Deep State
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As mundane as it sounds, the requirement for explicit presidential authorization of covert action was a significant reform. The “findings” stipulation meant that the CIA could not legally conduct its own freelance operations without the knowledge and consent of the president. This isn’t to say that presidents weren’t intimately aware of CIA operations, but rather that they always held a shield of plausible deniability. Hughes-Ryan was an attempt to force presidents to take responsibility for the intelligence community’s activities.
Operations conducted in the context of a war declared by Congress, or executed in accordance with the War Powers Act, were exempted from the restrictions.32 This was no small blessing, as at the time, the new law made for an onerous briefing arrangement given the scattershot congressional framework for intelligence oversight. Hughes-Ryan would eventually result in the requirement for the intelligence community to report to more than eight different committees: Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, Appropriations, and various intelligence committees in both the House and the Senate.33
Marathon committee appearances for covert action notifications proved unacceptable to the executive branch.34 Shortly after Hughes-Ryan, the executive began restricting certain notification briefings to a “Gang of Four,” consisting of the Senate and House intelligence committee leadership. It was a practice with no foundation in law but was tolerated by intelligence committee leadership.35
Today, journalists, whistleblowers, watchdog groups, and alert members of the intelligence community maintain a vigil so that mistakes of the past are not repeated. But are they successful, and is success even possible? Forty years after COINTELPRO, there are accusations that the government targets U.S. citizens who criticize policy. Glenn L. Carle, a former CIA case officer, has claimed that members of the Bush administration approached the agency “to get” Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor and fierce critic of U.S. activities abroad.36 The worst activities at Guantánamo Bay have ended, but Afghan government detainees incarcerated in a military prison at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, are often held without trial or timeline.37
These are the things we know about—the things that have been reported. But if an American public, inured to scandal and resigned to a kind of permanent shadow war, are no longer listening, will matters get better or worse? To ask the question is to answer it.
∗Congressional hearings would eventually find no evidence indicating that the NSA used these files to monitor Americans, but rather that they were incidental to the NSA’s foreign intelligence mission
Notes
1. Memorandum of Conversation, the Oval Office, the White House, January 4, 1975, Allegations of CIA Domestic Activities, Gerald R. Ford Library.
2. Memorandum for the File, United States Government, January 3, 1975, CIA Matters, Gerald R. Ford Library.
3. Memorandum of Conversation, Secretary Kissinger’s Office, the White House, February 20, 1975, Investigation of Allegations of CIA Domestic Activities, Gerald R. Ford Library.
4. Richard Gid Powers, Broken: The Troubled Past and Uncertain Future of the FBI (New York: Free Press/Macmillan, 2004), 271–272.
5. Ronald Kessler, The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI (New York: St. Martin’s, 2003), 107.
6. Tad Szulc, “The Politics of Assassination,” New York, June 23, 1975,
7. United States Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, The Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: Performance of the Intelligence Agencies, Book V, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, April 23, 1976.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. L. Britt Snider, “Unlucky SHAMROCK,” CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, April 14, 2007, https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/winter99-00/art4.html.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, America’s Most Secret Intelligence Organization (New York: Penguin, 1987), 306.
15. Ibid., 307.
16. U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command History Office, On the Trail of Military Intelligence History: A Guide to the Washington, D.C. Area, 2004, 16.
17. Bamford, The Puzzle Palace, 76.
18. Ibid., 317.
19. Ibid., 319.
20. Ibid., 314, 322.
21. Ibid., 315, 336
22. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 186, 313–314.
23. Shane Harris, The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), 332.
24. George W. Calhoun, Prosecutive Summary, United States Government Memorandum, March 4, 1977, 4.
25. Ibid., 8.
26. National Security Council Intelligence Directive No. 9, Communications Intelligence, Washington, DC, March 10, 1950.
27. Calhoun, Prosecutive Summary, 13, 14.
28. William Egan Colby and Peter Forbath, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), 14, 15.
29. James S. Van Wagenen, “A Review of Congressional Oversight: Critics and Defenders,” CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1997, https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/97unclass/wagenen.html.
30. 22 U.S.C. § 2422, Public Law 93-559, Section 662, December 30, 1974.
31. Alfred Cumming, “Gang of Four,” Congressional Intelligence Notifications, Congressional Research Service, January 29, 2010, http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/R40698_20100129.pdf.
32. 22 U.S.C. § 2422, Public Law 93-559, Section 662, December 30, 1974.
33. Van Wagenen, “A Review of Congressional Oversight.”
34. Philip Taubman, “Senate Approves Bill for Oversight on Intelligence,” New York Times, June 4, 1980; Loch K. Johnson, “Controlling the Quiet Option,” Foreign Policy 39 (Summer 1980). Note: Representative Les Aspin cast doubt on the CIA’s claim that this resulted in briefings for more than two hundred members and staff, telling the New York Times that only three committees conducted routine covert action reviews and that the full membership of the remaining five committees did not receive notifications. Loch K. Johnson, a former staff director of the House Subcommittee on Intelligence Oversight, estimated the actual numbers to be forty-six members and seventeen staff.
35. Cumming, “Gang of Four.”
36. James Risen, “Ex-Spy Alleges Effort to Discredit Bush Critic,” New York Times, June 16, 2011, A1.
37. Sarah Belal and Christopher Rogers, “Bagram Prison Inmates Deserve Clear Answers about Their Fates,” Daily Beast, April 29, 2012, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/29/bagram-prison-inmates-deserve-clear-answers-about-their-fates.html.
CHAPTER 7
Conspiracies
On August 2, 1964, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats engaged the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Maddox had been collecting signals intelligence. When the PT boats entered attack formation, the Maddox fired warning shots, and when the boats launched torpedoes, the Maddox unleashed its main batteries. The incident ended with three crippled North Vietnamese vessels and no Americans harmed.
President Lyndon Johnson ordered the Maddox to resume patrols and gave a press conference warning the North against any further provocations. (The South Vietnamese government wanted total retaliation, but SIGINT suggested that the attack was a one-off by an overly aggressive North Vietnamese commander.) Meanwhile, the National Security Agency (NSA) was incensed at the attack on its ship and moved onto war footing. It directed all ears against North Vietnamese, and ordered priority status to any intercepts related to activities in the region.
Two nights later, a Marine signals intelligence team transmitted a warning that North Vietnamese PT boats were maneuvering in a way eerily similar to those of August 2.
Meanwhile, the Maddox and the USS Turner Joy (sent to provide support) picked up a series of incomplete radar returns suggesting a North Vietnamese air and sea presence closing in fast, and received a priority alert from an NSA listening post warning of an imminent attack. When sonar operators detected signals suggesting hostile vessels closing fast, the two destroyers unleashed weapons on the radar blip for three and a half hours. They reported two North Vietnamese boats destroyed.
Hours later, acting on the advice of the secretary of defense, President Johnson authorized airstrikes against North Vietnam. Meanwhile, the on-site commanders grew alarmed that no evidence of an attack subsequently presented itself. Neither the Turner Joy nor the Maddox took damage. There was never a visual confirmation of North Vietnamese vessels; the attack was precipitated and directed by radar and sonar, and bad weather may have confused instruments and crew. The commander of the Maddox warned his superiors against any further actions pending a review.
Pacific commanders began forwarding reports to the Pentagon and the White House questioning the reliability of the contact report. Signals intelligence that was initially certain now seemed ambiguous at best. The most reliable confirmation available came from a separate, classified SIGINT operation that had picked up a situation report from the North Vietnamese describing an aggressive action it had taken. The report was based on the translation of an intercepted Vietnamese transmission, only parts of which were heard by the NSA. And one key word was mistranslated: the North Vietnamese had said that two “comrades” were lost, not two “ships.” An error like this is common in the din of battle, but with U.S. military leadership already shifting to a war posture, here it would prove fatal.
The president can be forgiven for his response to the initial, erroneous report. Other mistakes can be attributed to the raw signals intelligence forwarded to the White House; neither NSA nor CIA specialists were consulted in the matter, and the SIGINT was never properly analyzed. But either way, President Johnson, ready to widen the U.S. footprint in Vietnam, presented the attack to the nation and to Congress in the starkest possible terms.
In 1964, the NSA covered up its role in mistakenly reporting that two U.S ships had been attacked. Through 2001, the NSA insisted that a second attack did in fact occur two days later, and for years this story didn’t change. But it was a lie perpetuated by secrecy. As late as the twenty-first century, the facts of the attack were classified and marked as Secret/SI (which compartmented the material as secret signals intelligence) as a means of perpetuating positive perceptions by Congress of the agency. Why would it do this? One agency historian suggests that it was embarrassed by its mistakes; that its leaders wanted to believe that a pattern of aggressive action by the North Vietnamese was emerging; and that the system set up to analyze the signals intelligence was confusing, compartmentalized, and unreliable.
The NSA did not create a lie to justify ensnaring the country in a tragic war, but when politics hardened some mixed intelligence into an unquestionable set of facts, they went along with it. The cumulative effect of the secrecy and cover-ups then fueled fantasies of conspiracy theorists and eroded trust in the government. It never seemed to occur to those in authority that using government power to punish political enemies, doing things to non–U.S. citizens that the general public would never approve of, and getting Americans involved in wars they didn’t want can, and did, damage the ability of future presidents to protect the nation. Executive action in the post-Vietnam era is more tightly compartmented, and the latitude that the public often gives an executive during war has diminished over time. (Case in point: there will never be another military draft.)
History is replete with theories that the intelligence community and the military have used the power of secrecy to cover up covert actions so out of line with American priorities that it would shock our collective sensibility. The truth is less spectacular, though still troubling. The stovepiping of information—reporting secrets up the chain but sharing them with no one else, no matter how much the mission overlaps—is responsible for virtually every major intelligence failure of the modern age.
And there is a case to be made that the intelligence community as a whole is known more for its failures than its successes. This is the great burden that spymasters, analysts, and operatives in the field must bear. Arguably, the three most astounding failures of U.S. intelligence to protect the United States of America are the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Consider: Did the Navy or the FBI withhold an advance warning of the attack on Pearl Harbor from Roosevelt? No. Navy cryptanalysis had a field day with decrypts of Japanese diplomatic cable traffic. On documents sent to the White House, reports were labeled Top Secret/MAGIC. (MAGIC being the compartment for communications intelligence on Japan.) Even though the FBI had become the country’s de facto national intelligence service by 1940, the Navy did not share its MAGIC intelligence with J. Edgar Hoover or with the general and flag officers responsible for assessing the readiness of the Pacific fleet. Meanwhile, the FBI, focused primarily on Germans and communists, dutifully turned over every scrap of intelligence they collected about Japanese intentions to the White House—but not to naval intelligence analysts.1 Collectively, the policymaking apparatus had a good sense of what Japan might do and had already begun preparations for an American entrance into the war. But intelligence (and thus the ability to derive value from it) was compartmentalized and dispersed. Secrets were properly kept; they just weren’t properly used.
Before he died, Franklin D. Roosevelt had endorsed the policy of developing an atomic weapon for immediate employment. Astonishingly, Harry Truman was not briefed on the $3 billion doomsday project until twelve days after Roosevelt’s death. When Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, and General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, presented the bomb to the new president on April 24, it was as a fait accompli. The weapon would be ready in a few months, and it would be used to end the war.
Did the military deliberately manipulate the information available in order to ensure that Roosevelt’s settled policy would not be altered? Many accounts of Truman’s decisions subsequent to the revelation certainly suggest just such a thing. And if it were the case, it would represent one of the most egregious uses of secrecy in American history.
But in fact the opposite was true. Stimson and Groves were not of one mind about the wisdom of using the bomb. And Truman—a “decent, impulsive and simple man,” was motivated as much by his own insecurity at his instant presidency as he was by any false picture of the war or any set of constricted choices presented by his advisers.2 Truman knew what he was doing. And intelligence was rather incidental to his decision.3
Did the CIA keep information about plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion from President John Kennedy, afraid that he would balk if he knew the unlikelihood of insurgents successfully gaining a foothold in Cuba? No. Some charge that the Company had so much invested in the idea of regime change, especially following its successfully executed coup d’état in Guatamala, that it subordinated everything to the perceived menace from Havana.
But the truth is that the CIA’s internal predictions were as optimistic as the ones that Allen Dulles, director of central intelligence, and his deputy Richard Bissell presented to Kennedy. For his part, Kennedy not only endorsed the goals of the plan, but also withheld details of it from advisers to the Joint Chiefs of Staff—all in the name of secrecy.4 As the day of the invasion approached, Kennedy grew nervous about fallout from possible disclosures of U.S. involvement and yet was eager to show the Soviet adventurists exactly how unwelcome they were in our hemisphere. The president hedged his bets, pressing for “less noise” and cutting mission-essential air support. When Kennedy decided to move the landing point of the invasion eighty miles away from the Escambray Mountains—a political calculation—he neither asked nor was told by his military advisers that the Cuban exiles would have no plac
e to hide with no mountains near their invasion site.5
The CIA held nothing back from Kennedy. Its own mistake was compartmentalization; the covert action staff never “read in” those CIA officers with the most strategic knowledge of Cuba. And the president, despite misgivings and suspicions, obsessed over keeping a project a secret until the very end. Using an exile force to overthrow Castro was not an implausible scenario when President Eisenhower signed a covert finding authorizing it. But by the time Kennedy had clipped the mission’s wings to the nub, it was both implausible and became highly embarrassing.
Declassified CIA histories of the Bay of Pigs invasion that exonerate the Agency are predicated on knowledge gleaned from its failures after the fact. The Agency’s covert operations division did everything well—which is of course beside the point. Compartmentalization and secrecy ensured that “everything well” was not nearly enough.6
Volumes have also been written about the Kennedy assassination. From November 22, 1963, to September 10, 2001, it was the go-to singularity for crackpots and conspiracy theorists. It’s the shallow end of the insanity pool—a place where otherwise reasonable thinkers can wade in unreasonable ideas.
Here are the facts:7
Four years before Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger of a Carcano M91/38 bolt-action rifle, the FBI opened a case file on him. The former U.S. Marine had defected to the Soviet Union, taking with him, according to his mother, his birth certificate. The G-men feared the Soviets might recruit Oswald as a spy, or return an imposter to the United States in his stead.8 When Oswald returned four years later, special agents interviewed him, finding a man “cold, arrogant, and difficult to interview.” Oswald denied any wrongdoing, or that he had renounced his American citizenship. Two months later, the FBI again interviewed him and closed the file on him. Bureau sources in the Dallas Communist Party had never heard of the guy, and members of his family interviewed provided no actionable material. Notably, Oswald returned from the Soviet Union with a wife. The Bureau did not interview her, believing she could be adequately monitored in conjunction with her husband. Marina Oswald was, in fact, a point in her husband’s favor: a foreigner living in Russia cannot marry without the permission of the Soviet government. It seems unlikely that the Soviet authorities would have permitted Oswald to marry and take his wife with him to the United States if they were contemplating using him alone as an agent.9