Executive Secrets

by William J. Daugherty

  2. Godson, Tricks, xxxi. Hulnick asserts that “many observers of United States Intelligence came to believe that the CIA . . . was an independent actor in selecting and running covert actions, without any oversight or control, either by the president or the Congress” (“Covert Action,” 145–57).

  3. Hulnick, “Covert Action,” 145.

  4. Ibid.; Godson, Tricks, 40.

  5. See Andrew, Gordievsky, and Mitrokhin, Sword, 225–46, for compelling and convincing details of these KGB active measures and others. The United States government worked diligently in the mid-to-late 1980s to defeat the AIDS and “Baby Parts” disinformation, but it met with only partial success—even among sophisticated populations in Western Europe—so strong was the inclination to believe anything negative about American policies and government. Hulnick, “Covert Action,” at 153, clarifies this “distorted view.”

  6. Melvin Goodman, in Eisendrath, National Insecurity, 28. The quotations are from Warner, “Origins,” 1 (the version used here is found on the Studies In Intelligence Web site, and the page numbers correspond to that version). See Saunders, Cultural, for a detailed history of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

  7. Johnson, Bombs, 6.

  8. On January 15, 2000, the author conducted a Lexis-Nexis search for newspaper articles and editorials, dating from January 1, 1950, to January 1, 2000, using “covert action” as a keyword in either the title or in the text. The result was 815 stories, of which fewer than 10 percent were favorably disposed to covert action. While empirical in nature, this evidence highlights an ample prejudice against covert action in general on the part of the media. Not coincidentally, a 1992 survey of 1,400 journalists found 44 percent claiming membership in the Democratic Party, and presumably a corresponding preference for liberal ideals, as opposed to 16 percent belonging to the Republican Party; an “overwhelming majority” of these journalists admitted that they had voted for Democratic presidential candidates in the six elections between 1964 and 1980. (Janda, Challenge, 201). See also Hulnick, “Covert Action,” 153.

  9. Among the operations that professional CIA officers argued against as being unwise, illegal, or high-risk/low-gain were the overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala; the Bay of Pigs invasion and assassination plots against Castro during the Kennedy years; support of the Kurds at the behest of the shah of Iran and political action in Chile, both during the Nixon administration; and Angola during the Ford years. And let us not forget that the Iran-Contra scandal occurred in part because DCI Bill Casey, realizing that the majority of the career professionals in the CIA would oppose his plans, turned instead to members of the National Security Council staff and a few handpicked senior Agency officers whose actions exceeded their legitimate Agency roles.

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Opening epigraph is from the Twentieth Century, Need to Know, at 5.

  2. Godson, “Focus.” Virtually all (90 percent) of the gunpowder used by the American forces in the initial twenty-four months of the Revolutionary War were acquired through covert relationships with France and other European nations who were foes of the British. Turner, “Constitution,” 101, n67. Carter, in Covert, passim, identifies fourteen out of the first twenty-eight American presidents as practitioners of classic covert action programs, from 1787 until 1920.

  3. See: Wise, “CIA,” A35; Wicker, “Fiasco,” A29; Editorial, “Change,” 10A; Hoagland, “Costs,” A27; Goodman, “CIA,” 18; Halperin, “Prohibiting,” 85; Kennedy, “History,” A21; Kennedy, “Outlaw,” A22. These comments and sources do not even begin to include those who call for the demise of the CIA and all of its duties. Those who do so are generally less informed about intelligence matters, and their writings frequently are so laden with falsehoods, inaccuracies, distortions, and other things that are the product of an antagonistic imagination as opposed to research and knowledge that it’s amazing anyone publishes them. For a sterling example of this, see Baker, “CIA.”

  4. Berkowitz and Goodman, “Logic,” 38.

  5. Hitchens, “Unlawful,” 60. Hitchens makes numerous damning allegations, some of which (to the knowledgeable reader) are ludicrous at face value. Moreover, he provides absolutely no references or support for these serious allegations.

  6. Melvin Goodman, quoted in Eisendrath, National Insecurity, 28.

  7. Lowenthal, Intelligence, 118.

  8. Codevilla, Statecraft, 241.

  ONE: THE ROLE OF COVERT ACTION IN

  INTELLIGENCE AND FOREIGN POLICY

  1. The opening epigraph is found in Twentieth Century, Need to Know, at 41.

  2. The percentage of content from the different source categories will of course vary with the nature of the issue or topic being analyzed. “Open source” intelligence may imply to some that the information is known and readily available, but that is not the case. The sources may or may not be readily available, depending upon where they are published. What turns information into intelligence is the ability of the analyst to collate and correlate diverse bits of information from various sources to produce a coherent picture of what has happened, is happening, or may happen in the future. In many cases, it is the clandestinely acquired information that puts the rest of the material into final context, rather than providing the meat of the analysis.

  3. Godson sees covert action as “influencing conditions and behavior in ways that cannot be attributed to the sponsor . . . [i]t seeks to influence values, mostly through overt institutions and instruments,” in Tricks, at xxxi and 19. Johnson has defined covert action, in “Accountability,” at 81, as “the pursuit of American foreign policy objectives through secret intervention into the affairs of other nations.” True enough, but this definition overlooks programs and operations in which transnational groups (e.g., drug cartels, terrorist elements) and individuals may be targeted. Covert Action: it’s not just for countries anymore.

  4. Executive Order 12333, United States Intelligence Activities, 4 December 1981, 3 CFR 200 (1981, 46 FR 59955 [as amended by Executive Order 12701, 14 February 1990, 55 FR 5933]).

  5. Strong, “Covert,” 64.

  6. Intelligence Authorization Act of 1991, Pub. L. 102–88, 105 Stat, 429 (1991), Section 503 [c][4][e].

  7. Simply put, all covert action programs are special activities, but not all special activities are covert action. See inter alia Tuttle, “Secrecy,” 530–52, where he states that special activities is a “generally accepted euphemism for covert action”; and Strong, “Covert,” 64–65, who calls special activities a “euphemistic term” that has been “substituted” for covert action. Johnson states the same in “Accountability” at 82, and in Bombs at 2 and 48, where he refers to “disruptive economic covert action” as “special activities.” In point of fact, “disruptive economic covert action” is one element of classic covert action, that of political action operations, and has no relation to “special activities”—the use of the covert action infrastructure to perform non-covert action operations. Johnson errs further (Bombs, at 101–2) when he talks of the DO’s “Covert Action Staff” as the propaganda and political action component, and “Special Activities Division” (referred to simply as “SA” by DO officers) as the home of the paramilitary unit. Actually, SA is the home division of all covert action elements in the DO and manages the assets in the covert action infrastructure; the Covert Action Staff per se was disbanded some years after Vietnam.

  8. Godson, in Tricks at 3, refers to “intelligence assistance” as a category of covert action; however, the particular actions that he lists fit nicely under the rubric of “special activities.” See also Woodward, VEIL, 1 307–8.

  9. This same segment of society is loath for America to exercise any act of power, whether military, economic, or political, in foreign policy, as though it is ashamed or embarrassed by the very idea that America may have interests that could require defending or merely that it is possessed with such power. See also Godson, Tricks, 8; Twentieth Century, Need to Know, 16–17, 45–47.

 
10. Berkowitz and Goodman discuss the first two points in “Logic,” at 41, and again in Truth, at 129; the requirement of foreign governments who might be beneficiaries of or participants in these programs should be self-evident.

  11. Meyer, Reality, 66.

  12. Codevilla, Statecraft, 41.

  13. Felix, Short Course, 137.

  14. Godson, Tricks, 21–24; Codevilla, Statecraft, 38. See Mahl, Desperate Deception, for perhaps the definitive study to date of British covert action against the United States during the 1939–1941 period.

  15. Twentieth Century, Need to Know, 5.

  16. Ibid.; Laqueur, “Future,” 304.

  17. Johnson, “Accountability,” 82, and Bombs, 28; Laqueur, Uses, 333; Berkowitz and Goodman in “Logic,” at 38, and in Truth, at 126; Twentieth Century, Need to Know, 41–43; Lowenthal, Intelligence, 113. The Newsom quotation is found in Twentieth Century, Need to Know, 37.

  18. Cline, “Prerogative,” 360.

  19. Colby, “CIA’s,” 74.

  20. In covert action programs in Chile from 1967 to 1973, the following was spent: election campaign material and support to parties—$8 million; use of mass media to disseminate political messages—$4.3 million; influencing Chilean “institutions”—$900,000; promoting a coup against Allende—$200,000. Cited in Smist, Congress, 77, from the Church Committee hearings (page 95 of that document).

  TWO: THE “ROMANCES”

  OF COVERT ACTION

  1. The definition of Romances may be found in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. “Romances” as myth or misconception was coined by Theodore A. Dodge in an 1886 paper written for the Massachusetts Historical Society on the battle of Chancellorsville (as explained in Stephen W. Sears’s outstanding work, Chancellorsville [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996], 502).

  2. For detailed examples of early covert action and deception operations run by American presidents, see Andrew, Eyes Only, 6–13; John Carter, Covert, 15–52; Knott, Secret, 13–115.

  3. The reader can find concise histories of both the Church Committee and the Pike Committee in Loch Johnson, Inquiry, and Olmsted, Challenging, both of which present a balanced view of the hearings and faithfully report the findings of the committees.

  4. Hitchens, “Unlawful,” 60.

  5. In this, the author can speak from personal experience. Assigned for seven months to a country ruled by one of the absolute worst dictators in the hemisphere, it was a psychological ordeal just to live in the capital, much less to represent the United States government to officials of that odious regime.

  6. See Hitchens, “Unlawful,” passim, which manages to capture, in one article, the majority of criticisms aimed at the CIA. While many others have made the same condemnations, Hitchens presents them as succinctly, completely, and erroneously as any. In this article, he makes a number of spurious allegations, none of which received the comfort or support of references.

  7. Related to the author by a senior Agency officer who attended the meeting.

  8. Johnson, Bombs, 211. The DCI was George Tenet.

  9. Twentieth Century, Need to Know, 61.

  10. Colby, “CIA’s,” 72; Halperin, “Prohibiting,” 13; Damrosch, “Covert,” 795. The Hughes-Ryan Amendment is found at 22 USC 2422, section 662.

  11. Nutter, Black, 38. However, Nutter cites no examples to make his case, possibly because there haven’t been any since 1974.

  12. Hitchens, “Unlawful,” 60. He also ignores the scrutiny the Agency receives from leaks to the press and the information provided to both the public and the media through the Freedom of Information Act. And see Halperin, “Prohibiting,” 13. Whether a law limiting a policy element of a president’s general ability to conduct foreign policy would be compatible with the Constitution is problematic. Halperin also advances the interesting proposition that intelligence officers who lie in the line of their work become so corrupted that they lose the ability to tell the truth to anyone, especially to Congress. But this is merely Halperin’s supposition, which he conveniently leaves unsupported by any statistics or factual data.

  13. Hitchens, “Unlawful,” 61; Johnson, “Bright Line,” 300–301.

  14. See the bibliography for the writings of Halperin, Baker, Goodman, Kennedy, and Schorr, as well as selected editorials.

  15. See John Carter, Covert, 15–42, for enlightenment on the ultimate democrat’s employment of covert action during his two administrations. See both Carter, Covert, and Knott, Secret, for enlightening histories of our early presidents and their resort to covert action.

  16. The National Security Act of 1947 is found at 50 USC 403. See Houston, “Hillenkoetter,” 14; and inter alia Berkowitz and Goodman, Truth, 124.

  17. Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, adopted as part of the Intelligence Authorization Act of 1991 50 USC 413; Damrosch, “Covert,” at 797.

  18. Damrosch, “Covert,” at 802. Readers should not confuse United States domestic law with international law and the United Nations charter, nor for that matter, with the domestic laws of foreign nations. Virtually all nations prohibit espionage operations of any type being conducted against them by foreign governments; and many nations further prohibit foreign governments from simply running espionage operations on their territory even though another, “third party” government is the actual target. This is, of course, why intelligence officers, whether American or other nationalities, are posted abroad “under cover,” so as to hide activities that are illegal in the host country but which are legal under the laws of their own nation.

  19. In a demonstration of why inaccurate myths about covert action persist, critic Morton H. Halperin wrote in 1975 (“Decision-Making,” at 51) that the CIA “has been dominated by officials whose primary concerns and interest was covert operations over intelligence operations.” Although arguably correct during the 1950s and 1960s, by the time Halperin wrote this statement in 1975 it was manifestly untrue. Halperin, who worked in both the White House and the Pentagon as recently as the Clinton administration, and who no doubt maintained contacts in the national security arena (as “in and out and in again” political appointees are wont to do) either knew this wasn’t accurate or should have known.

  20. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the covert action element, OPC, and the intelligence collection element, OSO, were separate institutions, circumstances allowed OPC officers to advance to higher grades more quickly at a younger age. When the two organizations were merged in 1952 into the CIA’s Directorate of Plans, OPC officers held a disproportionate number of senior positions (Godson, Tricks, 35). This may be one reason why the CIA as an institution looked more favorably on covert action in those years than it did after the 1970s.

  21. See Godson, Tricks, 35–36 and 61–63, for additional detail. Woodward’s VEIL is replete with comments pointing to the CIA’s and the DO’s reluctance about and distaste for covert action.

  22. Horton, “Reflections,” 84. One assumes, however, that with the expanded authorities granted to the CIA after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that the ranks of covert action specialists have increased, particularly those of the paramilitary operators.

  23. Agency officers are fond of noting that while covert action programs are less than 5 percent of the Agency’s budget, they constitute about 95 percent of the Agency’s problems and bad publicity. Codevilla, Statecraft, 240; Johnson, “Accountability,” 88; Pike, “CIA Budget,” 1 (the entire document, printed out from the Federation of American Scientists Web site, is fourteen pages; page numbers in this and subsequent endnotes correlate to the pages of the printout).

  24. See Editorial, “Restricting,” A25, for a cogent explanation of why Iran-Contra was an “aberration” and not a genuine covert action. Also, Stone, “Loophole,” 5.

  25. The White House directives were NSDD-2, National Security Council Structure (12 January 1982) and NSDD-159, Covert Action Policy Approval and Coordination Procedures (18 January 1985). The Iran-Contra conspirators violated bot
h of these directives.

  26. See Draper, Thin Line, and Walsh, Firewall, for a fulsome accounting of this scandal; Berkowitz and Goodman, in Truth, present a useful summary at 133–36. See also Johnson, “Accountability,” at 83.

  27. In discussing Iran-Contra with numerous colleagues, the author personally heard dozens of comments about what was, to them, an obvious illegality, as well as expressions of wonder that it was never mentioned to Congress. The quotation comes from Nutter who is no Agency admirer (Black, at 37–38).

  28. See Clarridge and Diehl, Spy, for an example of a “woe is me, I did nothing wrong, I was a victim” proclamation.

  29. Godson, Tricks, 36–37.

  30. See for example, Isenberg, “Pitfalls,” 1, where he describes paramilitary operations as “secret wars” that resulted in “countless deaths and immense destruction,” an exaggeration of several magnitudes.

  31. As the final draft of this book was being readied for Agency review and publication, the administration of George W. Bush has received congressional authority to initiate war against Iraq, with the ultimate goal of regime change. The administration not only has no way of controlling who might come to power in such an event, but is even clueless as to who might actually possess the ability to seize and hold power. These two questions accompany a frightening number of unknowns with respect to a postwar Iraq, but likewise have not engendered any hesitation or doubt in the administration about the wisdom of its policies.

  32. Godson, Tricks, 3.

  33. Since the demise of the Soviet Union, much has been written by former intelligence officers, including those of the Soviet Union, on Soviet intelligence activities against the West and the United States. The most thorough of these works has also relied on files from the archives of the KGB. See inter alia: Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, and Andrew, Gordievsky, and Mitrokhin, Sword.