Page 2 of 4 The life and times of the
CIA By Chalmers Johnson
attack that
would prove almost as devastating as Pearl Harbor.
After September 11, the agency, having largely
discredited itself, went into a steep decline and
finished the job. Weiner concludes: "Under [CIA
director George Tenet's] leadership, the agency
produced the worst body of work in its long
history: a special National Intelligence Estimate
titled 'Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of
Mass Destruction'." It is axiomatic that, as
political leaders lose faith in an intelligence
agency and quit listening to it, its functional
life is over, even if the people working
there
continue to report to their offices.
In
December 1941, there was sufficient intelligence
on Japanese activities for the US to have been
much better prepared for a surprise attack. Naval
Intelligence had cracked Japanese diplomatic and
military codes; radar stations and patrol flights
had been authorized (but not fully deployed); and
strategic knowledge of Japanese past behaviors and
capabilities (if not of intentions) was adequate.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had even
observed the Japanese consul general in Honolulu,
Hawaii, burning records in his back yard but
reported this information only to director J Edgar
Hoover, who did not pass it on.
Lacking
was a central office to collate, analyze, and put
in suitable form for presentation to the president
all US government information on an important
issue. In 1941, there were plenty of signals about
what was coming, but the US government lacked the
organization and expertise to distinguish true
signals from the background "noise" of day-to-day
communications. In the 1950s, Roberta Wohlstetter,
a strategist for the US Air Force's think-tank,
the Rand Corporation, wrote a secret study that
documented the coordination and communications
failings leading up to Pearl Harbor. (Titled
Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, it was
declassified and published by Stanford University
Press in 1962.)
The legacy of the OSS
The National Security Act of 1947 created
the Central Intelligence Agency with emphasis on
the word "central" in its title. The agency was
supposed to become the unifying organization that
would distill and write up all available
intelligence, and offer it to political leaders in
a manageable form.
The act gave the CIA
five functions, four of them dealing with the
collection, coordination, and dissemination of
intelligence from open sources as well as
espionage. It was the fifth function - lodged in a
vaguely worded passage that allowed the CIA to
"perform such other functions and duties related
to intelligence affecting the national security as
the National Security Council may from time to
time direct" - that turned the CIA into the
personal, secret, unaccountable army of the
president.
From the very beginning, the
agency failed to do what president Truman expected
of it, turning at once to "cloak and dagger"
projects that were clearly beyond its mandate and
only imperfectly integrated into any grand
strategy of the US government. Weiner stresses
that the true author of the CIA's clandestine
functions was George Kennan, the senior State
Department authority on the Soviet Union and
creator of the idea of "containing" the spread of
communism rather than going to war with ("rolling
back") the USSR.
Kennan had been alarmed
by the ease with which the Soviets were setting up
satellites in Eastern Europe and he wanted to
"fight fire with fire". Others joined with him to
promote this agenda, above all the veterans of the
Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a unit that,
under General William J "Wild Bill" Donovan during
World War II, had sent saboteurs behind enemy
lines, disseminated disinformation and propaganda
to mislead Axis forces, and tried to recruit
resistance fighters in occupied countries.
On September 20, 1945, Truman had
abolished the OSS - a bureaucratic victory for the
Pentagon, the State Department, and the FBI, all
of which considered the OSS an upstart
organization that impinged on their respective
jurisdictions. Many of the early leaders of the
CIA were OSS veterans and devoted themselves to
consolidating and entrenching their new vehicle
for influence in Washington. They also
passionately believed that they were people with a
self-appointed mission of world-shaking importance
and that, as a result, they were beyond the normal
legal restraints placed on government officials.
From its inception the CIA has labored
under two contradictory conceptions of what it was
supposed to be doing, and no president ever
succeeded in correcting or resolving this
situation. Espionage and intelligence analysis
seek to know the world as it is; covert action
seeks to change the world, whether it understands
it or not. The best CIA exemplar of the
intelligence-collecting function was Richard
Helms, director of central intelligence (DCI) from
1966 to 1973 (who died in 2002). The great
protagonist of cloak-and-dagger work was Frank
Wisner, the CIA's director of operations from 1948
until the late 1950s when he went insane and, in
1965, committed suicide. Wisner never had any
patience for espionage.
Weiner quotes
William Colby, a future DCI (1973-76), on this
subject. The separation of the scholars of the
research and analysis division from the spies of
the clandestine service created two cultures
within the intelligence profession, he said,
"separate, unequal, and contemptuous of each
other". That critique remained true throughout the
CIA's first 60 years.
By 1964, the CIA's
clandestine service was consuming close to
two-thirds of its budget and 90% of the director's
time. The agency gathered under one roof Wall
Street brokers, Ivy League professors, soldiers of
fortune, ad men, newsmen, stuntmen, second-story
men, and con men. They never learned to work
together - the ultimate result being a series of
failures in both intelligence and covert
operations. In January 1961, on leaving office
after two terms, president Eisenhower had already
grasped the situation fully. "Nothing has changed
since Pearl Harbor," he told his DCI, Allen
Dulles. "I leave a legacy of ashes to my
successor." Weiner, of course, draws his title
from Eisenhower's metaphor. It would only get
worse in the years to come.
The historical
record is unequivocal. The United States is
ham-handed and brutal in conceiving and executing
clandestine operations, and it is simply no good
at espionage; its operatives never have enough
linguistic and cultural knowledge of target
countries to recruit spies effectively. The CIA
also appears to be one of the most easily
penetrated espionage organizations on the planet.
From the beginning, it repeatedly lost its assets
to double agents.
Typically, in the early
1950s, the agency dropped millions of dollars'
worth of gold bars, arms, two-way radios and
agents into Poland to support what its top
officials believed was a powerful Polish
underground movement against the Soviets. In fact,
Soviet agents had wiped out the movement years
before, turned key people in it into double
agents, and played the CIA for suckers. As Weiner
comments, not only had five years of planning,
various agents, and millions of dollars "gone down
the drain", but the "unkindest cut might have been
[the agency's] discovery that the Poles had sent a
chunk of the CIA's money to the Communist Party of
Italy" (pp 67-68).
The story would prove
unending. On February 21, 1994, the agency finally
discovered and arrested Aldrich Ames, the CIA's
chief of counterintelligence for the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe, who had been spying for the
USSR for seven years and
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