Читать книгу Whistleblower at the CIA - Melvin A. Goodman - Страница 9

ONE

JOINING THE CIA

“In order to know what is going to happen, one must know what has happened.”

—Niccolò Machiavelli

I never planned to join the Central Intelligence Agency. In looking back, there were signposts on my path to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in the summer of 1966. My three-year tour in the U.S. Army as a cryptographer exposed me to the intelligence world, and my two years in Athens, at the Joint United States Military Mission to Greece led to a love of travel and global politics. The training for my assignment at Fort Gordon in Augusta, Georgia, was secretive. My first tour of duty at the Pentagon involved encoding and decoding sensitive messages involving U.S. national security. My duties in Athens introduced me to behind-the-scenes developments during the Suez War in 1956, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, the launching of Sputnik in 1957, and the U.S. invasion of Lebanon in 1958. The latter invasion posed such a threat that my commanding general considered extending my tour as an “essential soldier” due to the possibility of warfare in the region. For the first and perhaps only time, at the age of 20, I was termed essential.

The assignment in Athens was important in another way. It gave me the opportunity to take college courses at a University of Maryland classroom on a U.S. air base. My professor, the late Dr. Amin Banani, a brilliant scholar from Iran, sparked my interest in Russian history and opened many academic and cultural doors. As a result of Dr. Banani’s encouragement, I applied to Johns Hopkins University, which I did to please him but without any expectation of being admitted. Following Hopkins, I went to Indiana University for graduate school where another professor, Dr. Robert Ferrell, took an interest in me and my work. He directed my Ph.D. dissertation on Soviet-American relations, which I completed largely because I didn’t want to disappoint this generous man. Without Professors Banani and Ferrell, my life would have been far different and much less interesting.

My initial interviews with the CIA and the State Department were in 1964 and 1965, when both agencies conducted interviews on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University. I was also approached by the National Security Agency (NSA) because of my background in cryptography and Russian studies. I pursued all three agencies because I was unhappy with the academic openings for Indiana University graduates at that time; I had no interest in going to Stevens Point, Wisconsin, or to Denton, Texas, to teach. I decided to look elsewhere as long as I could make use of my background in Russian studies.

The selection process was easy. The security environment at the NSA was oppressive, which is ironic in view of the extensive leaks regarding NSA surveillance of American citizens. There were security mobiles hanging from the ceilings at Fort Meade, Maryland, and political posters (“Loose lips sink ships!”) facing visitors in every corridor. There were badge checks within the building even after you got through security at the entrance. The foreign-service examination of the State Department was rigorous, but the personnel board of senior United States Foreign Service officers was off-putting. These officers had no interest in the work I was doing in graduate school and didn’t indicate that I could specialize in the Soviet and East European areas. The personnel board was unwilling to give me an entry waiver of 12 months so I could complete my dissertation research. I didn’t get the impression that the Foreign Service was interested in Russian area specialists with a serious academic background.

The introduction to the CIA didn’t have the pervasive security atmosphere of the NSA and, unlike the State Department, it was willing to accommodate my academic pursuits. I had no interest in working in clandestine operations, so I met no one from the Directorate of Operations, which coordinates covert actions worldwide. I emphasized my interest in the Soviet area and was directed to the CIA’s Office of Current Intelligence, where I met with the chiefs of the Soviet and East European regions. We discussed my dissertation topic on Soviet-American relations and held a lively exchange on national security and the role of intelligence in policymaking. Most importantly, they offered a one-year waiver to enable me to complete my research at the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York.

I was interviewed by the crème de la crème of the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence—the analytical division of the CIA that produces reports and briefings for the White House and policymakers. Senior managers in those days had joined the CIA in the late 1940s and early 1950s when the Cold War was heating up, and the Soviet Union had become the “evil empire.” This was probably the golden age for the CIA as an intelligence organization because of its sense of mission. Large numbers of liberal Ivy League graduates had been attracted to the CIA along with veterans of the military and the Office of Strategic Services, who were proud to serve a national security team’s international mission. This was a political generation that had been willing to take risks on behalf of U.S. interests, and had encountered no serious political criticism of the CIA or U.S. foreign interventions when they were recruited. When I arrived in the 1960s, however, there was widespread criticism because of Vietnam.

I arrived at the CIA in 1966 as the war was becoming costly and unpopular. Several supervisors were curious as to why someone who opposed the Vietnam War would join a CIA that was becoming infamous due to the war’s horrors, particularly the violent Phoenix program, which was responsible for the deaths of innocent Vietnamese people. I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t give much thought to the role of the CIA in Vietnam or in places such as Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, or Cuba, where the CIA had conducted some of its most destructive operations. The CIA’s involvement in the overthrow of the government in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954 as well as the targeting of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1959 and Fidel Castro in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs were far from my mind.

I was naïve, leaving the first round of CIA interviews believing that it was a large research institution specializing in international relations. I gave little thought to the security investigation that would take up most of that year, which included an oppressive lie detection test. The CIA had an excellent library in my fields of interest, a helpful and professional staff to assist in research, opportunities for additional language training, and access to the most sensitive secrets of the U.S. government on the Soviet Union and East Europe. I was impressed with the people I met in the interviews, and I was excited by the possibility of overseas travel.

There is no excuse for not focusing on the clandestine operations of the CIA, and not weighing the pros and cons of the agency’s violent role in undermining the governments of other nations, many of which were democracies. While the CIA had a legitimate role to play in the collection and analysis of intelligence, its role in the field of clandestine operations and covert action was questionable at best. CIA training courses were quite boastful of the covert actions behind the overthrow of governments in Iran and Guatemala, but I eventually concluded these events were strategic failures. We are still dealing with strategic setbacks caused by the pursuit of regime changes in nations lacking political stability outside the authoritarian strongman model. It took me too long to realize that CIA covert actions, as well as military intervention, had registered no strategic successes, but had been responsible for a series of strategic failures for the United States, and catastrophe for families and communities in foreign lands. It was particularly shocking to learn that the father of containment, George F. Kennan, whose books I had devoured as a graduate student, was a leading proponent of a covert action role for the CIA in the late 1940s—over the objections of the first CIA directors and their general counsels.

I learned early on, however, that the CIA was no “rogue elephant out of control,” but a secret agency that simply carried out the orders of the White House. CIA director Gates ordered the destruction of nearly all of the operational documents on the overthrow of Iran’s government (Operation Ajax) in 1953, presumably because one of the coup’s planners prepared a secret history that described the Eisenhower administration’s direct involvement. The coup may have been a tactical success, but it was a strategic nightmare that still burdens U.S.-Iranian ties. The same could be said for most covert actions.

The bureaucratic wall between the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence and Directorate of Operations contributed to my belief that I was doing legitimate work as an intelligence analyst and had nothing to do with the covert activities of the CIA’s “case officers.” The CIA headquarters building contributed to this feeling, because it was divided physically and ideologically between the two major directorates, or the “two sides of the house.” Analysts resided in the northern half of the building, and operations officers in the southern half. We ate in different cafeterias to make sure that visitors to the CIA would never stumble into covert operatives who worked under cover. The physical layout was cumbersome, and it inhibited contact and communication between analysts and collectors. The latter wanted this system because analysts were viewed as progressive eggheads who didn’t understand the harsh international environment. Few analysts objected, because we viewed many of the operatives as knuckle-draggers with little substantive expertise.

There was a double standard in the training of new hires. The CIA’s Directorate of Operations—in charge of clandestine activities in foreign countries—recruited operations types who were given rigorous training for nearly a year at a training facility in Virginia. They received training in paramilitary activities as well as operational tradecraft. The career trainee program was devoted to preparing incoming officers for a career in clandestine activities. There was no comparable training for new analysts. A few analysts received mentors when they got to their regional offices, but most were on their own.

A useful preparation for life as an intelligence analyst was reading studies from the senior research staff. I learned that the research in the academic community was not as up-to-date as the work being done by the senior research staff. The work of this small, elite group suggested that the best way to get good assessments is to recruit good students and give them enough time and independence in their areas of expertise to pursue their work. Since papers by the senior research staff were considered “working papers” and not final intelligence, they did not require formal coordination within the CIA or the intelligence community, which is the best way to encourage out-of-the-box thinking. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger knew that the best intelligence in Washington came from informal papers and not the formal estimates and assessments that carried the endorsement logos of myriad intelligence organizations. Coordinated intelligence is typically intelligence that forswears the most radical or experimental thinking.

Before facing the cultural challenges of the Intelligence and Operations Directorates, however, I encountered a personal challenge. Returning to my graduate studies at Indiana University’s Russian and East European Research Institute, I encountered strong hostility to the CIA among faculty members and fellow students. They were aghast at my career choice. One member of my dissertation committee, Professor Bernard Morris of the Department of Government, immediately resigned from my committee without any explanation either to me or to the Department of History. He refused to speak to me for years, let alone help with my research.

Morris had had a bad experience while serving in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which was the intelligence arm of the State Department. He told a mutual friend that the “Goodman thing” really bothered him because he did not want to be perceived as a former government official from the intelligence community whose students were seeking job counseling and, in my case, a job with the dreaded CIA. The episode with Morris left me angry and frustrated.

I learned later that Morris had faced a rigorous and unfair security investigation at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research and wanted nothing to do with anyone considering a career in intelligence, let alone at the CIA. Professor Morris, an engaging and exciting professor, was victimized by the wave of McCarthyism that swept over the State Department in the 1950s.

Morris was extremely important to me because he had arrived at Indiana University in 1963, a year after my enrollment, as a vigorous and articulate critic of the U.S war in Vietnam. I was opposed to the war too, but Morris had a deeper understanding of the relevant history and politics, and their implications for international stability. He soon developed a close circle of followers within the graduate student community, and a few of us became active in the teach-in movement against the war, which was later investigated during my polygraph examination for the CIA.

I was also sympathetic toward Owen Lattimore, another professor who was victimized by McCarthyism in the 1950s and, as a result, was treated shabbily by our university, Johns Hopkins, where he was a professor. Neither Morris nor Lattimore received the protection they should have had from their institutions, and their experience should have made me more critical about bureaucratic politics in Washington, craven bureaucrats who occupy important positions, and the cowardice of academic and governmental institutions.

The reaction from some of my closest friends at the university was equally passionate and outraged. There were several individuals who cut off all contact with me, although this group did not include such fellow students as James Collins, who became ambassador to the Soviet Union in the late 1980s; Richard Miles, who became ambassador to Azerbaijan in 1992; and another close friend—who must remain unnamed—who headed the CIA’s operational desk on the Soviet bloc. There were ugly letters from some graduate students, but they didn’t cause me to rethink my career choice.

Losing friends at Indiana University was good preparation for my experiences with another former student there, Robert M. Gates, a close friend before he became an adversary at the CIA. When Gates was nominated to be CIA director and I became his leading opponent at his confirmation hearings in 1991, more friendships were lost. I had great respect for my Indiana University friends who were expressing strong opposition to the CIA. I had little respect for my CIA critics, who seemed to be careerists or opportunists. At the same time, I had my supporters at the agency—including some in management positions—who took risks in providing examples of politicized intelligence to support my congressional testimony. And there were analysts who also took great risks in submitting sworn testimony against the confirmation of Gates. One of them, Carolyn McGiffert Ekedahl, became my wife two years after the hearings.

I entered the CIA with great enthusiasm in the summer of 1966. The agency’s headquarters are in McLean, Virginia, less than 10 miles from the White House. The 258-acre compound has a campus setting, which helped me ignore the heavily guarded main gate and the various barricades, which were fortified in 1993 after a young Pakistani national, Aimal Khan Kansi, killed two CIA employees and wounded several others, firing an AK-47 into cars headed into the CIA grounds. Shortly after the shootings, I got a call from the Virginia police, telling me that they had found an old copy of Newsweek in Kansi’s apartment from the time of the 1991 hearings. The police wanted me to know that the pictures of Gates and me were circled. I asked if Gates had also been called, and they assured me that he was getting 24-hour police protection. I asked what I was “getting,” and they replied that I was getting “this call.”

The CIA’s headquarters was designed in the 1950s by the same New York architects who designed the United Nations complex in Manhattan. The facade was impressive; the entrance offered an airy and open feeling. The compound itself was known as “Langley,” the name of the McLean neighborhood where the CIA is located. There is a statue of Nathan Hale, who was captured and executed by the British for spying for the United States, to the right of the entrance, and an egg-shaped auditorium nearby, where the jazz legend Lionel Hampton gave a concert for his neighbor from Connecticut, the CIA director George H.W. Bush.

The two major cultures of the CIA, the analytical and the operational, were quite distinct. The operatives believed the primary mission of the CIA was the collection of foreign intelligence. The recruitment of case officers involved a search for extroverts who would be trained at a facility in Virginia, to recruit foreign sources of secret information for policymakers, and not necessarily for intelligence analysts. Analysts had access to the raw information of the intelligence community, including the sensitive intercepts of the NSA, and used facts and inference for policy-relevant estimates and assessments. “Open source” materials, such as newspapers, official statements, and published statistics, were often more valuable than secret information from clandestine sources. Both directorates were good at dealing with the capabilities of adversaries; neither did a good job of dealing with intentions.

Clandestine operatives or case officers are deeply involved in policy; they rely on secrecy and hierarchy and share information on a strict need-to-know basis. They are typically generalists who serve overseas and rarely have regional or country-specific expertise. They typically move from one country to another every few years. The best of them gather important information by serving in key countries, but very few are good at incorporating that information into a global picture to serve the needs of policymakers. There were always exceptions, however. Most are hard working because they must do both the job that their cover status demands as well as their clandestine mission. Their political views tend to be on the right.

There was rarely agreement between clandestine operatives and intelligence analysts. Operatives were quick to support administration positions, giving upbeat assessments of the Vietnam War that were contradicted by the intelligence assessments coming from the Directorate of Intelligence. The differences between the two directorates on the war couldn’t have been more stark, moving Director Helms to remark “I felt like a circus rider standing astride two horses.”¹ CIA analysts and operatives differed on the impact of Mikhail Gorbachev on Soviet domestic politics and Soviet-American relations.

Intelligence analysts are tethered to their desks at Langley and get insufficient opportunities to travel overseas. It was particularly frustrating to learn that the Directorate of Operations did not permit Soviet analysts to travel to the Soviet Union, although this policy was altered in the 1970s. Intelligence analysts should have no policy axes to grind; their credibility rests on that fact. Unlike operatives, analysts tended to be progressive in their political thinking, which led President Richard Nixon to refer to them as “clowns.” They received short orientation trips to their areas of expertise, but got insufficient support from overseas case officers, who viewed analysts traveling with marginal and ineffective cover as a threat to their clandestine missions. I traveled to countries where the CIA station would not allow me to come into the U.S. embassy (for example, the USSR, India, Costa Rica) and I was denied travel to important countries (for example, Iraq, Pakistan) for no good reason. If the CIA had a genuine “one Agency” culture, intelligence analysts would have gone overseas regularly for temporary duty, and served tours in CIA stations. This would allow regular discussion of sources with case officers and assessments of the information that sources provide. When I was on the faculty of the National War College, the overseas trips were particularly rewarding, because we had support from defense attachés assigned to the embassies in countries we visited. The CIA needs a similar culture.

Unlike the Operations Directorate and the military, which offers extensive training to its recruits, the CIA in the 1960s was extremely casual in preparing intelligence analysts. I received no training and only informal mentoring upon entering the CIA, and no exposure to the problem of intelligence manipulation. The testimony I provided to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about corruption at the CIA was fully transcribed in official congressional publications, but there was no effort to incorporate these accounts into training manuals or actual case studies. An ombudsman post was finally created in the wake of the hearings, but there were no junkyard dogs among those who filled the post.

The CIA culture was challenging due to the differences between the Directorates of Intelligence and Operations. These two distinct cultures were formed during World War II in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The OSS had an operational element that served in Europe and Asia with some members becoming CIA directors: Allen Dulles, Helms, Colby, and Casey. The analytical element of the Office of Strategic Services served primarily in Washington, D.C., and their members were influential in forming the CIA’s Office of National Estimates, particularly Yale University’s Sherman Kent and Harvard University’s William Langer.

The culture of the clandestine service remains dominated by the secrecy of the mission; its hierarchical nature has its roots in the quasi-military origins of the Office of Strategic Services. The Directorate of Operations is a closed fraternity; even CIA analysts are considered outsiders who can’t be trusted. The risks confronting operatives are similar to those of Foreign Service Officers and military officers, but clandestine agents believe they are part of an exclusive club. The Directorate of Operations has become a paramilitary organization in many ways.

Operatives are extroverts by nature, getting their energy from other people, useful in recruiting foreign agents to do the bidding of the United States. The culture of the Directorate of Operations is inherently contradictory; it represents a closed, secret society inside an open democracy. It claims to have the highest morality, but represents a lawless organization overseas. The willingness to break laws leads to a resentment of congressional oversight. As former director of central intelligence General Walter Bedell Smith has conceded, “The CIA has committed every crime there is except rape.” The need to manipulate others and to obfuscate their own identities leads many to drop out of the directorate. For the overwhelming majority that remain, their own families, particularly their children, have no idea that they are clandestine operatives of the CIA. There is typically great anger when they become aware.

Unlike operatives, analysts are classic introverts. Many analysts are recruited from graduate school, where they were preparing for life in the ivory tower. The dominant culture of the Directorate of Intelligence in the mid-1960s was shaped by Sherman Kent, who believed that analysts must keep a distance from policymakers and must shield themselves from the prejudices and motivations of the consumers of intelligence. Unlike operatives, analysts are often critical of the excesses of U.S. national security policy, such as the Vietnam War and U.S.-sponsored coups in Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, and Chile.

Intelligence analysts have registered serious failures, such as the lack of warning about the decline of the Soviet Union or the phony assessments of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. These failures occur when intense policy pressure distorts the flow of intelligence information. CIA directors and deputy directors (Casey and Gates) were involved in the failure to accurately assess the Soviet decline; Tenet and John McLaughlin played key roles, providing tailored intelligence to allow the Bush administration to invade Iraq.

When I left the CIA in the mid-1980s, the dominant culture was shaped by Robert M. Gates, who could not have been more different from Kent, lacking both his stature and his intellect. Gates believed it was the duty of the analyst to study and serve the agenda of policymakers. The ethos of Robert Gates created the conditions that led to the corruption of intelligence.

President Truman designed the CIA so that the intelligence analyst would be at the center of the organization; it soon became obvious that clandestine operatives were the real center. Analysts typically resent their association with clandestine operatives, who are perceived as “spooks.” Operatives see analysts as naïve, idealistic, and unrealistic. Those senior officers of the CIA, such as Harvard University’s Robert Bowie of the National Foreign Assessment Center in the late 1970s, who thought they could merge the two cultures, did not succeed. Director John O. Brennan has created an unprecedented merger of the Directorates of Intelligence and Operations without consulting the Congressional Intelligence Committees and without debate within CIA itself.

I was wrong not to learn more about the CIA’s clandestine foreign interventions that were so abhorrent to many friends and academic colleagues, including my faculty advisors. I believed that my work in the Directorate of Intelligence, which was openly acknowledged, was far different from the work of the Directorate of Operations, which was covert and unacknowledged. I had little contact with officers of the Directorate of Operations, even in my own field of Soviet affairs. I developed an academic interest in the CIA’s clandestine operations, but I felt no responsibility for covert actions that involved destabilizing foreign governments, let alone assassinations and support for brutal regimes.

The CIA’s secret operations, particularly regime changes and political killings, were not the rogue actions of an out-of-control agency, however. These acts were authorized and conceptualized at the White House with the approval of the president. The National Security Act of 1947 that created the CIA did not refer to covert actions, but it did assign to the CIA “duties related to intelligence affecting the national security.” There is no evidence that President Truman wanted to use the CIA in such covert deeds, but his immediate successors, Eisenhower and Kennedy, gave the CIA a major clandestine role in foreign policy. Their successors endorsed covert actions that violated international law, and were not in accordance with U.S. law.

President Truman wanted a firewall between the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of Intelligence because he didn’t want the policy role of clandestine operations to compromise the analytic role of the Directorate of Intelligence. In 2015 Brennan destroyed the bureaucratic wall between intelligence and operations to create regional and functional “fusion centers,” which now situate analysts and operatives side by side. This creates greater centralized control and more opportunities for manipulating intelligence, and harms the production of strategic intelligence and authoritative National Intelligence Estimates.

The intelligence from CIA’s fusion centers concentrates on tactical warning, but does a poor job of explaining the “why” and “wherefore” of geopolitical events. The CIA was wrong, for example, in failing to anticipate the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and never warned the White House in 2002–2003 about the domestic consequence of using force in Iraq. The CIA clearly underestimated the military capabilities of the Islamic State, and the intelligence failure led to a policy failure in responding to a new challenge in both Iraq and Syria.

There were immediate rewards in joining the CIA’s Office of Current Intelligence, which provided timely intelligence to the president and key policymakers, particularly the friendship of a group of Soviet foreign policy analysts, about a half dozen or so, in their late twenties, most newly married, and one or two with young children. All had advanced degrees from good universities; all were progressive; all were committed to becoming good intelligence analysts. We held potluck parties at a time when Washington had few decent restaurants and salaries in the range of $6,000–$8,000 didn’t allow for dining out. When we moved from apartments to houses, we banded together with rented trucks and got the job done.

There was great esprit de corps in the first years. I pitched for the CIA’s Office of Current Intelligence softball team and played point guard for its basketball team. When CIA director Helms was asked by LIFE magazine to do a photo essay on the softball league, he agreed, if a healthy honorarium was paid. Helms was interested in padding the CIA’s budget; LIFE wasn’t that interested in our softball league. My contribution to the esprit was organizing small groups of analysts to go to Baltimore for baseball games, since Washington was deprived of the sport. On one occasion, I got management of the Orioles to welcome the CIA contingent on the electronic scoreboard, which was a great delight for all of us. In 1984, I chartered a bus to conduct a one-day tour of Charm City for 45 colleagues, another great source of merriment. I have a wonderful picture of a half dozen of us standing in front of the CIA’s Family Inn, a down-to-earth Italian restaurant in Fells Point.

We were an interesting mix, and became rather formidable within the Office of Current Intelligence. We gave no thought to the fact that there were no female analysts in our group. We worked long hours without any provision for overtime. We were feisty for the most part, and some of us manifested a contrarian streak. I developed a reputation for being particularly prickly, but there were few shrinking violets in the group. Some of us were simply quicker than others to go to the mat. I wrestled in junior high school, so I loved to go to the mat. We had no mentors inside the office so we nudged and badgered each other; some dealt with that better than others.

The group included, at one extreme, Bob Gates, who went on to become CIA director under President George H. W. Bush and secretary of defense under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. I took Gates to the cafeteria for his first lunch in the building in 1968, and told my colleagues that we would be working for this guy one of these days. It simply happened much sooner than I expected. Bob started out as a very good, hard-working analyst, but his ambition and ego eventually prevailed over his ethics and professionalism.

At the other extreme was Raymond McGovern, who currently heads a small group of former intelligence analysts who lobby the White House on sensitive issues and contribute regularly to various websites. Like Gates, McGovern came to the CIA as part of his tour as an Air Force officer; they locked horns immediately and they haven’t disengaged 50 years later. When the young McGovern became our branch chief, it was the even younger Gates who went to our bosses and succeeded in getting McGovern replaced.

I’m not a member of Ray’s group of activists because I prefer to pick my own causes and make my own cases. Ray’s civic activity has led to a great deal of notoriety, including an arrest in 2014 in New York City simply for trying to attend a talk by General David Petraeus at the 92nd Street Y. So much for the 92nd Street Y’s commitment to free speech, tolerance, and openness. Federal agents have also escorted Ray from public meetings where he merely tried to question former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld or former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

If anyone doubts the massive nature of surveillance of the American population, then just ponder the fact that McGovern had a ticket to the Petraeus event that was purchased online, and that the 92nd Street Y and New York City’s finest were waiting for McGovern at the door to bar his legitimate and lawful entry. The head of counterintelligence for the New York City police department may have had something to do with this. The counterintelligence chief is the former head of operations at the CIA, David Cohen.

My best friend in the CIA was the late Barry L. Stevenson. Barry and I traveled together in China; taught a course in Soviet politics and policy at the National War College; attended anti-war rallies in the Vietnam era; and forged a close personal relationship that lasted until shortly after the confirmation hearings for Gates in 1991. Barry, Bob, and I had been close in the 1960s and 1970s, and Barry did his best to bridge the gap when Bob and I became antagonists. Barry was one of the analysts who provided me with important documents that revealed how Gates was tampering with intelligence to satisfy those above him, but eventually Barry felt he had to choose between the two of us. He chose Gates, so I felt an ironic satisfaction when Barry was named the CIA’s ombudsman to prevent corruption in the mid-1990s. The position didn’t exist until several of us made the issue of politicization the thrust of our opposition to Gates’s confirmation as CIA director.

Another close friend was Eugene Wicklund, whose wedding reception was held at my apartment in Washington because it was within walking distance of the ceremony at the National Cathedral, and the cost was right. A favorite delicatessen in McLean, Virginia, for CIA analysts and operatives did the catering. Wicklund was a new and inexperienced analyst in 1968 when he accurately forecast the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, but he was silenced and even ridiculed by senior managers at the CIA and the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, who argued the Kremlin didn’t do that kind of thing anymore.² Fast forward to Russian aggression in Ukraine and Crimea in 2014–2015 for a similar CIA failure.

Many, if not most, of my colleagues in the Soviet Division of the CIA’s Office of Current Intelligence were opposed to the war in Vietnam and took part in anti-war rallies in Washington. More importantly, the CIA’s political intelligence on the war was implicitly critical of the U.S. effort and extremely pessimistic on the chances of U.S. success. The most memorable march occurred in 1967 and was memorialized in Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night. Stevenson and I proudly marched behind veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that had fought in Spain 30 years earlier. We went as far as the Pentagon, but when it turned ugly we took the advice of Kenny Rogers: “You gotta know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.” We imagined the absurd political imagery of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI agents taking pictures of the two of us as CIA anti-war protesters.

The environment and work in the Office of Current Intelligence suited my temperament and disposition. Our task was to provide timely political intelligence to U.S. decision makers. Pride of place was given to the President’s Daily Brief, which went to the president, the national security advisor, the secretaries of state and defense, and very few others. President Richard Nixon demanded that a copy go to the attorney general as well, which pointed to the close relationship between Nixon and John Mitchell. The fact that a very junior analyst could contribute to an intelligence document for the president of the United States was a major part of the excitement of our work.

The President’s Daily Brief was an all-source document that incorporated sensitive materials from the CIA’s Directorate of Operations; intercepts from the National Security Agency; cables from U.S. embassies; defense attaché reporting; and the excellent and under-appreciated media coverage from the CIA’s Foreign Bureau of Information. The National Security Agency is defined as a collection agency rather than an analytic one, but in the 1960s and 1970s they boasted some of the best analysts in Washington, and I soon learned to use the scrambler telephone to call my counterpart at the National Security Agency, Eugene Rowe, an outstanding intelligence analyst.

One of the peculiarities of the CIA during my tenure from 1966 to 1990 was the fact that so few people were delegated and so little attention was paid to the President’s Daily Brief, which was read at the highest levels of government, compared to the time and attention given to National Intelligence Estimates, which were rarely read by senior policymakers. The CIA tailored the Brief to the interests of the president, some of whom were readers (Kennedy, Clinton, and Obama) and some of whom were not (Johnson and Reagan). With the changes in the intelligence community, the Brief is now directed by the Director of National Intelligence—a retired military officer—and not the director of CIA—an intelligence professional.

In order to prepare items for the President’s Daily Brief or to contribute to National Intelligence Estimates, I had an in-box with the best of U.S. intelligence from an outstanding collection system is unmatched. We had the most challenging intelligence requirement in the community, judging the capabilities and intentions of the major adversary facing the United States—the Soviet Union. We were not fully appreciative of the great responsibility we had at the time, particularly in view of our inexperience and modest professional backgrounds. We had academic degrees, typically master’s degrees, but none of us had ever worked in foreign policy or intelligence communities. We had successes and failures. Our failures had nothing to do with collection; they were due primarily to the lack of rigor and imagination among analysts and, in the 1980s, to chronic political interference from Casey and Gates.

In addition to writing short intelligence items for the President’s Daily Brief and the National Daily Bulletin that went worldwide, we conducted briefings before congressional committees, traveled overseas for orientation and briefings of foreign liaisons, participated in the preparation of National Intelligence Estimates, and coordinated intelligence throughout the multi-agency intelligence community. I served on task forces at all hours of the day and night during crises such as the Six-Day War in the Middle East, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the October War of 1973, and even the Iranian hostage crisis and the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in the late 1970s, because there was always a Soviet angle to be investigated.

No one has ever studied the intelligence products of these task forces, although they produced the best assessments of fast-breaking situations around the world. These products were superior to the work of other intelligence agencies, and far more valuable than what appeared in the mainstream media. When I served on the task force on Vietnam in 1979, I fielded a call from former CIA director George H.W. Bush, who was traveling in Texas and wanted to be brought up to speed on the Chinese invasion.

I soon learned that the CIA’s intelligence support is invaluable in any negotiating arena, whether arms control negotiations such as SALT or negotiations on the Middle East. Harold Saunders, one of the leading Arabists in the State Department, who accompanied Kissinger in negotiations between Israel, Egypt, and Syria, affirmed to me the importance of CIA support. “When you are a mediator . . . you quickly realize you’re particularly naked because the Syrians had lived on, and the Israelis were sitting on, the Golan Heights, and the Egyptians had pumped oil from the Gulf of Suez and the Israelis were sitting on that territory,” Saunders said.³ “We weren’t, so our ability to keep people in the mediation honest and not trying to pull wool over each other’s eyes was entirely dependent on our having knowledge from independent sources.” He considered CIA support “superb.” If I sound overly enthusiastic, then it is because I was. I found all of this exhilarating.

It was impossible to hold a conversation in Washington in the mid-1960s without debating Vietnam. It didn’t take many social occasions for me to realize that the CIA wasn’t a popular institution, but a good way to disarm critics was to protest the war with chapter and verse evidence of U.S. perfidy and poor judgment in deploying a huge force to Southeast Asia. Twenty years later, the various annexes to the Pentagon Papers carried several National Intelligence Estimates that recorded CIA assessments from the early 1960s indicating that U.S. bombing of Vietnam would not hinder Hanoi’s ability to carry on the war against the South, and that the North Vietnamese would match every U.S. act of escalation, no matter how great the physical suffering.⁴ U.S. bombers dropped more ordnance on Vietnam than on Germany in World War II, with no impact on the outcome of the war in Southeast Asia. CIA director Richard McGarrah Helms soon wore out his welcome at both the Johnson and Nixon White House because of the pessimistic messages he carried to policy meetings.

The CIA prepared a series of studies for President Lyndon B. Johnson, National Security Advisor Walt Rostow, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that concluded that bombing operations such as Rolling Thunder, designed to complicate the enemy’s war effort, had not reduced enemy operations in the South or the amount of enemy supplies moving into the area. A good friend of mine at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Louis Sarris, was reaching identical conclusions, but McNamara ordered that Sarris be taken off the Vietnam account. Secretary of State Dean Rusk meekly carried out McNamara’s outrageous order, which may have been the first personnel reprisal of the war. Sarris was treated as a pariah by most of his colleagues because of his opposition to the war. Some of my colleagues, including my wife, encountered similar experiences in the wake of their testimony to the Congress to counter the confirmation of Robert Gates as CIA director.

Secretary of Defense McNamara responded to Sarris’s trenchant analysis with an angry and chilling warning to Secretary of State Rusk, saying, “If you were to tell me that it is not the policy of the State Department to issue military appraisals without seeking the views of the Defense Department, the matter will die.”⁵ Rusk assured McNamara that future memoranda that contained “military appraisals (would) be coordinated with your Department.”⁶ At a pivotal time in October 1963, only several weeks before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, when the groundwork was being laid for the tragic escalation of the war, key decision makers were denied ground truth about the situation in Vietnam from the CIA and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

Policymakers looked at CIA operatives and intelligence analysts with the same suspicion that operatives and analysts had toward each other. It is the rare memoir from a policymaker that extols the virtues of the CIA; for the most part the CIA became a whipping post for failed policy. Secretary of Defense McNamara lied about the intelligence he received on Vietnam and denied having access to good intelligence that provided sufficient warning of the fool’s errand that he supported. He used his memoir and a documentary film to argue that a lack of reliable information about Vietnam led to incorrect decisions in the early 1960s.⁷ “Our government lacked experts for us to consult,” he wrote. This was not true. Four decades later, the key members of the Bush administration used their memoirs to blame the invasion of Iraq on bad and inadequate intelligence.

A CIA colleague, Samuel Adams, fourth cousin seven times removed of the second president of the United States, became another outcast. He wore out his welcome with the CIA establishment by fighting the deliberate undercount of Viet Cong by military intelligence, particularly the Defense Intelligence Agency. Adams was taken off the Vietnam account, but was not moved far enough away, because after his lateral arabesque to the Cambodian desk, he found that the Khmer Rouge in Southeast Asia were also being deliberately undercounted. Policymakers had a difficult time dealing with the larger estimates of enemy fighting forces because such estimates exposed the exaggerated body counts of the military and begged serious questions about the need for a greater U.S. troop presence. Presently, military intelligence is being investigated for politicizing and exaggerating the results of U.S. actions against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

Adams was the enfant terrible of the CIA and indeed the entire intelligence community. He wrote one of the best books ever written on the politics of intelligence analysis, but, like most “best books,” it has been read by very few and understood by even fewer.⁸ Sam was the model of the crusading intelligence analyst. He had conclusively established that the intelligence community, led by the military, had severely and deliberately undercounted the numbers of Viet Cong with the prodding of military commanders who wanted to make the war effort appear successful. The bureaucratic infighting took place at the highest levels of the policy and intelligence communities, and the eventual release of thousands of documents supported Adams.

Many of these documents were available because Adams simply decided to take them home, which is far removed from standard security procedures at the CIA. The end-of-the-day security drill was a simple one that included taking paper bags of classified trash to the appropriate burn chutes; tugging at safe and file drawers to make sure they were locked; and combing the area for stray pieces of classified trash. But in 1969, when the CIA’s deputy director, Admiral Rufus Taylor, delivered a letter that suggested Adams should “submit his resignation” if he could not be a “helpful member of the intelligence team at CIA,” Adams tried a new drill.

Adams had no intention of quitting, so he began to remove documents in a daily paper, usually the Wall Street Journal, and bury them on a neighbor’s heavily wooded property in a wooden box that once held cheap Spanish wine. Like other whistleblowers, Adams walked the halls of Congress to interest our representatives in the intelligence failure that had destroyed so many lives in Vietnam, but he encountered a deafening silence, the same silence that would confront whistleblowers such as Daniel Ellsberg, Thomas Drake, and William Binney years later. When Adams and other contrarians were accused of exaggerating the numbers of Viet Cong, National Security Advisor Walt Rostow would typically add, “I’m sorry you won’t support your president.” Too many Republican senators on the intelligence committee dismissed my testimony because they thought it was nothing more than a reflection of a personal rivalry between two former friends at the CIA.

A good contrarian, Adams took his protests to the highest levels, circulating blistering criticism on various National Intelligence Estimates and accusing drafters of “self delusion.”⁹ The head of the Board of National Estimates was no longer a fellow contrarian such as Sherman Kent, but a more academic leader, Abbot Smith, who was not a bureaucratic infighter with sharp elbows, but someone who believed that National Intelligence Estimates should present agreed judgments and not sharp alternative views. This is exactly why so many policymakers choose to ignore the substance of these estimates. Helms knew that any estimate dealing with enemy strength could become a sensitive political document and told President Johnson that he considered not publishing some of them.¹⁰ There was one estimate on Vietnam that Helms simply didn’t carry to the White House. The dereliction of duty had reached every level of the policy and intelligence communities.

Like Ellsberg and Drake, Adams eventually chose to go public. First, there was an article in Harper’s magazine that I used in my courses on the CIA at American University, and then a CBS documentary, The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception. The article hit the stands only a few days before the fall of Saigon, but it had no impact. The CBS documentary had the lowest ratings of any national program for the week. The Adams saga is a reminder that the job of the intelligence analyst is not to ease the job of policymakers, but often to complicate it and to provide information they don’t want to hear. That is why whistleblowers are needed, and why messengers (i.e., whistleblowers) are shot.

Adams gained notoriety because General William C. Westmoreland, who was charged with a “conspiracy” to hold down the numbers of Viet Cong, sued the network for $120 million, with Adams named as a defendant because he was a consultant to the show. So a middle-level intelligence analyst found himself guiding the evidentiary search at a trial that turned into the only major investigation of the Vietnam War. It is difficult to prove conspiracy but, thanks to Adams and his purloined documents, Westmoreland withdrew his suit before the case was scheduled to go to the jury.

The Institute of Defense Analysis, a think tank for the Pentagon, corroborated Adams’s work and added its own pessimistic assessment of the bombing program, which was the “most categorical rejection of bombing as a tool of our policy in Southeast Asia to be made by an official or semiofficial group.”¹¹ CIA publications led to President Johnson’s decision after the Tet Offensive to curtail U.S. bombings in the North. Unlike Louis Sarris, who became a non-person at the Department of State with a windowless office that lacked a phone, Adams was treated as a hero by some of us at the CIA, because not only did he stick his finger in the eye of the policymaker, he was right to do so. The Adams affair sent a positive message to me about the importance of an independent intelligence service, an analytic corps prepared to tell truth to power, and the importance of tenacity in the process. It requires taking evidence where it leads and then standing up for it.

Just as Gene Wicklund got it right on the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Sam Adams got it right about the numbers of Viet Cong in Vietnam in the 1960s, another young colleague whom I admired—Bob Layton—got it right on the Tet Offensive of December 1968 that destroyed the Pentagon’s phony estimates of enemy strength. Layton was an intelligence analyst detailed to Saigon in mid-1967, and he prepared three major assessments in November and December 1967 that warned of a powerful, nationwide enemy offensive. One of the assessments uncannily predicted that the offensive “would in all likelihood determine the future direction of the war.”¹² These three assessments marked the finest predictive performance of any intelligence agency prior to Tet, but they had no impact on senior White House and CIA officials.

Layton was the best kind of contrarian, because he strived to get the attention of Walt Rostow, the war’s chief cheerleader in the White House. Just as George W. Bush got a completely distorted picture of the Iraq War from Dick Cheney, Lyndon Johnson got an incorrect assessment of Vietnam from Rostow. This is exactly why analysts need to be tenacious in getting the attention of obtuse decision makers, and this is exactly what Gates worked to prevent. He constantly warned against “sticking your finger in the eye of the policymaker.”

Layton was prophetic. In his third and final assessment, he predicted an all-out Viet Cong–North Vietnamese push and a willingness to accept “staggering losses” to accelerate a sharp decline in the American will to continue the war. In other words, the war was nearing a “turning point” that would determine the future direction of the country.¹³ The CIA’s special assistant for Vietnam, George Carver, gave this assessment to Rostow, and distanced himself and the CIA from the conclusions, which paved the way for the surprise in Washington when Tet hit. Carver was helped by the Intelligence Directorate’s North Vietnam analysts, who continued to believe Hanoi would follow a careful policy of attrition and resented a radical new assessment from outside their ranks.

The official histories of President Johnson and Walter Rostow want you to believe they read Layton’s assessments, and agreed with them. President Johnson claimed that he “agreed heartily with one prophetic report from our Embassy in Saigon [that the war was probably nearly a turning point]. I was increasingly concerned by reports that the Communists were preparing a maximum military effort and were going to try for a significant tactical victory.”¹⁴ Rostow even quoted Layton’s assessments at length and disingenuously claimed they indicated the extent to which the White House “appreciated” the structure of the Tet Offensive and the “data available to Johnson” as early as December 1968.¹⁵

This is why the U.S. intelligence community must protect the contrarian, often the best source for premonitory intelligence. During the worst days of Cold War McCarthyism, when the leading diplomatic voices such as those of Ambassadors George Kennan, Tommy Thompson, and Charles E. (Chip) Bohlen were muffled because of their conciliatory slant, it was the CIA and the Board of National Estimates that ignored McCarthyism and pursued “new thinking.” The ambassadors believed that the Soviets were more concerned with maintaining their own power than with expanding communism. CIA assessments supported this view, but McCarthyism ensured that hard-line neoconservatives would carry the day in the policy community. This was the feisty culture existing at CIA when I arrived, and the culture that dominated CIA debates until Casey and Gates introduced their brand of “McCarthyism” in the 1980s—a brand that dished out more than enough to turn a contrarian into a dissident.

My first 15 years at the CIA were a time of great excitement and fulfillment on a personal and professional level. My daughter was born in 1970, and my son was born in 1972. I took on a great professional challenge in going to Vienna in 1971 as part of the SALT delegation, which led me to miss my daughter’s first steps and first words. That was a mistake that I still regret as I watch my 11 grandchildren go through such developmental landmarks. My son was born during a teaching sabbatical at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. Soon after returning from Storrs, I went to the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research for a two-year rotation, where I worked with a talented group of Soviet analysts with strong academic backgrounds.

I spent a summer in Moscow at the U.S. embassy in 1976, working in the political section on Soviet relations with Asia. I traveled to most of the Soviet republics, and celebrated the 200th anniversary of U.S. independence with an interesting group of expatriots at a rooftop restaurant in Uzbekistan. The trips to Ukraine, Georgia, Estonia, and Lithuania, my ancestral homeland, were particularly rewarding. For the first time, I could actually study first-hand the places that I had read about in graduate school or examined from satellite photography at the CIA. I realized as never before that intelligence and academic reporting had greatly exaggerated the power and prospects of the Soviet Union. I conversed with Soviet officials and citizens at every level. If only I had taken my Russian language studies more seriously.

In Moscow, I shared an apartment with Lynn Jones, a former graduate school classmate from Indiana University, who was the bureau chief for ABC. As a result, I met many Soviet media personalities, and traveled with Jones on weekends to various places outside of Moscow to cover stories. We prepared interesting pieces on racetracks, wedding receptions, and dog shows. The chief of the political section, Jack Matlock, an excellent Soviet scholar and linguist, probably would not have approved. Twenty years later the New York Review of Books published Matlock’s favorable review of the book that my wife and I co-authored on Eduard Shevardnadze.¹⁶ The review made a big impact on my academic mentors.

There were many intelligence successes during this period that were a source of great professional and personal pride. The CIA’s analysis of the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s opened the door to U.S. triangular diplomacy between Washington, Moscow, and Beijing that established better U.S. relations with Moscow and Beijing than the Soviet Union and China had with each other. The improved relations with China opened the door with the Soviets to the SALT Agreement on limiting offensive strategic ballistic missiles; the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which was the cornerstone of strategic deterrence; and the Treaty of Berlin kept the divided city of Berlin from becoming a possible flashpoint between the United States and the Soviet Union in Europe. The arms control treaties of 1972 would not have received congressional ratification without the CIA guarantee of verification of the terms of the treaties.

These events took place despite the vulnerability the U.S. created for itself by waging an unwinnable war in Vietnam. The CIA’s intelligence throughout the 1960s and 1970s described the weakness of the U.S. military and political position in Southeast Asia, and, if that intelligence had been accepted, the United States might have been spared the Vietnamese setback, including the loss of more than 56,000 servicemen and women in an egregious war. There is no utility in good intelligence if it is not read and absorbed.

In my first 15 years, until Casey’s arrival as director, the CIA performed its analytical role as President Truman intended. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the CIA produced excellent intelligence that demonstrated that U.S. air power was meaningless against the guerrilla struggle in Vietnam and that the absence of an ally in South Vietnam meant no possibility of success against North Vietnam. CIA verification of the SALT and ABM treaties created the conditions for congressional ratification of the treaties as the agency stood up to the Pentagon’s opposition to disarmament. The CIA had a good understanding of the Soviet reasons for invading Afghanistan in 1979, which conflicted with the view of the White House and the National Security Council.

Intelligence analysts have a great deal of regional expertise and are often in a position to inform policy options, but only if policymakers are willing to engage. A typical example of conflict between policy and intelligence took place in the mid-1970s when Secretary of State Kissinger refused to recognize the qualifications of the leftist Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) because he wanted to pursue a wrong-headed policy on behalf of South Africa against the Soviet Union and Cuba.

Several of us were contrarians in trying to prevent the unnecessary dust-up over the Soviet combat brigade in Cuba in 1979, but we were unsuccessful. This wasn’t a case of intelligence corruption, but it demonstrated the ability of a national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to have untoward influence over the CIA’s national intelligence officer, Arnold Horelick, which spoke to the dangers of intelligence officials getting too close to policymakers. Several of us, however, managed to convince CIA director Casey and President Reagan that the “war scare” in Moscow was genuine and that U.S. actions had something to do with it. These events depicted the different worlds of intelligence and policy that are discussed in the following chapter.

FAILURE AS WELL AS SUCCESS

There were major intelligence failures during this period as well, particularly the failure to anticipate the Egyptian-Syrian attack on Israel in 1973, the October War. There is no doubt that Egyptian president Anwar Sadat surprised Israel’s Mossad as well as the CIA in organizing the attack on Israel. Less than 24 hours before the attack, the CIA told President Nixon that “both sides are becoming increasingly concerned about the activities of the other. Rumors and agent reports may be feeding the uneasiness that appears to be developing. The military preparations that have occurred do not indicate that any party intends to initiate hostilities.”¹⁷ Israeli intelligence also failed, despite the availability of an Egyptian spy who happened to be the son-in-law of former Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser and who provided advance intelligence of the Egyptian military operation.

Not only was the CIA terribly wrong about the possibility of hostilities, it told the president two days after the war began that “after several days of heavy fighting” the Israelis would complete the destruction of the Syrian army and “destroy as much as possible of Egypt’s army.”¹⁸ This was a much greater intelligence failure, involving group think and flawed intelligence that had dire consequences for Israel, because Kissinger dragged his heels on resupply of military equipment for the Israelis. Secretary of Defense Schlesinger finally convinced Kissinger that Israel was suffering huge losses and needed U.S. resupply as soon as possible.

The CIA’s track record on military intervention, the outbreak of war, and revolution is particularly weak. In addition to the October War, the stunning list of failures includes Korea in 1950, Hungary in 1956, the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Iranian Revolution in 1979, martial law in Poland in 1980, the Tiananmen Square nightmare in 1989, and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. More recently, the Arab Spring in 2010–2011, the rise and consolidation of Islamic militants in Iraq in 2014, the Russian seizure of Crimea in 2014, and the introduction of Russian military forces in Syria in 2015 were not anticipated by the CIA. War is an irrational process in many respects, and intelligence analysts pride themselves on being rational, which may explain some of these failures. But in the cases of the October War, martial law in Poland and particularly September 11, 2001, there was ample early warning and strategic intelligence. Overall, the intelligence collection was good; the analysis was poor.

The value of intelligence in wartime should not be written off, however, as intelligence analysis during any war or crisis pays huge dividends in terms of up-to-date situation reports for military planners and policymakers. Decision-making during the Cuban missile crisis benefited from timely CIA intelligence that allowed President Kennedy to know how much time he had to respond in view of the time the Soviets needed to deploy medium-range and short-range missile systems. One of the CIA’s most important Soviet agents, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, had provided sensitive Soviet manuals on medium-range and short-range ballistic missiles, which were invaluable during the missile crisis.

Similarly, National Security Advisor Kissinger had access to important intelligence when he was in Moscow to arrange a ceasefire in the Middle East during the October War. The CIA kept Kissinger apprised of Israeli ceasefire violations, which allowed him to press Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan to honor the ceasefire. Kissinger used a provocative nuclear alert to intimidate the Soviets during the war, which intelligence couldn’t support; he threatened the Israelis with unilateral intervention if the ceasefire was not honored, which intelligence did support.

In addition to having intelligence collection that was good enough to anticipate the Egyptian-Syrian attack in October 1973 and to track early Arab successes, the CIA knew that Egyptian President Sadat had decided to expel Soviet military advisors. In July 1972, the Egyptian analyst Gordon Sund and I were the first analysts in the intelligence community to report President Sadat’s decision to expel Soviet military technicians. In the wake of the summit meeting between Presidents Brezhnev and Nixon in May 1972, Sadat became convinced the Soviets would never lean on the United States to arrange an Israeli return of the occupied Sinai Peninsula.

Following our article on the likely ouster of the Soviets, Sund and I received phone calls from the deputy director for Intelligence, Sayre Stevens, saying that Kissinger had called CIA director Helms to say that it was “gratifying to learn about an important development from a CIA publication and not from the New York Times.” Sadat hoped the ouster of the Soviets would attract U.S. support for resuming the peace process, believing that Moscow was no longer a factor in the Middle East. Kissinger ignored the signal and, in his memoirs, falsely claims that Sadat’s “decision came as a complete surprise to Washington.”¹⁹ Kissinger conceded that he was “handicapped by my underestimating of the Egyptian president,” but he offered no explanation for failing to respond to Sadat’s “bombshell,” which could have prevented the war that began 15 months later. The CIA had provided premonitory intelligence, but Kissinger chose not to pay attention.

More importantly, Kissinger misused the intelligence that was available during the October War to declare an unjustified nuclear alert, a provocation that could have had terrible consequences. Kissinger declared Defense Condition III (DefCon-III) at a meeting of the National Security Council that he chaired late in the evening of October 24, 1973, arguing that the Soviets had sent nuclear materials through the Dardanelles and that General Secretary Brezhnev was prepared to intervene unilaterally due to Israeli violations of the ceasefire.

Neither assumption was valid. The intelligence system that tracked nuclear materials in the Dardanelles was a famously inaccurate system with numerous false positives, and the actual intelligence reading that Kissinger cited took place two weeks earlier. The note from Brezhnev to President Nixon was in fact a plea to the United States to rein in Israeli forces and return to the ceasefire that the United States and the Soviet Union had endorsed several days earlier.

Kissinger was the only principal at the National Security Council meeting who believed there was any likelihood of a Soviet intervention in the Middle East, and that a military alert involving nuclear systems was necessary. I spoke to other participants at the meeting, Secretary of Defense Schlesinger, CIA Director Colby, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Thomas Moorer, who considered DefCon-III risky and unnecessary. I served on the CIA task force at the time, and there was no intelligence that pointed to Soviet preparedness to intervene; there was no preparation of the air transport fleet; no resumption of an airlift of military equipment; no introduction of airborne forces. I argued at the time that the Soviets were not able to introduce forces at crucial points during previous Arab-Israeli confrontations in 1956 and 1967 because the Israeli Air Force had destroyed Egyptian air bases. The Soviets, moreover, had never used their airborne forces in a combat situation, and intelligence indicators showed they weren’t preparing to do so this time. By late October 1973, the Israelis had once again destroyed Egyptian air bases.

At an academic conference 25 years later, chaired by Ambassador Richard Parker, I repeated these charges against Kissinger and received support from former secretary of defense Schlesinger, who participated in the roundtable discussion. Interestingly, one of Kissinger’s most active acolytes, Peter Rodman, challenged my arguments and added that the United States “would have and should have been willing to go to war to prevent” Soviet military intervention. Rodman was still unwilling to concede that there was no intelligence evidence of such intervention.²⁰

Although the CIA’s Middle East analysts missed the October War of 1973, they understood the threat of Palestinian terrorism, particularly the threat to Jordan’s King Hussein; the foolhardiness of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982; and the callous disregard for the safety of U.S. Marines who were dispatched to Lebanon in 1983 without proper rules of engagement. These are examples of the CIA being more alert than the community of policymakers, who were insufficiently responsive to intelligence alerts.

The combination of the policy failure in not exploiting President Sadat’s ouster of the Soviets in 1972 and the intelligence failure in not anticipating the surprise invasion led to an unnecessary setback for the policy of détente with the Soviet Union. The combination of a threat to Israel and Kissinger’s trumped-up notion of a Soviet threat to intervene unilaterally in the Middle East, possibly with nuclear weapons, led the right wing to renew its attacks on arms control and détente with Moscow and caused the liberal supporters of détente to reverse their position due to concern over a Soviet threat to Israel. The current Russian-American confrontation over Syria is having similar consequences, with a renewed call for more active opposition to Moscow’s maneuvers.

Neoconservatives and the right-wing community in the United States have been traditionally hostile to CIA intelligence, often charging that CIA analysts are apologists for Russian or Chinese behavior. They totally dismissed the CIA’s success in refuting the so-called “gaps” in Soviet-American weaponry and exposing the myth of Soviet military superiority. Starting with the non-existent bomber gap of the 1950s, the CIA convinced President Eisenhower that the true gap was Moscow’s significant inferiority in air power. The missile gap was a fiction of the 1960 presidential contest between Kennedy and Nixon, with the Democratic candidate fabricating the notion of a U.S. lag in missile capability. Again, the true situation was Soviet inferiority, but Kennedy was having too much success in the campaign with the charge of a missile gap and refused to correct his accusations.

There were other gaps that the CIA challenged, particularly the so-called intentions gap that was floated by Harvard Professor Richard Pipes in the early 1980s, when he argued speciously and even risibly that the Soviets believed they could fight and win a nuclear war. Charges of a gap between the anti-ballistic missile stocks of the two sides were pure fiction. Nevertheless, Deputy Director Gates gave public speeches that distorted the message of his own Intelligence Directorate and even supported the phony charge of a civil defense gap.

Another phony gap that the CIA contributed to was the charge of a “relentless Soviet buildup” in strategic forces, even though military intelligence was more exaggerated than CIA assessments. The CIA overestimated the growth of Soviet defense spending throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, and it took several years for the CIA’s military analysts to convince Gates that the Congress had to be informed of the errors in earlier briefings. There were no increases in Soviet military procurement or investment, which were the most important indexes. It was not until 1983 that we were able to inform Congress that the “Soviets did not field weapons as rapidly after 1976 as before. Practically all major categories of Soviet weapons were affected—missiles, aircraft, and ships.”²¹

In addition to the neoconservative critics of Nixon’s policy of détente, there were liberals such as Senators Moynihan and Henry Jackson (D-WA) who joined with labor leaders such as George Meany and Lane Kirkland to malign the policy of détente. As a result, key players in the Ford administration, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, successfully maneuvered against Kissinger and his policy of détente and made a special effort to toughen the CIA’s assessments on the Soviet Union.

In order to sabotage arms control, particularly the SALT agreement of 1972, Cheney and Rumsfeld convinced President Ford to weaken Kissinger’s influence by ending his dual role as secretary of state and national security advisor, thus allowing General Brent Scowcroft to direct the National Security Council. Cheney and Rumsfeld then pressed the new CIA director, George H.W. Bush, to agree to the creation of a competitive threat assessment that would be prepared by an outside group of experts. The idea seemed harmless on the face of it, but those of us who had worked on SALT knew that a parallel estimative team of neoconservatives would manipulate the estimate process to satisfy the needs of their political agenda.

Our concerns were validated when we learned that members of the competitive team, know as Team B, included certified hard-liners or neoconservatives such as Harvard Professor Pipes, a Polish immigrant with extremely hard-line views of the Soviet threat; William Van Cleave, who served on the SALT team in Vienna and was an obstreperous foe of disarmament; Paul Wolfowitz; General Danny Graham; and Seymour Weiss. This would be tantamount to selecting Dracula to run a blood bank. If Cheney and Rumsfeld had set out to recruit a predictable team of troglodytes on the Soviet Union, they could not have selected a more reliable squad to heighten anxiety about Moscow.

I weighed in with my former boss on the SALT team, Howard Stoertz, who was now the national intelligence officer responsible for intelligence estimates on Soviet strategic forces. Stoertz knew that the Team A/B exercise was an “ideological and political foray” and not a substantive or intellectual exercise, but he was unwilling to block it. The deputy director of the CIA, E. Henry Knoche, not one of the sharpest tools in the CIA shed, was in favor of the idea and totally unsympathetic to the possibility of a manipulated National Intelligence Estimate. The Team A/B exercise was an excellent example of the pressure on the CIA from neoconservatives trying to tailor intelligence. The neoconservatives triumphed in 1980, when the United States elected a president who wanted to confront the Soviet Union, and installed an ideologue as CIA director to ensure that intelligence documented the charge of the “evil empire.”

The deputy director for intelligence in the mid-1970s, Sayre Stevens, aggressively fought the idea of a right-wing team entering the CIA, but couldn’t persuade CIA director Bush to block the efforts of the Ford administration. Stevens was one of the finest analysts that the CIA ever produced, and I knew him well from my experience with the SALT talks. On a key technical issue involving the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972, Stevens stood up to the Pentagon to argue that the Soviet surface-to-air missile system could not be considered an anti-ballistic missile system. This debate was overtaken by events several years later when both sides accepted a total ban on anti-ballistic missiles, which became the cornerstone of strategic deterrence until another President Bush recklessly repudiated the ABM Treaty in 2001 in order to deploy an ineffective national missile defense system.

Stevens also fought the Pentagon on a key issue involving the SALT treaty in 1972. The Department of Defense and the Pentagon didn’t want a ban on MIRVs—weapons of mass destruction that launch as a single missile but separate into multiple bombs directed at multiple targets—and believed that a demand for on-site inspection of MIRV sites would ensure there would be no agreement. Stevens and our verification team, along with the Department of State and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, convinced President Nixon and Kissinger that satellite reconnaissance could monitor a ban on MIRV deployment. The military representatives didn’t want to give up deployment of MIRVs, and they chortled privately over confronting the Soviets with on-site inspection. Ironically, the Department of Defense eventually found on-site inspection a bitter pill to swallow when it was introduced into treaty provisions.

Sayre liked a good fight and knew we had to “deal with contentions that we are wrong.” I took the same approach to the challenges from the White House on our position regarding Moscow and international terrorism, and again it was Professor Pipes leading the charge against the CIA’s intelligence. Twenty years later, CIA analysts rolled over for Vice President Cheney and offered intelligence assessments that were tailored for a post-9/11 White House obsessed with conjuring reasons to invade Iraq, instead of marshaling its full attention to defeating the enemies that had attacked the Pentagon and World Trade Towers.

The results of the Team A/Team B exercise were predictable. Just as the Soviet Union was beginning to reduce the growth in defense spending and Brezhnev was signaling interest in détente and arms control, Pipes’s team persuaded the CIA to adopt more threatening estimates of the Soviet strategic threat. Pipes’s world-view was stamped on the Team B assessments, which labeled the Soviets an aggressive imperialistic power bent on world domination. According to Team B, the Soviet Union rejected nuclear parity, was bent on executing and surviving a nuclear war, and was radically increasing its military spending. Team B predicted a series of Soviet weapons developments that never took place, including directed-energy weapons, mobile anti-missile systems, and anti-satellite capabilities.

CIA deputy director Gates used Team B assessments in speeches and articles in the Washington Times to ingratiate himself with the Reagan administration and to garner increased defense spending. By pitching policy, Gates violated the CIA’s charter, which stipulated that there should be no policy advocacy from the agency. As CIA director in 1992, Gates exaggerated the threat from Iran and the threat of nuclear proliferation to stave off cuts in the intelligence budget.

The sad lesson in the political use of right-wing ideologues to craft hard-line assessments is the susceptibility of intelligence to political interference and corruption. Just as Vice President Dick Cheney’s relentless pressure on the CIA led to false reports on Iraq in 2002–2003, Team B’s pressure led to exaggerated estimates of Soviet military spending and the capabilities of Soviet military technology. It was nearly a decade before the CIA began to correct and lower its estimates of Soviet defense spending and the Soviet strategic threat. In the case of Team B, the next administration—President Carter’s—ignored its bogus findings just as President Eisenhower had ignored the trumped-up conclusions of the Gaither Report on Soviet air power in the 1950s. The Reagan administration in the early 1980s, however, used the estimates to double defense spending, garnering $1.5 trillion in additional spending against a Soviet Union in decline and a Soviet military threat that was exaggerated.

The U.S. intelligence community should neither indulge in worst-case analysis, which distorts the international picture for policymakers, nor play the role of devil’s advocate, which panders to decision makers. Casey and Gates played devil’s advocate in the 1980s to link the Soviets to the Papal assassination plot in order to derail Secretary of State George P. Shultz’s resumption of détente. Tenet and McLaughlin did the same in the run-up to the Iraq War in an attempt to link Iraq to al Qaeda in order to strengthen Bush Junior’s campaign for war. In his self-serving memoir, Michael Morell acknowledged that the deputy director for intelligence, Jami Miscik, directed the Counterterrorism Center to prepare a classified memorandum “to see how far the analysts could push the evidence” to link Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda. The paper generated the impression of a connection, and Morell blithely noted that “well-placed staffers in the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President liked it.”²² Is there any wonder?

Inflated threat assessments have become an inherent part of the U.S. national security system, which is why the CIA was created in the first place—to prevent or at least counter such exaggerations. President Truman wanted the CIA to be the “quiet intelligence arm” of the White House, and the analytical successes of the Directorate of Intelligence from 1966 to 1981 were quiet ones. In the absence of effective oversight to assess the influence and impact of manipulated threat assessments on operations and diplomacy, we need whistleblowers to call attention to the misuse of an intelligence community shrouded in secrecy.