Executive Secrets

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Executive Secrets Page 9

by William J. Daugherty


  And in 1994, after DoD had spent billions of dollars and more than a few years attempting, with negligible success, to develop a long-range, high-endurance, multi-mission capable intelligence collecting “drone”—an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, or UAV—the CIA succeeded with a platform costing less than $5 million. The first-ever overseas use of this forerunner to the Predator (which, beginning in October 2001, gained public notice in Afghanistan) involved fewer than fifteen CIA personnel, led by a relatively junior officer, in two back-to-back deployments to a region of critical importance to senior U.S. government policymakers. During these deployments, the platform collected tactical intelligence of great value to military commanders and policymakers without losing a single UAV. Subsequently, a military unit deployed to the same area of operations with eight Predators; that deployment was composed of two hundred men and women, led by a colonel, and lost two UAVs in the first weeks.8

  Finally, the CIA has an almost instantaneous reaction or response time in a crisis situation. CIA officers can deploy in alias, under civilian cover, and travel with non-U.S. documents from Washington to anywhere overseas in just a few hours from the initial call, via commercial airliner or civilian-registered corporate aircraft. Upon arrival at the foreign destination, they will immediately receive the clandestine assistance of CIA case officers, operational support assistants, possibly technical officers and other special units, and a stable of intelligence reporting and support agents. Around-the-clock encrypted communications to Washington will be on call, including to the White House if necessary. The U.S. military can’t match, much less improve upon, this clandestine capability.

  The obvious conclusion is that those who advocate a transfer of covert action responsibilities to DoD simply do not comprehend all that managing and supporting covert operations entails. It should be noted, too, that the CIA has a core element of career covert action specialists in each of the four broad categories of covert action operations (propaganda, political action, paramilitary, and information warfare) who are uniquely qualified to manage peacetime covert action programs, yet another capability lacking at DoD.9

  Traditionally, the U.S. military has not coveted authority in peacetime covert action—programs having a foreign government as the target and where the ends are strictly political. But during the Deutch tenure as DCI, senior officials in DoD did seek to achieve equality, or even assume primacy, in the conducting of peacetime covert action. While the ostensible reasons given were that the military could manage the operations more effectively and more cheaply, those well versed in covert action at the CIA and elsewhere knew better; rather, it looked far more like the Defense Department was seeking to expand its authority in foreign policy, acquire CIA technology cheaply, and increase its budget than anything else.

  It began in 1995 when President Clinton named the deputy secretary of defense, John Deutch, to be his DCI, a nomination with near-disastrous consequences all around. It didn’t take long before almost all observers agreed that Deutch was a DCI who didn’t care about the Agency. Deutch had not wanted the position, and was said to have turned it down numerous times. Word in the Langley halls was that it was only the promise of the secretary of defense cabinet post in Clinton’s second term that swayed Deutch to move to the CIA. As such, far too many of his decisions as DCI were assumed by Agency officers, rightly or wrongly, to be based not on operational requirements or on the best interests of the Agency, but rather on keeping himself in good graces with the White House and Congress so as not to jeopardize his desired future assignment. One serious collateral consequence was that more than a few operations officers were concerned about what would happen if they found themselves in serious danger overseas: would Deutch make decisions on rescue or other issues based on requirements for success, or would he bow to Clintonian pressure for inclusion (or exclusion) of options or personnel founded not on mission requirements but instead on irrelevant factors such as racial or gender diversity, the president’s political standing, and a general aversion to risk-taking?

  Deutch brought with him key protégés from DoD—Nora Slatkin to serve as the Agency’s executive director, and Vice-Admiral Dennis Blair to fill the newly created position of Assistant DCI for Military Support—neither of whom knew anything about the intelligence business, much less covert action. Slatkin, previously an assistant secretary of the navy, owed almost her entire career progression to Deutch, and was therefore far more concerned about pleasing and protecting him than she was about the interests of the Agency. Worse, Blair came with an undisguised contempt for the CIA, but this did not deter him from either believing he knew better than career intelligence officers or from initiating action without fully understanding consequences. At one point Blair gave a press conference on Agency clandestine activities in the Balkans in which he related to the media intelligence sources and methods, including information that compromised the identity of several human sources. It cost the Agency nearly $10 million to exfiltrate the sources and their families and to relocate Agency case officers in-country, whose lives were placed in immediate danger, to safer areas (which concomitantly reduced their ability to collect intelligence). Blair was unapologetic and arrogantly asserted that he’d do the same thing again.10 Apparently that resonated well at the Pentagon, for it wasn’t long afterward that he was wearing the four stars of a full admiral and commanding all American forces in the Pacific theater.

  But of course it was Deutch, as DCI, who had the most deleterious effect on the Agency. Deutch was determined to change the culture of the Agency, especially the operations area, by making it more like the military. Yet doing so would have unquestionably resulted in the degradation of the CIA’s renowned, exceptional flexibility and responsiveness—characteristics one never associates with military bureaucracy, yet which are essential in covert action operations.11 At one point he ordered a junior field operations officer to leave a briefing on an exceptionally sensitive matter, even after it was explained to him that the officer was in the room because she was handling the recruited agent and collecting the intelligence. Deutch countered that such a sensitive asset should have been handled by a more senior officer. It was then pointed out that this junior officer was the one who had actually recruited the asset and, therefore, was absolutely the best officer to handle him. Deutch was unmoved, unable to get past a military mind-set regarding the roles of senior and junior officers that simply does not apply to the CIA mission.12

  One very obvious, and exceptionally detrimental, result of Deutch’s intention to change the Agency culture was the proliferation of staffs and the concomitant need for experienced officers to fill staff positions. Unlike the vastly larger military services, the CIA does not have sufficient employees to conduct operations while also sustaining a separate category of headquarters staff officers whose sole raison d’être is to serve the individual needs of senior officers. Far too often, field operations officers—those folks doing the Agency’s core mission of recruiting and running spies and collecting intelligence—were reassigned to headquarters staff duties, leaving fewer operations personnel either to run operations overseas or to manage the operations from Washington.13 As the Agency was also downsizing in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ranks of field operations officers thinned out dangerously while dozens of unnecessary staff positions were created.

  Manifestly, responsibility for peacetime covert action was not immune from Deutch’s intrusions. While at the Pentagon, Deutch had come to believe that the military could create and manage peacetime covert action programs better and cheaper than the CIA, although why this was so is unclear, save possibly for a visceral and general dislike of any competitor agency. But many CIA officers believed there were additional motives: a particular dislike of the CIA, a desire to garner the congressionally designated funds used to pay for covert action programs, and—perhaps most important—a hope of acquiring highly sophisticated new covert action technologies that the CIA had developed, but had not shared with D
oD.14

  In short, Deutch, along with Blair (who knew absolutely nothing about the CIA’s conduct of peacetime covert action), sought to involve the military in covert action, even though they had no knowledge of the reasons why, for nearly fifty years, president after president had assigned only the CIA to covert action missions. Indeed, they did not even realize that it was a key element of EO 12333. Early on in his tenure, Deutch attempted to initiate a covert action program, limiting knowledge of the program to but ten individuals—none of whom were from the Directorate of Operations! Eventually the deputy director of operations learned of the program, but by that time basic errors in operational tradecraft had been made, dooming the program to failure and wasting a large amount of taxpayers’ money.15 Over time, CIA officers experienced in covert action spent many long hours explaining and detailing covert action missions, Agency capabilities, and the laws and executive orders governing covert action to Blair and Slatkin. Finally, they began to see the light. But it was not an easy road.

  Possibly the lowest period was Memorial Day weekend 1995, when the Clinton administration was seeking a policy to deal with the genocide and seemingly perpetual crisis in Bosnia. During the whole of that long holiday weekend, senior CIA, military, civilian DoD, and State Department officers met almost without break to work out a covert action program, despite the absence of any coherent policy. In this marathon conference the military sought to create—and thus control—a “covert” program for Bosnia. But the final military-generated “covert program” concept was not covert in the slightest. It involved CIA personnel openly working with large numbers of uniformed U.S. military in supplying huge amounts of materials and training local forces. The projected cost was, in a word, staggering, much greater than the gross domestic products of more than half of the world’s nations. The “covert action program” went nowhere, resulting only in the total waste of an enormous amount of very senior government officials’ time.

  Nearing the end of their tenures in office, the Deutch clique finally came to understand the multiple reasons why the CIA was the presidential choice to conduct classic peacetime covert action, and from that point on, life for those Agency officers in the covert action business was a bit more comfortable. But those lessons may have to be learned all over again, as the United States fights the war against terrorism. As this was being written (a year into that war), Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was mulling over the use of the Defense Intelligence Agency and Special Forces troops to conduct covert action operations, normally the province of the CIA’s paramilitary operatives, thus blurring significantly the line between peacetime covert action requiring a Presidential Finding and wartime special operations. The chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at the time, Senator Bob Graham, was highly skeptical, indicating that he and the committee would be alert to any “end runs” by the military to attempt to subvert the Finding requirement, noting that “the fundamental reason the intelligence committees were created in the first place was because of covert actions that had run amok.” This notwithstanding, Rumsfeld established the position of undersecretary of defense for intelligence, creating a separate intelligence evaluation process that is alleged to provide the secretary with conclusions that support his particular policy slant by evading the rigorous corroborative measures that professional intelligence analysts conduct as a matter of course. (As of spring 2004, serious questions have been raised about the DoD evaluation process in light of the failure to locate weapons of mass destruction in the wake of the Iraq war—weapons the Pentagon were absolutely certain existed.)16

  Similarly, in early 2002 the Pentagon under Rumsfeld established a new Office of Strategic Influence dedicated to the dissemination of news items, both authentic and (selectively) false—in other words, disinformation—to foreign journalists; the office was quickly disbanded, however, when confronted with public criticism. Yet just eight months later, in October 2002, the Pentagon began reviewing the possibility of conducting covert influence operations as a component of the war against terrorism. Conceivably this would have entailed both propaganda and political action, targeted at the policy elites and the general public in neutral—and friendly—nations. The objectives would be to gain support for U.S. policies in fighting terrorism and to reverse public opinion hostile to the United States in the target countries. The Pentagon stated that its authority to conduct these operations stems from an existing DoD directive that permits similar operations but limits them to “adversary decision makers” (DoD Directive 3600.1: Information Operations); the creation of a covert peacetime capability, it argued, would only require amending the directive. DoD’s reasoning, à la John Deutch of years past, was that the military possesses superior technological equipment, that the U.S. military has “important interests” in a number of countries, and that no other U.S. government agency is capable of conducting these missions.17

  Of course, this proposal raises several issues. First, targeting neutral and friendly countries for influence operations in peacetime still requires a Presidential Finding under the Intelligence Authorization Act of 1991 and Executive Order 12333. The military should have no confidence that an internal DoD directive removes this statutory obligation. Second, much of what is accomplished in influence operations is not a matter of technology but of recruiting the human sources with the right access to serve as agents. And it is the CIA that has officers overseas and in contact with necessary third-country nationals, not DoD. Third, if DoD is allowed to pursue its own influence operations, where is the guarantee that they will be congruent with established U.S. foreign policy? All of the CIA’s covert influence operations are intensively coordinated with the Department of State and reported to Congress to insure compliance and compatibility with established overt presidential policies. What are the odds that DoD would require that its own internal covert action programs be coordinated with overt diplomatic efforts by the Department of State and covert programs run by the CIA? Without this nexus, programs that should be complementary and synergistic are apt to be competitive and counterproductive.

  Finally, the mission of favorably influencing allies belongs primarily to diplomats and elected officials. But if the U.S. government decided to do so covertly, then, again, current law stipulates that a Finding is required. One can only conclude that the war on terrorism combined with an aggressive secretary of defense has reinvigorated a dormant DoD desire to move into the peacetime covert action business through a mechanism (the DoD directive) that, in their eyes, precludes the need for a Finding. And that is, in plain talk, a terrible idea.

  FIVE

  The Discipline of Covert Action

  When the President asks the CIA to undertake a covert program because he cannot obtain public support for an overt policy, the CIA will be left holding the Presidential bag.1

  DCI Robert M. Gates

  The intelligence discipline of covert action consists of three well-established methodological, or operational, subsets and one newly emerging category. Traditional covert action operations involve propaganda, political action, and paramilitary operations. Propaganda is the least visible, least expensive, least threatening, and most subtle of the covert action methodologies. It also usually requires the greatest amount of time to be effective. Political action ranges from low key, simple, and inexpensive events to the highly visible and provocative. Paramilitary operations run the gamut from low-cost, discreet training for foreign military and security forces to the clandestine exfiltration of defectors, and on to hugely expensive programs such as supporting the Afghanistan resistance in the 1980s. Any discussion of covert action must at least allude to deception operations, though they are not one of the primary operational methodologies. While rarely employed by the CIA, deception operations are an essential part of military operational planning.2

  In addition to the three traditional methodologies, the emerging dependence of government bureaucracies, international businesses, financial institutions, worldwide c
riminal and terrorist groups, and individuals on computer systems in the 1980s created a new discipline of intelligence methodology, both in the collection of information and in covert action programs. The ability to clandestinely access data in computers to destroy or modify it, or even to destroy the hardware itself, is generically referred to as “information warfare,” providing new operational vistas for the imaginative intelligence or counterintelligence professional.

  PROPAGANDA

  Propaganda is the systematic dissemination of specific doctrines, viewpoints, or messages to a chosen audience. Usually it is employed to foster the acceptance, by the chosen target audience, of a particular policy position or opinion, although at times propaganda may be used simply to denigrate or undermine a belief or position held by a foreign audience without advocating an alternative. University of Georgia professor and intelligence scholar Loch K. Johnson has described propaganda as the most “extensive” form of covert action: “whatever policy the White House may be extolling at the time . . . the CIA will likely be advancing the same slogans through its hidden channels.”3 Propaganda is often superior to other types of covert influence provided that there is sufficient time available for it to work, for intelligent minds are not quick to abandon strongly held beliefs. Initiating a propaganda operation may require months, for media assets—agents working in the news media, with academic journals or the Internet, or in other professions that give them an influential voice in the public arena—first have to be identified, recruited, and tested by field case officers before the program can commence.

 

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