Executive Secrets

by William J. Daugherty

  Chile was an inexpensive program, relatively speaking. In the period from 1967 to 1973, the following expenditures were made: $8 million for election campaign material and support to favored political parties; $4.3 million for mass media to disseminate political messages; $900,000 to influence Chilean “institutions” (labor, students, peasants, trade unions, women, and private sector organizations); and a mere $200,000 to promote a coup against Allende.17

  It must be emphasized that neither the Church Committee in 1976 nor the Hinchey Report in 2000 found any evidence—contrary to one of the favored allegations of CIA critics—that anyone in the CIA or U.S. intelligence community was involved in the death of Allende. Likewise, charges that any element of the U.S. government assisted General Augusto Pinochet to accede to the presidency of Chile have been refuted. Finally, while CIA contacts in the Chilean military and security forces were involved in “systematic and widespread human rights abuses,” the Agency reported this to headquarters repeatedly and in line with the standing guidance at the time, and “admonished its Chilean agents against such behavior”; Agency personnel were in no circumstances supporters of these human rights tragedies.18

  Nixon and Kissinger also ordered the CIA to conduct, against all advice from the intelligence organization and the State Department, another covert action program involving the Iranians, the Iraqis, and the Kurds, an ethnic group composed of several dozen loosely amalgamated tribes residing in the mountain region where Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria intersect, known as Kurdistan. The president and his national security advisor must have been aware of the resistance the bureaucracy would mount, for they hid this program from the scrutiny of the 40 Committee.

  The Kurdish program ordered by President Nixon yields yet another prime example of how the CIA can be wrongly saddled with blame for a failed program. As one intelligence scholar and former Agency analyst wrote in 2000, the “CIA established covert relations with the Kurds in northern Iraq [in 1972] . . . only to abandon them when U.S. policy changed.”19 Unfortunately, this language leads the reader to believe that the relationship began at Agency initiative and that the relationship was congruent with established U.S. foreign policy. Both implications are erroneous, however, and so contribute to a perpetuation of unmerited criticism and misinformation about the Agency and covert action. The records of the Pike Committee hearings bring forth the correct story as a matter of record.20

  During the last week of May 1972, President Nixon and National Security Advisor Kissinger were guests of the Kremlin on a state visit to burnish an arms limitation treaty agreement with the Soviets. In the spirit of international friendship and East-West cooperation, Nixon and the Soviets signed a document entitled Basic Principles of Relations, which stated the United States’s express willingness to work with the Soviets for stability and peace in the Middle East. Among the measures to be implemented to achieve those goals was a pledge to reduce arms sales by both parties. This gesture of goodwill played well to the world press. It also lasted less than a week.21

  The president and his entourage departed Moscow on May 30, flying directly to Tehran to meet with the shah of Iran. At the first of two sessions, one topic on the shah’s (not Nixon’s) agenda was the rebellion of sorts being waged in Kurdistan. The shah asked Nixon—purely as a personal favor—to provide arms and supplies to the Kurdish rebels who were fighting the Iraqi army with the objective of establishing an independent nation of Kurdistan. But of course the situation was not that straightforward.

  The Kurds’ goal of independence had almost nothing in common with the individual objectives of the shah and the president. In point of fact, neither Nixon nor the shah cared one whit whether the Kurds ever achieved independence, which was, in any case, contrary to long-established U.S. policy vis-à-vis Turkey. Nixon was attracted to the idea simply as a means to “weaken and harass” the pro-Soviet regime in Baghdad; he had no interest much less desire in seeing the Kurds actually prevail. Not surprisingly, Nixon neglected to let the Kurds in on this secret. And the shah decidedly did not want an independent Kurdistan; he feared the Kurds, if successful, would detach the Kurdish region of Iran and incorporate it into the new Kurdish state. Rather, the shah was seeking only to precipitate disintegration within or an overthrow of the Iraqi regime, a traditional enemy made more dangerous now that it was a client state of the Soviet Union. The shah sought also to distract the Iraqi leadership from the continuing dispute with Iran over the Shatt-al-Arab border.22

  But that wasn’t all. The shah also had a collateral motivation of assisting his good friends, the Israelis. The latter, always alert for opportunities to weaken or divide their Arab enemies, wished to keep the Iraqi leadership and military focused on northern and eastern Iraq with the Kurdish problem so that they would be less likely to foment or join any Arab mischief against the Jewish state. In short, the Kurds were merely pawns in several larger games, games in which they had no inkling that they were even players. The Kurds were merely tools to be manipulated rather than a cause to be supported.

  Details of the Kurdish covert action program were leaked to the Village Voice in February 1975 just days after they were revealed to the House Select Committee investigating the CIA under the chairmanship of Representative Otis Pike, a Democrat from New York. It was disclosed that the program ran for almost three years at a total cost of $16 million, despite heated objections from those who knew of it at the CIA. The Agency tried three times to stop the program before it commenced, fearing that thousands of Kurds would die. Nixon ordered the Agency to undertake the operations anyway, despite the fact that doing so was distinctly counter to U.S. policy in the region and that the United States had no interest at stake there. Nixon did not tell Secretary of State William P. Rogers of the Kurdish program for some time after its commencement, apparently presuming—correctly—that there would be objections from that quarter, as well, when the State Department finally learned of the program.23

  During three years of vicious fighting in which the United States provided weapons, training, and other supplies, Nixon and Kissinger “discouraged the Kurds from negotiating a measure of autonomy with the Iraqi government but also restrained them from undertaking an all-out offensive.” Then in 1975 the shah concluded a secret treaty with Iraq over the Shatt-al-Arab. When the CIA learned of the settlement, Nixon ordered Agency officers “not to inform the Kurdish command and to keep the Kurds fighting, thus providing the shah with a ‘card to play’ in his negotiations with Saddam.” As partial payment for settling the border dispute, Saddam demanded that Iranian (i.e., United States) support for the Iraqi Kurds cease. The shah agreed and so informed President Ford, who was now in office after Nixon’s resignation. The Kurds were dropped cold—not because of a change in U.S. policy, but rather because of a change in Iranian policy! And this despite promises to the Kurds from the U.S. government at the commencement of the program that they would not be “summarily dropped by the shah.” Ultimately, “at least 35,000 Iraqi Kurds were killed and 200,000 made refugees as a direct result of U.S. policy.”24

  In 1975, while the Church Committee was investigating CIA abuses, a similar panel in the House of Representatives, the House Select Committee on Intelligence (known as the Pike Committee after its chairman, Congressman Otis Pike), was investigating Agency processes and procedures. Testifying before the Pike Committee, Kissinger maintained that “covert action should not be confused with missionary work.” The final report of the Pike Committee stated in response to Kissinger that:

  [t]he president, Dr. Kissinger, and the foreign heads of state hoped that our clients would not prevail. They preferred instead that the insurgents simply continue a level of hostilities that would sap the resources of our ally’s neighboring country. This policy was not imparted to our clients, who were encouraged to continue fighting. . . . Even in the context of covert action, ours was a cynical enterprise.25

  If there was any one program that exemplified the accusations that covert action had turned f
rom a tool applied strictly in the national interest during the Truman-Eisenhower years to one used by later presidents (especially Nixon) simply because it existed, this is it. Moreover, allegations that Nixon and Kissinger conducted a morally sterile foreign policy program devoid of any concern for loss of life or human rights were given great credence because of the callousness that underlay the Kurdish program.

  FORD

  Gerald R. Ford came into the presidency having developed and enunciated neither foreign nor domestic policy initiatives, but those who criticize him for this are highly unfair. Presidential candidates spend years pondering about where they want to take the country and how they intend to do it; and then they refine these plans as they navigate the electoral shoals and reefs. Ford, however, was a man who aspired only to become speaker of the House of Representatives but almost overnight found himself president only by dint of the most bizarre of circumstances. That he had to learn and devise as he went should have surprised no one. One result, though, was that Ford did not have great awareness of covert action programs or theory when taking office.

  It wasn’t until he had been in office for eighteen months and experienced the fallout from the Church and Pike Committee investigations into Agency abuses that Ford instituted changes in the covert action process. In February 1976 through Executive Order 11905, Ford replaced the 40 Committee with a new mechanism, the Operations Advisory Group (OAG), which was to serve as the president’s advisory body on covert action programs and policies. Membership included the national security advisor, the secretaries of state and defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the DCI. The attorney general and the director of the Office of Management and Budget continued in an observer status, as before. The order elevated the review of these programs and operations to cabinet level, rather than the deputy level, and removed the DCI from direct responsibility for covert action programs. This in effect ensured that the DCI would have to consult with the president’s most senior foreign and national security advisors more closely than before. Most important, the OAG ensured that policy decisions were made at the presidential level. This Executive Order was the first public document to describe intelligence functions and to place formal restrictions on them. The document also explicitly forbade assassinations, which had already been proscribed in internal CIA regulations under DCI William Colby.26

  Ford was the first chief executive to face the need for Presidential Findings for covert action programs, thanks to Hughes-Ryan, but as the legislation provided no guidance as to form, the administration decided upon broadly targeted “Worldwide” Findings. These Findings were written for what would become known in later years as “transnational issues,” threats emanating from multiple countries or geographic regions rather than from just one locus. Included in these Worldwide Findings were operations against terrorism, narcotics traffickers, counterintelligence targets, and, in the 1990s, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.27

  COVERT ACTION UNDER FORD

  The record of covert action programs under Ford is paltry, for several reasons. First, the Church and Pike investigations made the administration and the Agency reluctant to do much. However, the low-risk, low-cost political action programs aimed at the Soviet Union did continue, for they were not controversial. And second, there has been little declassified about covert action programs in the Ford years, again, no doubt, because they were minimal in scope. The above notwithstanding, there was one large program initiated in Angola, where, according to former DCI Robert Gates, Cuban military forces were acting as Soviet surrogates in a three-way civil war.28 Begun in 1975, the covert action program generated sufficient congressional controversy that it became the genesis of the Presidential Finding. (The program has been dissected in Covert Action by Gregory Treverton, an intelligence historian who was a staff member for both the NSC and the Church Committee.)29 On January 22, 1975, the Ford administration authorized a modest $300,000 for IAFEATURE, the covert action program that supported two of the three Angolian factions competing for power: the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) under Holden Roberto and the UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) Party of Jonas Savimbi. Interestingly, both groups also had relations with the Communist government of the Peoples’ Republic of China! The third force was the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), a Marxist group in thrall to Cuba and the Soviet Union. There were eventually more than twenty thousand Cuban troops in Angola serving as Soviet proxies, a situation that provided “perhaps the first clear-cut and dramatic demonstration” of Soviet willingness to exercise power in the post-Vietnam and post-Watergate period when they perceived they possessed an improved “strategic strength.” The late Cord Meyer, a former CIA senior officer and covert action specialist, said that the Soviet-Cuban intervention:

  In one strategic stroke . . . fundamentally succeeded in changing the balance of power in southern Africa to their advantage. In doing so, they gained effective political influence in a huge slice of the Dark Continent, obtained access to new strategic ports and airfields, and secured a political base from which to operate against the remaining non-Communist countries in Africa.30

  Complicating the situation was the fact that all three groups, besides being competing political movements, were distinct ethnic tribes: the Mbundu (MPLA), the Bakongo (FNLA) and the Ovimbundu (UNITA).31

  Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was again the driving force for this covert action program, arguing that the takeover of Angola by Soviet proxies would seriously damage U.S. interests. Yet, apparently all three warring parties laid modest claim to being Marxists of some ilk. In short, there was no genuine pro-democracy movement and there was no rational reason to think that whoever won in Angola would be pro-West, democratic, or progressive. Thus, Kissinger moved the United States into a covert war in which the U.S. government could expect little positive in return. For these reasons, and no doubt others, career officers at the CIA as well as the Department of State’s Bureau of African Affairs were solidly against any covert action in the former colony. The program’s initial funding was to Holden Roberto for only $300,000, not to buy arms or to fight, but merely to “show resolve” on the part of the United States. An additional $15 million was authorized in July 1975 and $10 million more in September to Roberto and Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA movement.32 Congress legislated an end to U.S. assistance in December 1975, by which time the Communist proxy forces of the MPLA had driven Roberto and Savimbi out of the capital and into the wilds. Angola’s was to become one of the world’s longest-running civil wars, lasting into the twenty-first century.33

  The stated goal of the administration—the prevention of a Soviet proxy taking power in Angola—was clearly articulated, but how that was to be attained was not obvious. According to Church Committee staff member Dr. Angelo Codevilla, the administration was unwilling to confront the Soviets by direct intervention, but it was equally unwilling to stand aside. Therefore it chose to apply covert action, the “third option,” although this phase of U.S. intervention in Angola accomplished little, nor could it have given the limited amount of assistance allocated. It was argued that since the Soviets and the Cubans were providing significant aid overtly to the MPLA, similar U.S. aid could and should have also been sent overtly. This was especially so since the entire world knew that Roberto and Savimbi were being supported by the Americans, thus rendering the “covert” program manifestly overt in the first place.34

  There was one other important covert action program in the Ford years that is still classified (although the government and citizens of the country itself undoubtedly know of it). This continuing classification is unfortunate in that it involved the removal of a dictatorship and the establishment of a full constitutional democracy that continues to this day. In essence, a nation and its people were brought into the family of democratic nations through the actions of the Central Intelligence Agency, acting on the explicit direction of the president of the United States. Beyond any
doubt, this program is one in which the bad guys lost, the good guys won, and a democracy arose out of a dictatorship. And arguably only American citizens remain in the dark about it.

  ELEVEN

  Jimmy Carter

  The CIA is a uniquely presidential organization. Virtually every time it has gotten in trouble, it has been for carrying out some action ordered by a president . . . [y]et few presidents have anything good to say about CIA or the intelligence they received.1

  Robert M. Gates, DCI

  James Earl Carter possessed a liberal’s visceral dislike of the CIA, all that it stood for, all that it did, and how it did it—especially in regard to covert action. Carter and others in his administration had “accepted at face value allegations of CIA’s role in plotting murder and other crimes,” a belief that was possibly abetted, consciously or otherwise, by the fact that Vice President Walter Mondale, also more liberal than centrist in political philosophy, had been a member of the Church Committee investigating Agency abuses. Thus Carter professed to be “deeply troubled” by much of what the CIA did. Yet by the end of his administration Carter had instituted a dozen covert action programs “after overt responses to Third World trouble spots had proven ineffective or impracticable,” and especially after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 shocked him to the core.2

  Most, if not all, of the covert programs begun by Carter were continued and expanded by the Reagan administration. For this, however, Carter has received little credit, remembered more often instead for preelection comments such as his referral to the CIA as a “national disgrace.”3 But Carter must have changed his opinion, at least a little, with the CIA’s successful covert extraction of six U.S. diplomats in Tehran who had escaped capture by Iranian militants and were being hidden by the Canadian ambassador to Iran. CIA officers also performed with heroism and ingenuity in preparations for the (later failed) rescue attempt of the Iranian hostages at Desert One, which could only have made another positive impression on the president.