intelligence Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
109 See Peter Wyden, Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979); and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), p. 453.
110 Quoted by Greg Miller, “CIA to Station More Analysts Overseas as Part of its Strategy,” Washington Post (April 30, 2010), p. A1.
111 Kimberly Dozier, “CIA Forms New Center to Combat Nukes, WMDs,” Associated Press Report (August 18, 2010).
112 Joseph S. Nye, Jr., remarks, Commission of the Roles and Capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community, Washington, DC (June 1, 1995).
113 Richard K. Betts, “The New Politics of Intelligence: Will Reforms Work This Time?” Foreign Affairs 83 (May/June 2004), pp. 2–8, quote at p. 7.
114 Author's interview with Richard Helms, Washington, DC (December 12, 1990), in Loch K. Johnson, “Spymaster Richard Helms,” Intelligence and National Security 18 (Autumn 2003), pp. 24–44, quote at p. 27.
115 See also, Willmoore Kendall, “The Function of Intelligence,” World Politics 1 (1948–49), pp. 542–52.
116 William M. Nolte, remark, panel on intelligence analysis, International Studies Association annual meeting, San Francisco (March 2008).
117 See the findings of the Butler Report, which are discussed in R. Gerald Hughes, Peter Jackson, and Len Scott, eds., Exploring Intelligence Archives: Enquiries into the Secret State (New York: Routledge, 2008), Ch. 12.
118 Former U.S. diplomat Martin Hillenbrand, remarks to the author, Athens, GA (January 21, 1987). President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State, George P. Shultz concluded acidly in his memoirs: “I had no confidence in the intelligence community…I had been misled, lied to, cut out.” This reaction went beyond the Iran-contra scandal to include his view that “CIA analysis was distorted by strong views about policy”: see George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Scribner's, 1993), p. 864.
119 Daniel P. Moynihan, “Do We Still Need the CIA? The State Dept. Can Do the Job,” New York Times (May 19, 1991), p. E17.
120 See The 9/11 Commission Report, as well as Graham, with Nussbaum, Intelligence Matters; Jane Mayer, The Dark Side (New York: Doubleday, 2008); and Zegart, Spying Blind.
121 See Hughes et al., Exploring Intelligence Archives; Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails; and Loch K. Johnson, “A Framework for Strengthening U.S. Intelligence,” Yale Journal of International Affairs 2 (February 2006), pp. 116–31.
122 Preparing for the 21st Century: An Appraisal of U.S. Intelligence, Report of the Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, March 1, 1996).
123 See, for example, Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo, “CIA and Pakistan Locked in Aggressive Spy Battles,” Associated Press (July 6, 2010).
3
Covert Action
Secret Attempts to Shape History
Two young men stood on either side of an easel that supported oversized charts. One man braced the charts, while the other occasionally moved a pointed marker up and down the slopes of red-colored trend lines.
Seated near them, a stout man in his fifties read from a typed statement. He spoke precisely, seldom looking up from the pages. His words fell in a dry monotone on the table before him. A gray ribbon of cigarette smoke curled slowly toward the high ceiling from an ashtray on the table. All three men wore starched white shirts with buttoned-down collars and Brooks Brothers ties. They might well have been marketing advisers tracing annual sales for the edification of a corporate board of directors.
The “board,” however, showed remarkably little interest in whatever profits or losses the charts revealed. Nor was the room anything one might expect to find in a corporate headquarters. It was elegant, even stately. Doric pillars, carved from wood, embellished the rich walnut paneling on the walls. A grand chandelier sparkled at the center of the ceiling. Beyond the spacious windows, draped with regal purple curtains, was a courtyard where a fountain sprayed a column of water high into the frigid morning air. This was no industrial park; this was the venerable Russell Building of the United States Senate, named after the legendary Richard Brevard Russell, Jr., Democrat of Georgia, the most prominent national security expert in Congress for decades
until he passed away in 1971.
A U-shaped bench dominated the hearing room, rising above the floor with its prongs facing the three men, as if they were trapped in a magnetic field. Within the concave space sat a stenotypist, her fingers dancing lightly on the keys of a machine. Two elderly lawmakers sat at the head of the bench, each a United States senator and a member of the secretive Subcommittee on Intelligence. They listened as the man at the table droned through his prepared statement on paramilitary, or warlike, activities of the CIA. As the Agency's Deputy Director of Operations (DDO), he was expected to present a report now and then to Congress. One of the senators rested his head in his arms and soon fell asleep. The other senator, the panel's chairman, stared blankly at the CIA briefer, nodded once in a while, and discreetly stole a glance at his wristwatch and then at the newspaper folded in front of him.
This was not the first time the DDO had experienced the distant look in the eyes of a lawmaker, or even the first time he'd seen one nod off. His job was to provide an update on the CIA's activities; how it was received on the Hill was not his problem. He cleared his throat and raised his voice for a moment, more to relieve his own boredom than to stir his small audience. “Paramilitary activities,” he said, “have been an important part of our program since the early days of the Cold War.”
The new inflection in the briefer's voice awoke the slumbering senator with a start. “Parliamentary activities?!” he bellowed. “You fellas can't go messin’ round with parliaments. I won't have it!”
A silence fell over the room. The stenotypist's fingers stopped their dance. The deputy director pursed his lips and looked at the subcommittee chairman.
“Senator, this briefing is on paramilitary, not parliament, activity,” the chairman said softly.
“Oh, well, uhruumph,” replied the sleepy-eyed senator, clearing his throat. He paused and tugged at his ear. “Okay, but y’all stay away from parliaments, ya hear?” With that admonishment, he rose from his chair and shuffled out of the room. At a nod from the chairman, the deputy director resumed his statement.1
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