The CIA has reneged on pledges made by three consecutive directors of central intelligence—[Robert] Gates, [James] Woolsey, and [John] Deutch—to declassify records on nine major covert actions: France and Italy in the 1940s and 1950s; North Korea in the 1950s; Iran in 1953; Indonesia in 1958; Tibet in the 1950s and 1960s; and the Congo, the Dominican Republic, and Laos in the 1960s.
He is nonetheless able to supply key details on each of these operations from unofficial, but fully identified, sources.
In May 2003, after a lengthy delay, the government finally released the documents on President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s engineered regime change in Guatemala in 1954; most of the records from the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco in which a CIA-created exile army of Cubans went to their deaths or to prison in a hapless invasion of that island have been released; and the reports on the CIA’s 1953 overthrow of Iranian prime minister Muhammad Mossadegh were leaked. Weiner’s efforts and his resulting book are monuments to serious historical research in our allegedly “open society.” Still, he warns,
While I was gathering and obtaining declassification authorization for some of the CIA records used in this book at the National Archives, the agency was engaged in a secret effort to reclassify many of those same records, dating back to the 1940s, flouting the law and breaking its word. Nevertheless, the work of historians, archivists, and journalists has created a foundation of documents on which a book can be built.
SURPRISE ATTACKS
As an idea, if not an actual entity, the Central Intelligence Agency came into being as a result of December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. It functionally came to an end, as Weiner makes clear, on September 11, 2001, when operatives of al-Qaeda flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Both assaults were successful surprise attacks.
The Central Intelligence Agency itself was created during the Truman administration in order to prevent future surprise attacks like Pearl Harbor by uncovering planning for them and so forewarning against them. On September 11, 2001, the CIA was revealed to be a failure precisely because it had been unable to discover the al-Qaeda plot and sound the alarm against a surprise attack that would prove almost as devastating as Pearl Harbor. After 9/11, 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 United States 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 FBI had even observed the Japanese consul general in Honolulu burning records in his backyard 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 U.S. government information on an important issue. In 1941, there were plenty of signals about what was coming, but the U.S. 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 Air Force’s think tank the RAND Corporation, wrote a secret study that documented the coordination and communications failings leading up to Pearl Harbor. (Entitled 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 CIA 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 U.S. 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 has 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 and other forms of intelligence collecting.
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 sixty years.
By 1964, the CIA’s clandestine service was consuming close to two-thirds of its budget and 90 percent of the director’s time. The agency gathered under one roof Wall Street brokers, Ivy League professors, soldiers of fortune, ad men, newsmen, stunt men, 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 director of central intelligence, 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.