Page 3 of
4 The life and
times of the CIA By Chalmers
Johnson
had sent innumerable US
agents before KGB firing squads. Weiner comments,
"The Ames case revealed an institutional
carelessness that bordered on criminal negligence"
(p 451).
The search for technological
means Over the years, to compensate for
these serious inadequacies, the CIA turned
increasingly to signals intelligence and other
technological means of spying, such as U-2
reconnaissance aircraft and satellites. In 1952,
the top leaders of the CIA created
the
National Security Agency - an eavesdropping and
cryptological unit - to overcome the CIA's abject
failure to place any spies in North Korea during
the Korean War. The CIA debacle at the Bay of Pigs
in Cuba led a frustrated Pentagon to create its
own Defense Intelligence Agency as a check on the
military amateurism of the CIA's clandestine
service officers.
Still, technological
means, whether satellite spying or electronic
eavesdropping, will seldom reveal intentions - and
that is the raison d'etre of intelligence
estimates. Haviland Smith, who ran operations
against the USSR in the 1960s and 1970s, lamented,
"The only thing missing is - we don't have
anything on Soviet intentions. And I don't know
how you get that. And that's the charter of the
clandestine service" (emphasis in original, pp
360-61).
The actual intelligence collected
was just as problematic. On the most important
annual intelligence estimate throughout the Cold
War - that of the Soviet order of battle - the CIA
invariably overstated its size and menace. Then,
to add insult to injury, under George H W Bush's
tenure as DCI (1976-77), the agency tore itself
apart over ill-informed right-wing claims that it
was actually underestimating Soviet
military forces. The result was the appointment of
"Team B" during the Ford presidency, led by Polish
exiles and neo-conservative fanatics. It was
tasked to "correct" the work of the Office of
National Estimates.
"After the Cold War
was over," writes Weiner, "the agency put Team B's
findings to the test. Every one of them was wrong"
(p 352). But the problem was not simply one of the
CIA succumbing to political pressure. It was also
structural: "For 13 years, from [president
Richard] Nixon's era to the dying days of the Cold
War, every estimate of Soviet strategic nuclear
forces overstated [emphasis in original]
the rate at which Moscow was modernizing its
weaponry" (p 297).
From 1967 to 1973, I
served as an outside consultant to the Office of
National Estimates, one of about a dozen
specialists brought in to try to overcome the
myopia and bureaucratism involved in the writing
of these National Intelligence Estimates. I recall
agonized debates over how the mechanical
highlighting of worst-case analyses of Soviet
weapons was helping to promote the arms race. Some
senior intelligence analysts tried to resist the
pressures of the US Air Force and the
military-industrial complex. Nonetheless, the late
John Huizenga, an erudite intelligence analyst who
headed the Office of National Estimates from 1971
until the wholesale purge of the agency by DCI
James Schlesinger in 1973, bluntly said to the
CIA's historians:
In retrospect ... I really do not
believe that an intelligence organization in
this government is able to deliver an honest
analytical product without facing the risk of
political contention ... I think that
intelligence has had relatively little impact on
the policies that we've made over the years.
Relatively none ... Ideally, what had been
supposed was that ... serious intelligence
analysis could ... assist the policy side to
re-examine premises, render policymaking more
sophisticated, closer to the reality of the
world. Those were the large ambitions which I
think were never realized. (p 353)
On
the clandestine side, the human costs were much
higher. The CIA's incessant, almost always
misguided attempts to determine how other people
should govern themselves; its secret support for
fascists (eg, Greece under George Papadopoulos),
militarists (eg, Chile under General Augusto
Pinochet) and murderers (eg, the Congo under
Joseph Mobutu); its uncritical support of death
squads (El Salvador) and religious fanatics
(Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan) - all
these and more activities combined to pepper the
world with blowback movements against the United
States.
Nothing has done more to undercut
the reputation of the United States than the CIA's
"clandestine" (only in terms of the American
people) murders of the presidents of South Vietnam
and the Congo, its ravishing of the governments of
Iran, Indonesia (three times), South Korea
(twice), all of the Indochinese states, virtually
every government in Latin America, and Lebanon,
Afghanistan and Iraq. The deaths from these armed
assaults run into the millions. After September
11, President Bush asked, "Why do they hate us?"
From Iran (1953) to Iraq (2003), the better
question would be, "Who does not?"
The
cash nexus There is a major exception to
this portrait of long-term agency incompetence.
"One weapon the CIA used with surpassing skill,"
Weiner writes, "was cold cash. The agency excelled
at buying the services of foreign politicians" (p
116). It started with the Italian elections of
April 1948. The CIA did not yet have a secure
source of clandestine money and had to raise it
secretly from Wall Street operators, rich
Italian-Americans, and others.
The millions were delivered to
Italian politicians and the priests of Catholic
Action, a political arm of the Vatican.
Suitcases filed with cash changed hands in the
four-star Hassler Hotel ... Italy's Christian
Democrats won by a comfortable margin and formed
a government that excluded communists. A long
romance between the [Christian Democratic] party
and the agency began. The CIA's practice of
purchasing elections and politicians with bags
of cash was repeated in Italy - and in many
other countries - for the next 25 years. (p
27)
The CIA ultimately spent at least
$65 million on Italy's politicians - including
"every Christian Democrat who ever won a national
election in Italy" (p 298). As the Marshall Plan
to reconstruct Europe got up to speed in the late
1940s, the CIA secretly skimmed the money it
needed from Marshall Plan accounts. After the plan
ended, secret funds buried in the annual defense
appropriation bill continued to finance the CIA's
operations.
After Italy, the CIA moved on
to Japan, paying to bring Nobusuke Kishi, the
country's World War II minister of munitions, to
power as prime minister (in office 1957-60). It
ultimately used its financial muscle to entrench
the (conservative) Liberal Democratic Party in
power and to turn Japan into a single-party state,
which it remains to this day. The cynicism with
which the CIA continued to subsidize "democratic"
elections in Western Europe, Latin America and
East Asia, starting in the late 1950s, led to
disillusionment with the United States and a
distinct blunting of the idealism with which it
had waged the early Cold War.
Another
major use for its money was a campaign to bankroll
alternatives in Western Europe to
Soviet-influenced newspapers and books. Attempting
to influence the attitudes of students and
intellectuals, the CIA sponsored literary
magazines in Germany (Der Monat) and Britain
(Encounter), promoted abstract expressionism in
art as a radical alternative to the Soviet Union's
socialist realism, and secretly funded the
publication and distribution of more than two and
a half million books and periodicals. Weiner
treats these activities rather cursorily. He
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