Page 4 of 5 THE GATES
INHERITANCE, Part 1 The
tortured world of US intelligence By Roger Morris
Iran, to
free the country and the Persian Gulf of its
historic predators, Russia as well as Britain. The
policy would enrage London and Moscow, FDR was
told; he nonetheless pressed on. Defying the old
empires, communist or capitalist - that was to be
"an example of what we could do", he told an aide,
"by an unselfish American policy".
It was
all over in April 1945 with his death. Into the
Oval Office
moved the more typical
American certainty of Harry Truman, a feisty,
remorselessly compromised machine politician who
would be led in the White House by bellicose,
half-informed aides and who gleaned what little he
knew of the outside world from a "story book view
of history", as his biographer Richard Miller once
put it, read with "a rousing Fourth of July
patriotism" in rural western Missouri - not so far
up the tracks from the vortex.
Targeting Russia Like Wichita's
B-52s and Titan missiles, the CIA was targeted on
Russia. As World War II had been for its
predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS), the Cold War was for the CIA. It defined
every purpose, and all else incidental. More than
80% of the agency's ever-fattening budget in its
early years was locked in the ice floe of the
Baltic syndrome. The CIA was not to be confused
with - or disposed to confuse the president and
his top officials with - genuine intelligence
about countries of the world in and for
themselves. The Middle East, Asia, Latin America,
Africa - a region mattered, for the most part,
only as it related to the struggle with the Soviet
Union. From the Vietnam War to Afghanistan and
Iraq - with scores of lesser-known disasters in
between - that willful negligence was, and
remains, immensely damaging.
As it
happened, though few American experts seemed to
realize it, the target had already been demolished
as the Cold War began, a condition from which it
never really recovered. If blinkered US
specialists missed much of Soviet political or
social reality, they could not help seeing the
country's sheer physical ruin. Revolution, terror,
civil war, purges, collectivization, famine, the
horrors of the Gulag, World War II's carnage,
still more postwar starvation - the three-decade
toll by various reckonings was in the range of
30-50 million dead and countless maimed, an
inconceivable demography of national desolation.
Whatever the number, the visible result
was a USSR in what one of its historians called,
with rare candor, "a state of abject poverty". The
1946-47 Ukrainian famine, like the Nazi siege of
Leningrad, made gruesome reality of old American
news claims of cannibalism. Nikita Khrushchev, the
former shepherd and miner, who rose to lead (and
reform) the post-Stalin USSR, recounted in horror
and shame a scene he had seen himself in postwar
Odessa: "The woman had the corpse of her own child
on the table, and was cutting it up."
In
1945, welcoming General Dwight Eisenhower to
Moscow after their joint victory over the Nazis,
Soviet Marshal Georgi Zhukov told his fellow
commander that the Soviet plight was even worse
than that of the defeated, destroyed Axis powers.
"Russia would never place itself in the position
of begging," Eisenhower recorded, noting the plea
embedded in Zhukov's description, "but ... he
could tell me with the utmost frankness that the
standard of living in Russia today was deplorably
low, and that it was his conviction that even the
present standard in Germany was at least as high
as it is in Russia ..."
Touring the USSR
two years later, British Field Marshal Bernard
Montgomery saw the same far-reaching ruin. "The
Soviet Union is very, very tired," he wrote
Eisenhower. "Devastation in Russia is appalling
and the country is in no fit state to go to war
... It will be 15 to 20 years before Russia will
be able to remedy her various defects and be in a
position to fight a major world war with a good
chance of success."
Nowhere was evidence
plainer than in the creaking Soviet military. By
1948, demobilization had reduced the Red Army in
Europe from more than 11 million to less than 3
million. Combat-ready troops matched Western
armies numerically, but lacked the equivalent
nuclear weapons or strategic air power - and those
were just the most obvious deficits. The Red Army
remained shoddily equipped, subject to high rates
of desertion and deplorable morale. As late as
1950, half its transport was unmechanized, moving
on still badly war-torn roads, with 80% of railway
bridges still seriously damaged.
Troops
were consumed with the occupation of vast new
Soviet-controlled territories in Eastern Europe
from the Baltic to the Balkans, with quelling
resistance and supporting the rule of local
communists, and, above all, with extracting
reparations and rebuilding the demolished USSR.
"In the late 1940s, the Red Juggernaut," concluded
a post-mortem by a team of scholars years later,
"was anything but."
Of condoms and
'endings in silence' Formed in 1947, the
CIA proved up to the task of justifying its
mission - despite the enemy's utter exhaustion and
preoccupation. By what historian Franklyn Holzman
called "politics and guesswork" (what our own era
termed "fixing intelligence around the policy"),
the agency launched a long tradition, which Gates
would inherit and carry forward two decades later,
of the systematic exaggeration of Russian power.
To the horse-drawn Soviet occupation army
in Eastern Europe, analysts added phantom
divisions, magically restored demobilized troops
and then topped the fictional mix with
hair-raising scenarios of a possible invasion of
Western Europe. They "exaggerated Soviet
capabilities and intentions to such a great
extent", as Holzman's study documented 20 later,
"that it is surprising anyone took them
seriously".
As would be true over the next
four decades, the media turned out to have not the
slightest difficulty parroting the fabrication.
Typically, under the headline, "Russia's edge in
men and arms" - and this was just as the Red Army
reached its nadir - an April 1948 US News and
World Report magazine announced: "Russia, at this
stage, is the world's number 1 military power
[whose] armies and air forces are in a position to
pour across Europe and into Asia almost at will."
By now a senior official awash in
contrived, ever more ominous intelligence, it was
Kennan who completed the CIA's initial portfolio
with a 1948 proposal to conduct covert subversion,
sabotage, and - in a term of suitable ambiguity -
"political action" inside Russia, the Soviet bloc
as a whole, or any other country where the rivals
might compete.
For the old threat that
knew no bounds, foreign or domestic, it was to be
containment uncontained. The task was not exactly
new for American governments long engaged in
freebooting regime-change in Latin America. But
the writ for intervention now spread into what,
for ever-provincial Washington, were essentially
uncharted regions of the world.
Begun
under the control of the State Department, covert
action was swiftly taken over by an increasingly
bureaucratically adept, politically potent CIA.
Kennan himself soon had qualms. "I would be
extremely careful of doing anything at the
governmental end that purports to affect directly
the governmental system of another country, no
matter what the provocation may seem," he said in
a speech as he left government in 1953. "It is
replete with possibilities for misunderstanding
and bitterness. To the extent it might be
successful it would involve the US in heavy
responsibilities."
The warning would echo
down half-a-century of grim history to Kabul 2001
and Baghdad 2003. But Kennan (whose view
policymakers were glad to accept so long as it
agreed with their own) was by then an outsider,
like many ex-officials he had already become a
prophet without honor in the increasingly
close-minded councils of Washington policy-making.
The new mandate for intervention would lie
with the innocuously titled "Office of Policy
Coordination". After initial fumbling by men far
too hesitant, it was handed over to Frank Wisner,
a well-to-do southerner and fey Russophobe in the
Lovett mold. He came to Washington in his bald,
jowly forties by way of a Wall Street law firm, a
wartime OSS liaison with Romanian royalty, and the
requisite Manhattan and Georgetown society friends
from whom he recruited the "old boys" who would
give the early CIA much of its outer gloss and
inner fatuousness.
Somerset Maugham,
Graham Greene, later Le Carre and others - a
teeming genre - would portray the smug ignorance,
incompetence, sleaze and self-ruin of spies'
machinations. But the Wisner club's all-too-real
version of life imitated, and improved on, art.
Funded by money skimmed from the Marshall
Plan, their "operations" were grim previews - and
parodies - of things to come, of a world that less
than two decades later would be second nature to
Gates. The code names were colorful; the realities
dark. Bloodstone enlisted Nazi SS veterans, most
of them war criminals, and placed them in key
positions - from the founders of West German
intelligence to CIA-paid advisers to tyrannical
client regimes in Iraq, Egypt, Syria or Saudi
Arabia, where they proved adept at organizing
secret police and using Gestapo torture methods to
deal with domestic democrats and Islamic devouts
(wiping out the former while scarring and steeling
the latter for a fierce evolution to our jihadist
world).
Mockingbird employed Washington
Post editor Phil Graham and other ready
establishment collaborators to suborn the foreign
press and American media. "By the early 1950s,"
wrote biographer Deborah Davis, "Wisner 'owned'
respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek,
CBS and other communications vehicles."
Meanwhile, the denizens of "policy
coordination" set off stink bombs at suspect youth
rallies around the world, launched balloons with
millions of propaganda leaflets over Soviet
satellites as well as the USSR, and sent flocks of
agents into Eastern Europe, Russia and Central
Asia to sabotage and foment uprisings, which were
confidently expected momentarily. To attack enemy
morale, always presumed to be frail, they schemed
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