A rather silly, but nonetheless enduring, myth is that the CIA was involved in Watergate. As noted in the introduction, DCI Richard M. Helms refused to go along with the White House cover-up, an act of integrity that cost him his position. Howard Hunt, a former CIA officer who was then working in the White House as a political operative and manifestly not as a CIA officer on detail, did obtain disguises for the “Plumbers” from the CIA, but he did so deceitfully by claiming that the materials were required for a highly classified matter of “national security.” Nevertheless, some authors persist in citing this one act of deception as proof positive of Agency perfidy in Watergate. As a result, readers are misled, the amount of erroneous information in the public domain unnecessarily increases, and the reputation of the CIA is unjustifiably sullied.
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, one myth that gained additional currency was that the CIA trained Osama bin-Ladin. This accusation is absolutely wrong. Bin-Ladin was a financier of several of the anti-Soviet Mujahedin elements, but he was never a fighter, and he never personally received any training or assistance from the U.S. government, although undoubtedly some individuals or groups that he supported financially did receive such training.
A favorite and completely erroneous romance is that the CIA has conducted assassinations and is responsible for abetting others. In the unvarnished and unequivocal words of former DCI Richard M. Helms, “the CIA has never assassinated anyone.” Added Helms, “There were many of us who never liked any idea of assassination. Plotting such an act is one thing and committing it is another. . . . But the fact remains, none of this [assassinations] happened.”36 This assertion, as well as proof that the CIA never attempted to assassinate a foreign leader absent White House direction, was confirmed by the Church Committee investigations and is backed up by, among others, historian John Ranelagh in his excellent history of the CIA.37 But despite presidential authorization to assist in or carry out assassinations in the cases of, for examples, Patrice Lumumba (who was killed by his political opponents before the CIA could act) and Fidel Castro, the Agency never succeeded. This obviously raises the question of whether it’s better to be incompetent or effective when the goal is the murder of another.
As a result of the congressional investigations into Agency activities during the 1970s (the Church and Pike Committees), President Ford issued an executive order banning assassinations. It was never clearly stated whether the order was limited only to foreign government leaders or whether it applied across the board (e.g., terrorists or narco-traffickers), and so without that clarification the working premise until the attacks of September 11, 2001, was that no one was to be assassinated. It is noteworthy that Congress has never acted through legislation to prohibit government-sponsored assassinations, whether by the CIA, the Defense Department, or any other government agency, despite all the rhetoric and apparent distress over the idea.38
The deaths of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam and President Salvador Allende of Chile are the two that are most often attributed to the CIA, and both are asserted to have been the product of CIA coups in those countries. The lifespan of these two allegations seems to be endless, although both were thoroughly explored by the Church Committee—composed of a fair number of both senators and staff members who would dearly have loved to pin murders on a “rogue” CIA—which exonerated the CIA both of sponsoring the coups and of the deaths that ensued.39
Documents from the Kennedy administration declassified since 1990 show beyond doubt that while the CIA—and the State Department—knew that a coup was being planned in South Vietnam, the U.S. government was neither instigator nor perpetrator. Indeed, the administration wasn’t even primarily interested in getting rid of Diem; it actually sought the ouster of his powerful brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, and if that meant allowing the South Vietnamese generals to stage a coup against Diem, then so be it. Adding to the record are recently released White House tapes and documents from the Kennedy years that prove conclusively that while Kennedy and his advisors welcomed the coup, they never actually considered the possibility that the Diem brothers would be murdered. The most significant lesson the Kennedy group learned from the coup was that they “vastly overestimated their ability to control the generals who ran the coup. . . .” Nevertheless, as recently as November 2002 a major news network would bill a story as the “anniversary of the CIA–backed coup in South Vietnam,” a headline that was in fact contrary to the content of the story. The CIA station in Saigon reported the planned coup and was directed not to interfere by the Kennedy White House. The coup then took its own course.40
Likewise, two exhaustive investigations—the Church Committee in 1975 and the Hinchey Committee in 2000—found that the United States had “tried unsuccessfully to foment a coup against the democratically elected Allende government but had not been directly involved in the 1973 coup” that ultimately led to Allende’s death.41 Although Nixon and Kissinger had ordered the CIA to work with the Chilean military in 1970 to prevent Allende’s assumption of office, it was soon realized that there was little or no ability to control the high-level military officers plotting the coup. The CIA was ordered to back down and ultimately retained only limited contact with senior military officers. Because of these contacts, the Agency probably learned of additional plotting by the military, which was distressed by Allende’s mismanagement of the economy in the spring and summer of 1973. A successful coup that did result in Allende’s death was eventually conducted by Chilean officers who were, in all probability, known to the CIA, but—as conclusively demonstrated in both the Church investigation (no friend of the Agency) and the Hinchey Committee—there was no Agency involvement in either the coup or the assassination. One can be assured that if either investigation—especially the Church Committee—had been less than absolutely certain in its exoneration of the Agency or Agency officers in this matter, the issue and the surrounding doubts would have in the least been left open to question.
For some mystifying reason, authors of works on the CIA keep saying that Desert One was a covert action operation. The mission officially designated Operation Eagle Claw, but more familiarly tagged Desert One, was a military operation devised and managed by the Department of Defense and executed by American military forces in uniform to rescue American hostages in Iran. Eagle Claw employed only modest, although important, paramilitary support from the CIA. The fact that it was a secret operation no more makes Desert One a covert action than secrecy made the D-day landings a covert action operation. (That said, there were certainly some in Congress who thought that Desert One should have been treated as covert action with respect to reporting requirements.)42 Likewise, there is no comparison between Eagle Claw and the “secret” or “paramilitary” wars in Indochina in the 1960s or Central America in the 1980s. Those earlier programs were genuinely covert action, in part because the CIA was specifically assigned the mission (with DoD in a supporting role) and because the combatants were either CIA officers or third country nationals instead of uniformed U.S. military forces. Other differences will emerge in a later chapter, but these two just mentioned are distinctive.
In sum, erroneous and misleading information has created in the minds of many Americans a flawed image of what the Agency does and how it does it, as well as what covert action really is. The above “romances” are a combination of this material and the “conventional wisdom” that has been bred in the public’s mind. It is now time to set the record straight.
THREE
Covert Action Policy and Pitfalls
The CIA conducts such activities only when specifically authorized by the National Security Council. Thus, CIA covert actions reflect national policy.1
DCI William E. Colby
Whether a covert action program ultimately succeeds, fails, or lands somewhere in between is often rooted in the degree to which a president and his advisor understand the limits and capabilities of covert action operations. Covert action can be a highly effective tool of presidential stat
ecraft when knowledgeably employed. But no matter how appropriate or effective a covert action program may be in any foreign policy scheme, the absolute first imperative must be that it is conceived and managed in full compliance with the Constitution, federal statutes, executive orders, and CIA internal regulations—including the requirement that Congress be fully informed. Beyond this desideratum, any decision to use covert action should generally include considerations of whether the “intentions and objectives are clear, reasonable, and just”; whether the means employed are appropriate in costs and methodology to the objectives sought; whether the Congress generally supports the president; and whether there is a favorable public consensus about the overall foreign policy objective the covert program supports.
An unambiguous comprehension of the capabilities and limits of covert action is essential for presidents and their key advisors. Covert action works best at the margins; it is not a magic bullet that will, by itself, solve a particularly thorny foreign policy problem. Without this understanding, intelligence officers will be forced either to attempt to convince the White House not to employ an inappropriate covert action program or to pull together an inherently unsuitable operation to please an insistent president or advisors. Should the president nonetheless order a covert action operation that lies outside the discipline’s capabilities or limits, program failure is virtually guaranteed—and often so is public embarrassment for the president and the Agency.
Some presidents—Eisenhower, Reagan, the first Bush—enjoyed an excellent understanding of covert action and initiated a number of successful programs. Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, understood covert action but, arguably possessing a flawed sense of morality, seriously abused it in Chile in 1970 and with the Kurds in 1972. While Jimmy Carter believed covert action to be immoral, just as he did much of the CIA’s overall mission, he nonetheless placed the highly knowledgeable Zbigniew Brzezinski as his national security advisor to superintend the initiation of viable covert action programs when the time came. Bill Clinton cared nothing for covert action, disdaining it as he disdained the CIA in general, and the same charge can generally be levied against his advisors, as well.2
Under Clinton and his national security advisor, Anthony Lake, who likewise was unacquainted with covert action specifics and prejudiced against the general concept, the administration’s first term saw a series of false starts and unwise initiatives that ate up valuable time but went nowhere. Intelligence professionals were repeatedly directed to find covert action solutions to issues—not infrequently the same issues time and again—that were manifestly unsuited for such. Even Tobi Gati, Clinton’s choice to head the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), the component that served as the coordination point for covert action programs, had virtually no comprehension of this statecraft tool. In a briefing to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) in the spring of 1995, Gati stated that she was very much against covert action programs because (in her opinion) they always failed or resulted in disaster. Asked to name some of these “disasters,” Gati, who was several years into her tenure at INR and thus could be reasonably expected to be knowledgeable about covert action programs and capabilities, then proceeded to list several counterintelligence failures and at least one flap resulting from an exposed intelligence collection program! The CIA’s deputy director for operations (DDO), attending the same briefing, noted for the record and to the amusement of the senators present that none of Gati’s alleged “covert action failures and disasters” were in fact covert action programs.3
Likewise, President John Kennedy and his brother Robert, the attorney general, were enamored with covert action, but whether or not they fully understood it is questionable, even after the Bay of Pigs disaster. CIA official Sam Halpern related how the Kennedys “chewed him out” when a sabotage operation inside Cuba that “blew up a small power plant or generator” made the front pages of newspapers in Cuba and Florida. The Kennedys were angry over the publicity and apparently couldn’t understand why things a secret agency did in secret became public. Halpern then had to explain that when you blow something up, “it’s going to make noise, people are going to see it, it’s going to be on television, and it’s going to be in the newspapers.” Added Halpern, “That’s the kind of stupidity we were getting from the White House, from the president and his brother.”4
Foreign policy initiatives consist of multiple subordinated, overt programs managed by the different agencies within the foreign policy or national security community. These overt elements may include diplomacy, military assistance missions, trade incentives or sanctions, low-interest loans or potential debt forgiveness, agricultural assistance, infrastructure aid, etc. There may or may not be a covert action component to the policy initiative, depending on the objectives, the target(s) of the policy, and the attitude of the president toward covert action. But whenever an administration is at a loss for a substantive policy, policymakers must not turn to covert action as some sort of magic “problem-solving” bullet. If there is one cardinal rule of covert action it is this: covert action cannot and must not serve as a substitute for an established overt policy that has been unambiguously enunciated and for which objectives are clearly and firmly established.5 As Roy Godson writes with succinct clarity:
Covert action, when integrated into coherent policy, can be remarkably effective—as exemplified by the covert “annexes” to the Marshall Plan and NATO, and to the Afghan resistance. But covert operations are not a substitute for coherent policy; they provide but one of the arrows in the national security quiver. Effectively utilized in conjunction with other tools, covert operations can play a valuable, even decisive role. . . .6
This fundamental principle has a number of equally vital corollaries:
A. Covert action is not and should not be a mechanism for resolving a crisis.
B. Covert action programs must be fully coordinated with the other relevant government agencies (e.g., State, Defense, etc.) and seamlessly integrated into the overall policy.
C. The goals to be attained by the covert action program must be clearly stated and reflect both “an accurate understanding of the prevailing conditions and sound logic.”
D. Covert action is not an appropriate “last resort” option, to be employed in the complete absence of any viable overt measures.
E. “Covert action . . . should never be used to rescue a failed policy,” as though it can magically correct an overt policy that probably should never have been attempted in the first place.
F. The operational components of any covert action program should not be randomly chosen by policymakers, as though they are “mix-and-match” fashion accessories, to be individually employed without an overarching integrated intelligence architecture.
G. Covert action programs should never be expected to achieve results immediately; a viable program requires long lead times for planning, for establishing necessary infrastructure, for recruiting necessary agents, and for budget development. Once begun, programs require additional time for the influence to be felt and acted upon by the target audience.7
H. The program goals should be compatible with American values and interests; if the program were to be compromised the American public should be able to say, “That was a worthy objective.”8
The first term of the Clinton White House shines as the best—or worst—example of misuse of covert action among modern presidents, as Clinton’s foreign policy team consistently violated each of the above “rules” (save perhaps for A and H) with respect to directives to initiating new programs. Consider the administration’s inability to gain a consensus on policies for Bosnia, Serbia, Haiti, and the tribal massacres in central Africa. The crux of the problem for the CIA managers was that Clinton’s advisors, unable to reach consensus on how to handle these crises—and the president unwilling to step in and make a firm decision on which option to employ—attempted numerous times to fall back on covert action as a sub
stitute for an overt policy or to defuse a crisis.
The “process” in the White House became frustratingly routine: Clinton’s advisors would first seek an easy solution to what was perforce a complex problem with the objective of presenting the president with a team consensus. This was especially acute in the Clinton White House as consensus would eliminate the need for the tough decisions that the president always so desperately sought to avoid throughout his tenure, no matter what the issue. From the outside, this factor inevitably appeared futile, for (even as college sophomores understand) there are never any easy solutions to foreign policy problems.
Then, unable to develop the desired policy consensus—and the president unwilling to make a decision when his advisors were divided—Clinton’s national security advisor, Anthony Lake, would ask the CIA to develop a broad menu of covert action options with the intention of selecting whichever options appeared to be the most promising. CIA managers were then left to spend excessive man-hours pulling together all possible operations when a clearly stated overt policy would have guided the CIA officers in winnowing out options unsuited to the overt policy. Agency officers would then make the presentation to a White House–based interagency review committee, which inevitably recognized the same inherent problems that the Agency did. These problems entailed high political risks as well as potential for risk of life, excessive financial costs, an undesirable necessity for coordinating with other governments (particularly acute in the central African crisis), and ultimately very little chance of any measurable success, much less an ability to significantly reduce the crisis. And yet, with some of these lingering crises, several months after presenting their findings to the interagency committee, the Agency would again be tasked by the White House to do the same thing, mostly because the crisis continued, the Clinton policy team still could not attain consensus, and the president still would not step in to make a decision. This, even though virtually nothing had changed with respect to the crisis to permit the creation of a viable covert action program.
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