AGENCY SUCCESSES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP78-03097A002400030068-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 27, 2005
• Sequence Number: 68
• Publication Date: March 25, 1976
• Content Type: MF

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25 March 1976
MORA DUf.7 .FOR :
n. a +, PD1 Executive Staff
Agency Successes
In response to your request, here are some items
culled from our files which may be useful in preparing
any unclassified review of CIA successes. We presume
most of these would be a part of a broader Agency statement
concerning the subjects involved and be incorporated
with other Agency contributions. We have written these
to avoid specific references to FBIS and I would hope
the final Agency paper would do the same. We do not
want to jeopardize this particular source and method.
D)r e
Foreign Broadcast Information Service
Attachment:
As stated
Distribution:
Original Addressee
ZJ- O/Dir/FBIS
Chrono & - E&PS
1 - FBIS Exec Registry
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Moscow Involvement in Portuguese Politics
Prompt Agency translation and dissemination of major
Soviet policy pronouncements in the Moscow press on develop-
s:seants in Portugal in July 1975 provided valuable input to a
special memorandum prepared for Secretary Kissinger and for a
subsequent protest registered with the Soviet anbassy by
Hal Sonnenfeldt over Soviet interference in Portugal through
the public media, a verbal protest the embassy counselor was
instructed to take seriously and pass to Moscow.
The t3ayaguez'' Affair
On Wednesday, 14 May 1975, while the U.S. mounted
military moves to rescue the U.S. merchant vessel "'Mayaguez"
seized by forces of the new Cambodian government, the Agency
was closely monitoring reports on developments from the
Phnom Penh radio. A key item translated and relayed to the
White House was the official Cambodian communique offering
to release the ship, made too late to halt American Naval
and Marine action to liberate the crew and vessel.
Disclosures that the Cambodians had made similar
piratical attempts against a South Korean vessel on 4 lay
and a Panamanian ship on 7 May had been reported from media
sources the previous week.
American POW's
Agency monitoring of North Vietnamese broadcasts and
radiophotos was credited with providing unique intelligence
on the fate of American POW's during the Vietnam war. Often
these sources carried the first confirmation, not only for
U.S. officials but for their families, that a missing Ar-terican
military wan was still alive, bold by the North Vietnamese.
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3!anoi's Stand on Negotiations with Saigon
In the spring of 1975, analysis of North Vietnamese
.edia made it clear -- weeks before the final collapse of
the Saigon forces -- that prior indications of Ilanoi's
willingness to negotiate a peace with the Thieu government
were no longer in evidence. This intelligence served to
demonstrate that North Vietnamese confidence in final and
complete military victory had reached a point where a
negotiated settlement was no longer contemplated. This
analysis thus contributed substantially to the U.S. assess-
ient of Hanoi's strength and the impending outcorie of the
war.
Information on Pathet Lao
Agency monitoring of clandestine and opposition radio
broadcasts often furnishes unique, otherwise unobtainable
intelligence on the plans, policies and actions of dissident
movements. A prime example during the years of the conflict
in Laos was the coverage of the Pathet Lao radio. Former
Aubassador to Vientiane Charles S. 1rhitehouse has commented
that without this Agency coverage of the Pathet Lao radio
there would have been no way to know on a timely basis what
Pathet Lao policies and positions on crucial issues were.
Reaction to U.S. Leadership Crisis
At the time of President Nixon's resignation, there was
concern among government circles about possible attempts by
adversary governments to exploit the hiatus in U.S. leadership.
Agency analysts quickly initiated a close study of communist
media which made it clear that no attempts to exploit the
:olitical crisis in Washington were underfoot. On the contrary,
:here was found in the Soviet media a prevalent eiiphasis on
a desire to maintain good relations with the United States.
The concerns of top USG officials were thus greatly alleviated
as the transition of power tool place.
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October 1973 'Middle East War
In the midst of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli conflict
and a threatening U.S.-Soviet confrontation in its wake,
President Nixon had scheduled a news conference for 26 October.
That same day, Communist Party General. Secretary brezhnev made
a major address to the World Peace Congress in Moscow in which
he discussed the U.S. military alert called the previous
day and derided "fantastic rumors" of Soviet plans to intervene
in the conflict. The translation of Drezhnev's remarks
was made available by the Agency to the President in time for
him to prepare a response to the Soviet leader for presentation
at the press conference.
In the days immediately preceding the outbreak of
hostilities on 6 October, Agency monitoring of Cairo and
Damascus media sources had resulted in reports on allegations
by both the Egyptians and Syrians of Israeli troop build-ups
and disclosures that military alerts were underway in the two
Arab countries, thus providing one of the few indicators that
the two nations might be contemplating military action against
Israel.
Soviet Intervention in Czechoslovakia
Agency coverage of radio broadcasts out of Czechoslovakia
in August 1968, when the USSR and some of its East European
allies resorted to military intervention to crush the liberal
regime of Alexander Dubcek, provided a major intelligence
contribution. Ambassador to the UN George Ball said this
reporting kept the U.S. mission "better informed than any
other delegation in the United Nations." Developments during
the intervention were elucidated by the Agency's coverage of
communiques released by clandestine Czechoslovak-controlled
radios as well as the Soviet-operated "Radio Vltava." Mr.
Bail noted in his assessment that the Czechoslovak delegation
then in the US also used the CIA reports to keep abreast of
developments because it distrusted the instructions it was
receiving from, Prague.
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Cuban Missile Crisis
The importance of the rapid collection and dissemination
of intelligence information from foreign media was never
better illustrated than during the Cuban missile crisis in
October 1962. On the mornings of 27 and 28 October, as the
soviet-U.S. confrontation was reaching a flash point, Presi-
sent Kennedy was attending meetings of the Executive Corr,ittee
of the National Security Council when messages from Soviet
Prey}ier Khrushchev to him were broadcast by Radio Moscow long
before delivery to the White House via normal diplomatic
channels.
The second message was the crucial one, announcing
Khrushchev's decision to dismantle the missile bases in Cuba
and return the missiles to the Soviet Union. The President
was given copies of the two messages virtually paragraph by
paragraph as they were received at the White =House from the
Agency's wire service. In an official announcement by the
Vf'hite House shortly after receipt of the 28 October message,
the President said: "I am replying at once to your broadcast
inessage...even though the official text has not yet reached
re.
In an interview with a CBS television correspondent a
month later, Secretary of State Rusk, in answer to a question
about the urgency of communications involved in this situation,
said "i think that there was a question of speed of communi-
cations through normal channels. The sheer physical problem of
transmitting messages to people who use another language,
requiring decoding and translation, with differences in
office hours in their respective capitals, did remind us all
over again that immediate communication is important: and
I think these public communications turned out to be the fastest
communications, so that this was, I think, the importance of
the broadcast message on October 28. It was a fast response
to the President's message of the day before and perhaps could
not have been handled through the elaborate channels of code
and translation and normal diplomatic patterns."
In a 12 December press conference, President Kennedy
observed that 'there was a delay, as you know, in the communi-
cations back and forth, in the Cuban affair. In some devroe
I think on one or two occasions it was necessary to rely
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on open broadcasts of messages, rather than sending them
through the coding procedure which took a number of hours.'`
In this instance, as in many others, Agency collection,
translation and rapid dissemination of highly significant
intelligence played a vital role in bringing the crisis to a
quick conclusion.
1962 Soviet Resumption of Nuclear Testing
The on-again, off-again nuclear testing of the United
States and the USSR took a new turn in 1962 when President
Kennedy ordered the resumption of atmospheric testing while
the 17-nation Geneva disarmament conference continued to
deliberate. The Soviets threatened to resume testing, the
while denouncing Washington for its decision. On 21 July 1962,
the Agency intercepted and reported a TASS domestic trans-
mission which disclosed that Moscow had made the decision to
resume nuclear tests. This intelligence was made available
to the White House well before the public announcement made
by the Soviet Government, permitting the White House to
announce to the press that the Soviets had made this decision
before Moscow itself was able to make the announcement.
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