Executive Secrets

by William J. Daugherty

  While some of the politically appointed heads and deputy heads of the Agency exhibited a predilection for covert action programs during their tenures, career officers have rarely shared their fondness.20 While it was problematic enough that covert action was never career enhancing in the DO—traditionally, advancement in the DO is through the recruitment of foreign nationals to provide intelligence and the management of those intelligence collection operations—there was an even more severe drawback to these programs: they were just not challenging, or even exciting, enough to attract most field operations officers. For substantiation, one need only look at the makeup of the DO office responsible for most propaganda and political action programs during the heyday of covert action during the Reagan-Casey years.

  In the late 1980s the DO’s Propaganda and Political Action Staff (PPS) headquarters element had just slightly fewer than forty officers ranked GS-9 and above either running or managing these operations; of this group only a very few were career DO case officers with full operations training and overseas field experience. The great majority were either converted analysts from the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) or Eastern European language translators who had moved into operations. None received more than a much-abbreviated introductory operations training period and some not even that. While not a desirable situation, it was nonetheless a necessity; no qualified field-experienced case officer cared to do that kind of work. Without the aid of retired covert action specialists from the 1950s and 1960s who came back to work as independent contractors, PPS would have found itself trying to operate without any experienced specialists and ignorant of that vital element known as institutional memory.21

  An additional—and significant—reason why DO officers dislike covert action programs is that “they feel that the chances for the CIA to be misused are never greater than when it is told to carry out a covert action.” This belief was prevalent throughout the Nixon era (when Nixon clearly did misuse covert action in Chile and Kurdistan) and while William J. Casey was DCI in the Reagan administration. By the mid-1990s and the end of the cold war, personnel engaged in purely covert action had diminished to a mere handful.22 (As this book was being written, however, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were causing a rejuvenation of covert action programs against the terrorist target and Iraq.)

  Because the Agency’s finances are secret, a prevalent myth is that covert action programs consume the lion’s share of the CIA budget. As with personnel, the extent of the Agency’s mission and budget devoted to covert action is consistently overrated. While it is generally accurate that perhaps as much as half of the Agency’s budget was dedicated to covert action during the 1950 and 1960s, that percentage steadily decreased in later years. During the Casey period—a benchmark because it constitutes the Agency’s most active period with respect to covert action programs since the Kennedy years—only about 5 percent of the Agency’s budget was being spent on covert action. In some years during the 1970s and the 1990s, the covert action budget didn’t even break the 3 percent level; one informed observer has asserted that, in 1990, the Agency funds spent on covert action came to only about 1 percent of the total Agency budget.23 Expenditures of this amount are practically insignificant in the Agency’s budget (much less in the overall budget of the intelligence community) and by no measurement constitute a significant slice of the Agency’s overall mission.

  Because CIA officers were involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, the inevitable conclusion, and continuing myth, is that Iran-Contra was a CIA rogue covert action operation. But Iran-Contra was neither a true covert action program nor a CIA program of any sort. In short, it “was a desire to evade all statutory and constitutional supervision and even to exclude the normal intelligence agencies in order to keep illegal activities secret” [emphasis mine].24 Whether or not it was truly a “rogue operation,” meaning that it was executed without the knowledge or direction of the president, is still uncertain, and may never be known for sure. But without question it happened because those on the White House staff—either with the president’s approval or without it—deliberately ignored both a standing presidential directive and federal law that required that all covert action programs navigate an established interagency approval and review process, and be reported to Congress after receiving the president’s signature. It’s the simple story of disaster striking because those who wrote the requirements broke them.25

  At heart, Iran-Contra was a criminal activity that utilized secrecy and deception, albeit one also intended to influence people or events. But merely because covert action programs share the same characteristics as the Iran-Contra fiasco does not magically make Iran-Contra a true covert action program. Nor was it a CIA program, for the Agency as an institution was never assigned any official responsibility whatsoever to manage and direct either of Iran-Contra’s two components—selling or otherwise providing weaponry to the Iranians in return for the release of Americans captive in Beirut, and then utilizing proceeds from those sales to fund the Contras despite a congressional ban on such aid.26

  There is no doubt that had the Agency, as an institution, been officially asked by the White House or by DCI Casey to do these activities, Agency lawyers and many operations officers would have immediately recognized the illegality of each of these two projects. And there can be no doubt but that lawyers would at some point have been involved, because all covert action programs receive legal scrutiny at four different levels, and because case officers by the 1980s had grown accustomed to seeking legal guidance any time they had questions about the legitimacy of an operation. Without doubt, show-stopping objections would have quickly been registered, and, probably, leaked to Congress for good measure. Indeed, Casey chose deliberately to exclude the Agency from this affair because he “feared that the professionals within the CIA would refuse to lie to Congress or break the laws,” a conclusion borne out by the angry reactions of large numbers of career officers once they learned of the scandal.27 The very few CIA officers, active and retired, who did work with Casey did so outside of Agency channels, utilizing office space in the Executive Office Building next to the White House for their work on “the Enterprise,” as it came to be called by those involved. And while the provision of a CIA propriety aircraft to move Hawk antiaircraft missiles to Iran was a combination of poor judgment and misinformation, it is difficult to argue that this one act serves to make Iran-Contra a “CIA” operation.

  The American public does not realize the depth of anger and the feelings of betrayal experienced by the majority of operations officers in the Agency when details about Iran-Contra surfaced. While some very senior officers rallied around and made excuses for their fellow senior DO colleagues who participated with Casey, at the lower levels, and particularly in middle management, there was a great deal of hostility toward those who had participated in the affair. When Iran-Contra was first exposed in the early fall of 1986, senior leadership in the DO first—but not surprisingly—denied any CIA involvement whatsoever in a cable sent to DO offices worldwide. When a bit more information about a possible Agency connection appeared in the press, the leadership sent another cable that in effect said, “Yes, this little item is true, but that’s the only CIA involvement.” When the next tidbits were exposed, the cycle repeated again, with still more high-level messages to rank-and-file DO officers admitting nothing more than a small amount of marginally inappropriate involvement. Then, when the story broke wide open and it was clear that Casey and his hand-selected Agency officers were far more involved than had been acknowledged, there were no more palliative comments from on high, only silence.

  Many DO officers felt betrayed by their leadership, and they strongly resented being deceived. Morale in the DO plummeted. More than a few DO officers were greatly disappointed when President Bush eventually pardoned the Agency employees indicted in the scandal, preferring instead to see them pay not only for breaking the law but also for bringing shame and discredit to the Agency and their directora
te. To this day, those officers who participated in Iran-Contra (with but one or two exceptions) deny that they were engaged in any inappropriate behavior. This did not stop them from accepting President Bush’s pardon, however.28

  Finally, the fact that these Iran-Contra “operations” were deliberately kept from Congress by the White House further undermines any argument that they were a CIA operation. Agency policy and regulations—in addition to the strict requirements imposed on the CIA by the president through various NSC directives—demand that Agency officers comply fully with all federal statutes, including the Oversight Act of 1980 (and, now, the Authorization Act of 1991), which levied the additional legal duty to report covert action programs to legislative oversight committees. While NSC staff in the White House may have felt comfortable deviating from federal law or presidentially imposed rules, few Agency career officers would have felt the same, although apparently Casey found those whose personal motivations permitted their turning a blind eye to legalities. When all is stripped away, it is clear that Iran-Contra was a criminal enterprise, directed and managed by White House staff, which was contrary to written presidential directive and federal law, and executed in a manner intended to keep it secret from the CIA as well as from everyone else.

  One romance that does have something of a logical foundation is that covert action programs are, ultimately, harmful to United States interests. Some covert action programs have been harmful to U.S. interests, to be sure, but many more have been unalloyed successes, both at the time they were undertaken and when reviewed retrospectively years later. History and the actions of historical figures can only be correctly understood if they are viewed in the light of their times. Critics of the decisions and policies of past presidents too often conveniently forget that they are privy to knowledge through hindsight that presidents didn’t have access to when making their decisions. More important, the critics know how the decisions played out—whether the policies succeeded or flopped, whether the long-term interests of the United States were well served or harmed.

  Anyone wishing to analyze the covert action programs of earlier times must first bear in mind that neither the CIA nor the presidents themselves saw covert action as “dirty tricks.” Covert action as a tool of presidential statecraft supported the three general cold war policies that grew out of NSC-68: prevent the spread of Communism to non-Communist governments; undermine regimes that were Communist with the hope of creating a more pro-West government; and help non-Communist regimes fend off efforts at Soviet subversion. As such, covert action programs, as well as the overarching foreign policy they supported, were intended neither to create democratic regimes nor to propagate democracy as the government of preference.29 As with any category of foreign policy program (e.g., political, economic, financial, or military), determining whether covert action programs were either harmful or helpful to U.S. interests is not subject to a blanket assessment but instead must be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

  Presidents are not clairvoyant; they cannot see the effects of their policies decades into the future. They act on what they perceive to be the best interests for the country and world at that time and can only hope that history will prove them wise. The threat of a Communist takeover in Iran was considered to be far more damaging to world peace and security in 1953 than the return of the shah to the Peacock throne, and the same can be applied to Guatemala a year later. Criticism of these two operations that placed dictators in power only arose years afterward.

  The arming of the Afghan resistance in the 1980s with the highly effective Stinger shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles became a focus of criticism a decade later only with the rise of stridently anti-American Islamic fundamentalist groups that were formerly members of that resistance. By the early 1990s pundits began deploring the Reagan administration’s decision to give Stingers to the Afghans, seeing the retention of the weapons by these fundamentalist groups as a potential threat to American airliners. Now, it may be that some members of the Reagan administration were sufficiently prescient to recognize this possible future threat in the mid- 1980s, but if so they remained silent, for there is no record of any presidential policy advisor registering this concern. One must recall that driving the Soviets from Afghanistan was only the administration’s intermediate goal; of much greater import was the Reagan White House’s strong belief that a military defeat would deal the Soviets a crushing blow in terms of world influence—and Stingers were seen as the key to that defeat. So even if someone in the White House had raised the potential, long-term possibility of a Stinger being used against U.S. interests a decade later, the very real, short-term opportunity to accelerate the decline of the Soviet Union and all that this would hold for world peace would doubtless have outweighed that concern. And so it was with other covert action programs, including Iran and Guatemala.

  In any foreign policy initiative, whether involving diplomacy, economic sanctions, military assistance, trade agreements, or covert action, there is always risk involved—including unforeseen consequences long after the conclusion of the program. The question becomes, then, should covert action be categorically ruled out as an option for immediate and real issues posing dangers to American security interests out of fear that these operations might, twenty or thirty years later, engender unforeseen and unforeseeable consequences?

  History leaves no doubt that all post–1945 presidents, without exception, have used covert action in the belief that it would not only resolve the immediate problem but would, in the longer term, be beneficial to the United States and to the nation in which the covert action program was conducted. And is this not the same belief, the same hope, that presidents hold when they authorize any type of foreign policy program? Until presidents become convinced beyond any doubt that all covert action programs will always end up inimical to U.S. interests, no president will eschew this capability. No president was ever more opposed to covert action than Jimmy Carter, and yet his record of reliance on covert action programs is as robust as any president’s.

  Another understandable myth is that covert action programs are either expensive, paramilitary programs or involve the overthrow of governments that inevitably ends up reported in the media. The truth is not so, on all accounts. Only a very few covert action programs have even a modest paramilitary aspect to them. Historically, the great majority of covert action programs involve only propaganda and/or political or economic operations and cost very little, often but a few hundred thousand dollars a year to run. As for being compromised in the media, all but a few of the programs targeted against the Soviet Union and the former Eastern European bloc ran literally for decades without once appearing in the press. For some reason, too many critics assume, without further reflection, that the large paramilitary programs that easily become public knowledge are the only covert action programs ever executed.30

  Of the hundreds of covert action programs run since the end of World War II, only a few have resulted in the overthrow of an established government. Moreover, there have been more failures in covert action efforts to reverse hostile regimes (Indonesia, Cuba, Guyana, Iraq) than there have been successes (Iran, Guatemala). In the 1970s, if not before, many professional intelligence officers came to realize that reversing governments not only is harder than they imagined, but that doing so often created more problems than it solved. The professionals concluded that you should overthrow a government only if you can control what comes afterward—and too often such is virtually impossible.31

  One of the lesser romances is that covert action was renamed “special activities” to obscure its meaning, thereby hiding the true nature of these programs. The term “special activities” was coined early in the Reagan administration, in Executive Order 12333, in which it was essentially synonymous with covert action. But during that administration, operations evolved that were seen as “nontraditional” intelligence activities (see chapters 1 and 5), or, as Professor Roy Godson has labeled them, “intelligence assistance activities.�
�� These operations were clearly not covert action programs and yet equally clearly were not of a collection or counterintelligence nature. What distinguished them was that they relied on the assets and resources of the CIA’s covert action infrastructure to accomplish the mission, and that they were almost always in support of friendly governments rather than against hostile regimes. Acting conservatively, agency lawyers have since required that many of these special activities be included in Presidential Findings, especially in light of the language in the 1991 Intelligence Authorization Act, which clarifies reporting requirements (see chapter 6).32

  There is, for some unfathomable reason, a segment of our society that always sees America as the source of the world’s problems, and which believes that America acts in ways far worse than its foes. This has led to the myth that only the United States engages in this undemocratic meddling in the internal affairs of other countries. There is indisputable proof that covert action operations were a staple of the Soviet Union in the cold war against the West. Indeed, any advanced country, democratic or otherwise, that possesses a political, economic, or military stake in events in foreign countries or regions relies on covert action operations at one time or another.33 As one intelligence officer has noted, in their relations with the United States, “virtually every nation in the world supplements its open diplomacy with various forms of covert action . . . attempting, with varying degrees of success, to influence our opinions and actions in ways congenial to the nation in perceptions of its interests.”34

  It is important to remember that the United States never sought to create conflict with the Soviet Union and has, at least in terms of desire, tried to play a positive role in the world. For American presidents and in most instances, “U.S. covert action was a defensive reaction to Soviet expansionism and the massive Soviet active measures program [consisting of] a well-organized, systematic effort to influence outside developments overtly, as well as covertly.” In other words, most covert action operations up through 1990 were ordered by presidents “only in response to perceived foreign (typically Soviet or Cuban) intervention, and often not until perceived Leninist ‘clients’ had taken repressive measures against democratic opposition groups . . . [t]he objective, in many instances, was to ‘level the playing field’ by offsetting the perceived Leninist influence.” For just two examples, among many, there was no intervention in Italy in 1940, nor in Nicaragua in 1980, until it became clear that the Soviets or Soviet clients were actively seeking to undermine the local government or to overthrow neighboring governments.35