STUDIES IN INTELLIGENCE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP78T03194A000400010021-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
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• Document Page Count: 58
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 10, 2005
• Sequence Number: 21
• Publication Date: January 1, 1976
• Content Type: IS

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STUD
IN
INTELLIGENCE
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
VOL. 20 No. 2 SUMMER 1976
TR-SINT 76-002
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SECURITY PRECAUTIONS
Materials in the Studies are in general to be reserved to US per-
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Sensitive Intelligence Sources and Methods Involved
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STUDIES IN INTELLIGENCE
Articles for the Studies in Intelligence may be written
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the literature of intelligence.
DAVID S. BRANDWEIN LEWIS J. LAPHAM
MAURICE C. ERNST RICHARD LEHMAN
HARRY E. FITZWATER WALTER L. PFORZHEIMER
LAWRENCE R. HOUSTON SAYRE STEVENS
E. J. ZELLMER
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CONTENTS
Page
Intelligence Reform in the Mid-1970s ....................Timothy S. Hardy 1
From the inside looking out, (UNCLASSIFIED)
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Bayesian Analysis for Intelligence ....... . .............. Nicholas Schweitzer 31
Some focus on the Middle East. (SECRET)
Thirty-five Years in Intelligence ....... . ..... . . . Lt. Gen, Vernon A. Walters 45
A new Farewell Address. (COPYRIGHT)
Intelligence in Recent Public Literature ............ . .. . ... . ....... . .. . . .. 61
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From the inside looking out:
INTELLIGENCE REFORM IN THE MID-1970s
Timothy S. Hardy
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are stars. They are reaping millions from their
investigative reporting. When Watergate rates a chapter in history books, they will no
doubt get more than a footnote. But another investigative reporter, whose role in the
story he broke was probably more integral and essential, is almost forgotten already.
Had Seymour Hersh not written his CIA domestic surveillance stories for the New York
Times in December 1974 (indeed, had not the Times seen fit to splash the first story
across five columns of page one headlined "Massive Surveillance"), there seems little
doubt that there never would have been a Rockefeller Commission, a Pike "Report," a
Church Committee, or an Executive Order 11905.
Books by Victor Marchetti and Philip Agee or occasional columns by Jack
Anderson were not able, as the Hersh article was, to stampede the new Ford
Administration into appointing a presidential commission, the first step down an ever-
widening path of inquiry. Hersh, and Hersh alone, caused the President, and then
Congress-put in the position where it could not allow the Executive Branch alone to
be the investigator-to make intelligence a major issue of 1975. His stories, combined
with a presidential reaction that gave the stories great credibility, took a long-
smoldering collection of problems and put them on the nation's front burner. One
would have to be quite persuasive to make the case that Woodward and Bernstein were
nearly as crucial to the unfolding of their story.
On the other hand, had not Woodward and Bernstein set a favorable tone for
investigative reporting, by giving great credibility to the delvings of the press into
once-sacred institutions, the splash made by the Hersh article might never have been
possible. The public and Congress had become quite susceptible to claims that the
government was out of control, that bizarre stories about secret conspiracies might
indeed be true. And the whole Watergate scenario led, as Senator Baker had been
fascinated to learn and determined to probe as an adjunct to his Watergate committee
tasks, in a number of bizarre ways to the CIA gates in Langley.
Yet Hersh may not even merit a historical footnote, perhaps, because the ball he
started rolling never really knocked down all, or even any, of the pins. The ending of
the Post dynamic duo's story, after all, was the resignation of a reigning President. No
such result capped Hersh's story. The CIA is thriving in Langley, its constituent parts
all strung together, its basic mission unchanged. The Defense Department still spends
more than 80 percent of the billions of national intelligence dollars in ways only
vaguely known to the American public. The new FBI building is still named for
J. Edgar Hoover. And one of the nation's most expensive and most important
intelligence organizations remains to this day unacknowledged by the U.S.
Government. Nonetheless, the Hersh article did set in motion events that led to
trumpeted "reforms" of the foreign intelligence community.
What follows is one insider's attempt to reconstruct that train of events. First, as
an investigator (with the Rockefeller Commission), then as a staff assistant to the
decision process (in the White House), and finally as an implementer (with the
Intelligence Oversight Board), I watched the intelligence issue wax and wane, both at
the office and on the nation's front pages. The views expressed here are biased by this
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background. In particular, the views are biased by not reflecting how the intelligence
community itself, either collectively or individually, viewed what was happening.
Nonetheless, the odyssey has provided some unique opportunities to see the events
unfold.
The most obvious result of any government investigation is the release of
information to the public. Even in the highly secretive world of intelligence, the past
two years have seen many revelations. The American public has available to it much
more information on the foreign intelligence community-the CIA, FBI, National
Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and other elements of Defense, State,
Treasury, and the Energy Resources and Development Administration-than it ever
had before. Most prominent in this regard are the histories of abuses. The Church
Committee's report on CIA involvement in assassinations details meticulously all the
scraps of information that could be found. The Rockefeller Commission told for the
first time the story of the suicide of a person on whom the CIA had been testing LSD,
and numerous stories on government drug testing have followed. NSA and CIA watch
lists that collected thousands of Americans' communications by cable and mail have
been amply documented.
Some of these stories have been told and retold so many times that it is doubtful
much of the public has been able to recognize that such activities, as reprehensible as
they may have been, do not characterize the overwhelming focus of foreign
intelligence activities. Take, for instance, CIA's Operation CHAOS. The CIA collected
substantial amounts of information on domestic dissidents from 1967 to 1973. The
Rockefeller Commission deemed the program a violation of the CIA statutory charter.
The story has been told so often, though, that it would be easy to assume such activities
were at the heart of CIA operations. CHAOS was the focus of the original Hersh New
York Times articles. It merited a 20-page chapter in the Rockefeller Commission
report. Church Committee hearings with James Angleton, Tom Huston, and Richard
Helms put CHAOS in the headlines again in the fall of 1975. CHAOS was featured in
the final Church Report, only to be on the front pages again several weeks later when
the Senate Select Committee issued a supplemental report on the operation. Each
time, headlines highlighted the 7,200 Americans on whom the CIA compiled files, but
none of these reprises added substantial new details to the story first comprehensively
told by the Rockefeller Commission. Rarely was there mention that an earlier story was
being retold.
It cannot be denied, though, that the retellings had their purpose. On the first
telling, many readers remained skeptical, on the one hand doubting that such events
could really have occurred, while on the other hand wondering whether there might be
even more to the story than was being told. With repetition, the story grew in
credibility; newspaper stories shaded into documented history. Skeptics from varied
viewpoints could begin to accept the story and begin to come to agreements on
rational responses to abuses of the past. Retellings could also be used, as they were by
the Church Committee, to highlight proposed reforms: otherwise dry legislative
proposals that would gain little publicity unless placed in the context of the wrongs at
which they were aimed. The Church Committee's retellings were especially well-timed
to provide new impetus last spring when enthusiasm seemed to be dying for
establishment of a permanent Senate Intelligence Committee.
The past year's revelations have, however, gone beyond detailing abuses of the
past. When 1975 began, the CIA organization chart was classified. The Rockefeller
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Commission report in June 1975 was careful not to name offices below the level of the
four Directorates. By April 1976, the Church Committee talked freely of lower-level
offices, like the Domestic Collection and Foreign Resources Divisions, and told what
they do. Similarly, the Rockefeller Commission avoided using operation code
names-violating its rule only in the case of CHAOS, the particularly apt name chosen
to denote attempts to understand American dissidence, and there only after serious
debate among the staff about the appropriateness of using even that name in an
unclassified report. The Church reports talk freely of RESISTANCE and
MERRIMACK, of AMLASH and MONGOOSE. Naming names may seem
insignificant today, but it certainly did not seem insignificant a mere year ago when
they were still kept under wraps.
Naming names was but a first step. While the Rockefeller Commission discussed
CIA proprietary companies and methods of establishing cover only in the very
broadest sense-and even there with great trepidation and after much agonizing-the
Church report details their types and uses. The method of producing finished
intelligence, the types of covert actions conducted in the past, the budget process,
relations with the academic world-all are detailed in official government documents
as they had never been before. Reading the congressional documents, one familiar
with issues in the intelligence community over the past 15 years would find little that
was new to intelligence leaders, but much that was discussed for the first time in a non-
classified document. On the other hand, the documents contained much that was new
even to career intelligence officers who had never had a view from the top. Intelligence
agencies had traditionally compartmented information, made it available only to
those persons who had a genuine need to know it. As a result, many employees of
intelligence agencies no doubt learned more about their employers than they ever had
reason to suspect they would learn before retirement. One classic example of this
learning process is exemplified by the references to the CIA's old Domestic Operations
Division in Victor Marchetti's book. As knowledgeable as Marchetti had become in his
years at the Agency, his description of this office contrasts starkly with its true nature,
since revealed by the Church reports.
Among the purposes of any revelations should be publication of that information
needed for informed public debate. There was for many years little or no public debate
on the role of intelligence agencies, the only exceptions being aftermaths of the U-2
and Bay of Pigs incidents. The last year has seen much debate; has the information
been made available for it to be informed? In the civil liberties area, the answer is
largely yes. As the recommendations of the Rockefeller and Church reports and the
detailed prohibition section of the President's Executive Order 11905 on Foreign
Intelligence (18 February 1976) demonstrate, public discussion is possible and has
begun on the limits-at least domestically-to be placed on foreign intelligence
activities. On the other hand, the still-classified Attorney General guidelines for NSA
collection and FBI counterintelligence activities cover areas where public debate
cannot be easily accommodated with the demands for security. Revelation of the
details of what communications the U.S. does not allow itself to intercept would be of
great value to unfriendly nations who would be happy to know how they can
communicate without being intercepted. In the broader area of the effectiveness of the
intelligence agencies-their resource allocations and the organization of their
effort-problems have been identified publicly, but informed debate remains difficult
because of the limits placed by security on further description. Which collection
systems deserve more emphasis-or less; whether National Intelligence Estimates are
any good-or not; whether the overall intelligence budget is big enough-or too
big-these questions cannot be debated in a public forum on the basis of publicly
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available information. Although studies of these questions have gone on for years
within the Executive Branch and will be more intensely reviewed by Congress in the
future, public discussion is unlikely to be useful. While it might be easy to find fault
with the Church report because it is so focused on prevention of abuses that it has
little to offer in the area of effective operation of the intelligence community, the limits
placed on publicly available information represent one stumbling block to any
congressional committee that would wish to bring the public into this debate.
Congressional and press revelations do more than get information into the public
sector. An article like Hersh's can be the catalyst for change. Once either estate latches
on to any person or institution-be it Gulf Oil or the CIA-reactions to the revelations
by those attacked are inevitable. The most immediate reactions are likely to be aimed
at preventing future activities like those that made the splash in the press in the first
place. Over the longer term, the press of scandal may also-from time to time-lead to
substantive improvements. Administration responses to the intelligence revelations
have aimed at both the short and long range, What is the lasting value of either?
Start with prevention of abuse-the response to the immediate, highly publicized
issue. The largely unrecognized story is that many abuses had been attacked well
before Seymour Hersh wrote his article. Indeed, the article would probably never have
been written had not the attack already begun. The original compilation of CIA
wrongs was pulled together for James Schlesinger when Watergate revelations-the
Woodstein team intrudes again-were making life unpleasant for the new CIA
Director. The "Family jewels," as the compilation came to be known, represented a
long, comprehensive, in-house collection of dynamite materials. Rarely, if ever, had
any government agency pulled together in one place such a damaging document. The
mere process of putting this information in one place may well have provided the
source of Hersh's article, and subsequently, provided the material that formed the
backbone (and most of the skeleton and even skin) of the Rockefeller Commission
Report.
It should not be taken as a criticism of the Rockefeller Commission to state that it
served primarily as a blue-ribbon panel to edit and publish the CIA Family jewels;
rather, that fact should be seen first as a commentary on the useful role of outsiders
invited in to counsel the government, and secondly as a tribute to the Agency-a
tribute, not just because the Agency demonstrated an ability probably unmatched in
the Government bureaucracy to learn what had been and still was going on
throughout its organization, but also because as a result new regulations to end abuses
were issued by Director Colby even before 1975 began. The mail opening
program-probably the most damaging of the domestic abuses-had been terminated.
Operation CHAOS had been phased out, largely because the events that provoked it
were over, but also because the CIA had never been fully comfortable about its
involvement with domestic dissidence. Formal procedures to limit physical and
electronic surveillance and gathering of income tax information from IRS had also
been put into effect. Assassination was outlawed by Director Colby long before the
President mentioned that story to the press.
No matter how honorable had been the CIA's actions subsequent to collecting the
Family jewels, convincing the American public of the wisdom of its actions could
never have been accomplished by the Agency itself. The merit of asking a commission
made up of members and staff from outside the government to make such judgments
was that some degree of impartiality was necessary to establish credibility. The limited
nature of the Rockefeller Commission's "outsideness"-being chaired by the Vice
President and populated to a large extent by former government officials-ensured,
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however, that even its credibility remained to be tested by continuing investigations by
Congress and the press. The Commission's credibility became especially crucial just
before its report was issued. Rumors flew in the press that two versions of the
report-one classified and one not-were being written, that the White House was
censoring the report, and that it would contain the full story of the alleged foreign
assassination attempts. The first rumor was completely false; from the beginning the
Commission had planned to issue only an unclassified report, knowing full well that
the existence of a secret report would only fuel demands for the full, unabridged story.
Every draft done by the Commission was thus written to be an unclassified document.
The second rumor had some validity, but no truly embarrassing connotations. The
Commission was justifiably concerned not to release inadvertently sensitive classified
information, while still telling the full story of the activities investigated. The White
House was given an advance copy of the report to review, but no attempt was ever
made to change even one word of the investigative findings. The third rumor
particularly strained credibility when the Commission failed to make any findings
with respect to alleged assassinations of foreign leaders. Although the Commission had
become aware of the assassination stories early in its work, it had not been pushed to
explore this area until it was well along in probing the domestic activities that had
originally led to its formation. Regardless of what political motivations led to exclusion
of any findings on the assassinations in the Commission's June 5, 1975, report-and
such motivations did exist-the underlying problem was that by this date-the
scheduled deadline, already extended several months-the Commission was still far
from completing this aspect of its inquiries. Whatever credibility the Rockefeller
Commission could muster would have been sapped by a premature publication of
preliminary findings in this highly sensitive area.
The minimal need for further reform of the CIA-assuming internal regulations
alone could be considered sufficient to prevent abuse in the future-can be seen in the
welcome embrace of the Rockefeller Commission recommendations by the Agency.
Only the suggestion that the CIA's budget total be made public provoked serious
disagreement. By mid-summer 1975, it was apparent that the intelligence community
was quite willing to accept implementation of the Rockefeller recommendations. A
number of White House staff people, with Counsel to the President Philip Buchen and
Associate Counsel James Wilderotter in the lead, bustled around putting together a
draft Executive Order imposing restrictions, not only on CIA, but on all foreign
intelligence agencies. Inter-agency representatives were called in to make sure the
restrictions were acceptable. At one point, disagreements led the drafters back to an
Order that dealt only with the CIA. As suggested by the Rockefeller Commission, the
Executive Order for the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) was
drafted and redrafted to give it the new responsibility of policing the community; the
only issue at the time was whether the Board, given this new task, would continue to be
allowed to have a staff detailed from the intelligence community.
It appeared, around Labor Day 1975, that there was a real opportunity for the
President to take the initiative away from Congress by announcing that the Rockefeller
recommendations had been implemented. At that time, the Church Committee had
not yet had any public hearings, the Pike Committee was still trying to get organized,
and the Rockefeller agenda represented most of what was in the news. There was an
opportunity for quick, decisive action. Against a background of a Nixon
Administration notorious for ignoring reports from presidential commissions, the Ford
Administration could show it was different; when good ideas were advanced, they
were implemented. The staff effort, however, died aborning. It died not because of any
serious policy objections to the types of restrictions that would have been
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imposed-hut rather, it seemed, because no one within the White House was pushing
to grasp the opportunity. Lack of direction was apparent. Those who counseled that
Congress would never act and that therefore issuance of restrictions was in the long
term an unnecessary limitation of foreign intelligence won the day.
The interaction of publicity, politics, and substantive reform was clear. Publicity
had created an issue worthy of Presidential attention; publicly imposed restrictions on
intelligence agencies would never have been on the Oval Office agenda had not Hersh
and the New York Times put them there. Politics, however, framed the issue for the
President; the issue had become less one of what restrictions should be imposed and
more one of whether any Executive actions were necessary to prevent more drastic, less
appealing congressionally imposed restrictions. There was at the time only a small
constituency within the Executive Branch for unilaterally limiting its own activities.
Unless forced to do so, or unless political benefits could be derived by such action, the
Executive Branch was loath to act.
Within but a short several months, it seemed that the moment for making an
impact through the Rockefeller recommendations had passed. The Administration had
been put on the defensive. The Pike Committee was beating on the intelligence
community for documents, subpoenas were issued, threats to find the Secretary of
State in contempt of Congress were on the front pages, and questions were being raised
whether the community could even predict the next Pearl Harbor. The assassination
report was not far from completion in the Senate; covert actions in Chile and Italy
were about to be attacked. Mere implementation of the Rockefeller recommendations
would have appeared a weak gesture once these wider issues had been opened. James
Angleton's testimony that intelligence agencies should not always be expected to obey
the law cast into extreme doubt the value of issuing any executive order with
restrictions on the intelligence community. Through the autumn, it seemed less and
less likely that the Administration would pull itself together to implement even the
Rockefeller recommendations. The once frantic pace in writing and rewriting
restrictions ended completely. All Administration effort was directed toward
controlling the damage public revelation could cause intelligence agencies, as
Congress kept threatening more and more embarrassing days of public hearings and
kept demanding more and more sensitive intelligence information.
By mid-November 1975, the time when implementation of the Rockefeller
recommendations would be an effective public stance for the President had passed, but
a new initiative began. By this time, the White House role in the intelligence issue was
no longer being run out of the Counsel's office; the Intelligence Coordinating Group,
with representatives of the major intelligence agencies and chaired by presidential
counsellor Jack Marsh, had been formed. The group was staffed by Michael Duval,
formerly of the Domestic Council. From within this group, the realization arose that if
the President were prepared to move further-go beyond the Rockefeller
recommendations-Congress could still be scooped, and the political initiative
regained from a Congress that had seized the momentum and placed the
Administration on the defensive. When the President announced his intelligence
decisions in February 1976, much press comment spoke of the shifting public
perception of intelligence issues caused first by the murder of Richard Welch in
Athens, and then the congressional fiasco with the leaking of the Pike Report. From a
perspective in the White House, however, neither event had much to do with the
intelligence reform package. These events may have been important in some respects,
but they were not central to reform. Rather, the failure of the President to act in August
seemed due to disorganized staff work then, while his action in February seemed due
to an organized staff effort five months later.
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The new White House staff intelligence leadership had prevailed in arguing that
the investigations had created an opportunity for decisive (and "historic") presidential
action. The passing of the late summer opportunity opened up new opportunities in
the winter. Had the President implemented the Rockefeller recommendations around
Labor Day, it seems in retrospect extremely doubtful that the impetus to wade in again
in early 1976 with more intelligence actions would have been strong. The Rockefeller
recommendations dealt only with CIA domestic activities and by the end of August, it
appeared unlikely that agreement could be reached on restrictions for other agencies.
The recommendations included few organizational issues. The President's
announcements on February 18, 1976, went much farther. They dealt with all foreign
intelligence agencies; they set limits overseas as well as in the United States; they
included presidential support of an electronic surveillance bill that Congress alone had
been pushing previously; they addressed organization and management issues.
Thus began the effort to put together an "affirmative action plan"-a series of
positive reforms to accompany any announcement of presidential restrictions to be
placed on foreign intelligence, a shift from damage control to leadership. The first
concrete evidence that such a plan was in the works was the convening of a National
Security Council study group, chaired by the office of Management and Budget, with
representatives of all intelligence agencies, to lay out options for reorganization, From
mid-November to mid-December, daily, in President Nixon's old Executive Office
Building hideaway, this group worked to put together four major options for overall
reorganization and subsidiary options for oversight and control of intelligence
activities.
The NSC/OMB task force did not have to start from scratch. A whole series of
intelligence organization and management issues had-almost since the September
day in 1947 when the CIA was born-remained open to debate. Hersh and the New
York Times had provided an opportunity to set in front of the President these issues:
Could the Director of Central Intelligence really be the leader of the foreign
intelligence community? No, said the CIA because he had never been given adequate
control of the 80 percent plus of national intelligence assets in the Defense
Department, even by President Nixon's 1971 letter which the Schlesinger Report had
inspired. No, said the Defense Department, because the Director would always have a
conflict of interest as long as he still ran the CIA. But, yes, it would be nice if someone
could be given effective control so that resource decisions would be better
made-provided, of course, that resource control was possible without usurping
Defense's needed operational control. Do consumers of intelligence get the product
they need? No, they do not always, but whose fault is that-the consumer's or the
producer's? And, anyway, is there any organizational way to solve that problem? Does
the intelligence community's organization promote competing analyses, or rather
accommodation and compromise of views? Where does the CIA fit in-as the collator
above partisanship, or as another partisan in competition among intelligence
judgments? Is there any way to assure that intelligence agencies do not abuse the
secrecy within which they operate, or conversely, do not allow Presidents to abuse
them? Give an oversight responsibility to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board? Or, a new Board? Or, a Special Counsel? Or, a super Inspector-General? Do
covert actions have to be run by the CIA? Or, should they be run out of State? Or
Defense? Who should approve them before they start?
Each of these issues had a history; none required the glare of press and
congressional inquiry to be recognized within the government. The NSC/OMB group
set forth no options that had not been considered internally before, did no original
research, and added no new understanding to complex problems-its importance was
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that it wrote a report at a time when persons around the President wanted options for
him to choose among and announce. The group also served to give all the intelligence
agencies a role in the formulation of decisions for the President. Each agency could see
what options were being presented and thus prepare its arguments pro and con.
Providing for such participation was necessary if the President wanted to enlist internal
support for reform. At the same time, the group provided assurance to the President
that reforms being pushed by his staff had been reviewed by intelligence experts.
After the submission of the NSC/OMB study, the decision process moved back
into the White House staff structure. The President asked for a comprehensive
statement of issues and options. A thick notebook with a white cover embossed with
the presidential seal was prepared for him to take on his Christmas skiing trip to Vail.
The press was told of the notebook to ensure that it would be publicly embarrassing for
anyone to try to stop the momentum that was building for announcement of reform.
(The press not only created issues for the White House; it thus also served as a willing
tool of the White House.) The NSC/OMB study was an appendix, but it was also the
basis for the main text of the notebook. The four major organizational options-(1) a
Department of National Intelligence; (2) a DCI with resource control over all national
assets but operational control over none; (3) a DCI with only coordinating authority,
even over the CIA; and (4) maintenance of the status quo with a few tinkerings-were
all described. They were set in the context of the issues the study group had identified
and debated. The CIA's graphics shop prepared a number of pie charts, flow diagrams,
and organization charts to emphasize certain issues. The familiar old penchant for
finding government organization characterized by "mess" charts was carried into the
intelligence area with a chart showing the complex web of operational, resource and
substantive intelligence chains of command. The notebook, like the study group
report, represented no new insights into intelligence issues; but it gave great reality to
the reform movement. It demonstrated that real issues and options existed. By pulling
them together in one document for high-level consumption, it made a decision process
inevitable. The use of graphics and other professional-looking packaging contributed
greatly to the momentum.
After Christmas the coordination process that began at the staff level in the
NSC/OMB group was further promoted at the top management level. Copies of the
"White Book" were made available to top intelligence leaders, and they were called
into the Cabinet Room on January 10 to be briefed, along with the President, by Jack
Marsh on the book's issues and options. At the meeting, the CIA threw a fifth
organizational option into the hopper, moving the decision process a step closer to a
workable reorganization plan. The CIA's option (#4A, as it was tagged) gained
particular credibility by being presented on a large chart done by the same CIA
graphics shop in the same format as it had used for the large charts of the first four
Options, which the White House staff used at the Cabinet level meeting. Coordination
having been "achieved," the decision process moved once again back to the White
House staff structure. With the President leading the way, and with heavy
participation of Marsh, Duval, Buchen, and Brent Scowcroft of the National Security
Council and Don Ogilvie of the Office of Management and Budget, over a four-week
period, the options were narrowed, the decisions made.
Again, packaging played a major role. Shortly after the Cabinet-level briefing,
drafts of the Executive Order, a press fact sheet, organization charts, and presidential
public statements and messages to Congress were prepared, and once again, put in a
notebook (blue cover this time) embossed with the presidential seal. Just as the White
Book had demonstrated that real options existed, the Blue Book demonstrated that an
impressive package of decisions was possible. Added to the decisions on reorganization
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and restriction were support for electronic surveillance and anti-assassination bills
already before Congress, submission of legislation to protect information on
intelligence sources and methods, and presidential comments on congressional
oversight.
Progress ebbed and flowed. Decisions at this point were being made within the
White House; the intelligence agencies were left largely in the dark on which options
were being chosen. Some clue must have been given, though, when the NSC/OMB
group was called together hastily to critique Option 4A. The evolving decision that this
was the option to choose was masked, however, by asking the group at the same time
to critique a Defense Department proposal for realigning intelligence research and
development activities of Defense and CIA, a proposal that no. one in the White House
was seriously considering at the time.
By early February, the President had fully digested the issues and made his
decisions. He decreed that the package should be readied for announcement at his
upcoming press conference, and the final pieces fell together quickly. Last-minute
inter-agency drafting sessions on the Executive Order gave each agency its final chance
for input and its first opportunity to see some portions of the Order which had been
worked on solely in the White House. The restrictions portion of the order was
polished for the umpteenth time. Other portions of the Order that had not received
such painstaking care were hastily reviewed. Little opportunity for objection to the top
management restructuring was given the intelligence agencies; they were shown its
structure only in the last few days before announcement. Any chance for dilution of
the restructuring was deliberately circumvented through keeping possible agency
opposition uninformed. Members of the new Intelligence Oversight Board were chosen
and asked to serve. Executive Branch and congressional leaders were briefed; the
President began his regular press conference with announcement of the intelligence
reforms, and the press got a background briefing. Seymour Hersh was not at the
briefing, but it certainly represented the culmination of the process he had initiated.
The President had scooped Congress by announcing and initiating implementation of
his decisions before the Senate even made its recommendations public.
Reactions to the press and Congress alone, however, cannot fully explain how the
reorganization came out the way it did. Indeed, although the impetus for some sort of
action came from outside the Executive Branch, the substantive decisions were made
almost solely on the basis of internal inputs. As a result, several concepts that operated
for most active participants in the decision process as generally accepted guidelines
were particularly important. Although each is probably quite sound, none was ever
seriously scrutinized. No major conflicting guidelines were ever explored. Given these
concepts, the decision process actually had quite limited options. Description of the
concepts fills in the other half of the picture of how the February 18 actions came
about:
Restrictions d la Rockefeller Commission: Although the Executive Order's
restrictions (Section 5) went through literally hundreds of rewordings, the final product
did not vary significantly from the recommendations of the Rockefeller Commission
(which themselves were, in part, borrowed from Defense regulations drafted after the
Ervin Army surveillance hearings). It includes the ban on domestic CIA electronic
surveillance, the general prohibition-with exceptions-on collection of information
on domestic activities of Americans, and the admonitions to obey the law in obtaining
IRS information, opening mail, and giving assistance to law enforcement agencies.
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Even though the Rockefeller Commission spoke only to CIA domestic operations, its
basic format and intent were carried forward into limits on activities of all intelligence
agencies. Some limits were given worldwide application. At no point was any
substantial attempt made to refocus the effort, to resist the use of a public document
such as an executive order to issue the restrictions, or to add significant new loopholes
or restrictions.
Throughout the process there was concern that valuable sources of foreign
intelligence not be outlawed inadvertently, and, thus, a need arose to write restrictions
carefully; but at no time was any attempt made to legitimatize the clear abuses of the
past or to create hidden loopholes by tricky drafting. In that area where drafting was
most difficult-electronic surveillance-the solution was to direct the Attorney
General to issue guidelines (guidelines which could be classified and thus be more
detailed and tailored to technological capabilities). Foreign intelligence agencies were
always to he limited to legitimate foreign intelligence activities; although reasonable
men could differ on exactly where lines should be drawn, there was always a sincere
recognition that lines did need to be drawn to protect civil liberties of Americans. The
Hord Administration was given a bum rap by those commentators who characterized
the Executive Order restrictions as an attempt to authorize the wrongs of the past; the
close similarity between many of the Church Committee recommendations in this area
and the Order itself are testament to that bum rap. The Church Committee diverged
substantially from agreement with the Executive Order only in its insistence that
restrictions on intelligence agencies be enacted in statute, thus eliminating the
possibility that a future President would simply amend the Executive Order whenever
it became unduly inhibiting.
Increasing Accountability: Even before the drawing of the first intelligence
mess" chart, a key phrase in White House discussions of intelligence reform was
increasing the accountability of top intelligence leaders. The concept lies behind much
of what was done. The Executive Order speaks of the obligations of senior leaders; it
delegates responsibilities to agency heads, not their agencies; Cabinet-level appointees
were asked to replace their top deputies in reviewing covert action proposals, and the
President for the first time embraced his responsibility to approve them; individual
Department and Agency inspectors-general, general counsels, and agency heads were
told to report directly to the new Oversight Board.
This focus on accountability had several intriguing aspects. For one, it led to
much drawing of boxes and of lines connecting boxes. Often the question of
organization seemed primarily one of which organization could be drawn most easily
on a simple pyramided organization chart. Boxes and lines substituted for in-depth
analysis of how decisions get made or information flows. The net result was a clean
chart-with direct accountability to the President-that could be contrasted for the
press and public with the mess chart with which the community began. Yet, perhaps
not so surprisingly, the increase in accountability is not nearly as clean as the new
chart. The National Security Council may be officially in a leadership position just
under the President, but its intelligence role remains as it always has been quite fuzzy.
The Committee on Foreign Intelligence may have been given resource "control," but
it remains a "committee" attempting to run a multibillion dollar show. The U.S.
Intelligence Board may have been abolished; but, as all knew it would, it has
resurfaced with the new name, National Foreign Intelligence Board.
The emphasis on accountability may also have contributed to the unspoken
decision that the President's reforms would not include any shifting of responsibilities
among intelligence agencies. The focus of all reform was on top management; no
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change dipped below that level to affect existing inter-agency divisions of labor. Those
divisions were accepted; although problems might exist, they could be solved by
ensuring that community leadership was well-structured; the President need not enter
that fray himself. Inclusion in the Executive Order of "charters" of responsibilities for
each element of the community was, therefore, merely a process of putting in non-
classified form similar lists that already existed in NSC directives and other documents.
Within the Executive, much was made of these charters; they were to substitute for
absence of statutory charges to the National Security Agency and Defense Intelligence
Agency and for adequate statutory guidance to CIA; they were to represent the open,
candid attitude of the Ford Administration. Perhaps predictably, they had little if any
impact; the country had been too saturated with other, more detailed information to
find much value in these quite general statements.
A third intriguing aspect of the emphasis on accountability is that it should have
become the focus of Executive Branch intelligence reform after the rev^'ations that
many of the abuses of intelligence agencies were caused not by too little, but rather by
too much, accountability to the President. Often the agencies had wandered from their
statutory roles precisely in an effort to be responsive to Presidents who sought (or
ordered) their help either in covert operations overseas or in dissident surveillance on
the home front. Well before the reforms were announced, Senator Church had
admitted he was no longer in pursuit of a rogue elephant. This apparent irony was a
major focus of criticism after the intelligence announcements were made; it had been
rarely, if ever, a subject of debate within the Executive prior to the announcements. It
was perhaps symptomatic of the Ford Administration's image of itself-and indeed
largely its reality-that no doubt would ever enter its mind that Presidents could be
trusted, were honest, and always proceeded by legal means. The result may be long-
term increase in beneficial accountability, but the short-term fallout was strong
criticism for the President's plan. It was lack of implicit trust in the integrity of the
Presidency that provided the thrust of the Church Committee recommendations and
marked the basic distinction between those recommendations and the President's plan.
We Need Covert Action. The Bay of Pigs had opened to public debate the value
of covert action; the secret war in Laos escalated criticism of such activities; but more
recent revelations about Chile and Italy had sparked serious and sustained public
arguments for the first time that covert action was inimical and detrimental to
American foreign policy. Are covert action's gains worth the costs? Must all such
actions be conducted secretly? The answers are by no means obvious; the questions are
quite complex when viewed in the context of the wide range of activities covered by
the term. Options presented to the President always made a bow to the question and to
the related question whether the capability, if maintained, should be kept within the
CIA; but real study of either question was never initiated. The accepted gospel-that
the President must retain a capability somewhere between declaration of war and
diplomatic initiative, and that only the CIA was equipped to handle such
actions-remained throughout the reform discussions just that: accepted gospel.
Although the need to impose restrictions on intelligence agencies was seized on as an
opportunity to tackle other issues such as resource control, it was not similarly used to
reassess covert action. The only announced limitation on covert action was the ban on
political assassination. Further events will be required to push the executive to study
the costs and benefits of such activities. In the interim, covert action will continue
under any Administration, although probably continuing only at the much reduced
level of recent years.
Better Control of Resources: When James Schlesinger, then at the Bureau of the
Budget, reviewed intelligence in 1971, his focus had been on resource control. Since his
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report, it had often been observed that the intelligence budget process had not focused
on resource tradeoffs between competing systems and agencies; that the ability to
collect-rather than the need to collect-often drove resource decisions; and that
possible savings could be had through tighter resource control. It was these
observations that led to formation of the Committee on Foreign Intelligence, which
was given resource "control" over all national intelligence assets. The Committee was
to have the control that had not been achieved by the Director of Central
Intelligence-since being given centralized resource responsibility in 1971-or by
existing Office of Management and Budget, Intelligence Community Staff, and
executive committee arrangements. Because the emphasis in setting up the new
committee, the one major organizational rearrangement of the February 18
announcement, was on resource control, its membership embraced only CIA and
Defense (with a swing vote given to the National Security Council), the two major
resource users in the intelligence community. The State Department, and other smaller
intelligence units, long represented in the U.S. Intelligence Board structure, were not
included.
Despite this emphasis on resource control, at no point in the reform deliberations
was there serious study whether the resource problem, which most agree did exist in
1971, was still a central management problem. The intervening five years had seen
much budget pressure on intelligence, both from a tight overall federal budget and
from inflation. Adjustments to tight budgets had inevitably forced budget decisions
that may not have been made as frequently in earlier, less constrained years. Never
explored was the observation made by some budget reviewers that what the mid- and
late 1970s called for was not tight budget control, but, rather, encouragement of
creativity in initiating new intelligence techniques and programs. Instead, the
Schlesinger conclusions of 1971 were parroted each time the issues were set forth. Thus,
the CFI was established as a means of controlling demands for more money, when it
was quite possible that the needed mechanism by 1976 was one that encouraged the
funding of such demands.
Outside Oversight: The Rockefeller Commission had been convinced that
oversight of the CIA had to include an outside voice. It called for a congressional joint
intelligence committee, and it said the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
should be given, for the first time, an oversight role. In retrospect, it had become clear
that CIA and FBI had suffered, not benefited, from a three-decade absence of
overseers. The Rockefeller Commission worried especially about the absence of
institutions to which a beleaguered intelligence head could appeal when being
pressured by the White House to bend rules of law or propriety. Congress could help do
this job, but a role was also foreseen for a separate safety valve, within the Executive,
but outside the chain of command. The President easily embraced these concepts.
Thus, the new Intelligence Oversight Board, three distinguished persons from outside
Government, was asked to review, and report to the President and Attorney General
on, illegality or impropriety. Although options such as Special Counsel on the white
House staff or a centralized Inspector-General were also advanced, the need to have
this Executive oversight include an outside influence was always given the highest
priority. Disputes were limited to whether it made sense to give PFIAB this role, or to
constitute a new Board. The decision was to split this responsibility in recognition of
the other overriding and somewhat conflicting responsibility of the already existing
PFIAB to encourage more and better intelligence activities. Ironically, given this
decision, the Oversight Board was manned with three members all of whom were
already on, or added to, PFIAB.
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As with other top management reshufflings in the President's plan, establishment
of the Oversight Board represented victory for a central concept without any study of
the anticipated result, It was a given that outsiders should be brought into the
propriety review process; questions about what those outsiders would do were not
asked. Thus, on February 19, even for the fairly well defined role of the Oversight
Board (much better defined, for instance, than the role given the Committee on
Foreign Intelligence), implementation of the Executive Order began without detailed
guidance. Numerous questions arose: Would the Board issue advisory opinions on
activities it found legal and proper, or would it buck all decision to the President or
Attorney General? Would the Oversight Board initiate inquiries of its own or wait for
misconduct to be reported to it? What would the Board do if it found an activity to be
illegal and it nonetheless continued? How important did an activity have to be to
deserve reporting to the President? How would the Board relate to the new Senate
Intelligence Committee which also expected to have reported to it all infractions of law
or regulation? What in the clandestine world of intelligence was the distinction
between proper and improper activities? The bare outlines of the Executive Order left
the Oversight Board with much leeway in which to interpret its role, ensuring that the
implementation process would be more important than the establishment of the Board
itself.
The President also endorsed a joint congressional intelligence committee as an
idea whose time-after at least 21 years of discussion-had come.* He opposed
unilateral declassification of information by Congress and supported repeal of the
Hughes-Ryan requirement that appropriate congressional committees be informed of
all covert actions. At the same time, he made it clear that it was up to Congress, not the
Executive, to fashion its oversight mechanism. As the Senate moved toward setting up
its own permanent intelligence committee, a number of issues separated the
congressional advocates from Administration positions. Many Senators saw a need for
this committee to authorize all intelligence appropriations, to be "fully and currently
informed" of all activities including those still in planning, and to have authority to
make classified information public. On each issue, the Administration felt Congress
would unduly hamper flexibility and endanger security. It was around these issues that
debate flowed in the Senate. From the Administration viewpoint, however, none
should have been nearly as important as establishment of an overriding principle of
comity. Each of the issues was significant only if one assumed antagonsim between the
committee and the Administration. Threats to reveal secrets, revelation of budget
figures as part of an authorization process, and difficulties in meeting a fully and
currently informed standard would be unlikely if committee and Administration
recognized they were involved in a joint endeavor to assure the best possible
intelligence-by legal means. Each issue, however, became a sticking point that
endangered establishment of such a spirit of comity. Administration secrecy in the
foreign policy areas and congressional irresponsibility in several well-publicized leaks
over recent years had so soured relationships that reestablishment of a spirit of comity,
as had existed, for instance, in the 1950 Cold War period, seemed impossible. Disputes
about how the two estates could work together quickly became issues of principle on
which neither side wished to be accommodating. By acting through a Senate
Resolution, rather than a statute, the Senate avoided any chance of a White House
veto and won on all these issues. Only time will tell how the practice of congressional
oversight works.
Quality of the Product-No Guideline: Congressman Pike seemed to have hit on
a real nerve when he lambasted the intelligence community for not predicting Tet in
*The first such proposal was introduced in the House as early as 1948, but caused little discussion-Ed.
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Vietnam, the coup in Portugal, the 1973 Arab-Israeli war or the Turkish invasion of
Cyprus. He further delved into quality of the intelligence product by giving the
spotlight to Sam Adams to talk about massaging of Vietnam statistics and to retired
CNO Admiral Elmo Zumwalt to comment on SALT verification. Civil liberty abuses
of the past were admitted and could be prevented in the future, but if all the billions of
dollars of efforts were not producing what they were supposed to, then really serious
problems existed in intelligence. Pike's well-publicized attacks are, of course, easily
answerable; his concept of the value and use of intelligence was limited by being
oriented toward splashy headlines rather than in-depth understanding. Nonetheless,
lie was aiming at the tip of an iceberg of a genuine issue: is the intelligence product
any good? And, if not, what can be done about it? Questions along similar lines had
been asked within the Executive Branch. The National Intelligence Estimates had
from time to time drawn questioning of their reliability and usefulness. The daily
publications were often criticized for being less enlightening than the New York Times.
Yet when the intelligence community was "historically reorganized," minimal
attention was paid to the quality of the intelligence product. The NSC/OMB working
group added some options to shake up the production community only at the last
minute, and those options were never seriously considered afterward. Production did
not involve the dollars that would make it a resource issue, nor the glamour of
accountability, nor-despite Pike-the public urgency, to be included on the agenda.
Production was considered a management issue to be pursued, if at all, by the newly
reorganized intelligence community, not through presidential initiative.
Secrecy Must be Improved: The President endorsed and sent to Congress a bill to
enact criminal penalties for unathorized disclosure of information containing sources
and methods of intelligence. The bill had been kicking back and forth between the
CIA and Justice Department for several years. They had reconciled their differences
over it in late 1975, and it was, without further coordination or any debate, included in
the President's February announcement. Never was any doubt expressed that this was
an easily justified, limited piece of legislation, important to the protection of the
secrecy of the guts of the intelligence community, and acceptable to most
congressmen. The Administration should have known better. The Rockefeller
Commission had wandered into this issue somewhat innocently and had been attacked
for its efforts. It also had been shown the CIA draft legislation; but, because it was
quite worried about Bill of Rights problems in the area, the Commission attempted to
avoid taking any stand by recommending:
... legislation, drafted with appropriate safeguards of the constitutional rights of
all affected individuals, which would make it a criminal offense for employees of
the CIA willfully to divulge to any unauthorized person classified information
pertaining to foreign intelligence. (Emphasis added.)
The intent may have been to avoid taking a stand, but the press immediately
interpreted the recommendation as an attempt to muzzle both itself and employees
seeking to reveal wrongdoing. The President's sources and methods bill brought the
same reaction. Never were Administration spokesmen able to convey the message that
this legislation was targeted on a limited amount of classified information and that
criminal penalties were being established only for those persons who, having been
given authorized possession of such information, passed it on to unauthorized persons.
The press and critics of the Administration quickly picked on this legislation as
indicative of a tone of increased secrecy that rubbed off on the whole reorganization.
This piece of legislation drew more comment than any other portion of the intelligence
announcement and detracted greatly from the opportunity to portray the overall
reforms as beneficial to civil liberties interests. In retrospect, given the slim chances for
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passage of the bill now or any time soon, it is extremely doubtful that its inclusion was
beneficial to either the intelligence community or the President.
Leave Out the FBI: Hersh had written about the CIA, and not the FBI, and thus
the focus from Christmas 1974 to Valentine Day 1975 was all on foreign intelligence. It
was the CIA that the Rockefeller Commission was asked to probe all spring; CIA
involvement in foreign assassinations was what preoccupied the Church Committee all
summer; Congressman Pike focused his fall hearings on berating CIA activities. The
National Security Agency got dragged into the inquiries, partially because of oblique
references in the Rockefeller Commission Report to CIA receipt of information on
dissidents from "another" agency. But the FBI came in for its major lumps only after
the President's February 18 announcement.
As a result, the announcement had little to say about the FBI. Part of the FBI was
included in the description of the foreign intelligence community, but the Bureau was
totally excluded from the restrictions on intelligence activities. Instead, the Attorney
General was told to draft internal justice regulations for the FBI. There was good
reason for excluding the Bureau from the general intelligence restrictions; its combined
intelligence and law enforcement responsibilities required different ground rules.
Nonetheless, failure of the President's package to address the FBI left a hole in the
otherwise comprehensive set of documents. Now that FBI black bag jobs are the
scandal getting press and justice Department attention, the Administration has once
again lost the initiative. As it becomes more and more likely that attempts to justify
break-ins will be grounded on arguments of national security and the foreign threat,
the failure of the February 18 plan to address them explicitly will require new
responses.
The President's February 18 announcement sparked a flurry of newspaper articles.
Some dissected the Executive Order restrictions, probing unsuccessfully for tucked-
away loopholes; others analyzed whether the reorganization changes would have any
impact. All such articles, though, could only be predictive, and thus speculative.
Would the Oversight Board stop abuse? Would the Committee on Foreign Intelligence
save the taxpayers millions? Would covert actions be thoroughly reviewed? The
announcement had no answers; implementation was what mattered. Directions to
Inspectors-General and General Counsels to report to a board of outsiders on illegal
activities could easily be ignored or even forgotten. Giving the Director of Central
Intelligence chairmanship of the committee controlling national intelligence was no
guarantee that he or his Intelligence Community Staff would have any grasp over
Defense assets, It would be easy for cabinet principals to stop attending Advisory
Group meetings and allow covert actions to be approved without deliberation. Once
the glare of publicity and presidential attention was off intelligence, old patterns could
easily be revived.
Now, as the Executive Order approaches its anniversary, when some answers are
beginning to be available, the press has by and large lost interest. Few questions have
been asked about even mundane-though enlightening-details such as the hiring of
staff, initiation of reports, and convening of meetings. Establishment of a Senate
Intelligence Committee will mean there will be a new staff in town probing these
questions, but the press has moved on to new scandals (including FBI bag jobs),
leaving the cleaning up of the old to others. Only time will tell whether Congress
effectively oversees. Seymour Hersh could initiate a year of intelligence revelation,
which could precipitate real changes in the way intelligence is structured, but only the
tried and true government official was still involved when the dust settled. Left to him
will be the final word.
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More on analytical techniques
BAYESIAN ANALYSIS FOR INTELLIGENCE:
SOME FOCUS ON THE MIDDLE EAST
The job of intelligence is becoming increasingly more complex, partly because of
changes in the international order, but primarily because there is ever more
information available. The following measures of this "information explosion" are
often cited, in popular works like Alvin Toffler's Future Shock and in more sober
publications like the Harvard Business Review:
-scientific and technical information is generated at the rate of 6,000,000 pages
per year;
-the U.S. government alone publishes more than 100,000 reports per year, not to
mention more than 450,000 articles, books, and papers;
-the world's output of books is approximately 1,000 titles per day.
At times the analysts liken the intelligence process to a funnel, in which they are the
narrow neck which has to read and assimilate everything that passes through. The
problem is that the top of the funnel has grown larger by the year, while the neck has
remained the same.
How does one cope with this information flow? What techniques can aid the
intelligence analyst in assessing data more efficiently? How can the various
individuals, offices, and agencies better coordinate their efforts? How can we improve
our capabilities to perceive the gossamer without rending it, and to react to the
ephemeral before it passes? One obvious answer is computer assistance in selecting,
filing, retrieving, and coordinating data, as well as in editing and producing the end
reports of this process. The SAFE system and others under development in the Agency
are promising responses to these needs. Another answer may lie in the use of more
sophisticated methods of data analysis, often developed in academia and often
dependent on computer processing for data correlation or other statistical
computations, such as modeling and simulation.
It is obvious to the most casual observer, however, that such analysis will take us
only a very short distance in understanding the politics of the Middle East. Even if one
knows the military, economic, and social capabilities of the major countries in the
Middle East, the individual personalities of leaders such as President Asad, President
Sadat, and Prime Minister Rabin, along with the political pressures which buffet them,
make the prediction of events one of the most Sisyphean of human endeavors, Hans
Morgenthau in Politics Among Nations categorically states that "the first lesson the
student of international politics must learn and never forget is that the complexities of
international affairs make simple solutions and trustworthy prophecies impossible."
The more experience we gain in attempting to apply "methodological" analysis
to complex political-military problems such as the near future of the Middle East, the
more hopelessly doomed to failure such mechanistic models seem. They will continue
to be so until the model employed is at least as complex and flexible as that which a
human expert is capable of working with in his own head, and even that mental
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model-as we are so painfully aware-is far from adequate to encompass the
complexities of such a situation.
What I shall describe here is one very modest method of adding certain benefits of
probability and statistics to traditional analysis. The central technique employed in
the reports was Bayesian inference,* but equal credit for the project's success must go to
an adaptation of the Delphi technique. Over the past three years, OPR has applied
these techniques to the study of various situations involving a potential for hostilities,
including the likelihood of a major North Vietnamese offensive during the dry season
of 1974 (the year before the debacle), the prospect of Sino-Soviet hostilities from
summer 1974 to the present, and the likelihood of Arab-Israeli hostilities from autumn
1974 to June 1976, when Arab-Israeli issues took a back seat to the internal problems of
Lebanon. The result has been three series of reports, each coordinated by OPR and
issued on a periodic basis, and all well-received by their readers.
In the course of our projects, we have recognized many limitations and have
harbored certain reservations about the applicability of the method; such limitations
and reservations are discussed in Appendix 2. In many ways, the Middle East was the
most complex of our studies, and our analyses were correspondingly less
straightforward, less satisfying, and less impressive than the other two. By the same
token, however, this situation presented us with the greatest challenges and pushed us
against the limits of the design. The examples used in this paper have therefore been
drawn from that problem.
If. Description of the Techniques
Bayesian Analysis
The statistical formula which forms the basis for our analysis bears the name of
the Reverend Thomas Bayes, who was the first to express in precise quantitative form
this particular mode of inductive inference. His work, entitled "An Essay towards
Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances," was read posthumously in 1763 before
the Royal Society, of which he was a fellow. The most accessible copy of it appears in
Biometrika. Dec. 1958, pp. 293-315. It is a tool of statistical inference, used to deduce
the probabilities of various hypothetical causes from the observation of a real event. It
also provides a convenient method for recalculating those probabilities in the light of a
continuing flow of new events. Reduced to its simplest form-and it is by no means a
difficult formula to begin with-the "rule of Bayes" states that the probability of an
underlying cause (hypothesis) equals its previous probability multiplied by the
probability that the observed event was caused by that hypothesis. Once the
probabilities are assigned, which is the difficult part, the mathematics are as simple as
A=B x C. (A more detailed explanation of the mathematics involved is given in
Appendix 1.)
One of the classic uses of this type of induction is described by Frederick Mosteller
and David Wallace in "Inference in an Authorship Problem," in the Journal of the
American Statistical Association, June 1963, pp. 275-309. This was an investigation to
resolve the disputed authorship of twelve of the Federalist papers (49-58, 62 and 63),
based upon the frequency per 1000 words of various non-contextual words such as
upon, also, though, although, while and whilst. The rule of Bayes was used to derive
the probability of Hamiltonian or Madisonian authorship for the papers, based upon
observed frequencies of the tell-tale words in The Federalist and in other examples of
*See Jack Zlotnick, "Eaves Theorem for Intelligence Analysis," and Charles E. Fisk, "Conventional
and Bayesian Methods for Intelligence Warning," Studies in Intelligence XVI/2.
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their writing. The results, which are considered a classic example of the
overwhelmingly strong inference which can attend this type of analysis, were in
consonance with most contemporary assessments, assigning all of the disputed papers
to Madison.
In the field of intelligence, a perfect application for Bayesian inference has been
developed to identify military units and installations which are seen in photography.
For example, groups of weapons, buildings, and local improvements may be observed,
and the type of military unit-such as an infantry regiment or a motorized rifle
battalion-may be immediately obvious. Often, however, certain typical features may
be absent, or certain extraneous pieces of equipment may confuse the identification. In
such cases, the inferential strength of the rule of Bayes has frequently been able to cut
through the noise of a few contradictory items to assign a high probability to a
particular type of unit.
An explanation of how this is done will serve as a useful lead-in to the use of Bayes
for political analysis. The starting point, the data base from which inference is drawn,
is a set of probabilities for seeing certain identifying features in different units. For
example, whereas a group of ten tanks may be a common sight in a motorized rifle
battalion, ten tanks may very rarely be seen in an infantry regiment. Thus the
following probabilities might be assigned: 90 percent that such a group of tanks would
be seen if the unit is a motorized rifle battalion, and 10 percent that the tanks would be
seen if the unit is in fact an infantry battalion. These probabilities, called the
"objective probabilities," can be derived either from historical observation or from
expert opinion; the early application of this technique drew upon the knowledgeable
guesses of analysts in this field; these probabilities were later supplemented by a study
of known units, When the probabilities associated with a whole range of identifying
features and equipment are aggregated using Bayesian analysis, the type of unit under
study often emerges clearly from the noise.
This paper describes the application of Bayes to political analysis, an even more
complex field in which there are no objective probabilities of events, and in which the
historical examples of previous conduct are ambiguous or inapplicable. The political,
economic, strategic, and social events of the world are imperfectly understood and
difficult to measure. For example, what is the difference in significance if Shimon Peres
says "the Israeli military movements are strictly precautionary," rather than "the
Israeli military movements are strictly defense"? Which is more probable if Israel is
seriously considering a preemptive attack? How much more probable? Would we be
able to derive some form of objective probability from a catalog of previous uses of
those phrases and previous attacks? And how probable are such statements even if no
attack is in the wind? The interpretation of public statements and troop movements is
difficult, to be sure, but it is still our job to interpret them. Hence to use a technique
like Bayes it is necessary to turn to expert judgments expressed quantitatively. The
values assigned are educated guesses and are imprecise, but they provide a starting
point and at least a rough basis for comparison and analysis. Our experience suggests
that it is relatively easy to induce analysts accustomed to qualitative expressions of
probability to shift to numerical assessments. If we can face the challenge of assigning
probabilities to such events, Bayesian analysis can allow us to squeeze a little more
information from the data we do receive. One danger, however, is the ever-present
tendency to attribute more precision to a number than is warranted, and it must
continually be stressed that the numbers are only approximate.
It is only proper at this point to mention that individuals in the Agency have
investigated the utility of this technique for many years, and that much of the
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acceptance of our current efforts is due to earlier experiments applying Bayes to the
analysis of historical intelligence situations. As Mark Twain said, "Habit is habit, and
not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a
time."
Delphi
The Delphi technique was developed by the RAND Corporation in the late 1940s
as a systematic approach to soliciting, improving, and combining expert opinions on a
subject. Its major points are
(1) formulation of the problem under investigation in quantitative terms,
(2) interrogation of experts through questionnaire or interview,
(3) controlled iteration, in which the results are usually presented statistically and
the anonymity of individuals is preserved.
It has been used by government, business, contract R&D organizations like RAND,
and academic institutions in hundreds of studies, often as a method of forecasting
scientific and technological progress. It tends to break down barriers between
disciplines and to stimulate creative thought through cross-fertilization from related
and unrelated technical fields. It also tends to elicit ideas from experts in a setting
which enjoys some of the benefits of large groups without the difficulties of group
dynamics and personal competition. As will become apparent in the next section, these
major components of Delphi were all incorporated in the Bayesian analyses.
A historical footnote at this point may lend credence to the premise that mere
expert opinion can be used to investigate the labyrinthine corridors of international
affairs. A study by Frank Klingberg in 1937 analyzed responses from 220 persons who
were judged to be knowledgeable about world affairs. They were asked to rate from 0
to 100 the probability of war within ten years for 88 pairs of states. The results, as
reported by Quincy Wright in A Study of War (pp. 338-340 in the abridged version)
were highly correlated with the orientation and sequence of entry of states in World
War II. Wright's critique of the study was that "predictive results of some value for a
few years ahead can be obtained from an analysis of expert opinions."
The Specific Adaptation of the Techniques
In creating a workable vehicle for intelligence analysis, there has been much
adaptation. We have faced the realities of working with individuals who often are
under pressure, and we have tried to develop a genuinely useful procedure without
being Procrustean. There is often a conflict between pure theory and applied
engineering, and although we do our best to satisfy both, we tend to favor the
engineer.
The actual procedure for the reports is a periodic routine. On the first day of the
period, each of a number of participating analysts submits the items of evidence he or
she has seen since the last round which relate in any way to possible hostilities in the
Middle East. The submission is in the form of one or two sentences summarizing the
item, along with the date, source, and the classification, for example,
The Egyptian war minister visited naval forces in Alexandria on 11 February. He
asked officers and other members of the naval forces to continue their vigilance
and to prepare to face any sudden military situation. (Cairo Radio, 12 February
1976, unclassified)
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The choice of data is left entirely to the analyst, who is instructed to include anything
he considers relevant, and to exclude what can be judged to be irrelevant. There is
surprisingly little overlap in what is submitted, with considerable diversity the rule.
Later the same day, a coordinator consolidates the items, resolving differences of
wording, emphasis, and meaning, and returns the complete list of items to all
participants. By the following day, the analysts working individually evaluate the
items and return the numerical assessments. Cartography and printing usually take
two more days, so the reports are three or more days old when distributed.
One of the central features of our studies is the use of a group of analysts rather
than a single expert. This more than anything else influences the data-gathering
process, the format of the publication, and the actual production procedure. The
reasons for this approach are:
-to bring to the exercise a range of expertise beyond the experience of any single
analyst;
-to supply a richer mix of evidence on the questions by asking each analyst to
contribute anthing he or she considers important. As most political, military, or
strategic intelligence problems are reflected in a host of areas, such varied
inputs as propaganda analysis, photographic interpretation, and logistic
calculations are useful;
-to provide a balance of expertise in which the effects of organizational and
individual bias are minimized.
It is an accepted fact that different analysts will tend to place greater reliance on
different types and sources of intelligence. The consolidated list of intelligence items,
which is circulated to all participants without identifying the contributors, provides an
opportunity for each analyst to call an item to the attention of his colleagues. To avoid
time-consuming group meetings, the problems of scheduling, and group dynamics
effects, each analyst works on the probabilistic assessments individually and relays
them to the coordinator.
Another feature of the studies is that each periodic report actually contains the
intelligence items identified and used by the participants, with only a paragraph or
two of composed text on the principal trends during the period, No attempt is made to
formulate or coordinate a lengthy textual analysis of the situation. This allows the
reader of the reports:
-to see the basic evidence rather than just a summary and hence to understand
better the analysts' assessments;
-to make his own direct assessments if he so desires, or just to keep up with the
topic by viewing the evidence regularly;
-to maintain a concise chronology of the situation.
The ability to portray the results of the analysis graphically was one of the
strongest arguments for using a quantitative method like Bayes, and the graphs in the
publication have been well-received. The probabilities of the various types of
hostilities (the hypothesized events) are immediately visible on a broken-line chart
(Figure 1). This conveys much information at a glance, and seems to represent an
advance in communication over traditional methods of reporting, especially in
illustrating trends far more concisely and vividly than do words. In addition, the range
of estimates around the central measure shows clearly and concisely how much
disagreement there is. It is just possible that much of the success of the reports is due
more to this informative brevity than to the validity of the estimative technique.
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Bayesian Analysis of the Likelihood of Middle East Hostilities Within 30 Days
SYRIA -Either alone or in concert with other Arab States-will initiate major
military action against Israel
ISRAEL-Will launch an attack against one or more Arab states
31 Mar 14 Apr 28 Apr
9
Ti
r
f
31 Mar 14 Apr 28 Apr 12 May 26 May 9 Jun
-- Lowest estimate by any - Average of all analysts Highest estimate by any
of the analysts (median) of the analysts
Mostdeeply shaded area shows inter-quartile range of opinion
Figure 1.
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Individual Assessments of the
Likelihood That Internal Disturbances in Lebanon
Will Cause Arab-Israeli Hostilities Within 30 Days
31 14 28 12 26 9
Mar Apr Apr May May Jun
The points on this chart are chosen by each participant on an intuitive basis
Participants:
Achterhof - - - Helfenstein Newton
Allen ---Koshnick ??-?? Norton
Oubberstein --Markides -"'-? Parish
?--- Elmore Moore --?- Patrick
? Average of all analysts
Figure 2.
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The final technique, also presentational, is the listing of all participants by name
and office. This visibility is pleasing to the analysts, who normally endure extreme
anonymity in their work. In fact, the interest evinced by both participants and readers
over this feature has been so great that a supplementary graphic was developed which
allows the participants to be visibly identified with an individual line. This graphic
reflects their hunch opinions on a separate but related question (Figure 2). The
individual identification is not permitted in the main questions because we have found
a slight tendency to want to manipulate the results if an analyst feels uneasy with the
direction his assessment is taking. Incidentally, although this chart is totally non-
methodological, it performs well as a barometer of change; once each individual
chooses his position on the chart-as a hawk, a dove, or a middle-of-the-roader-the
tips and downs are fairly consistent across the board. The trends are clear from month
to month, and there is no need for all participants to agree on a single number
III. A Middle East Example
The Starting Point
The following description will catalog the questions which were investigated, and
illustrate how the probabilities are calculated. The project also required extensive
preparation for the proper use of bureaucratic and human resources, but these matters
are beyond the scope of this paper.
After much discussion of what questions would be relevant, approachable, and of
interest to our government audience, four scenarios or hypotheses were set out:
-No major hostilities are planned by Syria, Israel, or Egypt within 30 days;
---Syria-either alone or in concert with other Arab states-plans to initiate major
military action against Israel within 30 days;
--Israel plans to launch an attack against one or more Arab states within 30 days;
--Egypt plans to disavow the disengagement agreement within 30 days.
These four may not be mutually exclusive, but we have treated them as such for the
purpose of calculating probabilities. We also know that we have not exhausted all the
possibilities. Foreign policy analysts are all too familiar with the words of the elder von
Moltke: "Gentleman, I notice that there are always three courses open to the enemy,
and that he usually takes the fourth."
At the inception of the exercise, each participating analyst assigned a set of
probabilities to these four hypotheses, based upon his understanding of the situation
up to that time; these were the best starting estimates available. The sum of the
probabilities had to equal 1, or 100%; that is, it was assumed that one of the four had
to occur within 30 days. Generally, the hypothesis of no hostilities within 30 days was
assigned a probability of from .7 to .95.
Subsequently, these estimates were changed, by assessing the evidence-from
open and classified sources-in terms of each of the hypotheses and calculating the
new probabilities according to the rule of Bayes. There is an independent set of figures
maintained for each analyst, which is charted over time to show changes and trends.
Evaluation of a Sample Intelligence Item
For example, let us simplify the calculations by assuming only two hypotheses,
that Israel is planning to launch a major offensive against Syria within 30 days, and
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that she is not, and further assume that an analyst has assigned the following
probabilities to these hypotheses:
Probability that Israel is planning to launch a major offensive against Syria in 30
days-10% or .1
Probability that Israel is not planning such an offensive-90% or .9
Also assume that the following item arrives and that the analyst assigns
probabilities to such a report surfacing, first assuming that Israel is planning an attack,
and second assuming that she is not:
"Israeli Finance Minister Rabinowitz stated that the nation's economic situation
is one of war and scarcity, not one of peace and prosperity." (Jerusalem Radio, 20
February, unclassified)
Probability that this would be said if Israel is planning to launch a major offensive
against Syria within 30 days-99% or .99
Probability that this would be said if Israel is not planning such an
offensive-80% or .8
This information can be used to revise the probabilities that each hypothesis is true by
using the Bayesian formula. The formula itself and the complete calculations are given
in Appendix 1.
Revised probability that Israel is planning to launch a major offensive against
Syria within 30 days-.12
Revised probability that Israel is not planning such an offensive-.88
Notice that the two prior probabilities added to 1, or 100%, and that the revised figures
also equal 1, even though the conditional event probabilities do not.
As this is a recursive process, in which a succession of events are assessed, the
revised probabilities become the prior probabilities for calculating the effect of the next
item, and the final set of probabilities for a period become the starting point for the
next period's assessments.
Utility as a Predictor of Events
The Bayesian method upon completion results in an archive of evidence,
evaluations, and predictions which lend themselves to various forms of evaluation. The
main criterion for evaluation is the accuracy of prediction, although this may not be as
straightforward as it seems. Because of the myriad variables in the prediction equation,
an event may occur which was only ten percent probable the day before, or an event
which was scheduled to occur may fail to materialize. Thus there have been times of
great uncertainty during our reporting periods when the probability of certain
hostilities rose, only to fall back again later. Does this mean that the high probability
of the event was somehow in error? Rather it would seem to mean that at the time the
event could very well have occurred if other factors had coincided; the evaluation
cannot really be considered "wrong."
Generally, our studies have successfully predicted non-events. That is, they
showed that the evidence did not support any of the positive hypotheses of hostilities,
and none of them in fact occurred during the period studied. In such a case, the point
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to be noted is how early the evaluations moved away from an indeterminate figure
toward a strong probability of no hositilities. It has been our experience that the
Bayesian calculations show this movement earlier than the analyst's intuitive
judgment would. Until one of the positive hypotheses actually occurs during the course
of a Bayesian exercise, it is difficult to know the predictive value of the technique. If
such a positive event does take place, it would be possible to conduct a much more
searching evaluation. What were the earliest indicators? What evidence was missing,
overlooked or misperceived? When did the trend lines signal a significant alteration in
the situation? How did the Bayesian assessment compare with other intelligence
assessments?
Other Benefits to Participants and Readers
't'here is no magic and no inherent wisdom in Bayes. In simplest terms, the
Bayesian technique consists of a statistical formula and a procedure for its use. It is an
organizing device which allows an analyst to use his expert understanding of a
situation to assess the likelihood of various hypotheses about an intelligence problem,
and to evaluate fragments of evidence in terms of those hypotheses. The Bayesian
formula then aggregates those numbers mathematically, rather than by the non-
rigorous logic of human induction, into an overall set of probabilities. This has the
following advantages:
-More information can be extracted from the available data because the
technique allows each piece of evidence, central or marginal, to add its weight
to the final assessment in a systematic way; thus, a number of small items can
outweigh a large one, and the probabilities are not at the mercy of the most
recent or most visible item. -
-The procedure provides a reproducible sequence of steps for arriving at the final
figures; a disagreement among analysts can thus often be seen to be a
disagreement over the meaning of certain items rather than an unresolvable
difference of opinion.
-The formulation of the questions forces the analyst to consider alternative
explanations of the facts he sees, thus loosening the bonds of established
opinions. In other words, he is asked to look at how well the evidence explains
hypotheses other than the one he has already decided is most likely.
-The use of quantified judgments allows the results of the analysis to be
displayed on a numerical scale, rather than through the use of terms such as
"probable," "likely," "unlikely," or that gem "possible." In addition, the work
of more than one analyst can be portrayed in graphic form, with ranges and
averages.
-The formal procedure has been shown to be less conservative than analysts'
informal opinions, and to drive the probabilities away from 50-50 faster and
farther than the analysts' overall subjective judgments do. This is often initially
unsettling for the analysts, but most have admitted that they later agreed with
the assessment.
-The mere fact that a team of experts is asked to assess periodically the evidence
on an important intelligence question provides managers of intelligence
production with a degree of assurance that the question is indeed being
monitored effectively.
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Applicability of the Technique
The starting point for any investigation, whether in intelligence or in an academic
setting, must always be the careful formulation of the relevant questions. The Bayesian
technique has definite limitations, and it can only be applied where certain criteria are
met:
-The question must lend itself to formulation in mutually exclusive categories,
such as war versus no war, or the development of a nuclear capability versus no
nuclear development. If various overlapping possibilities enter into the picture,
such as limited border harassment or the development of a purely peaceful
nuclear capability, the results of any Bayesian formulation may be suspect.
-The question must be expressed as a specific set of hypothetical outcomes. The
Bayesian approach would be useless as a predictor of "the pattern of future
Middle East relations." The question would at the least have to be re-cast in
terms of specific alternatives, that is, a set of scenarios of Middle East
developments. In this process, however, there would be a danger that the
question would be so simplified as to render any answer irrelevant and
uninteresting.
-There should be a fairly rich flow of data which are at least peripherally related
to the question. For example, for the question of nuclear development, data on
all related materials and processes would be relevant. If information is sparse,
the technique is very sensitive to each item and may be less reliable.
-The question must revolve around the type of activity which produces
preliminary signs and is not largely a chance or random event. For example, it
would be fruitless to attempt to predict which military leaders will be in Cairo
on a particular day. Bayesian analysis reacts only to preparations for and
indicators of the hypothesized outcomes.
The Future of Such Analysis
The Office of Political Research has found this technique to be a useful adjunct to
traditional analysis. It is the frequently-voiced opinion of various readers of the
Bayesian reports that they are thought-provoking and represent an advance in
communications over traditional methods. There is nevertheless a healthy respect and
a continued need for the traditional analysis of complex problems which are beyond
the limited scope of Bayes. Most of the research and writing in our office, the rest of the
Agency, and the rest of the intelligence community will continue in the traditional
mode, but we shall supplement it when appropriate with Bayesian analysis and other
"new" methods.
Appendix 1. The Statistical Basis for the Technique
The rule of Bayes is a statistical identity, derivable from the laws of intersection of
sets and the definitions of conditional probability and mutually exclusive events. Most
statistics textbooks contain the derivation, one source being Miller and Freund,
Probability and Statistics for Engineers, pp. 29-32.
In symbols, the rule is P(Hi/E)= P(Hi) X P(E/Hi)
n
Y~ (P(Hi) X P(E/Hi))
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where
E is an event, an "item" of intelligence;
II is an hypothesis, a hypothetical cause of events;
Iii is one of a set of n mutually exclusive hypotheses;
P(Hi) is the starting, or "prior," probability of an hypothesis;
P(E/Hi) is the probability of an event given Hi, of an event occurring, given a
particular underlying cause;
P(Hi/E) is the probability of an hypothesis given E, the "revised" probability of
an hypothesis, given that a particular event has occurred.
In words, it says that,
given an analyst's starting probabilities P(Hi)-his intuitive feeling for the
likelihoods of a set of more or less mutually exclusive hypotheses, and
given his assessments P(E/Hi) of how likely an event would be if each of the
hypotheses were true, then
the updated version of the hypotheses themselves P(Hi/E) can be calculated in a
straightforward fashion.
The procedure is also recursive; if there are more than one event to be assessed, the
updated or revised probabilities of the hypotheses from this round become the starting
probabilities for the next round.
The example which was given in section III is here shown calculated in full, using
the Bayesian formula:
P(H1)=.1
P(H2)=.2
I'(E/H1)=.99
P(E/H2)=.8
P(H1) X P(E/H1)
.1 X .99
.099
(P(Hi) X P(E/Hi))
_
.12
P(112) X P(E/H2)
.9 X .8
.72
(P(Hi) X P(E/Hi))
Appendix 2. Limitations of the Method
Limited Applicability-The first and foremost reservation in the use of this
technique, as noted earlier, is that it is applicable only to certain types of questions.
They must be capable of definition as a set of fairly distinct outcomes or hypotheses.
Also, the procedure involving many analysts, cartographic plates, and finished
printing is too cumbersome to use on crisis questions. It is certainly possible, however,
for the technique to be further adapted, either through computer assistance in routing
and printing, or by eliminating the printing overhead and the complexity of operating
with many analysts.
Data Problems-There is the problem of identifying which evidence is relevant;
that is, whether certain peripheral items should be included, and, if included, whether
they should carry less weight than the other items. We have delegated that decision to
the analysts. After all, they are the experts, and their frequent disagreement over items
shows that objective measures of relevance would be virtually impossible to devise.
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Very little editorial judgment is imposed by the coordinator in the process of
consolidating evidence, and any item which appears to be even marginally related is
included for evaluation. Nevertheless, each analyst is then allowed to ignore any item
he considers irrelevant. This gives the participants great leeway over what they rate,
but insures that they at least see the evidence and make an explicit decision on its
relevance. Furthermore, if a participant sees two or more items as overlapping, he is
asked to rate only one of them.
Related to this is the problem of source reliability. A report may come from an
unreliable source, it may be subject to other interpretations, or it may be a misleading
fabrication. Although some methodologists have suggested that each analyst assign a
numerical measure of source reliability along with each item, to be incorporated into
the calculations as a weight, we have avoided placing this extra burden on the analyst
by requesting that he internalize this requirement and assign probabilities which
reflect how much faith he places in each item, If an analyst understands the process
and rates items thoughtfully, he can cause items of greater salience and reliability to
have a greater effect on the calculations. This is because the effect of an item increases
as the range of probabilities assigned to it increases.
Another related problem is that of negative evidence, or "the dog that barked'in
the night-time," from "Silver Blaze," a Sherlock Holmes story in which the singular
event was that the dog did not bark in the night-time. This refers to the fact that the
absence of any positive evidence may in itself be highly indicative, and the journalistic
bias toward reporting events rather than non-events compounds the situation. That is,
we tend to get news only of events or changes, whereas the fact that the status quo is
being maintained may be quite significant, and there is no way for the analyst to rate
this, We recognize the problem, and feel that it is at least partially solved by including
the following item whenever it appears necessary: "How likely is it that only these
events would occur (and be seen) if hypothesis 1 is true?", "... if hypothesis 2 is true,"
etc.
Problems over Time-There are difficulties in the use of the method in a project
continuing over many months. First, the questions probably require some reference to
a time period (explicit or implicit) in which the hypotheses are to manifest themselves;
that is, whether they will occur within 30 days, or a year, or five years. As a project such
as this continues, the timeframe must either contract or move forward. Contraction
would occur if there is a fixed date in the future which limits the possibilities, such as
the development of a nuclear potential by 1978. In this case, the passage of time and
the reduction of the period remaining may itself be of significance, and a coordinator
may choose to include an item to that effect for evaluation. Moving the timeframe
forward occurs when the question is of the probability of events within the next 30
days, etc. This is looking through a "sliding window," and the approach raises the
problem of retaining or discarding data which were evaluated months earlier with
regard to an earlier frame of possibilities. Our solution has been to drop earlier
evaluations and recalculate the probabilities each time using only a fixed timespan of
evidence multiplied against the original intuitive probabilities. The intuitive starting
probabilities are also updated at intervals.
Problems with Numbers-There are also two numerical problems. The first is that
a probability of zero is unacceptable mathematically, not to mention analytically. If
any conditional probability is evaluated at zero, the probability of the related
hypothesis becomes zero, and no amount of other evidence can rejuvenate the
probability. Thus any evaluation of zero should be replaced by a very small number.
The second problem is more profound, being the way individual analysts handle
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SECRET Bayesian Analysis
probabilities. It has been our experience that some people think easily in probabilities,
others have to work at it every time, and a few need constant attention and retraining
to overcome a distorted or unrealistic feeling for probabilities. The only solution for
this problem, aside from a careful initial choice and subsequent replacement, is
constant attention to the analysts' assessments and frequent retraining using
illustrative items of evidence.
Manipulation-Finally, there is the problem of conscious manipulation. An
analyst may assign his probabilities in a manner which reflects a pre-determined goal
rather than unbiased judgment. Although we have found this to be quite rare,
nevertheless it does occur. In our early studies, the participants were identified with the
Bayesian trend lines, and there were occasions of manipulation. Avoiding disciplinary
solutions, we have almost entirely circumvented the problem by identifying the
participants on the supplementary intuitive graphs and not on the Bayesian charts.
This allows them to express strongly-held personal opinions in a forum designed for
that purpose, and the methodological purity of the Bayesian calculations is increased
greatly.
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A new Farewell Address
THIRTYFIVE YEARS IN INTELLIGENCE*
Lieutenant General Vernon A. Walters
In my lifetime, 35 years of being in intelligence has really been not only rewarding
in a material way, but fun.
I came into the army in 1941 and I was immediately interviewed by a Master
Sergeant who was very impressed by the fact that I spoke a multitude of languages. He
sent for a Major-and in those days, you know, Majors were pretty divine beings-and
he came over and was equally impressed. This was about the time that the United
States Army was commissioning Mr. Knudsen, the head of General Motors, as a
Lieutenant General in the Transportation Corps, and David Sarnoff of RCA, a
Brigadier General in the Signal Corps and I thought, "They'll probably make me a
Lieutenant Colonel in Intelligence, but if they offer me a majority, I'll take it since
we'll all soon be in the war and everybody will have to make sacrifices." So we went on
down this assembly line getting shots and various other things, and finally we got to
the end and everybody was comparing MOS's and I said, "What's an MOS?"
Someone said, "That's your military occupational speciality. That's what you're going
to do in the army." So I thought the time had come for some of this leadership I was
going to be asked for so I turned to one of the other guys and I said, "Go down and
find out what 0506 is." It worked like a charm. He almost saluted; he jumped up; he
went away and came back with a puzzled look on his face and he said, "0506 is truck
driver." And I said, "Somebody's made a mistake." But nobody had, and guess who
drove a truck?
So, I drove a truck for a while and I finally went to Officer's Candidate School.
The only reason I went is that there was just one vacancy in Military Police and I went
before this board that came up from Providence and they asked me what I did for
recreation and I said I skied-I was the President of the Fort Ethan Allan ski club.
Well, that absolutely transformed the president of this board who was also a skier and
none of those New York State Troopers or policemen had a chance for that vacancy
after that! I was sent down to the Infantry School and I was told that at the end of the
Infantry School's three months I would go to one month of military police training
since there wasn't any Military Police School yet. So, I went down to this infantry
thing and I went through three of the toughest months in my life. As we got toward the
end I kept asking, "What about this military police training?"; and I got evasive
replies. Finally they said, "Oh, there is a shortage of Infantry Second Lieutenants and
you are going to be one."
I was assigned to a new Division at Camp Shelby where I was a Platoon Leader
and subsequently a Company Commander. At the same time, I was made the
regimental Intelligence Officer, which was a certain amount of duplication which
theoretically wasn't supposed to happen, but it did. I'll never forget how grateful I was
to the Jewish tailor in New Orleans who made Nazi insignia for me so I could show the
troops what it was going to look likel I was happily engaged in doing these two jobs
when one day my Colonel called me in and he showed me a telegram, a very cryptic
*Copyright, 1976, by Vernon A. Walters. This is an excerpt from a farewell speech given by General
Walters at CIA on 8 June 1976.
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telegram which said, "You'll immediately dispatch Lt. Walters to the military
intelligence training center at Camp Ritchie." I'd never heard of this, and he said,
"How can I create a new Division when they take people away from me by name?" I
wasn't anxious to go, because my job at Shelby called for a Captain and I was a
Second Lieutenant-and in those days it could happen in about three months!
Camp Ritchie
Anyway, I was shipped off to Camp Ritchie and here was a real reflection on the
state of American intelligence in peace time-or what was left of peace time. In the
United States, we have always built up a great intelligence capability during wars and
we've always almost immediately dismantled it thereafter. I arrived at this Camp
Ritchie, which had an American Commandant, but the man who was really running it
was a British Colonel. The United States was one year into the war and this U.S. Army
Military Intelligence Training Center, for all practical purposes, was run by a British
Colonel. We had a lot of crazy exercises there and they were very good ones in some
respects. The farmers around there had signed some piece of paper allowing the
Federal Government to use their land. What they did not expect to see was a bunch of
people in German uniforms and with German weapons creeping across their farmyards
in the middle of the night. More than once we had narrow escapes from angry farmers
who said, "No, no, I just said the U.S. Government; I didn't say you Germans could
use my farm!" This was where I first met Archie Roosevelt. We were together on a
team. On one exercise they'd dump you in the middle of the countryside. They'd hand
you a German map of the area with all of the place names changed, and they'd tell
you to go to a certain place using the German name of it. They wouldn't tell you the
American name so nobody in the area could tell you where it was if you asked them!
'[he first thing you had to do was find out where you were. You had to walk until you
came to a bridge or road or power line or something else. I remember I was very good
at this and our team was never worse than third at getting back to camp. One night I
was really bewildered as to where we were and Archie said, "Don't tell me you don't
know where we are. We'll never get back." But we did. If you got back, you'd get some
sleep; if you didn't get in until daybreak you had to go to class shortly afterwards. One
clay, after we'd been out all night and all day, at 5 o'clock there was great turmoil and
all the doors were closed and the phones were cut off. We were going somehwere! I
waited and then I finally went to bed and said, "If I'm involved, wake me up." In a
little while, someone shook me and said "You're involved. Get up." So I got up and we
rode down in trucks from Camp Ritchie to Fort Myer, where I now live, and I
remember the little towns we went through at 12 or 1 o'clock in the morning. We were
signing the "Horst Wessel" song, the "Marseillaise," the "Internationale," and
various subversive enemy songs-everybody was an expert in these things. The great
gagline at Camp Ritchie was "I am speaking 19 languages, English the best. When do
I make Master Sergeant?" In case you all are wondering, our present Secretary of State
was there! As a matter of fact, I'll let you in on a secret which shouldn't leave this
building. He was a jeep driver for Karl Wagner, who has been my executive assistant
here at the Agency!*
So we went to Fort Myer where we were issued helmets-the real new ones, not
the old World War I type-and we were told to go to Fort Bragg. We all went off to
Fort Bragg and I reported in to the G-2, 9th Infantry Division, and he said, "What are
all of you doing here? We're supposed to see you at Newport News in 10 days." So we
*Henry Kissinger went overseas on a counterintelligence assignment. He and Wagner worked together
hiring the Battle of the Bulge, and because Wagner was senior, Kissinger drove the jeep. (Ed.)
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all took off and went home or back to Ritchie and drove our cars home and did all the
other things we had to do.
North Africa
We sailed out from Newport News and I had a small Intelligence detachment. I
opened my orders after three days at sea and found I was going to French Morocco,
which was a great surprise since all of us knew we were going to Dakar. The orders said
that when we got there I had the initial duty-I hate to mention the word-to kidnap
16 crane operators and bring them down to the dock during the night so that when the
ship sailed in in the morning, we would have the crane operators to unload the ships. I
think I am covered by the Statute of Limitations on that. By the way, all of them came
quite voluntarily and nobody was injured. So we were aboard ship and we had a thing
called the Special Missions Detachment. We were universally christened "The
Missionaries" by all the other people on the ship. Nobody really knew what we did
and, as a matter of fact, neither did we. But, one day the senior officer on the ship
called me down to his cabin. He had a box in front of him on the table and in it was a
tube-like affair. He said, "Walters, you're Intelligence." And I said, "Yes," looking
very mysterious, and he said, "What's this?" I said, "I don't know," and he looked at
me and said, "I suppose you wouldn't tell me even if you did." It was a bazooka but
none of us knew what it was at that time. It was a rather terrifying weapon in that the
projectile had a wire with a ring attached. There was considerable discussion as to
what would happen if this ring were pulled. Did it arm the weapon, or did the weapon
fire? We finally had a volunteer, a Major Adams, to test it despite the fact that the ship
was combat-loaded with bombs and shells and so forth. He went up to the Captain's
Bridge and the Captain removed himself to another part of the ship from which he
could control it in case anything happened. The Major pulled the ring and nothing
happened, so he stuck it in the tube and pulled the wire and, of course, a tremendous
flash came out of the back of the tube and set fire to the canvas awning around the
Captain's Bridge, and the projectile went off into the sea. We still didn't know exactly
what it was, but we knew it made a lot of noise and that if it hit something harder than
the water it probably would explode. The Captain forbade any further
experimentation on his ship.
Well, we got to the Moroccan coast and it was really something out of one of
those war movies. We were assembled on the deck of the ship and we heard the
President announce that we had landed in North Africa. We all looked at one another
and said "Now we're in for it. Those people on the dock are all listening." None of
them were, as it turned out. They played the Star Spangled Banner, and to the tune of
other martial music we clambered down nets out of the boats, I got on to a destroyer, a
World War I destroyer that had all its superstructure razed off and we sailed right into
the harbor. As we came in, we could see the French flickering at us, obviously
inquiring who we were. We didn't answer. We got into the harbor but the destroyer
ahead of us had run aground. We pulled up to the dock and as we did, the French
opened fire. You know, we'd sat on benches at Fort Benning and we'd seen puffs of
smoke of varying sizes at some distance from us, but none of it was like this black-red,
unpleasant, noisy business that was taking place quite close to us. We got ashore,
figuring that moving forward was probably the best thing to do. We had a Navy fire-
control party with us and we said to them, "You'd better do something about this or
we're all going to get killed." Actually we said it more urgently than that. So they
radioed out to sea where the battleship, New York, was standing. There was a
tremendous great flash and you could see these great naval shells coming in, which
was astonishing to me. They hit about a mile inland and we said, "My God, for twenty
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years all you do is practice and you can't hit anything." We got another salvo from the
French guns and I must say in credit to the Navy that their third salvo was right into
the positions of those French guns and they fired no more that night. So we then
quietly went about the kidnaping and picked up the 16 crane operators. Through good
intelligence. we had very accurate information on their movements. Incidentally, the
day before we landed, some planes came down from Gibraltar and dropped the very
latest intelligence on our deck so that we had intelligence that was about 24 hours old.
In interrogating some of the French prisoners, the use of this information so impressed
them that they broke down and told us a great many things they otherwise would not
have told us. This was an example of how intelligence can be used to obtain more
intelligence.
At daybreak, I had about 200 prisoners on my hands. Supposedly I had a team of
six people, all of whom spoke French, but they were always being pirated by somebody
and I was down to three to handle 200 prisoners! I took them up to a warehouse, and
they all wanted to go to the bathroom at once. The only way I could figure to do this
was in alphabetical order, and, since I have suffered a great deal from alphabetical
lists, I said "All prisoners whose names begin with Z, Y, and X take one step forward.
We will get to the A's and B's later." While I was in the middle of these prisoners,
someone stole my gun out of my holster. I was both embarrassed and frightened, so I
called the prisoners together and told them that someone had taken my gun and that I
wanted it hack. I made many references to the Geneva Convention and I said, "I'm
going to turn out the lights for 60 seconds. Don't try to rush us because there are four of
us here with leveled Tommy-guns and if we hear you attempting that, we're just going
to fire indiscriminately." We turned out the lights for about 30 seconds and when I
turned on the light there were six pistols on the floor! All these men had been carefully
searched, so things don't always go according to the training manuals.
On another occasion General Harmon, who was an extremely violent man who
commanded the Division, came in while I had two prisoners who had been captured
sniping in civilian clothes. He said "Who are these people?", I said, "They are
snipers." He said, "Shoot 'em, shoot 'em.", and I said, "General, let me talk to them.
Maybe they'll tell us something." He said, "OK, if you want to." So I explained to the
prisoners that they had violated the Geneva Convention and were subject to unknown
penalties which I preferred not to mention and would they please tell me who was
organizing the sniping. They very hastily told me who was organizing the sniping and
we went up with a tank and got him. He was a French Captain whom I later met on a
Commemoration of this day, the 8th of November, under the Arc de Triomphe. He
was a Brigadier General and so was I, and it was faintly awkward.
I was sent forward to Rabat and, later, to Tunisia, but before we got to Rabat we
came to a place called Mazagan. There was a river there and we figured that the
French would blow the bridge. When we arrived we found that the garrison had
withdrawn to the far side of the bridge and were making preparations to resist. General
Harmon said to me "Walters, go up and tell those crazy Frenchmen we don't want to
fight." He said, "Go up in my half-track and stand up so they'll see you coming in a
friendly spirit." I was grieved by this, but I got in the half-track and a Signal Corps
Lieutenant volunteered to come with me. I saluted him when he got in and he said,
"Why are you saluting me?" and I said, "You're coming voluntarily." We got up to
the bridge and the bridge clearly was mined with wires running off the far side of it.
We went by a great big French flag and I was standing up so I gave it a great big
highball hoping that some hidden sniper wouldn't shoot me. When we got to the
bridge the driver stopped and looked at me and I looked at him and, frankly, it was a
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situation in which I was beyond speech. I just pointed across the bridge! I weighed the
differences between being blown up by the French on the bridge or countmartialed for
cowardice by General Harmon, and I decided that in one case I would simply be dead
and in the other case I would be dead and dishonored, and between the two I preferred
the former. Well, I got across the bridge and two Frenchmen jumped up and
announced that I was their prisoner. I was so relieved at getting across the bridge that
this seemed like nothing, and I said, "Stop all this foolishness and take me to Col. So-
and-so immediately." Well, they were rather surprised that I knew his name. I said
"Where is he, where is he?" and they said "oh, his CP is up on the hill." I said, "Get in
and take me up there." They did and at least I had a French uniform in the half-track
with me. The Colonel greeted me with a very glum expression and said, "What do you
want?" I said "Colonel, I have come in the name of the ancient friendship which has
united our countries ever since the beginning of our national life." He said "Don't give
me that Lafayette stuff. What is it you want?" "Well," I said, "We want you to go
back and take up your garrison duties while we go to Tunisia and throw out the
Germans." He said, "Don't you know that I have orders?" and I said, "Colonel, if
they gave you orders to spit on the French flag, would you do it? Or would you look to
see where those orders came from?" It shook him a little bit so I pressed home. I said,
"Colonel, I have lived 10 years of my life in France and you can't live that long in a
country without feeling something for it. When I think that the Germans are marching
down the Champ Elysees as masters and booting Frenchmen off the sidewalks ..." His
tears began and I finally hit him with my double whammy which was, " Colonel, every
soldier you kill here, whether he be French or American, will be one the less to march
under the Are de Triomphe when dawns the day of glory." He said "Stop." I took him
back to General Harmon who promptly made me a first lieutenant and gave me a
medal, so that was a fairly profitable morning.
We then went on to Rabat where for 48 hours I was the Military Governor of
Rabat. As a lieutenant I ran everything from requisitioning freezing space to policing
up the houses of ill-repute. But a U.S. Colonel who had been a volunteer in the French
Army arrived, and suddenly I was out in the forest sleeping under my shelter-half
again. Then they sent me forward to Tunisia where I interrogated German and Italian
prisoners and found that what they told me at Ritchie was interesting but didn't always
correspond to the actual situation. In the middle of that assignment they hauled me
back to Algiers and got me involved in the middle of the Admiral Darllan-De
Gaulle-Giraud goings-on, which I tried to stay out of but couldn't. In the middle of
that I got a telegram saying I was to be sent back to Ritchie to teach Prisoner of War
interrogation. I came back via Great Britain and spent a couple of days there, I
returned to Ritchie where I enjoyed about a three-month reign in triumph. As the only
returnee from the war, I could get away with all kinds of lies and war stories and there
was nobody who could check them!
Stateside Duty
One day I got a phone call from the Pentagon. I was then the head of the Italian
Prisoner of War interrogation section because we were preparing for the operation into
Sicily. A Colonel in the Pentagon called and said, "Lieutenant, we want you down
here tomorrow morning at 9 o'clock to take a group of Portuguese officers around the
United States. This is very important because we want them to give us bases in the
Azores." I said "Colonel, there must be some misunderstanding. I don't speak
Portuguese." He said, "No, but you speak French, Spanish, and Italian and all that
stuff. You'll understand them." I said, "Colonel, I love Carmen Miranda's songs but I
don't understand them," and he said, "Lieutenant, there is a misunderstanding. You
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seem to think I'm inviting you to be here!" So the next morning at 9 o'clock I reported
down there, and fortunately the Portuguese spoke French and Spanish and Italian. I
got in an airplane and rode with them for two months around the United States
showing them various things. What we were trying to do was show them that we were
strong. They didn't believe that we would go into occupied Europe. When we got
them to the Curtis Wright factory in Buffalo and they saw the hooks [for towing
gliders] on the tail of the C-46's, and when they saw the B-24's at Fort Worth being
produced on a visibly moving production line, and when they saw Mr. Kaiser's ships at
Long Beach being launched 12 days after the keels were laid, they began to believe
that we might be going in. Well, that worked out pretty well and I went back to Camp
Ritchie. Later they wrote a letter to the War Department saying that I spoke
Portuguese like the great author of the famous epic poem, and about two weeks later
some Brazilians showed up so there was no question as to who would go with them but
that great Portuguese expert! I went around with them for a while and I was
meditating about everything that was going on and I figured that at that age the three
things that interested me from a career point of view most were what we defined as the
MM&P Society-the Medals, Mileage, and Promotion Society-of which everyone
was a member, admitted or not. I decided that none of these things were to be had in
the United States and that if I wanted any of them I'd have to go back to the war. Of
course, the man at Ritchie who had me didn't want to let go of me until he got some
more people back from the war with even more fantastic stories. I went out to Ft.
Leavenworth with the Brazilians and went through the Command and General Staff
School. Curiously, the main problem our class went through there turned out to be
what was done a year later at Normandy! It was a five-division landing on the base of
the Carentan Peninsula. Then I was ordered to Rio do Janiero to accompany the
reconnaissance party from the Brazilian division that was going to the European
theater. I went over with them and Mark Clark saw me and decided he wanted me for
his multi-lingual army. I took the Brazilians back to Brazil, knowing they were going
to come hack later, and I was sent back to be Gen. Clark's aide.
Being Gen. Clark's aide was very interesting. I guess I learned more during those
nine months than in any other period in my life. I probably had more to learn at that
period of my life than at any other time. It was not the easiest job in the world. Gen.
Clark and I today have splendid relations but we're both mellowed by old age. In
those earlier days it wasn't quite the same. Let me give you an example of one of my
problems. We were riding along in a jeep and he turned to me and he said, "May I ask
what precautions you have taken for my safety against enemy air attack?", and I said,
"Why yes, General, The MP alongside the driver in the jeep in the rear is scanning the
sky to the rear; the MP alongside the driver of the jeep in the front is scanning the sky
to the front, and I'm watching whatever I can." He replied, "Of all the ridiculous,
farcical, theatrical, unmilitary, unworkable, childish, fanciful systems I have ever
heard in my life, that is the worst. My dog, Pal, could think up a better system than
that." Since the dog was always getting lost, I was gravely tempted to say, "General,
why don't you ask the little S.O.B. and see what he can do for you.", ... but I didn't!
Ile continued, "And how are all those bright air-raid wardens of yours going to notify
anybody if they see anything?" (Let me put in as a parenthesis that neither Gen. Clark
nor I had seen a German airplane since Salerno, and neither of us had recently talked
to anybody who had seen a German airplane since Salerno.) I said "Yes, Sir. There's a
siren in all three jeeps and the first guy that sees it sounds the siren." I got another
series of adjectives, none of which he had used the first time (I marveled at his
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vocabulary), winding up with, "It is perfectly obvious to me that you have never been
strafed." I said, "General, in North Africa, where there was a German Air Force, I had
one of my men killed on the beach. And in Tunisia, I was strafed five times in one day
on the road between Tabarka and Medjez el Bab. (It was only three, but there was no
possibility that he could check on me.) I thought, "Now I've got him." He turned to
me with a triumphant smile on his face and he said, "Is that so? Well, it is perfectly
obvious to me that you learned nothing from it." Later on I worked up enough
courage and I went in and I said, "General, it's perfectly obvious to me that I can't
give you the type of service that you want, and I think, in all fairness to you and to me,
it would be better if you got an aide who could." He looked me up and down for about
90 seconds and he said, "Walters, let's get one thing straight. You don't quit whenever
you feel like it. I fire you when I'm ready and I'm not ready." It wasn't until late that
afternoon that I realized he'd said something nice to me, because if he had wanted to
get rid of me, he could have done so.
It was a job that required great diplomacy and tact. One day I was riding along
with him and we came upon a band of Italian partisans loaded with tommy-guns and
belts of ammunition. He said, "Ask these birds if they know who I am." I said to the
men in Italian, "You recognize the Commanding General of the Fifth Army, don't
you?" They all said, "Generale Clark," and we had a splendid day after that!
On the 5th of June we finally made it into Rome. The senior aide who got lost on
the way to the Excelsior Hotel was fired and I became the senior aide because I knew
the way to the Excelsior Hotel, That night, about 3 o'clock in the morning, I couldn't
sleep so I turned on the radio, I heard the German radio giving the announcement of
the Normandy landing. I debated whether to wake up the General or not and decided
against it on the grounds that he probably already knew. In the morning at 6 o'clock I
went in and said, "General, the landings began during the night." He said, "The sons
of bitches! They wouldn't let us have the headlines for the fall of Rome for even one
day." (It was on page 5 or 6!)
I stayed with him until the Brazilians came, and I cannot say that my going to the
Brazilians was a pure accident. There was a certain amount of conniving involved.
Anyway, I went to the Brazilians and almost my first experience was that the Corps
Commander came down and asked them if they could handle a particular action and
they said, "Yes," and he asked them if they needed any help and they said "No." So
he walked out very pleased with his new Brazilian Division. As soon as he walked out
the door, they turned to me and said, "Walters, you have to get us out of this." I said,
"Get you out of this? How do I get you out of it? You said you could do it." They said,
"Yeah, but you can't say 'No' to the Army Commander." I said, "No, you can't say
'No,' but you can ask for so much support he can't give it to you." The Brazilian
General looked at me kindly for a moment and he said, "Walters, If you're going to
work with us, you will soon have to learn the difference between `Yes,' which means
`Yes' and `Yes' which means ' No."' This was one of my first discoveries in the field of
intelligence: That "Yes" does not always mean "Yes,"
Well, I stayed with them until the end of the war, then I went back to Brazil and
was the assistant attach& there for a while and then I got involved in the Bogotazo, the
riot that Fidel Castro was first involved in in Colombia. General Marshall and
President Truman came to Rio, and General Marshall was going to the Pan American
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conference and he had an Ambassador with him who spoke Spanish but the
Ambassador was meeting all his old buddies and they were having a great conversation
while General Marshall sat there twiddling his thumbs. That lasted through two
foreign ministers' meetings whereupon the Ambassador was fired and I was summoned
to be interpreter. Then Mr. Truman came and General Marshall turned me over to
Mr. Truman. I always remember, though, that at the Rio conference I was in civilian
clothes and General Marshall looked at me and he said, "Walters, are you going to
wear that tie this afternoon?" I was wearing a tie which was in conformity with my age
at that time. I knew he wasn't for it but I didn't know why, so I said, "No." He said
"That's good. This afternoon when I'm talking and Eva Peron is there I want her to be
listening to what I'm saying and not looking at your tie!" When I reported in to
General Carter, one of my predecessors here, who was General Marshall's executive
officer at that time, he received me in his villa wearing a bathrobe, and he had stars on
the shoulders of the bathrobe. I thought this odd, but at that age I thought most
generals were odd. They've changed greatly since. So he explained to me what General
Marshall liked and didn't like, and what I was to do and what I was not to do, and I
said, "Thank you," and left. As I was walking out the door, he said, "In case you
wondered why, I've never worn a uniform since I got my stars, and, by God, I'm going
to wear them on something!"
That conference went off peacefully and the next y?ar General Marshall sent for
inc to go to the Bogota Conference with him and I was living in the house with him
when the leader of the opposition was shot. This set off what turned out to be a civil
war. That afternoon the building was surrounded. There was a lot of shooting; there
were dead people in the street outside, and it was very unpleasant. That was Friday,
Saturday, and Sunday. Sunday, I decided, would be a good day to go to church, so I
borrowed General Marshall's car and he said, "Now bring it back because I'm going to
need it." I went down with a guy from the State Department and we got into the main
square downtown and found that the Cathedral was c',osed. It filled me with some
unease that on Sunday morning in a South American city the Cathedral was closed,
but the State Department guy was very calm and he saiA to the guy, "Drive into the
next square." We drove into the next square and as we did, a wild fusillade broke out
between soldiers in the middle of the square and snipers in the building. I was greatly
distressed by this, but he said to the driver, "Stop the car." I said to him, "Cecil, do
you think this is a good idea?", and he said, "Yes. People generally shoot at moving
cars; rarely at parked cars." I meditated on that as I examined the texture of the carpet
on the floor of the car and the state of my shoe laces and after a little while the square
was empty of people and I said, "Don't you think we can go to church now?", and he
said, "Yes, we can go to church." We told the driver and drove over to the church.
Cecil got out and started up the steps, and without actually turning around he said to
the driver over his shoulder, "We will be in here about 45 minutes, come back for us
then." "Oh no, senor," said the driver, rushing past us, "Today I, too, am going to
church!" Governor Harriman was there and I took him down to the President's. To
make a long story short, we got shot at a couple of times and he was most unmoved by
this. He was reading a copy of sugar production of the Province of Pernambuco which
he found thrilling. When we got to the President's Palace there were no sentries, so we
walked inside. Obviously, we were received with consternation. Finally we were taken
up to the President and I will always remember Gov. Harriman, one of our great
liberals. As we banged on the door, the butler opened the Joor in a white tie and armed
with a tommy-gun, and Mr. Harriman promptly took off his hat and handed it to him!
We went up to the President and he noted that he had invited 23 people to dinner and
we were the only ones who had shown up!
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With Harriman
Shortly after that, Mr. Harriman asked me to go to Paris with him for the
Marshall Plan. I spent two years there getting a liberal education in labor, economics,
banking, finance, and all sorts of things of which I'd known nothing. Some of our
analysts will tell you that I still don't know too much. Then I went with him to the
Wake Island meeting between President Truman and General MacArthur. It is not
true that General MacArthur kept Mr. Truman waiting. It was an interesting thing.
General MacArthur was there when we arrived, and Mr. Truman arrived after us. I
was a little startled when Gen. MacArthur did not get up out of his jeep and go over to
the airplane until the President was on the ground, and I noticed that he didn't salute
him. Ten years later, I asked Mr. Truman whether he'd noticed this, and half-way into
the question he said, "That he didn't salute me? You're damned right I noticed that he
didn't." He did not believe the Chinese were coming into the war. Mr. Truman said,
"All our indications are that they are," He said, "No, they are not, This is the hour of
our strength, not of our weakness. We no longer stand hat in hand." I must say that he
said in advance that he would do the Inchon landing and he told Mr. Harriman the
day he would do it and he did it on that day.
With Eisenhower
I then came back to the United States to work for Mr. Harriman again and then
Gen. Eisenhower picked me up to take me to SHAPE with him, and I was attache for a
number of years. Then I was plucked out to go to things like the Geneva Conference as
Gen. Eisenhower's interpreter where he made this offer of open skies: "You overfly us;
we overfly you, and I wish I could convince you of my sincerity. If only God would
give me the power to convince you." At that there was a loud clap of thunder and
every light in the building went out. The Russians are still trying to figure out how we
did it!
Then I went to the Bermuda Conference with him and there the Prime Minister of
France got sick and the French came to me and said, "Will you have General
Eisenhower's doctor come over and look at him?" I did and when he ascertained the
symptoms he said, "No, have Lord Moran, who's Churchill's doctor, go over and see
him." So Lord Moran went over and I moved away and they said, "No, we need you.
Stay here." So he examined the Prime Minister and he said, "Prime Minister, you've
got a very bad case of bronchitis, and you must stay in bed," and the Prime Minister
said, "I can't stay in bed. Everybody will think it is a diplomatic illness." He said,
"No, I will tell them it is not a diplomatic illness." The Prime Minister said, "Well, I'll
tell you, if you promise me that I can go to the meetings tomorrow, I'll stay in bed
today." And Lord Moran looked at him and said, "Prime Minister, prophecy is as
difficult in medicine as it is in the field. of politics." The Prime Minister got pneumonia
and he didn't go anywhere.
Then I carne back to the United States and worked at the NATO Standing Group
which gave me great experience in dealing with our Allies. The Americans in this
Standing Group wanted to put everything in writing; the British wanted to put
nothing in writing, and the French didn't care one way or the other. I asked the French
General why he didn't care and he said, "Well, you see, you Americans have a
sacrosanct written constitution. You want it all in writing. The British have no written
constitution so they resist anything in writing, and we French don't care because when
the crunch comes, everybody is going to do what he thinks is in his best interest
anyway."
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Italy
Then I went to Italy, where I had one experience that taught me never to
underestimate the local service. Before leaving, I was briefed in this building by
General Cabell, and I was briefed in the Pentagon by all the intelligence specialists,
and they stated that the Italians had a pretty good intelligence service but they hadn't
got a great deal of money and they weren't in the "big time." I got to Italy where they
had a set-up which would drive Sen. Church crazy, because the FBI, CIA, NSA, and
1)IA were all the same person. He wore a monocle and looked more like the Chief of
Spies than anybody in "Scorpio" or "Three Days of the Vulture" or anything else. I'd
known him in Italy during the war, and I made arrangements for my first visit to an
Italian military unit in Milan. I started off, and the Pentagon was in one of its
economy frenzies, so I didn't take my driver with me because he was a civilian and
earned more per diem than I did as a full Colonel. I drove up to the American base in
Leghorn, spent the night, and the next day I was lured away from the direct trip to
Milan by the memory of a great restaurant in Florence where they had the greatest
green lasagna I'd every eaten. I thought, "What difference does it make, my program
doesn't start in Milan until tomorrow?" so I parked the car in front of the station and
walked two blocks to the restaurant. The green lasagna was fantastic, and while I was
eating, a man came up to me, clicked his heels, and said, "Senor Colonello, there have
been several changes in your program and the Chief of Service wanted you to get them
before you arrived in Milan." Now, since Florence is a city of 720,000 people and I'd
looked in the rear vision mirror and hadn't seen anybody following me, I understood
that what I was getting was a demonstration. As he left he said, "Here are the changes,
and you are the guest of the Chief of Service." I couldn't pay the bill! Fourteen years
later, in my present capacity, I went back to Italy. I finished my business in Rome on a
Friday and, as I was not due in Paris until Monday, I rented a car and drove to
Florence. I parked the car and went for a walk with my people after checking into the
hotel. I remembered that restaurant, so I went to it and the green lasagna was
fantastic. I called the waiter for the bill and, although I was in civilian clothes he said,
"Senor Generalle, there is no bill." I said, "What do you mean, there is no bill?" The
young man at the next table stepped up and said, "General, I am Captain Manicale.
In order that you may know that in 12 years the service has not lost its skill, once again,
you are the guest of the Chief of Service."
Brazil Again
From there I was transferred laterally to Brazil over my bitter protest, because I
had a big empire in Italy and a small one in Brazil. I arrived in Brazil to find
Ambassador Lincoln Gordon who had been at the Marshall Plan with me and who
knew I'd served with the Brazilians during the war. I went in and I hope it wasn't
truculently that I said, "Well, Mr. Ambassador, here I am. What do you want from
me'?" He said, "Three things: I want to know what is going on in the military; I want
to influence it through you; and most of all I never want to be surprised." With
pardonable immodesty, when the coup came he was not surprised. Those behind it
were all my old buddies whom I'd known in Italy during the war. No, I did not incite
them into doing it, but they did tell me they were going to do it and who am Ito turn a
deaf ear under such circumstances? The Soviet Ambassador at that point said to me,
"Now they are going to make you a General." I said, "Mr. Ambassador, you are sadly
misinformed about the United States. We do not make people Generals on the basis of
imagined services." Thirty-two days later they made me a General, so he called me up
and he said, "Walters, how do you explain this?" I said, "The only way I can explain
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it, Mr. Ambassador, is that I obviously had more professional competence than I
thought I did the last time I talked to you." I used to have quite a lot of fun with him.
He came up to me one day at a parade and said, "The trouble with you Americans is
you never bother to learn anybody else's language." Immediately I thought, "He
hasn't read my autobiography like I've read his." He said, "You demand that people
speak English to you, and you make no effort to talk to them." I said, "No, Mr.
Ambassador, that may have been true 20 years ago, but it isn't true any more." And he
said, "Yes, it is true, and as a people you have no gift for languages like we Slavs." At
that point I switched to voluble Russian. That shook him, and I stepped in for the kill
and that's when disaster struck. I said to him in Russian, "Mr. Ambassador, would you
like to try Portuguese?" knowing that I spoke it much better than he did. He looked at
me and he said, "Walters, you may be a good soldier, but a diplomat you are not!" He
is now the Soviet Ambassador to Bangladesh.
Then I was told I had to go to France as attache, and I thought, "My God, I'm
stuck in this attache circuit." So I told the Chief of Staff this and he said, "May I ask
you a question?", and since he was the Chief of Staff I said, "Yes." He said, "Has it
prejudiced your career much?" I was then a Brigadier General, so I said, "No." He
said, "OK. Go!", so I said, "Well, you have to let me go to Vietnam first," and he did,
which was interesting from the point of view of the French. When I got to France, I
almost immediately fell into the student riots, and I was having grave difficulty with
all my colleagues in the Embassy who thought that this was the end. I did not. I said,
"The General has all the trumps-the loyalty of the Armed Forces and the
gendarmes-and that's all he needs." The day he finally banged the door and said, in
essence, "Everybody is going back to work and all this nonsense is stopped," I knew
that everybody else would send in the text of what he said, so I sent one of my shortest
telegrams. I said, "This afternoon at 4 o'clock General De Gaulle played the trumps
referred to in my previous message." I had been at the U-2 Conference with General
Eisenhower and General De Gaulle* and I must say they behaved very well there.
When I met De Gaulle after I arrived in Paris in 1968, he recalled to me the name of
the village where I'd met him in Italy before. There I'd been told he didn't speak
English, so I translated what he said loosely with additions like "He says, 'No,' but I
think if you push him he'll give," or "He says `Yes,' but I don't think he wants to do
it." Since I'd read in Life Magazine that he didn't speak English, I felt quite safe, but
at the end he stood up and he said, "General Clark, we have had a very interesting
conversation. It is my devout hope that the next time we meet, it will be on liberated
soil of France." He turned, tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Walters, you did a
good job," so presumably I was not totally incorrect, but that made me very cautious
about fooling with people's translations.
I arrived in Paris at a very awkward time. The French had put us out and closed
the bases and everything else. Later on, the retired head of the French Intelligence
Service said to me, "When you came here with this long French background, we were
convinced that the Americans had sent you here to stir up the Army against General
De Gaulle for NATO, so we watched you very closely. The fact that you were a
bachelor gave us two possible handles we could get hold of you with, but when
neither of them worked out, we decided that you were like the traditional bishop-
never in your own diocese," Before I left France, I got into both the silos and the
submarine pens.
*For General Walters' account of the 1960 Four Power Meeting which the USSR terminated over the U-2
issue, see "General De Gaulle in Action," Studies in Intelligence XVIII/4.
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Then, while I was in Paris, I got involved in the mysterious adventures of Henry
Kissinger. One day Kissinger took me to meet some North Vietnamese and started
some negotiations with them which I conducted for a very long time. I had strict
instructions that nobody was to know about this, and I was terrified that either the
legal attache would report that I was dealing with the North Vietnamese or the CIA
station would report that I was having illegal dealings with them, but it all worked out
all right. This went on for quite a long time and they are really the most unpleasant
people to deal with. When I got into dealing with the Chinese, which was a little later,
then it was easier. I was once called back here by President Nixon and told that he
wanted to get in touch with the Chinese, and I was to deliver a message to them, so I
went back to Paris. I went to watch the Chinese Embassy three mornings in a row and
I saw the Ambassador leave at 8:30. On the fourth morning at 8:20 I pushed open the
door and said, "I am the American Military Attach@; I have a message for your
Government from my President." I had made one previous pass at the Chinese military
attache in the Polish Embassy when I had him alone, and when I gave him this
message he looked at me in absolute horror and said, "I'll tell them," and ran! This
time they received me and they took me in and we got involved in long discussions. I
had many, many visits with them and many negotiations about Henry's trip and the
President's trip and everything else. Several times there were attempts to change the
venue, but the Chinese refused to change it. As a little matter of historical interest, I
asked them to release Fecteau and Downey. I was dealing with Huang Chen, who is
now the Chinese head of the liaison office here, and I asked him. He was very
noncommittal and simply said he would transmit it. It took quite a while. I would say
it was three or four weeks before we got an answer, and they said they'd release them at
different time frames and so forth. I was in the United States. The only other person
who was privy to these negotiations was Nancy Lewis and she was the name I'd given
them and they called her in. I believe she was skiing. She was off skiing on the
weekend-feeling that with me gone the mice could play-and she had to come back
from her skiing weekend to get the message but it was that simple, and it was not in
any detail or anything else. We'd just asked them, saying it would be a great gesture in
connection with the President's visit if they would do it. It was a request from him.
About four weeks later they said they would do it, but they would to it in phases, one
after the other.
The Chinese are very curious about the United States, so I finally gave them a
World Almanac, and I'm sure they got 500 intelligence reports out of it.
The first time I took Henry to see them, smuggling him in was a major operation.
He went in and as we left he said, "Tell me, when you come to see them, is it the
same?", and I said, "Oh no. When I come to see them, I'm met at the door of the gate
by a low-ranking guy; at the door of the building by a medium-ranking guy, and then
I'ni taken into the Fu-Manchu Room which is all red velvet and Chinese lanterns and
gold where I sit for 90 seconds. Then the Ambassador appears in the door and says,' Ni
hao,' and I say, `Ni hao.' When you went in, the two guys were at the gate and the
Ambassador was waiting on the steps, and you got both background music and incense
which I never get." I saw a smile of quiet satisfaction spread over his face at the
evidence that even in this egalitarian society there was some respect for hierarchy.
One night he was to come over to France and I was to bring him to Paris. At the
beginning of this he said, "Do you have to tell the French?", and I said, "Yes. They're
watching the Chinese; they're watching me; they're watching everybody, and they'll
know." He said, "How do we prevent it from spreading?", and I said, "You go to
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Pompidou and you ask him to keep it in the very upper level of French Intelligence."
So we did. On the night he's to arrive I am to go to Bourges in central France where
he's going to land and I'm to bring him by car to Paris. At about 5 o'clock in the
evening I begin to get these frenzied telephone calls from the White House: "There's
something wrong with the airplane's hydraulic system; we don't know whether the
airplane's going to land; Rogers is going to find out; Laird is going to find out; they
will break off the negotiations; do something!" I said, "How can I do something? I
can't cover the whole of Western Europe. You've got to tell me where the airplane is
going to land." At 9 o'clock, they called me and told me that the airplane was going to
land at Frankfurt, which was the worst possible place from the point of view of secrecy,
but actaully the best place because they had arresting gear at the end of the runway
like on a carrier to stop the airplane in case the brakes didn't work. So I walked down
the street to President Pompidou's office and asked to see him, and this caused some
consternation. Fortunately, I had taken him on a trip around the United States shortly
before and they'd seen me on television, so I got in and I explained this situaiton and
he picked up the phone on his desk. He called his airplane out at the private hangar
and then he asked, "Go out there. My airplane will take you. Pick him up and bring
him back here." I drove out there, and one hour and six minutes after I left
Pompidou's office we were airborne, which I thought was pretty good reaction time. As
we flew towards Germany, I thought, "If this airplane crashes, I will have been
defecting to the Soviet Union in a French airplane and, once again, I will be dead and
dishonored." I had no orders; I had no nothing for this. We landed at Frankfurt
behind his airplane. We taxied over and I walked up into the airplane. Kissinger was
sitting in his chair. He looked up at me and half a smile came over his face. He said,
"Jesus Christ, am I glad to see you. What are we going to do now?", so I said, "Well,
walk down the ladder and go up the ladder into that little French airplane. We'll move
the baggage." So he did, and we started back to Paris and the French pilot called me
up front and he said, "General, this is the President of France's airplane. The Germans
know it. This airplane, without clearance and without flight plan, managed to
penetrate German airspace, land at Frankfurt, spend nine minutes on the ground and
return. Tomorrow morning the Germans are going to be in my office wanting to know
what we were doing there." I would like to tell you that I had a snap answer. I didn't. I
thought about it and finally a brilliant idea struck me. This was before any of the
recent events in Washington. I said, "Tell them it involves a woman. They'll believe it
of the French and be discreet." But he said, "What if Madame Pompidou finds out?"
I said, "If Madame Pompidou finds out, I give you my word of honor as an American
Army Officer, I will tell her the truth." He said, "Fine." Six months later I saw him
and I said, "Calderone, did the Germans ask?" He said "Yes." I said, "What did you
tell them?" He said, "I told them what we agreed," I said, "Did that satisfy them or
did they have any other questions?" He said, "They had one other question." I said,
"What was that?" They asked, "Is she German?"
The Agency
Well, some time thereafter, on the 2nd of May, I was assigned to this job. I am
about to leave it, and people say to me, "What is it like? Was it worth it?" The answer
is an overwhelming "Yes!" They have been four of the most challenging, rewarding
years of my life. The people I have met here have been magnificent. I am proud of my
association with this Agency as I am of the years I spent in the Army. When I had my
confirmation hearings, Senator Stennis asked me what my ambitions were and I said,
"Mr. Chairman, when I came into the Army, my ambition was to make Major. If you
don't confirm me and I retire as a Major General, I will have had one of the most
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rewarding careers of anybody who ever wore an American Army uniform." In the
Army, and in this Agency, on the many silent battlefields upon which we have been
called as a people, not through our own choice, to fight, I have truly had more than my
share.
One of the things that I've marveled at during the darker days of my service with
the Agency is how steadfast our friendly services have been through all this. They've
really been very good. They were afraid we were going to give them away, and then
they found that we weren't. They marvel at that. One man said to me: "You know,
you Americans are an extraordinary people. No one in history has every tried to run a
secret intelligence service in a department store window. You Americans may be able
to do it. After all, you're the only ones that have been to the moon." But they marvel;
they come in glassy-eyed after they've seen that CIA road sign out there. And one of
them told me a great story. He said, "Once the Soviets recruited a spy in Naples, and
his name was Agnuello. And they took him to Moscow and they trained him in short-
wave and they trained him in micro-dots and secret writing and everything else, and
then they sent him back to Naples and said, 'You stay there. We'll be in touch with
you in a year or two.' A couple of years later a guy from Moscow went to the address
and looked in the entrance. Agnuello was ground floor right. He pushed the button;
the guy opened the door, and he said, 'Mr. Agnuello?' He said, 'Yes.' 'I have come
from Moscow.' The guy looked at him and said, 'There's a mistake. I'm Agnuello the
tailor. Agnuello the spy is on the third floor."' Sometimes, I think our name is
Agnuello!
I must share one more story that the head of the French service, whose mother is
an American, told me. It has a point for foreigners. He said, On an island in the
Pacific, three guys were shipwrecked. One was French, one was British, and one was
American. And they were captured by the cannibals. The chief of the cannibals said, ' I
have bad news and good news for you. The bad news is we're going to have you for
lunch tomorrow. And I don't mean as guests. And the good news, and you need good
news after that, is I'm going to give you anything you want in the meantime.' So he
turned to the Frenchman and he asked, 'What do you want?' The Frenchman said,
'Well, I'm going to be executed in the morning so I think I would just as soon spend
my remaining hours with that beautiful cannibal girl over there.' So they said, 'OK,'
and they untied the Frenchman and he and the cannibal girl went off into the woods.
Then he turned to the Englishman and asked, 'What do you want?' The Englishman
said, 'I want a pen and paper,' He asked, 'What do you want a pen and paper for?' He
said, 'I want to write a letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations to protest
against the unfriendly, unjust, and unsporting attitude you have adopted toward us.'
So they gave the Englishman a pen and paper and a hut where he could write. Then
they turned to the American and they asked, 'What do you want?' The American said,
'I want to be led into the middle of the village; I want to be made to kneel down, and I
want to be kicked in the rear end by the biggest cannibal here.' The Chief looked at his
Vice Chief and he said, 'That's a weird request, but those Americans are a weird bunch
and since I promised, we have to do it.' So they led the American in, they made him
kneel down, the biggest cannibal kicked him and knocked him 15 feet. As the
American sprawled out, he pulled out a submachine gun he'd been hiding under his
clothes and cut down the nearest cannibals and the rest fled. The Frenchman, hearing
the gunfire, came out of the woods; the Englishman came out of the hut. They looked
at the American standing there with the smoking tommy-gun and they said, ' My God.
Do you mean to say you had that gun the whole time?' The American said, ' Sure.' And
they said, 'Well, why didn't you use it before now?' The American looked at them with
an expression of hurt sincerity and he said, 'But you don't understand. It wasn't until
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they kicked me in the rear end that I had any moral grounds for such extreme and
violent action,' "
I would like to take this opportunity, before probably the largest gathering I will
have the opportunity to talk to at the agency, to thank you; to congratulate you on
producing the finest intelligence in the world under a bombardment without
precedent in American or any other history; and to tell you that wherever I am, my
heart will be with you. I wish you every success because the success of this Agency
means the survival of this nation and freedom in the world. Thank you very much.
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SECRET
INTELLIGENCE IN RECENT PUBLIC LITERATURE
MASTER OF SPIES: The Memoris of General Moravec, by Brig. Gen. Frantisek
Moravec. (Bodley Head, London, 1975; Doubleday, New York, 1975.)
Brigadier General Frantisek Moravec, who died in Washington in 1966 at the age
of 71, was not only a thoroughly professional intelligence officer, but above all a
patriot whose entire adult life was closely linked with the fate of his country,
Czechoslovakia. Through two major wars, he firmly believed in the righteousness of his
cause and in his professional capacity acted firmly-according to his critics even
ruthlessly at times-toward its furtherance. His political philosophy was strongly
influenced by Czechoslovakia's first President, Thomas Masaryk, who helped found
Czechoslovakia as a liberal parliamentary republic, and Frantisek Moravec labored for
the restoration of such a system in his country until the day he died. Consequently,
even though intelligence operators might consider this a shortcoming, it is not at all
surprising that the book combines the account of Moravec's intelligence operations
with considerable narrative dealing with the history of Czechoslovakia since 1918.
As a very young man during World War I, Moravec went into exile to fight with
the Czech Legion in Russia. Having witnessed the birth of the state as an independent
republic in 1918, he saw it partioned in September 1938 and occupied by Nazi
Germany in March 1939. These events forced him into his second exile. He returned
from London in 1945 only to find himself watching helplessly as his country was taken
over again in February 1948, this time by the completely Moscow-dominated
Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Shortly thereafter, General Moravec's third and
final exile began. On crossing the perilous border into West Germany he remarked: "In
a small case I carried everything I could take away from a lifetime of service to
Czechoslovakia."
When he returned from Russia in 1918, Moravec chose a career in the military
and in 1928, as a young major, was assigned to the Second Directorate of the General
Staff: Military Intelligence and Counterintelligence. As he preferred service with
troops, he did not cherish this assignment. Little did he know then that this branch of
the Czechoslovak military was to play a major role in the next war, which then seemed
deceptively far away. At this point the book describes familiar problems facing many
intelligence officers around the world: lack of command support, difficulties with
other government agencies, weak logistics, insufficient budgets, etc. Moravec also soon
discovered that his political leaders were not always ready to trust and act upon
information he provided. This early period also includes revealing glimpses of
Moravec's liaison operations with the Russians, which were initiated shortly after
Czechoslovakia had established diplomatic relations with the Kremlin in 1933. This
budding liaison effort included Moravec's trip to the Soviet Union in 1936 when he
discovered-as many negotiators have since-that the Soviets demanded much but
were willing to contribute little or nothing. One of the most telling incidents of
Moravec's stay in Moscow was the time he was invited to visit the Red Army museum,
and with some shock discovered that a rogue's gallery of "enemies of the people"
included President Masaryk.
Moravec's operations during the early thirties were largely defensive in nature,
since after Hitler's accession to power in 1933 it soon became obvious that, with some
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aid from segments of the sizable German minority in the Sudetenland, economically-
balanced and militarily "rich" Czechoslovakia (well-equipped army, the Skoda and
other armament plants, etc.) would become one of his first targets in his march for
Lebensraum. Moravec's secondary objective was defense against the irredentist efforts
by the Budapest regime to cause unrest in the areas of Slovakia which Hungary had
lost in 1918.
The General's first exposure to strategic intelligence came in 1937, in what can
only he termed a windfall. A well-placed German General Staff officer offered his
services to Moravec and, initially for monetary gain only, soon began producing
intelligence vital to Czechoslovak interests. A few years later, Paul Thuemmel was to
become one of the most valuable and productive intelligence sources of the World War
11 era. Paradoxically enough, he also represented probably the biggest frustration in
Moravec's professional life, since the Prague government-and more importantly
Czechoslovakia's ally France-could not or did not want to heed Thuemmel's highly
accurate warnings of Hitler's expansionist plans.
On the eve of the German occupation of truncated post-Munich Czechoslvakia,
Moravec with British help arranged for an airplane and, accompanied by his most
trusted officers and his most important files, flew to London where he offered his
services to the British and to Masaryk's successor, President Rduard Benes, who was
then organizing a government-in-exile. During the war Moravec achieved many
intelligence successes, not only through his prime agent Thuemmel but also because
with British assistance and logistical support he was quickly able to organize a tightly-
knit and effective service which became recognized by the Allies as one of the best
among the nations which had established exile governments in London. Among these
achievements was Thuemmel's timely and accurate reporting on Hitler's preparations
for the invasion of Russia, which President Benes passed to the British and even to
Stalin.
Moravec's most spectacular and-as it turned out later-most controversial
operation was the 1942 assassination of the "Protector of Bohemia and Moravia,"
Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler's senior representative in Prague. This affair not only
attracted world attention at the time, but has fascinated historians on both sides of the
Iron Curtain ever since. The controversy about it is two-fold.
First, the domestic resistance leaders in occupied Czechoslovakia claimed after
World War II that they had not been consulted and that the cost in German reprisals
(including the razing of the village called Lidice) was too high. This discussion
continued after 1948 when both Moravec and some of the non-Communist under-
ground leaders went into exile. Two years before Moravec's death, he agreed to a
series of debates with these leaders under the sponsorship of a Czech emigre cultural
association in Washington. during these somewhat heated sessions (which this
reviewer attended,) Moravec explained his position essentially as stated in the book,
namely, that he was obeying his President's orders. There appears to be no reason
to disbelieve Moravec's interpretation, which is also supported by a number of
Czechs who were close to Benes in London and who claim that the latter was obsessed
with the idea of getting Czechoslovakia "on the map" so that the country's post-war
requirements would be supported by the Allies.
Second, Communist historians also examined this incident as well as the story of
Paul Thuemmel) and in so doing faced a serious problem. Because Moravec left the
country in 1948, thus becoming a "traitor and unperson," the party line required that
his accomplishments he minimized if not erased altogether from history books. While
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the assassination of Heydrich could not simply be ignored, the Communist Party
found it convenient to echo the reservations of the domestic non-Communist resistance
leaders, i.e., that it was a costly mistake. In the more primitive period of Communist
re-writing of history in the early fifties, it was even suggested that Benes had ordered
this action solely to rid himself of the Communist underground. Credit for certain
undeniable successes of the wartime Czech intelligence service, such as Thuemmel,
had to be taken away from Moravec and attributed to some of his subordinates who
had remained in Czechoslovakia after 1948. Regrettably, certain Western
historians-unwittingly or otherwise-picked up some of this disinformation, as a
result of which a shroud of controversy still hangs over the Heydrich operation which,
while almost perfectly executed by a professional intelligence planner, was indeed
costly.
The closing chapter offers a historical perspective of the events in Czechoslovakia
which led to the Communist seizure of power in 1948. As in other parts of the book,
political developments predominate, especially since, at Communist insistence,
General Moravec upon his return home was not permitted to continue his intelligence
work but rather was assigned a troop command.
Once the Communists achieved full control of Czechoslovakia, Gereral Moravec
realized he had to leave his country again. His dislike and mistrust of Soviet intentions
in post-war Europe were much too well known. Thus the book ends with his third exile.
The most interesting portions of the book to the professional will undoubtedly be
those dealing with the building of the Czechoslovak intellingence service in Prague,
and the re-building of it to fit wartime conditions in London. Moravec not only
managed in short order to organize an effective headquarters staff but also soon set up
outposts, resident agents, and radio operators in many locations in occupied as well as
in neutral Europe. Readers with a preference for more spectacular action will probably
find the Thuemmel saga and the Heydrich affair more to their liking. All in all,
"Master of Spies" should be considered a valuable contribution to any intelligence or
foreign affairs library and should satisfy even the average uninitiated reader.
While the point is not directly relevant to the substance of the Moravec memoirs,
this review would not be complete without noting that the work in its present form was
not actually written by General Moravec himself. It was rather meticulously and ably
compiled from notes, tapes, and conversations with her father by Mrs. Hanyi Moravec
Disher. Her effort in presenting an eminently readable and concise account deserves
credit not only for its modesty and lack of personal or professional glorification, but,
above all, for the fact that her project of publishing this book was accomplished at all.
It is a pity that General Moravec did not live to see the final product.
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MOE BERG: ATHLETE, SCHOLAR, SPY. By Louis Kaufman, Barbara Fitzgerald,
and Tom Sewell. (Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1974.)
Big league baseball catcher "Moe" (Morris) Berg (1902-72) was known in the pre-
World War II years as the unusual ballplayer who was remarkably competent in more
than a dozen classical and modern languages and their literatures. Now, as a result of
this popular biography, Moe Berg is likely henceforward to be known as the unusual
OSS agent who would neither make a financial accounting for advances of $21,000 nor
accept the Medal of Freedom for his wartime atomic intelligence work,
Moe Berg was clearly an unusual person. The son of immigrant Ukrainian Jews,
Moe did a thing that was unusual at the time for people of his kind: he went to
Princeton (1919-23). Majoring in Romance languages, he graduated magna cum
laude; he then studied law at Columbia, passed the bar, and joined a Wall Street firm.
In the meantime he had started two decades of professional baseball-Brooklyn,
Chicago, Cleveland, Washington, and Boston-and was avidly pursuing the study of
Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, the conventional European languages, Japanese, and Chinese.
Moe was an unusually attractive person. He was actually "tall, dark, and
handsome" (6'1", 190 pounds, well-built) and the very model of dress, manners, and
social skills-a popular Strauss waltzer. Not only was he unusually bright and
erudite-according to the record and the testimony of numerous professional people
interviewed by the authors-but he was also a lifelong, genuine philologist in the
original sense of that word, that is, a lover of learning for its own sake.
Finally Moe was psychologically a "loner" (and a bachelor). He was a
"mysterious ... but ... level man" (p. 213), according to an official of the wartime
ALSOS Mission, and "a big question-mark guy" (p. 56), according to Casey Stengel.
Worse than the latter, however, he was a big problem guy for Allen W. Dulles, OSS
chief in Bern, to whom Berg would not "report his activities" and whose relationship
with Berg was "a stormy one" (p. 203). The classified record certainly shows that
Dulles found Berg "as easy to handle as an opera singer"; Dulles informed Washington
of his hope that when Berg left Bern he would not soon return.
For the two hundred interviewees whose reminiscences constitute the bulk of this
book, Berg was a natural spy. For them he was always off by himself, hard to find,
going and coming, doing nobody really knew what, and always being polite but
unrevealing. Learning of his OSS activity, they found therein the explanation for his
otherwise strange behavior. Hence, baseball associates of 1934 were not surprised to
learn years later that Moe [allegedly] had then been a State Department photographic
spy in Tokyo, and a post-1967 friend-a surgeon at Massachusetts General
Hospital-''felt he was working for the CIA" (p. 259)-at a time when he had ceased
to be a contract employee and was at least sixty-five years of age.
That State Department episode strains credulity. The authors, who do no
footnoting, give a detailed account in Chapter 1 of Berg-ostensibly carrying flowers
to a new mother but actually concealing a movie camera under his black
kimono-clandestinely filming Tokyo's industrial and military facilities from the roof
of a hospital. The authors certainly portray the operation as some kind of State
Department commission, and the product-they indicate-was turned over to
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"military intelligence." which years later" removed Moe Berg's films from their resting
place" (p. 28) and of course made significant use of them in the Tokyo air raids. But in
1946 Berg wrote, in an unpublished letter, that in 1943 he had turned over to "several
interested agencies" in Washington some "moving pictures" from which "shots of
Japan and Siberia I had been] extracted for duplication for possible official use." This
reader is left wondering how much is fact and how much is fiction in the authors'
account of the clandestine origin of those films.
No such clandestine caper marked Moe's year (1942-43) with Nelson A.
Rockefeller, then Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), but here again the
authors make it sound more secret and mysterious than it probably was. Berg went to
South America on a well-publicized goodwill tour; the Washington Post is quoted as
describing it as "almost without parallel in the annals of diplomacy" (p. 147) (! ).
Actually, Berg's main job (cover?) was furthering the "Good Neighbor" policy through
improving relations between American soldiers stationed on newly-established military
bases and their local South American hosts. At the same time, however, Berg-linguist,
conversationalist, politically alert citizen-made "secret, high-priority assessments of
political figures" (p. 147), especially in Brazil. Whatever the order of priorities,
Rockefeller was happy with the trip, and OSS-with an independent bead on
Berg-found it another reason for eagerly recruiting him in mid-1943.
The unpublished record shows that Berg was brought into OSS largely through
the effort of the OSS deputy director for special operations, Ellery C. Huntington, Jr., a
partner in the law firm in which Berg had worked years earlier. Huntington had no
specific assignment in mind for Berg, but, as the authors show, one soon showed up.
The chief of the Manhattan project, Gen. Leslie R. Groves, was worried about the
possibility of Germany being months ahead of the U.S. and Britain in the development
of an atomic bomb. Having been given the atomic counterintelligence responsibility,
Groves sought assistance from OSS, among others. "Donovan gave him Moe" (p. 164),
recalled an ex-OSS official.
Boning up on the fundamentals of atomic physics, Moe took off on a roving
assignment to Europe, especially Italy and Switzerland, to identify, locate, and report
on German and Italian scientists and facilities engaged in atomic energy, and also
bacteriological, warfare work. He parachuted into Norway late in 1943 and made a
report on the Rjukan heavy water plant, which was part of Germany's atomic bomb
setup. In mid-1944 plans were made for Berg's arriving and departing Italy by
submarine in order to spirit away some Italian scientists, but the liberation of Rome
made possible a more conventional entry-by plane; other considerations forced Moe
to rest content with informative and-from the allied point of view-reassuring
discussions with the Italians on the state of atomic developments. On his own,
however, Moe identified and persuaded the chief of Italian aircraft development
work-Dr. Antonio Ferri-to move to the U.S., where he now heads the New York
University Aerospace Laboratory. Late in 1944 Moe amazed his atomic energy co-
workers by attending a lecture by Germany's top atomic bomb scientist, Prof. Werner
Heisenberg, and developing useful contacts with the score of scientists in attendance;
while the lecture was held in neutral Switzerland, it was attended by several Nazis and
was surrounded with Nazi security precautions.
From the Heisenberg lecture and subsequent contacts, Berg obtained information
about the status and location of German scientific activity which General Groves later
credited with enabling him to gauge the kind and amount of pressure which he needed
to place, and not place, on his already hard-working Manhattan personnel. From
Ferri's presence and activity in the United States, this country gained two years in the
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experimental work on the development of high-speed aircraft. For these and other
activities, accomplishments, and services-including the acquisition of many scientific
sketches, papers, and documents-Moe was judged a fit candidate for reception of the
Medal of Freedom. For some unaccountable reason, however, Moe refused it-as he
wrote-"with due respect for the spirit with which it [was] offered" (p. 233). His
friends thought it "typical of Moe to turn it down." He never did accept it, but a few
years ago his sister initiated action to obtain it in his name.
It was also typical of Moe, according to the authors, that he did not like to fill out
forms. They say he never learned to drive an automobile, because-as he told
friends-" I hate the bureaucracy of the automobile. Forms, rules, licenses. I don't
have time for that sort of madness" (p. 209). And he did not have time, apparently, for
"the madness" of accounting for $21,439.15 of OSS funds advanced to him during his
two and a half years of service. The government, anxious to clear the books, was
confident that salary, travel, per diem and other legitimate expenses-Moe said he
never paid for any information-left little, if anything, for him to pay. Former General
Counsel Lawrence R. Houston met with Berg in New York to try to settle the matter,
but Berg-"extremely pleasant and polite"-would not budge. Houston confessed
himself at a loss to "explain the basis for his refusal" (p. 236). Moe never did settle up.
He remained "a big question-mark guy."
As sketched by the authors, Berg's postwar years seem to have much resembled his
earlier years with the one exception that he really had nothing on which to expend his
talent and energy. There was the constant reading and studying, the browsing in
bookstores and libraries, appearing and disappearing from the society of friends,
attendance at ballgames, and a potpourri of activity-a little CIA contract work, a few
law cases, a business reverse, an argument with his brother over the storage of books
and newspapers; but Berg, the philologist, had nothing comparable to the catcher's
mitt or counterintelligence to fill up the non-philological hours. From beginning to
end Moe emerges from this unpretentious biography as a sweetly sad, or sadly sweet,
loner who did his own thing and kept it pretty much to himself.
Thomas F. Troy
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