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 has 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 its key people 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.”
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 had sent innumerable U.S. agents before KGB firing squads. Weiner comments, “The Ames case revealed an institutional carelessness that bordered on criminal negligence.”
THE SEARCH FOR TECHNOLOGICAL MEANS
Over the years, in order 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 agency’s abject failure to place any spies in North Korea during the Korean War. The agency 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’être of intelligence estimates. As 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).
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 neoconservative fanatics. It was tasked with “correcting” 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.” But the problem was not simply one of the CIA succumbing to political pressure. It was also structuraclass="underline" “[F]or thirteen years, from 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.”
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 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 reexamine premises, render policymaking more sophisticated, closer to the reality of the world. Those were the large ambitions which I think were never realized.
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 (e.g., Greece under George Papadopoulos), militarists (e.g., Chile under Gen. Augusto Pinochet), and murderers (e.g., the Congo under Mobutu Sese Seko); 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 9/11, President Bush asked, “Why do they hate us?” From Iran (1953) to Iraq (2003), the better question would be, “Why would they 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.” 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 filled 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 twenty-five years.
The CIA ultimately spent at least $65 million on Italy’s politicians—including “every Christian Democrat who ever won a national election in Italy.” 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.