STUDIES IN INTELLIGENCE [Vol. 13 No. 4, Fall 1969]

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP78T03194A000300010008-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 126
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 14, 2004
• Sequence Number: 8
• Publication Date: January 1, 1969
• Content Type: IS

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STUDIES
INTELLIGENCE
VOL. 13 NO. 4 FALL 1969
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
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STUDIES
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INTELLIGENCE
VOL. 13 NO. 4 FALL 1969
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
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STUDIES IN INTELLIGENCE
EDITORIAL POLICY
Articles for the Studies in Intelligence may
be written on any theoretical, doctrinal, oper-
ational, or historical aspect of intelligence.
The final responsibility for accepting or
rejecting an article rests with the Editorial
Board.
The criterion for publication is whether or
not, in the opinion of the Board, the article
makes a contribution to the literature of in-
telligence.
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EDITORIAL BOARD
ABBOT E. SMITH, Chairman
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E. DREXEL GODFREY, JR.
LAWRENCE R. HOUSTON
HUGH T. CUNNINGHAM
Additional members of the Board are
drawn from other CIA components.
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CONTENTS
Page
"Rolling Thunder" and Bomb Damage to Bridges 1
Kenneth C. Fuller, Bruce Smith, and Merle Atkins
Intelligence tackles an old problem in a new form. SECRET
Cloud Nine: A Problem in Intelligence Production 11
James W. Featherstone
Current intelligence delivers a maximum effort. SECRET
Winnowing Wheat from Chaff James R. Shea 19
Tracking down Soviet underground nuclear explosions.
SECRET
On the Accuracy of National Intelligence Estimates 25
Abbot E. Smith
More on the theory and practice of estimating. SECRET
Non-Electronic Agent Communications 37
Gabriel M. D'Echauffour
Rudiments of an ancient craft ever new. SECRET
Defense Against Communist Interrogation Organizations 49
Michael L. Mineur
Some guidelines for secret agents. CONFIDENTIAL
The Bogotazo Jack Davis 75
In retrospect: US intelligence and the explosion in Colom-
bia. SECRET
Platt's Law 89
DDI/New York Paul Corscadden 91
Intelligence during a Presidential transition. SECRET
The 30 September Movement in Indonesia . . John T. Pizzicaro 97
Some retrospective reflections inspired by recent research.
SECRET
Intelligence in Recent Public Literature 113
MORI
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Intelligence tackles an old
problem in a new form.
"ROLLING THUNDER" AND BOMB DAMAGE
TO BRIDGES
Kenneth C. Fuller, Bruce Smith, and Merle Atkins
The program known as Rolling Thunder, a systematic but restrained
air offensive against selected economic and military targets in North
Vietnam, began on 2 March 1965. The basic objectives of Rolling
Thunder were to reduce the ability of North Vietnam to support the
Communist insurgencies in South Vietnam and Laos; to increase pro-
gressively the pressure on North Vietnam to the point where the re-
gime would decide it was too costly to continue directing and support-
ing the insurgency in the south; and to bolster the confidence and
morale of the South Vietnamese. As the days of the air campaign over
North Vietnam stretched into months, the requirement developed in
Washington and particularly in the White House for independent
assessments of the results. As a consequence, CIA was asked to make
its own assessment of the bombing campaign as well as to join the
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the preparation of an analysis
for the Secretary of Defense. The work on bomb damage to bridges,
which is discussed in this paper, is one example of the reporting on
the Rolling Thunder program. Although the extent of damage and the
cost of repair are the principal topics discussed here, the White House
was equally concerned to find out how much time would be needed
to restore lines of communication (LOCs ).
Background
North Vietnam's major contributions to the war in the south have
been its military manpower, its function as the control center for the
insurgency, and its function as the logistics funnel through which
materiel, mostly from the USSR and Communist China, has moved
into South Vietnam. Consequently the attainment of the first objective
of Rolling Thunder hinged almost entirely on the ability to impede
or stop the flow of men and supplies from North Vietnam to South
Vietnam. Although a number of different target systems were taken
under attack, the Rolling Thunder campaign was essentially and at
MORI/HRP
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times almost exclusively an interdiction program. A standard bombing
strategy to achieve such a goal was to stop or slow military traffic in
rear areas by interdicting critical choke points along heavily used
LOC's. Bridges of course qualify as such, and during Rolling Thunder
more attack sorties were flown against bridge targets than against
any other fixed target system.
As the bombing campaign progressed, policy-makers and high-level
Presidential advisors started asking the intelligence community to
assess the effectiveness of the effort. Among the questions posed were
those on the status of damaged bridges and North Vietnamese counter-
measures to bypass the bridges. The Secretary of Defense specifically
wanted to know the number of bridges damaged, the estimated cost
of repairing the damage, whether or not the flow of traffic south was
being effectively impeded, how quickly the bridges could be re-
stored, and the net impact on logistics capabilities. Answering these
questions proved to be a knotty problem.
Number of Damaged Bridges
In one of his columns in 1966, Art Buchwald pointed out that avail-
able statistics suggested that the US apparently had destroyed all of
the bridges in North Vietnam many times over. He concluded that we
must be "dropping our own bridges on North Vietnam and then bomb-
ing them." Buchwald's quips contained much truth. During the early
months of the bombing campaign, depending on the sources being
used and the degree of discrimination exercised, one could get an
extraordinary variety of estimates of the total number of destroyed
bridges in North Vietnam, ranging from as low as 657 to as high
as 7,000. When total "bridge-kills" began approaching these incredible
numbers, it became apparent that a new basis of intelligence assess-
ment was in order. Before we could get at the matter of the true
extent and nature of the damage and the impact of the program on
the enemy's logistic activities, however, there were fundamental prob-
lems to be resolved including such basic questions as when is a
bridge a bridge. Within CIA the job was given to the Construction
Branch of the Office of Economic Research (OER).
Analysts from OER, in consultation with DIA, discovered that early
estimates of destroyed bridges were compiled almost exclusively from
pilot reports. Now it is very difficult for a pilot to assess accurately
the results of a strike while traveling at high speed and when the
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target area is obscured by smoke and dust. To narrow the credibility
gap concerning the number of bridges damaged, OER analysts decided
that the only reliable method was to use "hard" evidence provided
through the eye of a camera rather than the fleeting evidence pro-
vided through the eye of a pilot. Starting in September 1965, there-
fore, a special task force consisting of personnel from OER and DIA
and the Imagery Analysis Service (IAS) spent many man-hours re-
viewing all reconnaissance missions flown over North Vietnam search-
ing for damaged bridges. This intensive search, completed in March
1966, revealed that 216 bridges actually had been destroyed during
the first year of the interdiction campaign, compared with 657 in what
were at that time the currently most conserative assessments. The
figure rose to a high of 541 destroyed bridges by the end of the bomb-
ing program in October 1968.
Once the principle of using aerial photography was adopted as the
sole source of information from which to make hard estimates, a
group of CIA/IAS photo interpreters was assigned the tedious but
important task of scanning all photographic missions looking for
damaged bridges. Each bridge crossing was measured and cataloged,
and a photograph of each was prepared for later analysis by OER.
During the three years of bombing, personnel in the Construction
Branch analyzed and filed over 2,500 prints covering some 600 bridges.
These photographs provided the basic input for answering many ques-
tions posed by the Department of Defense and the White House on
the effectiveness of the interdiction campaign.
Conceptual Problems
Before an accurate bridge count could be attempted, a number of
conceptual problems had to be solved. One such problem was how to
define precisely what constituted a bridge. It appeared somewhat
irrational to place a 10 or 20 foot water crossing in the same category
as the 1,000 foot bridge at Viet Tri or the mile-long Paul Doumer
bridge crossing the Red River near Hanoi. Many of the smaller cross-
ings could more accurately be described as culverts, causeways, or
simply improved fords, and thus were excluded from the bridge count.
Another problem that arose concerned the definition of a "destroyed"
or "damaged" bridge. Mere cratering of bridge approaches or "near
misses" in adjacent rice paddies could not be counted as damage
serious enough to interdict a water crossing. The concept of Severe
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SECRET "Rolling Thunder"
Damage Occurrence ( SDO ) was developed, therefore, to assess bomb
damage. An SDO was defined as damage sufficiently severe to deny
a crossing to users until a significant amount of repairs had been
performed, requiring considerable time, materials, and labor. For ex-
ample, serious damage would include a dropped span, a destroyed
pier, or a destroyed abutment. Holes in a deck, cratered approaches,
twisted superstructure, or a slight shifting of spans was not considered
serious damage.
In 1967 a study of the effectiveness of bombing bridges in North
Vietnam was made by OER analysts. A sample of 46 Joint Chiefs of
Staffs ( JCS ) target bridges which had severe damage was used. The
study covered the period from the start of bombing through January
1967. Photography provided most of the information for the assess-
ment of the extent of damage to the bridges, and bomb damage assess-
ment reports provided data on the volume and types of ordnance
used. The study revealed that there were 249 hits out of 11,744
bombs dropped, for an average of one hit for every 47 bombs dropped.
In other words, slightly over 2 percent of all bombs dropped succeeded
in damaging a bridge to such an extent that it needed extensive repairs.
Cost of Repair
In addition to an accurate count of interdicted bridges, policy-
makers wanted to know what it would cost to rebuild destroyed
bridges to their original state. The best method to arrive at an aggre-
gate cost figure would to be use North Vietnamese costs for bridge
construction in terms of dongs and then convert the dong figure
into US dollars according to an appropriate dong-dollar construction
ratio. This ideal approach could not be followed because of our com-
plete lack of statistical data on North Vietnamese construction costs.
The procedure finally adopted was therefore a compromise, but it did
enable the calculation of relative values.
The costing methodology involved selecting a number of US
bridges for which construction costs were available and which were
similar in design to many bridges in North Vietnam. Unit costs for
labor, materials, and equipment were calculated and then adjusted
to reflect construction inputs available to the North Vietnamese. The
result of these calculations indicated that $700 per lineal foot would
provide an order of magnitude for the cost of building permanent
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highway bridges in North Vietnam.' This figure was tested by
referring to reports from a prominent US engineering firm that had
estimated the construction cost of building 205 highway bridges in
Southeast Asia. These estimates averaged $740 per lineal foot, which
was within about six percent of the figure obtained by the OER
method.
In estimating the cost of repairing damage to a bridge, the struc-
ture was broken down into its component parts: abutments, piers,
and superstructure. Relative costs for each of these components were
then derived for each damaged bridge, and only the destroyed
components were considered in estimating the cost of both tem-
porary and permanent repair or replacement. The estimated total
cost figure for rebuilding all bridges to their original state rose
from about $10 million after the first year of bombing to over $30
million by the end of the Rolling Thunder campaign.
A similar approach was used in estimating the cost of construction
and repair of temporary wooden bridges. These crude, relatively
cheap structures of simple design were easy to build. It was calcu-
lated that the cost of construction averaged $50 per lineal foot
and required 30 men for each 20 feet of bridge under construction.
During the entire campaign, 292 temporary wooden bypass bridges
were built at an estimated cost of $10,000,000.
In addition to bridges, over 500 bypasses of other types were
constructed. These consisted of pontoon bridges, causeways, ferry
slips and fords, at a cost of approximately $3,000,000. In this instance,
the real burden was the requirement for large numbers of personnel
to construct, maintain, and repair these crossings. Manpower re-
quirements were far more burdensome than material costs, especially
during 1966 and early 1967. In these years it is estimated that 72,000
full time and nearly 200,000 part time workers were required to keep
the LOC's open. At the same time there were several Chinese en-
gineer battalions totalling more than 20,000 troops working on the
roads and railroads north of Hanoi.
Highway bridges were used as the basis for all estimates. The cost of recon-
structing railroad and combination (rail/highway) bridges was obtained, generally
.speaking, by doubling highway bridge costs. Railroad bridges are designed to carry
much- heaver loads than highway bridges, which means a significant increase in
the volume of materials used and much heavier foundations.
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StCKt 'Roiling Thunder"
Countermeasures
One of Newton's laws states that "for every action there is a
reaction that is equal in magnitude but opposite in direction to the
action.' Three years of examining photographs of destroyed bridges
indicated that this dictum also applied to the North Vietnamese
program to counter the effects of the bombing. During the early
months of the Rolling Thunder program, the North Vietnamese were
unable to repair LOC's as fast as they were damaged. It took them
several months to organize their labor force and pre-position ma-
terials near anticipated areas of attack. After two years of bombing,
however, they had so organized their construction effort that they
built and repaired bridges and other bypasses faster than the crossings
could be interdicted. Their modus operandi was to rely on labor in-
tensive repair techniques and local building materials. They stockpiled
stone, bamboo, and timber near expected targets and assigned con-
struction personnel to nearby semipermanent work camps to maintain
and repair allotted segments of the LOC's. As the campaign neared
its end the North Vietnamese countermeasures had been perfected
to a point that many of the serious damage occurrences could be
repaired in hours rather than days. The main emphasis in the North
Vietnamese countermeasures program, and the main reason for its
ultimate success, however, was, the strategy of building multiple by-
passes for all important crossing points.
Types of Bypasses
The type of bypass chosen for construction was generally determined
by the nature of the terrain, and the number of bypasses constructed
at a crossing point depended on the importance of the route. Fords
were common in the mountainous regions where streams are shallow
and narrow. Cable bridges with removable decking were usually
constructed where the stream banks were high, and where the
streams were fairly narrow but deep. Temporary wooden bridges,
pontoon bridges, and ferries were predominent in the lowlands
where the rivers were too wide and deep to ford. Constructed fords
were the most common means to bypass damaged highway bridges,
especially in the early months of the bombing campaign. They
could be quickly built and repaired with local materials. They
could, of course, only be employed at shallow crossings where banks
were low. The construction of alternate bridges was also an effec-
tive countermeasure. The virtue of these bridges was their simplicity.
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They were built from salvaged components and locally procured
timber, lumber and rock. Because of their short span design they
were easy and quick to build and repair, but difficult to destroy.
One innovative variety which appeared, unique to North Vietnam,
was the cable bridge, which proved to be a very effective method
for repairing or bypassing highway bridges. Parallel steel cables
drawn taut between anchorages on each bank were covered by
prefabricated wood sections which provided a removable deck. The
only method of interdiction was to bomb the cable anchorages
buried in the river banks, which proved to be a most difficult
assignment. Ferries and pontoon bridges were used at the 'largest
water crossing. Ferries are a relatively inefficient means of rapidly
moving a large volume of goods and were used mainly to carry
rail traffic over major river crossings. Pontoon or float bridges proved
to be effective bypasses for truck traffic. They were difficult to
interdict because they could be divided into sections and hidden along
river banks.
Number of Bypasses
The trend of the North Vietnamese countermeasures effort can
be illustrated by the change in the average number of bypasses
built for important JCS-targeted bridges. Repeated aerial photography
indicated that the numbers steadily increased, as shown in the
following tabulation:
TYPE OF BYPASS
Total number of damaged JCS-
targeted bridges' 46 52 54 54
Total number of bypasses 99 157 175 200
Of which:
Fords (including cause-
ways and culverts) 18 22 22 22
Alternate bridges 26 36 38 49
Cable bridges 9 14 15 16
Ferries and pontoon
bridges 46 85 100 113
Average no. of bypasses _
per bridge 2.2 3.0 3.2 3.7
THROUGH THROUGH THROUGH THROUGH
MAY 67 SEPT. 67 DEC. 67 SE:PT. 68
Joint Chiefs of Staff ( JCS ) targets were those designated under ground rules
established by the White House in an effort to avoid possibilities of escalating the
war, and those considered most crucial to its successful termination.
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SECRET "Rolling Thunder"
Why Bypasses?
The North Vietnamese preoccupation with the construction of
bypasses was a well-conceived response to the bombing campaign.
In effect, they dispersed their LOC chokepoints just as they had dis-
persed their POL storage facilities and other targets which gave their
system a built-in redundancy that greatly lessened its vulnerability to
effective air attack. Multiple bypasses at a single crossing generally
were placed so far apart that the dispersion pattern of a bomb stick
would bracket only one bypass at a time. ( See Figure 1.) Therefore,
where it may have taken one raid to interdict a crossing during the
early days of the bombing program, in later periods it took two or
three raids to interdict the same crossing. The most important rail/
highway crossing in North Vietnam is the Paul Doumer Bridge over the
Red River at Hanoi; at one time it was supported by 20 bypasses.
Multiple bypasses thus increased the probability that at least one
crossing at a site would always remain serviceable. In addition,
because it normally took as much ordnance to interdict a bypass as
to interdict the original bridge, the cost of bombing a water crossing
in North Vietnam increased much faster than the cost of repairing
it with cheap local materials. At the same time, US aircraft were
subjected to the same risks when attacking bypasses as when at-
tacking the original bridge.
After the Bombing Halt
The story of estimating bomb damage and analyzing North Viet-
namese countermeasures abruptly ended on 31 October 1968 when
the bombing program was stopped. However, the expertise and
voluminous files that were built up over three years of work are
still useful. These assets now provide the basis for estimating the
extent and speed of reconstruction rather than the cost and effect
of destruction. Also, they will provide a valuable data base for
the historian or anyone doing a post-mortem on the Rolling Thunder
program.
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Fluent.: I. Bypasses at Phuong Dinh, North Vietnam.
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Current intelligence delivers
a maximum effort.
CLOUD NINE: A PROBLEM IN
INTELLIGENCE PRODUCTION
James W. Featherstone
On the 24th of January, 1969, there descended upon the Directorate
for Intelligence at CIA a document that for a brief but frantic period
was to try the resources of the Directorate in some ways more
severely than they had ever before been tested. This document
was a National Security Council directive, later dubbed by those
who became affected by it, with appropriate irony, "Cloud Nine."
This directive called for an inventory of the international situation
as of 20 January 1969, in the form of a "current assessment of the
political, economic, and security situation and of the major problems
relevant to US security interests and US bilateral and multilateral
relations" world-wide. It demanded, in addition, "a discussion, where
appropriate, of the data upon which judgments are based, uncertain-
ties regarding the data, and alternative possible interpretations of
the data." To make certain that the response was properly pointed,
the directive posed, in 52 pages, a total of 893 probing questions
touching almost every country on the globe. The answers were to
be in the President's hands by the 20th of February, a matter of
26 days, including weekends.
Obviously this was a task of formidable magnitude, one that at
first glance appeared almost impossible of fulfilment in the time span
allotted. Of course, certain short cuts could be taken. It is always
tempting, for example, when confronted with a requirement of
large dimensions, to look on the shelf for already canned material
that could be dusted off, updated if necessary, and ladled out
lukewarm to the consumer. Another timesaving device is to by-pass
the usual processes of editing and review, sending forward imme-
diately from the typewriter the analyst's sweaty draft. Unfortunately,
although in many instances, at least, the analyst views the draft as
perfect, the editor thinks it is merely perfectible, and his ministrations
toward that laudable end take time.
In this case, it was decided that there would be no short cuts.
A really fresh look at the situation would be taken, candid judgments MORI/H RP
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would be rendered, and the answers would be made as incisive and
unequivocal as it lay in our power to make them. Each answer
would be responsibly edited, and the entire lot would be reviewed
by two senior officers?one of them the chairman of the task force
established to complete the project?who would ensure that, sty-
listically and substantively, the whole massive response met the high
standards set by the DDI. In appearance the response was to be
neat and attractive, if not as psychedelically colorful as a Madison
Avenue product, and it was to be carefully packaged. And finally,
in the words of the Director, as far as CIA was concerned, at least,
the deadline would be met. His determination in this respect may
have been influenced somewhat by knowledge that the directive
had been levied also on the Departments of State, Defense, and
Treasury, putting the Agency, in a sense, in competition with them
for timely production of a quality product.
The manner in which inter-Office and inter-Directorate teams
were manned and organized ?to prepare the answers and get them
edited and coordinated is a complex story in itself. Here, however,
we propose to deal with a different aspect of the Cloud Nine problem,
one with which we are well acquainted especially in current in-
telligence production, but which is not generally thought of until
it becomes potentially a major obstacle, as it did in the case of
Cloud Nine. This aspect embraces the mechanics of reproduction,
the process of getting a clean draft typed, a final draft printed, and
a finished product ready for distribution to meet a deadline.
Anyone with any experience in the management of current in-
telligence is likely to be more familiar than he likes with the
sentence, "It's in the typewriter." This sentence, usually uttered
in a tone of bored indifference by a writer who has been asked what
has happened to an item that has a rapidly approaching deadline,
typifies an all too common feeling among professionals that once
the draft is written, the work is done and the project completed.
Would that it were so; our task would be much easier. Few, of
course, would buy the proposition that the clerical process is as
difficult or complex or even as valuable as the analytical/writing
process. But the fact remains that in many instances, unless the
analyst's work is typed and reproduced and distributed at the
right time, the analyst might just as well not have done it at
all, for all the effect it will have. So from this point of view, the
clerical process, whatever else its level in the scale of values in
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the profession of intelligence, is just as essential as the analytical
one. And it is played down or disregarded only at the peril of
derailing the entire train of intelligence production.
In the case of Cloud Nine, it was clear from the outset that
the production process, unless carefully managed, would unques-
tionably defeat us. This was partly the result of the sheer bulk of
the project. It stemmed also from the decision to start from scratch
and to apply the full editorial review machinery to the final product.
It was closely related, obviously, to the shortness of the deadline:
less than three weeks remained after the writing teams had been
organized in which to finish and deliver the product. And, of course,
the fact that all of the production personnel involved in Cloud
Nine had other duties that normally occupied them full time, duties
that still had to be carried on simultaneously, compounded an already
difficult situation. Given all of these factors, it was legitimate to
question whether the deadline would, in fact, be met as we plunged
into work.
It was estimated originally that CIA's response to the NSC di-
rective would require about 1,000 pages, and in actuality this estimate
was only slightly below the mark. Each original contribution would
be subjected to at least two levels of editing. No one, least of all
the analyst, was hopeful that minimum alterations in the first or
any subsequent drafts would suffice. The average editor is said to
live by the principle that the pen is mightier than the sword, and
it is commonly held that he forgets that both can be equally lethal
against their natural targets. So it was conceivable that every con-
tribution to the aggregate response would have to be typed a minimum
of three times and quite possibly, when finally reviewed, for a
fourth. The massive size of this typing load made it potentially a
serious obstacle to our meeting the deadline, a built-in impediment at
every stage of production between the writer, the reviewer, and
finally the print shop. A backlog of any consequence at any stage
of the process could cause us to miss the target date by a wide
margin.
In fact, the key to the success of any large operation of this
sort is to establish and adhere to a realistically phased writing-typing-
correction schedule that will ensure a smooth, steady, and controlled
flow of material from the writers through the editors to the printers.
This began, in the case of Cloud Nine, with scheduling the actual
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sEcRET Cloud Nine
writing so that the answers to the easier questions would be prepared
and edited first and the more difficult ones deferred until close to
the deadline. It was hoped, and indeed it turned out to be the
case, that the senior reviewers would be confronted on any given
day with no less and if possible very little more than they could
plow through in around ten hours. Since these two gentlemen con-
stituted a marked constriction in the pipeline, having to read every-
thing, it was mandatory that their part of the operation proceed
smoothly.
To ensure the essential control of the flow of material, a control
center was established in OCI's Publications Support group. Here
a number was assigned to each question in the NSC directive ( they
were unnumbered in the document itself) and notation made of
the team and office responsible for producing the answer and of
the scheduled date of delivery to the senior reviewers. As the
various answers were written, edited, and typed in second draft,
they were sent to the control center. The center, in turn, passed
them to the senior reviewers. When the latter had finished massag-
ing them, they were returned to the control center, which then
had them put on mats in final form and sent them to the print shop
for reproduction. The control center could tell at any time, and kept
the Task Force Chief informed, whether the production schedule
was being maintained, where any particular answer was at any
time, etc. The system made it possible also to have the individual
answers printed as they were completed, regardless of sequence,
and to ensure that assembly and pagination of the entire response
could be done in orderly fashion at the very end of the process.
Obviously it would have been fatal to hold the drafts until all
parts of the response were in and had been put in the sequence
required by the NSC directive before beginning to print them.
The production schedule was extremely tight, and there was little
latitude for slippage. We were fighting the clock to such an extent
that, rather than hand carry, we used the pneumatic tube system to
get papers from one part of the building to another without delay,
and to keep everyone busy. At one point, the tube system broke
down, causing a certain amount of panic until the missing papers
were located and extracted, and business could go ahead again.
Despite this and a few other lapses, our attack on the Cloud
Nine problem was well-organized, and it proved to be effective. The
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flow of manuscripts actually began earlier than expected, and no
large backlog developed at any time. But even with the best or-
ganized and most rational schedule, we would still have failed to
deliver on time if we had not had the MTST?Magnetic Tape Se-
lectric Typewriter. We had eleven, and sometimes twelve, of these
machines at our disposal, five of them in OCI's Publication Support
group and the remainder elsewhere in the Intelligence Directorate.
We could have used more, since not all of the substantive teams
had one available to them. The answers to the vast majority of
the questions, however, were put on magnetic tape after initial editing
and review had been completed by the substantive teams. The tapes
and the corresponding typed drafts were then delivered to the Con-
trol Center in OCI, where the tapes were retained while the senior
reviewers were working independently on their copies of the drafts.
The revisions made at this level were then, with the aid of the
MTST, incorporated in a finished, corrected tape and a final draft
typed simultaneously.
The advantage that the MTST has over the ordinary manual
or electric typewriter, and its unique contribution to Cloud Nine,
may not be apparent from this generalized description of procedures.
So to be a little more specific: At a reasonable estimate, probably
less than five percent of all the pages in the analysts' original type-
scripts were completely untouched in both levels of review. Retyping
all of these pages by hand would have been enormously time-consum-
ing, not to mention the strain it would have imposed on the typists
themselves. But when a draft on tape is run through the machine,
the MTST retypes automatically at a very high rate of speed. The
trained operator stops the machine wherever a correction is neces-
sary, enters the change on the new typed draft and the corrected
tape, simultaneously, and directs the machine to proceed until the
next change is encountered. By this means a clean, corrected draft,
together with a new tape, is rapidly produced with a minimum
of effort compared with what would be required without the MTST.
Depending upon which stage of production we are talking about,
this new draft is either a typescript designed for further review
or a mat for printing, if final review has been completed. We believe
that without the MTST, it would have taken about twice the num-
ber of typists twice the time to do the same job.
A final factor bearing on our success with Cloud Nine?intangible
but nonetheless critical--was the morale of the machine operators.
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Theirs was an exacting task, and, despite the magic of the MTST,
a nerve-racking one because of the constant pressure on them to
get the thing done, and done accurately. Their performance was
splendid, their pride in their work obvious and justified. At one
point when the Task Force Chief inadvertently referred to them
as typists, he was politely but firmly told that they were machine
operators. The distinction is a valid one. The girls do have to be
trained to operate the MTST, and certain stages of their work are
somewhat akin to computer programming.
Between February 3, when Cloud Nine drafts began to pile into
Publication Support's office, and February 16, when the mats were
finished, the machine operators worked every day. The five in the
Publication Support group, alone, together with three proofreaders,
racked up a total of 378 hours of overtime. Their supervisor had to
watch them closely?a pleasurable occupation in any event?for signs
of exhaustion and falling efficiency. Occasionally he had to tell one
to pack up and go home. But he was most impressed by their energy
and drive and their devotion to duty, which clearly went beyond
any desire for overtime compensation.
Once the mats were done, the only remaining hurdles to be
surmounted were printing and assembling the answers. These tasks
were performed in Printing Services Division's plant on the seventh
floor of Headquarters Building, operating around the clock. Con-
sidering ?that the various parts of the project were delivered to
the plant piece-meal and were printed on arrival, without regard
for final order of the answers, the job of collation alone was staggering.
Small changes in the texts, moreover, were being introduced up
to the very last moment. Printing Services Division designated a
Control Officer for Cloud Nine who, in close coordination with
the Control Center in OCI, monitored the flow of mats into the
seventh floor plant and ensured that the printing schedule was main-
tained. High standards of appearance were demanded and met. And,
of course, in this as in other Agency components engaged in Cloud
Nine, regular routine work requirements had to be carried on at the
same time.
When Cloud Nine was finished and put together, it filled 7 volumes
and 1030 pages, counting inserts. The product was the result of a
team effort probably unparalleled in the Agency's history, involving
cooperation?smooth at all times?between elements of the DDP,
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ONE, DDI, DDRET, and DDS. The Director called it the most
extensive compilation of intelligence data and judgements ever as-
sembled in such a brief time span. It was delivered to the White
House a day before the deadline, and could actually have been
sent over two days early. But that would have been ostentatious
and might, besides, have promoted the dangerous view that Agency
deadlines can be clipped back more severely than they already are.
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No Foreign Dissem
Tracking down Soviet
underground nuclear
explosions.
WINNOWING WHEAT FROM CHAFF
James R. Shea
Every year hundreds of seismic events occur in the Soviet Union
and are detected by sensors of the US Atomic Energy Detection
System (USAEDS ). Finding out which of these disturbances are
earthquakes and which are the dozen or so underground nuclear
events conducted each year by the Soviets is a major task for the
intelligence community. This has been of particular importance since
the signing of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which
required the Soviets to conduct all their nuclear tests underground.
Prior to the signing of the Treaty the Soviets were known to
have conducted only two underground nuclear tests, one in 1961
and one in 1962, although they may well have conducted some
additional underground nuclear events at yields below the detection
threshold. The Soviets probably did not, however, make major use
of underground testing from 1949 to 1963; after all they had well-
established atmospheric proving grounds at Semipalatinsk and Novaya
Zemlya and conducting weapon development tests in the atmosphere
was both easier, faster, and cheaper than to do them underground.
This all changed in 1963, and our interest in underground test
detection increased as a consequense.
A major factor spurring on improvements in seismic detection and
identification techniques was the possibility that a treaty banning
all nuclear testing, including that conducted underground, might
be signed between the US and the USSR. Such a treaty has been
discussed, off and on, for a number of years. An alternate proposal, to
ban all underground testing above a certain size or magnitude, has
also been discussed extensively, but no agreement has yet emerged.
Both of these approaches keep raising the question?how can you
tell if a distant seismic rumble from behind the borders of the
USSR is a natural event or a nuclear explosion, and can you be
confident enough in your identification to rely on national means
of verification rather than on-site inspection of suspect nuclear tests?
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MORI/HR
P from
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Wheat From Chaff
When a seismic event is picked up on USAEDS sensors, it is
recorded ultimately in Washington as a seismic wiggle which is
then decoded by experts who decide, first, whether a seismic event
has in fact occurred, and second, whether receipt of the signals
by several separated seismographs enables an approximate location
of the event to be determined, much in the same fashion that
direction-finding is done to determine the source location for elec-
tromagnetic signals.
Once an event is established as Soviet in origin, various methods
are employed to determine whether it was an earthquake or an
explosion. For many events the "depth of focus" can be found (the
depth beneath the earth's surface at which the disturbance occurred),
and often this turns out to be so great that there is no question
that the event was natural, simply because no one can drill shot
emplacement holes to, e.g., depths of tens of kilometers. Other
seismic analysis tools such as "complexity" ( earthquakes normally
produce more complicated seismic records than do nuclear tests)
and "first motion" ( shock direction at the focal point is normally
outward, or compressive or an explosion and is compressive and
rarefactive in opposing quadrants for an earthquake) also help identify
some events. Shallow earthquakes put more energy into surface wave
motion than do explosions. Although deep earthquakes have about
the same surface wave motion as explosions they can be identified
by their depth as earthquakes. This method of discrimination becomes
ineffective for events of low magnitude because the seismic signal
becomes too small.
The Soviets conduct a number of tests each year at known proving
grounds, and these are the easiest of all to identify. The first Soviet
underground test was detected in 1961 in an area some 40 nautical
miles south of the normal atmospheric test area at Semipalatinsk.
Prior to this event the area in question had not been recognized as
a test site. After consideration of all the evidence, however, including
the fact that the area in which the event occurred was not a seismic
zone, was located close to a known test area, and contained sizable
mountains suitable for underground testing ( the Degelen chain),
the community concluded that this was indeed a probable underground
test site. Since then, of course, the Soviets have conducted many un-
derground tests. The total detected from 1961 to 4 July 1969 now
stands at 76. Most of these have been in the Degelen Mountains,
but a number have been at other areas within the Semipalatinsk
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Test Site. In general, a seismic event anywhere in the vicinity of
Semipalatinsk is presumed to be a nuclear test unless shown other-
wise. The same is also true of Novaya Zemlya, where the Soviets are
known to have conducted five underground nuclear tests, the first
in 1964. Although the Soviets used Novaya Zemlya for atmospheric
testing up to 1962, there was by no means unanimous agreement
that they had opened an underground test site when the first two
seismic events were detected there in the fall of 1964. The events
were, of course, brought under intensive intelligence scrutiny because
of the past history of Novaya Zemlya in atmospheric testing, the
relative lack of seismic activity in the area, and the presence of
sizable mountain peaks suitable for underground testing. The Soviets
confirmed for us that this was a test area by detonating there in
the fall of 1966 their largest nuclear test?about 1 megaton. A
clandestine report was also received describing rock slides from
this event and providing evidence of tunnelling by the Soviets
for emplacing their nuclear devices.
Probably the most interesting of the Soviet seismic events are
the so-called "out-of-area" tests they have conducted in the past few
years primarily for peaceful purposes. Here the assets of intelligence
were brought fully to bear on identifying what were presumed from
the start to have been probable explosions because of their oc-
currence in non-seismic areas of the Soviet Union distant from the
normal test sites. All told there have been six such events since
1965, one each near the towns of Ufa and Tyumen (slightly west
and east of the Urals, respectively), two near Karshi (just north
of the Afghanistan border), and two near Azgir at a site north
of the Caspian Sea. In some cases it took months of analysis
to establish that the events actually were nuclear explosions.
Although they were for peaceful purposes, the Soviets maintained
press silence about the events, making the job of tracking them
down much more difficult. We were aided in the case of the first
Karshi event in 1966 by Soviet articles about the great difficulties they
had had in shutting off a wild gas well in the Urtabulak deposit,
which was quite close to the location of this event. They had tried
a number of different techniques to seal off the well, but all had
failed, and it was at least conceivable that they might resort to
a nuclear explosion to stop the runaway well. The matter was thrown
into doubt when the Soviets listed this seismic event on their pub-
lished earthquake list, contrary to their previous practice. We finally
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SECRET Wheat From Chaff
received good information indicating that this was indeed a Soviet
nuclear explosion to put out a runaway gas well. Because of its
proximity to this event, a seismic disturbance near Karshi in 1968
was also considered to be probably an explosion to seal off a wild
well. Other out-of-area events have generally been harder to pin down
as to identity and purpose, but information from intelligence sources
has provided a valuable supplement to that provided by the USAEDS
seismic net.
There remains the problem of the "unidentifieds," the much larger
number of events that are detected, but for which there is no ready
or probable explanation. Seismic means alone are unable to distinguish,
for example, between chemical and nuclear explosions. The Joint
Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee regularly examines small seis-
mic events that often later turn out to be Soviet high explosive
detonations (sometimes with yields as high as several kilotons) for
canal and dam construction. If the yields are large enough, tens of
kilotons or more, there is no question of their nuclear nature, but
at low or modest yields collateral evidence has to be brought to bear
to sort out the wheat from the chaff.
When all the foregoing techniques have been applied, the usual
result is that there are perhaps 20-30 seismic events per month of
magnitude 3.8 ( equivalent to a nuclear explosion yield of about 1
kiloton if fully coupled in bard rock) or greater that are not iden-
tified. We usually can in time identify the largest events. Those that
remain unidentified are for the most part rather small events. As
a result of progressive improvements in seismic detection method,
events of smaller and smaller magnitude are being detected.
This raises another question: at what point on the scale do these
small events become insignificant to us? If the Soviets are conducting
a few tests annually in the fractional to low kiloton range without
detection, is our knowledge of their nuclear progress, which has
already been severely hampered by lack of debris from their under-
ground tests, seriously reduced? The answer to this question is of
utmost importance in defining the seismic level below which under-
ground nuclear tests would not be allowed under a threshold test
ban treaty. A decision about such a definition would also be affected
by the possibility that underground shots could be "decoupled," that
is, conducted in an underground cavity in such a way that the
seismic signals from the explosion would be weakened by the time
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they reach the cavity wall. This would result in distant readings of
seismic signals suggesting a substantially smaller shot than was ac-
tually fired. Indeed, such a decoupled shot might not be detected
at all. Such a technique could permit the Soviets to experiment with
larger yields, and therefore possibly make more progress in the de-
velopment of nuclear weapons, than they would legitimately be en-
titled to under a threshold test ban treaty.
As matters stand at present, most of the unidentified events have
occurred in seismically active areas of the USSR, i.e., areas in which
earthquakes are relatively frequent. These events in seismic areas are
therefore presumed to have been earthquakes. An attempt is made
to develop collateral evidence that would indicate whether any of
these were nuclear tests, but because of limitations on intelligence
capabilities and resources, normally no firm conclusions about them
are possible. As a result, it is possible that the Soviets have "gotten
away with" some nuclear tests in seismic areas in recent years without
our knowing about it.
It is, however, fair to conclude that a combination of seismic record
analysis and intelligence analysis has been reasonably successful in
identifying seismic events occuring in the USSR, particularly those
in seismic areas. For events in seismic areas our capabilities are
less good when the yields are small, but fortunately, our concern
about missing a limited number of small yield tests is least in this
area. Any improvements in present intelligence capabilities to identify
small events in seismic areas probably will be limited and costly
to achieve.
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More on the theory and
practice of estimating.
ON THE ACCURACY OF NATIONAL
INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATES
Abbot E. Smith
Whenever I talk about National Intelligence Estimates to an in-
telligence training course, or to any other group, someone always
asks; How accurate have these estimates been; what is your score?
The question is perfectly legitimate but my answer is usually vague
and unconvincing. The purpose of this article is to try to explain
why the answer is so unsatisfactory, and then to explore the problem
further.
It would seem reasonable to suppose that one could get a truly
objective, statistical verdict on the accuracy of estimates. Go through
the papers, tick off the right judgments and the wrong ones, and figure
the batting average. I once thought that this could be done, and I
tried it, and it proved to be impossible. The reasons are various.
The Number of Estimates
Since National Intelligence Estimates began to be produced by
their present methods in late 1950, there have been some twelve or
fifteen hundred of them. Each of these papers, however, contains
a multitude of "estimates," that is, of statements setting forth an ex-
plicit or clearly implied judgment. Many of them also include one
or more footnotes of dissent, conveying an opinion in conflict with
the judgment in the text. I am sure that if one were to try and work
out an accuracy score covering the product of nearly twenty years
he would have to scan not less than 25,000 judgments, and prob-
ably far more. Even if one tested no more than ten or a dozen
NIE's he would find several hundred statements to be checked.
Most of these are restricted judgments, frequently appearing
in subordinate clauses, and usually introduced because they con-
tribute background to a more contentious or consequential estimate.
Most of them were probably not questioned or discussed. I would
guess that the vast preponderance of them were quite correct. And
if we assume for the moment that they could all be checked, and
that 95 percent of them did in fact turn out to be right, I still doubt
MORI/HRP
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SECRET On Accuracy
that we would be justified in swelling with pride. Most of them
were simply too easy. Although indubitably matters of judgment, they
were not matters of difficult judgment. In short the batting average,
if it were arrived at, would be worth about as much as the batting
average of a major league team playing against a scrub outfit in
a sandlot. This is why a complete, objective, and statistical tally
would not be worth doing.
To be sure, we must not presume that because an estimative judg-
ment appears in a subordinate clause it is necessarily inconsequential.
Consider a sentence beginning: "Since the Soviet leaders will not
in the near future cease to distrust the United States . . ." If this
clause should prove wrong, not only would the rest of the sentence
be unsound but the foundations of most estimates about Soviet
policy would be undermined. Nevertheless, this is not a judgment
which anyone would score high on a list of estimative triumphs.
But suppose again ( as might well have happened) that sometime
in 1958 or so a sentence had begun: "Since no change is to be
expected in the Sino-Soviet relationship . . ." Such a clause would
certainly in hindsight rank high on a list of egregious errors, yet
it is not likely that in 1958 it would have been seriously questioned.
Common sense tells us that a box score of estimates must be
selective if it is to mean much; it must take account only of the
important judgments. In saying this, however, we have left behind
the wholly objective approach. Doubtless there are many estimates
which everyone would agree to be important, but there are many
others on which opinions would differ. The hard fact of life is that
the high-level consumer of NIE's?the only person whose opinion
really matters?is apt to judge the whole output on the basis of
two or three estimates which strike home to him. If they prove
correct, NIE's are good; if incorrect, they are bad.1
Incidentally, from a strictly professional point of view the intelligence esti-
mator would often rank his successes and failures differently from the way the
consumer would. For example, I know of several difficult estimates which proved
wrong, and wrong because they showed a failure to grasp the nature of forces
at work in a situation; these grieve me greatly, though so far as I am aware no
high-level consumer ever noticed them. And there have been some which received
high praise, but gave me little satisfaction; they were too easy, or they were merely
lucky.
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The Difficulty of Checking
A great number of the judgments rendered in NIE's cannot be
checked at all as to validity; the facts are not available. This is
bound to be so; it is no reproach to intelligence collection or research.
We estimate, for example, that political leader X is in serious trouble,
but then it turns out that nothing much comes of it, and we may
never know whether he really was in trouble, or, if he was, whether
it was serious. Or we estimate that if the United States undertakes
a given course of action the response of other countries will be
such and such; but the United States never undertakes that action,
and we never know whether we were right or wrong. There are
of course a great number of "contingency" estimates, in sentences
beginning: "If such and such happens, then so and so will probably
follow." But the contingency never occurs, and the estimate can never
be objectively checked.
Often those judgments which can be checked have to be scored as
partly right and partly wrong; we would view them as "right on the
whole," or as "wrong by and large." Or again, suppose we have made
an imprudently precise estimate, as that the Soviets will at a given
time have 500 missiles of type X, and then they turn out to have 510.
Conceivably this might be an important error; more likely it would be
considered negligible. But how many more than 500 would they have
to have before the estimate should forthrightly be deemed wrong?
Estimative Formulations
The drafters of estimates are deeply conscious of two obligations:
to distinguish between statements of estimate and statements of fact,
and to convey as clearly as possible the degree of confidence with
which an estimate is delivered. On the second point Sherman Kent
has written in this periodical. His injunctions may be simplified as
follows: since the degree of confidence must usually be conveyed in
words, these words should as far as possible be uniformly used and
with full understanding of their meaning; for example:
a. Something "is possible" or "may be" true. This constitutes no judgment
of probability; it is in effect a statement merely that the thing under con-
sideration is not out of the question. But the fact that it is mentioned at all
constitutes a judgment that it is something worth bearing in mind.
b. Something is "probable" or "likely"; this means that there is about a 60
or 65 percent probability of it's occurring or being true.
Let us see how this affects the matter of scoring.
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SECRET On Accuracy
First, suppose that an NIE says that "it is possible" that such and
such may occur, and then it occurs. We could score this as a correct
estimate, which it was. But since a very large number of things are
"possible," was it really the kind of judgment that deserves to register
a plus for the perspicacity of the estimators? Perhaps it was, and
perhaps it wasn't; that will depend on what we were talking about.
Now suppose that the NIE says that something will "probably"
occur, and it does not. The estimate was strictly not 100 percent
wrong, for it only gave the event about a 60 percent chance of occur-
ring; perhaps it should be scored as 60 percent wrong. But pause a
moment, and suppose that somehow we come to realize that there
never had been any appreciable chance of the event occurring; then
the estimate was really about 100 percent wrong. Or suppose that we
come to know that there was indeed a 60 percent chance of its occur-
ring but that something happened?perhaps even an act of US
policy taken as a consequence of the NIE?which prevented it from
occurring; then the estimate was 100 percent right?or was it?
It ought to be observed that while the subtleties of the preceding
paragraph complicate the problem of making an objective and sta-
tistical study of the validity of NIE's they are of no consequence in real
life. The high-level consumer pays little heed to qualifications. If he
is interested in a judgment that something "probably" will happen,
and if it turns out not to happen, he denounces the estimate as 100
percent wrong, period. The saddest example of this was seen in the
ill-starred estimate of 19 September 1962, issued as the Cuban missile
crisis approached. That paper discussed at some length the possibility
that the Soviets would put "offensive" surface-to-surface missiles in
Cuba. Nowhere does the estimate declare even that the Soviets would
"probably" not do so; the presentation was obviously labored, difficult,
and inconclusive. Yet the late Senator Robert Kennedy, after the dust
had cleared away, wrote as follows in his book, Thirteen Days:
"No one had expected or anticipated that the Russians would deploy surface-
to-surface ballistic missiles in Cuba.
"No official within the government had ever suggested to President Kennedy
that the Russian build-up in Cuba would include strategic missiles. . .
"The last estimate before our meeting of the 16th of October was dated
the 19th of September, and it advised the President that without reservation
the U.S. Intelligence Board, after consideration and examination, had con-
cluded that the Soviet Union would not make Cuba a strategic base. . ."
This brings me to the next point.
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On Accuracy
The Discrete Statement and the Context
Neither Senator Kennedy nor the many others who condemned
that NIE on Soviet missiles in Cuba were altogether wrong in doing
so. The text of that paper was labored and inexplicit. I think that a
reader might well have understood that it showed the intelligence
community to be beset by the gravest doubts and concerns. Never-
theless it conveyed an unmistakeable impression that the Soviets
would probably not do what they did. One may well say that in draft-
ing those passages we ought to have followed Sherman Kent's edicts
and come out with a clear-cut statement that the act was improbable;
as it turned out we might as well have been killed for a sheep as a
lamb. But it was the weight and impact of the context that carried
the judgment, rather than any explicit statement. What the estimators
probably wanted to convey was something like this: "We really think
it unlikely that the Soviets will do this thing, because it would be out
of accord with their conduct of affairs in the past, and probably turn
out to be disastrous for them; nevertheless, with the evidence as it is,
and bearing in mind the gravity of the matter, we think that the risk
of their doing it is so great that the US Government should provide
for the contingency that it may happen." My concern at the moment
is with the question: Supposing that the estimate had in fact said
these words or their equivalent, how would its validity have been
objectively scored? Still, I suppose, as wrong.
Most NIE's are not so dramatic in their implications, yet a great
many convey their message by the context, or rather by the total text.
They are something more than collections of discrete statements.
Many address questions such as these: what is the situation and what
the prospects in country X; what is the trend of Soviet military policy;
what is the nature and dimension of revolutionary potential in Latin
America; and so on. The validity of such papers depends only partly
upon the accuracy of each particular statement in them. It must also
be judged by the impact and tone of the document as a whole--the
choice of facts which are cited, the distribution of emphasis, the
cogency of argument, even the literary quality. I think that such a
paper could be basically correct even though it had a great many
statements which proved incorrect, and basically wrong even though
many statements were accurate.
Sophisticated estimating indeed ought almost always to be some-
thing more than bald prediction. The course of events is seldom
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SECRET On Accuracy
inevitable or foreordained, even though hindsight often makes it look
that way. A good paper on a complicated subject should describe the
trends and forces at work, identify the contingent factors or variables
which might affect developments, and present a few alternative pos-
sibilities for the future, usually with some judgment as to the relative
likelihood of one or another outcome. Occasionally such a paper can
afterwards be deemed precisely "accurate"; more often it will be
difficult to arrive at a verdict in any fashion which can in the strictest
sense be called objective. It may be a very long time indeed before
we "know" the causes and background of great events. We still get
a new analysis, every year or so, of the forces that led to the American
Revolution; how soon shall we arrive at objective truth about the
forces currently at work in Southeast Asia?
What it comes to is this: a complete, objective, statistical audit of
the validity of NIE's is impossible, and even if it were possible it
would provide no just verdict on how "good" these papers have been.
Like the Bible, the corpus of estimates is voluminous and uneven in
quality, and almost any proposition can be defended by citations from
it. Obviously, if we are to make estimates at all we shall sometimes
make wrong ones. An assiduous and hostile critic could certainly make
up an extensive list of errors, some of which would be grievous. And
a friendly compiler could counter with a massive collection of correct
judgments. I usually say to the training course that, being knowledge-
able about the contents of NIE's, I believe that on the whole they have
been "good." But it may well be thought that mine is a biased verdict,
and moreover that since I am a maker and not a consumer of esti-
mates my opinion does not matter anyway.
Seldom if ever does a consumer of consequence pronounce on the
virtue of NIE's as a whole, though comments on particular papers or
particular judgments have been frequent. The more emphatic of these
comments are almost always adverse, since attention seems more
likely to be gripped by an important estimate that has gone sour
than by one that has turned out right. This is natural enough; it
distresses but does not astonish the estimator. Once in a while, how-
ever, the temptation to some sort of rejoinder is almost irresistible,
and in the following section I indulge myself.
On 1 August 1969, Senator Thomas J. Dodd delivered a speech in
the Senate during the debate on the Safeguard program. A part of this
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speech was devoted to the achievements, or non-achievements, of US
intelligence, and the theme was essentially in the following sentence:
The American intelligence community, although it has performed well in
certain situations, has not been impressive when estimating the intentions and
plans of our adversaries.
The Senator went on to support this contention by a list of specifics,
beginning with the failure to warn of the North Korean Communist
attack on South Korea, the subsequent intervention of the Chinese
Communists, and the earlier Soviet initial explosion of the A-bomb.
Leaving these aside ( because they occurred prior to the existence of
the present machinery for coordinating National Intelligence Esti-
mates) let us examine some of the others.
a. The intelligence community "failed to predict . . . accurately
the Soviet H-bomb."
Our performance in this respect represents in fact one of those
many instances where we were either good or bad, depending
on the way one looks at it. We did fail to predict it "accurately."
Yet an estimate in March 1953 said that field testing of a
thermonuclear device was possible by mid-1955, and further
that it would be unsafe to assume that the Soviets would not
have a workable thermonuclear weapon by mid-1955. On 18
August 1953, another NIE said that field testing might occur
at any time. Soon afterward it was confirmed by analysis that
the first test had in fact taken place on 12 August.
b. "In 1956 [the intelligence community] failed to alert us to the
Soviet invasion of Hungary . . . And, despite warning signs
which many of our lay experts took seriously [it] was also dis-
posed to discount the possibility that the Red Army would invade
Czechoslovakia to depose the Dubcek regime."
It is true that neither the invasion of Hungary in 1956 nor that
of Czechoslovakia in 1968 were forecast in National Intelli-
gence Estimates, which represent the consensus of the intelli-
gence community; in fact no such coordinated papers were
prepared on these situations in the months immediately pre-
ceding the invasions. In both cases, however, and especially
that of Czechoslovakia, various estimative memoranda and
current intelligence publications reported the state of high ten-
sion and the Soviet military build-up. Without saying that
invasions were likely, these papers emphasized that they were
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un Accuracy
possible, and were surely under consideration by the Soviet
leadership. The US Government was made aware that the
invasions might occur, though it was not assured that they
would occur.
C. "In the period immediately before the Cuban missile crisis,
the advance consensus of the intelligence professionals was that
the Soviets would not tempt the fates by deploying nuclear mis-
siles in Cuba."
I have discussed this above, concluding that despite various
qualifications that might be made, the Senator's verdict is
essentially correct. With respect to the performance of the in-
telligence community, however, an additional quotation from
Senator Kennedy's book is appropriate: "The important fact,
of course, is that the missiles were uncovered and the informa-
tion was made available to the government and the people
before missiles became operative and in time for the US to act."
d. "In 1957, the intelligence community was completely without
advance information on the Soviet Sputnik."
Strictly construed, the Senator's words seem to condemn the re-
sults of collection rather than of estimates, and in this sense
they may be correct. Nevertheless, in December 1955 an NIE
said that the Soviets could put an earth satellite into orbit by
1958, and in March 1957 another NIE estimated that they could
do so by the end of the year. They did, in October. We have
always considered this a praise-worthy example of good esti-
mating on the basis of very scanty informatoin.
e. "[After 19571 our intelligence community lapsed into one of its
very rare periods of overstatement when it advised the Eisenhower
administration that there was a massive missile gap between the
Soviet Union and ourselves. Today it has been documented that
the so-called missile gap was a Soviet-engineered hoax, and that
our intelligence community fell for phony information put out by
Khrushchev for the purpose of intimidating us."
We certainly overestimated the number of Soviet ICBM's which
would be operational around 1961. But we certainly did not
fall for a phony plant by Khrushchev. There was virtually no
hard information available, beyond the fact that the Soviets
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had successfully tested an ICBM in 1957. The principal basis
for the overestimate was probably the opinion of the best US
missile experts in those early days as to the number of ICBM's
that could be manufactured in a given period of time, granting
a previous successful test. Nevertheless, the estimates were
wrong.
f. "In more recent years, conversely, . . . estimates of Soviet in-
tentions regarding the size of Soviet ICBM forces have turned
out to be woefully conservative."
A just criticism, despite a few defenses that could be put up.
These exhaust the Senator's list of specifics. Consider now some
further general observations which he made: the following quotation
combines three passages which were separate in his speech:
"When it comes to estimates of Soviet intentions, however, there is admittedly
a lot of guesswork involved. . . I think it pertinent to point out in this con-
nection that our intelligence community has erred far more frequently on the
conservative side than otherwise in their estimates of Soviet capabilities and
intentions. . . over and over again, the Soviet performance in the field of
armaments has either surprised us completely or substantially surpassed our
estimates."
As I have tried to show in preceding parts of this article, it would
be idle to attempt to prove or disprove these statements by objective
and statistical analysis. With respect to numbers of Soviet weapons,
one could easily make up a list of projections which were too low,
another of those which were too high, another of those which were
substantially correct, and a final one?very short?of those which,
thanks more to luck than wisdom, were precisely correct. The projec-
tion of numbers, however, is the most precarious of all estimative
exercises; there is indeed "a lot of guesswork involved," especially as
one looks beyond the two or three years subsequent to the date when
the estimate is written.
Suppose we try one test, however, using the somewhat non-objective
criterion of "importance." Probably all would agree that it is im-
portant to forecast with reasonable accuracy the appearance of new
Soviet weapons systems, and to do so well ahead of their initial opera-
tional dates. Probably most would agree further that the weapons
systems mentioned in the following list were the most important to
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On Accuracy
forecast, though others might certainly be added. Here is the record
of NIE's in this matter:
a. In 1950 (the first year of National Intelligence Estimates in present
form), jet medium bombers were forecast for the Soviet forces in 1952; they
appeared in 1954.
b. In 1951, thanks to the appearance of a single aircraft identified as a
heavy bomber ( the so-called Type 31, never thereafter seen) heavy bombers
were thenceforth estimated to be brought into Soviet forces; they were in
1954.
c. In October 1953, an NIE said that a Soviet surface-to-air missile of
native design could be developed by 1955; the first SA-1 missiles (based
on a German design) became operational around Moscow in 1953; all sites
were operational by 1956. The first SA-2 battalion became operational in
1958 or early 1959.
d. In October 1954, an NIE said that the Soviets could have an ICBM
ready for series production about 1963, or at the earliest possible date in
1960; the SS-6 became operational in 1960.
e. In 1957, an NIE said that the Soviets could not have an ABM by 1962.
In 1959 the estimate was that the Soviets were pushing hard on the prob-
lem and could have a first operational capability with an ABM in the period
1963-1966; the Moscow ABM system began to be operational in 1968.
f. In 1965, an NIE said that the Soviets would probably produce a new
class of ballistic missile submarine, that it would almost certainly be nuclear
powered, and that it would carry perhaps 6-12 missiles of an improved type.
That NIE also judged that a new missile with about 1,000 n.m. range would
come into service in 1967-1968. These estimates were made purely on the
basis of Soviet requirements; there was no hard evidence of such develop-
ments at the time. In 1966 we saw the first unit of the new Y-class submarine
having 16 launch tubes, and the Soviets began testing a new missile with
an estimated range of 1,300 n.m.; this system?submarine and missile?be-
came operational in 1968.
g. In 1965, an NIE said that the Soviets could probably attain an opera-
tional capability with a multiple independently guided re-entry vehicle
( MIRV) in the period 1970-1975.
I think it true to say that in the past fifteen or twenty years no im-
portant new Soviet weapons system has appeared which had not been
heralded in advance in National Intelligence Estimates. The initial
operational dates have often been wrong, but as the above citations
indicate they have usually been wrong because they have set the date
too early; they have not "erred far more frequently on the conserva-
tive side than otherwise."
34
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To attack Senator Dodd's contentions is not to prove anything con-
clusively about the validity of National Intelligence Estimates as a
whole. There are a good many people within the intelligence com-
munity ( and probably outside as well) who feel that the net impact
of NIE's over the years has been to over- rather than under-estimate
Soviet military capabilities and intentions. If one of these persons were
to draw up a documented indictment, it could probably be countered
in the same fashion that I have tried to counter Senator Dodd's
charges; and still nothing would be finally demonstrated. The esti-
mator himself finds it useful to look into his record, not merely for
the satisfaction or chagrin he may derive from the exercise, but because
it may help him improve his performance in time to come. But the
man whose opinion counts most?the "high-level policy-maker"?
will never get his evaluation of NIE's from an exhaustive study of
them. He will have no more than a vague impression?an impression,
however, which will suddenly and emphatically crystallize whenever
an estimate crucial to his immediate concern proves wrong. Once his
view is thus formed it may take a long time to change.
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No Foreign IDissem
The rudiments of an ancient
craft ever new.
NON-ELECTRONIC AGENT COMMUNICATIONS
Gabriel M. D'Echauffour
Consider the following situations, all of which are possible. As a
matter of fact, all of them have actually occurred in the not too distant
past, and all may occur again at rather surprising places and times:
Situation: Outbreak of hostilities, closing of stations, evacuation of
station personnel, loss of contact with station assets.
Situation: Defector walks into station and requests asylum. Defector
agrees to return home for a specified sum of money. He ap-
pears legitimate and valuable, but his value would be
greater if he were in place.
Situation: Agent is recruited in country X, is transiting country Y on
the way home to the denied area. Station Y directed to meet
agent, provide certain clandestine training, and send agent
on his way.
Situation: Agent working for us in friendly area, in rather relaxed en-
vironment which permits face-to-face meetings with the
case officer. One day the agent finds that he is being trans-
ferred to a hostile area where face-to-face meetings will no
longer be possible.
Situation: Station recruits agent who is member of the local Com-
munist party. Agent's position precludes contact locally
without jeopardizing agent's position.
Situation: Local asset has friend or relative in denied area who he
feels is amenable to recruitment. Asset sent as legal traveler
into area to attempt recruitment.
Situation: Agent traveling for short vacation trip into a denied target
area.
Situation: Station asset, member of local Communist labor union, going
to Bloc country to attend Communist-sponsored labor
conference.
MORI/HRP
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SECRET Secret Writing
The above situations all have one thing in common: a means of
agent communications is needed. Secure communication is a vital fac-
tor in any clandestine operation, whether it be face-to-face or other-
wise.
In the above situations, one solution is to have recourse to non-
electronic agent communications techniques, also called chemical com-
munications, or in the slang of technical tradecraft, secret writing (SW).
The purpose of this article is to describe briefly the various methods
available and to outline considerations affecting their application. Our
object is to provide some guidance to those who may at some time be
confronted with the subject of SW, whether it be from a positive
collection viewpoint, counterintelligence, or in some other connection.
Note-Taking Devices
The first type of SW device we will consider?note-taking employ-
ing direct writing implements?has restricted, but very useful appli-
cation. Such implements consist generally of a chemical substance in
the form of a piece of ordinary pencil lead, or other various camou-
flaged hardware items containing secret ink, which may be used to
apply secret writing directly to paper materials. Since the devices are
used to write directly on paper, there is inevitably some disturbance of
the fibers of the paper. In some countries methods are known for de-
tecting such disturbances, and therefore direct writing is normally not
employed for correspondence transiting international borders through
mail channels in which effective chemical censorship may be encoun-
tered.
Even with this restriction, however, the direct writing technique
has many uses. It may be used for dead-dropped notes, or for notes
to be carried by case officers traveling internationally or in a difficult
operational area. This method has been used very successfully by
agents and cut-outs, who may carry the writing on newspapers,
magazines, and the like through border points, thus avoiding routine
chemical censorship, for passage to the case officer in the form of a
direct report, or in the form of debriefing notes containing data
which one would not trust to memory. The devices have been used
successfully by ships' crewmen, train conductors, aircrew members,
and legal travelers. Use of these devices might be considered in
preparing correspondence to be left in dead-drops as a precaution
against accidental discovery, perhaps by a child at play, or by the
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passer-by who kicks over a can and finds the drop. The technique may
perhaps also be considered for use by agents or case officers carrying
written material to forestall the possibility that severe illness, acci-
dental death, or some other untoward event might bring incriminating
written materials in their possession to the attention of local authori-
ties. In rare cases, the devices have been used within internal mail
channels where the chemical censorship is generally less effective
than in international mail channels, but in general this is not advisable.
The time required for training in the use of these devices usually is
from one to two hours, but as with other techniques the time varies
in direct proportion to the abilities of the agent.
Microdots
A more intricate method of SW, and one of the most fascinating to
amateurs as well as to students of tradecraft, is the microdot, a photo-
graphic reproduction of textual material reduced to one by two milli-
meters or less. This method is well-known to most of the sophisticated
intelligence services and continues to be widely and securely used.
Although microdots can be used both as an agent sending and a
receiving technique, they are primarily used in the latter application
due to the complexity of preparation.
In general, it takes almost the same time to train an agent to
receive microdots as it does to instruct him in the use of direct writ-
ing devices, but about two to four hours should be allowed. In ad-
dition, the media selected for carrying dots should be appropriate,
such as an envelope, a postcard, or some other plausible object. Most
important, however, the agent needs either natural access to a micro-
scope of approximately 100 power magnification or must be furnished
a microscope or other readout device. Scientists and doctors can easily
receive mocrodots since they usually have a microscrope and are well
versed in its use. Possession of such equipment is not so unusual,
however, that other individuals cannot plausibly have it.
The security of microdots obviously lies in the difficulty of de-
tecting them. ( Try spreading an ounce of black pepper on the floor
and finding a dot mixed into it.) This is not to imply, however, that
a microdot in a postcard or letter could not be found if the censors
were sufficiently interested in the particular item suspected of con-
taining one. This consideration is discussed at greater length below.
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SECRET Secret Writing
It is also practical to have agents "send" microdots. The difficulties
involved, however, are somewhat greater than in receiving, as the
agent must have some photographic dexterity, photographic equip-
ment, either normal or specially provided equipment, and some
degree of privacy. In addition, considerably more training time is
required. The Soviets frequently train their staff agents to send as
well as receive microdots, but after they are in place they usually
only receive. In the nature of the technique, microdots are not
generally appropriate for mass transmission of intelligence informa-
tion. Individual burying of each dot is required, and their use in
quantity would tax the agent's eyes as well as his nerves.
For ease of readout, a dot usually contains several hundred words or
less. Usually only one or two dots are sent at a time. As indicated
above, they are not pasted on the surface of the carrier but imbedded
within it to reduce the possibility of detection and avoid risk of de-
tachment in the course of normal handling.
Examination for the presence of microdots generally consists of
holding the suspect item in front of a strong light to look for small
dark objects buried within it. Since well-hidden dots cannot be
detected in this way, other tests may often be necessary.
Latent Image
Another photographic technique employed in clandestine commu-
nications uses a latent (invisible) photographic image, e.g., of a
secret message or picture, which is processed into a photographic
print such as a snapshot and rendered insensitive to light, but remains
recoverable by the agent by means of a photographic chemical
process. The process is well known to photographers and has been
described in open literature. Its security lies in careful calculation
of where and how it is to be used. It may be employed in agent
sending or receiving channels, but like the microdot, is more readily
used for the latter. Any agent who can normally receive photographs
in mail could be considered for this technique.
Liquid Ink Secret Writing
Historically, invisible inks have been used in secret writing since
antiquity. References to this can be found in ancient Greek and Roman
literature as far back as 230 B.C. The principle is relatively simple:
a chemical is dissolved into a quantity of solvent, usually water, to
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provide a colorless, or nearly colorless, liquid ink which is used to
write invisible messages with a stick or quill pen. Development is
usually by application of a different chemical which reacts with ?the
dried ink to produce a visible color which may then be read. There
are, of course, many different chemical combinations which behave
in this manner. Liquid secret writing is primarily restricted to agent
receiving, and the preparation of messages is by the technical staff.
One consideration in the choice of which of the many liquid SW
systems to use is the relative ease of recovery of the message by
the agent. The ease of recovery of the systems that may be selected
will vary considerably, and the choice will depend in part upon
how much privacy the agent has.
Carbon Writing
Although liquid inks still find operational application, they have
in recent years given way to carbon writing techniques. Apart from
the gains in chemical security which many, but not all, carbon systems
offer over liquid inks, there is a substantial gain in simplicity since
it is inherently easier for an agent to use a carbon. Liquid writing
is much more time-consuming in all respects, particularly in training
time and in the preparation of messages. With liquid secret inks,
it becomes difficult to maintain continuity in writing the message as
the ink dries, and what has previously been written disappears.
An SW carbon is essentially a piece of paper of normal appearance
which has been impregnated with small quantities of secret writing
chemical. When used in a manner similar to a black office carbon,
small quantities of the SW chemical transfer to another sheet, form-
ing a secret message. The many carbon systems differ chemically.
Messages prepared from some are easily developed, while others
require complicated and time-consuming treatment. For some, indeed,
a laboratory is needed. Each SW carbon may normally be used for
as many as fifty messages, and may be mounted in a pad of ordinary
writing paper for concealment. Training time required for carbon
writing is normally four to six hours.
The carbon technique is normally used by the agent to write to
his case officer, and most of the sophisticated intelligence services
have a good many systems of the kind. In this field, as in others
in the SW business, there is stiff competition to produce ever new
systems defying detection by hostile services. This involves a con-
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tinning quest for new and more secure chemical combinations as
older methods become compromised. The object, of course, is to
stay ahead of the research of the opposition, and to outwit its
chemical censors.
Agent Training
As we have noted, the training time required for introduction of
SW techniques varies, depending on the aptitude of the agent, and
the nature of the techniques he is being taught. In many operations,
the time available for training is limited. It will be evident, however,
that training should not be slighted. Obviously, SW ought to be
taught to an agent in advance of his actual need to use it in an
operational situation. Time should be allowed not only for practice,
but for corrective re-training or instruction in an entirely new tech-
nique. Most SW methods appear relatively simple, but lacking
adequate training, the agent may make mistakes resulting in illegible
development of the SW, or at worst jeopardizing his personal security,
that of the SW system, and of the operation as a whole.
Since agent communications are a critical link in most operations,
pre-planning and introduction of techniques?including training and
establishing of practice channels?are certainly in order. It is rec-
ommended that an SW specialist be consulted at an early stage
in the planning and that the training be conducted by the specialist.
Prior planning in most cases will offer the opportunity for tailoring
the SW techniques to the case situation. Adequate training can help
avoid events such as the recent one in which the agent mistook
blank paper for his carbons and wrote twelve blank SW "messages"
over a year's time. Needless to say, this proceeding generated much
concern among his correspondents not to speak of the paper work.
Censorship and Operational Security
No discussion of SW would be complete without a consideration
of the security environment in which it is to be employed. In the
most general sense, this involves the matter of censorship. By defini-
tion, censorship means to withhold information or materials, which
are judged to be morally, politically, or otherwise inappropriate
or undesirable. With respect to programs designed to uncover secret
writing channels, one should use the term technical ( or chemical)
censorship, or even more appropriately "interception for technical
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examination," since the process usually involves extraction of the sus-
pect item for physical examination, and its re-introduction into the
normal channel.
A large number of countries exercise censorship in varying degrees
in an effort to control the flow of written information, to provide in-
telligence leads, or in some areas, to control anti-regime activities
and the criminal element. To these ends some of these countries,
but not all, have developed technical facilities of varying effectiveness
for searching out and resolving secret writing. Most technically ad-
vanced countries have some capability in these respects.
Thus, the use of SW in an operation is predicated on one or all
of the following: a) to make the transmittal of information secure
against accidental discovery because of misrouting or accidental loss
by the carrier of the message; b) to protect intelligence against
discovery during mass, random, or selective opening of mail by
authorities or others who are only concerned with reading the 'visible
text; or c) to maintain security against efforts directed at uncovering
secret writing.
The security of an SW operation depends upon a number of factors:
a) the proper use of the SW materials which is related to training
time and quality; b) the technical ( or chemical) security of the
secret writing method employed; which is in turn related to c)
the technical capability of the opposition in the areas where the SW
is being employed. A method providing total security in Borneo
may not be secure in Russia. Equally important for security are the
non-technical operational circumstances, such as the agent's physical
security, how he posts his SW, and the consistency with which all
other non-SW security practices are observed to avoid attracting at-
tention to the operation, and to avoid stimulating a specific exami-
nation of the agent's mail, even though such examination should prove
fruitless.
In planning an SW operation, all these angles must be considered.
Generally, under-developed countries do not have a capability for
detecting SW, although they may be opening mail. Also, a liaison
service from a technically sophisticated country will not generally
provide a "friendly" country with its most effective methods for
detecting secret writing, because defensive chemical techniques are
inherently related directly to knowledge of offensive techniques. Thus,
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ECKET Secret Writing
the service that detects and analyzes a system will logically incorporate
it into its battery of counterintelligence techniques.
Upon occasion, when routine mass opening of mail is taking place,
the examiners may be told to look for evidence of SW, such as writ-
ing impressions, or for letters which make no sense or appear other-
wise suspicious. Letters selected may then be passed to a technical
laboratory for chemical examination. Success will then depend upon
the relative security of the SW method employed and the capabili-
ties of the laboratory. Some countries, such as China, for example,
with its large manpower reserve, can afford to open and scan large
quantities of mail. None, however, can afford the manpower to look
for technically sophisticated secret writing on more than a fraction
of a percent of the total volume.
The risks in using SW can thus be minimized if the choice of
technique is properly made. The selection of a secret writing system
for a particular case depends upon the reliability of the agent, his
area of operation, the training time available, the privacy of the
agent, and the channels involved.
As noted above, the chemical security of SW systems and tech-
niques varies. Obviously the most secure and complicated system
cannot be given to every case, nor is it needed in every case. To
do so would insure that it would be quickly picked up in any
double-agent operations, or by other means, and would become
known to the opposition. The loss of a particular SW system in
one application, however, does not necessarily mean that it cannot
continue to be used in some other area. Indeed, depending on the
circumstances, it may even continue to be used in the same area.
Operational Considerations
SW should not normally be used except when an agent must have
clandestine means to communicate or when caution dictates provision
for contingencies. On the other hand, there have been instances where
SW was introduced to an agent merely to improve his reporting by
forcing him to be more concise. There have also been instances in
which SW was introduced to impress the agent with the profes-
sionalism of the organization. The writer handled a case in which
the agent was introduced to SW purely as a means of shocking him
into the realization that he was indeed involved in clandestine ac-
tivities. This helped induce him to take more seriously other opera-
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tional matters, such as surveillance and solicitation of information.
The Soviets apparently prepare their staff agents in SW communica-
tions as a matter of routine. SW does make demands on the time
of the case officer and agent and in some instances, introduces some
added risks to the operation. These can and should be minimized,
however, by careful training, planning, and selection of techniques
to be used.
The main questions to be answered when planning and selecting
SW systems can now be summarized. What countries of operation
are involved, that is, what are the SW channels? What is known
about the censorship and SW capabilities of the countries involved?
What is known about the importance of the agent in terms of access?
How reliable is the agent? Where will the SW message from and
to the agent be processed, and by whom? How much privacy will
the agent have? What is his profession? Who will train him? What
can he legitimately or plausibly have in his possession? What can
he carry across the border? In his position, would it appear logical
for him to send and receive mail? Is an accommodation address
available for the agent to write to? What languages will be used?
Normally the agent who writes SW messages should not reveal
his true identity in the visible part of the letter. In some cases
where the text of the secret writing may pinpoint the agent and
where it is feared local censorship can detect and develop SW,
it may be desirable to encypher the SW text. Generally, however,
the large volumes of mail being sent offers such a formidable task
to censors that only select suspect letters can be given thorough exami-
nation. Thus, the sheer volume of mail provides a great deal of
safety, and if proper attention is given to other security considerations
the agent's mail normally will never be suspected of carrying secret
messages. In areas where more stringent technical censorship is
expected, more secure techniques would need to be considered.
Accommodation addresses, which serve as the receiving point for
the agent's SW to his case officer, must be carefully chosen and
should as far as possible appear to be legitimate normal mail
channels. Generally, a letter to a country considered neutral or
friendly from the viewpoint of the country of origin is less suspect
than one to an unfriendly area. SW to the agent may directly iden-
tify him if intercepted and developed or otherwise detected. There-
fore, it is advisable to minimize the volume of SW messages sent
SECREJ
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SECRET Secret Writing
to the agent, and desirable when possible to mail SW to the agent
internally in the country, thus circumventing international censorship.
It may be desirable where possible to have the agent write with SW,
but receive by encyphered radio broadcasts, with SW receiving only
as an emergency back-up technique.
Contingency Planning
Past experience has proven the value of establishing SW "stay
behind" capabilities in areas where direct contact with the agent may
be lost. This situation has arisen many times in the past. Equally
important is provision for the possibility that an agent may sud-
denly be transferred to an area where personal contact is precluded.
This also happens frequently. In many such instances, adequate
preparation for the use of SW may not be possible, especially
preparation through practice. Therefore, whenever SW may be a
possibility, steps should be taken to have the agent trained at the
earliest opportunity.
The writer has encountered a number of cases where SW was not
given to an agent because it was thought that the agent would
continue to be able to "travel out" frequently for personal meetings,
or that the agent was only going away for a "short period of time"
or that the agent's "present access doesn't warrant SW reporting."
Subsequently it developed that the agent could no longer travel
out, or found himself cut off for several years from personal con-
tact, or his access suddenly became valuable. Sometimes the con-
sequences of such changes may subsequently be corrected by train-
ing the agent through a third party or by having written instructions
dead-dropped to him. These are inevitably poor substitutes for pre-
planning. Case officers often tend to regard techniques such as carbon
writing as too simple to warrant the expenditure of time for training
and practice sessions. There are, however, many case officers who
have lived to rue this oversight, having experienced the frustration of
agents who cleverly have made technical innovations on their own
or, more commonly, have failed to remember technique, such as the
agent who wrote his message with his carbon and mailed the carbon
to his case officer. There have been successful SW cases after an
absolute minimum of training, or even training by written instruction,
but these are exceptional. In SW it is best to play it safe.
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In the dynamic scene of clandestine operations, technical tradecraft
in general will continue to expand and develop. Certainly secret
writing continues to evolve and to play its role in operational ac-
tivities, growing ever more complex, or as simple, as the situation
demands. The purpose of this article has been to enlighten and to
establish guidelines and a philosophy for non-technical personnel
who may be confronted at some time with situations?such as were
sketched at the outset of this paper?in which SW is the best
available solution.
SECRET 47
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Some guidelines for
secret agents.
DEFENSE AGAINST COMMUNIST
INTERROGATION ORGANIZATIONS
Michael L. Mineur
The suggestions offered herein for practical defense against Com-
munist interrogation organizations are designed to be used very selec-
tively and with caution in the briefing of anti-Communist secret
agents running the danger of Communist imprisonment'. Because some
of the tactics outlined could be of use to other categories of persons,
such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, and noncombatants, this
study is offered with the reservation that it is not to be construed
either as a modification of official US Government doctrine or an
exhaustive treatment of the Communist system of prisoner manage-
ment and exploitation.
The Importance and Techniques of Preparation
Most of the available guidance on this subject is too much con-
cerned with the tactics of the conflict between the prisoner and
his interrogator after arrest, and not enough with the preparations
that the endangered agent can and should make in advance. His
preparations are very often decisive in determining the outcome of his
resistance effort. The agent must be prepared physically, organiza-
tionally, and mentally.
Among the most important physical preparations is to separate one-
self as far as possible from incriminating materials such as commo
plans, one-time pads, radios, secret inks, weapons, special cameras,
documents, and money in bulk. Linkage to incriminating persons must
be adequately covered, and all the standard procedures of operational
security and conspiratorial discipline must be understood and main-
tained. Plans for emergencies must be worked out in advance and
rehearsed. These plans should be set up for use under unfavorable
conditions, when one is under surveillance or suspicion.
Organizationally speaking, the agent should have made all possible
arrangements for the support and safety, rescue or warning of his
Briefers should bear in mind that some agents, getting the full briefing, might
decamp rather than take the risks.
MORI/HRP
from pg.
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Interrogation
family and others dependent upon him. He should have set up some
system whereby his sponsors will learn of his arrest?if it occurs?
at an early date, so that they can begin to help him. He should have
arranged a simple code for concealing information in any letters or
messages he might be able to send to his family, if the family is
witting of his secret activities or affiliations.
This is a grim subject, and part of the mental preparation?a most
important part?consists in accepting and living with these possibili-
ties. An agent conditioned to face them honestly is likely to be far
more capable and careful than the chance-taker who hopes somehow
to get by without self-discipline and without the intensive prepara-
tion that is the only way to success in any clandestine operation.
The agent should have studied the security service and interroga-
tion systems operating in his area and should have prepared himself
against surprise. The agent must prepare and thoroughly rehearse
his cover story and his fall-back cover story for his status, action, and
associations, and backstop them as far as possible. He will usually be
able to get help with this work from his sponsors. There is an inward,
or psychological aspect of imprisonment for which the prisoner must
be fortified. Prisoners with a high ideological motivation are able to
defend themselves and to continue to struggle against the opposition
longer than others, even under conditions of extreme hardship. Per-
sons who have strong religious beliefs are able to resist much more
effectively than those with a weak faith or none. A person under-
taking the dangerous work of the secret agent should in any case
develop an ideological basis. If not religiously inclined, he should
review in his mind the great cause of human freedom and the
price that others have willingly paid to defend and advance it.
Patriotism, the welfare of families and friends, and concern for his
own future self-respect, all help to reinforce the will to resist. Very
few persons are aware of how much hidden strength they actually
have. The medical profession, which has the opportunity to observe
persons fighting for their lives?often against incurable ailments?
can testify to the fact that, when a person makes up his mind to
resist, he can accomplish miracles.
The Arrest
It is, of course, essential that the agent, as a standard procedure,
maintain a level of preparation for ?arrest. However, since he has
to take chances in order to accomplish anything, it becomes important
50
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to know something of the signs of impending arrest. History is replete
with accounts of agents arrested with incriminating evidence in their
possession long after they themselves had good reason to expect arrest.
Any change, however subtle, in the attitude of persons with whom
one is in everyday contact must be fully reviewed as to possible causes.
From the point of view of preparation, the agent should carefully
study people with whom he has casual contact, such as an apartment
house janitor, a storekeeper, a barber, for example. In a totalitarian
country, people of this sort are keenly alert. If they have been ap-
proached under some cover by a local security officer to provide
information about the agent, they will have received a tremendous
shock and their attitude toward the agent is bound to change. He
may observe signs of fear, sudden prying curiosity, avoidance, or
even unusual pleasantness, on the part of such persons. He ma:y have
nothing but a feeling that their attitude has changed. Such warning
signs should never be ignored.
If the agent is carrying out proper countersurveillance procedures
he may detect signs that he is under observation. Although one would
think that an agent detecting such signs would take strict measures
to remove evidence, in many cases he has simply continued on his
way?often with unfortunate results.
From time to time the agent may detect that his quarters, or his
place of work, have been tampered with. He may discover articles
out of place or missing, or signs of the rumpling of clothing in
drawers, and the like. There are simple methods of so arranging
various objects that their movement can be detected. Very frequently,
the secret search of one's premises is an important warning that
one is suspected. However, inquisitive persons and thieves also en-
gage in this kind of activity.
The arrest or disappearance of confederates or accomplices is, of
course, a warning that no one could misunderstand.
It is often possible for the sponsor of a secret agent to warn him
through some prearranged system of communication that he should
suspend operations, flee immediately, or the like. The most careful
preparation and planning is essential to assure that the agent will be
able to verify the authenticity of a warning, as well as to understand
it correctly. From time to time persons have been trapped by "warn-
ings" fabricated by the local security service and intended to stampede
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CONFIDENTIAL Interrogation
them into some unwise action. Persons who should have known better
have fallen for such simple tracks as an anonymous telephone call
from "a friend," an anonymous letter dropped into the mailbox or
shoved under the door, even a visit by an unknown well-wisher. Of
course, in the areas where resistance to Communism is high there
will be a person here and there who, out of the goodness of his
heart will assist an enemy agent. But in the vast majority of cases, in
a totalitarian country, fear of the consequences and general suspicions
of everybody effectively prevent people from helping each other
secretly?which is one of the main reasons why totalitarian govern-
ments survive.
Arrest occurs in two basic forms: overt and secret. In overt arrest
actions, the Communist services tend to use a good deal of manpower
to bar escape and to crash into the rooms of the suspect with the
minimum loss of time. Occasionally they will have access to the keys
to the suspect's lodging and use them for even swifter invasion of
the premises. Sometimes these services deliberately create a great fuss
during the arrest action, presumably in order to intimidate and
impress the population. Arrest in this form indicates the intent of the
authorities to liquidate the operation and formally charge and sen-
tence the persons apprehended. The agent is advised to plan his
resistance toward minimizing the offense, trying to get the charges
changed to criminal charges and in general to aim at leading the
arresting authorities to conclude that common crime is in fact the
principal activity of the arrested persons.
In case of overt arrest, the prisoner in Communist hands in a civil-
ized area can expect standard criminal processing, including photo-
graphing and fingerprinting, body search, replacement of belongings
with a prison uniform, medical check, a hot shower bath, and assign-
ment to a cell under close guard. In case of espionage suspects, these
procedures will be very thoroughly carried out. The arrestee can ex-
pect to confront one or more interrogators for a long time to come.
In the case of secret arrest, quite a few of these procedures may
be omitted. The prisoner may find himself in a safehouse, and the
physical search may concentrate on depriving him of the means of
suicide. The search for evidence may thus be a good deal less
thorough than it might otherwise be. There may be evidence of con-
cern for his state of mind in many cases; but in others the sternest
and most thorough processing will occur. The prisoner should keep
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alert to every nuance of the processing, as he can often gain clues
as to how much is known and what is intended. He should be par-
ticularly alert if he is left in the company of talkative guards or "fellow
prisoners" for long periods of time, as these persons will in all proba-
bility be plants trying to elicit information from him, and influence
his attitudes.
In secret arrest operations, the person detained is usually accosted
on the street by a number of men who "escort" him to prison or a
safehouse as inconspicuously as possible. Secret arrest as a rule means
that the arresting service has plans which require that the fact of the
suspect's arrest be concealed as long as possible. This does not neces-
sarily mean he is to be turned loose to be used as an informer, for the
intent may only be to gain time and avoid scaring others before
arrests can be made. It may mean that the arrestee is expected to pro-
vide evidence leading to the identification and arrest of persons not
yet known to the security service. Occasionally a person is arrested
on trumped up charges in the hope of getting him to provide evi-
dence against himself by surprise and under high pressure. The pos-
sibility also exists that the arrest has been undertaken secretly in
order to avoid embarrassment if the prisoner has to be released for
lack of evidence later?that is to say, the arrest is a bluff. But in a
good percentage of the cases there is a substantial prospect that the
person detained may be let loose to function as a doubled agent, and
the arrested person should take comfort from this circumstance and
plan his defense accordingly.
Interrogation
While the prisoner is being processed into his cell, last minute
preparations for his interrogation will be under way. The interrogators
who are to deal with the prisoner will be putting the finishing touches
on their interrogation plan and examining the materials recovered
during arrest and body search. Frequently, the prisoner will not be
interrogated for some time after entering his cell. During the interval
the prisoner should review the main points of his cover story and of
his fall-back story and decide what his attitude toward the interroga-
tors will be. He may be fed, briefed on the rules, and allowed to go
to sleep, only to be suddenly awakened and hurried off to an interroga-
tion cell.
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If the prisoner has been secretly arrested, his handling can vary
widely. He may not be searched. He may be brought to a safehouse.
He may be given a very friendly reception. On the other hand, he may
be subjected to very harsh and violent treatment, in an effort to force
or frighten a confession out of him. Harsh or violent treatment and
hasty interrogation are indications that the arresting authorities are on
a "fishing expedition" and do not really have sufficient information
and evidence in hand.
/n the initial stages of any interrogation it is best for the prisoner
to play the role of a well-intentioned, but confused and innocent
victim. The jails are full of prisoners who made the mistake of being
clear and precise in their replies to seemingly harmless questions.
The first thing every interrogator has to determine is whether his
prisoner can tell a straight story about anything, or whether he
is in a state of confusion. Prisoners are under no obligation to
collaborate with their captors by exhibiting good memories and
making coherent statements. This is the time to forget as much as
possible.
In all interrogation sessions, the prisoner should try to discover
the following:
a. What is known about him; more specifically, what evidence
does the interrogator have? Even Communist interrogators have
to have evidence to convict suspects, and they seldom have as
much as they pretend to have. Nothing should ever be admitted
unless the evidence that the interrogator exhibits is overwhelming.
In such cases the admission should be framed in such a way
as to mislead the interrogator as to the true nature of the evidence.
One should never assume that the case is hopeless and that one
might as well tell all.
b. Where did the interrogator get his information? The prisoner
often overlooks the fact that the interrogator may let slip information
which will indicate who betrayed the operation. By feigning
stupidity and confusion and pretending not to understand ques-
tions, the prisoner may maneuver the interrogator into making
further disclosures which may indicate the source of the betrayal.
c. What are the intentions of the authorities? By the time the
prisoner is in his cell, he will have many clues to analyze: The
arrest procedure, the search procedure, the remarks which the
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arresting authorities may have made within his hearing, and other
circumstances preceding the arrest which he may call to mind.
Thinking these things over as calmly and as thoroughly as pos-
sible can help the prisoner to plan his defense.
d. How much importance do the authorities attach to the
prisoner? When the prisoner faces his interrogators, he can gain
valuable clues as to how much effort the opponent intends to
make in his case. He may find himself confronted with an expert
interrogator who knows the prisoner's language and background
very thoroughly, or he may find a relatively inexperienced and
ignorant interrogator working against him. The type of custodial
handling, such things as the number of persons making the arrest,
the speed and efficiency of his handling, ?the level of rank of
officers dealing with him, all provide clues in this direction.
In the period before arrest?and certainly before interrogation?
the prisoner should have made up his mind as to what facts he must
conceal at all costs. Such facts would include: the identity or hiding
places of other agents, the hiding places of items of evidence, the
true objectives of the operation, and important information concern-
ing his superior officers and his sponsoring organization.
Some General Rules
The rules which will help a prisoner to deal with his persecu-
tors fall into two general categories: rules concerning attitudes and
psychological defenses, and rules covering practical actions and de-
fenses.
The first psychological rule is never to give up hope, no matter
how desperate the situation appears to be. One must always bear
in mind that the opponent is not only human but in all likelihood
under heavy pressures of doubt and handicapped by fragmentary
information. In espionage matters so much is cloudy and confused
in even the clearest cases, that prisoners who know the game can
frustrate their opponents--if they persist.
The second psychological rule is to view oneself in custody as
continuing the fight with other weapons and on another basis.
The third rule is to view oneself as a patriotic hero fighting to free
his people. After all, the soldier fights in groups, from which he
draws courage. The secret agent generally spends most of his time
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CONFIDENTIAL Interrogation
fighting singlehanded without this type of strong support. His fight
is waged against great odds; hence he deserves extra credit for
heroism?not condemnation as a "cowardly spy." One's own evalua-
tion of oneself tends to get across to associates?and guards and
interrogators are de facto associates of a sort, who may come to
respect the prisoner who respects himself in spite of themselves.
The safest pose is the pose of calm equality: "We are both doing our
duty according to our principles."
Rule four is in many ways the most important: Care must be taken
not to slip insensibly into the attitude that there is no world except
the prison, no future, and that the time scale of the prison is all that
counts. It must consciously be remembered that there is another
world and that one day the prisoner will have to face that world and
its rewards or punishment. Liberation may be very sudden and
soon?then what?
Rule five is to remember one's own importance. The agent, con-
fronted with the vastness of the prison and the clandestine activity,
tends in any case to come to consider himself and what he does as
unimportant. This is both a harmful attitude and an error: the agent
is often very important and never unimportant. He can within limits
continue to have an effect upon the world even while tied hand and
foot, possibly even a greater effect than when he was at large. He
cannot know what is going on behind the scenes of the opponent's
organization. His case may be a cause c?bre, or even the subject
of international negotiations. The prison administration, however, will
make every effort to make him appear to himself as the forgotten man.
Combatting Environmental Influences
The tactics of most Communist services are designed to weaken the
prisoner through relatively simple but highly effective methods.
"Brainwashing" as commonly understood is an inexact notion. The
prisoner can expect to be confined in a bleak and uncomfortable cell
illuminated with a very bright light 24 hours a day. He will be under
constant observation but unable to communicate with anyone. He
will be required to obey minute, irritating, and senseless restrictions.
His food supply will be inadequate and particularly deficient in vita-
mins. He will be deprived of sleep, required to sleep in a certain posi-
tion when he does get a chance to lie down, and may have to stand
for many hours on end. Interrogators and others will suggest that he
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is guilty of all sorts of things and may alternate their treatment with
sudden, unexpected interludes of kindness and even friendliness. The
alternation of this treatment, especially when one is not prepared
for it, can induce a state of mind gravely weakening the power to
resist. Many former prisoners have stated that they were most weak-
ened by friendly approaches after a long period of hardship. They
found themselves forgetting that the interrogator was their enemy.
They found themselves accepting the idea that they had to exonerate
themselves and rehabilitate themselves, succumbing to intense feel-
ings of guilt.
The interrogators, while they have a great deal of latitude and
authority over the prisoner's situation, nevertheless would get into
trouble, possibly quite serious, if the prisoner died or became de-
mented or crippled as a result of the treatment he had been subjected
to. The interrogator is not all-powerful. Prisoners should eat what-
ever food is placed before them to sustain their strength. With a little
practice, however, some persons can vomit at will, and it could be
effective if the prisoner suddenly did so upon the interrogator or in
his presence. No interrogator enjoys close and continued contact with
a prisoner who has lost control of his bowel movements. Fainting is
sometimes an effective gambit. This interrupts the interrogation and
creates time-wasting interludes while the prisoner is revived. The
prison administration takes care to forestall attempts by prisoners
to commit suicide. However, people have committed suicide in prison
through dashing their heads against the walls, through biting their
wrist arteries open, through inhaling items of food causing strangula-
tion, and through other ingenious methods. There is nothing to pre-
vent the prisoner from experimenting with suicide attempts in such
fashion as to alarm the interrogator, and it takes a pretty determined
interrogator to avoid making the prisoner's lot easier when this
threat becomes evident.
Immediately upon imprisonment the prisoner should devise some
method of keeping track of time. This is most difficult if there is no
daylight in the prison cell. The prison schedules and routines are often
deliberately varied in order to distort the prisoner's sense of time.
The prisoner can pass the time he records very profitably by engrav-
ing upon his memory, through the process of repeated recall, important
details about his opponents which will be valuable later on. Unless
the prisoner makes a conscious effort to memorize these details, when
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Interrogation
he gets out of prison he will usually be unable to recall important
facts, dates, and the like. The prisoner should memorize the features
and mannerisms of the interrogators, particularly unusual items such
as an accent, a deformity, or some striking habit. He should attempt
to find out as much as he can about the building in which he is
housed, particularly its location. He should attempt to become familiar
with the guards, who in a sense are also prisoners. The "friendly"
guard, of course, is usually a provocateur, so he should be told noth-
ing of significance except what the prisoner wants to reach the ears
of his interrogators. However, cultivation of the guard can be used
to elicit interesting details from him and may enable the prisoner
to ease his own lot a little. Now and then the guard will be found
who is in fact sympathetic to the prisoner. The prisoner should at-
tempt to identify the vulnerabilities of interrogators and, of course,
always look for clues as to their identity. The intelligence services of
the free world are very well informed as to the identities of inter-
rogators and can match the information the prisoner supplies with
the information they already have to identify the interrogator fully
later.
People captured by Chinese or other Asian Communists may find
themselves imprisoned with a group of "reformed" prisoners, rather
than isolated. The other prisoners are under heavy pressure to "re-
form" the victim. They will endlessly argue with him, plead with
him, and abuse him, exerting moral pressure, and surrounding him
with an ideological environment that will cause him to feel deserted,
guilty, and hopeless. A person caught in such a situation can play
for time, as this process takes days and often weeks to be effective.
He can also use the situation to create confusion. For example, he can
tell different individuals "in confidence" very different stories, and if
he is good at dealing with people, he can create feuds amongst the
people seeking to "reform" him, playing one off against another.
The effects of isolation and inactivity quickly weaken all?espe-
cially persons who are congenial and like human company. We all
depend to a great extent on our associates for moral support and for
a feeling of reality. When held in a dark cell, all alone, day after
day, the desire for human contact, which can be satisfied only by the
interrogator, grows very strong in many persons. Worry becomes an
incessant companion. The tendency to see the interrogator more and
more in a heroic light and as a friend also develops. Most prisoners
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expect to find the enemy to be vile and revolting, and their resistance
is greatly weakened when they discover that the interrogator can be
a fine, clean-cut, idealistic, and quite charming person. The best de-
fense against this approach is to keep telling oneself this is just an-
other trick. If one can develop insight into one's own human weak-
ness, much of the effect of this trick will be lost. The prisoner should
realize that it is normal for a person in isolation to feel that he is
losing his mind, to feel extremely guilty, to feel terribly lonely and
anxious. The prisoner's fear that he is losing his mind is the best
guarantee that he will not lose it.
The personal equation in the relationship with the interrogator must
be borne in mind. Most people do not have dominant personalities or
great powers of leadership and persuasion. Some interrogators have
a great deal of such power. They are persons who exercise natural
authority over others, and the prisoner will find himself emotionally
affected by the demands of such commanding persons. Here again,
insight into one's own weakness is the best defense.
It is also particularly hard to resist the blandishments of an inter-
rogator who is obviously convinced of the justice of his own cause,
and sincerely attempts to "reform" the prisoner. It is well to remember
that some of the most sincere persons in history have been the most
vicious, such as, for example, Adolf Hitler. Sincerity is no guarantee
of the justice of a cause, but unless one is on one's guard against
it, one can become persuaded.
As long as possible, and certainly until the pressure becomes in-
tolerable, the prisoner should stick to his cover story. If he has worked
up a plausible story, and has learned it reasonably well, and has lived
his cover, he may be able to make the interrogator believe it. This
happens more frequently than most people think. The interrogator is
just another human being. In any case, as the interrogation proceeds,
the prisoner can elaborate and develop the legend or cover story,
especially if he has had the foresight to appear to be very confused and
mixed up in the beginning. If gaps in the cover story become appar-
ent, the prisoner can think up lies to insert. As the interrogation pro-
ceeds, he can rehearse these lies with the interrogator until the prisoner
himself begins to believe the story. If, after a long time, the prisoner
is forced to make a false confession he can use his fall-back cover
story and go through the same routine as he did with the first story.
Finally, if and when the prisoner is brought to admit that the fall-
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back cover story was a lie, he should go back to the original cover
story, telling the interrogator that he had told the truth the first time
and then had been forced to lie and now can think of nothing but
to tell the truth. It should be noted, and remembered, that the truth
would quite possibly not be believed in any case. It has been the
experience of many prisoners who, at an early stage, made a truthful
confession, that they received the same treatment as if they had lied.
The reason is that the opponent expects the prisoner to lie and very
often has no way of telling how much of his story is true and how
much is false, most cover stories being a mixture of truth and false-
hood.
During interrogation it is well to try to distract the attention of the
interrogator from sensitive items of information. This can be done
by pretending to conceal information of secondary importance in such
a way as to get the interrogator interested in prying it out of the
suspect. For example, a prisoner who has no confederates can tell his
story in such a way that the interrogator will conclude the prisoner
must have had help. Eventually the prisoner can involve innocent
persons?preferably persons loyal to the regime?thus causing the
investigative apparatus to waste a great deal of energy and, quite
possibly to arrest and interrogate persons who cannot possibly pro-
vide assistance.
Combatting Arguments
The prisoner can expect to be assailed with many arguments, all
intended to persuade him to cooperate. One argument that is fre-
quently effective is the statement: "We know all about your activities
anyway. What I am doing is giving you a chance to explain and justify
yourself." While this argument seems silly to a man who is not in
prison, it has been extremely effective with many prisoners. Threats and
promises are often made in a linked fashion. For example, the prisoner
may be told he will be executed as a war criminal unless he cooper-
ates, in which case he may be redeemed and even allowed to go free.
Particularly effective is the trick of minimization. The interrogator
takes the position that the prisoner was a dupe, really did not intend
to commit a terrible crime, was victimized by his superiors, did not
understand what he was doing, and so forth. The interrogator says
that he fully understands the prisoner's activities and reasoning and
might do the same if he were in the prisoner's shoes. This technique
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is quite effective in inducing a prisoner to make small admissions. Once
such small admissions have been made, they are used to pry more
and more information out of the victim.
Another argument which is very effective when several persons in
the same network have been arrested is based upon the natural dis-
trust people have for each other. The interrogator will say or imply
that the other persons arrested have long since confessed, putting the
blame on the victim now being interrogated. The prisoner is then
asked what he has to say in his defense, and if he believes he has
been betrayed, he may easily fall into the trap of trying to put the
blame on his accomplices. The only safe rule, no matter how over-
whelming the evidence may be that others have confessed, is to stick
to the story, and under no circumstances to attack one's associates.
Political arguments are often effective, especially against prisoners
who do not know the inside story of Communist activities. People will
be confused by long quotations from political authorities attacking
their beliefs. It should be remembered that the devil himself can
quote Scripture to his purpose. Often quotations from very great men,
such as Abraham Lincoln, are twisted and edited to suit such pur-
poses. Very effective is the "inevitable victory of Communism" ap-
proach. The prisoner is told that soon his homeland will be occupied
by Communist forces and that he will be personally responsible for
what happens to his family and friends if he does not cooperate. He
will be told that Communist success is only a matter of time, and that
he is wasting himself trying to prevent it. He will be told that he is
pulling the chestnuts of other countries out of the fire, that he is a
dupe of the capitalists, that his superiors are quislings and that the
only way out is for him to help his enemies.
A particularly dangerous interrogator is a convert to Communism
who was formerly on the prisoner's side of the fence. He can say,
"I used to believe the same way that you do. I changed my mind for
such and such reasons, and you can do the same." The convert can
persuade the prisoner to hope that he too can be redeemed by con-
version. After a long and miserable time in prison, this temptation
becomes very strong. The best defense for the prisoner is to remember
that conversion under duress is always suspect, and that, if the man
interrogating him is a genuine convert, the circumstances of his con-
version could not have involved duress.
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A prisoner can sometimes waste a great deal of the interrogator's
time by long and involved descriptions of trivial affairs and matters.
This is particularly effective if, from the beginning, the prisoner has
used complicated constructions and confusing non sequitur in his ex-
planations. When stopped in a rambling discourse, the clever prisoner
flounders and gets mixed up, loses the thread of what he was saying
and then winds up starting at the beginning once more. Most inter-
rogators tend to let the prisoner talk in the hope that he will say
something of value. In most Communist prisons the interrogator is
required to report the prisoner's statements in writing. The more con-
fused and rambling the information is, the more time-consuming and
repulsive the task of transcription becomes.
In some circumstances it may be profitable for the prisoner to tell
the interrogator that the day may come when the interrogator?like
a number of the Nazi Gestapo?may find himself on trial as a war
criminal. Some interrogators fear this ultimate fate. A prisoner can
sometimes profitably attempt to involve the interrogator in an ideologi-
cal discussion. Most Communists render lip service to Marxist ideology,
but know as little about Marx as the average religious person knows
about the Bible, the Torah, or the Koran. It does no harm to ask for
Marxist literature. Anything which will delay or sidetrack the inter-
rogation can be useful. Sometimes such literature will be supplied
on demand, and the ingenious prisoner can contrive to waste the
interrogator's time and energy in fruitless ideological discussions. The
prisoner who knows the laws pertinent to his case can often quote
it to help himself. Communist law is usually a farce, but it is a farce
that Communists are expected to maintain.
Warning
In all cases, whether or not the prisoner undertakes to arouse the
curiosity or the fears of the interrogator, great care must be taken
not to arouse personal hostility. One of the most foolish and dangerous
things a prisoner can do is to incur the personal hatred of the guards
or the interrogators.
It is customary in most Communist prisons for the prisoner to be
required to sign the written protocol of each day's interrogation. If
the prisoner has had the foresight not to carry specimens of his own
handwriting with him, he can sign the protocol in a distorted hand-
writing (which he should have memorized). However he signs, he
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Interrogation
should always first write, "I have read this document," and then cross
his signature over this line of writing. This is legal in most Communist
prisons and hinders the use of the signed protocol as if it were a
signed confession. To the limits of his ability, the prisoner should
refuse to countersign documents written in a language he does not
understand.
Coping With Interrogator Tricks
In addition to environmental influences, direct accusation, and
moral pressure, the prisoner will have to deal with a great many
tricks of the interrogation trade. There are so many of these that a
full catalogue is impossible. Most of the tricks, however, are relatively
simple, and once one has studied the pattern of trickery and types of
common tricks outlined below, one should readily be able to spot
most of them. It should be noted that these tricks are not confined
to Communist interrogators, but are used by police and other interroga-
tors all over the world. The defense suggested will be discussed in
connection with the individual approaches.
A most obvious trick which is still surprisingly effective is to ask
the prisoner why he thinks he has been arrested. The trick is very
simple and very often provokes the prisoner into making disclosures
which the interrogator had never suspected. The best defense is some
statement which fits into the cover arrangement. If, for example, the
prisoner is posing as a national of some other country, he may infer that
he has been arrested because it is the policy of the local government
to persecute citizens of his country. Whatever explanation the prisoner
volunteers should be along the line of imputing persecution, or error,
or blackmail, or some other discreditable motive to the arresting au-
thority. This is part of the basic posture of the prisoner of rejecting
any implication that he could be guilty of an offense. As always, the
reply should not be conspicuously clear. It is always safe to say one
has no idea, but this reply is negative, and attacking is usually a
better defense.
Sometimes the prisoner will find himself accused or suspected of
activities in which he has never engaged. This can be a trap, for it is
quite possible that the prisoner, in his haste to establish an alibi by
proving where he really was at a given time, will provide the arrest-
ing authorities with information of great importance which they
did not have and may not even have suspected to exist.
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Sometimes elaborate scenarios are set up to induce the prisoner
to believe that he is not, or not yet, under interrogation. For example,
he may find himself awaiting processing in a cell with two or three
other "prisoners," one or more of whom are actually informers. These
persons will seek to involve him in a harmless conversation. The wise
prisoner never forgets that there is no harmless conversation in. prisons.
The prisoner may be asked to fill out some simple form concerning
his belongings, and involving notification of relatives, employer, or
friends. By filling out such a form the prisoner may provide the inter-
rogator with a specimen of his handwriting and often a great deal of
useful information. If forced to fill out any forms, the prisoner is well
advised to use a distorted handwriting and to put in false or mis-
leading information. Occasionally an interrogator will pose as a tech-
nical specialist. That is to say, a "guest" of the interrogation staff rill
be left alone with the prisoner on the pretense that the interrogation
has been interrupted to "talk shop." Depending on the cover story that
the person under interrogation is supporting, he should or should not
go along with this trick.
A particularly devastating trick is to compel the prisoner to tell his
cover story or legend backwards. It is, therefore, a good idea, when
memorizing a cover story, literally to learn it forwards and backwards.
When a question of alibi arises, that is to say, a determination of
where the prisoner was at a certain time, the prisoner who has not
lived his cover is especially vulnerable. For example, the prisoner may
state that at a certain time he was at a certain hotel in a certain
city. The interrogator makes a note of this and then, after some hours
or days have passed, calls the prisoner in and says that he has in-
vestigated the alibi and asks the prisoner whether he noticed any
unusual event during his alleged stay at the hotel. Conversely, the
interrogator may tell the prisoner that at the time he was supposedly
at the hotel, there was a hold-up or some other spectacular event.
This he will do in the course of a "conversation" and the prisoner, in
his effort to sustain his alibi may go along with the interrogator's
fabrication and so trap himself. The interrogator, of course, may not
let the prisoner know that he has been trapped. The best defense of
a prisoner who has not been at the place he claims to have been is
to plan in advance to claim a place where he could have been sleep-
ing at the time something unusual occurred. He could, for example,
in the hotel situation, easily have missed even a fire in some other
part of the hotel through being asleep.
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The interrogator may have an enormous file on his desk and look
into it from time to time as if reading about the prisoner. He may
speak as if he knows a great deal, dropping names, mentioning
addresses, even telephone numbers. This type of technique can be
exploited to the prisoner's advantage, for the interrogator, in his
efforts to impress the prisoner, may let slip many valuable items of
information, including the extent of his own ignorance.
Some interrogators have success with very simple tricks such as
staring silently at the bridge of the suspects nose. This gives the
suspect the feeling that the interrogator is looking through him. Most
persons cannot stand a sustained silence. The wise prisoner will simply
sit and stare back.
Sometimes interrogators resort to very persistent and detailed ques-
tioning about matters about which the prisoner has no knowledge,
with the result that, when a question is slipped in to which the
prisoner can provide a satisfactory answer, he will feel relieved and
let fall information he should keep to himself.
Sometimes a prisoner is plied with questions which make no sense.
Most persons worry about losing their minds or at least self-control
in such situations and naturally assume that they themselves are slip-
ping, when in fact the interrogators are deliberately talking nonsense.
It is a good idea to play around with this trick to keep the interrogator
talking nonsense as long as possible, as this gains one time.
On occasion prisoners are stripped naked and made to stand before
one or more interrogators for long periods of time. Sensitive individ-
uals find this extremely trying. We all rely upon our clothing to sustain
our image and our status. One good defense against this kind of thing
is to begin to cough and sneeze and tremble and to show preoccupa-
tion with the physical rather than the mental result of such indignity.
A common expedient is to upgrade the prisoner's living conditions
as he becomes more cooperative. He may begin prison life in a dank
or mosquito infested cell and advance to a cell which may even have
a carpet and a private toilet. He may be confined with other prisoners
who pretend to have a dreaded disease, such as tuberculosis, a venereal
disease, or a skin disease, or even leprosy.2
Persons who have visible leprosy are no longer infectious. Tuberculosis bac-
teria exist everywhere in prisons anyway. Venereal disease cannot generally be
communicated without the cooperation of the victim.
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A prisoner of importance may find himself in the hands of a
"medicarspecialist who gives him psychological examinations and may
tell him he is on the verge of insanity and suggest that he take some
injection. Everyone has heard rumors of the use of truth serums
and other debilitating drugs, "brainwashing" drugs, and the like, and
many persons are disposed to feel that no one could blame them for
confessing when confronted with or injected with drugs.
As a matter of fact, a determined person can successfully resist
truth serums and other chemical gadgets. It is obviously very frightening
to be visited by a soi disant medical specialist suggesting shock treat-
ments, nerve resection, frontal lobotomy, or castration as a means of
"helping" the prisoner to become "normal." These expedients lose
their effectiveness, however, if the prisoner realizes they are tricks,
and that a prison administration will not usually countenance any
such activities.
The Cuban interrogators have used a particularly devastating
expedient to break the will of prisoners who resist: the false firing
squad. A common variation of this trick is to have the prisoner
brought out to witness the execution of some other prisoner. Some-
times the execution is real and sometimes it is staged. He then is
told his turn is next, he is blindfolded and led to the stake, a volley
of blank cartridges is fired. The effect of this is naturally overwhelming,
and is heightened when the prisoner is told, after he discovers he
is still alive, that the next time he may not be so lucky and then
he is given one more chance to tell his story. One defense against
this trick is the knowledge that he will not be executed as long as
he has not provided the information the regime seeks. As a matter
of fact, prisoners nowadays are seldom executed without some form
of trial, even in Communist areas, because of the effect upon the prison
administration of allowing too much arbitrary mistreatment of
prisoners. As far as is known, Communist services make little use of
electromechanical "lie detectors" or polygraphs, apparently because
the general hypocrisy and paranoia of Communist societies make it
impossible to get reliable results. On occasion some trickery employ-
ing a machine represented to be a "lie detector" may be employed.
The person interrogated is best advised to deny any imputations by
the machine that he is lying.
A variant of interrogation trickery that is as old as the hills but
still traps many persons is the "good guy", "bad guy" trick. This
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is worked as follows: One interrogator consistently harasses, insults
and badgers the suspect, accusing him of lying, threatens him with
violence, pushes him around and in general behaves very badly. The
other interrogator is a friendly and rather well-intentioned man
who plays the role of the friend of the prisoner, attempting to re-
strain the "bad guy" and protect the prisoner. Eventually the prisoner
is left alone with the "good guy" who then attempts to win the prisoner's
confidence by condemning his colleague. Strange as it seems, many
a prisoner falls for this trick. Most persons are now aware of the
existence of mirror windows or two-way mirrors and realize that
someone may be watching them. Ordinary mirrors, however, are
occasionally used so that the interrogator can watch the prisoner
and his reactions while appearing to look elsewhere. The interrogator
may go to some other part of the room to fumble with a drawer or
some other object and casually make a remark to the prisoner which
contains frightening implications, and observe how the prisoner reacts
when he does not believe he is under observation.
Interrogators often seek to aggravate a prisoner by pointing out
such signs of guilt as sweating, crossing and uncrossing of legs, nail
biting, blushing, or aversion of the eyes. Persons not guilty of anything
become exceedingly nervous and uncomfortable when under inter-
rogation. In point of fact, only hardened criminals and aberrant
personalities of certain types behave calmly in such a situation. The
best defense is to say one is always nervous and ill-at-ease when in-
terrogated or questioned or even in conversations. The display of
horrible photographs of bombing victims, murder victims, or other
atrocities occurs occasionally. The interrogator calls to the prisoner's
attention that he is responsible for atrocities. This provocation has
two objectives. It can make a person feel guilty, or it can provoke
him into attempting to justify the acts of the power he supports.
The best defense is to deplore these misfortunes and to take no
stand whatsoever with regard to them.
The prisoner finds himself in a particularly hazardous situation
when he makes some small admission and the interrogator tries to
use this to pry more information out of him. Of course, "the longest
journey begins with a single step," but there is no law that says
that a person, having made one step, necessarily has to take further
steps. An admission or a slip of the tongue can be used by the
resolute prisoner to lure the interrogator up a false trail.
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Some interrogators will provide the prisoner with pencil and paper
and demand that he write his life history. This is a very tiring and
time-consuming activity. If the prisoner has maintained his posture
of confusion effectively, there is nothing to prevent him from preparing
a most confused biography. A great deal of time can be gained in
this way, as well as much peace and quiet for recovery of equilibrium
and review of the situation.
The prisoner should conceal all knowledge of foreign languages,
as far as possible. The interrogator will be very interested to identify
the foreign languages spoken by the prisoner and may use a number
of tricks, such as suddenly addressing the prisoner in a language
he is suspected to know, or speaking to a third person in this
language, while observing the prisoner. He may say something uncom-
plimentary or startling about the prisoner, seeking to cause a visible
reaction. If a strange language is spoken in his presence, the prisoner
should always make the appearance of trying to hear and understand
what is said. Many prisoners who know a foreign language act ostenta-
tiously uninterested in such a situation, but the normal behavior of a
man who does not know a language is to listen attentively in the effort
to catch a word here and there, finally to give up and lose interest.
Prison informers are not usually brought forward while there is
intensive interrogation, but may be after the prisoner has been in-
terrogated or if he is held indefinitely in detention pending investiga-
tion. The prison informer can be exceedingly dangerous or useful
depending upon the skill of the intended victim. It is wise to regard
all fellow prisoners as informers. Especially suspect, however, should
be persons who warn the prisoner against other inmates of the jail,
persons who are quite healthy in spite of the miserable prison con-
ditions. The informer often has the task of discouraging a resistant
prisoner. The prisoner should never lose sight of the fact that con-
tact with an informer or other provocator gives him an opportunity
to supply deception information to the interrogation staff, while
pretending to be telling the truth in confidence.
The interrogator will tell the prisoner, "we are alone and can
talk completely privately." A tape recorder may be ostentatiously
displayed and turned off so the prisoner can talk "off the record."
Many tall for this although common sense should tell them that no
prisoner is ever alone with any interrogator. Even if several people
are not listening in on concealed microphones and recording on
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concealed machines, what the prisoner tells the interrogator will
be told to everyone needing to know and often enough to the world-
at-large. In fact, no prisoner can ever be sure he is truly alone
anywhere. Not only are peepholes and audio devices easily employable,
and closed circuit TV a possibility, but the prisoner may find himself
quartered in a cell with a person he has every right to trust and who
is in fact trustworthy, in order that concealed devices can pick up
their conversation. Stool pigeons confined in a cell with a prisoner
may point out a "hidden" microphone and involve him in a discus-
sion outside its range, where another microphone is known to them
to be hidden.
Propaganda Exploitation
One of the most painful ordeals the agent-prisoner has to undergo
is the attempt of the apprehending service to exploit him for propa-
ganda purposes. Efforts may be made to get him to denounce his
sponsors and the regime he has been serving in favor of the Com-
munist system, both on paper and in public before cameras. De-
pending on the intentions of the Communists, the prisoner may have
to undergo a show trial or some other legal farce. Show trials usually
require that the prisoner rehearse his part in the show until it is
letter perfect. Commonly, he will be rehearsed in a story which
displays him as pleading for mercy and as the victim and/or accomplice
of a capitalist machination.
One gambit used with success in many cases is to invite or allow
the prisoner ?to write one or more letters to his loved ones. These
letters must conform in many parts to a prescribed text. If the agent
has prepared for this contingency in advance by arranging a simple
open code with his loved ones, he can use this opportunity to convey
useful information. The code must be simple, and cannot convey
complicated ideas. Provision in such a code should be made to
send at least the following messages:
a. What is stated about my situation is (is not) true.
b. I am ( am not) being severely maltreated.
c. I suspect (know) I was betrayed by
d. The enemy knows ( does not know) who my accomplices
were.
e. The enemy has a source in
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Interrogation
In some show trials, prisoners have had the courage to denounce
their rehearsed pleas. In the case of a prominent prisoner this
action may have some value, as the foreign press may be represented
or hear of it. However, in the average show trial no reporters other
than Communist sympathizers will be in the courtroom. The most
heroic conduct on the part of a prisoner ordinarily will not be men-
tioned by such persons. As a rule, therefore, the prisoner should aim
to make himself as uninteresting and useless for propaganda purposes
as possible. The propagandists do not like to put on a show with
unreliable persons?or persons who show of symptoms of crippling
mental or physical mistreatment which might arouse the sympathy
of an audience. All trials end with a predetermined verdict on which
courtroom conduct, unless it is bitterly hostile to the Communists,
will have no effect.
The thing to bear in mind in refusing cooperation in propaganda
exercises is that in the long run it will have no effect on the fate
of the prisoner whether he complies or not. On balance he will prob-
ably be better off if he does not comply. For some reason, the
Communists tend to inflict more suffering and demands on the
weak than on the strong.
At times the prisoner may be trapped by technical devices used
without his knowledge. He may be asked to review some progaganda
statement out loud and then state what he thinks of it. A secret
tape recorder will be set up to record his voice apparently saying
what in fact is merely being read. It is, therefore, advisable for anyone
given anything to read to read it in silence. Sometimes statements of
the prisoner are taken out of context and merged with something he
said elsewhere to make a damaging statement. There is little the
prisoner can do to guard himself against an effort of this kind unless
he says nothing at all, which is always a method to be tried but
can seldom be sustained long if the interrogator chooses to employ
drastic measures.
Penitentiary, Escape, Release
Once the prisoner has passed through the sentencing procedure, the
interest of the authorities in his case declines very sharply, although
attempts may later be made to recruit him as an informer. The pris-
oner should bear in mind that entry into a penitentiary with a long
sentence does not necessarily mean that he will serve this sentence.
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Important captured Communist agents are from time to time ex-
changed for agents of the West. From time to time there are diplo-
matic negotiations, as in the case of the Cuban and the East German
prisoners, resulting in the release of thousands of individuals: who
had resigned themselves to many years in prison. There is the pos-
sibility of escape. There is the possibility of the overthrow of a Com-
munist regime. This is a danger that the regime is constantly preoc-
cupied with. In the recent case of Czechoslovakia, an explosion of
the entire Communist system in Europe was thought to be imminent.
This can and will happen again and again, possibly with increasing
frequency. The prisoner should bear these consoling factors in mind.
In the penitentiary or concentration camp the prisoner will again
find human association. Among the prisoners he meets there will be
persons with whom he can cooperate, but there will also be secret
informers against whom he must defend himself and whom he can
also exploit by telling them whatever it is he wants the authorities
to believe. The prisoner should always beware of special officers in
the prison who have a stature higher than the guard personnel, es-
pecially "welfare officers" or "morale officers", or "political indoctri-
nation officers". These are very often state security service men re-
sponsible not only for keeping an eye on the prisoners, but for watching
the guards. Some of the guards will be extremely venal and others
will hate the regime.
The prisoner should look upon himself in the penitentiary as con-
tinuing the fight in a special situation, not simply as a man who is
out of action until release. His conspiratorial skills and training can
be used to good advantage in the prison. He can learn a great deal
more about conspiracy in the prison. This is, after all, the school of
conspiracy in which the Communists learned their trade. A prison is,
in a very real sense, a typical Communist country in miniature. Skill-
ful and determined prisoners have effectively operated within such
penitentiaries safely and for long periods of time to create great diffi-
culties for the prison administration, organize escapes, subvert guard
personnel, and sabotage the installation.
In considering escape plans and confederates, the prisoner must
never forget that the prison administration from time to time may
induce provocateurs to suggest escape, and thus dupe the prisoners,
later visiting heavy additional punishment on them. A provocation
of this kind generally destroys escape ideas for quite a long time.
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A provocation which is elaborate, but sometimes is used, is to
allow the prisoner to escape in company with another prisoner who
is actually a member of the security service. Usually the escape is
"miraculous" and the prime mover is the provocateur. The intent is
to win the confidence of the prisoner. In a variant of this trick,
the prisoners escape, and meet the confederates of the provocateur,
who profess to distrust the prisoner, consider him a stool, become
very angry, and threaten to kill him unless he can prove his loyalty
by proving that he has been operating against the regime. The temp-
tation to betray operations and contacts under such conditions is
strong. The best defense is to say nothing on the grounds that one
can never trust anyone and take one's chances, for it is after all
by no means unusual for one prisoner to help another escape without
ulterior motives.
The prospects and conditions governing physical escape and sub-
sequent evasion of controls vary so widely that only very general rules
can be given here:
a. Be careful whom you trust ( see above on types of provoca-
tions).
b. Be realistic as to the prospects of success: it is one thing to
get out of a prison; it is quite another to get out of the country,
and it may be foolish to try physical escape if other factors are
tending to promote the chances of early release. Prison guards may
be lax because there are other obstacles to escape beyond the
perimeter.
c. Do not aggravate your situation by committing serious crimes
in the escape effort; for example, murdering a guard will usually
result in a death sentence. Of course, there may be occasions of
active warfare in which the prisoner in his escape action is in effect
undertaking guerrilla warfare. This is not commonly the case, how-
ever, for a secret agent arrested in alien territory.
d. Beware of becoming involved in escape plots from which
you may later want to withdraw. The others plotters may decide
you know too much.
e. Above all, never become involved with persons who are sin-
cere but indiscreet.
Release from prison can come about, as already mentioned, through
a number of factors over which the prisoner has no control. One
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of the ways to get out of enemy custody most easily is to get oneself
recruited as a double agent, that is to say, to let oneself be "turned".
The hostile service, of course, is aware of this, but sometimes has
no choice but to try to recruit agents from among its captives. It
is well for the agent to memorize the factors which can make him
a desirable "turn around" for his captors:
a. Special access or other capability to accomplish something
for them.
b. Lack of publicity in his case.
c. Fundamental "job loyalty." If a man conveys the impression
that he has desperately and loyally defended the interests of his
sponsor so long as he thought the sponsor was in the right, only
turning his coat when he came to see how wrong his sponsor was,
he will win a great deal more trust than if he gives the impression
of merely yielding to pressure.
d. "Unpacking." In general, before a person will be considered
really "doubled," he will have had to make a full confession of
his activities. It is possible to display the appearance of this pro-
vided the planning has been thorough, even while concealing vital
information. The agent can best plan his ultimate "confession" ( really
a third cover story) at his leisure in his cell after he has had many
sessions with his interrogators and has discovered what they
actually know. He can devise a story which explains the known
factors and makes him look attractive from the point of view of
potential to do things the opponent wants him to do. Woven into
the story should be factors which induce the opponent to think
he can control the potential "double agent" through blackmail. For
example, the prisoner in the course of "unburdening his soul" can
confess to serious but not easily checkable misdeeds, such as em-
bezzlement or fraud. Confession to crimes such as murder is fine,
provided investigation by the opponent will confirm that such a
crime was in fact committed, the guilty person not apprehended,
and the prisoner could have committed it. The prisoner may "betray"
an ambition to become a figure of power in his homeland which can
only be realized by collaboration with the enemy. The prisoner
must be very careful in pretending to become "converted" to the
opponent's faith. Protesting too much is usually suspect, but true
believers seeking converts are often quite vulnerable to being de-
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Interrogation
ceived by the pretence of belief on the part of others. Easy capit-
ulation is, of course, fatal to any hopes of emerging as a double
agent.
Most prisoners in jail for clandestine operations find themselves
free as a result of one or another event unexpectedly and suddenly.
A word of caution is in order: There is a tremendous temptation to
share one's joy and information with all one encounters in the first
wild elation of release. This should be rigorously suppressed, for
only harm can come from spontaneous disclosures, even when fully
true, to unauthorized persons before coordination with the original
sponsor has been effected. Publicity may for example alert the person
who betrayed the prisoner, so that he may escape or destroy evidence.
Whatever is said will be twisted by certain publications to the det-
riment of sponsors, friends, and relatives and thus may endanger in-
nocent persons. Public recriminations against the Communists for
treatment received in prison can hinder the release of other prisoners,
and possibly damage secret operations which are under way. For
maximum effect, release stories have to be enriched with information
not known to the released or escaped person, and publicized at the
right time and place. It may be desirable to avoid any publicity, as
this may be just what the opposition hoped to achieve.
Above all, the prisoner should never forget that one can turn
almost any situation to one's advantage with a little luck and care-
ful planning.
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Distant events shape the
craft of intelligence.
THE BOGOTAZO
Jack Davis
On the afternoon of 9 April 1948, angry mobs suddenly and
swiftly reduced the main streets of Bogota to a smoking ruin. Radio
broadcasts, at times with unmistakable Communist content, called
for the overthrow of the Colombian government and of "Yankee
Imperialism." Many rioters wore red arm bands; some waved ban-
ners emblazoned with the hammer-and-sickle. A mob gutted the
main floor of the Capitolio Nacional, disrupting the deliberations of
the Ninth International Conference of American States and forcing
Secretary of State Marshall and the other delegates to take cover.
The army regained control of the city over the next day or two.
But not before several thousand Colombians had been killed. It was
the bogotazo.
The reaction in Washington was also dramatic and swift. Congress-
men and commentators alike lamented that Communist Russia had
scored a signal victory in the Cold War. The recently organized
Central Intelligence Agency in particular was rebuked for having
provided no warning of this "South American Pearl Harbor." And
on 15 April the Director of Central Intelligence defended the Agency's
performance, first before a congressional subcommittee investigating
the failure of US intelligence, and then before the Washington press
corps.
This article attempts to assess the impact of the bogotazo on the
history both of Colombia and of the CIA. The passage of two decades
is a mixed blessing in this undertaking by one who was not a partici-
pant. Some formerly disputed aspects of the affair seem clear in
retrospect; other aspects remain or have become murky. Those among
the readers who personally experienced this dramatic episode, either
in Bogota or in Washington, are urged to transmit comments to the
editors of the Studies, so that a more definitive account can be
written for the history of the Agency. MORI/HRP
from pg.
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Bogotd: The Aborted Revolution
One thing now seems clear amidst the confusion that still surrounds
the bogotazo: Colombia in 1948 was closer to social revolution than
it has ever been before or since. The old order was under challenge
from a forceful and extremely popular politician, Jorge Eliecer Caftan,
and the poor in the cities, especially Bogota, were in a rebellious mood.
But it was the assassination of the one that turned on the dreadful
violence of the other. No one else was able to harness the savage
energy of the mob; certainly not the feckless Colombian Commu-
nists, though they tried. The government preferred to blame the
riots on Communist agitation and foreign intrigue, rather than to
address itself to the underlying causes of popular discontent. Today,
some twenty years later, the same elite, somewhat expanded and
more enlightened, still controls Colombia. Indeed the bogotazo has
served as an antidote to revolution, because the ruling classes now
tend to avoid the excessive partisanship and disdain for the welfare
of the masses that helped set the stage for the rising of the poor
on 9 April?"Black Friday"-1948.
Throughout nearly all its history, political and economic power in
Colombia has been monopolized by a small elite which has ruled
through either the Conservative or Liberal Party, or through some
combination of the two. Leaders of national stature who attempted
to organize the masses against the oligarchs were rare. Caftan was
one such. He was himself of humble origin and mixed blood. He
was a staunch antagonist of oligarchical rule and a spellbinding orator.
His keynote was "I am not a man, I am a people."
Yet by 1948 Caftan had captured control of the Liberal Party,
which was the majority party even without his broad personal fol-
lowing. Only a split of the Liberal vote between Caftan and an
oligarch nominated by the Party had enabled the Conservatives to
capture the presidency in 1946. Caftan was a strong favorite to
win the presidency in the election scheduled for 1950. His role as
Liberal Party leader, naturally enough, somewhat curbed his license
to attack the oligarchs of both parties.
The bogotalios, usually resigned to their poverty, had turned bitter
in the years immediately following World War II. Times were bad;
the rich made their clever adjustments, but, the poor suffered simul-
taneously from soaring prices and declining job opportunities. Also, in
the usual pattern of Colombian history, the return of the Conservative
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Party to power in Bogota in 1946 meant that its partisans in the hin-
terland, with the help of the army and police, were intimidating
their Liberal counterparts. Early in 1948 Caftan had addressed a
rally of 100,000 in Bogota and demanded an end to government per-
secution and violence.
The gaitanistas were angered still further by the fact that their
hero had not been appointed to the Colombian delegation to the
International Conference of American States which convened in
Bogota on 30 March. Moreover, Foreign Minister Laureano Gomez,
to the Liberals the most feared and hated Conservative leader, had
been selected to head the Colombian delegation and thus had been
"elected" president of the Conference. There is evidence that some
supporters of Caftan, apparently with his knowledge and perhaps
mild encouragement, were considering the possibility of a coup d'etat
for 1948. This probably reflected their awareness of the growing popu-
lar discontent and their doubts that a fair election would be held
in 1950. In any case Gaitan's murder on 9 April also put to death
a potentially revolutionary moment and the bogotazo was no more
than its wake.
The assassination took place on a downtown street as Caftan was
walking to lunch. The murderer was apparently one of those fanatics
or psychopaths we say may never be excluded from calculations on
the safety of dignitaries. His motives cannot be known for certain,
for he was battered to death on the spot by frenzied bystanders.
Inevitably, charges were raised of the complicity of the Conserva-
tive Party, of the Communists, and of the US. But no strong evidence
of a political plot has ever been produced.
Naturally enough the outraged populace of Bogota was convinced
that the Conservatives were the culprits, and its vengeance was di-
rected primarily toward the Party's symbols, though also toward
those of the oligarchy generally. Laureano Gomez's newspaper build-
ing and his suburban estate were destroyed. The mobs that attacked
the Capitolio were looking for Laureano (though they were also
The assassin was identified as Juan Roa Sierra. The Colombian police indicated
that he was seeking revenge for a relative slain by an Army officer, who had been
acquitted on 8 April on the strength of a legal defense by Caftan. A subsequent
government-sponsored study of the affair by Scotland Yard agents does not men-
tion this story, but pictures Boa as a mystic with delusions of grandeur who had
sought a political appointment from Callan and had been given a run-around.
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Bogotazo
shouting anti-US slogans). Cathedrals and priests as well as public
buildings and commercial establishments were made targets, be-
cause the Church was associated with both the Conservative party
and the old order.
What of leadership? Caftan's stalwarts gave the mob some early
political direction, hoping to topple the government. The red arm
bands were the traditional symbol of the Liberal Party. The Commu-
nists had long planned to disrupt the Conference but before the as-
sassination had attempted nothing risky or substantial. After the
start they also did what they could to enlarge the disorders and
to give them a political direction. From time to time they gained
access to the microphones at radio stations captured by rebel forces.
Through the Soviet Embassy they also had access to clandestine
stations and to printing presses. But the Communists were neither
strong enough nor popular enough to take command. Caftan had
stolen most of their thunder through his own populistic appeals.
In terms of both radio time and street leadership the bogotazo was
mostly a gaitanista affair. In any case, frenzy and drunkenness soon
diverted the mob from its interest in political vengeance and revolu-
tion, to violence and looting as ends in themselves.
There were many foreign radicals in Bogota at the time, to
advertise their causes in the publicity extended to the Conference
of American States. Fidel Castro, then 22 years old, happened to
be one of them. Thorough investigations indicate that he played only
a minor role. Castro subsequently reported that he tried to turn the
mob into a revolutionary force, but was defeated by the onset of
drunkenness and looting. The episode may have influenced his
adoption in Cuba in the 1950s of a guerrilla strategy rather than
one of revolution through urban disorders.
Most of the police in Bogota were pro-Liberal and gaitanista in
their political loyalties. Many joined the mob or handed over their
arms soon after the rioting began. In contrast, the army, slowly aug-
mented from provincial barracks, stood by the government. The
soldiers followed the orders of their officers and shot volley after
volley, point blank, into the crowds. This?together with the stead-
fastness of the Conservative president, the growing concern of many
Liberal leaders about the anti-oligarchical nature of the affair, and
the unwinding of the mob's fury?brought a sharp reduction in vio-
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lence within a day or two. But continued sniping, dislocations brought
on by a general strike, and a dispute over the burial site for Gaitan
kept the capital city unsettled for another week.
Events in the outlying cities were much less significant, though not
devoid of drama. Some Communists were able to raise the Soviet
banner over the town hall of Barranquilla. Apparently it took but
one army officer to tear it down. Liberal partisans gained control of
Cali temporarily. A presumptuous group of local Communists: then
declared the establishment of the "Soviet Socialist Republic of
Colombia." Here too the army swiftly reestablished government con-
trol. The officer in charge was the then obscure Colonel Gustavo Rojas
Pinilla, whose effectiveness and devotion to duty were duly noted
in Bogota.
As it turned out the bogotazo probably had its most lasting impact
on the countryside. Political violence involving feuding Liberal and
Conservative bands, never completely absent in Colombia, had been
increasing in tempo since the return to power of a Conservative gov-
ernment in 1946. (The Liberals previously had ruled since 1930.) In
the period before April 1948, the Conservatives, with help as we
have indicated from army and police, had been getting the best of
it. With the news of the bogotazo, Liberal partisans struck everywhere
with fury. But soon Conservative bands had better arms and were
able to retaliate. Rural warfare reached a new high level known as
La Violencia, which was to claim more than 200,000 lives in the
following decade. This remarkable bloodletting, stimulated by the
bogotazo and nourished by the deeply rooted feuds between Conser-
vatives and Liberals, also reflected the hard times economically, the
attractiveness of violence as a way of life for many peasants, the
ineptness of the government, and the senseless factionalism of the
country's more civilized politicians.
The inability of the civilian leaders to curb either the rural violence
or their own bitter political disputes opened the way for Rojas
Pinilla, now a general, to take control as military dictator in 1953.
He made progress in reducing rural warfare; but by 1957 his regime
had become so arbitrary and corrupt that he was put out of office by
the oligarchy and the military establishment. The former in particular
feared Rojas' efforts to organize a mass anti-oligarchical party. In
1958, to curb such tendencies and to preclude future bogotazos, the
civilian leaders set up a remarkable coalition government called the
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National Front that has prevented Liberals and Conservatives from
competing for office directly.2 They have over recent years considerably
curbed their partisanship, and worked, with modest success, toward
improved conditions for the poor. The National Front is scheduled to
run to 1974. Another bogotazo is possible; but for the moment there
is no revolutionary leader of stature, and the poor, while perhaps
discontented, are not seething.
Washington: The Aborted Investigation
The- Washington reaction to the Bogota riots was heavily influenced
by the initial responses in Colombia of the Conservative government
and of Secretary of State Marshall. The Colombians charged that
both the assassination and the riots were parts of a "premeditated
movement inspired by Communists and undesirable foreign elements"
to sabotage the conference. Marshall reported to the press that the
riots had been Communist-inspired and as such were an extension
to the Western Hemisphere of the tactics of subversion and violence
that the Soviet Union was employing in Europe. He insisted that the
conference continue in Bogota (as it did), so that international com-
munism would be denied a victory over the free countries of America.3
In 1948?the year of the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia,
of concerted Communist drives to gain power in France and Italy,
and of the beginning of the Berlin blockade?a deliberate Soviet ex-
tension of the cold war to the Western Hemisphere was indeed a cred-
ible phenomenon to many US observers. The following is from a New
York Times editorial (April 14):
"Backing up the findings of the Colombian Government, Secretary of State
Marshall and other delegates to the Inter-American Conference have now
likewise accused Soviet Russia, and its tool, international communism, of in-
stigating the riots that wrecked Bogota and cast a pall over the whole West-
ern Hemisphere. Basing their judgment on first-hand information and per-
sonal observation on the spot, they see in the tragic events which interrupted
their deliberations the same powers and patterns at work as in the attempted
insurrections in France and Italy. And that makes Bogota, as Mr. Marshall
said, not merely a Colombian or Latin American incident but a world affair,
and a particularly lurid illustration of the length to which Russia is willing
to go in its no longer ( cold war) against the democracies."
Among other features, the office of president is rotated between the parties and
the congress is divided equally between them.
Within a few days after the riots the Colombian government began reporting
that the assassination had been a non-political act. In time Marshall indicated that
he believed that the Communists had taken advantage of the disorders but had
probably not directly initiated them.
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The US reaction to the bogotazo?in particular the talk of an in-
telligence failure and the search for a scapegoat?was conditioned
not only by cold war jitters but also by election year politics. The
Truman administration was already under attack from its Republican
adversaries for, among other things, being inept and naive in the
ways of combatting Communism. Governor Dewey, campaigning for
the Republican presidential nomination, had been attacking Truman
for the shortcomings of the recently-established Central Intelligence
Agency even before the Bogota riots. Then on 12 April he let loose the
following blast:
"If the United States had the adequate intelligence service it should, it
would have known about Communist plans for the Bogota uprising in ad-
vance. Knowing what goes on in the world is just as important as know-
ing how to handle it. The Panama Canal is vital to our security. Yet because
of the dreadful incompetence of our present government, we apparently
had no idea what was going on in a country just two hours bombing time
from the Panama Canal.
"During the war the United States had the finest intelligence service
operating all over South America under J. Edgar Hoover. After the war
Mr. Truman ordered the entire service discontinued. He cut off our ears
and put out our eyes in our information service around the world." 4
Dewey's attack in good measure reflected the prevailing attitude
in this country toward the role of intelligence organizations. The shock
of the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent
wartime emphasis on prediction of enemy attack led many Washing-
ton observers to believe that all crises should be predicted in advance.
Thus, only a grievous intelligence failure would have caused us not
to have had prior warning of the Bogota riots ( especially insofar as
they were part of a well-planned Communist conspiracy).
At least several congressmen thought so, including Rep. Clarence J.
Brown ( Republican, Ohio). On April 10, the day after the riots,
Brown urged an investigation of the intelligence community by the
House Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments.
This committee had sponsored through the House the National Se-
curity Act of 1947 under which CIA had been established. Brown let
it be known that he intended to call first Admiral Roscoe H. Hillen-
koetter, Director of Central Intelligence, and then representatives of
the State Department and of the military intelligence services.
From a report on the speech in The New York Times, 13 April 1948.
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Bogotazo
At this point the motives, actions, and interactions of participants
become private and complicated. Hillenkoetter made some abortive
attempts to quash the investigation. He apparently also became con-
vinced that the CIA record on the matter was a good one. He dis-
cussed strategy with President Truman who apparently encouraged
him to confront the congressional critics with the CIA record. Truman
and his political advisors, qua Democrats, may have decided that
such a course might strip Governor Dewey of a political issue and re-
dound to the credit of the Administration as well as of the Agency.
In any case Hillenkoetter did appear on 15 April before an executive
session of a special subcommittee of the Committee on Expenditures.
Representative Brown, chairman of the subcommittee, opened by
stating that it was authorized to investigate the CIA to "learn whether
the Secretary of State and other high officials were promptly warned
that a revolution was impending in Colombia, and that their attend-
ance at the Bogota Conference might endanger their lives and bring
embarrassment to the United States."
From his hard charging testimony the Admiral appeared to be any-
thing but a reluctant witness. He rebuked his critics by stating that
CIA had known of "unrest in Colombia" and of the "possibility of
violence and outbreak aimed primarily at embarrassing the American
delegation and its leaders," and that this information had been trans-
mitted to officials of the State Department.
He then read excerpts from classified CIA intelligence reports,
based on information received from agents in Bogota during Janu-
ary-March 1948. These talked of Communist plans to demonstrate
against and block the progress of the conference. Some of the reports
indicated that at least one advisor to Caftan was an advocate of
social revolution and was in contact with Colombian Communists
and the Soviet Embassy.
IIillenkoetter in his testimony charged that Embassy officials in
Bogota had blocked the transmission to the Department in Washing-
ton of a key report. He said that this report, dated 23 March, indicated
"confirmed information that Communist-inspired agitators will at-
tempt to humiliate [the] Secretary of State and other members of
[the] US delegation . . . by manifestation and possibly personal
molestation," upon their arrival in Bogota. ( This would of course have
taken place late in March.)
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This was a period of endemic wrangling between State and CIA.
Some Department officials believed that the Agency was trying to
build an "empire" abroad; Agency officials for their part resented
State's reluctance to provide cover for Station personnel and the
interference of ambassadors with the transmission and dissemination
of CIA reports. Thus, Hillenkoetter may have raised the issue of inter-
ference to spark congressional support for the Agency's position.
Also, the Admiral apparently felt that he had erred in not disseminat-
ing this particular report (which had been transmitted to CIA Head-
quarters) on his personal authority as Director of Central Intelligence,
and he may have wanted to present the facts of the case to the
congressional investigators in the most favorable light.
In any case, his charges served to give the critics of the administra-
tion a new target for attack in the Bogota affair?the State Depart-
ment. Representative Brown made a big point of the intereference
issue at the hearings ( and subsequently before the House and at
press conferences). He said that Congress in establishing CIA had not
intended for State to have the power of veto over Agency reporting
and that he would work to see that the will of Congress prevailed on
the matter. State, moreover, was now subjected to criticism from
Brown for not having called off the conference after being warned by
CIA of pending disorders.
Then, after the executive session, someone called in the press,
perhaps Representative John W. McCormack ( Mass.), the only Dem-
ocrat at the hearings. And Hillenkoetter at the subcommittee's direction
read his testimony?complete with excerpts from top secret reports
and charges against State?to reporters at dictation speed.
State reacted the same night with its own news briefing. The
State spokesman cited classified reports from the Bogota Embassy
warning of possible disorders and molestations of delegates during
the Conference. The State reports were more general than the CIA
documents but covered similar ground. The Department said that
Secretary Marshall had known of these warnings before his de-
parture, and had brushed them aside with "salty remarks," stressing
that it was "quite ridiculous to suppose that the twenty-one Ameri-
can republics should even consider being intimidated by the protesta-
tions of one kind or another from Communists, or anyone else." State
made it clear it had received no warnings of assassinations or major
rioting.
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The story?of explanations, charges, and countercharges complete
with release of classified information?became the lead item in major
newspapers around the country on 16 April. That afternoon, for
the benefit first of the House of Representatives and then of the
Washington press corps, Representative Brown repeated his charges
of an intelligence fiasco, now directing his fire mainly against the
Administration and the State Department. The story thus again got
prominent newspaper coverage on 17 April. Next came a period of
weeks during which editorialists, political columnists, and radio
commentators turned their attention to the story. Officials of CIA
reported that the more perceptive journalists came around to sup-
porting its role in the affair. Officials at State made the same claim.
When Secretary Marshall heard of the rousing events in Wash-
ington he ordered an end to the public dispute between State and CIA,
and to the airing of classified documents. His authority was sufficient
to have his will prevail, though he probably was aided by growing
embarrassment among senior White House advisers and leaders of Con-
gress. The Brown subcommitte never reconvened?despite the Chair-
nan's public statements that he planned to call witnesses from State
and the military intelligence organizations, and even Marshall himself
when he returned to the country. Marshall's success in continuing the
conference despite the devastation of Bogota and in obtaining a reso-
lution condemning international Communism soon produced news
stories of US diplomatic successes and decreased attention to charges
of intelligence failures.
Inside CIA
As dramatic an event as the bogotazo was in the first year of the
Agency's history, it is difficult, twenty years later, to point with
confidence to any specific impact on the course of affairs. Admiral
Iillenkoetter was convinced that the Agency's record of warning was
a good one, and a number of critics were disarmed by his testimony.
Yet some within the Agency appear to have reacted as if the Bogota
affair had indeed been an intelligence failure, or at the least a warning
of institutional vulnerability to charges of not having adequately
forecast one or another crisis. The bogotazo thus appears to have
been one event?perhaps a pivotal early event?that led to a strong
emphasis in reporting upon "beating the newspapers" on any story
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Bogotazo SECRET
of crisis involving Communists. One veteran observer speaks of a
"Bogota syndrome," that is, an extraordinary concern with early warn-
ing of crises and emphasis on the Communist angle.
There apparently was soul searching on the intelligence side of
the house as well. The Office of Reports and Estimates ( so remembers
one veteran) had discussed in staff meetings the possibility of dis-
orders during the conference. The consensus was that the Colombian
government would be able to control the disorders, and no warnings
were published in the monthly Review of the World Situation as
it Relates to the Security of the United States, or in other serials or
special reports. The bogotazo may have produced considerable pres-
sure for greater attention to the publishing of warnings of possible
crises, especially those with any Communist connection. Considering
the Cold War atmosphere at the time and the mandate of the
collectors to concentrate on Communist affairs, such developments on
both sides of the Agency were probably inevitable, with or without
the stimulus of the bogotazo.
The bogotazo may have been one factor ( doubtless a minor one)
leading to the establishment in 1950 of the Board and Office of
National Estimates. Some observers and commentators during 1948
concluded that the Bogota affair revealed weaknesses in the analysis
and coordination of intelligence that exceeded in importance any
weaknesses in collection. The Eberstadt Report to the Hoover Com-
mission (i.e., the Report of the Committee on National Security
Organization to the Commission on Organization of the Executive
Branch of the Government), of November 1948, made this point
without specific reference to Bogota:
"The greatest need in CIA is the establishment at a high level of a small
group of highly capable people, freed from administrative detail, to con-
centrate upon intelligence evaluation. The Director and his assistants have
had to devote so large a portion of their time to administration that they
have been unable to give sufficient time to analysis and evaluation. A small
group of mature men of the highest talents, having full access to all informa-
tion, might well be released completely from routine and set to thinking about
intelligence only. Many of the greatest failures in intelligence have not been
failures in collection, but failures in analysing and evaluating correctly the
information available."
The assassination of Gaitan was very probably a private and irra-
tional act and, as such, an unpredictable event. To that extent, so
SECRET
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SECRET Bogotazo
was the bogotazo.5 Yet a closer understanding of Colombian politics
at headquarters might have produced far greater concern about the
attitudes of Caftan and his devout followers, and less about the plans
of the small and far from bold Communist forces. Secretary Marshall,
however, would probably have dismissed warnings of political tensions
as summarily as he did warnings of Communist disorders.
This is not to say that at the time all hands within CIA were
attributing too much importance to the Communists as a factor
in Latin American instability. The 12 May 1948 issue of the Review
of the World Situation as it Relates to the Security of the United
States presents an analysis which has withstood the test of history:
'The disturbances which interrupted the Bogota Conference are more
properly attributable to the basic political and economic tensions prevalent
in Latin America than to international Communist conspiracy. Without ques-
tion the Communists were conspiring to embarrass and discredt the Confer-
ence, and they were quick to seize the opportunity afforded by the outbreak
of violence. That outbreak, however, was clearly the spontaneous reaction
of Liberal partisans, already on edge as a result of acute political tensions
and party violence, to an assassination no doubt erroneously attributed to
the Conservative government.-
There are perhaps some lessons in the bogotazo for assessing con-
temporary crises in Latin America:
(1) When a critical situation is as fully developed as was the
case in Colombia in 1948 (i.e., the presence of a rebellious popular
mood, of a virile radical leader, and of reports of coup plotting),
the intelligence community with its current resources on Latin
America will almost certainly be tuned in generally. Complex prob-
lems of timing and interpretation, however, will probably still rise.
(2) The actual moment that gives birth to revolutionary violence
or to violence without revolution will often depend on a chance
combination of circumstances and will thus be largely unpredictable.
(3) Many potentially revolutionary situations will not produce
social revolutions; strong leadership with broad popular appeal
will almost always be an essential ingredient.
Richard L. Stokes, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 17 April 1948, attributes
the following to a State Department official: "Only Superman and Steve Canyon
combined could have learned that, at 1:15 p.m., on April 9, six blocks away from
the meeting place of the conference, Jorge Eliecer Caitan would be shot to death
by a personal enemy named . . . Sierra. Such pinpoint predictions of acts virtu-
ally unpremeditated are beyond the power of any human intelligence service."
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(4) Assessing the role of Communists in a revolutionary situation
takes special care; their noise and dramatic presence may not be
based on much actual strength and popular appeal.
(5) Finally, an outbreak of violence, even of dreadful violence,
need not permanently weaken the reigning regime.
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PLATT'S LAW
All old-time analysts in the profession have heard of Platt's Law;
few are familiar with its exact terms. Like Darwin's theory of evolu-
tion, it has often been distorted or misrepresented, giving rise to
grave errors. For the guidance of the young we publish herewith the
original formulation of this seminal discovery, as recently exhumed
from ancient files.
25 August 1951
Mr. Sherman Kent
Office of National Estimates, CIA
My dear Mr. Kent:
As one of the earliest purchasers and most constant readers
of your classic on "Strategic Intelligence," I am writing to invite
your attention to the omission from your ( otherwise) excellent book
of a fundamental principle in the production of intelligence.
Assume the following situation:
1. You have prepared after much thought and wide discussion
the first draft of an Intelligence Estimate. This draft contains certain
details and statements which your careful study of the problem leads
you to believe should be included.
2. This first draft is reviewed by the first echelon above your
own. Members of this echelon read your details. After thus getting
the benefit of your explanations, they find these details self-evident and
so eliminate them from the paper along with many of your other
pet phrases. So the second draft is prepared stripped to the bare es-
sentials.
3. The second higher echelon, on reviewing the second draft
thus cut to the bone, finds many of the bare statements lacking in
proper justification or background. This second echelon therefore
insists on the inclusion of more explanation and details. So the third
draft is prepared, restoring the details and pet explanatory phrases
which echelon No. 1 cut out.
4. In turn, the next higher echelon reviewing this third draft
and receiving the benefit of the explanations now once more included,
finds these details unnecessary and cuts them out. . . .
MORI/HRP
89 from pg.
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5. And so on, from echelon of review to echelon of review ad
infinitum.
General Principle derived from the above universal experience:
Whether or not the necessary explanatory details and pet phrases
of an, intelligence paper appear in the paper as finally published,
depends entirely upon whether the number of higher groups which
successively review the paper is even or odd respectively.
I have, Sir, the honor to be your humble follower in the study
of fundamental intelligence principles,
Washington PLATT
Brigadier General USAR-Hon.
one-time AC of S, G-2 Armored Force
AC of S, G-2 XIX Corps in ETO
Commanding General 98th Infantry Division
now Lower echelon Intelligence Officer, OSI-CIA
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No Foreign Dissem
Intelligence during a
Presidential transition.
DDI/NEW YORK
Paul Corscadden
Within hours after the polls had closed on 7 November 1968, Presi-
dent Lyndon Johnson invited President-elect Richard Nixon to the
White House to plan for the smooth transition of power by Inaugura-
tion Day 1969. Summoned to attend the meeting of the two men on 11
November were a number of President Johnson's key policy advisers
and administrators?including the Director of Central Intelligence,
Richard Helms.
Decision at the White House
President Johnson had determined at the outset of the 1968 cam-
paign to provide intelligence briefings for the major candidates, After
the nominating conventions, Vice President Hubert Humphrey,
Mr. Nixon, and the independent George Wallace had received brief-
ings from Mr. Helms on Soviet strategic farces, the political situation
in South Vietnam, and the Russian intervention in Czechoslovakia.
Now, prior to the inauguration, Mr. Johnson proposed to make avail-
able to his successor the same intelligence product shown to him.
Consequently, he instructed the Director of Central Intelligence to ar-
range intelligence support of the President-elect and key members of
his staff at their temporary headquarters in New York City.
Such arrangements had proved make-shift in the past. An impro-
vised situation room at the Commodore Hotel in New York had been
visited no more than a few times by Governor Sherman Adams prior
to the inauguration of President Eisenhower in 1953; John F. Kennedy
had been briefed two or three times by Allen Dulles before he took
office on 20 January 1961. Mr. Helms 'determined, in keeping with
President Johnson's wishes, that Mr. Nixon should benefit from a more
sustained effort. The DCI assigned to the Directorate of Intelligence
responsibility for providing support to the incoming administration.
The Office of Current Intelligence would be the executive agent, col-
laborating with other Agency components as required.
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MORI/HRP
from pg.
91-96
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SECRET DDI/New York
The DCI decided to send a three-man team to New York to confer
immediately with the President-elects chief aide, Robert Haldeman,
at the Hotel Pierre at Fifth Avenue and Gist Street. The Deputy Di-
rector of Intelligence, the Director of Security, and the Deputy Chief
of the Office of Current Intelligence left for New York the next day.
On the advice of the Secret Service, the President-elect had estab-
lished offices on the 38th and 39th floors of the Pierre. Access was by
way of an elevator that was monitored at lobby level by special agents
with short-wave radios and a direct telephone line to a command post
on the 39th floor. Security's New York office had arranged with the
Secret Service for the Agency officers to be admitted and also for the
installation in the suite occupied by the President-elect, himself, of a
safe for storage of classified documents.
The Nixon staff agreed that CIA should establish at its own expense
a secure area to house a combination Situation and Reading Room to
which members of the staff could come to read classified documents
after they had received their security indoctrination. Space was not
readily available in the Pierre, which, in any event, the Secret Service
had already discovered could not be rendered truly "secure"?so it
was decided to locate the Agency's outpost, dubbed "DDI New York,"
in the basement of the Nixon Campaign Headquarters at 450 Park
Avenue, at the southwest corner of Park Avenue and 57th Street. This
site, which was formerly the world headquarters of the North American
Missionary Alliance and was slated to be demolished, would attract
far less attention than the Pierre. It also served as the office of Richard
Allen, who then functioned as the President-elect's principal staff ad-
viser on foreign policy.
The DCI, the Executive Director, and the DDI approved plans for
the facility, and OCI assigned two officers to man it. The staff was
completed by a secretary drawn from the New York Domestic Con-
tacts field office plus two experienced communicators from Head-
quarters.
The area selected for the Agency's facility was adjacent to an ele-
vator and not far from the building's boiler room and heating plant;
it had served during the campaign as a mimeograph room and now was
used as a catch-all for broken office machinery, discarded press re-
leases, and a wide assortment of debris. The Office of Logistics was
given 72 hours, a weekend, to transform the area into a habitable
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DDI/New York sKRET
office. Logistics personnel hauled furniture, safes, and office equip-
ment by van from Washington, arriving on Park Avenue early on a
Sunday morning?shortly after a special security team had "swept"
the premises. They quickly emptied the area, painted walls and ceil-
ing, sealed off air ducts leading to other floors of the building, installed
window air-conditioners below sealed street-levels grills, and rewired
all of the electric circuits to allow for the installation of communica-
tions equipment.
Such frantic activity had not gone unnoticed by other occupants of
the building, who assumed that the "Secret Service," ?the "Federal
Bureau of Investigation," or some sensitive military agency had
moved in and would, inter alia, assume responsibility for the physi-
cal security of all the President-elect's staff offices and even for the
protection of Mr. Nixon's family. The Office of Security had decided
not to identify the operation as Agency-sponsored but, rather, to allow
anyone who learned of its existence to draw whatever conclusions he
chose. Before long, staff secretaries were calling to ask that someone
"behind the Black Door" investigate the disappearance of office sup-
plies and even find a purloined television set. The supervisor of the
staff mailroom demanded one day that an Agency communicator
"taste" canned hams sent as a Christmas gift to the President-elect.
Effective 19 November with an eye to production schedules in the
Office of Current Intelligence, communications between New York
and Headquarters were open from 0500 to 2100 each weekday, from
0500 to 1300 on Saturdays, and from 1700 to 2100 on Sundays. Ex-
cept for a one-day interruption because of power failure, communi-
cations remained open until late on the morning of 17 January 1969.
The daily Vietnam Situation Report arrived the evening of its pub-
lication in Washington; the Central Intelligence Bulletin and The
President's Daily Brief came soon after five o'clock each. morning.
Ad hoc, crisis reporting could be sent at any time, and the Agency
Operations Center was able to alert staff officers in New York to critical
developments during non-duty hours. Daily courier service, which
had begun on 13 November, continued through 25 November as a
stand-by measure.
Flexibility and availability were to be the keynotes of the operation.
A complete set of publications in a sealed envelope marked "Eyes
Only - the President-Elect" would be delivered daily to Rosemary
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SECRET DDI/New York
Woods, the President-elect's secretary, in Mr. Nixon's office. Nixon
staff members who had access to the intelligence publications were
to come to the facility whenever convenient. Current publications,
along with appropriate National Intelligence Estimates, special
memoranda, intelligence handbooks, and various graphic aids were
prominently displayed.
For the first ten days, only "finished" intelligence was made avail-
able. It soon became apparent, however, that the needs of the new
administration did not coincide in every detail with those of the
Johnson administration. The foreign press had begun to speculate
openly about the incoming administration, its personnel, and its policy
options. This and other information was available to the White House;
little of it would reach the Nixon staff unless some vehicle were de-
signed to convey it.
The Director of the Office of Current Intelligence on 29
November compiled the first "Nixon Special," an "Eyes Only," all-
source intelligence memorandum for the President-elect. The Foreign
Broadcast Information Service transmitted directly to New York
foreign press treatment of the new administration.
On 2 December, the "intelligence portfolio" was passed to Harvard's
Professor Henry J. Kissinger, whose appointment as Special Assist-
ant for National Security Affairs was announced by the President-elect
at a news conference at the Pierre. The same afternoon Kissinger came
to the Agency facility on Park Avenue for a briefing. He was shown cur-
rent issues of all of the intelligence publications available in the fa-
cility, told what had been delivered to the Presientelect, and was
pledged the utmost cooperation on the part of the DCI. He was also
assured that the Agency was prepared to be as helpful as possible in
shaping the types and subject matter of reports and publications and
their format to meet the wishes of the new administration. Kissinger
asked for time to become familiar with the demands that would be
made on him by the incoming Chief Executive, but promised to ar-
range as part of his daily schedule a 15 minute intelligence briefing.
He also accepted the offer of Agency officers to advise him immediately
of any critical world development requiring the attention of the
President-elect. Two days later, at a meeting at the Pierre, Kissinger
requested a series of one-hour briefings on major problems confronting
the new administration?briefings to be fitted into his schedule where-
ever possible.
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DDI/New York
At a meeting with DDI/New York officers on 14 December, Kis-
singer directed that Attorney General-designate Mitchell was to re-
ceive The President's Daily Brief, The Central Intelligence Bulletin,
and all other reports in which he had expressed an interest. He had
been one of the first for whom Haldeman had requested a security
clearance on 12 November but subsequently was not available for in-
doctrination by Agency officers until after the President-elect unveiled
his cabinet. Mitchell, a towering figure in the Nixon staff, was to be-
come a major consumer of these publications. One of the Agency offi-
cers met almost daily with the Attorney General-designate until the
last day the Nixon staff worked in New York.
The President's Daily Brief had been uniquely tailored to the needs
of the outgoing administration?just as its predecessor had been
shaped to the reading preferences of President John F. Kennedy. The
authors Of the PDB 'could assume that President Johnson and his prin-
cipal advisers were familiar with the background of most of the sub-
jects covered each day and were often able to employ a shorthand style
without sacrificing clarity or breadth. The President-elect and Kis-
singer, however well read, lacked familiarity with many of the prob-
lems dealt with in the PDB.
This situation had not been unanticipated by the Agency. In fact, the
Office of Current Intelligence already had begun to devise a new ver-
sion of the PDB for Mr. Nixon and his aides. Considerably expanded in
length, the new brief had been circulated for comment to the DCI,
DDI, and other principal officers in the Agency. With their 'concur-
rence, it was decided to send a new PDB to New York.
Because of Kissinger's crowded schedule, his briefings were held
on a somewhat ad hoc basis. The probing questions of the incoming
Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, his insatiable
demands for assessments of the significance of even isolated develop-
ments on a low order of probability, meant that far more speculative,
estimative 'analysis than normally characterizes current intelligence
reporting was required. It was therefore decided to supplement the
topics covered each day in the PDB and the occasional briefings by
the DDI/New York officers with more detailed backup pieces by
DDI analysts. These reports were written as soon as the makeup of an
issue of the PDB was known in Headquarters and were sent to New
York at convenient hours during the day. On 'several occasions senior
analysts with special competence in the areas dealt with in these an-
nexes came to New York to meet with Kissinger. By the middle of
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SECRET DDI/New York
January The President's Daily Brief had been totally redesigned to
meet Mr. Nixon's preferences. The new brief would consist of three
sections?Major Developments, Other Important Developments, and
occasional annexes?all double-spaced and printed on legal sized
paper bound at the top.
The first section, Major Developments, was subdivided into sections
on Vietnam, the Middle East, Soviet Affairs, and Europe. This was
not a static listing. As developments warranted, some areas could be
dropped, others added. The second section, Other Important Devel-
opments, was intended to highlight problems which?though not yet
critical?could in time engage US policy interests. The annexes were
to fulfill the same role as the "problem papers" that had been sent
to New York.
Under the Johnson Administration, the PDB had been published at
five o'clock in the morning, six days a week, and delivered to the White
House an hour later. However, in order that he and his National Se-
curity Council staff would have time to mull over the intelligence re-
porting before meeting the Chief Executive, Kissinger proposed that
the PDB be released at 5 or 6 in the afternoon, for delivery to him that
same night and to the President the following morning. Changing the
publication time meant an additional lag of 12 hours in the reporting
time, but Kissinger pointed out that so-called "late starters" could be
reported in The Central Intelligence Bulletin and specifically called
to the President's attention. This arrangement, he believed would
most satisfactorily meet the new President's plan to hold regular
meetings with his key advisers at nine or nine-thirty each morning.
Kissinger surmised that he would brief the President for 30 minutes
each morning, immediately following these staff conferences.
By the middle of January, DDI/NY had served its purpose. The
Offices of Security, Logistics, and Communications stood by to re-
move files and communications equipment and to transport them under
guard to Washington over the weekend. At 0730 on 17 January, a two-
man security team was already guarding a moving van that had been
loaded with most of the furniture from the basement suite. Inside the
building, packers were boxing the last of the files, and a communi-
cations technician stood by to dismantle the teletype equipment once
Headquarters approved a request to do so. The last message, request-
ing this permission, was sent at 0840 EST. It was the 523rd message
sent or received since the facility had opened and the 2,179th page of
text.
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Retrospective reflections inspired
by recent research.
THE 30 SEPTEMBER MOVEMENT
IN INDONESIA
John T. Pizzicaro
Early in 1969, the Special Research Staff of the Directorate of In-
telligence published an extensive analysis of the Indonesian upheaval:
Indonesia - 1965, The Coup that Backfired, by Helen Louise Hunter.
It is classified SECRET-NO FOREIGN DISSEM, and may be obtained
from the Directorate of Intelligence with appropriate authoriza-
tion. Mrs. Hunter's study is reviewed in the following pages by
a senior officer of the Central Intelligence Agency who served in In-
donesia throughout the coup period. His observations on the events
described are sublective, and the conclusions summarized are his own.
The publication of Indonesia - 1965, The Coup that Backfired is an
important event for serious students of the Asian scene. Before it be-
came available to the intelligence community there existed no reliable
analysis of an episode that not only defied full comprehension at the
time it occurred, but has since retained an aura of mystery and, indeed,
controversy among observers in and out of government. We are there-
fore grateful to Helen Louise Hunter for her impressive accomplish-
ment in distilling out of masses of intelligence reporting an orderly,
coherent and historically defensible treatise. Mrs. Hunter has gone well
beyond the limitations of conventional research, and has produced a
book?readable, intelligible, enormously interesting.
The question has been raised?and it remains valid?could not this
analysis have been produced without heavy classification or, better,
with none at all? The need for a definitive treatment of the subject has
been acute, for reasons that will be indicated below. And certainly
Mrs. Hunter's study could hold its own in the public domain with ap-
propriate modification. The fact of the matter is that virtually all
source material used in The Coup that Backfired was obtained origi-
nally via clandestine channels, and its release would have entailed
serious complications. Hence, the decision to stand on Secret classifi-
cation.
It must first be noted that almost no one these days is objective about
Indonesia. People who have lived there either love it Or hate it; many MORI/HRP
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of them leave bewitched. Scholars who have never set foot in the
country adopt it sight unseen, and fight for eventual access. The excep-
tion to all this is Helen Louise Hunter. She speaks no Indonesian, has
never been to the country, and has no axe to grind. But she has done
her homework with painstaking thoroughness, and has developed
cogent answers to all the important questions. Although Mrs. Hunter
would be the last to claim final say on the complexities analyzed in
The Coup that Backfired, it is hard to visualize a more definitive treat-
ment of that historic event on the basis of information currently
available. Her paper was submitted in draft to a cross-section of CIA
and State Department officers who had served in Indonesia during the
coup period, thus permitting minor changes in detail and atmos-
pherics; as far as substance and the logical flow of the narrative are
concerned, her account cannot be faulted.
The key questions, of course, are relatively few in number, and have
been asked repeatedly by interested observers since 0730 hours on 1
October 1965. Who was Untung, and what was the 30 September
Movement? Why were the generals murdered? Was the Indone-
sian Communist Party the prime mover, or was it an innocent by-
stander on the sidelines of an internal army upheaval? Was there a
Generals' Council? What was President Sukarno's role? Answers
to these basic questions emerged a very short while after the event,
fragmentary at first, but gradually achieving perspective, and have gen-
erally withstood the scrutiny of time and the availability of new in-
formation. But the picture is not complete, and it may never be.
A curious feature of the upheaval was that while the march of
events was fairly dramatic and at times noisy, most developments?
especially in the early stages?were shielded from public scrutiny and
made little sense to the unassisted observer. Overt sources were
limited in access and utility. Even the redoubtable American press
corps had a rough time of it during the early weeks, and was able to
meet its reporting requirements effectively only by extensive piggy-
backing on US mission sources for both background and detail. In time
the situation eased. The Indonesian press began to flex its muscles
under Army supervision. People began to talk, and the rumor mills
resumed operations. By and large, though, throughout the eight to ten
months following the coup attempt, overt information remained
inadequate and decidedly inferior to that available to the US Govern-
ment from clandestine sources,
98
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Inevitably, there were periods of uncertainty and speculation as to
what was happening and why, and what would happen next. The
25X1 most striking of these occurred during the first 24 hours. Contact with
ources had long before been
placed on a maximum security basis, owing to the extreme tension and
sustained threat to the American presence that characterized the months
of mid-1965; prearranged schedules applied until such time as they
could be adapted to meet the requirements of the new emergency.
Should the latter have been foreseen? Ideally, yes. In practical terms, it
would have been asking a great deal to predict an event that, for all
its similarity to the traditional fire and brimstone drama of the Ramay-
ana, defied both the logic of historical dialectic and the apparent drift
of Indonesian politics. An interesting facet, however, is that for weeks
25X1 in advance of the coup,I reporting on developments within
the Indonesian Communist Party?the so-called PKI?gave a graphic
and detailed picture of its activities which led directly and, as we see it
with the advantage of hindsight, inexorably to the events of 1 October.
These included the caching of arms and grain, military training of
youth and women cadres at Halim Air Base, and?most important?
the reorganization of party structure in the greater Djakarta area
along military-tactical lines. The signs were clearly there, and a field
appraisal of the situation was being coordinated in draft with the Em-
bassy when the coup brake.
In Java, where ironies compound themselves, the wayang kunt 1 is
normally cited by foreigners to explain the inexplicable or to account
for whatever in Indonesian behavior defies Western comprehension.
Late in the evening of 30 September, this writer attended a wayang
in the suburban district of Manggarai. It was held outdoors in the
village market place under the auspices of the mayor, and attended by
a throng of contented-looking Indonesians from the neighborhood. The
handful of foreigners present sensed no hostility whatsoever. As the
show went on, the seats grew harder, and by 0100 the period of en-
chantment had passed; the next day was a working day. The road
home was along Djalan Krakatau, past the house of the Army com-
mander, General Yani, and farther on past that of Brigadier General
Sutojo, both scheduled for execution within a few hours. There was
The shadow play, based on stories adapted from the Hindu epics, and tradi-
tional entertainment of Indonesian village life.
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no hint of menace in the shadows of the darkened street. The flickering
light and jingle of an occasional trishaw suggested a most ordinary
night.
Morning came, bright and fresh, Djakarta's best time. But it was
Friday, and one should remember that in Indonesia things always
happen on Friday. The route from Kebajoran to the city seemed nor-
mal enough until reaching DjaIan Thamrin and turning east on Mer-
deka Square. At that point the mood changed with the scenery. Strange
troops guarded the intersections. Why strange? It is difficult to
say, but they were not the usual custodians of local peace and order
that Djakarta residents grew to recognize. They were infantry with
serious faces and unfamiliar shoulder patches, armed and deployed
tactically. The gates of the Gedung Telekomunikasi were closed
and the area swarmed with troops. Further on, the American Em-
bassy was similarly encompassed. Instead of the khaki-uniformed Mo-
bile Brigade who customarily guarded the outer premises, infantry
held the line, a heavy machine gun at the gate, although making no
attempt to interfere with people arriving for work. It was a perplexing
sight for seven-thirty in the morning. The next few minutes witnessed
a rump staff meeting in the Embassy lobby, chewing over a story told
by the Assistant Air Attache about a firefight behind his house in
Kebajoran shortly before dawn. His servants reported that a general
had been killed. Which general, he did not know. It turned out later to
have been Pandjaitan.
After comparing notes briefly with Embassy colleagues and officers
reporting in, I felt that some personal reconnaissance was in order,
particularly since the telephones were all dead. A meandering route by
Volkswagen past the houses of key generals and other points of mili-
tary interest proved revealing. General Yani's house was cordoned
off at each end of the block by military police. General Nasution's
house was likewise inaccessible. The residence of Major General Par-
man was apparently deserted, but not under guard. A short distance
away, Brigidier General Sukendro's residence was closed up tight?
not surprising since he was away on a visit to Peking?and that of
Brigadier General Magenda showed no signs of life. The streets
throughout that sector of the city were remarkably empty and quiet.
Nearby commercial districts lacked their customary bustle, although
they were by no means deserted. Approaching the Square again, green
uniforms abounded. They swarmed about the Gambir railroad station
on Merdeka Timur and on up toward Army Headquarters. Strategic
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Command Headquarters (KOSTRAD) across the street had its share
too, and although they looked like the others to the unpracticed eye,
there was a difference. It was discernible, though hardly appreciated
at the time, in the small patch of white cloth the former wore on their
left shoulder bar. (By morning on 2 October Suharto's men were
wearing a similar identification, but colored red.) Lastly, the For-
eign Department, its 'attractive white facade and pillars gleaming in
the morning sun, was 'observed under heavy guard. Exactly what all
this unfamiliar military pomp added up to became a little clearer when
the writer returned to the Embassy to hear that Radio Indonesia
had come on the air, proclaiming the existence of the 30 September
Movement. The name of Lt. Col. Untung was on the way to becoming
a household word, and the activities of the so-called Generals' Coun-
cil appeared to have some bearing on the events of that unusual
Friday morning.
To fathom the sequence of events thereafter, there is no better way
than to sit down with The Coup that Backfired and follow Mrs.
Hunter's tracing of its labyrinthine path. She has much to offer,
even to those of us who, having been there, profess to understand
what happened and why. Her paper is organized rather uniquely and
in a way that lends itself to the layman's comprehension. The first of
its four main sections deals with the events of the coup itself. The
second focuses the movements of all leading personalities from the
time of the coup until the curtain rings down on their particular
act of the melodrama. Next she examines the plot itself as it un-
folded during the critical month of September, the period when
plans were made and in a sense the outcome of the coup fore-
ordained. The fourth section, and in Mrs. Hunter's opinion the
most important, concentrates on the final sequence of events lead-
ing up to the coup, including the decision to carry it out. An
extremely helpful summary and statement of her conclusions are
provided at the end. There is also an evaluation of the primary source
material on which the entire analysis is based, namely, the pris-
oner interrogation reports produced by the Indonesian Army. Mrs.
Hunter is careful to distinguish between her categories of material?
fact as established in the public domain, testimony of the coup par-
ticipants, and conjecture, whether her own or that of others. The key,
of course, to any 'serious interpretation of 'the kaleidoscopic and some-
times contradictory pattern underlying this episode devolves on the
validity of the Army interrogation material. The author accepts it as
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essentially valid, and her reasons for doing so are cogent. The reader's
task is further facilitated by a first-rate graphics representation of the
coup highlights, including the only effective map analysis this writer
has seen, plus some helpful time-and-movement diagrams, and, last
but not least, a host of excellent photographs.
With respect to the Communist Party, the author makes it crystal
clear that PKI bore the major responsibility for planning and implemen-
tation of the entire operation. Other important Indonesians, not
necessarily Communist, were also intimately involved. The ultimate
question, and one which Mrs. Hunter scrutinizes with care, bears on
the role of President Sukarno. She concludes that the evidence re-
flecting his full involvement is not conclusive, and from a legal stand-
point she is probably correct. Yet as a practical matter the evidence
Mrs. Hunter marshals so graphically in these pages can hardly be
construed as signifying anything less than Sukarno's intimate involve-
ment from the outset. The question is admittedly not open-and-
shut, and from the Indonesian standpoint there have been valid grounds
for abstention from full and public attribution of responsibility to
the former president. Witness General Suharto's extremely careful
handling of the issue.
As a problem of intelligence acquisition and analysis, it is interest-
ing to note how Sukarno's role in the 30 September affair became at
once the central and vital question for both the Indonesians and those
of us foreigners who were engaged in looking over their shoulders.
Initially it was approached rather cautiously in discussion, sometimes
pointedly avoided. Before long, however, it was clear that the question
was under discussion in high cabinet circles, civilian and military. As
diffidence faded, similar reflections appeared at lower levels of govern-
ment. It was soon apparent that in Army circles talk on the subject
had taken on a brutal frankness. Well placed sources quoted Nasution
and Suharto directly, notwithstanding the fact that those personages
remained fairly circumspect in their public utterances. By late October
there were indications that Sukarno's removal on grounds of his in-
volvement in the coup was already under consideration. As attitudes
of leading Army figures crystallized, with General Nasution figuring
as the hard-liner, the pattern was reflected in extensive reporting from
a wide variety of extremely well-placed sources. Throughout Novem-
ber the pressure intensified and talk of an Army move to eliminate
Sukarno, by assassination if he would not acquiesce, echoed in both
military and political circles.
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This period, it will be recalled, coincided with the killing of vast
numbers of Communists or presumed Communist sympathizers
throughout the country. Although Djakarta was spared the horrors of
that nightmare, the city was by no means exempt from the emotions
that gave rise to it. Thanks to tight Army discipline and intensive se-
curity measures sustained over many months, an explosive situation
was kept under control. On the other hand, bitterness against the
President continued to mount. More and more people believed! that
he was just as guilty as PKI leader Aidit. And yet Sukarno, recovering
from the state of shock that characterized his behavior in early Oc-
tober, had once again begun to play his cards skillfully. He refused
to panic. He temporized on critical issues, minced his words on all
possible occasions, and gave no sign of willingness to concede another
inch to General Suharto. Many observers at the time believed he held
the current edge in what was clearly a struggle for ower. His da s,
however, were numbered. By mid-December
undertook a detailed analysis of the situation, an a vise
that events were moving toward a showdown. Information t en
available left most of us convinced that Sukarno was in-
deed a witting participant in the 30 September conspiracy. Whether
the move against the Army leaders had been his original idea, or
whether he merely responded to the advice of his henchmen, was con-
sidered essentially immaterial. The critical point was that Sukarno's
endorsement of the coup plot made it feasible; his participation gave
it an excellent assurance of success. Without him the plan would have
been totally unrealistic. Headquarters was told that an appreciable
number of highly placed Indonesian leaders had reached similar con-
clusions. Under the circumstances it was felt that the objective va-
lidity of their views was far less important than the fact that they en-
tertained them. Grounds for direct action were thus available; the
showdown was believed to be near at hand.
Two courses of action appeared open to the Army, each predicated
on the assumption that history could not be turned back 'and that Su-
karno could never regain his former ascendancy. On the one hand,
Suharto might opt for gradual assertion of authority over the operation
of government; Sukarno could be neutralized slowly but steadily and
relegated to figurehead status while the Army tightened its 'control.
Or, Suharto could undertake more or less immediate action to 'strip
Sukarno of his authority. His decision, was be-
ing made for him?in part by the desperate economic situation of the
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country which cried out for ameliorative action, and even more so by
the intensifying political pressures converging on him, both within the
Army leadership and among the younger political elements beginning
to emerge as factors to be reckoned with. The latter included organi-
zations of university and high school students, already quite vocal in
their attacks on the President.
25X1 The analysis of the situation was discussed at some
length within the Mission. Embassy opinion leaned toward the first of
the two alternatives proposed.I I the grad-
ual approach would not suffice under the circumstances facing Gen-
eral Suharto. Thus, in concluding its rather lengthy commentary,
25X1 bri 23 December that the next few wee,
would probably see a resolution of the impasse, with the Army taking
direct steps to terminate President Sukarno's control over the govern-
ment. Mid-January 1966 saw the crisis come almost to a head, precipi-
tated by student demonstrations over the cost of living. But the Army
failed to follow through, and Sukarno was given another month or so
in which to attempt his final maneuvers. The redoubtable old tyrant
did his utmost in the cabinet reorganization of 21 February; he fired
General Nasution as Minister of Defense, and appointed more leftist
sycophants to ministerial posts than anyone realized were still above
ground. That was the beginning of the end. In a few days the stu-
dent upheaval, under Army patronage but a remarkable phenomenon
in its own right, engulfed Djakarta and paved the way for Suharto's
move on 11 March when he forced the President to sign over to him
authority for all measures required for the safeguarding of security
and government stability.
Not all Indonesians today view Sukarno's elimination with equa-
nimity. Pockets of support and even affection for him can still be
found, particularly in the Nationalist Party strongholds of Central
Java. By virtue of them Sukarno remains a. factor in Indonesian poli-
tics. He is, of course, no more than a factor; he is certainly not a
power.
An interesting sidelight on Sukarno's role in the 30 September
Movement is the almost total lack of interest in it displayed by the
American academic community. The latter, strongly influenced by
George McT. Kahin and the Modern Indonesia Project of Cornell's
Southeast Asia Program, have been much more attentive to the role
of the Indonesian Communist Party in the coup and to the fate it has
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suffered as a consequence. The fascinating thing about this rather un-
usual bias is that it developed in full bloom very shortly after the coup
itself. It was couched then, and has been ever since, in language par-
alleling that used by the PKI when the latter on 2 October explained
its relationship to the 30 September Movement: The Party merely
endorsed the patriotic action of Lt. Cal. Untung in forestalling the
expected counterrevolutionary coup of the Generals' Council sup-
ported by CIA. What happened was an internal Army affair, but in
the words of the leading Communist newspaper the support and sym-
pathy of the people were on the side of the 30 September Movement.
Over the ensuing weeks this theme was developed in greater detail
at Cornell, but except for an occasional article bearing on it, almost
nothing reached print. There was method in Corneffs cautious ap-
proach to the matter, based on concern lest the Indonesian military
learn of the latter's hostility and decide to curtail access to the coun-
try. To date the so-called Cornell "white paper" remains unpublished,
though it is available in the form of an unsigned dissertation dated
1 January 1966, classified STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL, entitled A
Preliminary Analysis of the October I, 1965 Coup in Indonesia. The
Indonesians are naturally aware of the Cornell position, and they re-
sent it. The scholars predicate their position in large measure on a
total rejection of the Army reports of prisoner interrogation, claiming
that they are based on torture and fabrication, and they place little
or no credence in the published confessions of the coup principals or
testimony of other witnesses before the Military Tribunal. They ar-
gue that since the interrogation reports are not openly available, who-
ever gains access to them must be in league with the Army. In ac-
tuality, the trial evidence covers much of the same ground and offers
ample food for thought to the interested reader. And there is the
nub of the problem. Are the Cornell scholars really interested? Are
they willing to consider any radical deviation from their own pre-
conceptions? This is a harsh insinuation, but it must be weighed. Ruth
McVey, who for many years has been a major luminary and authority
on Indonesian Communism closely associated with the Cornell group,
took the firm position in 1965 that the PKI would not move directly
to seize power, being content to settle for the slow but steady progress
it had registered in the preceding ten years.
This view has by no means been confined to the Cornell group.
Donald Hindley of Brandeis and J. M. van der Kroef of Bridgeport
took similar positions in their respective books published in 1965 be-
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fore the coup. It has been the Cornell group, nonetheless, that has
held most dogmatically to the idea that the PKI became the scape-
goat in the Indonesian upheaval and was unjustly saddled with re-
sponsibility for it. In this writer's opinion there is a serious question
of intellectual integrity involved in the issue. How better to defend
the thesis that the PKI would not do what it did than to argue that
it did not in fact do so?
A reflection of the amount of vitriol that can still pervade a gather-
ing of intelligent men and women over an issue of this character was
noted in last April's meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, of the Con-
ference on Asian Studies, in a confrontation between Guy Pauker of
Rand Corporation and several proponents of the basic Cornell thesis.
Pauker is an authority on the Indonesian Army and well read on the
subject of the coup, his views on the latter being generally compatible
with those depicted in Mrs. Hunter's analysis. After presenting his
brief but cogent monograph, The Rise and Fall of the Communist
Party of Indonesia, Pauker was attacked viciously for his reliance
upon Army interrogation reports which according to one of his inter-
locutors (Roger Padgett, then of Cornell), Pauker knew were doctored.
The attack was snide and ad hominem, a clear aspersion on his in-
tellectual integrity. Donald Hindley arose subsequently and criticized
Pauker's reliance upon the doctored reports, but conceded that he now
agreed with Pauker's conclusions regarding PKI involvement. The cha-
rade was carried further when another participant needled Hindley
for endorsing Pauker's conclusions while disparaging his sources.
To allay any reasonable doubts about the authenticity of the in-
terrogation material, the Appendix to Mrs. Hunter's study should be
ready with care. She treats the matter with detachment, concluding
that there is no evidence whatsoever to support the charge of doctor-
ing or fabrication on the part of the Army. Convictions die hard,
though, and one may safely surmise that were The Coup that Back-
fired to be declassified and made public, it would be attacked by the
academicians with a ferocity at least equal to that aimed at Pauker,
and for the same reasons. Among the better known writers on In-
donesian developments, Ruth McVey has had comparatively little to
say in print since October of 1965. She is said to be working on the
definitive book concerning the coup and its denouncement, hopefully
to establish the PKI's innocence of responsibility for the 30 Sep-
tember affair. It will be welcomed by the many scholars who share her
views and who look with disdain upon the opinions of Guy Pauker
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and Arnold Brackman, both of whom are working on books of their
own on the same issue, and who maybe presumed to reflect a pro-
Army bias.
This academic skirmishing might perhaps be safely ignored were it
not for the difficulty in which it leaves the informed reader who has
no access to classified material, as well as the serious student of Asian
history and politics who seeks to evaluate the Indonesian upheaval of
1965-66. Of the two, the man in the street who reads books is in the
more advantageous position. He now has Robert Shaplen's Time Out
of Hand: Revolution and Reaction in Southeast Asia (Harper and
Row, 1969), most of which also appeared in The New Yorker (Is-
sues of November 23, 1968, May 24 and May 31, 1969). Shaplen does
an excellent job of making a complex subject readable. It is clear that
he has been briefed in great detail by Indonesian military sources and,
not impossibly, by US officials conversant with the same material,
covering events up to late 1968. The latter point is of particular in-
terest because Shaplen is thus able to draw upon information of quite
recent vintage, which he exploits to great effect in asserting the 'com-
plicity and responsibility of former President Sukarno. He does this in
sharper terms than Mrs. Hunter has seen fit to adopt, notwithstand-
ing her vastly more detailed and incisive analysis of Sukarno's
role. In both, the key element is the testimony of Brigadier General
Sugandhi (Sukarno's Minister of Information), the details of which
were not known until comparatively recently, and then only through
clandestine channels. It is difficult to take the Sugandhi testimony
at face value and sustain any doubt about Sukarno's intimate involve-
ment.
One curious feature of Shaplen's otherwise extremely well-informed
survey is his acceptance of the original story of the kidnapped gen-
erals' maltreatment at Lubang Buaya. Whether for purposes of dra-
matic heightening of his account or because he actually believes it,
Shaplen holds to the tale of torture and multilation of the generals
by frenzied Communist women. The story is untrue, although in the
early days following the coup attempt it was bruited around widely
and given general credence. Apart from this, Shaplen's observations are
strikingly consistent with Mrs. Hunter's. The similarity is in fact so de-
tailed that one is led to wonder whether or not Shaplen was given
access to the classified account.
On balance, The Coup that Backfired constitutes a unique contri-
bution to intelligence annals. It is regrettable that an analysis of corn-
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parable quality is not overtly available to serious students of Indo-
nesian affairs. While Pauker and Brackman may in time produce books
capable of dealing frontally with the proponents of the Cornell thesis,
it is doubtful that either version will match The Coup that Backfired
in depth or scope. At some future date it might therefore be well to
reconsider the possibility of declassification. Until that occurs, MTS.
Hunter's study must remain the province of a somewhat limited pro-
fessional audience, much of it already entertaining preconceived views
of what the 30 September Movement was all about. As one of the
worst offenders in the latter respect, this writer is now happy to claim
a clearer perspective and even stronger convictions on the how and
why of that event.
Let it first be noted that the year 1965 saw the Indonesian Com-
munist Party embark on a collision course with the Army. The gauntlet
was thrown down brazenly by Chairman Aidit in January when he be-
gan to press for NASAKOM-ization of the armed forces.2 This was
followed not long afterward by a proposal made to President Sukarno
for arming the peasants and workers, the so-called Fifth Force. The
initiative was Aidifs, and it contrasted sharply with the apparent
passivity of the Army leadership. Sukarno's initial response was some-
what diffident. He purported to be unimpressed, made occasional am-
bivalent observations on the subject, but avoided commitment. As the
weeks wore on, however, he displayed increasing signs of interest in
the Aidit proposals, and the Army was not slow to take the hint. Major
General Mokoginta, Panglima of the North Sumatra Regional Com-
mand and anything but pro-Communist, began training local militia?
i.e., peasants and workers?in what he described as anticipation of
President Sukarno's forthcoming instructions.
The point is that there was nothing in the posture or behavior of
the Army leadership during those critical months to suggest concerted
initiative, whether in the form of resistance to Sukarno's domination
or in active response to the PKI challenge. The existence of the Gen-
erals' Council is said to date from that period, but the testimony of
the coup principals and other Sukarno supporters is extremely vague
as to where the idea originated. In any event, out of it came the story
NASAKOM is the acronym representing Sukarno's basic concept of the State,
predicated on representation and participation by the key elements of Indonesian
society?the Nationalists, those of religious persuasion ( i.e., Islamic), and the Com-
munists. NASAKOM-ization of the Armed Forces would have entailed full Com-
munist participation in command and administration.
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of the generals' plot to take over the government, which subsequently
served as the ostensible basis for planning and implementation of the
30 September Movement. While the charge of coup plotting can be
dismissed as without foundation, the idea of a secret grouping of gen-
eral officers had some basis in fact. In approximately January, 1965,
a number of generals closely associated with Army Commander Gen-
eral Yani began to meet with some regularity to discuss a variety of
problems facing the Army. I on the delib-
erations of this group, described colloquially by its members as the
"brain trust," reflected an acute concern on their part with what all
recognized as a determined PKI effort to force them to the wall. The
group included Generals Suprapto, Harjono, Parman, Sukendro, and
Sutojo, all of whom, with the exception of Sukendro, were killed on
1 October. Most of the officers were official members of the Army
General Staff, and in that capacity they had every reason to meet
regularly. None was a commander of troops, without which no coup
attempt could be successful. Over and above these considerations,
to argue that the brain trust was at least 'construable as a conspira-
torial body, while it has a certain plausibility, is to ignore the basic
fact of life prevailing in the first nine months of 1965, namely, that
the morale and political 'outlook of the army leadership at that period
were so bad, and its leadership so divided and at odds with other
elements of the armed forces, as to render it incapable of pursuing
an adventurous course of action.
A flurry of concern unquestionably developed in midsummer over
Sukarno's health. But it cannot be shown for certain that it did any-
thing more than stimulate the basic drift of events already under way,
which, however one chooses to read the signs, represented a syste-
matic effort on the part of President Sukarno and his principal con-
stituents to neutralize any capacity for independent action that the
army may have possessed. The role of President Sukarno during that
phase of the development has been variously interpreted. In attempt-
ing to reconstruct it following the coup, gen-
erally saw the President as a witting and willing participant, and to
some extent swept along under pressure from the Aidit and probably
the Subandrio forces. His role as we saw it was to provide 'authority
and legality for the action undertaken and to provide insurance against
failure.
Today Sukamo's role ?stands Out in much bolder relief. The im-
pressive testimony of key communist members of the conspiracy, plus
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new reporting from Army sources showing extensive involvement in
the 30 September Affair on the part of important military figures
previously thought to be above suspicion, offer an image of Sukarno
as a prime mover, a dominant force in the enterprise. In retrospect,
there is no other satisfactory explanation for the dynamics of the year
1965. Without Sukarno as an active sponsor, the PKI would never have
embarked on its collision course with the army. It is almost incon-
ceivable that Subandrio, regardless of his dreams of ultimate succes-
sion to the presidency, would have moved ahead of his master. The
same applies to Air Force Marshal Omar Dani. The cleavages within
the armed forces were indeed real; but only under Sukarno's active
instigation would senior non-Communist military leaders have dared
to participate in a violent move against their colleagues in the top
army command.
Why would Sukarno have seen fit to accelerate a process already
going well under his full control? Perhaps he was simply in a hurry.
The Indonesian revolution was no ball of fire. After twenty turbulent
years its energies had flagged. Sukarno may have taken his cue from
Mao Tse-tung. Certainly, had the coup succeeded, there would have
been Red Guards aplenty to scour the archipelago in a massive purge
of counterrevolutionaries.
Why did the coup fail? The answer is simple according to the basic
tvayang motif: The wicked giant, supported by witches from the for-
est, tried to seize the kingdom; but ?the good prince, in alliance
with friendly gods, prevailed. The triumph of good over evil. Some
say that the coup wag poorly planned and badly executed. By West-
ern standards, that may be so. Yet, notwithstanding its short and futile
life, the coup failed by a hair's breadth. The pivotal factor was prob-
ably the killing of the generals. Had they not been killed, but merely
sequestered, and thus in Indonesian style eliminated from public life,
the coup would almost certainly have been carried off successfully.
Conversely, if the Untung forces in accordance with the plan had suc-
ceeded in killing all the generals, the operation would probably have
accomplished its objective. Nasution's survival not only frustrated the
plotters and shattered their composure. More importantly, it provided
a continuity of authority within the Army and lent moral assurance
to Suharto in the critical early hours. Success might still have been
achieved in the face of Nasution's survival had Sukarno himself not
lost his nerve. Instead of holing up at Halim Air Base for twelve
critical hours, the President's logical move would have been to return
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at once to the palace, call in all military commanders and the cabinet,
and assert his full authority in the crisis. At that stage Suharto lacked
the momentum he later developed. He would not have dared to clash
head-on with the President. The old magic would have prevailed,
as it had done so many times in the years past. Instead, Sukarno sat
and waited, but nothing happened. Suharto and a comparative hand-
ful of Army officers regained their composure, and took quick stock
of the grim reality staring them in the face. Yani and his strongest
officers were gone, presumably dead. Whatever the name of the game
was, it was a question of survival. By the time Sukarno had pulled
himself together it was too late. The Suharto/Nasution duuravirate
was firmly established and the transition had begun.
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INTELLIGENCE IN RECENT PUBLIC LITERATURE
POWER IN THE KREMLIN. By Michel Tatu. (London: Collins,
1969. 570 pp.)
Looking back, one finds it a little hard to tell now whether the
figure of Khrushchev looms so large in our memories because his suc-
cessors somehow seem so small or because he was in fact a man of
considerable political 'stature. Whatever the, truth of the matter, the
years from roughly 1957 to 1964 were certainly lively ones on the in-
ternational scene, and we can thank Khrushchev for some of our most
anxious and entertaining moments. Bu i now along .comes Michel Tatu,
a Frenchman who spent most of these same years in Moscow watch-
ing the Kremlin at close range, and we can thank him (among others)
for the news that while Khrushchev was so busy bedeviling his ene-
mies abroad, his opponents at home were just about as busy bedevil-
ing him!
Tatu's book, Power in the Kremlin, From Khrushchev to Kosygin,
is an unabashed exercise in Kremlin?logy. As one reviewer has already
observed, moreover, it is Kremlin?logy at its best. And it may be more
than that: it may indeed be the best Kremlin?logy, i.e., one of the best
single works ever written about domestic Soviet politics. This book
does for the political scene in the USSR?in particular, the "Unmaking
of a First Secretary"?approximately what the first of The Making of
the President series does for the American, a feat all the more remark-
able because Tatu, quite unlike White, had no real access to Soviet
leaders and no entree into the closed, murky world of Soviet politics.
I praise this work highly in full awareness that its author is a com-
petitor of sorts, as well as a colleague. And I should mention that
William Hyland, co-author of The Fall of Khrushchev, 'a shorter work
which covers some of .the same territory, and which, alas, was pub-
lished at about the same time, perhaps would not agree with me. But
I also praise it because I wish to make clear at the outset that Tofu's
volume is an excellent study and?as we say in the trade?should
be must-reading for all students of the Soviet scene. But this is a serious
book and it deserves a serious critical review.
Power in the Kremlin ( a crisp and apt title) surveys its subject
under five major headings: The U-2 Affair and Its Consequences, The
22nd Party Congress, The Cuban Fiasco, The Fall, and The Collective
MORI/HRP
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Leadership on its Own. Emphasis in the first three of these sections
is placed on the struggle of Khrushchev's opponents to resist his poli-
cies and to restrict his powers and, in the fourth section, on their ulti-
mately successful efforts to remove him from office. Thus, for exam-
ple, in the discussion of the U-2 incident, Tatu makes the point that
it "played a decisive role in the reversal of Soviet policy," and in ad-
dition, helped to lead to the formation of an informal but effective
anti-Khrushchev coalition (including Kozlov and Suslov) among
Khrushchev's top colleagues. The fifth section concerns itself with the
post-Khrushchev collection and is much less interesting than the
others.
It does not really matter that most of Tatu's central theses are
familiar and that a fair amount of what he has to say concerns pre-
viously explored territory. His notions about the domestic political
impact of the U-2 affair, for example, coincide quite nicely with simi-
lar sentiments expressed earlier in Karl Linden's book, Khrushchev
and the Soviet Leadership 1957-1964, which deals essentially with the
same period. But Tatu arrived at his conclusions independently of
Linden, and indeed Linden's ideas were by no means unique when
they first appeared. Moreover, it should be recalled that Tatu did
not wait until the publication of Power in the Kremlin to reach judg-
ment. He did so, in fact, as the events were actually taking place,
both in Le Monde and in conversation with Western diplomats in
Moscow (including US diplomats). He thus helped at the time to
shape everyone's ideas about politics in the Kremlin, including those
of intelligence analysts in Washington (this one included). In any
case, the validity of Tatu's examination and the importance of his
ideas does not rest on when they appeared or, for that matter, on
their originality.
Tatu's theme is grand, but along the way he by no means neglects
small but nonetheless illuminating episodes. He reminds us, or tells
us for the first time, of some fascinating incidents. As late as 6 May
1960, for example, after the U-2 had been brought down, Khrushchev
publicly reasserted his oft-repeated belief in the sincere desire of
President Eisenhower for peace. But later in the same month, a
spokesman for conservative interests in the CPSU had this to say:
-Yes, we wanted to believe Eisenhower, we wanted to believe him for the
sake of peace on earth . . . But unlike certain simple-minded persons, we
were not exactly moved to enthusiasm by the President's foggy, evasive state-
ments." (reviewer's emphasis)
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"In order to appreciate the outrageousness of such statements," com-
ments Tatu, "it should be noted that the Chinese themselves went no
further in their criticism of Khrushchev at the time, and occasionally
used the same words."
Tatu also occasionally throws out an interesting and provocative
question which he leaves the reader to answer for himself. Sometimes
these questions are rather startling in their implications. He asks, for
example, whether the Berlin crisis of 1961 brought about the subse-
quent increase in Soviet military expenditures, or whether, conversely,
the need of the military to strengthen the armed forces brought about
the crisis.
As is perhaps already evident, Tatu's work is not for those who like
their political analysis in the manner of Mary Barelli Gallagher or who ?
are seeking a light summer entertainment. It is overly long, and will
surely tell most readers more than they want to know. And, almost as
if he could not bear to discard notes he had made during the event,
Tatu sometimes overburdens his account with detail which seems
irrelevant and inconclusive.
A more serious charge is that, to paraphrase the clich?Tatu ne-
glects (although he does not completely ignore) the forest for the
trees. As indicated, many of the trees which he studies with such en-
thusiasm are simply of little account as timber. The part of the forest
most neglected is, not surprisingly in a book of this character and in-
tent, foreign policy. But Tatu overdoes it; he tends to regard interna-
tional problems almost wholly in a domestic light. The following sen-
tence, for instance, strikes me at least as decidedly odd: "Nothing else
of any significance was in fact touched on kat the Congress) apart
from the Albanian and Chinese problem, which was only a form of
the struggle for power projected on to the international scene. . ." (re-
viewer's emphasis.)
A part of the problem is that, as described by Tatu, there is a certain
lack of connective tissue between events, especially international
events. Links between domestic and foreign events are too often simply
referred to in passing, if at all. Thus, for example, in the sections deal-
ing with Khrushchev's difficulties during the winter of 1963, there
are few references to Soviet foreign policy. This is important for several
reasons, but notably because developments in this area clearly rein-
force Tatu's thesis that Khrushchev's policies?e.g., de-Stalinization
and economic reform?were in trouble. There was a close parallel be-
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tween Khrushchev's internal setbacks and what was happening to his
principal foreign policies. These too, were running into effective op-
position. Clearly, the conservatives led by Kozlov wished to retrench
abroad as well as at home. It will be recalled, for example, that Khru-
shchev's interest in a nuclear test ban treaty, strongly expressed in the
immediate aftermath of the Cuban missile 'crisis, came to naught until
he was able to pick up the thread again in June, after his defeat of the
conservatives.
In a larger sense, a similar fault can be discovered in Tatu's treat-
ment of the missile crisis itself. The period leading up to that crisis
is covered in some detail on the home front ( though perhaps inade-
quately explored on the international scene). But since he attributes
almost everything to the lure of Berlin, Tatu tends to neglect the two
principal Soviet motives in the affair: Khrushchev's desire to overcome
US strategic superiority and to damage US prestige; and his more per-
sonal, though equally important wish to improve his own position.
Tatu does not discuss in this context the whole discouraging pattern
of events, domestic and foreign, in the two years preceding Cuba. He
thus does not explore the notion that the Cuban gamble reflected
Khrushchev's extreme frustration and even desperation, that in fact
Khrushchev was impelled by his failures on both the internal and in-
ternational fronts, and that he sought in this way to recover lost mo-
mentum abroad and to forestall his ouster at home.
It may be an occupational fault of Kremlinologists and Kremlinology
to neglect, relatively speaking, the international scene and its impact
on Soviet politics. This is perhaps not surprising, given the rigors and
necessary emphases of the art. There is also the matter of time. Tartu
admits that Kremlinology must grope, and that takes time, a lot of it.
Precious little may be left for explorations of the foreign field, except
insofar as it may seem to intrude on the convoluted world of internal
Soviet politics. In any case, few practicioners seem very much con-
cerned with the need for looking very far beyond the walls of the
Kremlin itself.
The importance of this work does not lie, however, in the marginalia
mentioned above. And it was admittedly not Tatu's purpose to pro-
vide us with a full account of Khrushchev's foreign policies. The signifi-
cance of the book is twofold: it is the most thorough and persuasive
account yet of the nature of Soviet politics during the Khrushchev
era?an era described at the time by many Kremlinologists (includ-
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ing many within the US Government) as politically placid and lack-
Mg in high-level contention; and it is as such the one account most
likely to make an impression, even indirectly, on those in the West
whose business it is to respond to and contend with the Soviet chal-
lenge. In Tofu's words: "No policy of relations with Moscow can be
planned intelligently without regard to the capital question of how it
affects the struggle for influence at the top level of the Soviet Union.
For this purpose, the symptoms of that struggle which are visible to
the outside world must be taken seriously however slight they may
seem."
Richard W. Shryock
WESTERN ECONOMIC WARFARE, 1947-1967: By Gunnar Adler-
Karlsson. (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. 1968. 319 pp. 64 Sw.-kr.)
This book is an analysis of the postwar trade control programs of
the US and its allies against the USSR and other Communist coun-
tries. The major portion of the book is devoted to the historical de-
velopment of the trade control programs. The most interesting por-
tion, however, is the evaluation of the impact of the controls and the
judgment that these failed overwhelmingly to achieve their objectives.
The author's argument is well documented, but his conclusions are
overstated and need to be substantially qualified.
Controls on exports to the Communist world have been with us for
two decades. The two chief systems of export controls applicable to the
Communist countries are the unilateral controls based on the US Ex-
port Control Act of 1949; and the multilateral controls administered
since 1949-50 in cooperation with our European allies and japan
under the aegis of the Coordinating Committee (COCOM). These
two sets of controls, designed principally to delay and complicate the
ability of the USSR (along with the Warsaw Pact countries and Com-
munist China) to ,augument its military potential, were adopted
during the height of the cold war.
The scope of both lists has been reduced and interpretation of con-
trols has been liberalized over time; nevertheless, there has been con-
siderable friction between the US and its allies over what should be
exported to the Communist world. In the early postwar period when
our allies were economically dependent on the US, when Stalin was
molding his "closed" economic bloc, and during the Korean war, there
MORI/HRP
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was closer official adherence by the allies to the stricter US inter-
pretations. After the death of Stalin in 1953, the Korean armistice,
and the growing economic recovery in Europe which produced compe-
tition for foreign markets, there was pressure in COCOM for a re-
laxation of trade controls.
All COCOM countries, including the US, are in general agreement
concerning the embargo of items on the international Munitions and
Atomic Energy lists, but broad disagreements exist on the COCOM
International List I, where items have both civilian and military uses.
The COCOM International List I is the lowest common denominator
for export controls, and any participating country is free to apply a
higher level of controls. US controls are wider in scope and more vig-
orously enforced than those of Western Europe and Japan, because
the US is more inclined to look on the Communist countries as posing
a strategic threat, while other Western countries tend to regard the
Communist countries as a vast potential marketewhich must be ex-
ploited before US competition makes it impossible to do so.
It is Mr. Karlsson's purpose, he says, to look at the history of this
"embargo" policy "reluctantly adopted by the West European govern-
ments.. . to analyze both the political forces which created the policy,
and the economic effects which it may have had on East-West trade
and on the balance of power between the Communist bloc and its
Western adversaries." The generous proportions of his book testify to
the fact that he approached his task with a vengeance. The 8"x101/2"
volume has more than 200 double-columned pages liberally interlarded
with diagrams and tables; there are more than 1,000 source refer-
ences and footnotes (many rather long and fortunately relegated to
the back of the book), and more than 50 pages of trade statistics in
the appendix. Ostensibly the author also consulted numerous sources
in his research, including more than 100 periodicals in a half-dozen
languages. His bibliography includes about 200 authors?from the
best known experts on the Soviet economy to numerous lesser lumi-
naries.
The history of the controls programs, which takes up roughly half
of the book (all or major portions of chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, and 10),
is the strongest part of the book. The obvious painstaking research
using unclassified materials has resulted in a well-documented unclas-
sified history of the trade controls program. Those of us who have ac-
cess to classified sources and particularly those who at least are gen-
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orally aware of the trade controls program and some of its history
might question the utility of Mr. Karlsson's monumental effort. The
book's chief distinction would appear to be its encyclopedic proper-
tions rather than any new contributions or insights into the question
of the merits or lack thereof of the trade controls prop-am. Our col-
leagues in academia, however, who are not privy to classified mate-
rials, may well regard Karlsson's book as a major contribution to the
literature on Western export controls, particularly its historical de-
velopment. This is not to say, however, that some of the motives and
reasoning for various trade controls actions that he attributes to policy
makers are necessarily true. Thus, there is some reason to doubt that
during the period 1947-53 American leaders "had no vision of peace
beyond the collapse or defeat of Soviet power . . . and that the Ameri-
cans hoped to achieve a collapse after which the Russians would come
and beg for renewed trade relations, now on American conditions."
(pp. 88-89).
The theme which runs throughout the book is that the embargo
policy, which Karlsson says was instigated by the US and perpetrated
on its allies over the last two decades, has been futile; that numerous
diversions have undermined the controls; that the embargo has caused
considerable ill feeling among our allies; that depriving the Commu-
nist countries of Western goods helped Stalin consolidate his Eastern
European domain, promoted autarky, and affected development of
East-West trade up to 1953; that the costs imposed on the USSR by the
denial of certain goods were negligible; and finally that it failed to af-
fect perceptibly the growth of the Soviet economy and Soviet military
power. The book, in fact, is an almost unrelieved indictment of the
Western trade controls programs allegedly nurtured by the United
States and foisted on our hapless allies in the early postwar period.
It is certainly true that there have been many diversions. This fact
has been well documented in classified and unclassified sources. It is
also true that much ill will has been generated because of trade con-
trols. However, it is highly debatable that Western trade controls
were more than marginally influential in fostering the creation of
Stalin's economic bloc in the East. As to the development of East-West
trade up to 1953, we can only be sure that trade controls had a major
impact on US trade with the Communist world. Commodity scarcities
pursuant to the Korean conflict, inward direction of trade among the
USSR and Eastern European countries, and the liberalization of trade
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among Western European countries all played a role in the stagna-
tion of trade between East and West at that time.
Karlsson's thesis that controls have had little impact on Soviet eco-
nomic growth is based on a comparison of "non-realized imports" (the
difference between actual imports from the West and the estimated
value of imports in the absence of controls) with Soviet GNP. This,
he says, would have affected only one-tenth to one-half of one percent
of GNP during the height of the embargo period (pp. 189-90). He
states that the bottleneck effects of the embargo restrictions may have
affected a greater share of the economy and that an exaggerated esti-
mate might be a slowdown in growth from the "potential 8 percent to
the actual 7 percent" during the 1950's. Based on "these exaggerated
assumptions" the effects of the embargo policy would have been to re-
tard economic development during the decade of the 1950's by one
year.
A study undertaken in the intelligence community several years
ago confirmed the thesis that controls have had little impact on growth.
It concluded that a complete embargo by NATO would have caused,
under generous assumptions of impact, the equivalent to the loss of
only a few months' increment to output in the USSR and Eastern
Europe. It has not been possible, moreover, to identify any of the items
imported from the COCOM countries by the USSR and Eastern Eu-
rope for which there would be no possible substitute.
The principal justification for export controls for many years has
been their contribution to or maintenance of the technological lag in
the USSR. It is in this area that Karlsson's arguments are weakest.
The denial of some goods undoubtedly has had an impact on those
economic capabilities that lie at the edge of advancing technology. In
this sense, the quality of Soviet economic growth must be inferior to
what it would be otherwise. The current pattern of trade controls is
aimed primarily at those goods whose technology the USSR has had the
most difficulty mastering.
The technological gap between the USSR and the developed West
is large and is probably widening, as a recent classified study inch-
cates. This statement is at odds with Karlsson's evaluation of Soviet
technological prowess, which he attributes in part to the "efficient
organization of R & D work" there (p. 124). On the contrary, he
sees little point in controlling exports of technology to the USSR, other
than those clearly possessing strategic significance. Karlsson's argu-
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ments seem to be derived mainly from statements made in the
Gaither report in 1958 regarding the rapid pace of Soviet military
development (p. 123). Indeed, the USSR has achieved near-parity
with the US in technology for producing many types of weapons
and space equipment, and even superiority in a few areas. Soviet
priorities, however, have favored the military sector. According to
the above-mentioned report, second priority has been given to the
basic industries whose output directly supports both military produc-
tion and the investment programs essential to rapid growth--steel,
fuels, electric power, producers' equipment, and more recently, chem-
icals. The bulk of the output of these industries is produced with tech-
nology obsolescent by a number of years relative to that predomi-
nantly in use in the West; e.g., technology for producing computers,
peripheral equipment, and solid-state electronic components (a 5-
year lag and widening); the Soviet technological composition of
machine tools is inferior because of its poor quality and preponder-
ance of general-purpose tools; production technology and product
mix of the Soviet automotive and tractor industry are obsolescent;
all aspects of Soviet petroleum technology lags well behind the US
as does much of Soviet chemical technology.
Contrary to Karlsson's evaluation of the efficiency of Soviet II & D,
the technological gap exists and is largely due to the Soviet system
of planning and economic administration which retards innovation.
The importation by the Soviets of Western technology and equipment
valued in billions of dollars during the 196(Ss has been designed to
help overcome this gap. The denial of key advanced Western tech-
nology and equipment via export controls, moreover, has contributed
td the technological lag. The lag is in some degree attributable to the
US unilateral trade program because a substantial amount of key
advanced Western technology is covered by US patents and licenses.
The relaxation of Western controls undoubtedly would lead to
changes in the ,composition of Communist imports from the West.
Such imports would feature equipment and technology for priority
sectors where the lag is greatest, e.g., computers, microelectronics,
petroleum refining and exploration, metal finishing, thermal power,
and certain chemicals. The contribution that such imports would make
to Communist economic growth is, of course, unquantifiable. In-
directly, such imports would help to improve the general economic
OFFICIAL ()Nix 121
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performance of the USSR and Eastern Europe and, thus, would
make it possible for them to allocate more resources to military pro-
duction than otherwise would be the case. Some of these items, com-
puters, for example, have military as well as civil uses and, thus, would
directly strengthen the Soviet strategic/military posture.
As noted above, denial of strategic goods for two decades did not
prevent the USSR from building a formidable military establishment
at home as well as in Eastern Europe. The military sector is the first
claimant of goods and services in these countries. Denial of Western
technology and equipment, therefore, has had minimal impact on the
size of Soviet military programs. On the other hand, the denial of
Western technology and equipment probably has increased the costs
and reduced the effectiveness of Soviet military programs, and delayed
development and deployment of some weapons systems. Technolog-
ical lags appear to have been absorbed in Soviet military systems at
a cost of reduced effectiveness, e.g., through weight penalties in
aircraft; more cumbersome command, support, and communications
systems; limited flexibility; and reduced reliability.
Controls in the past decade probably have retarded Soviet produc-
tion technology in semiconductors and other electronic components
by denying access to silicon and germanium metals, the processing
machinery for these metals, and transistor and diode production lines.
This delay, in turn, has probably contributed to present lags in digital
computer production technology, which has remained embargoed.
The Soviet lag in production technology for large high-speed com-
puters probably would be a constraining factor in the size and pace
of deployment of a nation-wide ABM system. The US lead in de-
veloping a MIRV system may also be attributable in part to computer
superiority. Optimal nuclear warhead design requires large com-
puter capacity.
The current Soviet lag in the field of microelectronics contributes
to computer deficiencies. The USSR does not yet produce integrated
circuits on a commercial scale. Failure to acquire adequate supplies
?of integrated circuits may retard the deployment of on-board missile
guidance packages and reduce the accuracy of missiles. In the general
field of military applications, unrestricted access to Western micro-
electronic components and/or technology would enable the USSR to
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replace existing Soviet-made components in a wide variety of military
gear with smaller, lighter, and more reliable Western components.
The quantity, quality, and variety of Communist output of telecom-
munications equipment falls far short of meeting Communist require-
ments. As the USSR increases its investment in sophisticated weapons
systems, such as ABM and offensive missile systems, increasing re-
quirements will be generated for a wide variety of telecommunica-
tions systems for strategic application. Included among these systems
are hardened communications facilities in target areas, under
ground control links for hardened missile sites, automated nation-
wide command and control functions, and facilities for rapid and
secure data and voice transmission. The USSR's capability in the
telecommunications techniques needed to satisfy these requirements
is deficient, and numerous attempts to acquire Western technology
and equipment have been made in recent years. The lack of adequate
high-rate data transmission equipment in particular is a serious
hindrance to the deployment of an ABM system, which requires an
intricate network of communications facilities, connecting radars,
computers, command and control centers, and defensive missiles.
The impact of US and Western trade controls on the USSR and
other Communist countries has been less than originally hoped for.
However, they were never intended to bring the USSR to its knees, as
implied by Karlsson. They have not slowed Soviet economic growth
noticeably in the past but they have contributed to the technological
lag which is the major factor in the current economic slowdown.
The have not prevented the USSR from becoming a formidable
military power, but they have denied it equipment and technology
which would have upgraded some weapons systems, and in any
case probably have helped delay the deployment of certain weapons
systems. What this has meant in terms of costs to the Communist
world cannot be quantified. The costs to the Western alliance, par-
ticularly with respect to the loss of political capital by the US, should
be weighed in the balance, of course. The viewpoints of our Western
allies in assessing the strategic significance of exports relative to com-
mercial gains are different from that of the US. Protected by the US
nuclear umbrella, the options are easier for our Western European
allies.
Robert S. Kovach
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ASSASSINATION BUREAU, INC. By L. Natarajanan. (New Delhi:
Perspective Publications, 1967.)
This book is a lurid account of five political assassinations in Asia
during the past twenty years. It is a reprint of articles previously
serialized in the nominally independent Indian leftist weekly, Main-
stream (circulation, 4,000). It cannot be treated as a serious work.
What we can discern of the motives behind such a publication may,
however, he of some interest.
L. Natarajanan is a pen name of Nikil Chakravarty, an Indian
Communist Party member for more than 30 years. An Oxford Uni-
versity student in the 30's, when he joined the British Communist
Party, he had personal acquaintances among India League and
Congress Party leaders that have stood him in good stead over the
years. The first fifteen years of his party work were devoted to "com-
bining legal and illegal activity"; he was a party journalist and, when
occasion demanded, a wartime member and later (1948-50) a leader
of the clandestine technical apparatus of the CPI, under various aliases.
From 1952, when he wrote American Shadow over India for the
party press, his career followed a different course. Aligned with
Ajoy Ghosh, the new Secretary-General of the party, he was used in
party contacts with Soviet Bloc embassies, and eventually became
head of the India Press Agency, a Communist Party "news" outlet
created with Soviet financial backing. After Ghosh's death he moved
away from open association with the party but strengthened his rela-
tions with the Soviets, who also financed the establishment of Main-
stream. At one point in 1959-60, it was reported that he was taking
on "counterintelligence duties" with Americans as his target, when
the party took new steps to create a secret mechanism. What is known
is that he has for 'several years published numerous articles on CIA
in Asia in various outlets, virtually all of them elaborate fabrications.
The first case treated is the assassination in 1947 of General Aung
San, the leader of the nationalist Executive Council that governed
Burma in the first post-World War II period, and the subsequent
execution of the organizer of his assassination, U Saw. The second is
the murder in 1949 in South Korea of Kim Koo, a leading political
opponent of then President Syngman Rhee, and the third the shooting
in 1951 of Liaquat Ali Khan, Prime Minister of Pakistan. The last two
cases are those of Ceylonese Prime Minister Bandaranaike who met
MORI/HRP
from pg.
124-126
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violent death at the hands of two Buddhist monks in September 1959,
and of the Japanese Socialist Party leader Asanuma, stabbed at a pre-
electoral meeting in September 1960.
Soviet apologists and agents of influence have special problems
in dealing with the question of political assassination. One difficulty
is, as Khoklov and other Soviet defectors have stated, that the USSR
has resorted to assassination for many years, although mainly of
political ,oppositionists who fled from Soviet territory. In this book
the author addresses another problem, the fact that not all victims
of political assassination operations attributed to the imperialists can
be identified as simonpure fighters against capitalism and imperialism.
The central idea appears to be that the British and the Americans
use political assassination against erstwhile puppets, a theme which
is consistent with Soviet efforts in the CENTO, SEATO, and OAS
treaty areas to drive wedges between the US and cooperating political
leaders. In the Burmese case, it is U Saw, the organizer of the assas-
sination of Aung San, who is betrayed by his masters. An interesting
sidelight in this case is the fact that the Soviet Union, in its attack in
early 1969 on the Chinese and their Southeast Asian puppets,
claimed Aung San as the leader of the "good" Burmese Communists
at the end of World War II, whose death made it possible for
Maoist sectarians to break up the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom
League, thus playing into the hands of the imperialist enemy.
In the Korean case, the Americans are cast as the villains behind
both the elimination of Syngman Rhee and the death of his opponent,
Kim Koo. The idea that no Korean should trust the US is reiterated.
The stream-of-consciousness account of Syngman Rhee's thoughts sug-
gests that the author of the piece?Indian or Soviet?has found a
way of communicating with the spirit world.
The Pakistani case is built around a supplementary theme used in
Soviet wedge-driving?that the British and Americans will use any
means necessary against each other in their struggle for colonialist
hegemony, and that their failures to expose each other's crimes arise
in the last 'analysis from the fact that they are tied together by their
crimes. Apparently the person who inspired this piece believes in the
validity of the old Nechayev principle of conspiracy, that the best way
of making a fellow conspirator reliable is to lead him to commit a crime
and to hold the knowledge of his guilt over his head.
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The case of "Sword" (S.W.R.D.) Bandaranaike, again suggests the
theme that a collaborator will be liquidated if he begins to see the
error of his ways and to move away from his subordination to the
imperialists. Again Anglo-American mutual jealousy and mistrust is
woven into the story along with the idea that an agent shared between
the two may be the local villain of the piece.
In the Japanese case, which in one or two places also suggests either
spirit-world sources or a penetration in the US Embassy in Tokyo,
the book again plays on the theme of an assassination as a sequel to
an unsuccessful American effort to influence a political group, in
this instance, the Socialist Party of Japan.
Neither the "facts" presented, the professional ability of the writer,
nor the interpretive analysis of why these assassinations were neces-
sary to the US and Britian are likely to have impact even in India.
They are, however, useful for Indian Communists who need a ration-
alization that can be acceptable from a Marxist-Leninist point of
view for the fact that the opponent they condemned yesterday as an
imperialist puppet may be today's forgotten man, as far as the "im-
perialist beast" is concerned. Some erstwhile friends of the West in
South Asia who turn against the US or Great Britian also may find
the stories handy polemic aids when they cannot frankly explain
to their associates why they have turned toward the USSR.
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