Declassified CIA Records
Tim Weiner's book, Legacy of Ashes, is important for many
reasons, but certainly one is that it brings back from the dead the
possibility that journalism can actually help citizens perform
elementary oversight on our government. Until Weiner's magnificent
effort, I would have agreed with Seymour Hersh that, in the current
crisis of American governance and foreign policy, the failure of the
press has been almost complete. Our journalists have generally not even
tried to penetrate the layers of secrecy that the executive branch
throws up to ward off scrutiny of its often illegal and incompetent
activities. This is the first book I've read in a long time that
documents its very important assertions in a way that goes well beyond
asking readers merely to trust the reporter.
Weiner, a New
York Times correspondent, has been working on Legacy of Ashes for 20
years. He has read over 50,000 government documents, mostly from the
CIA, the White House, and the State Department. He was instrumental in
causing the CIA Records Search Technology (CREST) program of the
National Archives to declassify many of them, particularly in 2005 and
2006. He has read more than 2,000 oral histories of American
intelligence officers, soldiers, and diplomats and has himself
conducted more than 300 on-the-record interviews with current and past
CIA officers, including ten former directors of central intelligence.
Truly exceptional among authors of books on the CIA, he makes the
following claim: "This book is on the record -- no anonymous sources,
no blind quotations, no hearsay."
Weiner's history contains
154 pages of end-notes keyed to comments in the text. (Numbered notes
and standard scholarly citations would have been preferable, as well as
an annotated bibliography providing information on where documents
could be found; but what he has done is still light-years ahead of
competing works.) These notes contain extensive verbatim quotations
from documents, interviews, and oral histories. Weiner also observes:
"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 Mohammad Mossadeq 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 [the CIA] 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
towers in Manhattan and the Pentagon in Washington, DC. 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 11th,
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 U.S. 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 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
(1973-1976), 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, 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.
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 had sent innumerable U.S.
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, in order to compensate for these serious inadequacies, the
CIA turned increasingly to signals intelligence and other technological
means of spying like 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, 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 neoconservative 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: "[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." [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 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." [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 (e.g.,
Greece under George Papadopoulos), militarists (e.g., Chile under Gen.
Augusto Pinochet), and murderers (e.g., 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 9/11, 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 twenty-five
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 to power as
Japan's prime minister (in office 1957-1960), the country's World War
II minister of munitions. 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 over two and a half
million books and periodicals. Weiner treats these activities rather
cursorily. He should have consulted Frances Stonor Saunders'
indispensable The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and
Letters.
Hiding Incompetence
Despite all this, the CIA
was protected from criticism by its impenetrable secrecy and by the
tireless propaganda efforts of such leaders as Allen W. Dulles,
director of the Agency under President Eisenhower, and Richard Bissell,
chief of the clandestine service after Wisner. Even when the CIA seemed
to fail at everything it undertook, writes Weiner, "The ability to
represent failure as success was becoming a CIA tradition." [p. 58]
After
the Chinese intervention in the Korean War, the CIA dropped 212 foreign
agents into Manchuria. Within a matter of days, 101 had been killed and
the other 111 captured -- but this information was effectively
suppressed. The CIA's station chief in Seoul, Albert R. Haney, an
incompetent army colonel and intelligence fabricator, never suspected
that the hundreds of agents he claimed to have working for him all
reported to North Korean control officers.
Haney survived his
incredible performance in the Korean War because, at the end of his
tour in November 1952, he helped to arrange for the transportation of a
grievously wounded Marine lieutenant back to the United States. That
Marine turned out to be the son of Allen Dulles, who repaid his debt of
gratitude by putting Haney in charge of the covert operation that --
despite a largely bungled, badly directed secret campaign -- did
succeed in overthrowing the Guatemalan government of President Jacobo
Arbenz in 1954. The CIA's handiwork in Guatemala ultimately led to the
deaths of 200,000 civilians during the 40 years of bloodshed and civil
war that followed the sabotage of an elected government for the sake of
the United Fruit Company.
Weiner has made innumerable
contributions to many hidden issues of postwar foreign policy, some of
them still on-going. For example, during the debate over America's
invasion of Iraq after 2003, one of the constant laments was that the
CIA did not have access to a single agent inside Saddam Hussein's inner
circle. That was not true. Ironically, the intelligence service of
France -- a country U.S. politicians publicly lambasted for its failure
to support us -- had cultivated Naji Sabri, Iraq's foreign minister.
Sabri told the French agency, and through it the American government,
that Saddam Hussein did not have an active nuclear or biological
weapons program, but the CIA ignored him. Weiner comments ruefully,
"The CIA had almost no ability to analyze accurately what little
intelligence it had." [pp. 666-67, n. 487]
Perhaps the most
comical of all CIA clandestine activities -- unfortunately all too
typical of its covert operations over the last 60 years -- was the
spying it did in 1994 on the newly appointed American ambassador to
Guatemala, Marilyn McAfee, who sought to promote policies of human
rights and justice in that country. Loyal to the murderous Guatemalan
intelligence service, the CIA had bugged her bedroom and picked up
sounds that led their agents to conclude that the ambassador was having
a lesbian love affair with her secretary, Carol Murphy. The CIA station
chief "recorded her cooing endearments to Murphy." The agency spread
the word in Washington that the liberal ambassador was a lesbian
without realizing that "Murphy" was also the name of her two-year-old
black standard poodle. The bug in her bedroom had recorded her petting
her dog. She was actually a married woman from a conservative family.
[p. 459]
Back in August 1945, General William Donovan, the
head of the OSS, said to President Truman, "Prior to the present war,
the United States had no foreign intelligence service. It never has had
and does not now have a coordinated intelligence system." Weiner adds,
"Tragically, it still does not have one." I agree with Weiner's
assessment, but based on his truly exemplary analysis of the Central
Intelligence Agency in Legacy of Ashes, I do not think that this is a
tragedy. Given his evidence, it is hard to believe that the United
States would not have been better off if it had left intelligence
collection and analysis to the State Department and had assigned
infrequent covert actions to the Pentagon.
I believe that this
is where we stand today: The CIA has failed badly, and it would be an
important step toward a restoration of the checks and balances within
our political system simply to abolish it. Some observers argue that
this would be an inadequate remedy because what the government now
ostentatiously calls the "intelligence community" -- complete with its
own website -- is composed of 16 discrete and competitive intelligence
organizations ready to step into the CIA's shoes. This, however, is a
misunderstanding. Most of the members of the so-called intelligence
community are bureaucratic appendages of well-established departments
or belong to extremely technical units whose functions have nothing at
all to do with either espionage or cloak-and-dagger adventures.
The
sixteen entities include the intelligence organizations of each
military service -- the Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marine Corps,
Navy, and the Defense Intelligence Agency -- and reflect inter-service
rivalries more than national needs or interests; the departments of
Energy, Homeland Security, State, Treasury, and Drug Enforcement
Administration, as well as the FBI and the National Security Agency;
and the units devoted to satellites and reconnaissance (National
Geospatial Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office). The
only one of these units that could conceivably compete with the CIA is
the one that I recommend to replace it -- namely, the State
Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). Interestingly
enough, it had by far the best record of any U.S. intelligence entity
in analyzing Iraq under Saddam Hussein and estimating what was likely
to happen if we pursued the Bush administration's misconceived scheme
of invading his country. Its work was, of course, largely ignored by
the Bush-Cheney White House.
Weiner does not cover every
single aspect of the record of the CIA, but his book is one of the best
possible places for a serious citizen to begin to understand the depths
to which our government has sunk. It also brings home the lesson that
an incompetent or unscrupulous intelligence agency can be as great a
threat to national security as not having one at all.
Chalmers
Johnson's latest book is Nemesis: The Last Days of the American
Republic (Metropolitan Books, 2007). It is the third volume of his
Blowback Trilogy, which also includes Blowback and The Sorrows of
Empire. A retired professor of international relations from the
University of California (Berkeley and San Diego campuses) and the
author of some seventeen books primarily on the politics and economics
of East Asia, Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research
Institute.
Copyright 2007 Chalmers Johnson
This essay is a review of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner (Doubleday, 702 pp., $27.95).
The American people may not know it but they have some severe problems with one of their official governmental entities, the Central Intelligence Agency. Because of the almost total secrecy surrounding its activities and the lack of cost accounting on how it spends the money covertly appropriated for it within the defense budget, it is impossible for citizens to know what the CIA's approximately 17,000 employees do with, or for, their share of the yearly $44 billion-$48 billion or more spent on "intelligence." 
