INTELLIGENCE FOR NATIONAL POLICY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
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• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: C
• Document Page Count: 132
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 25, 2002
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: November 1, 1967
• Content Type: BOOK

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CIA INTERNAL USE ONLY
c 1 E IAL
INTELLIGENCE FOR NATIONAL POLICY
by
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
OFFICE OF TRAINING
irk ~`irs~ USE ONLY
-FOR- OEEIC1Ak ONLY
25X1A
25X1
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INTELLIGENCE FOR NATIONAL POLICY
by
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
OFFICE OF TRAINING
25X1A
ti
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4ae
e1e a 9~~-. a .. - ~
ICIAL USF"ONL
25X1A
INTELLIGENCE FOR NATIONAL POLICY (Central
n e ce Agency, Office of Training, November 1967,
For Official Use Only)
ERRATA, First Printing
(Headings and subheadings are not included in line counts.)
p. V, line 3: quarters and analysis should be quarters
research and analysis
p. vi, line 26: coworkers should be co-workers
p. 14 (unnumbered subtitle page): END PRODUCT should be THE
END PRODUCT
p. 16, line 24: establish should be established
p. 17, line 42: promonitory should be premonitory
p. 23, subheading: Harbor should be Harbors
p. 25, line 27: manufacturing should be maneuvering
p. 73, line 27: not grounds should be not on grounds
p. 84, line 22: econmic should be economic
p. 113, line 14: online should be on-line
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FOREWORD
The amount of literature devoted primarily to intelligence production and
to intelligence support of national policy is miniscule as compared with the
literature concerned with clandestine activities. Few books on intelligence pro-
duction have appeared, and most of these are either now outdated or are
oriented primarily toward military intelligence.
The Intelligence School of the Office of Training makes a continuing effort
to keep abreast of new material which might be useful for orienting and training
in intelligence production and in the broad nature and uses of intelligence.
Although "Intelligence for National Policy," which was completed in manuscript
earlier this year by a senior analyst of the Central Intelligence Agency, neces-
sarily and admittedly reflects a personal viewpoint, it seems admirably suited
to fill this training need. It has therefore been published for this purpose.
This book is For Official Use Only. It may prove useful to departments
and agencies of the United States Government that are concerned with the
production and use of intelligence for national policy.
The Intelligence School,
Office of Training, Central
Intelligence Agency
November 1967
For Official Use Only ill
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INTELLIGENCE FOR NATIONAL POLICY
Preface
The literature on intelligence treats very much more about clandestine
activities in the field than about the ingenuities and scholarship that go into head-
quarters and analysis. The direction of author enterprise has resulted in hard
digging around locked gates of secrecy.
My own labors in this book keep clear of the keyhole journalism that would
expose secrets of intelligence. Nor do I recount intelligence collections coups
that were achieved in circumstances of personal risk and high drama. I write
of "finished intelligence"-the organizational arrangements for its production,
some of the analytical methodologies, and the various formats for carrying intel-
ligence analysis to the highest councils of government. Where I discuss intelli-
gence collection, it is in the context of implications for the validity of final analysis.
Where I touch on an operation like the Bay of Pigs, it is again only for the bearing
on problems of intelligence analysis, or on questions of public policy (such as
proposals for expanded Congressional oversight) which may affect the milieu in
which intelligence analysis is conducted in the United States.
I give two additional forewarnings about purposeful limitations in the pres-
entation. First, it is patterned on an unclassified text I wrote some years ago
for instructional use by the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. The present
study is more dotted with case examples, but references to substantive conclusions
do not take the reader beyond what is already public knowledge. Thus he will
find nothing new about the state of Soviet agriculture or about Chinese Com-
munist nuclear testing. He will, however, come away better instructed about
American intelligence capabilities on such matters.
Second, the presentation is much more concerned with the preparation of
intelligence than with the uses to which intelligence is put after it is prepared.
This perspective reflects my own working experience in the Central Intelligence
Agency, limited as I have been to supplying policymakers with intelligence rather
than to policy formulation drawing on intelligence. This is far from saying that
I have neglected the important subject of the relation of intelligence to policy;
I have in fact gone into the subject in a little detail. But my focus has been the
restraints on the intelligence officer. I have not elaborated, as someone else with
experience in a policymaking role could have, on the weight that policymakers
actually give to intelligence findings.
The result of these two limitations is a study that, subject to considerations
of security safeguard, describes and appraises the intelligence input into national
policy. The design is to give the reader a better idea of just what intelligence
does in supplying this input to policymakers, of how well intelligence does its
job, and of how much ought reasonably to be expected from intelligence. Does
today's intelligence provide better protection against another Pearl Harbor?
What are the guards in intelligence against analyses that are slanted to serve
a special policy interest? Can intelligence point to a decent record of forecast-
ing? Where forecasts have been in error, has intelligence nevertheless been
alert enough in its subsequent day-to-day monitoring of events to give timely
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knowledge of threats to the national security interest? Would the quality of
intelligence be affected by its subordination to more legislative oversight or to
other forms of surveillance in the government?
One of the common working traits of the professional intelligence officer is a
suppression of ardor in discussions of possible policy courses, lest his supposedly
dispassionate analysis take on the suspect coloration of special pleading. I be-
lieve this habit of a long training is reflected in this study, which tends more to
exposition and interpretation than to affirmative policy recommendations. The
surface neutrality is not worn to support any pretense of full objectivity; I admit
to a sympathetic bias for the intelligence calling. I hope the following pages
suggest some good reasons for the bias and leave the reader impressed with the
usefullness of intelligence scholarship in government.
I could hardly have written these pages except for a fortunate circumstance
which extricated me temporarily from the working problems that so fully engage
the typical intelligence officer in these times. The good fortune was my selec-
tion, along with fourteen others from various government agencies, to attend
Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
during the 1965-1966 academic year as a Princeton Fellow in Public Affairs. I
did my writing during the hours when I could bring myself to miss opportunities
for intellectual stimulus which come in quick succession at the Woodrow Wilson
School.
I did not show all the typescript to members of the faculty, and for this
reason alone, they could hardly be associated with my viewpoints. I ought
further to note that, helpful as their specific criticisms were, we were far from
bridging all areas of disagreement. This observation applies as well to friends
and coworkers in Washington, none of whom concurred with me on all points.
I therefore underline the customary author insistence in prefaces on taking in-
dividual responsibility for views expressed in the pages that follow.
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PREFACE ......................................................... v
Chapter
Collective Analysis ............................................ 1
Community Origins ........................................... 2
The Community Principle ...................................... 3
The USIB Agencies .......................................... 4
Community Relations ......................................... 8
Objectivity and Policy Support ................................. 10
2. CURRENT INTELLIGENCE ................................... 15
Publications ................................................. 15
The Process .................................................. 17
The Operations Center ....................................... 19
Strategic Warning ............................................ 20
No More Pearl Harbors? ...................................... 23
3. THE ESTIMATE .............................................. 27
Production Flow Chart ........................................ 28
How Conclusive the Conclusions? .............................. 30
The Consensus Problem ....................................... 32
The Cuban Estimate ......................................... 33
4. THE RESEARCH STUDY ...................................... 37
The Encyclopedic Study ...................................... 38
The Special Purpose Study .................................... 41
5. POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE .................................. 43
External Affairs .............................................. 43
Domestic Affairs ............................................. 46
Biographic Intelligence ....................................... 49
8. ECONOMIC INTELLIGENCE ................................. 51
Gross National Product ....................................... 52
Industry Analysis ............................................. 53
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Agriculture .................................................. 54
Balance of Payments .......................................... 55
Transportation ............................................... 56
Manpower ................................................... 57
Domestic Finance ............................................ 58
Military Costing .............................................. 59
Intelligence and. East-West Trade 60
The Non-Communist Economies ................................ 62
7. MILITARY INTELLIGENCE .................................... 65
Men and Hardware ............................................ 65
Doctrine ..................................................... 67
Geographic Intelligence ........................................ 69
8. SCIENTIFIC INTELLIGENCE ................................. 71
Wartime Scientific Intelligence ................................. 71
The Postwar Area of Surveillance 72
Postwar Case Histories ........................................ 75
Personnel ................................................... 76
Arms Control and Intelligence ................................. 78
9. OPEN AND SECRET SOURCES ................................ 79
The Overt Sources ............................................ 79
Content Analysis of Open Materials ............................ 82
Diplomatic Collection ......................................... 85
Clandestine Collection ........................................ 87
10. TECHNICAL COLLECTION ................... ............... 91
Changing Soviet Attitudes ..................................... 91
Photo Intelligence ............................................ 92
Signal Intelligence ........................... ............... 94
PART V. INTELLIGENCE IN THE DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY
11. ROLES AND IMAGE .......................................... 97
Intelligence and Covert Action ................................ 98
Analysis and Collection ....................................... 100
The Intelligence Personality .................._................ 103
12. SURVEILLANCE OVER INTELLIGENCE ...................... 107
Congressional Surveillance ...................................... 108
Executive Surveillance .......................................... 109
The Joint Committee Idea .................................... 114
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Part I
THE NATURE OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE
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 G ~ Fi ENT L
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Chapter 1
The Community
On the seventh of October 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson entered
Bethesda Naval Hospital for surgery. The President had given the final word
to go ahead with the operation, but was his the effective decision? Or had the
decision really come earlier-at the time when his physician made a diagnosis
which left the President with no practical alternative to surgery?
America is not a society which in the general run of circumstances vests
authority in doctors to operate against the wishes of their patients. But the
doctor's conclusion that a patient's life is in jeopardy generally outweighs other
considerations influencing a patient's formal decision. This is not to affirm that
doctors are the real loci of decision-making in all matters of health. They are
often disregarded when the danger to life is not clear and present. Tobacco
shares are still good buys on the stock exchanges. Americans still gorge on
sugars and animal fats. There are nevertheless important periods in the medical
histories of men when their decisions simply constitute assent to expert opinion,
involving very little of independent judgment.
The role of the fact-finder, in medical diagnosis and public administration,
is most crucial in the case of decisions which follow almost inescapably from the
evidence. The legal codes require coal mines to be closed down if they are in
serious violation of safety regulations. When the safety inspector has incontro-
vertible evidence of hazards, the decision to close down the mine is in effect
determined by his findings. Intelligence officials only rarely have the occasion
to be so determinative in decision-making. An important reason is that intelli-
gence findings are usually partial and inconclusive. Even if all the main facts are
unquestioned and the interpretation of evidence is unimpeachable, the course of
action that should follow is generally arguable, and the role of intelligence in the
argument is being circumscribed by an evolving tradition. Still, there is no gain-
saying the influence of intelligence, and there is a legitimate public interest in
knowing if intelligence really is informed.
Collective Analysis
The Dictionary of United States Military Terms for Joint Usage defines intel-
ligence as "the product resulting from the collection, evaluation, analysis, integra-
tion, and interpretation of all available information which concerns one or more
aspects of foreign nations or of areas of operations and which is immediately or
potentially significant to military planning and operations." With appropriate
changes in the last few words to bring in the nation's additional interests in
political and other non-military developments abroad, this definition of intelligence
as a "product" is suitably modified to indicate one sense in which the word is used
throughout the following pages. It is also used in the sense of the intelligence
organization or of intelligence organizations generally, much as people use words
like management and labor to represent particular groupings in society.
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hierarchy. At the echelons of the regiment, the army, and the major area com-
mand, there are corresponding levels of intelligence support. At a still higher
echelon, the Secretaryof Defense and the Secretary of State are likely to draw on
what is called departmental intelligence, prepared by their own intelligence
organizations at the Pentagon and Foggy Bottom headquarters. The function
of national intelligence is to serve the nation's highest command post, to provide
information on foreign developments needed at the level of the President or of
the President in association with his closest advisers. At this level, the charac-
teristic feature of intelligence analysis is that it bears on major problem of national
strategy, cutting across departmental lines.
The characteristic feature of relationship to broad national strategy is not
the invariable feature. That is to say, national intelligence is not always limited
to what is commonly understood as strategic intelligence. If the President wants
information on some item of combat intelligence-and in war situations he often
does follow the battlefield situation closely-it will be national intelligence if he
gets the information through the machinery for national intelligence production.
National intelligence on the current situation in Vietnam may include items of
combat intelligence.
In the United States, national intelligence is not the product of a single organi-
zation. It represents ;rather a composite effort, offered by the Director of Central
Intelligence-with provision for dissents if there are any-as the consensus of
several intelligence organizations. The needs of highest-level decision-making
are not always best served by a consensus production, and American intelligence
organizations preparenumerous individual analyses that relate to major problems
of national security. Since these individual analyses do get to the summit echelon
of decision-making, they are included in this study of national intelligence. The
strictest usage, however, differentiates them by such designations as, say, Central
intelligence (if produced by the Central Intelligence Agency), Defense intelli-
gence (if produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency in the Department of
Defense), or State intelligence (if produced by the Bureau of Intelligence and
Research in the Department of State).
Community Origins
Intelligence in America began to come of age in World War II. Its maturing
if still youthful lineaments could be traced partly in the expansion of the military
intelligence services; but this expansion was clearly related to requirements for
support of wartime military operations, and it was uncertain at the time that mili-
tary intelligence would have an enduring role in support of national policy. The
Office of Strategic Services (OSS), however, grown to a personnel strength of
some =y the war's end, had been chartered to provide the kind of intelli-
gence support that policy at the highest level might well continue to require when
the military strategy and tactics of wartime gave way to peacetime forms of
maneuver. As the head of OSS, General William J. Donovan, foresaw the require-
ment, it would be for peacetime policies framed with as full intelligence as pos-
sible on the economic strengths of foreign countries, their political intentions,
their technological capabilities, and their psychological vulnerabilities.
While the popular literature on OSS after the war centered on the drama of
its clandestine activities behind enemy lines and in third countries, General
Donovan was also an enthusiast for tapping the reservoirs of overt information
on foreign countries. Whatever the proportions of overt and covert input, he
believed that the quality of finished intelligence output depended crucially on
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and OSS drew heavily on the skills of hundreds of academicians from the fields
of history, political science, sociology, economics, and the other scholarly dis-
ciplines. For about a year before the end of the war, he strongly urged on
President Roosevelt the importance of setting up a permanent peacetime intelli-
gence service before the talents gathered together by OSS were dispersed.
General Donovan was far from alone in his advocacy of peacetime intelli-
gence. Pearl Harbor had shocked an entire nation, and the instructive lesson
for many Americans was that adequate intelligence constituted an integral part
of national security. When President Truman took office in 1945, he "considered
it very important to this country to have a sound, well-organized intelligence sys-
tem, both in the present and in the future." 1 There was widespread disagree-
ment within the government, however, on the best institutional arrangements
for peacetime intelligence. General Donovan's proposal, although it provided for
the continuation of the military intelligence services to support the operational
requirements of the armed forces, envisaged a new organization directly under
the President to provide the information and analyses in support of broad national
policy. The FBI, the State Department, and the military services, for their part,
were apprehensive of encroachments on their own departmental missions. The
net result of a bureaucratic tug of war was the disbanding of OSS in October 1945
before agreement could be reached on a successor arrangement. The hiatus was
only a few months; in January 1946, the President issued his executive directive
establishing the Central Intelligence Group (CIG).
The Community Principle
The CIG was a stopgap compromise. The Group was financed in effect by
departmental grants rather than congressional appropriations. It had no em-
ployment rights, obtaining its personnel on assignment from the Departments.
But the creation of the CIG proved to be a first step toward the peacetime intel-
ligence organization that General Donovan had envisioned. The CIG began
early to provide daily and other summaries of intelligence to the White House.
Like the Central Intelligence Agency which was to be set up by statute the next
year, the CIG was headed by a Director of Central Intelligence appointed by the
President. Like the Central Intelligence Agency, it was made subject to the
formal oversight of a higher body of cabinet-ranking officials. Like the Central
Intelligence Agency, the CIG was forbidden the exercise of "police, law enforce-
ment or internal security functions." Like the Central Intelligence Agency, it had
a charter to take on other functions that the overseeing authority decided could
be performed better centrally than by the Departments.
The provisions of the National Security Act of 1947 creating the Central
Intelligence Agency placed it formally under the National Security Council.
The members of the NSC include such figures of consequence as the Secretaries
of State and of Defense, but in concept it is advisory to the President, and as a
collegial body it is no longer the structured organization it once was. It meets
irregularly and then primarily to consider matters other than the administration
of the Central Intelligence Agency. For all practical purposes, General Donovan's
project of a postwar intelligence agency reporting directly to the President has
been realized.
'Harry S. Truman, Years of Decision (New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1955), p. 98,
cited in Allen Dulles, The Craft of Intelligence (New York: The New American Library,
1965),p.43.
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o say this is tar trom asserting t e tnum li t i
munity principle of intelligence organization in the United States. The access
that the Director of Central Intelligence has to the President gives a certain
primacy to CIA viewpoints, but it does not debar a hearing for any contrary
opinions that may be strongly held in other intelligence agencies. The Director's
administrative authority extends only over the CIA. In the exercise of his in-
fluence over the rest of the community, he works-as President Kennedy phrased
it in a letter of January 1982 to incoming Director John. A. McCone-"with the
advice and assistance of the U.S. Intelligence Board," a body on which all the
major intelligence services are equally represented?
This Board (abbreviated to USIB and pronounced "yousib" in the everyday
parlance) meets usually once a week, oftener during "flaps." Its functions are
both substantive and managerial. On the substantive side, the USIB reviews the
most important judgments of national intelligence before they are passed to the
President and the NSC. On the managerial side, the understandings reached in
the Board about procedures and areas of responsibility are accepted as authorita-
tive throughout the intelligence community.
In addition, the Board in effect sets a pattern for formal and informal col-
laboration among the intelligence services at lower echelons. The formal ma-
chinery for second-echelon coordination takes the shape typically of USIB stand-
ing committees, each created by USIB to cover the joint efforts of the intelligence
services in a specialized area. The Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee
and the Guided Missile and Astronautics Intelligence Committee are examples
of two USIB committees charged with the effective coordination of intelligence
on advanced weapons technology. Intelligence in. other fields of science comes
within the purview of the Scientific Intelligence Committee. A comparable
coordinating role in economic intelligence is exercised by the Economic Intelli-
gence Committee. A National Intelligence Survey Committee oversees the pro-
duction of the "country encyclopedias," the basic background studies to which
the several agencies contribute chapters in their respective areas of major com-
petence-religion, ports and harbors, government structure, terrain, agriculture,
transportation." Perhaps the most active standing committee is the Watch Com-
mittee, charged with determining the intelligence consensus on probabilities for
the early outbreak of hostilities .4
These committees represent only some of the inter-agency bodies, permanent
and ad hoc, that have been established to coordinate the work of the intelligence
services. As this array of interagency arrangements must suggest, the intelligence
community is much more than the agencies that comprise it; it is the multiplicity
also of the formal and. informal personal relationships that cut across agency lines.
The agencies do, however, retain their independent character, and a description
of agency roles is the indispensable element in any survey of the community.
The USIB Agencies
In addition to the designated intelligence services, "ten or more" agencies
of the Government were found by the Hoover Commission in 1955 to expend
public funds on foreign intelligence.6 This is of course to use the word intelli-
gence in its broadest sense-to include the Federal Reserve Bank and Treasury
S U.S., Congress, Senate, Committee on Armed Services, Hearing, Nominations of McCone,
Korth, and Harlan, 87th Cong., 2d Sess., 1962, p. 37.
'See infra., chap. iv.
'See infra., p. 23.
U.S., Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, Intelli-
gence Activities: A Report to the Congress, Washington, 1955, p. 17.
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reports on oreign financial markets, or example, the epartment o Commerce
analyses on economic conditions affecting American export prospects, Agriculture's
surveys of foreign crops, the Labor Department's published research studies on
labor developments abroad, studies of the Bureau of Mines on world-wide mineral
production. The term intelligence community, however, is ordinarily under-
stood to include only the agencies represented on the United States Intelligence
Board. The community, in this commonly restricted use of the term, is charted
on the following page.
In this community, the Central Intelligence Agency plays a leading role. The
law setting up the Agency in 1947 specified responsibilities for coordination of the
Government's intelligence effort and for the general correlation and evaluation
of intelligence. These functions alone would have been compatible with a
smallish staff that did little of the pick-and-shovel work but could make substantive
judgments on foreign intelligence, very much perhaps as a small Council of Eco-
nomic Advisers is able to draw on the products of other government agencies to
make the important conclusions on where the domestic economy is heading. The
1947 statute, however, provided the authority for the Central Intelligence Agency
to assume other responsibilities. First, the Agency could perform "such additional
services of common concern" as the National Security Council determined were
best performed centrally. Second, the Agency might take on "other functions
and duties related to intelligence" as the National Security Council from time to
time directed.
CIA's growth followed from these provisions of the law and from the problems
of the times. In the earlier years, the Departments were hard-pressed by budget
stringencies, and they found solutions by unloading some of their activities on
the new organization. Then the intensification of the cold war and the onset of
hostilities in Korea placed demands on the Agency to increase its intelligence-
collection operations. There were also some types of analysis which the Agency
undertook in the absence of sufficient resources in other services-the analysis
from scratch of economic intelligence on the Communist countries, for example.
The legislation setting up the CIA does not designate its head as the Director
of the Central Intelligence Agency but rather as the Director of Central Intelli-
gence. The title connotes a role that extends beyond the directorship of the
Agency to the guidance of the intelligence community as a whole. President
Kennedy drew the distinction in his letter of January 1962, wherein he expressed
the view that John McCone should "delegate to your principal deputy, as you
may deem necessary, so much of the direction of the detailed operation of the
Agency as may be required to permit you to carry out your primary task as
Director of Central Intelligence." 6 In accordance with this view of the larger
role of the Director, he no longer sits on the United States Intelligence Board,
as Allen Dulles did, both as Chairman and as the CIA representative. The
Agency is now formally represented on the Board by the Deputy Director of
Central Intelligence, while the Director sits only as Chairman, symbolizing his
broader responsibilities for the "guidance of the total U.S. foreign intelligence
effort," in President Kennedy's words.7
Apart from his chairmanship role, the Director's primacy in the community
is buttressed by the fact that he is the only head of an intelligence service who
has direct access to the President. All other intelligence service chiefs are at
varying levels below cabinet or agency heads and therefore not in the family
U.S., Congress, Senate, Committee on Armed Services, loc. cit.
'Ibid.
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The Intelligence Community....
DIRECTOR OF
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
i CIA
STATE
DEFENSE
NSA
AEC
FBI
L~.,o ' /`/---r---REPRESENTATIVE OF THE DIRECTOR, FBI
L-001 '
F
INTELLIGENCE
ADVISER
TO PRESIDENT
NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL
STATUTORY MEMBERS
OTHER PARTICIPANTS AND OBSERVERS
ADVISERS
CHAIRMAN, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF
DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
UNITED STATES INTELLIGENCE BOARD
DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
1000, / // /
/
/
/
COMMITTEES OF USIB
(REPRESENTATIVES FROM AGENCIES)
WATCH COMMITTEE
ECONOMIC INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE
SCIENTIFIC INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE
OTHER USIB COMMITTEES
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i~~~ ?-- --DIRECTOR, NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY
i~ - - - - - REPRESENTATIVE OF THE COMMISSION
---+---DIRECTOR, DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
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of h President's close advisers. The Director's influence is also reflected in
his role as adviser on the National Security Council. During the Eisenhower
Administration, a current intelligence briefing by the Director of Central Intelli-
gence was the invariable first agenda item at meetings of the Council. If meet-
ings now are less frequent, it is still the Director who attends as the only
intelligence representative and who thus presumably exerts the added measure
of influence that comes from physical presence at the Council table.
For a brief period in the fall of 1945, it appeared that the Sate Department
might assume the leading intelligence role. The research and analysis assets
of OSS were transferred to State, and President Truman wrote the Secretary of
State:
I particularly desire that you take the lead in developing a comprehensive
and coordinated foreign intelligence program for all Federal agencies con-
cerned with that type of activity. This should be done through the creation
of an interdepartmental group, heading up under the State Department which
would formulate plans for my approval ...8
The President dropped this idea, partly because the military intelligence
services showed no enthusiasm for State leadership. State, however, held on to
its new intelligence arm, a purely analysis organization that is today constituted
as the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). State's representative on the
USIB, the Director of Intelligence and Research, ranks at the level of Assistant
Secretary in the Department's hierarchy. Apart from its political and economic
contributions to national intelligence, INR brings a broad scholarship to research
and analyses in support of departmental policy and decision-making.
Army, Navy, and Air Force intelligence, as well as the J-2 of the Joint Staff,
were once individually represented on the USIB. In 1961, however, the Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA) was activated; and in time, the new Agency took over
all of J-2 and some intelligence components in Washington of the three military
services. The representative of these consolidated military interests on the USIB
today is the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Like most other meas-
ures of recent years in the Department of Defense to blur service lines, the
integration of the intelligence effort engendered the expected anxieties in certain
quarters. The arrangement worked out in the USIB to assure consideration of
service viewpoints provided for the attendance of the three service intelligence
chiefs in observer capacities. DIA speaks for Defense, but Army, Navy, and Air
Force intelligence sit in; and in fields like weapons developments where they have
especial technical competence and interest, they still have the opportunity to in-
fluence the final intelligence consensus.
The National Security Agency (NSA), although it is in the Department of
Defense, is not represented on the USIB by the Director of the Defense Intelli-
gence Agency. The separate voice that NSA's own director has in USIB reflects
the importance to intelligence of this Agency's capabilities in the field of telecom-
munication transmissions. The impressive professional talents of NSA include
communications systems engineers, computer specialists, mathematical experts
in probability theory, and physicists engaged in research on the upper atmosphere.
A representative of the Atomic Energy Commission also sits on the USIB,
since the AEC keeps an intelligence watch over foreign developments in nuclear
energy. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is also represented. As the princi-
e U.S., Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, Foreign
Affairs, Task Force Report, Appendix H, Washington, 1949, p. 92.
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pal internal security agency of the Government, the FBI is concerne with
domestic rather than foreign intelligence. In the exercise of its internal security
functions, however, the FBI often turns up important foreign intelligence. Regu-
lar liaison is maintained to assure the quick despatch of such information to the
rest of the community.
Community Relations
Clearly, the foreign intelligence responsibilities of the six USIB agencies
are not equally broad.. NSA's activities are associated with communications and
related fields. AEC turns its eye only to nuclear energy matters. The FBI
disseminations are the by-product of activities in the domestic field, not the result
of purposeful programs in the field of foreign intelligence. Only CIA, INR of
State, and DIA of Defense have across-the-board analytical assignments. These
three constitute the influential triumvirate in determination of the community
consensus on matters of substantive intelligence-prospects in the U.S.S.R., out-
look in Vietnam, developments in the Dominican Republic, for example. The
triumvirate is even more influential in the case of intelligence which does not
reach the USIB level. of review. The forum in which such intelligence is con-
sidered may not include say FBI representation, but the CIA, State, and Defense
are invariably represented. If these three are agreed, their conclusions are
accepted as national intelligence.
How well does the system work? A community of different intelligence
services can be a seedbed of interservice rivalry, for the organization that has
the spirit which is the essential of effectiveness will want both pride of place
and gratification of separate recognition. The maneuver for position is most
likely to take on features of adversary relationship in the period before roles
have been clearly defined and firmly established. The FBI, on the basis of its
wartime intelligence experience in the Western hemisphere, proposed itself after
the war for a world-wide intelligence role. Secretary of State Byrnes' opposing
view was that the State Department should have the predominant authority over
the intelligence effort,. The military services, as was noted above, were of another
mind.
The act setting up the CIA in 1947 was a result of many compromises to allay
anxieties about bureaucratic position and status. The FBI, for example, was
excepted from a provision opening departmental intelligence to the inspection
of the Director of Central Intelligence. The approach of the Director of Central
Intelligence to the FBI, it was stipulated, would be in writing before the FBI
would have to take action. Then the Director of the FBI would make available
such information "as may be essential to the national security." The distinction
in the statute between the FBI and the other agencies has not been a matter of
really practical significance, since the Director of Central Intelligence more
nearly negotiates than commands community cooperation in any case. The
phrasing of the 1947 Act nevertheless attests to deeply ingrained concerns at
the time about organizational place and prerogative.
These are concerns which tend to diminish insofar as the community
machinery can run smoothly over the years without instances of unreasonable
trespass across jurisdictional lines. There is a general awareness, however,
that the shape of the present intelligence community is not set in concrete, and
so a certain guardedness continues which gives a sense of inter-agency competition
as well as of cooperation to the community principle. The most recent major
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change in the community, the establishment o t e Defense me gence Agency,
was seen in some quarters as a potential for challenge to CIA eminence in intelli-
gence. Allen Dulles expressed the CIA interest frankly:
There is, of course, always the possibility that two such powerful and well-
financed agencies as CIA and DIA will become rivals and competitors. There
is obviously also room here for an expansion of traditional Army ambitions
to run a full-fledged and independent covert collection service of its own,
which is hardly justifiable under present circumstances. . . Furthermore,
the high caliber of the officers, military and civilian, directing the two
agencies, if maintained, should guarantee effective performance, but it is
vital to protect the authority of the Director of Central Intelligence to
coordinate the work of. foreign intelligence.9
Organizational pride and sensitivity are of course not limited to the agencies
of the intelligence community but are rather characteristic features of govern-
ment and business. Up to a point, these features are regarded as plus rather
than minus factors in estimations of efficiency; the prevailing doctrines of
management today approve of arrangements which can open paths of communi-
cation while respecting organizational personality. The profits of General
Motors are testimony to advantages of decentralized operations and, beyond
that, even of a certain competition among the autonomous divisions of the
corporation.
Nevertheless, the situation encourages journalistic sniffing for power struggles,
and there has as a result been some comment on the subject from official quarters.
The most recent occasion for such comment came in an investigation of the
Cuban missile crisis. The party allegedly in conflict with CIA-the Strategic
Air Command-was outside the intelligence community, but it would conceivably
have the backing of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the United States
Intelligence Board. Congress, however, found no grounds for condemning
anybody:
There have been numerous news reports alleging the existence of a
conflict between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Strategic
Air Command (SAC) with reference to the operation of the U-2 high
altitude flights. These reports have contained allegations that a deadlock
existed between CIA and SAC and that this was resolved at the policy level
by transferring the function of flying the U-2 missions from CIA to SAC.
It has also been alleged that this is one of the reasons for the delay in
locating the MRBM sites in Cuba.10
The Senators' findings were that the installation of surface-to-air missiles in
Cuba had created a new danger to the CIA-operated U-2's and that, in these
circumstances, there were good policy reasons for transferring the program for
overflight surveillance of Cuba from a civilian to a military agency.
... There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that any conflict
between CIA and SAC existed or that there was any delay in photographic
coverage of the island because of the fact that the U-2 program was being
operated by CIA prior to October 14.
Dulles, op. cit., p. 46.
10 U.S., Congress, Senate, Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the Committee
on Armed Services, Investigation of the Preparedness Program: Interim Report on the Cuban
Military Buildup, 88th Cong., 1st Sess. 1963, p. 9.
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Likewise, there is no evidence whatsoever of any deadlock between
the two agencies or any conflict or dispute with respect to the question of
by whom the flights should be flown."
However ordered the working relationships, the fair question arises of
expense in duplication of activities. There are fields of concentration-State
in political intelligence and DIA in military intelligence, for example-but juris-
dictional boundaries are not etched in stone. DIA can hardly follow the Viet-
namese military situation in separation from the political context, and State
similarly has enough knowledge of the military area to raise questions about
certain DIA judgments. The overlap of competencies and activities is clearly
visible in the regular publications of the intelligence agencies; DIA's daily
summary of intelligence has a heavier military content than CIA's, but the
purview is much the same. How much of the overlap is justifiable?
The judicious answer does not reject arguments for duplication altogether.
Men wear shirttails because overlap is a practical necessity in human affairs.
There are persuasive reasons, in particular, for rejecting single sources of judg-
ment when fallibility is the inescapable feature of judgment. Legislatures
have two houses, courts of appeal go over the same evidence as courts of original
jurisdiction, and scholars in a hundred scattered universities properly plow the
same fields of knowledge.
To suggest the advantages of access to several sources of judgment is not
to deny the costs. In intelligence, however, the heaviest costs go for collection
rather than for analysis. Modern methods of technical collection are especially
expensive-U-2 flights, monitoring of foreign broadcasts, scientific detection of
nuclear tests, telemetry of missile flights. These various categories of technical
collection are assigned to specific agencies. The heavy expense is inherent in
the operations, not in duplication of effort. In the circumstances, the elimination
of overlap in intelligence analysis would have only a modest effect on the overall
intelligence budget.
The community principle in intelligence will always be vulnerable to derision
by those who abhor an organization which shows a criss-cross network rather
than a straight-forward hierarchy of authority. However, the fact of life con-
fronting the architects of the postwar intelligence edifice was that they could
not build on cleared ground. The military had intelligence services, and there
were cogent reasons for military commands to retain their intelligence arms. By
the time the CIA was established, the State Department had acquired some
capabilities of its own in intelligence research, and there was as good logic for
State as for the military to have in-house intelligence support. The circumstances
dictated retention of the existing intelligence agencies, and the institutional
structure of American intelligence is now well established on the base of the
community principle.
Objectivity and Policy Support
The acme of influence by intelligence in policymaking was exercised by
the fictional figure whose heroic outlines Sherlock Holmes drew in "The Ad-
venture of the Bruce-Partington Plans":
You are right in thinking that he is under the British government. You
would also be right in a sense if you said that occasionally he is the British
government. . . . All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omni-
science. We will suppose that a minister needs information as to a point
which involves the Navy, India, Canada and the bimetallic question; he
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ou get his separate advices from various departments upon each, but
only Mycroft can focus them all, and say offhand how each factor would
affect the other. They began by using him as a short-cut, a convenience;
now he has made himself an essential. In that great brain of his every-
thing is pigeon-holed and can be handed out in an instant. Again and again
his word has decided the national policy.12
In the real world, there is of course not even a close approximation to the
omiscience of Mycroft. While the ideal of intelligence is to have all the relevant
facts, the governing principle is to present what is available with a minimum
of distortion. One of the advantages of national intelligence, produced as the
pooled thinking of several organizations, is that it does provide a check against
analyses that might take on the character of special pleading for certain policy
interests. Whenever the issue carries a high emotional charge-prospects of the
war in Vietnam, the impact of controls on trade with Communist countries,
the results of foreign aid to developing countries-national intelligence should
have the virtue of producing analyses that are bent as little as possible to the
passionate attachments of a particular interest group in the government.
This is not to say that an intelligence organization, working alone, will con-
sciously corrupt data to make certain policies look good or bad. But intelli-
gence is something more than a pipeline for the flow of information. The in-
formation is framed in language, and the biases of analysts can intrude through
the most earnest attempts at objectivity. This is not altogether or even mainly
a danger that derives from any special position of the intelligence analyst in
the bureaucracy. For American intelligence analysts, the principal difficulty is
the very fact of their being American. The hard task is to escape their American
skins-to comprehend the logic, rather than ridicule the absurdity, of Communist
China's bumbling essay of the "great leap forward", of the USSR's wasteful
investments to expand grain production in the virgin lands, of Cambodia's
obsessive anxieties about immediate neighbors and seeming indifference to the
dangers of engulfment by China. There are no fool-proof safeguards against
this sort of general "establishment" bias, but the exposure of organizational view-
points to critical comment from other agencies does help.
In the struggle for objectivity, national intelligence clings to the conven-
tions against its advocacy of U.S. policy courses. In the United States today,
the written national intelligence analyses stop short of recommending specific
policies. When their viewpoints are given orally, some intelligence officials
do move farther than others toward involvement in policy recommendations.
There are times when policymakers invite this involvement-"O.K., what would
you do?" During the Senate hearing on the confirmation of his appointment
in 1961, John A. McCone, the incoming Director of Central Intelligence, indi-
cated he did not regard his new position to have any policymaking function.
But he also suggested that he might not be unresponsive if the President asked
his opinion on a policy issue:
I would expect that because of the various areas of activity that I have
had in Government in the past, that maybe my personal opinion may be
asked on some subjects. But in my role as Director of Central Intelligence,
it would be beyond my competence to deal with policy.18
So the conventions are not rigid, and there is sometimes a maverick who
would ignore them altogether. The test of effective intelligence, according to
"A. Conan Doyle, "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans," Teller of Tales,
ed. W. Somerset Maughan (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1939) pp. 327-328.
" U.S., Congress, Senate, Committee on Armed Services, Hearing, Nominations of McCone,
Korth, and Harlan, 87th Cong., 2d Sess., 1962, p. 42.
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one of Britain's most distinguished intelligence officials in World War , is no
merely to be right, but to persuade an operational staff to take the correct
measures. `` . . . you will be called an alarmist and will be told that you have
no business interfering with operational policy. But in the end you will be
justified by events." 14
The trend of practice is to draw intelligence into the procedures leading
up to but not through the final formulation of policy. National intelligence is
now frequently directed to assess probable effects of postulated U.S. courses
of action. Before the go-ahead to bomb North Vietnam, intelligence may con-
sider the effect on Hanoi's military capability, the reaction of world opinion,
the impact on the Sino-Soviet dispute. And intelligence makes subsequent
assessments to determine how well the established policies are advancing na-
tional interests. How much has Castro been hurt by the U.S. embargo on
trade with Cuba? Is military and economic aid to India substantially improving
its capabilities to resist= Chinese Communist aggression? The array of evidence
that intelligence can offer is not always impressive. When it is, it is bound
to carry weight in policymaking councils, no matter how conscientious intelli-
gence may be in disassociating itself from the final decision.
The influence of intelligence in decision-making was minimal during most
of the days before World War II, when the United States had very little in the
way of an intelligence service. Naval intelligence was not established on a
permanent basis until 1899, and it was an established rule in the Navy up to
World War II that intelligence was there only to present the facts, never to
influence planners and command officers by estimating the probable intentions
of the enemy.15 Army intelligence up to World War II was not a prestige serv-
ice; it had language and other specialists of admitted abilities, but many billets
were too often filled with officers near retirement whose viewpoints carried
little influence in command decisions. Respect for intelligence services came
late in a country which had grown great with little need for careful analysis
of foreign developments. Oceans, not knowledge, were the cushions of national
security.
The band of intelligence personnel that was left in Washington after World
War II found it heavy going at first against the disesteem of rival careerists.
Foreign Service officers, for example, were unsympathetic to the idea of a center
in the State Department that might offer analyses challenging their own assess-
ments. They won the day in 1946 over the Department's intelligence chief,
who resigned in protest when intelligence personnel were dispersed to geographic
desks under Foreign Service officers. In 1947, Secretary of State Marshall re-
grouped the intelligence analysts again into their own units, but the influence
of their research and reports in policy councils was doubtful for a good many
years. Roger Hilsman, who was eventually himself to become State's intelli-
gence chief, observed in the mid-1950's that intelligence analysts felt their esti-
mates were being ignored. Foreign Service officers, for their part, indicated
to Mr. Hilsman that they received comparatively little of value from intelli-
gence.1e Affairs had apparently improved very little since the first Hoover Com-
mission's investigation in the late 1940's, when the Commission commented on
the lack of acceptance of intelligence personnel by other segments of the State
R. V. Jones, "Scier..tific Intelligence," Journal of the Royal United Service Institution,
Vol. XCII, No. 567 (August, 1947), p. 355.
'Roberta Wohistette::, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1962), pp. 279, 288-289, 317-318.
" Roger Hilsman, Strategic Intelligence and National Decisions (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free
Press, 1956), pp. 40-41.
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in the Department, expending too much of its energies on research that did not
contribute sufficiently to meeting the needs of policymakers.17
This picture is outdated, partly as a result of Mr. Hilsman's own strenous
efforts in the early 1960's to make intelligence a more "policy-oriented" effort.
Even before, however, the government was developing the institutional ma-
chinery for tailoring intelligence production to the needs of policymaking and
for trimming policy decisions to the findings of intelligence. Throughout the
two Eisenhower administrations, the Director of Central Intelligence presented
his oral reports on current developments almost every week before meetings of
the National Security Council. In addition, formal intelligence estimates were
produced in phase with the schedule of policy position papers prepared for
Council consideration. Not only did the Director of Central Intelligence sit
as an adviser on the Council, but intelligence representatives also participated in
the deliberations of its subordinate organs. A Deputy Director of the Central
Intelligence Agency, for example, sat as intelligence adviser on the Planning
Board, which was responsible for drafting the formal policy position papers that
would be passed up for consideration by the Council. Intelligence was also
represented in the Operations Coordinations Board, which had responsibilities
for overseeing and reporting to the Council how well government agencies and
departments were implementing established national policies. The theory of
intelligence representation in these policy forums was not to give intelligence
an explicit vote in decision-making, but to assure that all available information
was considered before decisions were reached. If the Operations Coordinations
Board, for example, was reviewing foreign aid programs to India, it was to
have concurrent intelligence analyses of Indian economic conditions and popular
morale.
The Planning Board and the Operations Coordinations Board were abolished
in President Kennedy's administration, and the National Security Council itself
has diminished in the influence it exercises as a body in Presidential decision-
making. But these bodies left a lasting impress in. the precedent they set of
closer contacts between intelligence and policymaking. The President may not
see the Director of Central Intelligence so often in the collegial forum of the
Council, but he consults personally with him. The rule is for intelligence to
be represented in task forces and interagency bodies at high and low echelons
of the governments. Getting the intelligence opinion is now accepted as a
necessary part of the staff work that goes into the preparation of long-range
strategies and into the framing of quick decisions.
The trend is toward a still wider acceptance of intelligence as more and
more individuals with backgrounds in the field move on to responsible posts
elsewhere in government. The roster of important policymarkers with intelli-
gence experience includes White House aides, ambassadors, and assistant secre-
taries of state. With the widening are of decision-makers who are sophisticated
about what intelligence can or cannot give them, intelligence finds itself better
informed of what decision-makers need. The energies of intelligence get more
and more engrossed with answering the phone call from the White House, the
query of the Under Secretary, and similar requirements from high places for
fact and expert opinion. Intelligence does less guessing about what it should
be doing and goes to work with clearer specifications of what policymakers
want done.
'' U.S., Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, Foreign
Affairs, Task Force Report, Appendix H, Washington, 1949, pp. 15-16.
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Part iI
END PRODUCT
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Chapter 2
Current Intelligence
The product that is sent up to the policymaking officials as "finished in-
telligence" is information overlaid with the critical commentary of intelligence
analysts. If "raw intelligence" or "intelligence information"-to designate the
unevaluated report from the field-is so significant as to deserve direct relay
to the decision-makers, the first thoughts of the intelligence analysts are not
likely to be far behind.
The dilemma of high rank is how to stay on top of daily events and still
have the time to reflect on problems in depth. The task of current intelligence
is to saw especially on the first horn of this dilemma. The task is above all se-
lective: only the barest fraction of incoming reports are passed, with appropriate
analysis, up the line. Current intelligence is thus not attentive to all the in-
formation needed to up-date handbooks. It is spot information of immediate
interest and value to policy officials-a new Soviet budget, another editorial in
Communist China's party newspaper scathing Moscow's "modern revisionism,"
infiltration of a small group of terrorists from Cuba into Venezuela, identification
of additional North Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam, a clash between Indian
and Pakistani troops in Kashmir.
Publications
This sort of news is likely to get into the current intelligence publication that
the CIA disseminates every morning to top officials in the government. Since
the publication does carry analysis, the problem of objectivity dogs the Agency's
heels. Admitting that complete objectivity is an unattainable goal, CIA is hope-
ful that the publication at least does not slant toward any special organizational
interest. The safeguard against organizational slant is to check out analyses
by telephone or teletype with intelligence analysts in the State and Defense De-
partments. In addition, representatives from these departments sit on a panel
which reviews the current intelligence items before giving final approval for
publication.
This effort to get current reporting that is national intelligence, rather than
the product of a single organization, is testimony to the striving for objectivity.
However, coordination is the thief of time, and there is a rule of reason which
takes over on the many occasions when the paramount necessity is for quick
reporting rather than consensus. If consensus is not possible on such occasions,
items are published with dissents noted in footnotes. Sometimes events break
in the early hours of the morning when there is no time for full coordination
of views among the intelligence services. The urgent tasks may then be to get
some report written before the daily publication goes to print. The report
will be published with due notice to the reader that it does not represent national
intelligence but only the analysis of the Central Intelligence Agency.
For the most part, current intelligence vehicles other than CIA's daily pub-
lication are not consensus products. One of these vehicles is the oral briefing.
15
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Research. The Secretary of Defense similarly relies on oral briefings from his
Defense Intelligence Agency. The influential views of high-level intelligence
officials are in turn shaped by the oral briefings they receive from the working
specialists in their own organizations. In addition, working specialists some-
times make direct contact with operating officials-in formal briefings, in phone
conversations, at the luncheon table, or through the back and forth of across-
the-table talk when the intelligence specialist is assigned to a task force or just
sits in on one of the many meetings that make up part of the decision-making
process in Washington.
Other vehicles for current intelligence are published on a weekly or other
periodic schedule. The intelligence periodical has something of the function
of the big newspaper's "Week in Review." While he still labors under the tension
of a publication deadline, the analyst has a bit more time to assess the significance
of recent events. He is under the constraint of checking out his analysis with
others in his organization, but he does not coordinate with the other intelligence
services. There may be features of his analysis, therefore, that would not win
general assent.
Still, the occasions when a current intelligence periodical gives space to a
singular viewpoint are rare. There are too many concurrences that must be
obtained even when coordination is confined to the circle of analysts within
a single service. In the case of current intelligence, the problem of concurrence
is not perhaps so much one of moving experts from a passionate adhesion to
establish positions as it is of their scholarly insistence on a sufficiency of evidence.
The intelligence officer is here much like the social scientist who has drawn some
shrewd inferences from a sample survey, only to be told that the sample is too
small to give results that are statistically significant. Differences among current
intelligence analysts arise most commonly from these varying propensities to
"go out on a limb" before further evidence comes in.
The analyst's recourse, if he feels he must call attention to an emerging
development, is to write a personal memorandum. He has no assurance that
this memorandum will go far up the line. It may never get beyond the desk
of a superior who decides that the thesis is dubious and not worth taking the
time of important officials. On other occasions, the memorandum does move
up the hierarchy to make its due impression on higher authority. Not that the
usefulness of the personal memorandum rests entirely on the impact it makes
immediately in the upper echelons. Whether or not it moves far up, it is quite
likely to be read by working colleagues and perhaps to stimulate a lively debate
that eventually gets heard in the higher reaches. In this way, many issues in
the Sino-Soviet debate were publicized throughout the government before they
were fully treated in the official publications of the intelligence services. The
interchange of personal memoranda effected some hard rethinking on the subject
of Sino-Soviet relations and soon established a new intelligence consensus that
had considerable import for U.S. policy toward Communist countries. The view
of monolithic cohesion in the bloc gave way to a sharpened awareness of poly-
centric forces, with implications for the objectives to be sought by U.S. policy
in such areas as, say, trade controls.
Thememorandum need not be quite so individualized a medium for current
intelligence analysis. It can be an organizational product too, drawing on the
cooperative efforts of a group. However, the memorandum, like the periodicals
issued by a single intelligence service, does not proceed from the labor pains
that give birth to national intelligence, as that concept is most rigorously defined.
16
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The memorandum wi a written a ut ma ters a concern m t e su e 1 -
of policymaking, but it will be offered as the product of a narrower consensus
than true national intelligence-say the view of one of the' offices within an
intelligence organization. Its forms are so varied (a typed note or a slick printout
with color graphics, a mere paragraph or a couple of dozen pages with annexes)
that it is perhaps the most useful method of packaging current intelligence to
meet the specific needs of operating and staff officials.
The uses of the memorandum are likely to expand steadily as these officials
become more and more habituated to the supporting role of intelligence. The
collective effort that goes into national intelligence production is hardly justified
for answering every question that comes to the mind of every official. A mem-
orandum from State intelligence, the DIA, or the CIA should be quite sufficient
to answer a simple query from the White House about the health of Communist
China's Minister of Defense. Even on more involved matters, there are officials
who are especially interested in reading the analysis of a particular expert. Then
there are the officials who like to compare the analyses of experts in different
agencies. Increasingly, current intelligence finds itself thus shaping memoranda
to meet an order with individual specifications, so to speak, even while it turns
out its standard publication for the general market.
The Process
The work involves close deadlines. The analyst whose in-box gets an item at
10 o'clock in the morning that clearly calls for inclusion in the daily publication
knows he is in for a long day and maybe a hard night. He will lunch at his
typewriter, go through struggle sessions with all the persons who must agree
with his line of analysis, and await after-hours calls about fresh news that should
perhaps be ground into his write-up before the presses roll.
If the raw report from the field is received in the pre-dawn hours, the
analyst may not meet the press deadline, but he will bend every effort to getting
out some interpretation as soon as possible. One part of the interpretation
specifies the firmness of his evidence. If it comes from a clandestine source,
how well tested is the agent for accuracy? If it comes from a statement that a
foreign official made to an American diplomat, what is the possibility that the
foreign official was talking to deceive? If it comes from an aerial photograph,
how clear was the picture, how much was obscured by cloud cover? The
scruples of the profession require that current intelligence make clear when
it is reporting hard evidence and when it is just sounding a cautionary alert.
Proceeding from its judgments about the reliability of the evidence, cur-
rent intelligence can go to analytic commentary. The commentary is almost sure
to draw on relevant background material. When Liu Shao-chi replaced Mao
Tse-tung as Communist China's chief of state, for example, the analyst filled
in such background details as Liu's age, his preeminent position as party theoreti-
cian, his relationship with other members of the politburo, his attitudes toward
Westerners. The analyst also tried to be as promonitory as the facts permitted.
Was Liu's appointment an augury of Mao's early retirement? Did Mao's in-
ferential designation of his successor diminish the likelihood of a struggle for
the succession?
The current intelligence analyst is not ordinarily a researcher in depth, for
he seldom has the time to be. He is nonetheless likely to be a respected au-
thority in his field, very much as the best foreign correspondent of a newspaper
can lay his good claim to expert knowledge. If the current intelligence analyst
is reporting, for example, on Panamanian rioting, he is able to report the facts
with background information about the extremist elements involved, both Com-
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munist and non-Communist. In his rundown of Communist involvement, he will
touch on the Panamanian People's Party, which is small. and torn by dissension,
yet able to exert an influence beyond its numbers by making common cause
with other groups. He is able to report readily, in addition, on the pro-Castro
revolutionary organization, the National Action Vanguard, which cooperates with
the People's Party in rioting and looting.
For all this information, he looks mainly to the fund- of information in his
head or his immediate files. These files are made up largely of cables,
dispatches, news ticl:er, and other documents that have crossed the analyst's
desk in recent months. The documents come in such volume that he is on
constant guard against missing the significant in the mass. He is ever dis-
criminating among items, deciding which can be disregarded, which should
be filed for possible future reference, which ought to be reportedwithout delay.
He goes at this task with something of the journalist's nose for the newsworthy.
If the subject is one that will probably make front-page headlines in the public
press, the analyst knowsfrom past experience that policy officials will also want
some intelligence analysis, particularly if intelligence has information which
is not in the press accounts.
Apart from this general instinct for news, the analyst has some first-hand
knowledge of reader interest. Knowing that the Treasury and State Depart-
ments are concerned about speculative pressures against the British pound, the
analyst draws up short when he comes across evidence of a decision by Com-
munist China to convert some of its sterling holdings. In his report on the
subject, he endeavors to make clear how much pressure against the pound is
threatened by this Chinese Communist decision. Are the amounts involved
really large? Are the Chinese moving to reduce their sterling deposits below
traditional levels? Or have they found themselves with a favorable trade balance
and decided at this time to do no more than cut their increased sterling holdings
back to customary working levels?
Current intelligence thus does its best job of supporting U.S. government
operations when it knows what those operations are. It gives better warning
of a submarine threat if it knows that U.S. fleet units are in waters where
foreign submarines have been sighted. It is more likely to report Soviet dis-
cussions of a plan to step up broadcasts in Swahili if it knows that the Voice
of America is reconsidering its own patterns of broadcasts to Africa. It is more
alert to Peking's efforts to purchase certain electronic equipment if it knows
that the U.S. government is currently urging friendly governments to deny
licenses for the export of such equipment to the Chinese.
A good deal of the current intelligence analyst's effectiveness depends on
his verbal. skills. There are editors enough in intelligence organizations who
give polish and clarity to language, but the editor runs against an especially
fast clock in current :ntelligence. His task is manageable only if the current
intelligence analyst is reasonably adept with words. The ideal current intelli-
gence analyst writes well while writing quickly.
Is all this stress on speed prejudicial to accuracy? It can be, and policy-
makers should fully understand the tentative quality of current intelligence.
The current intelligence analyst has a charter to relay his findings without the
delays incident to complete evaluation and interpretation. As the current intelli-
gence analyst sees his :role, he is much like the traffic controller on a new experi-
mental superhighway. The analyst's in-box is the traffic controller's monitoring
panel, which informs him about traffic conditions along the road. The crucial
task is to note any changes in the traffic quickly; the crucial problem is to calcu-
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late quickly the difficulties that these changes wil ea to. a Jo is no
only to cover events but to stay ahead of events. With his facts and his fore-
sight, the controller alerts drivers, police, and towing-equipment operators of
the situation as it seems to be shaping up over the next several hours.
Traffic conditions can be predicted from present flows somewhat as devas-
tating floods can be computed from early observation of upstream waters. If
there are such mathematical models in international affairs, the current intelli-
gence analyst is a long way from understanding and applying them. Pressed
for quick assessments, he is prone simply to project a straight line, so to speak,
from the current situation. This can make for a fair batting score in prediction
since current intelligence is concerned primarily with the shortrun future, and
the general situation tomorrow is more likely than not to be much what it is
today. A weather forecaster given to this sort of empiricism might not average
badly in certain climates. The rub would be his failure to give due warning
of the hurricanes and other disasters that are the most important threats to
security.
How much better should the current intelligence analyst be expected to do?
It is certainly too much to expect current intelligence to call every turn, even
after the turn. The best stock market analyst does not identify a bull or bear
market trend at its very beginning; the test of the good analyst is how close
to the low and the high he advises buying and selling. The traffic controller
can note that traffic is extraordinarily heavy and can warn that a jam-up may
occur at any time. But he is better at spotting a jam quickly than at making
an on-the-nose prediction of the exact time it will take place. When he fails
to give the notice that would enable preventive action, he is hopefully quick
enough with facts and analysis to enable timely remedial action, so that traffic
movement is smoother than it would be if he were not on the job. He does
not have the responsibility for getting the information needed to look 'very
far ahead, for assembling the demographic and other data needed in the formu-
lation of a highway construction policy to take care of the country's expanding
numbers of people and motor vehicles. The current intelligence analogue to
the traffic controller, in short, keeps the nation's leaders up to date, but his
focus on passing events and prospects for the near future-helpful as it is for
day-to-day decision-making-is not sufficient to support the judgment that should
go into basic policy formulation. The supplemental requirement by policy-
making councils is for intelligence assessments reached through a more delibera-
tive process.'
The Operations Center
Most current intelligence can be written during daytime working hours,
but the watch for new information goes on all the time. Every intelligence serv-
ice today is served by a 24-hour operations center, at which watch officers main-
tain a continuous scan of incoming material and make quick decisions whether
or not the substantive expert should be alerted at once by a phone call to his
desk, when necessary to his home, in awkward hours to his bedside. It follows
that the night skeleton force of the operations center must include some senior
intelligence officer who brings to his job the competence of a generalist rather
than of the area or functional specialist. This means that the senior officer of
the center will suspect the portent of most significant developments even if
he is not competent himself to write the intelligence analysis.
' See infra, chaps. III and IV.
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In his moments of uncertainty, he plays it safe, getting the analyst out of
bed, perhaps requesting the analyst to look at the material himself, even if a
trip over snowy roads is probably to end in caustic mutterings about being dis-
turbed to no purpose. At other times, the senior officer at the operations center
is confident enough of his own judgment to make a slight rewrite himself in
some memorandum about to go to press.
Day and night, the operations center is in telephone or teletype contact
over secure lines of communication with intelligence and command centers in
other agencies. If the current intelligence analyst in the CIA wants to check out
a late analysis with ot]aer agencies so that it can be presented as national intelli-
gence, he has the means to do so. If he feels his analysis requires some fill-in
about U.S. deployments, he will request the watch officers to get in touch im-
mediately with the appropriate agency or get on the phone himself. If the
situation calls for further posthaste reporting from the field, the operations center
can move immediately to get the analyst's requirements to the suitable intelli-
gence collection office. The facilities for rapid communications constitute one
of the most expensive requisites of current intelligence, and intelligence budgets
are providing for considerable investment in further improvements.
The task force of analysts mobilized for a crisis will probably work from
the operations center, where they take over from the watch officers the first
scanning of incoming material on the situation. In the center, the task force
works with minimum lag between the receipt of material at the headquarters
building and the despatch of finished analyses to the reproduction facilities.
Military deployments, merchant ship movements, and other data are graphically
displayed and kept up to the minute. Higher officials keep calling in for brief-
ings on the latest developments.
When the Reid govermnent fell on April 25, 1965, for example, current in-
telligence analysts began immediately to prepare a memorandum giving the
background of the coup and assessing the comparative strengths of the con-
tending forces in the Dominican Republic. The memorandum done, the analysts
stayed on in the operations center through the night to make sure that they kept
abreast of the fast-moving developments.
The labors of covering the rapidly changing situation soon became too much
for the few analysts regularly assigned to Dominican affairs, and personnel from
political, biographic, and economic intelligence offices were shifted to mobilize
a task force for around-the-clock reporting. One of the principal requirements
was for a memorandum every hour, day and night, to keep the White House
fully informed of the latest developments. Analysts who were not members
of the task force in the. operations center were alerted to watch for reactions,
official and popular, throughout the world and to funnel all relevant intelligence
to the task force. The analyst on France, for example, kept his eye cocked for
statements by French cfficials on the Dominican situation, as well as for note-
worthy commentary in the French press. Throughout the crisis, the task force
reviewed a flood of incoming intelligence and sent forth its steady stream of
assessments-in the regular publications, in briefing papers for legislative groups,
in scores of special memoranda as they were requested on such subjects as eco-
nomic conditions, military dispositions, popular sympathies, and political maneu-
vering among the several factions in the rebel and government camps.
Strategic Warning
"I don't care what the CIA does," General Marshall is reported to have
said when he was Secretary of Defense. "All I want from them is twenty-four
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hours' notice of a Soviet attack." 2 That is to say, General Marshall wante some-
thing more than the minutes of advance warning provided by signals received
only after the missiles had left their pads. These signals are not in the province
of intelligence. They are rather received directly by the military services, whose
radars, infra-red detectors, and computers are designed to cope with a situation
which is past the help that intelligence can offer. Theirs is the bailiwick of
tactical warning, after the missiles are already on their way. General Marshall
asked for strategic warning, while the enemy is still girding for the attack.
The strategic warning effort is centered on the study of indications. The
indication, in current intelligence parlance, is the action that is taken to get
ready for hostilities. When the Chinese Communists sold their sterling and
bought gold in London in the spring of 1965, the hedge against pound devalua-
tion was only one of the possible motivations that current intelligence considered.
Another possibility that came to mind related to the war in Vietnam. Were the
Chinese anticipating escalation of the war, possibly their own imminent inter-
vention in force? If China was going to war, would it not withdraw its assets
abroad before they were seized or blocked?
The Chinese gold purchases were in fact not a prelude to intervention in
force, but the action signaled a possibility, and current intelligence had to give
attention to the signal. Specialists in indications analysis have tabulated a long
list of such actions that could signal an impending attack. In the economic field,
the signals include the withdrawal of deposits in foreign banks, the recall of
merchant ships to home ports, the accelerated stockpiling of aviation fuels.
In the political field, the signals include the warning passed through the diplo-
mat of a third country, the burning of diplomatic codes, the intensification of
bellicose propaganda, the round-up of dissidents and unreliables. In the mili-
tary field, the signals include the call-up of reserves, the build-up of ground forces
along the frontier, the upsurge of repair activity in naval shipyards.
The function of the indications specialist in current intelligence is to check
out each signal that is received, no matter what the prevailing climate of in-
telligence opinion. He acts the devil's advocate against this climate, which can
nurture impressive talents for cavalierly explaining away signals that seem
compelling in retrospect. Before the North Koreans attacked in June 1950,
reports indicating an impending invasion were received in Washington about
once a month. But the general thinking in the United States, as Dean Acheson
put it, was "that the danger of alienating world opinion in the cold war and
the risk of invoking our striking power with atomic weapons in a hot war would
deter any use of armed forces in aggression." 3 Subversion rather than direct
military action was considered to be the main danger from the Communists.
Before their intervention, the Chinese made statements charging that U.S.
"aggression" in Korea was a preliminary to attack on China. The Chinese told
the Indian ambassador that they would send troops in if U.S. forces crossed the
38th parallel. After the parallel was crossed, the Chinese foreign ministry issued
a statement that China could "not stand idly by." The Chinese stepped up their
buying in foreign markets, specifying short-term delivery dates. The signals
were recurrent, but intelligence had not at that time developed the procedures
for ensuring as sharp a focus on the signals as on the seeming logic of the situa-
tion. The opinion was widespread that the Chinese Communists, who had come
to power only the year before and had yet to consolidate their control over the
'Christopher Felix, A Short Course in the Secret War (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co.,
1963), p. 33.
'New York Times Magazine, March 28, 1954, p. 77.
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ma nlanc1, would decide against the risks of a major war. This climate of opinion
was not fully dispelled even by the first brushes of the U.N. forces with the
Chinese Communists; a good many Americans still inclined to the view that the
Chinese would stop short of a full-scale commitment.
The rationale of indications analysis is that surprise attacks like Pearl Harbor
and Korea are "telegraphed." However, the signals take on meaning only to
analysts who can be charmed but never fully persuaded by anyone's impeccable
logic. This is the earmark of the indications specialist, who is on watch against
surprise--who is swpicious of the majority judgment, which by definition
is wrong in circumstances of surprise. "A Pearl Harbor disaster is to be ascribed
in no small measure to the absence of some unpleasant and insistent person, who,
knowing of the growing animus of Japan, kept asking when is the attack coming,
where is it coming, and how is it coming." 4 The procedures for strategic warn-
ing in the United States call on the indications specialist to play this role of the
unpleasant, insistent gadfly.
He focuses on the problem of surprise attack. He watches with something
like the responsibility of the goalie in soccer, who places a high probability on the
ball coming his way, even when it is far down the other end of the field. This
is a set of mind which makes him a good goalie. But it is far from the sure
instinct that he would. want if his job called for him to be where the ball was
really headed.
In view of this propensity to analysis in terms of his special responsibility,
the indications specialist does not get free rein to draw his own conclusions. The
standard procedure is rather for him to confront the area or functional analyst
and request evaluation of a signal. If the indications specialist feels itchy about
the Chinese gold purchases, he will ask an economic analyst to scratch. The
economic analyst may respond with some asperity that many others besides Chi-
nese Communists are buying gold when the value of key currencies like the
pound is in question. He will be at no loss to supply other plausible reasons for
China's financial transactions. If this is the only signal that the indications spe-
cialist has at the moment pointing to Chinese intervention in Vietnam, he may
assent to the economic analyst's logic. For he knows that a single indication is
untrustworthy, that he :is really on the prowl for patterns. Have the Chinese also
begun to emphasize civil defense training? To increase their stockpiles of food?
To strengthen radar defenses along their Vietnamese border? To build new air-
fields for staging fighters to the south? To lampoon Moscow for cowardly cau-
tion in Vietnam?
None of these developments is an essential preliminary to a Chinese Com-
munist attack, and all of them may take place without leading to an attack. But
if many such developments have actually been tallied on the indication specialist's
scoreboard, they will come out in the discussion with the economic analyst on gold
purchases. Whether or not they influence the economist's conclusions at the
time, they are likely to cast a light on future evidence, so that implications for
surprise get due consideration and are not just rejected out of hand.
Further evidence will also be analyzed in the light of emerging signal pat-
terns pointing in exactly the opposite direction. While the indications specialist
is best known for his ever-present anxieties to avert another Pearl Harbor, he also
tabulates the so-called negative indications in the course of his work. Is a coun-
try increasing the number of its merchant ships abroad, is it becoming less
' Sherman :Kent, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Prince-
ton University Press, 1949), p. 160.
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belligerent in its propaganda line, is it drawing down its strategic stoc iles?
No one of these indications tells very much by itself, but as part of a consistent
signal pattern, they do point more in the direction of peace than of war.
The National Indications Center, staffed by indications specialists from the
several intelligence services, compiles all the indications spotted by the intelli-
gence community. By the end of every week, the Center has a long list of indi-
cations, together perhaps with differing opinions about significance. The Center
operates as a staff arm of the Watch Committee, and the Center assembles the
more ominous indications into an agenda for each meeting of the Committee.5
This body, composed of ranking officials from each of the intelligence services,
meets once a week (much oftener in crisis situations) to take up each signal
in the agenda and attempt to reach consensus about implications for imminent
attack. The Watch Committee's conclusions, with dissents if there are any, are
summarized after each meeting in a report which stands as the authoritative posi-
tion of national intelligence on prospects for the immediate future.
No More Pearl Harbor?
In April 1965, the Soviets and East Germans made a show of force to restrict
allied access to Berlin. The Communists increased their air activity over West
Berlin, they enforced altitude restrictions on Western airplanes flying the air
corridor over East Germany to Berlin, and they closed the autobahn. The Com-
munists gave military maneuvers as their excuse for the temporary restrictions.
U.S. intelligence analysts were not especially alarmed; it was clear enough that
the Communists were making gestures to register their displeasure for the con-
vening of a Bundestag session in West Berlin, outside West Germany's proper
territorial jurisdiction according to the Communist view.
The situation nevertheless called for the customary indications analysis. A
military exercise may be a rehearsal for an impending attack, may even disguise
a deployment for attack. So the indications specialist, wearing his typically sus-
picious attitude, performed his function of posing alarmist interpretations to the
intelligence analysts in touch with the situation.
Can the specialist with this cry-wolf function keep up his credit rating with
the general body of intelligence analysts? The answer is he can but only if he
has a decent respect for the maxim that effective warning is selective warning.
In practice, he does not ordinarily press his case very hard at the very first
signal, for he knows that it does not take many signals to prick the ears of intelli-
gence analysts today when crises come in quick succession. In 1962, for example,
intelligence was alerted in the spring when a Laotian cease-fire was broken, in the
summer when Chinese Communist military forces were deployed into the Taiwan
Strait area, and in the fall when Soviet missiles were discovered in Cuba and
Chinese troops crossed over into India. The instability of the times is a constant
prod on the responsible intelligence analyst to cooperate in the indications exercise.
The problem of necessary cooperation resolved (at least while the world is
so close to the brink), intelligence analysts still ponder the limitations of the
indications technique. The logic of the method is that a country has to ready
itself to launch a surprise attack, that it has to close the gap between its present
level of readiness and the level necessary for combat success. The purview of
indications analysis encompasses the measures taken to close the gap. The scope
for indications analysis disappears when the gap is closed, when forces are poised
for attack and only the decision to strike is in question. The Chinese Communists
have long been massed at the Indian border and near the Nationalist-held offshore
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islands. Most o the indications, that is to say, the troop movements, airfield
construction, and other features of military buildup, were recorded several years
ago. In this sort of situation, the strike can come with little forewarning.
Analysts introduce a somewhat more theoretical context in their discussions
about conflict in a "zero-reaction-time" world, with its full array of solid-fuel
missiles and airborne armies. There is general agreement that the indications
method does not quite serve in situations where "instant-ready" weapons systems
are all-important and logistics irrelevant, where nations can jump from standing
starts. Fortunately for the indications methodology, instant readiness is an ideal
not a reality. No nation in the real world can stay on full alert-its industrial
centers all evacuated-for months on end. Its posture until very late has to be
something short of the full-ready; it has to make some "windup." It will conceal
some of its moves from the intelligence of the adversary, but it will compromise
the ideal of complete concealment. The evacuation of urban populations, the
removal of national treasures, all the civil defense measures necessary to make
victory at all meaningful require days or weeks to carry out.
If the crisis lasts any time at all, the problem for the indications specialist
is not the shortage of signals but the plethora. The horn of plenty includes an
ample share of counterfeit signals. The spurious information on missiles in
Cuba before 1962 from both honest and mischievous sources was in excess of
the genuine. Disaffected Cubansmade claims about missile locations that were
disproved by aerial photography. Soviet leaders gave personal assurances that
the U.S.S.R. would not send offensive weapons to Cuba.
The indications analyst can filter some of the static, but he worries about the
brilliant minds which have turned to the labor of avoiding or distorting the signals
that constitute the input of strategic warning. In the contest of wits, the indica-
tions analyst is all too likely to be short of enough facts to prove his case. Pearl
Harbor provides the classic case study in surprise. How well would the indica-
tions methodology have served in 1941?
The enterprising Japanese surveillance of Pearl Harbor appears in hindsight
as one of the major indications of the coming attack. Japanese planes that
crashed during the raid carried intelligence on ship anchorages, on local radio
frequencies, and on the specified targets against which they were to make their
torpedo runs. At the briefingthat the Japanese pilots received the day before
the attack, they were given the latest intelligence figures for the number of major
naval units at Pearl Harbor-seven battleships and seven cruisers-which were
not far off from the actual numbers of eight battleships and eight cruisers. At
their final briefing, the pilots were given sheets that showed with substantial ac-
curacy the position of warships berthed at the Navy Yard and around Ford Island.
American intelligence did not know before the attack how successful the Japanese
espionage effort was, but the United States did know from intercepted communi-
cations and other sources that Japanese agents had stepped up their reporting
on ships in Hawaiian waters.
The rising notes of shrill menace in Japanese propaganda provided another
indication that Japan might be on its way to some new military adventure. The
theme, fuming and frequent, was of the necessity to clear the Far East from
British and American exploitation.
By mid-November, it was well established that many merchant ships had
been taken over by the Japanese navy. To throw off any intelligence service that
was trying to keep up with Japanese naval movements, Japanese naval ships on
November 1 changed the identification codes-the so-called call-signs-they used
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in radio communications. Only a month later, on December 1-an unpre-
cedentedly short interval-the call-signs were changed again.
Diplomatic messages intercepted throughout the month of November gave
perhaps the most suggestive indications that the Japanese were to cast a die in
some desperate gamble if the Kurusu and Nomura negotiation missions in
Washington were unsuccessful. It was made clear in the messages that the
Japanese government would at least break relations with the United States if the
negotiations failed. By November 28, the Japanese negotiators in Washington
were told that the talks would be ended for all practical purposes in two or three
days, although the appearance of continuing negotiations was to be maintained
"to prevent the United States from becoming unduly suspicious." 6 There was
intelligence in Honolulu on December 6 that the Japanese consulate had been
burning its papers for the past two days.
These and other indications add up to a long list. But intelligence was
dispersed, and there were no adequate procedures for communicating the findings
of one intelligence service to another. Thus intercepts of Japanese naval messages
did not find their way to Army intelligence, and diplomatic intercepts that were
being read in Washington did not go, with all their ominous import, to the com-
mands in Hawaii. Intelligence items were read singly; nowhere were they
brought together to make their cumulative impact.
In hindsight, everyone knows what the cumulative impact should have been.
The problem in hand is honestly to say whether today's National Indications
Center, lacking the vantage point of hindsight, would really alert Pearl Harbor
in simulated circumstances of 1941. Honesty requires note of some spurious
signals: shore leave given to large numbers of Japanese sailors while the attacking
fleet was steaming to Pearl Harbor; false radio traffic to make U.S. intelligence
believe that certain vessels were manufacturing near Japanese home waters; rein-
forcement of Manchurian garrisons in order to lend credibility to rumors that
Japan would be moving against the U.S.S.R.
Assuming it was not thrown. off by the false signals, how would the National
Indications Center, in our simulation exercise, react to the valid signals? These
quite clearly suggested at the time that the United States and Japan were on
collision course, but did they focus at all on the point of collision? The Japanese
consulate in Hawaii was burning papers, but so were Japanese offices in San
Francisco, Washington, and elsewhere. The intensity of Japanese espionage in
Honolulu was matched by the energy of intelligence against American targets in
Manila, Panama, and San Diego. The innuendoes in the intercepted diplomatic
messages of imminent eruption reinforced American feelings that some new
Japanese aggression was indeed in the making, but where?
The consensus in 1941 was that the Japanese lunge would be in the Far East-
against Siberia possibly but more likely through Thailand into Burma and Malaya,
with an assault on the Philippines preparatory to attacks against Singapore and
the Netherlands East Indies. Even in hindsight, this appears as an essentially
accurate intelligence judgment of Japan's main strategic objectives. Pearl Harbor
was not in fact one of these objectives. It was a tactical target, attacked not for
the importance to Japan of Hawaii per se, but to eliminate the strongest force
that might threaten the success of Japan's strategy. (The irony of Japan's tactical
success in Hawaii was of course that the strategic results were the exact opposite
'Roberta Wohlstetter Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1962) p. 201. Most of the other warning signals cited in this section are taken
from this work, the best available study of events preceding the disaster from the perspective
of indications analysis.
For Official Use pnl
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of Japan's intentions: American forces of unanticipated strength were pulled
squarely into the area of the Japanese aggression.)
The indications, ir.; brief, pointed pretty much to war but not too clearly to
the point of surprise attack. And it would seem quite rational in our simulation
exercise also to figure the odds in favor of a direct thrust by Japan toward its
strategic objectives in Asia, with the United States beset only by difficult decisions
about just how far to go to deny the Japanese these objectives.
Strategic warning, however, is not calculation of the most probable develop-
ment. Strategic warning is the announcement that a danger threshold has been
crossed. When the ball gets down to one end of the field, it is still not an even-
money bet that a team will score. But the situation calls for the goalie to be on
special alert. If our simulated National Indications Center incorporates today's
machinery for strategic warning, the outcome is a combat-ready posture in Hawaii.
This is because the machinery is programmed to reflect openness of mind about
outside possibilities and to provoke reflexes of vigilance everywhere if there is a
threat anywhere. The scheduled discussions of indications at all intelligence
echelons, culminating in the vigorous debate among top intelligence officials in
the Watch Committee, conclude with statements no less foreboding than the
intelligence opinion that actually obtained in December 1941-that the Japanese
will soon be on the move again. But the Watch Committee's formal conclusions
have the authority and acceptance that result in all the Pacific commands being
put on full alert. With the consequent step-up in air and sea patrols scouting
Pacific waters, the Japanese fleet is perhaps spotted. Whether or not the Japanese
fleet is discovered en route, Hawaii has a deeper appreciation of the deteriorating
international situation, and signs like the appearance of unidentified airplanes on
Army radar screens are read in Honolulu with a fuller understanding of their
ominous portent.
This is not to suggest thatintelligence can be cocksure of its strategic warn-
ing abilities. All the simulation indicates is that U.S. intelligence is prepared
for World War II. The best to be said of the actual record since World War II
is that it has been an improving one, but that there have not been enough near-
replicas of Pearl Harbor to justify firm conclusions. Although the elements of
surprise in the North Korean attack of June 1950 were too many to do credit
to American intelligence, the indications methodology, was still rudimentary at
the time. The Chinese intervention later in the year was more suggestive of the
potential of indications analysis. There were faults, noted earlier, in evaluating
the indications pointing to Chinese entry, but the United States did not
find itself facing the Chinese forces without any advance warning whatever.
The indications, though incorrectly evaluated, were fully reported, and the reports
were disseminated to the operating commands, so that the intervention, by con-
trast with Pearl Harbor, was not quite a thunderbolt out of the blue.
The discussion in the next chapter on the Cuban missile crisis will further
substantiate the need. to allow a margin for chances of evaluation error. Given
this margin, the diligent compilation and reporting of indications will come to
better than half the strategic warning task. If there is no guarantee against the
surprise strike, the record makes the reassuring point that intelligence does pick
up and disseminate warning signals at the time of gravest national danger.
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Chapter 3
The Estimate
The President and his closest advisers would no more be without current
intelligence than without their daily newspaper. They want current intelligence
to keep them up to the minute. They want quite another intelligence product
when they have to make major determinations or reassessments of policy. The
policy review on economic aid to Brazil does not lean on day-to-day intelligence.
The need is for a formal intelligence appraisal of the Brazilian government's
record in curbing runaway inflation, pushing long-delayed agrarian reform,
attracting broad political support. The need is for a formal forward-look at
Brazilian prospects. The intelligence estimate, or strategic estimate as it is often
called, is the generic designation of the document that performs these policy-
support functions. At the level of national intelligence, its specific title is the
National Intelligence Estimate.
Since the range of American policy interests is worldwide, virtually every
country is likely to become the subject at some time or other of an intelligence
estimate. Estimates on the giants of the Communist world, the U.S.S.R. and
mainland China, are never many months old before new looks are scheduled.
Lesser Communist nations, surveyed less often, may be grouped in an estimate,
say, on Eastern Europe. The developing nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin
America get similar review-singly or in regional estimates-with special atten-
tion to problems of economic strain, social instabilities, and direction of political
alignment in international affairs. The strategic estimates on West European
countries will consider evolving roles that bear on the solidarity of Western
multinational groupings like the Common Market and NATO. Then there
are estimates which are not drawn on strictly geographical lines-on the Sino-
Soviet dispute or on nuclear proliferation, for example.
The formal estimate characteristically essays a longer forward-look than
current intelligence, but this is not to say it must keep outside the current intelli-
gence time span. The estimate on the U.S.S.R. will project Soviet weapons
systems ten years ahead, if that is the desirable lead time for planning American
weapons systems. If the next twelve months are crucial for the tenure of the
present Brazilian government, the estimate on Brazil will project prices and
other indices for only a year or so. A "crash estimate" of likely Soviet actions
and attitudes over the next few days is in order at the time of a Suez crisis.
The "crash estimate" certainly and the other estimates to a lesser extent go
over much the same ground as does current intelligence. But current intelligence
is primarily narrative and reportorial, with such analytic comment as the overriding
imperative of quick reporting will permit. The estimate is expected to be the
more reflective product, enlarging on what the items of current intelligence add
up to. In the estimate, the signs of popular dissatisfaction in China are evaluated
against a background that elaborates on trends in agricultural output, experimen-
tation with different collective forms of rural organization, army morale, and
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manipulation of the hate-America theme to consolidate control at home. The writ-
ing requires a breadth of information that cuts across academic disciplines, taking
in subjects of economic change, scientific achievement, social stresses, military
power, and political dynamics. It requires the wide-ranging scholarship that
can integrate findings from all these lines of inquiry and hopefully give answers
to the important questions that policymakers are asking or should be asking
about China.
Production Flow Chart
There are two ways a National Intelligence Estimate gets started. One is
on the request of an important policy official; a word from the White House is
stimulus enough. These outside initiatives are most likely when policy decisions
of great moment are being weighed-in a situation like the Soviet military build-
up in Cuba, for example. Usually, however, intelligence can tell itself what it
ought to be doing, and it can tell itself long enough in advance to make up a
schedule of estimates for the coming year. An estimate on the U.S.S.R. is
invariably on the schedule. An estimate on Ghana may be put on the schedule
if the last one is clearly outdated. And if a coup in Iraq is in a fair way of
affecting the balance of forces in the Middle East, intelligence may decide on an
estimate out of schedule.
The labor pains of the estimate begin with an exercise that is called establish-
ing the terms of reference, a list of the crucial questions-drawn up by the CIA
in consultation with other contributors-to which the estimate will hopefully
provide answers. The list can be comparatively short if the focus of the estimate
is narrow-say Cambodian Prince Sihanouk's present position, with particular
inquiry into whether he has taken his pro-Peking version of neutralism beyond
a point of no return. The list will be long indeed if it is to clarify the stature
of the U.S.S.R. or Corranunist China, since the purpose is to assemble the knowl-
edge about these countries which should affect American policies with respect
to military expenditures, trade controls, propaganda programming, foreign aid,
diplomatic strategy.
In this latter case, the terms of reference will include a battery of questions
on internal political developments. Do present arrangements for collective
decision in the top leadership appear stable? What issues are likely to provoke
disagreements? What alignments on these issues are to be expected fromthe-mili-
tary marshals, the party careerists, the government bureaucrats? What are evolv-
ing popular attitudes? Are there strong pressures from the intelligentsia for freer
expression in the arts? How responsive is the government to workers' expecta-
tions of rising living standards? Are the peasants dragging their feet in incon-
spicuous sabotage of agricultural expansion programs? Are ethnic minorities
limiting themselves to passive discontent or moved to sporadic riots?
In the field of foreign affairs, the terms of reference will relate especially
to policy attitudes bearing on relations with the United States-possible modus
vivendi in Europe, promotion of anti-Americanism in Asia, propaganda line on
disarmament. The questions will go beyond broad generalities to identify posi-
tions on such specific issues as Berlin, Vietnam, German unification, and American
military bases, with a view to distinguishing areas of give from inflexible lines
of hardened national interest. The foreign affairs section of the terms of refer-
ence will also devote considerable attention to the state of the country's own
system of alliances, which may be crucial for its changing posture toward the
United States. Is the military alliance which the U.S.S.R. and Communist China
signed in 1950 much more now than a scrap of paper?
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On military matters, the terms of reference will ask the important questions
about evolving force structure. What are the available figures for personnel
and equipment strength in the conventional branches of the army, navy, and
air force? What is the level of attainment with advanced weapons systems?
What are the capabilities for combat in different geographic areas? What are
the accepted doctrines on surprise attack, nuclear deterrence, guerrilla warfare,
civil defense, general war, wars of "national liberation"?
The economic terms of reference will be addressed to problems in agriculture,
rates of industrial growth, patterns of foreign trade, levels of foreign aid, popula-
tion increase, gold reserves, experimental departures from the rigidities of central
planning. The list of questions will turn like an elliptical curve around two foci
of interest. One is fixed on the economy's capability to sustain the enormous
amounts of defense expenditures that are necessary for great power status in the
twentieth century. The other is the economy's comparative record in raising
mass living standards-the non-military challenge to convert a world by demon-
strated superiority in "peaceful competition." The terms of reference will
therefore include questions that pin down the specifics of hard choice in resource
allocation, that go into fine detail on both the "guns" and "butter" sectors of the
economy. The questions will narrow down to investment and other data for
electronics industries, aircraft, missiles, space programs, grains, meat, automobiles,
housing, education.
There is finally the ever-increasing attention that goes in these times into
the terms of reference that deal with scientific achievement. Billion dollar
programs in America ride on the answers to these terms of reference. The
questions probe into such avenues of inquiry as levels of technically-trained
manpower, facilities for engineering and scientific education, research and
development on new weapons systems, laser technology, military and peaceful
applications of atomic energy, new capabilities in outer space.
The terms of reference are circulated to all participants, and the work of
drawing up written contributions is divided up along well-established lines of
primary jurisdiction and specialized competence. State's intelligence estimators,
for example, will concentrate on getting the answers to the political terms of
reference; the Defense Department's analysts will give their main attention to
the military sections of the estimate. There are no hard constraints, however,
against any agency trying to influence any part of the estimate. Defense, State,
and the CIA may each have viewpoints about the relevance of the Sino-Soviet
military alliance in particular contexts, and their contributions will overlap on
this and other issues.
The principal labors from here out fall on the CIA estimators. Theirs is
the task of getting out a version which reflects the consensus, so far as that con-
sensus is obtainable, of all the intelligence services. Theirs is the travail of
writing and rewriting to clarify points or meet objections of a CIA board of
senior officials. Theirs is the toil of meeting with representatives of the other
intelligence services to try to work out differences that still appear after second
or third rewrites. The final wording always represents CIA's judgment at the
minimum; the published document goes forward as the view of the Director of
Central Intelligence. If other agencies are still left in dissent on some points,
they give their reasons in footnotes.
The process is not one for turning out estimates with anything like the speed
of current intelligence analyses. A National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet
Union may, in fact, take months between the first attention to terms of reference
and the final publication. This is not too long if there is no especial reason for
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gncy, ttie po icymake
A rs requirement is not for in ormation to support a
quick decision but rather for knowledge by which to set the policy course of the
nation over the coming years. There are, however, crises which call for estimates
with one or two day deadlines, and on these occasions, the usual procedures have
to be telescoped.
How Conclusive the Conclusions?
Since the best of logic can be coupled with fallacy, intelligence estimators are
self-conscious about establishing as wide an area of hard fact as possible. The
core, often the bulk, of the National Intelligence Estimate is the rundown of
recent history and the record of accepted fact-the purges in high places, the
official statements on foreign policy, the tone of propaganda, the achievements
in space research, the purchases of foreign grain, the budget figures for military
expenditures, the judicial trials of dissenting intellectuals, the hardening of
missile sites, the testing of nuclear weapons, the construction of worker housing,
the reorganization of military commands, the commitments for new foreign aid,
the state visits to developing countries, the display of new military aircraft.
This attention to credible evidence is maintained throughout the writing of the
estimate, and the estimators cap the writing with a post-mortem of their labors
that directs attention to gaps in the available information. These post-mortems
serve notice to intelligence of the collection efforts that must be made and the
research that must be initiated so that future estimates can be made on a stronger
basis of fact.
In the meantime, the estimator feels keenly the limitations of his factual base,
not only in foreseeing things to come, but also in tracing things as they are. Its
long border with the U.S.S.R. is a serious liability for Iran. Its economic back-
wardness is another. Its dissenting minorities in Azerbaijan another. And its
underdeveloped political institutions still another. Some of the pertinent facts,
like the length of the border, are firm, but most evidence-on the dissatisfactions
of ethnic minorities, for example-falls short of the certainties the estimator needs
to support conclusions about the health of Iran.
The difficulties mount when the estimate gets into its look at the future.
Can the estimator be something better than a soothsayer? If he can, it is again
with the support of a decent factual base. If he has to forecast whether the
Chinese Communists :intend in the weeks ahead to invade Taiwan, he will draw
up a tabulation showing what the Communists have in the way of amphibious
lift facilities. He will set forth recent military deployments on the mainland.
He will make a statement about weather in the Taiwan Strait at this time of year.
He will review recent Chinese Communist propaganda on the "liberation" of
Taiwan. And he will be sure to analyze recent official statements on the subject
by the Chinese Communist leaders.
The attempted focus on fact notwithstanding, the estimate can never be
better than an approximation: you estimate, as the cynical aphorism goes, when
you run out of facts. Many of the facts are unknowable, like decisions that
a party presidium is still debating. And the facts which are simply unknown,
like the Kremlin decision which has finally been made, may be as out of reach
as the unknowable. At some point in the writing of every National Intelligence
Estimate, the estimators are up against the innate problem of their craft-to be
accurate when the best that the available facts allow is to be plausible.
It boils down to the proposition that the future is not an open book, and
intelligence does no service to policymakers by overstating its knowledge. When
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it is forecasting only in the sense that demographers forecast populations. The
demographic forecast is not a flat prediction but a projection calculated on the
basis of certain reasonable assumptions about birth and death rates. The range
of reasonable assumptions is likely to be fairly wide, so the population forecast
is customarily presented with "high," "low," and "middle" projections. When
birth and death rates take unexpected turns, demographic forecasts prove to
be wide of the mark. But as working hypotheses, the demographic forecasts
are useful for the early years at least, and it is easy enough to bring them into
line as soon as new evidence justifies new calculations.
Similarly, the prevision of the Soviet Union's defenses in 1975 is useful
as a first approximation for those who have to make decisions about American
defenses. The estimate's figures serve as working hypotheses for planning. It
would be surprising if the figures conformed in all respects to the actual course
of events, but the estimate on the U.S.S.R. is a recurring exercise, and changes
in the forecast will carry their due weight for revisions of policy. The impera-
tive for intelligence is not any impossible faculty for being right every time,
even when the evidence to go on is still shaky. The mandate is rather for a
schedule of frequent revision, so that the latest estimate is consistent with the
latest evidence.
This doctrine of periodic revision, however, is no comfort in the exigencies
that call for estimates of the very short term. If the estimators are asked for
judgments in September about Chinese Communist intentions to cross the Hima-
layas into India before the snows fall, they are being asked for a forecast that
will all too soon be tested by events. The ten-year projection is analogous to a
game whose rules permit changes of strategy. But to predict the events of the
next few weeks is to join in a game where the stakes ride on one round of play.
There are no revisions of strategy; there is only the initial strategy to determine
the outcome.
If intelligence is less than reasonably certain of its case in such a situation,
it has two recourses. One is to state frankly that insufficient information is at
hand to make a prediction. This categorical a statement appears only occa-
sionally in estimates; the intelligence ego understandably shies from the admis-
sion that equates to no better guidance than that "time alone will tell."
The second recourse is to suggest possibilities for the future which take in
the more or less likely eventualities. If the estimators left it at that, they would
be casting themselves in the image of equivocating Delphic oracles. The esti-
mators, therefore, usually attempt some statement about orders of probability.
The Chinese may do nothing, they may only engage Indian border patrols, they
may penetrate into India up the full extent of their boundary claims, or they
may try to engage the full strength of the Indian army and bring it down to
crushing defeat. The possibility of China's doing nothing may be rated as low
if it happens to be a year when border clashes have become routine. Evidence
at hand on logistic buildups and supply problems may allow some judgment
about the depth to which Chinese armies can penetrate. The calculations that
go into such an estimate will in the end probably permit of a statement giving
comparative probabilities of the courses of action to which Communist China
is for practical purposes limited. The probabilities will not have the precision
of mathematical odds, but they will at least point to one course of action as
more likely than another.
While intelligence is sometimes the butt of derision about overcaution in
prediction, responsible estimators will scorn pretensions to foreknowledge that
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they do not have. The quack's alternative is unambiguous pre ction that is
deceptively straightforward in appearance but paradoxically even more cautious
than honest intelligence. His dodge is the margin of safety that comes from
always predicting the worst. This is going out on a limb but not on one which
is in danger of cracking. If the worst happens, the heads of estimators who
forewarned stay on their shoulders. If the worst does not happen, there are no
subsequent inquiries to get anyone's scalp.
The artifice may be a safeguard against investigations, but the margin of
safety in intelligence forecasting, as in bridgebuilding, does not come cost-free.
It was American policy toward the end of World War II to urge the entry of
Soviet troops into China, mainly because the predominant intelligence opinion
in the United States took a wide margin of safety in appraising the fighting
qualities of Japan's Kwantung Army in Manchuria. This Army had consisted
of Japan's crack troops before the war, but these had long ago been transferred
out to fighting theatres. An unsure intelligence, however, continued to give the
Kwantung Army the reputation it no longer deserved. The result was the
entry of Soviet troops in 1945, their restrictions on the movement of Chinese
Nationalist troops into Manchuria, and their shelter of the Chinese Communist
forces that eventually took over.
It is questionable, therefore, that policy is at all well served by pressures
on intelligence to speak in clearer tones of black and white. Intelligence hedges
because it doesn't know, and in these circumstances, uncertainty-not presumed
knowledge-should i:nderlie the policy rationale. A player should under-
stand when he is in a game of closed and not open poker. The two games
call for quite different: strategies.
The Consensus Problem
Insufficient though the evidence may be, an estimator will try to make the
most of what he has, applying of course the rules of conscience and good judg-
ment against making more of the evidence than it deserves. What an estimator
will do alone, however, is not what estimators will do collectively. The hazard
in preparation of the National Intelligence Estimate-a document to which
all the intelligence services subscribe-is that it will have to be worded to get
the acceptance of those who would make the least of the evidence. This does
not so much require an explicit surrender to the most guarded opinion as a
facility for taking in all opinion by vagueness and generality of language.
The alternative of a more positive analysis with many dissenting footnotes
does not strike the estimators as any more helpful to policymakers. Too many
dissents, in fact, should suggest that the master draft is too definitive-that its
conclusions are arguable, not well enough supported by the evidence. In most
cases, it would seem proper for the intelligence services to concede the point
and settle for a wording that is a truer reflection of the uncertainty in the situa-
tion. A customary rewrite, for example, could have it that Castro "may" do
thus and so, in place of the "will probably" of the first draft.
If Castro s probable course of action on a certain matter is, however, one
of the central concerns of the estimate, the preference is for a sharp draft with
reasoned dissents ovex any compromise wording. Either horn of the dilemma-
watered-down language or an array of dissents-tells the policymaker in effect
to be his own intelligence officer; but if this is to be his role, he will do better
to read all the pros and cons. What he does not want is a clutter of dissenting
footnotes that are not really vital for the main thrust of the estimate. On these
less important parts of the estimate, considerable effort will go into the working
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out of compromise positions. If this effort is unavailing, tired arms may we l
give way to the intelligence service with the most specialized competence in
the subject. The rule of reason is simply that the main points of the estimate
should not get lost in a sea of quibbles about tangential issues.
There are times when the department head or White House official will
choose to bypass the problem of consensus, preferring-by way of a first look
at any rate-to have the analysis in memorandum form from a particular in-
telligence service. The number of such estimative memoranda increased after
President Kennedy took office and policymaking took on a more personalized
character than it had under the well-staffed procedures of the Eisenhower ad-
ministration. The informality of the newer methods offered advantages usually
in speed of drafting and sometimes in sharper conclusions. The National In-
telligence Estimate, however, never lost its standing as the authoritative reference
when policy decisions of the gravest national import were in the making. How-
ever much alone the President was in reaching the final decision on such occa-
sions, he listened attentively to recommendations from many quarters in formal
or informal assembly. Group processes for policy counseling seem to call
on group processes for intelligence estimating; so during the weeks preceding
the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, the felt need was less for a long spectrum
of individual views on whether or not the Russians would put offensive missiles
into Cuba than for the best judgment that intelligence as a group could make
on this subject.
The Cuban Estimate
"In the fall of 1962, most specialists in Soviet affairs believed that long-
range Soviet missiles, with their closely guarded electronic systems, would never
be stationed on the uncertain island of Cuba nearly 6,000 miles away from
Soviet soil and supplies." 1 When events proved this opinion wrong, the usual
post-mortems ensued to pinpoint the causes of error.
The causes were of two categories. One was the base of evidence up through
the summer of 1962. The evidence was a mosaic of reports from Cuban sources
and photography from aerial reconnaissance.
The Cuban sources, refugees and others, alleged the introduction of mili-
tary aircraft and Soviet missiles. These sources did not have the best record
for accuracy in their past reporting; they had an understandable self-interest
in underscoring Castro's villainy and his intrigues against American security.
Intelligence analysts attached enough credibility to the reports, however, to
lay on requests for increased aerial reconnaissance. The resulting photography
soon established that the U.S.S.R. was indeed supplying Castro with surface-to-
air missiles (good only for defense against aircraft overflying Cuba) and with
coastal defense missiles (good only against offshore shipping).
A Senate investigating committee later suggested that intelligence analysts
should have inferred the worst from the installation of these short-range missiles:
Among other things the discovery of the surface-to-air missile complex in
the San Cristobal area on August 29 could logically have led to the assump-
tion that they were being constructed to protect a strategic missile installation
since it was clear that these SA-2s were not being emplaced for the purpose
of protecting any existing or known military installations.2
'Theodore Sorensen, Decision-Making in the White House (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity. Press, 1963), p. 67.
U.S., Congress, Senate, Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the Committee on
Armed Services, Investigation of the Preparedness Program: Interim Report on the Cuban
Buildup, 88th Cong. 1st Sess., 1963, p. 11.
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 Approved For,Release 200/1 intelligence i in tact ask itself at the time what was the purpose
of these defensive missiles. Were they primarily prestigious additions to Castro's
growing military arni, which already included Soviet jet fighters? Were they
to guard sites which Castro could use for the launching of longer-range missiles
against the southern and eastern United States? Or were they to guard some
other vitally important type of new installation? The possibilities were con-
sidered, but the inconclusiveness of the evidence thus far assembled forced the
estimators onto the second category of error-deduction relying on an uncertain
syllogism.
The major premise of the syllogism was that the U.S.S.R. did not wish to
provoke to the point of nuclear war. This proposition rested on the record of
responsible Soviet navigation in the dangerous waters of the cold war. Moscow
had never gone so fair as to ship the offensive-type missiles to any other country
in the Communist camp. The minor premise was that the U.S.S.R. fully under-
stood the depth of .American feeling about Communist strategic weapons in
Cuban sites. The intelligence conclusion that followed was that the Soviets
probably would not emplace offensive missiles in Cuba.
The minor premise was false. It was a misestimate of the Soviet estimate.
Estimating a Soviet estimate of U.S. intentions puts U.S. intelligence into an
unfamiliar field-the examination of American actions. The examination has to
cover every act of diplomacy that communicates American attitudes to the Soviet
Union, including acts which are diplomatic only in the extraordinary uses of
the word:
Every change in the defense budget, every selection of a major weapon
system, every important deployment of troops, every Congressional hearing
of the annual budget of the armed forces, is diplomacy. It is diplomacy,
because at least one strong motive behind any action taken is to communicate
something to the leaders of potential enemy countries about what we can do
and about what we will do.8
Following this line of thought, the minor premise of the Cuban estimate
should have been developed from an explicit review of certain American actions.
The Bay of Pigs, for example: how did it affect Moscow's estimate of U.S. resolve?
American toleration of the subsequent Soviet military buildup in Cuba: what
further encouragement did each step give the Russians that they could go one
step further? President Kennedy's statement to the press in August 1962 that
the United States "has obligations all around the world, including West Berlin":
could the Russians infer that the President's decisions on Cuba would be in-
fluenced by his consciousness of American vulnerabilities elsewhere in the world? 4
The President's announcement on September 4 that the United States would not
tolerate the installation of missiles in Cuba capable of reaching American terri-
tory: might Soviet leaders be so committed by this late date that. such an an-
nouncement would not sufficiently impress them of the necessity to reverse
course?
It will not do to answer that the Russian might well misestimate. The ques-
tion before the American estimators was whether the Russians were more likely
than not to misestimate. Klaus Knorr suggests that the estimators might reason-
'Thomas C. Schelling, "Deterrence: Military Diplomacy in the Nuclear Age," Virginia
Quarterly Review (Autumn 1963), reprinted in the U.S. Congress, Senate, Subcommittee on
National Security and International Operations of the Committee on Government Operations,
Conduct of National Security Policy: Selected Readings, 89th Cong., 1st Sess., 1965, p. 43.
`Arnold L. Horelick, "The Cuban Missile Crisis: An Analysis of Soviet Calculations and
Behavior," World Politics (April, 1964), p. 384.
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ably have calcu ate e pro a i ities to avor a rem n s misrea ng o e
American mind:
It must have been difficult for Soviet intelligence to estimate correctly the
immensely strong popular feelings in the United States on the Cuban issue.
It was an emotional involvement that many of our allies (including Canada)
found hard to comprehend and to approve. Is it not possible, if not likely,
that Soviet intelligence expected the United States Government to splutter,
perhaps even to roar, but to consult its allies, who would urge caution, to
bring the case before the United Nations, which would lead to long and
inconclusive debates, and in the end resign itself to accept the fait accompli? a
Professor Knorr was writing, as he would concede, with the advantage of
hindsight knowledge. The estimators lacked this advantage, but they were
still not ensnared by their web of logic. They were aware that the evidence
was not all in, and they did not assert their conclusions with such confidence as
to terminate the relentless search for evidence.
In the meantime, the President understood the limited policy uses of the
intelligence estimate. An estimate is only one of the forms of intelligence upon
which a President depends. He could not have decided earlier on his confronta-
tion with Khrushchev even if the estimate in hand had predicted the Soviet em-
placement of longer-range missiles in Cuba. The stakes were much too high to
justify such a grave decision on anything but the hardest of evidence. His main
reliance had to be on the current intelligence that went to the White House daily
and kept him apprised of the mounting Soviet military commitment in Cuba.
After intelligence reported the confirming evidence that longer-range missiles
were in Cuba, the logic of the estimate was to get its final test. The faulty
premise of the logic was that the U.S.S.R. appreciated how forcefully the American
government would react to strategic missiles in Cuba. President Kennedy con-
verted this premise into incontrovertible fact. His courage tested the logic of
the estimators' analysis anew and vindicated it in the end. The U.S.S.R. acted
as intelligence originally foresaw it would act to keep its distance from the
nuclear brink.
6 Klaus Knorr, "Failures in National Intelligence Estimates: The Case of the Cuban Missiles,"
World Politics (April, 1964), p. 465.
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Chapter 4
The Research Study
When the Reid Cabral government fell in April 1965, it stimulated an under-
standable surge of interest throughout Washington in certain background infor-
mation on the Dominican Republic. Who were the key personalities in the
country? What was the strength and disposition of its armed forces? How
much of the population was literate? What progress had been made with
agrarian reform? Which were the principal political parties? What was the
state of government finances? How good were the harbor facilities that were
available for the landing of American troops? What sort of terrain would the
American forces find? How much range of temperature, humidity, precipitation,
and other climatic feature would they encounter? Intelligence should be able
to supply this type of information almost at once.
In the language of the trade, this information is called basic intelligence-
the fundamental facts about geography, economy, social structure, political or-
ganization, military capabilities, and other aspects of national stature. Basic
intelligence can be prepared in response to urgent requirements of the moment,
but in most of its formats, basic intelligence is the result of long prior research,
completed and put on the shelf, so to speak, for later reference.
Now research inevitably draws its devotees into byways of scholarship which
have an uncertain relevancy to policy issues of the day. There is in current
intelligence and estimative intelligence an inherent discipline against going too
deep into these byways, for current reports and strategic estimates are written
explicitly for use by policy officials. While many research studies are targeted
toward the high-level planner or policymaker, the genre by and large does not
compete as well as current intelligence and estimative intelligence for the time
that the busy man at the top can give to his reading. Particularly if it is many
pages in length or is heavily technical in content, the research study is rather
likely to be read in its entirety only by other analysts and then to serve as the
capital, so to speak, that they can draw on for their own analyses and evaluations.
In this situation, research can find itself on a long line from the pole of practical
policy support, but the proper length of the line is one of the unresolved problems
of intelligence organization and management. The familiar debating points on
the issue of basic versus applied research reappear in discussions about the level
of detail intelligence should compile on witchcraft practices in the Congo.
Decisions in the matter are strongly influenced by budget ceilings and by
fashions in thinking at the top about the degree of orientation which intelligence
research should have to the requirements of policymaking and executive action.
The call is still primarily for national intelligence that is "action-conscious" and
"policy-oriented"-that is to say bears clearly on important decisions being made
at the top. As a result, research programs get trimmed drastically in some years,
but intelligence has been too self-conscious about past embarrassments to feel
entirely easy about the cutbacks. One of the classic cases of embarrassment was
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occasion for bitter complaints by British ship commanders about the absence of
accurate maps and lack of information about beaches and fjords. The operational
planning drew on woodcuts of Norwegian beauty spots in the 19th century.
Large rocks blocked the approaches to what were thought to be suitable landing
beaches. Jetties that were supposed to have cranes and heavy tackle were lack-
ing in such equipment. The appalling errors of basic intelligence played a great
part in the British debacle.'
The same sort of situation was encountered during the American operations
against the Gilbert Islands in 1943. Some of the needed hydrographic data were
even more out of date than the scenic woodcuts which British intelligence had
used for the Norwegian landing. The activities of coral polyp in the century since
the last oceanographic survey was conducted had made the old charts on the
Gilberts so inaccurate as to be worse than useless. Intelligence was uninformed
about the reefs and other beach features, knowledge that was vitally needed for
decisions about the larding craft that could get American marines ashore with
minimum danger of grounding. As it turned out, the larger landing craft proved
unsuitable, and men scrambling ashore were mowed down by Japanese fire. At
the end of the battle for Tarawa, a thousand marines lay dead, many of them
killed in the first terrible hours of the landing. Along with the two thousand
wounded, they bore witness to the vital necessity of accurate basic intelligence?
The Encyclopedic Study
Norway and Tarawa underlined the need for encyclopedias of information on
every area where the United States might conceivably find itself involved. But
a war was on, and the immediate concern was to get basic intelligence completed
on the fighting areas. The British fortunately were well along with ISIS (Inter-
Service Intelligence Studies), and these were of much help to American officers
in the planning for North African operations. The basic intelligence gap that
called for immediate filling in America related to the Pacific theatre of operations,
and the joint Chiefs of Staff instituted procedures to put out the massive basic
intelligence volumes known as JANIS (Joint Army-Navy Intelligence Studies).
JANIS came out too late to influence World War II operations, but the encyclo-
pedic volumes on the history, geography, economy and sociology of the Far East
got well dog-eared by frequent use in the intelligence services of the United
States just after the war.
The experience with JANIS confirmed intelligence officials in their opinion
that basic intelligence studies had to be on hand for emergencies and that such
studies should be developed in peacetime, when the channels for collecting
information were more open and when the absence of wartime pressures per-
mitted better checks for accuracy.
While the needs of war were the strongest stimulus for the basic intelligence
effort, it was appreciated that the studies should cover more than the subjects of
wartime interest. For one thing, the problems of military occupation required
intelligence support in providing details about economic institutions, public health,
social characteristics, and political background. For another thing, emerging
cold war concerns suggested the potential usefulness of information bearing on
such activities as propaganda, foreign aid, and trade controls. And finally, the
1 H. Montgomery Hyde, Room 3603 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1962), pp.
28-29.
'Ladislas Farago, War of Wits: The Anatomy of Espionage and Intelligence (New York:
Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1954), p. 74.
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history of efforts to consolidate the peace a ter or ar m e e n
of a basic intelligence effort that would contribute to the wisest conduct of
American diplomacy.
One of the most interesting contributions of basic intelligence abroad after
the first World War had been the so-called peace handbooks that served the
British delegates to the peace conference in Paris. Sherman Kent has described
these handbooks as Baedekers to meet the minimal needs of delegates responsible
for drafting the peace treaties:
The section on Bohemia and Moravia ran to 109 standard-size pages. No
one who read them could possibly have remained in ignorance of the main
ethnic and economic problems which were to beset the men responsible for
drawing the western frontiers of the new Czechoslovakia, and no one who
read them would fail to acquit himself better at the peace table.
There were many other handbooks in the series, and each emphasized
those phenomena of a given country which were certain to come up in the
discussions. For example, the book on France has a long and detailed section
on Alsace-Lorraine; the one on Germany has sections on Silesia, the Kiel
Canal and Heligoland, and the Colonies; the one on Turkey, an excellent
treatment of the Straits question; and there is one entire short study on the
Yugoslav Movements
As American intelligence officials foresaw the research task ahead, it would
culminate in comprehensive assembly of all the basic intelligence on foreign areas
required by the American government. The volumes of information would serve
the needs of the military services for data used in strategic and high-level opera-
tional planning, and they would serve civilian officials responsible for formulating
and executing the many aspects of U.S. foreign policy. The information would
be largely descriptive, but this was not to say that it would be devoid of analysis.
It would not have to be as predictive as current and estimative intelligence, but
as in the better encyclopedias, there would be interpretive commentary.
The range of information was to extend across a wide set of scholarly dis-
ciplines. There would be a geographic section, for example, to give information
on frontiers, landforms, soils, climate, vegetation. A transportation section would
break down into discussions of railroads, highways, civil air, merchant shipping,
inland waterways. An economic section would go into crop production, industrial
structure, public finance, patterns of trade. A sociology section would present
data on population distribution, religious affiliations, educational levels, ethnic
diversities. A political section would be informative on matters of historical
background, constitutional forms, party rivalries, internal control mechanisms.
For the more important countries, at least, it was envisioned that the discus-
sions would go into considerable detail. The discussion of railroads, for example,
would include description of rolling stock, bridges and tunnels, gradients, time-
tables, signaling systems, track curvatures. The discussion of highways would
detail the seasonal conditions of the various roads, bridge dimensions, width of
shoulders, steepness of grades. The discussion of inland waterways would give
data on currents, depths, turns, constancy of channel alignments, freezing, bridge
clearances. The discussion on civil air would show aircraft performance, fre-
quency and reliability of service, navigational aids, convertibility to military use.
Photographs, graphs, maps, and charts would supplement the text.
'Sherman Kent, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Prince-
ton University Press, 1949), pp. 24-25.
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 App%esedpre isonseor inteIlQge/nce officlalsA R~P> 0 01940s have taken form in
the basic intelligence series that is called the National Intelligence Survey (NIS).
Like the current and estimative forms of national intelligence, the NIS is a col-
lective effort of the intelligence services. All the services are represented on a
National Intelligence Survey Committee, which meets to determine production
priorities and set general policy with respect to the NIS program.4
In format, the NIS series for each country appears as many paperback
monographs-a separate monograph for railroads, manpower, and every other
section of the survey. The research and writing are divided up, with military
analysts, for example, taking responsibility for sections on terrain and naval
facilities, while CIA analysts prepare some of the economic and political sections.
The CIA, in addition, performs central administrative services like editing, print-
ing, and dissemination.
Another consideration in making the sections organically separate is the ease
of updating. The intelligence in sections dealing with such subjects as climate
and terrain is relatively permanent in character. Once the research is done, only
infrequent revisions are necessary. In the economic and political sections, on the
other hand, the intelligence may be of a more fugitive sort. Key political leaders
die, governments are overturned, and new industries get established; and a main-
tenance schedule calling for more frequent update is necessary.
There is no question about the peace of mind the NIS affords intelligence
officials anxious to avoid the embarrassments of any future Tarawas. The series
get their tests of usefulness whenever another area suddenly hits the headlines-
Korea, Lebanon, the Dominican Republic. With a still far from perfect record,
basic intelligence is acquitting itself better than it did during World War II.
The Hoover Commission adjudged the NIS to be an "invaluable publication." 5
Such kudos notwi `hstanding, it is ordinarily difficult to attract as influential
support for NIS intelligence research as for current and estimative intelligence ac-
tivities. When the flaps come and the pressures for current reporting and quick
strategic estimates are especially strong, the temptation is to build up necessary
strength in task forces by calling in researchers who are working against distant
publication deadlines. Inevitably, NIS research takes on the imputation of
second priority. The experts are then tempted to stay on in current intelligence
or estimative assignments, where they can earn a high ,psychic income in ready
service to top echelon policymaking. This is not to deny that some of the very
best talent is in research, but intelligence officials at the management level still
ponder the problem of the "brain drain" that keeps breaking the continuity of
the research effort.
There is some sentiment for contracting out the many pieces of research that
draw on open data-weather conditions, balance-of-payment problems, recent
history, government structure, social institutions. Universities and other outside
organizations may be as well equipped as in-house staffs to assemble the informa-
tion on many of these subjects, and the outsiders would presumably be insulated
from the high-tension currents that so often short-circuit in-house research in the
crisis situations. However, contrary arguments are offered in favor of the better
management controls and other advantages that inhere in in-house research, and
intelligence is still groping for the best answer to the problem.
Intelligence is also giving thought to new formats. There are types of basic
intelligence-listings of power plants and pipelines, for example-which can be
'See supra, p. 4.
5U.S., Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, Intelligence
Activities (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1955), p. 68.
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i en ra car es an run through data processin a ui I. I-
6 quick print-outs on demand. In some cases, particularly where the information
can be presented tabularly rather than textually, these print-outs may be superior
to the bound publication. In other cases, the bound publication is handier.
Whatever the format, the pick-and-shovel work of accumulating basic intelligence
is bound to go on as long as the memory of Tarawa haunts the conscience of
America.
The Special Purpose Study
Basic intelligence produces the omnibus reference work as a standby product,
an encyclopedia to consult when a question arises, not a study written to answer
any particular question. When basic intelligence addresses itself to the latter
purpose, its product is a study in depth. The depth study, by contrast with the
all-purpose encyclopedic series, can be written with a sharper eye to the current
needs of policymakers. A recurring subject for depth study is the pattern of
Communist trade. Such a study is usually heavy with tabulations for the U.S.S.R.,
China, and East European countries showing the proportion of their commerce
that is made up of trade with the West. There are often other tabulations to
show which non-Communist countries are most dependent on trade with the
Communists. The study might go into the topic of Communist interest in long-
term credits from the West, and it would review the varying attitudes of Western
governments towards extensions of credits to the Communists. The study could
assess the emerging apprehensions of some East European countries about being
shut out of Western markets as the Common Market countries progress toward
full customs union. It could also examine the faint signs of East European
interest in associating with Western countries in GATT (General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade) to help preserve Communist positions in Western markets.
This kind of study in depth is of quite a different order from the assembly
of information that goes into the National Intelligence Survey. The encyclopedic
NIS is excellent for finding the answer to a specific question of fact (the gauge
of railroads in Vietnam), but it does not provide the help that research can give
to policymakers who want to know what might be done about force structures in
NATO or about Sino-Soviet differences. The deep narrow study is the vehicle
for this sort of help. By contrast with the miscellany of information in the basic
intelligence encyclopedias, the deep study is long on history, replete with analysis,
and inclined to predictive conclusions. One of the better illustrations is the
historical study by Navy intelligence in World War II to determine the chances
of a Japanese surrender. The record of combat in the war indicated the influence
of Bushido conditioning and suggested an invulnerability to surrender appeals.
The study noted, however, the cultural legacy of the inter-clan struggles, in which
the defeated clan had invariably chosen to surrender rather than go to death in
battle.6
If the deep study is of some bulk, with tables and graphs and appendixes,
it will not be read in all its detail by policymakers at the level of the President's
immediate advisers, although they may get abstracts highlighting the major
findings. But it will be read probably at lower echelons of policy and certainly
by analysts responsible for writing the current and estimative intelligence on the
subject. A major purpose of the deep study is, in fact, thus to save current and
estimative intelligence from superficiality of knowledge, from hardened analysis
in a frame of set conceptions and stock cliches. In this connection, some offices
encourage the personally signed study, wherein the researcher can take his
'Farago, op. cit., pp. 15-17.
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scholarly look at basic premises without committing his agency as a w o e o
still tentative lines of analysis.
While-the special-purpose study is clearly a sharper instrument for serving
policy than the omnibus reference study, it would not do to suggest that all special
purpose research is undertaken in connection with some policy decision in the
making. There is research that is undertaken simply to fill certain intelligence
gaps, whether or not policy decisions are imminent. If information on, say, Soviet
microbiological chemistry is not up to acceptable standard, a go-ahead for research
will be given. The finished study would have a limited circle of interested
readers, but the subject is considered too important by intelligence to be neglected.
Other studies of limited interest might cover social rootlessness in Africa, migra-
tion from rural to urban areas in China, new literary trends in the Soviet Union.
The concern of intelligence, when it comes to subjects like these, is to avoid
duplicating the research that university scholars are carrying on, sometimes on
government contract. The External Research Staff of the State Department's
Bureau of Intelligence and Research is a clearinghouse of information about
outside research on foreign areas. The Staff regularly publishes lists of on-going
and completed research. It publishes specialized bibliographies and research
abstracts, and it is an assiduous collector of conference papers and unpublished
manuscripts. The most useful of this outside research finds its way into intelli-
gence libraries and analysts' files, making its imprint on intelligence opinion and
so becoming part of the corpus of intelligence scholarship.
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Part III
FIELDS OF ANALYSIS
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Chapter 5
Political Intelligence
"We are a people," said de Gaulle at his news conference in September 1965,
who are rising-like the curve of our population, of our production, of our
foreign trade, of our monetary reserves, of our standard of living, of the spread
of our culture and our language, of the power of our arms, of our success in
sport." i De Gaulle's is very much the perspective of intelligence, which also
sees the stature of a nation as a compound of its strengths and failings in every
sector of its culture-its economy, its political life, its scientific and technological
level, its military establishment, its social relations. There are generalists in
senior intelligence assignments whose competence ranges across these func-
tional areas, but intelligence analysis usually starts at the specialists' level. The
technical analysis of the latest Chinese atomic explosion is a job for the physicist
who is making his career in scientific intelligence. The economic intelligence
officer is asked to interpret the Soviet state budget. Authoritative figures on
the size of North Vietnam's army come from the staff that specializes in military
intelligence.
Among these functional specializations, political intelligence gets perhaps
the widest readership in high places. The councils of the country's highest
officials are kept informed of battlefield situations, economic changes, and scien-
tific developments, but the focus of their interest is impact on political policy and
implication for political maneuver. Along with the technical analysis of the
Chinese explosion, the President and his official family will want information
on the reaction of China's Asian neighbors to the bomb test, the propaganda
uses that Peking can make of the test in consolidating domestic political sup-
port, the effects on the Soviet position in disarmament negotiations, the possible
implications for increased pressures to accept Communist China in international
councils.
External Affairs
With the gradual disappearance of bipolarity in international affairs, political
intelligence is hard put to specify the adhesive qualities of formal alliances.
Lineups vary with the issues. De Gaulle's support of the United States in the
Cuban missile crisis is no guidepost to his stand on the issue of Vietnam.
Since intelligence watches adversaries much more closely than it follows
allies, a most important area of political intelligence coverage in this field of
international alignments has been the changing nature of Communist bonds.
"To many a member of the Union League Club," wrote Walter Lippmann just
after World War I, "there is no remarkable difference between a Democrat, a
Socialist, an anarchist, and a burglar, while to a highly sophisticated anarchist
there is a whole universe of difference between Bakunin, Tolstoi, and Kropotkin." 2
The New York Times, September 10, 1965, p. 2.
9Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1932), p. 69.
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The man who has not: seen the sharpening differences among ommu r
recent years is like the man to whom all members of another race look alike.
The differences are clear when one puts himself close enough to see the dif-
ferences, and political intelligence has been following Communism from the
close range that is accessible to those who are fully instructed in the nuances of
Communist ideology and in the semantics of Communist debate.
The task of political intelligence has been uncommonly facilitated by the
polemical propensities of the Communists. Whatever the underlying reasons for
their disagreements, they invariably are cast in ideological terms, with citations
from Marxist scriptures and allusions to historical heresies. The party press and
journals are the customary vehicles for the exchange of diatribes, although Chi-
nese and Russians have also found themselves in face-to-face controversy on the
floors of Communist party congresses in third countries and in other forums.
Since the late 1950's, these open sources of information have afforded political
intelligence ample detail on the progressive disorganization of the international
Communist movemen:. To supplement these open sources, there have been
several valuable collection coups by clandestine means.
The new opportunities that the dispute may open for American foreign policy
are coupled with complications for the work of political intelligence. The even-
tual overthrow of cap:,talism is still a cardinal point of Communist doctrine, but
intelligence has a much more difficult task than detailing the formal principles
of a faith. There are places in the world where the evangelical principle is fully
embodied in the working program of party action. Elsewhere, the principle
needs appraising in the context of increasing attention to consumer problems,
pressures for intellectual contacts with the West, and the rise of a technically-
minded rather than doctrinally-oriented managerial class.
In most of the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America,
Communists of all stripes consider the "objective" situation as favorable for fur-
ther revolutions, but political intelligence must still inform on the considerable
variations of Communist strategies. Parties in sympathy with Moscow are more
likely than China-oriented parties to avoid tests of strength with present govern-
ments. The strategy of the Iraqi Communists, for example, according to an
article of December 1.964 in the Moscow-line World Marxist Review, is not now
to struggle for the establishment of a "working-class" regime but rather to strike
alliances with other forces in the country. Political. intelligence is quite aware that
such shifts in the party line are not irrevocable decisions to abandon traditional
forms of revolutionary action, but the shifts have nevertheless to be noted for the
new challenges they pose to American foreign policy. Governments opposed by
Communist elements are not the same problem for American diplomacy as gov-
ernments drawing on Communist support.
The problem is further complicated by the fact that Moscow's word is no
longer sufficient to determine the pattern of local Communist strategies. Party
leaderships, like the Japanese, which were once stolidly submissive to Soviet
dictates, have moved into the pro-Chinese camp or asserted independent stands.
Even where the leaderships are still with Moscow, their subservience is limited
by concerns with rank-and-file opinion in their own parties.
In several cases, the schism in the world movement has broken local Com-
munist parties into hostile groups which trade epithets taken from the Sino-Soviet
broil. The pro-Chinese elements that split away in India now make up a party
which is larger than the parent pro-Soviet party. Political intelligence has to
follow developments in eachof the parties as arms of Soviet and Chinese foreign
policy respectively. This is to say that the U.S.S.R. and China have sectors of
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Ap
split-party situations.
Often the nature of party lineups is such that political intelligence is hard
put to categorize positions. The Italian Communists, for example, have been the
target of the most vituperative Chinese attacks for "revisionist" tendencies, but it
would be a most superficial analysis that simply put the Italian party in Moscow's
camp. In their denial of Soviet authority over Communist parties, the Italians
can be as adamant as the Chinese. The testament of the late leader of the Italian
Communists, Palmiro Togliatti, espoused a Communism that gave full scope to
national divergencies and that was not held together by any internationale. While
sympathetic with the Chinese on the issue of independence from Moscow, the
Italians differ with the Chinese, and to a lesser extent with the Russians, on other
issues, speaking out for further de-Stalinization and for rapprochement with
heretical biases like Tito's.
The Italian Communists are the second largest party in a country where no
party has a majority and every government has to be a coalition. In these cir-
cumstances, political intelligence feels compelled to stay well abreast of these
party developments, among other reasons to be forearmed against the unwelcome
possibility of Communist participation in a future Italian government. The an-
swers that political intelligence will give about Italian foreign policy in such an
eventuality will almost certainly be complex, unlike the cut-and-dried analysis that
the Communist stereotypes of an earlier era would have justified.
One of the noteworthy features of the Sino-Soviet dispute is that it has not
only weakened Moscow's authority over Communist parties in non-Communist
countries, but that it has given impetus to polycentric forces in Eastern Europe,
once the Soviet Union's uncontested sphere of influence. Political intelligence
never regarded China as a Soviet cat's paw and now considers that the East
European Communist countries have moved varying distances from their one-
time satellite status. The Russians now pretty much recognize the inadvisability
of forcing any of these countries too hard. Thus Rumania gets the leeway it
demands on economic policy, even though the Soviets would prefer to dampen
some of Bucharest's industrial aspirations and assign it a more agrarian role under
"basic principles of Socialist international division of labor."
Political intelligence does not of course make all of its foreign-affairs analyses
in the context of possible leverage for Soviet or Chinese influence in the world.
There are other aspirants to leadership, whose policies may or may not jibe with
American interests. In some settings, the maneuvers of these hopefuls are more
meaningful as political intelligence than the Soviet or Chinese roles. Nasser, for
example, is an important force who counts for much more in the intelligence on
Yemen than the Soviet Union or Communist China. Throughout Africa, a variety
of exile groups offer opportunities for a country to unsettle affairs in neighboring
territory. Ghana harbors the Sawabah Party of Niger; Burundi gives similar
sympathetic shelter to Rwanda exiles.
In Latin America, Castro makes an exceptionally strong appeal to revolu-
tionary elements. Since Latin America is so close to home, a high priority goes
to political intelligence coverage of Cuban underground influence. Some of the
intelligence comes from the open public record-the radio broadcasts from
Havana to Latin America, for example. The broadcast scripts are not only in
Spanish but also in French, Haitian Creole, and the Indian dialects of Aymara
and Guarani. The content of the broadcasts includes firebrand scenarios that
enlarge on say the activities of Colombian and Venezuelan guerrillas. The Creole
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broadcasts to Haiti have featured selections on how to prepare for the "first stage"
of revolution.
The Cuban commitment to subversion across international frontiers is also
documented in public addresses and communiques. In his speech on January
2, 1965, Castro foresaw that the United States would be forced eventually to come
to terms with Cuba when the Americans found themselves having to deal with
"several" other revolutionary regimes in the Western Hemisphere. The com-
munique issued in November 1964 by the Cuban-sponsored meeting of Latin-
American Communist leaders in Havana called for "active aid" to guerrillas in
Venezuela, Guatemala., Colombia, Honduras, Haiti, and Paraguay. In his address
to the UN General Assembly, the now departed Che Guevara called for "bullets
not ballots" in Latin America. He admitted, or rather boasted, that Cuba had
helped "freedom fighters" of Venezuela to "acquire military knowledge."
The boast is given substance by other sources of information. Agent reports
give fairly good deta:1 on the courses of instruction Cuba is giving to revolu-
tionaries. The General Directorate of Intelligence has been identified as the key
Cuban agency for training in guerrilla warfare, sabotage, terror. The Directorate
also passes Cuban funds to Latin American revolutionary groups-some $200,000
to Yon Sosa's terrorist band in Guatemala in 1963, another $50,000 to revolu-
tionaries in El Salvador, about $30,000 to a pro-Castro political group in Panama.
In November 1963, Venezuelan authorities discovered a three-ton cache of Cuban
arms. Postal authorities in Panama that year destroyed an average of over ten
tons of Cuban propaganda a month.
Some of the most perceptive political analyses are in despatches from Foreign
Service officers, whose internationally accepted responsibilities require them to
report on foreign policy trends in the countries to which they are accredited.
Equally informative reporting comes from U.S. ambassadorial missions to such
multinational groupings as the U.N., NATO, and the European Economic Com-
munity. These traditional forms of diplomatic reporting and the intelligence
analyses that draw on this reporting are more likely to deal with questions of
America's relationships with its friends than with maneuvers of adversary forces.
How far does de Gaulle intend to go to weaken the supranational features of the
Common Market? How much of NATO will survive as a structured organiza-
tion to which France will commit military forces? Are India and Pakistan
showing signs of give on Kashmir? How is Japan's interest in mainland Chinese
markets affecting its diplomatic relations with Taiwan? How is the next lineup
on Communist China's admission to the United Nations shaping up? If political
analysis is to contribute to the wisest American policies, it is not only by informing
on the strength of adversaries but also by conveying the fullest understanding of
the sensibilities of friends and allies.
Domestic Affairs
Political intelligence can hardly appraise the weight of a foreign government
in the international arena without knowing how well the government is doing at
home. De Gaulle could take many of his initiatives in foreign affairs only as
long as his was so commanding a political figure in domestic affairs. Commu-
nist China's international stature has derived in good part from the fact that the
regime in Peking is the first government in modern times to have consolidated
political control over the entire Chinese mainland, even over dissident areas like
Tibet. Argentina is less prestigious a figure in Latin American affairs since Peron
left his legacy of political instability in Buenos Aires.
The intelligence officer who follows the domestic political affairs of a foreign
country brings to his work a knowledge of the handbook facts about constitutional
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an g government structure. He is much more interested, however,
in the working political process. Since the intelligence officer cannot watch every-
thing, he must know what to watch particularly; his first task is to know the
distribution of political power in the country.
The distribution will shift as contenders for leadership strike new balances
in the political scales. A Communist party's Central Committee, for example,
does not exercise decision-making powers when the top leader dominates the
Presidium. When there is a struggle for power, however, political intelligence
turns with especial interest to the Central Committee, which may be called on
to arbitrate the disagreements. Such was the case in June 1957, when Khrushchev
successfully appealed to the Central Committee to undo the temporary victory
won by his "anti-party" opposition in the Presidium.
Sometimes the lesser organs and individuals of the party or government are
usefully watched for the mirror images they afford of the real power patterns.
Who is selected to give the major addresses at party congresses? Do the speeches
of delegates to a Chinese party congress echo the opinions of Liu Shao-chi or the
sentiments of other leaders? What prominent figures are not even in attendance?
When congresses, central committees, and other such bodies are not in session,
political intelligence can sometimes follow the fortunes of rival groupings in the
everyday vehicles of propaganda. Is there a renewal of emphasis in China on
the importance of military subordination to party control? Perhaps some case
is building up against one of the marshals. Is there a clear reticence by an East
European government to join in the denigration of Stalin? Evidently the old
guard of the party is still in the saddle. Do Pravda and Izvestia editorials slant in
different directions? A new challenge to the top leader may be in the making.
But political intelligence can hardly limit itself to watching maneuver in the
government and party. The elites govern only insofar as their authority is ac-
cepted below; and the degree of acceptance is one of the central concerns of
political intelligence. The attention here is riveted on society at large, and much
of the coverage could be designated as sociological intelligence. In Africa and
other developing areas, this means a sharp eye on the disintegration of tribal or
rural societies, the rapid pace of urbanization, the separation of youth from family,
and the resultant vacuum of values that is so incompatible with the social dis-
ciplines necessary for political stability. The temper of the Tamils in Ceylon,
of the students in South Vietnam, of the Indian tin miners in Bolivia, of the
Palestinians in Jordan, this is the material of rabid political passion and sometimes
the best measure of a government's grip on office.
In Communist countries, the authorities are especially prideful of their in-
sights into popular attitudes and of their abilities to enlist popular support. Mao
Tse-tung boasts that he keeps his hand on the "pulse of the masses." He does
not mean so much that policy is trimmed to existing public opinion as that keen
attention goes to the feasibility of shaping public opinion to accept policy. Politi-
cal intelligence therefore stays attuned to Communist propaganda lines, both for
what they indicate about official policy and about domestic reaction to official
policy. When a regime's propaganda demands a "rectification" program to
"purify party and government organizations by resolutely weeding out bad
elements which have sneaked in," rails at the "hooliganism" of youth, lashes the
"conservatism" of peasants, harangues against the "chauvinism" of minorities,
assails the "cosmopolitanism" of intellectuals, on such occasions the Communists
themselves speak eloquently to political intelligence of popular dissatisfactions.
When the propaganda reaches fever pitch, it may speak to political intelli-
gence of Communist miscalculation and frustration. The commune period in
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China, for example, was one of high exaltation, during whic the country s ea ers
seemed genuinely convinced that social reorganization, popular exhortation, and
political indoctrination would combine to bring such a muster of human energies
as to vindiate once and for all their fundamentalist faith in the potentialities of
the new order. The p:ropaganda line was to "let politics take command," that is,
for politics to overrule all technical objections of economists, engineers, and
agronomists. The customary statistical checks on accomplishments were allowed
to lapse almost completely, with authoritative commentary speaking scornfully
of the "mystification" of statistics and elaborating on the virtues of "relying on
the masses." The falsification of numbers eventually became rampant, as the
statisticians became more and more intimidated by injunctions to act as "willing
tools" of the Party, while the Party leaders virtually asked to be deceived by sta-
tistics that indicated achievements unprecedented in agricultural history.
In the end, the realities of serious food shortages intruded through the mists
of error, and the large communes were dropped in favor of organizational forms
that permitted rewards to the peasants which were more commensurate with
individual effort. By this time, a traditional exporter of food had become a large
net importer; the resulting balance-of-payments problem forced a scaling-down
of the industrial imports needed for economic development; and the political credit
of the regime plummeted throughout the land. For political intelligence, the
most pointed lesson was the tenacity of the Communist hold on the reins of power.
Mao Tse-tung and his supporters in the leadership rode through the storm, putting
down occasional mutinous dissent with relatively little difficulty. They came
away from the experience in the early 1960's somewhat sobered by their tech-
nical bungles but with increased confidence in their grip on authority and in their
ability to withstand challenges from all quarters. As with Stalin, who survived
all blunders and beat back all challenges, self-assertion and bellicosity became
more than ever the distinguishing stamps of Mao and the other first-generation
leaders of Communist China.
Political intelligence has had experience enough with twists in party lines to
appreciate the possibilities of eventual shift in Peking to softer accents. It is
never easy to call the turns, but intelligence has to expect them eventually, for
the Communists are tinctured by both "revisionist" and "dogmatic" strains. Mao
Tse-tung, who now works himself into furies at revisionism, once scorned dogma
as "more useless than cow dung." And in the mid-1950's, the Chinese espoused
a "hundred flowers" ideal, with a slogan to "let all flowers bloom, let all schools
of thought contend." China's present backwardness in science, for example,
would be corrected, :(t was said, by giving intellectuals access to ideas from all
sources, Western as well as Communist. English would again be taught in Chi-
nese middle schools, and Western scientific journals would circulate in increasing
number. The propaganda invited freer speech in the land, subject though the
invitation was to the proviso that the newer freedoms meant no sanction for the
propagation of so-called counterrevolutionary views. This was so short a period
in Chinese Communist history as to be perhaps an aberrance from the main
truculent tradition. But intelligence has to be on watch for all straws in the wind
if policy is to take advantage of all opportunities.
When intelligence turns to domestic politics in the developed democracies,
it is working with facts that are generally much easier to come by. Information
is largely overt. When it happens to be privileged, it is still generally acquired
in conformance with the conventions of diplomatic conduct-the authorized
briefing, for example, to a Foreign Service officer from a government official.
Largely on the basis of such overt and near-overt categories of information, politi-
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 200 'tail PeYgencerassesses say fne prospec s ote e ch Socialists. Are7th0 So-
cialists in France attracted toward a popular front with the Communists, who
contributed so impressively to the good showing of Mitterand in his 1965 campaign
against de Gaulle for the French presidency? Or will they move toward a group-
ing with center parties? Or are they incurably addicted to the old ways of
splinter parties and "revolving-door" governments? In Italy, how durable is the
center-left government, when the Socialists will feel periodically compelled by
Communist taunts to assert their militance in behalf of worker interests, to the
unconcealed irritation of the Christian-Democratic right wing of the coalition?
In Canada, how strong is separatist sentiment among the French-speaking citizens
of Quebec? The primary mission of intelligence is not to spy but to com-
prehend and inform. The absence of clandestine sources of information is no
bar to intelligence analysis.
Biographic Intelligence
Biographic intelligence is closely interwoven with the concerns of political
intelligence. It is not that biographic intelligence deals exclusively with political
personalities; on the contrary, biographic intelligence should be well equipped to
range far beyond politics and come up with ready listings of say all the heavy-
water specialists in the Soviet Union. It is simply that politics is so much a
study of personalities and loci of personal power that political intelligence and
biographic intelligence are terms often applied with equal validity to the same
analysis. When the President is to receive a visitor of state, political intelligence
and biographic intelligence combine forces to supply information on the sub-
stantive views of the visitor and his traits of personality. Is he from the left or
right wing of his political party? Does he have public support in his. country,
or is he held in office by the armed forces? Does he speak English? What
commitments does he want from the United States?
For national policy, the paramount interest is of course in men at or near
the top. Whenever the analysis turns on the subject of possible leadership
changes, biographic intelligence has much to offer. It can readily supply listings
by age, for example, of contenders for the top job; in most but not all Communist
countries, the man in his mid-sixties has begun to slip on the succession ladder.
Biographic intelligence is also at hand with information on ethnic origin. Preju-
dice against persons of Jewish origin is too strong a handicap to overcome in the
U.S.S.R. and in Eastern Europe. Nor is it an advantage to come from one
of the non-Russian nationalists recently absorbed into the U.S.S.R. (Finn,
Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian); a Mongol or any other figure not belonging to
the predominant Chinese strain stands a poor chance for the top job in China.
What is the evidence of recent quantitative and qualitative indicators? Bio-
graphic intelligence is always up to date with counts of recent appearances and
conspicuous absences. It can supply the order of appearance of Presidium mem-
bers atop the Lenin mausoleum on May Day. It can give the record of positions
as honorary pallbearers at funeral of old Bolsheviks. It can compare the en-
comiums in birthday greetings to national leaders with the panegyrics of previous
years. It can report the number of constituencies nominating the chief political
figures for the Supreme Soviet. Before the elections in February 1958, Khru-
shchev was nominated 223 times, Bulganin only 15 times. The next month
Bulganin was dropped from the premiership.
The particular allegiances of individual Communists is important. Who is
likely to support whom? The record of sponsor-protege relationships may be
revealing. How many posts in the party apparatus has an aspirant to supreme
leadership packed with his own proteges? How many have remained constant
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to their original sponsor over a years 'T e study o eir s pee e a i
published articles may be instructive. Do they seem, if the analysis is on China,
to sound like Liu Shao-chi or Chou En-lai men? Or is there another rising star,
Defense Minister Lin Fiao perhaps, who is now setting the style of rhetoric?
While the biographic dossiers are fullest for the men in high places, a con-
siderable effort must go into the accumulation of information on lesser figures.
This is especially the case for countries vulnerable to frequent coup and revolu-
tionary overturn. During the Dominican crisis of April 1965, the files of bio-
graphic intelligence were searched for information on the political leanings of
lesser known figures. Which of the leftists showed Castroite sympathies? Which
were better described as populist in orientation, unlikely to coexist in close har-
mony for long with pro-Communist elements?
The thinner dossiers have only skeletal facts; the fuller ones portray the
rounded man. If the intelligence is good, it permits a tabulation of. all his ap-
pointments to government and party posts, his resignations, his arrests, his trips
abroad, his stand on public issues, his family ties to other persons of consequence,
his friendships, enmities, and other associations.
Every now and then, intelligence finds it rewarding to take an across-the-
board look at a regime person-by-person. The death of Chinese politburo mem-
ber Ko Ching-shih in April 1965 was one occasion for such a review. His death
brought the membership of the Central Committee (including alternate members)
down to 181 from the 194 originally elected in 1958. Of the survivors, something
could be said about the number who had not appeared in public recently and
were no longer figures of consequence-a few because they were out of favor,
others possibly for reasons of health. This left a core of high-ranking persons
who were noteworthy for the fact that they were mostly sixty years old and over.
Within a very few years, the government could have a new visage because so
many new faces would have to be brought in to replace the patriarchs. In the
meantime, biographic intelligence would have to keep building its files on the
younger figures, if it was to be timely with information to American policymakers
about the likely attributes of Communist China's emerging second-generation
leadership.
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Chapter 6
Economic Intelligence
"Victory in modern war," observed Hanson Baldwin just after World War
II, "is no longer won by the big battalions but by the big factories, backed by
the big laboratories and the busy scientists." 1
Some qualification to this view seemed in order when one equated "big
battalions" in the atomic age to nuclear weapons. To some minds, the im-
possibility of a long war in a situation of all-out nuclear conflict made the size
of forces in being the most important consideration in analyses of national
power; there would be no time, as there had been in World War II, to convert
plowshares into swords and so tip the military scales with economic strength
after war was declared. In this theoretical construct, it was possible to show
that the concerns of economic intelligence might become less and less relevant
to meaningful analysis. For several reasons, however, just the opposite has
turned out to be the case.
First, the economic advances of the U.S.S.R. in the 1950's enabled the Com-
munists to throw out the challenge of "peaceful economic competition." It be-
came clearly important to keep abreast of Soviet economic performance quite
apart from any consideration of military threat, but rather for any bearing on
rival standings in the cold war.
Second, Korea and Indochina and a number of lesser conflict situations
compelled continuing attention to the economic implications of military hos-
tilities that did not involve the use of nuclear weapons. The strains on France's
budget constituted one of the important factors undermining the French resolve
to hold on in Indochina. The potential strain on China's economy became an
important subject for economic intelligence in any estimate of how far into
India the Chinese Communists would penetrate in 1962.
Third, it became increasingly clear that the atom bomb was not yet the
cheap equalizer to cut major powers down to the military size of smaller
countries. The costs of maintaining military establishments after World War II
ran unprecedentedly high. In particular, the dues for membership in the nuclear
club were, for many governments, prohibitive. The economic capability of a
country to sustain exorbitant defense expenditures thus clearly became a matter
of intelligence concern. Granted that all-out war might be short, the buildup
would be long. The devastating nuclear war, Edward Teller noted, "will be
measured in hours, possibly in fractions of hours. The period in which the
decision is made as to who wins the war, on the other hand, will be long, such
as ten years preceding the time of the war." 2 The analytical task was analogous
to the older calculations of war potential-that is, the economic strength that
could be converted into combat power in wartime. Only now, the matter of in-
terest was perhaps better called defense potential-the economic capability to
sustain expensive military postures before war started.
'Hanson W. Baldwin, The Price of Power (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), p. 14.
'Washington Sunday Star, January 13, 1957, p. A-28.
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Gross National Product
Economic growth in the U.S.S.R. during the 1950's was rapid-probably
better than six percent a year on the average, in terms of gross national product.
The growth rate slowed appreciably in the 1960's, partly because of failures in
agriculture, in large part because the arms race with the United States put such
serious strain on the Soviet economy. There was an upsurge of expenditures
in the U.S.S.R. on research and development of space and advanced weapons
systems, on missile procurement, on production of nuclear bombs and ground
electronic equipment.
In the United States, which chronically produces below capacity levels,
defense spending can be a stimulus to the economy. In the U.S.S.R. where
production is closer to capacity, the sharp boost in defense outlay meant a
diversion of funds from industrial investment and a slowdown in the drive for
modernization of plant facilities. The Soviet defense potential, in short, was
subject to some severe constraints; and to appraise the constraints, economic in-
telligence started with an examination of the Soviet Union's gross national prod-
uct-the total value of all the goods and services produced during the year.
Other things being equal, the bigger the GNP the more a nation can spend
on arms. One of the things that does not stay equal is the size of the population.
If it is growing, per capita production is not going up as fast as total output, and
the amount that can be spent on defense is to that extent diminished. Another
thing that is not equal is the nation's commitment to rising living standards. If
the leaders have promised to build homes, they must allocate less for building
arsenals. The problem for economic intelligence is to consider such qualifications
and determine how much of the gross national product represents defense po-
tential-that is, how much can be directed to the military sector. There is,
however, no one figure for defense potential to fit all international situations,
and economic intelligence has to make its calculation on the basis of reasonable
assumptions about the: situation. A population will sacrifice much if the country
is invaded. On the other hand, consumer goods incentives are necessary to
hold up production levels when the threat to national security is less imminent.
The theory and concepts are clear enough, but economic intelligence confronts
difficult measurement problems. There are components of GNP on which the
U.S.S.R. does not publish figures, and a considerable program of intelligence
research is necessary to fill the gaps. Quite apart from the sketchiness of the
data, intelligence struggles with the problem of valuation. The Soviet GNP
can be stated as so many dollars, but it makes a difference to know what values
are imputed to each category of output. Is it right to value the services of Soviet
barbers according to their ruble earnings? If they are as efficient as American
barbers, this procedure understates Soviet GNP in any comparison with the
United States. One calculation of Soviet GNP in 1959 showed that it was about
a fourth of U.S. GNP when each category of production was valued on the basis
of ruble costs. The figure went up to a half when costs in the United States
were imputed to each of the respective categories.3
The case for one method of valuation as against the other is rarely clear-cut. Any country
shows up better if its output is valued according to the other country's costs. The logic of
this proposition is perhaps best understood in the context of the economic principle that
countries tend to produce the goods they can produce the cheapest. If France tends to
specialize in the production of wine and Germany of beer, France shows up better in a
comparison of the two countries if the higher costs of producing German wine are imputed
to the output of French wine. Correspondingly, a higher figure is imputed to German pro-
duction, if German beer is valued on the basis of what it costs to manufacture beer in France.
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 App i In? act as`~ipp ry0tool or an a ysis. RTh a aeiinl'tilveApicture or cierens e
potential requires attention also to less aggregative measures that indicate the
performance of individual industries.
Industry Analysis
The defense potential of several prosperous Western countries shows up well
after a first look at the aggregative indexes like GNP and industrial production.
But these countries have a small industrial base in advanced weapons and related
products like electronics. Over the shorter run, this is one of the severely limit-
ing features on their defense potential. There are others, and economic in-
telligence should know the details.
In the case of the Communist countries, the details are not easy to get at.
When the Chinese had something to boast about in the 1950's, they considered
their propaganda interests well served by putting out considerable information
on petroleum production, steel ingot output, and other categories of industrial
achievement. When the reasons for boastfulness disappeared in the early 1960's,
the Chinese stopped releasing such figures, and intelligence had to fill in as best
it could on the basis of other data.
For some items, the Communists never released output figures. Military
aircraft production is a secret, and intelligence takes several different approaches
toward its estimate of the figure. One approach is by way of the data on air
force order of battle and tables of equipment. Another is through available in-
formation on plant capacities. If the answers from several approaches check
out at least approximately with each other, intelligence finds itself with the
basis for an estimate of the production figures.
Indirect approaches also have to serve economic intelligence for production
figures on certain minerals, gold for example. Any Soviet citizen who disclosed
absolute production figures for precious metals would be severely prosecuted
under the State Secrets Act of 1947, as amended in 1956 and again in 1959. Still,
economic intelligence is not entirely lost for figures. It has at hand old statistics
on Czarist gold stocks, and it can compute with varying margins of error the
components entering into annual additions and withdrawals by the Communists.
Fair figures are available, for example, on Soviet gold sales abroad. As for
production, the Soviets themselves published the figures up through the mid-
1020's. The annual accretions to the Soviet gold stock have become a little
more difficult to estimate for the years from 1927 on, when Stalin imposed his
more secretive standards. There is, as a result, some disagreement among
authorities on the subject, with the figures derived from sources accessible to
economic intelligence running lower than other calculations .4
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Agriculture
Economic intelligence pays the closest attention to the food sector, first
because it has proved to be such a severe constraint on the defense potential of
Communist countries, second because it has had such important implications
for the political standing of Communist leaders at home and for the prestige
of communism in international affairs. In May 1957, a cocky Khrushchev
made political capital out of his boast to overtake the United States in per
capita production of milk, butter, and meat. At a Communist Party plenum
on agriculture in March 1962, he admitted failure:
We simply do not have enough meat. If we remain with the present dis-
position of sown crops, and with the present yields, we shall have no feed.
There will be no meat or milk either today or tomorrow a
Agriculture in Communist countries is invariably starved for investment
funds. Mechanization and the use of new seed varieties in the U.S.S.R., al-
though more widespread now than under Stalin, are still far below American
standards. For a time, Khrushchev reversed a downward production trend at
relatively low cost by expanding acreage in the new lands of Siberia and Ka-
zakhstan. When the original soil fertility and moisture were used up, weed in-
festation increased and output fell. In 1963, a severe drought in both the older
farming areas and in the new lands produced a situation of near disaster. It
took heavy imports of grain from the West to save the day for Russian con-
sumers. The Soviet leadership was forced to take decisive measures in agri-
6 Richard Ruggles and Henry Brodie, "An Empirical Approach to Economic Intelligence in
World War II," Journal of the American Statistical Association (March 1947), pp. 72-91.
U.S., Central Intelligence; Agency, Production of Grain in the U.S.S.R., CIA/RR ER 64-33,
October 1964, p. 7. (Unclassified.)
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 co c! Fig
"am%ihou~/programsI oRc~mbat0wiind erosion, o extend
irrigation, and to increase applications of lime, as well as plans to expand pro-
duction of fertilizers, pesticides, and farm machinery.
The calculations of economic intelligence on Soviet agriculture rely heavily
on the announcements of the Communists themselves. Intelligence does not
of course accept Communist figures uncritically; it makes adjustments. Stalin's
agricultural statistics, for example, were based on the concept of "biological
yield"-the grain as it stood in the fields-and had to be adjusted to make
them comparable with Western figures based on "barn yield"-the figure
after harvesting. Today the Soviet statistics are more nearly but still not exactly
comparable with figures calculated on a "barn yield" basis; the Soviet measure-
ments include excessive moisture weight and foreign matter. There is, more-
over, evidence that local authorities sometimes construct Potemkin villages
of falsified statistics to outwit the central authorities in Moscow. Acres of
unharvested grain are reported as harvested. Farm managers dip into feed and
seed stocks to report fulfillment of production plans-a practice that equates to
the reporting of grain production both in the year of harvest and the year fol-
lowing. When the political pressure is heavy to grow corn, land planted in
oats is reported to be in corn. Production on private plots may be included in
reports to Moscow with the production attributable to the collective or state
farm. Whereas the estimates of economic intelligence on grain production in
the U.S.S.R. were fairly close to Soviet official statistics throughout most of the
1950's, the Soviet figures have had to be substantially discounted in recent years.
In the case of China, the discrepancy between official figures and the
truth was especially wide during the commune and "leap forward" drives of
1958-61. When official claims became so clearly and embarrassingly inconsistent
with the mounting evidences of widespread malnutrition and large food imports,
the Chinese finally stopped releasing figures on grain production. Economic
intelligence continued, however, to make its own estimates on the basis of in-
formation on yields, weather reports, and other data.
Balance of Payments
Part of a country's defenses represent a foreign input-the jet fighters im-
ported by Israel, for example. This foreign input has to be financed in a way
that does not draw down a country's gold or other monetary reserves. The
state of the country's international payments and receipts (or the balance of
payments in the terminology of economic accounting) therefore tells a good
deal to economic intelligence about defense potential, as well as about the
health of the economy in other respects. The British economy, for example,
was booming and blooming in the mid-1960's, insofar as indicators like record
lows in unemployment and record highs in gross national product were any
guide. But the country was paying out more to foreigners than it was taking
in, and in Britain, where so many foreign institutions keep funds on deposit, the
consequent loss of monetary reserves might have led to a disastrous run on
the pound.
In this situation, the political pressures became increasingly strong for a re-
duction of Britain's military commitments abroad, since these contributed sub-
stantially to the balance-of-payments deficit. Some sections of British opinion
favored the withdrawal of the British Army on the Rhine, although West Ger-
many was offsetting part of the fund.outflow by its agreement to make certain
purchases in Britain. Other sections of opinion argued that closing down
British military installations "east of Suez" would do even more to help the bal-
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ance of payments. Whatever the merits o each argument, it was c e t
the payments crisis was a telling point to the British in favor of major
defense cuts.
The British balance-of-payments statistics are in the public record, and the
bearing on Britain's military capacities is openly debated in parliament. If
the balance-of-payments data are less freely available on the Communist coun-
tries, economic intelligence is still well enough informed generally on the situation.
The Chinese Communists may not publish in detail their foreign earnings from
exports, but economic intelligence gets a start in calculations by looking at the
import figures published by the non-Communist countries. It is similarly not
possible for Communist countries to hide entirely their purchases from abroad.
In 1963,. for example, its crop shortfalls forced the U.S.S.R. to buy some 800
million dollars of grain from the West. Since the U.S.S.R. could not well con-
ceal purchases of this magnitude, economic intelligence could readily enter them
into an arithmetic that worked out to a substantial limitation on Soviet ability
to buy capital equipment and other goods abroad.
Some figures for 1964 are suggestive of the methods of economic intelligence.
It knew that the total value of the U.S.S.R.'s foreign trade was about 15 billion
dollars in that year, and it knew how much of this trade was with the indus-
tralized countries of the West. It knew that Soviet purchases from the West
were substantially in excess of sales, had in fact exceeded sales consistently for
a decade. It knew that the U.S.S.R. had financed this deficit by two methods-
substantial gold sales and medium-term credits from Western banks and sup-
pliers. It calculated that the Soviets now had reason to worry about their
dwindling gold reserves-down by about a half in the decade. The Soviets
had reasons, moreover, to be reflective about new borrowing, for the curve of
repayments on old credits was rising sharply. The weight of evidence was that
the Soviet leadership would scrimp on imports of industrial equipment and
raw materials, despite the adverse effects on the U.S.S.R.'s economic growth rate.
Transportation
In order to bring its military power to bear in any fighting theatre, a country
has to transport its power to that theatre. When China invaded India, the task
for the transportation analysts in economic intelligence was to calculate the effect
of the long supply line on the scale of the Chinese military effort.
The problem in this case was essentially one of highway logistics, since there
were no railroads all the way to the Tibetan borderlands adjacent to India, and
the possible contribution of air transport was marginal. The Chinese have three
main access roads to Tibet, winding some 700 to 1,800 miles from railheads over
very rugged terrain that climbs to elevations as high as 16,000 feet. Economic
intelligence, knowing the carrying capacities of the roads, could set these against
the supply requirements of the forces already in Tibet and determine what excess
capacity was available to support additional Chinese troops in operations against
India.
The intelligence allowed for trucks moving at a certain rate of speed, a rate
that was consistent with knowledge about the surface conditions of the roads.
Since flow quantity is a product of rate of speed and the number of trucks
moving, the calculations allowed for proper distancing between trucks, taking
into account the "concertina" effect of truck convoy operations. The other rele-
vant factors that entered into the calculations included reductions in capacity due
to vehicle breakdowns, number of impossible operating days during bad weather,
driver rest periods, night operations, and other operational contingencies. With
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figures for supply requirements rations, petroleum, ammunition, and other sup-
plies), economic intelligence thus attempted a first approximation to the num-
ber of troops the Chinese could commit if hostilities were to go on long enough
to exhaust existing stockpiles in Tibet.
The same sort of computation has to be made when appropriate for other
methods of transport. Miscalculations by Stalin's transportation analysts about
the size of airlift the Americans might muster perhaps entered into his Berlin
blockade decision of 1948. During the Korean war, when the possibility of a
naval blockade against Communist China was debated in America, transportation
analysts in intelligence were called on to make the relevant calculations. The
calculations considered the capacity of the Communists to transport goods by
rail over the Soviet Union's Trans-Siberian Railroad link to China. It was not
possible to make through rail shipments from the U.S.S.R. to China because the
track gauges of the two systems were different. The delays resulting from trans-
shipment arrangements at the border, availabilities of rolling stock, turnaround
time at terminals, the limitations of bottleneck sections in the Chinese railway
net, these and other factors entered into intelligence calculations of China's
vulnerability to naval blockade.
The transportation lines that move purely domestic trade of course also fall
in the realm of economic intelligence. Even in the relatively self-sufficient coun-
tries, there is economic specialization by region, and within regions between
town and countryside. When transport facilities broke down in China during
the disorders attending the conflict between the Nationalists and the Communists,
serious food shortages in cities occurred alongside surpluses in nearby regions
of the countryside. One of the acknowledged achievements of the Communists
after their victory was their quick restoration of transportation facilities. Food
shortages recurred in poor crop years, but the restored transport net made pos-
sible the better distribution of supplies. The Communists thus managed on
the whole to eliminate local famines, even if they had to do this by spreading
the poverty.
Manpower
The manpower analysts in economic intelligence take their point of departure
from the total size of a foreign country's population. There are countries, like
the U.S.S.R., in which the size is on balance a source of national strength. There
are others, like India, in which it will be for a long time to come a drain on
national power.
From overall size of the population, intelligence moves on to the quantity
and quality of manpower available for specified activities. The number of males
of military age in North Vietnam is the stepping-stone figure that economic
intelligence takes toward an estimate of the size of army Hanoi can muster. As
the calculation proceeds, it is successively qualified by such factors as the health
characteristics of the population and the low per-capita outputs that require
such a large proportion of the population in developing countries to remain. on
the farm even in circumstances of fullest mobilization. For developed countries,
where capabilities in advanced weapons are relevant, the matter of manpower
availabilities has other aspects. The number of men of military age is still
important, but so are the numbers in other categories-engineers and scientists
in aerospace electronics, for example.
When intelligence turns from issues of mobilization potential to considera-
tions of economic viability in peacetime, the subject of population growth rates
sometimes proves crucial for the analysis. Concerns of American policymakers
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about the effectiveness of foreign aid policies brought intelligence into the con-
troversial field of population pressures back in the 1950's. The 1959 study by
State intelligence on "World Population Trends and Problems" foresaw that
rapid population growth might "prove to be one of the greatest obstacles of
economic and social progress and the maintenance of political stability in many
of the less developed areas of the world." 7 The subject of population increase is
invariably brought into National Intelligence Estimates on countries or regions
where the problem is most serious-India, Communist China, Latin America.
Some governments are beginning to promote programs encouraging contra-
ception. The scale of official measures taken so far has been too small to affect
the demographic statistics much, but the evidence is of more energetic educa-
tional campaigns in the offing. The Chinese alternate between Marxist avowals
of faith in the ability of communism to provide for all and propaganda drives
to extend knowledge of contraception throughout the country. Their census of
1953 disclosed a population that was some 100 million more than was previously
estimated. Population increase has added another 150 million since then. These
large numbers have evidently impressed themselves on those Chinese whose
responsibilities in economic planning require them every year to match food
availabilities against the expanding number of people. Much too often in recent
years for the comfort of this group, China has had to draw down its foreign ex-
change reserves by expensive imports of grain from abroad. However, the eco-
nomic planners are careful about affront to the party doctrinaries, who will not
countenance explicit contradiction of a sacred scripture that is dotted with anti-
Malthusian quotations from Marx, Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung. The subject has
received the joint attention of economic intelligence and political intelligence.
Domestic Finance
When Hitler came to power in 1933, Germany's poverty in gold reserves
appeared in some superficial commentary as a serious limitation on his capabili-
ties for aggression. In the actual event, of course, Hitler was not critically
handicapped by his financial problems. He drew his economic strength from the
employment of idle workers and the fuller utilization of unused plant capacities.
As Hitler's enterprises illustrated and as the allied effort in World War II
underlined, there are circumstances in which finances are not limiting and in
which economic intelligence must make its analysis almost wholly in real rather
than money terms. These circumstances occur in the context of inspired national
effort-usually in an all-out war situation when national survival seems to be at
stake. By very high taxes, forced bond sales, and other such financial recourses
not ordinarily tolerable to people, efficiently-administered governments of de-
veloped countries can command the labor and resources they need. For eco-
nomic intelligence in this situation, it is the availability of resources, not finance,
which is taken as limiting in analyses of defense potential.
This is not, however, the situation in which economic intelligence has to
make most of its analyses. In many conflicts, governments do not try or are
simply unable to enlist the full will of their peoples. Revenues then fall far short
of requirements. The disordered finances of Chiang Kai-shek's government was
a serious limitationon his fighting capabilities against the Communists. Inflation
was rampant and popular morale in Nationalist China disintegrated. Similar
problems of money management plague the developing countries today. In-
flation is the typical experience of these countries, sometimes to finance struggles
' U.S., Department of State, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, World Population Trends
and -Problems, July 23, 1959, p. 18. (Unclassified).
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times just to get the funds necessary for ordinary operations of government.
For these countries, intelligence assessments of prospects draw heavily on analyses
of financial instabilities.
Finances in the Communist countries are generally more stable, but economic
intelligence turns to analysis of their state budgets for two reasons. First, they
reveal much about the economy at large, because so many activities that are in
the domain of private business in capitalist countries are financed through state
budgets by the Communists. Most investment in the U.S.S.R., for example, is
financed through the state budget. Second, the Communist state budgets are
of special interest for what they indicate about military expenditures. This is
not to say that intelligence accepts the Soviet figures on defense expenditures
without qualification. Economic intelligence tries to get at the true picture by
uncovering the "hidden" defense expenditures in the budget, some of these
apparently included in accounts which the Soviet budget describes as "residuals."
Military Costing
For economic intelligence, the budget is a first step toward knowledge about
Soviet military expenditures. As a total, the defense figure in the budget is
suggestive of the overall constraint the Soviet leadership is accepting on military
expenditures. Without the total for a guideline, intelligence could go astray by
making separate calculations of the possible Soviet effort on intercontinental missile
systems, on electronic networks for military warning, on aircraft for airlift forces,
on conventional weapons. Each calculation would be consistent with accepted
Soviet capabilities in the respective field, but the aggregate would be far higher
than what the Soviets have indicated can be spent on defense as a whole. The
effect of such unsophisticated analysis would be to justify uneconomic planning
in the United States to meet presumed bomber gaps, missile gaps, and other
military gaps all at once.
The fact of the matter is, of course, that many new military programs are
feasible for the Soviets, but neither the U.S.S.R. nor any other country will ever
be rich enough to carry them all out simultaneously. It must choose, and the
choice is made after comparisons of costs and consideration of the presumed
effectiveness of proposed weapons systems. Not that hard economics will be
completely governing in final decisions, but it will set its bounds on likely di-
rections of Soviet military planning.
What intelligence has to do is very much what American defense officials
have to do in determining current and future force structures for the United
States. The calculation involves a consideration of possible strategies and the
associated differences of forces and weapons systems. This involves extended
computations: first to total up costs for each military program and then to total
up each likely complex of programs.
The computational format that shows the relation of costs to specified
programs differs from conventional budgetary presentations. The latter show
expenditures for pay, construction, and other outlays by military branches. The
intelligence requirement, however, is to compute expenditures attributable to
specific programs that cut across the traditional accounting categories. The ad-
vantage of this program format is that it makes explicit the cost considerations
which enter into final decisions about building say a fleet of missile-equipped
nuclear-powered submarines. And it shows how a decision to go ahead with
one program must limit the capacity to adopt another.
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Fuller descriptions of the method are available in several good studies.8
For purposes of this exposition, it suffices at this point to repeat that the Soviets,
like the United States, cannot spend all they would like in one sector when there
are compelling reasons to maintain expenditures in other sectors. The method-
ology offers a tool for economic intelligence to determine the scope of choice open
for practical purposes to Soviet defense officials. This is, not to assume that the
Soviets have adopted accounting practices only recently introduced in the United
States Department of Defense. The assumption is only that the methodology
sets forth the economic considerations that enter explicitly or implicitly into
rational decision-making among all governments. Where the considerations enter
only implicitly or are qualified by comparative political strengths of various
pressure groups, the Soviet decisions on military programming do not naturally
reflect comparative cost-effectiveness relations to fine degrees of accuracy. But
the methodology still affords insights into the likely shape of the Soviet military
challenge, as it is constrained by the factor of limited resources.
One of the features of the format is that it sets forth costs over the life of the
program, projecting schedules of annual expenditures for research, development,
production, and operations. After estimating likely combinations of programs,
economic intelligence is thus in a position to analyze economic impacts in suc-
cessive years. Different program mixes mean different impacts even if total ruble
costs are the same. The changeover from tanks and artillery to missile systems,
for example, tends to reduce demands on the steel industry and increase demands
on the electronic industry. There are new demands, which economic intelligence
can trace, on scarce labor skills for research and development, then for production,
later for maintenance. The analysis can lead on to conclusions about likely
repercussions in civilian and in other military sectors.
Theconclusions are invariably qualified. This is hardly surprising, since the
determination of probable costs is difficult enough for American program analysts
even when they are setting up their budget models of American defense programs.
When intelligence analysts attempt the same exercise for a Soviet defense program,
they may have to apply parameters from U.S. experience. It is conjectural, how-
ever, how close say Soviet testing expenditures in a certain military program will
come to testing expenditures in the most nearly comparable American program.
Taken alone, the technique has wide margins of probable error. As is usually the
case in intelligence, each technique serves best when it is used in conjunction
with others. So used, military costing illuminates the character of Soviet military
competition and improves the basis for sound defense planning and programming
in the United States.
Intelligence and East-West Trade
The World War II restrictions against trading with the enemy became
partially operative again in 1948, when the United States imposed controls on
certain trade with the Soviet Union and the Soviet-dominated countries of East-
ern Europe. The new restrictions constituted a major departure in peacetime
policy; throughout the inter-war years of the 1920's and 1930's, the U.S. Govern-
ment had placed no official obstacles in the way of American businessmen who
wanted to trade with the Soviet Union. American private corporations had
in fact helped install in the Soviet Union the sort of industrial equipment that was
now to be placed on prohibited lists.
e David Novick (ed), Program Budgeting: Program Analysis and the Federal Budget, A
RAND Corporation-sponso:red Research Study (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1965), pp. 50-82 and 218-236.
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e a ministration of trade controls has involved close liaison with intelli-
gence. The liaison has been necessary for two reasons.
First, the compilation of items to be placed on the denied lists: this required
prior intelligence analysis of the contribution that trade in these goods would
make to Soviet military capability. In the case of goods which had both a
military and civilian use, economic intelligence helped determine legitimate civil-
ian requirements, so that quantitative controls might be imposed on exports in
excess of those requirements.
Second, effective enforcement: this called for intelligence support in getting
information on Communist and other efforts to evade the controls. The Com-
munists could get deliveries, for example, by using consignees in third countries.
Economic intelligence could contribute to dossiers on foreign firms which had
acted as such consignees or had some other record of suspect activity in trade
with the Communists. Applications to the U.S. Department of Commerce for
licenses to export goods on a denied list to these firms would be approved only
after the most careful scrutiny to make sure that the exports would not be
transshipped to Communist territory.
Economic intelligence could also help agencies enforcing such financial con-
trols as freezing of certain foreign funds. If dollar accounts in American banks
owned by Chinese Communists were to be frozen, for example, the Treasury had
to know who was the actual not nominal depositor. In World War II, Swiss
businessmen who were the ostensible owners of large dollar accounts had in fact
acted on behalf of German principals.
Economic intelligence has the responsibility to give policy a full appreciation
of the diverse interests in the West that must be accommodated in the shaping of
economic denial programs. Up to a point, the other industrial countries have
cooperated with the United States. Beginning in 1950, these countries worked
out certain minimum standards for export controls by which all agreed to abide.
Further impetus to the cooperation of these countries in the period of Marshall
Plan aid was given by the Mutual Defense Assistance Control Act of 1951. The
Battle Act, to give the more familiar name of this legislation, required the termi-
nation of American aid to countries shipping arms, ammunition, and atomic energy
materials to the Communists, and it authorized the President to terminate aid
if other specified items were shipped. The export controls of other countries,
however, are typically less severe than those of the United States, which is almost
alone in applying such extreme sanctions as total or near-total embargoes on
trade with the Asian Communist governments and Cuba.
Objectives of economic denial are framed with full knowledge that it is
not likely to constitute a knockout blow against any Communist government.
In recent years, economic intelligence has contributed to judgments supporting
flexibility of policy stance. In contrast to the embargo on trade with Communist
China, the United States now readily grants most license applications for ship-
ments to Poland and Yugoslavia. These East European countries, moreover,
have received food aid and been accorded most-favored-nation tariff treatment.
Dean Rusk set forth the rationale to Congress in 1964:
Since the Communist countries no longer form a completely monolithic
bloc in political terms, it follows that we should not treat them as a mono-
lith in trade terms. Our trade policies should be custom tailored to fit the
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need-designed to differentiate among communist countries in accordance
with the conditions and behavior of individual countries and our specific ob-
jectives toward each .9
The Non-Communist Economies
The balance of forces in the world is affected only in part by how well or
poorly the Communists do. America also has a stake in 'the economic health of
the non-Communist countries and in the direction of their economic policies.
The coverage of economic intelligence, therefore, includes inflation in Colombia,
economic development programs in the depressed southern half of the Italian
boot, balance-of-payrrments crisis in Britain, French conversions of dollar holdings
into gold. The collected information is likely to be overt in the main, available
in the press and other open sources. However unproblemed the task of collec-
tion, the conclusions seldom follow inescapably, and economic intelligence takes
up much of the burden of analysis.
One frequent area of analysis covers the economic relations of non-Com-
munist countries with the Communists. The trade figures do not generally add
up to really significant magnitudes; comparatively few non-Communist countries
have as much as five percent of their foreign trade with the Communists. Those
that depend on Communist markets for much of their exports-Iceland and Fin-
land, for example--do of course bear watching for vulnerability to Communist
economic pressures. But economic intelligence does not see directions of trade
as running invariably parallel with lines of political advantage to the United
States or the U.S.S.R. As their principal market, the United States is often the
target of grievance in developing countries for falling prices of say bananas or
coffee. The balance of advantage can thus turn against a power if its domi-
nating position as a major customer leaves it open to charges of economic ex-
ploitation.
The aid figures also get close intelligence scrutiny. The accounts kept in
intelligence show the Communist aid credits announced; there is no problem
getting this information, for the credits are loudly trumpeted. The column
showing deliveries on the credits is only approximate in its accuracy but invariably
clear about the long time lag in implementing aid commitments. Economic in-
telligence also keeps its record of attitudes in recipient countries-Egyptian
charges about breakdowns of bulldozers and boilers, for example. At most, in
countries like India and Egypt, Soviet aid seems to obtain a certain consideration
for Soviet diplomatic interests. Aid has not moved these countries off their
basically neutralist positions in international affairs, nor has it attracted popula-
tions to alignment with the Communists in domestic affairs.
Whether or not the developing countries are recipients of Communist aid,
they are the center of Communist hopes for the next revolutionary wave. There
is sufficient plausibility in the Communist propositions of high revolutionary po-
tential to justify the concerns of intelligence about the economic progress of these
countries. The typical National Intelligence Estimate or other across-the-board
survey on a Latin American country will therefore probe the economic dimen-
sion-land tenure systems, stop-go flows of investment from abroad, recurrent
flights of domestic capital, exorbitant drains on national treasuries of deficit-
ridden state-owned enterprises, price outlooks for major export commodities.
Analyses on Brazil, for example, have followed the record since World War
II of industrial boom in a setting of inflationary spiral. The boom became a bust
Dean Rusk, "East-West Trade," Statement before Senate Committee on Foreign Relations,
March 13, 1964, reprinted in the Department of State Bulletin (March 30, 1964), p. 478.
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Pr lyEi, when the inflation accelerated to breakneck velocity and President
Goulart's political extremism alarmed foreign and domestic investors. After the
new administration of Castello Branco seized power, the analyses probed the na-
tional capacity to endure the deflationary pressures of his stabilization program,
then went on to appraise longer-term prospects for economic growth if the
stabilization wringer succeeded in bringing a return of business confidence. Re-
search studies included considerable attention to balance-of-payments problems
that had been brought on by the slide in coffee prices, the drying up of capital
inflows, and the mounting obligations of amortization and interest service on
past borrowings from abroad. The studies considered some of the major struc-
tural defects of the Brazilian economy-the inordinate dependence on coffee for
export earnings, the lagging development of rural areas, the inadequate transport
network, the downward pressure on per capita incomes resulting from population
growth of more than three percent a year, the bloated empire of state enterprises
which required large government subsidies to cover ordinary operating expenses.
Economic intelligence on the developed areas-Japan and Western Europe
primarily-also draws largely on the available mass of overt data. The story
here has brighter hues than the analyses on the developing countries. In gen-
eral, the studies document impressions of resurgence that have taken on pro-
portions of virtual "economic miracles." There were problem periods, however,
when economic strains took on grave political importance. Italy's inflationary
pressures and alarmingly large balance-of-payments deficits in 1963 and 1964
impaired Premier Moro's chances to hold his center-left coalition together.
Prime Minister Wilson's policies to stem the accelerated flight from the pound
after Labor's victory in 1964 were crucial for his political prospects.
The conjuncture of economic and political currents is perhaps most prominent
in the intelligence analyses on the European Common Market. Intelligence re-
search has followed the progressive lowering of tariff and other economic barriers
within the Common Market, with attention to the political strains engendered
between forces in Europe (like de Gaulle) concerned for the preservation of na-
tional sovereignties and those who saw the future in a progressive extension of the
supranational ideal.
The United States, for its part, was sympathetic to the ideal of European union
but hopeful that the shape of union not imply any contraction of important Ameri-
can markets in Europe. For this reason, intelligence analyses frequently touched
on Common Market opinion about such subjects as agricultural integration. The
American interest was that integration not involve European farm support prices
at levels that tended to expand European production at the expense of American
farm exports. The task was not one of clandestine collection but of overt and
diplomatic reporting, with intelligence research and analysis making its periodic
appraisals of the situation for the consideration of policymaking councils.
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Chapter 7
Military Intelligence
In the spring of 1981, shortly after the inauguration of President Kennedy,
the situation in Laos deteriorated to the point of American decision to redeploy
naval forces in the Pacific. A few months later, Khrushchev forced the Berlin
issue to the point of crisis. The common thread in this quick succession of
crises at the very outset of the new Administration was the heightened danger
of American military engagement against the Communists. The hard American
decisions in these days of trial were necessarily shaped in large part by the
intelligence on Communist military capabilities. The acceptance of Pathet Lao
participation in a coalition government followed from the logic of Pathet Lao
military successes. The resolute decision on Berlin was made only after the
fullest consideration of all the forms of military pressure that the Soviets might
apply. Both cases underscored how pertinent military intelligence could be for
political decision.
Men and Hardware
To ask in a crisis what forces the Communists can throw into the scales of
battle is to ask what forces they have in being and ready reserve. Intelligence
has of course done its work long before on this subject. To begin with,- the
basic intelligence handbooks have good accounts of military command structure-
for the Soviet Union and for virtually every other country-from ministry and
general staff level down through the echelons of subordinate units. The com-
mand structure is a frame for setting forth the order of battle-that is, the per-
sonnel and equipment strength of each military unit. Every unit that military
intelligence identifies is an accretion to fighting power, but it is not a simple
additive process. Units may be under strength, may be only cadre organizations.
There are also calculations to be made of ratios between combat and non-
combat personnel. Communist armies have a high proportion of men on the
firing line; cooks, clerks, and rear services draw from the number of fighting
troops in other armies. The indifference to service support serves the Commu-
nists well when they are fighting on their doorstep. It was the superb logistic
support of rear services, on the other hand, that made American victory possible
in the overseas fighting theatres of World War II. The lesson is instructive for
military intelligence, which has to make estimates of fighting capability in dif-
ferent areas of operations. The Chinese Communists could not sustain offensives
for long periods in Korea because their rear services could not maintain the
necessary flow of materiel to the fighting front.
The order-of-battle job is fine detail work, involving multitudes of posting
entries into card files set up for each identified or suspected military unit. The
drudgery pays off frequently in useful national intelligence. In the early days
of a Taiwan Strait crisis, for example, order-of-battle intelligence may first note
the arrival of one or two military planes at an airfield near the off-shore island
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of Matsu or Quemoy. Once the air division to which the planes belong is as-
certained, the possibility is checked out that the entire division is transferring to
a new base. The same watch goes into the identification of ground units moving
into an area, and intelligence is sooner or later in a position to estimate the
extent of military buildup for the guidance of the White House, State, and other
top officials. The methodology is standard for a variety of situations. When
order-of-battle intelligence on the Viet Cong showed the grouping of forces first
into battalion commands and later into regimental commands, the indication was
that the Viet Cong felt strong enough to move from hit-and-run guerrilla tactics
to larger-scale military assaults.
Useful as the methodology is, it often has a bias toward underestimation.
The method of estimating forces from unit designations does not serve well
when troops are thought to be moving in but information on unit designations is
lacking. Intelligence may accept "unidentified units," but there are fairly stiff
criteria too in the determination of these. Despite reports from refugee and
other sources that Soviet combat forces were disembarking in Cuba, the pre-
vailing intelligence judgment up to the showdown in October 1962 was that
the Soviet personnel were only instructors and advisers, perhaps 10,000 in all
including both military and civilians. Late in October, however, aerial pho-
tography confirmed the presence of organized Soviet combat units, and subse-
quent intelligence appraisals put the October figure for Soviet personnel in Cuba
at about 22,000. Writing about half a year later on the subject, Senate investi-
gators expressed their continuing skepticism of intelligence capabilities on this
subject: "Bearing in mind the lack of hard evidence on the question and the
substantial underestimation of last fall, we conclude that no one in official United
States circles can tell, with any real degree of confidence, how many Russians
are now in Cuba . . ." 1
When order-of-battle intelligence is accurate, it provides information not only
on troop strength but also on hardware. The requisite in the calculation is
knowledge of the equipment organic to say a Chinese Communist air division
or infantry regiment. The identification then of new air divisions and infantry
regiments in the Taiwan Strait area adds up, with allowance for under strength
units, to so many aircraft and so much ground fire power. If the technical intel-
ligence arms of military intelligence have been on the job in collecting data on
performance characteristics-speed, combat radius, and maneuverability of
Chinese Communist jet fighters, for example-the information is well in hand
for an appraisal of the heightened military threat to Quemoy or Matsu.
The intelligence focus on hardware is increasingly sharp now that military
budgets are more and more weighted by the costs of equipment, with budget
decisions in the United States greatly affected by additions to fire power and
strike power abroad. The sources of intelligence information on hardware are
varied. Disabled tanks are captured in the field, whole aircraft are acquired
when Communist pilots defect, the speed and height of flying planes are regis-
tered on radar, the range and other characteristics of missiles in flight are re-
corded in telemetry, ships are photographed in foreign ports or on the high seas.
The testing, deployment, and use in combat or training operations of new
weapons, in other words, generally subjects the weapons to some intelligence
surveillance.
1 U.S., Congress, Senate, Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the Committee on
Armed Services, Investigation of the Preparedness Program: Interim Report on the Cuban
Military Buildup, 88th Cong., 1st Sess., 1963, p. 4.
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Ater a certain point, in act, secrecy ecomes so i cu a governments
decide the balance of national advantage lies in reaping the propaganda value
of some open publicity. May Day displays of new missiles, bombers, and
motorized artillery are cases in point. But due care has to be taken against at-
tempts at deception. At one May Day demonstration in the mid-1950's, foreign
air attaches in Red Square looked up to see jet bombers of a new type, in the class
of the American B-52. One of the Soviet purposes may have been to misdirect
American military programming with a message that the new bombers were in the
stage of quantity production and deployment. The Soviets were actually mov-
ing from bomber into missile production.
As the Russians moved into missiles, the energies of intelligence were bent
to uncovering the capabilities of the new weapons systems. The systems in-
volved complexes of missiles, sites, ground electronics, and skilled personnel.
For intelligence to understand the missile systems meant for intelligence to
acquire data on the performance capabilities of all major components of the
systems. A surface-to-air missile system, for example, included radar capable
of detecting aircraft up to a certain range; the missile itself was effective up to
a certain altitude; a certain amount of time was required between the detection
of a target and the missile launch; so many men were required to man the site;
so much training was required by the operators and by the maintenance techni-
cians; so much time was needed to disassemble the complex and put it back
into operation at another location.
The intelligence task also involved the location of storage areas for missile
fuels and of new construction that might be related to missile emplacement.
The objective of the intelligence effort was acquisition of enough information to
permit tabulations of main characteristics, to enable accurate sketching of princi-
pal features, and to facilitate plots of missile sites throughout the Soviet Union.
The shape of the Soviet transport net helped narrow the intelligence search.
Missiles, fuels, and supporting equipment were massive and could not be moved
far from existing arteries of transport. Intelligence looked at all possible routes
for missile shipments, asked what types of cars were necessary to carry the
weights required, and what routes could accommodate the cars. Vicinities close
to the Trans-Siberian Railroad were obvious targets of intelligence investigation.
The intelligence search was facilitated by Soviet design requirements at first
for overweight warheads, necessitating missiles that were too big to be put easily
in concrete underground silos.
The increasing attention to missiles went on, of course, along .with a con-
tinuing watch over conventional weapons and equipment. Soviet ships were
studied for their suitability in Arctic operations. Chinese Communist naval con-
struction was appraised for its bearing on capabilities beyond coastal waters.
Transport aircraft capacities were estimated to determine how many transport
sorties would be necessary to airlift say a regiment or division. The intelligence
surveillance extended across the spectrum of ordnance, signal equipment, quarter-
master supplies, and other military categories.
Doctrine
The collected information on performance capabilities of military equipment
is a step toward inferential intelligence judgments about strategy and tactics.
The nature of military equipment determines tactical limitations and strategic
applications. Asian resources in manpower alongside comparative poverty in
equipment virtually dictate recourse to human-sea tactics. Countries like the
U.S.S.R., with capabilities in both men and equipment, have a wider range of
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strategies from which to choose, but for them too, the limitations of their equip-
ment shape their strategy and tactics. Does the newest generation of missiles
make the hardening o:E missile sites in the U.S.S.R. more feasible? Or do con-
tinuing problems of hardening suggest alternate strategies based on missiles that
can roam the highways on trucks, that ride up and down railroads on special cars,
that can ply the oceans on surface ships or submarines, that can float along inland
waterways on barges? Is the Soviet space program far enough along to generate
thinking in the U.S.S.R. about the possibilities of orbiting space stations from
which to intercept and destroy missiles in mid-flight?
There is not likely to be full agreement among the military elite of any
country about the strategic and tactical implications of the latest technical ad-
vances in weapons and military equipment. It would hardly do for military
intelligence to mistake its own logic for the prevailing thinking in the U.S.S.R.
or Communist China or any other country. More direct approaches to the facts
about evolving doctrine abroad are available. One is through observation of
training exercises. How was artillery used in support of ground forces in the
latest maneuvers? Are combined maneuvers with allies frequent? What em-
phasis is given in air force training to gunnery, rockets, night flying, close sup-
port of ground troops? How much training is given to militia forces? Do border
security troops participate in maneuvers along frontiers?
The open literature is also helpful. Soviet articles on Western airborne
troops and Soviet claims about the number of parachute jumps made by their
troops in a year are indicative of thinking about the uses of tactical surprise. The
articles on amphibious warfare in Soviet military publications of recent years are
also suggestive, particularly when considered along with the reestablishment of
the Soviet marine corps.
Now that debate has been freed from the constraints of "Stalinist military
science," there is evidence of considerable intellectual ferment in the U.S.S.R.
on the subject of appropriate strategies for the nuclear age. The discussions are
not nearly so uninhibited in the U.S.S.R. as in the United States, but enough is
said to permit some appraisal of the trend of Soviet thinking on major issues.
Are the Soviets committed to nuclear warfare, or do they incline toward a
balanced-force structure that allows flexibility of strategy, that reserves the
use of nuclear weapons to extraordinary circumstances? What are Soviet atti-
tudes toward the view that nuclear war equates with mutual defeat for the nuclear
participants? Are the results of the initial nuclear exchange, in the Russian
analysis, sufficient by themselves to decide victor and loser? If not, what role
do ground forces play in nuclear war? Can nuclear war be a protracted conflict?
What role is envisaged. for the various delivery systems--strategic air power as
well as missiles? What is the thinking about the future of interceptor planes
as more and more surface-to-air missile sites are constructed? How much atten-
tion is going to civil defense?
Under Khrushchev, the trend of thinking for a time inclined toward raising
the weight of nuclear arms and delivery systems in strategic calculations. His
statement to the Supreme Soviet in January 1960 called for retrenchment of
standing forces and greater reliance on missile systems; he proposed a one-third
reduction in military manpower. Khrushchev may have regarded nuclear pre-
paredness only as insurance against unilateral Soviet defeat, not as assurance of
clear-cut Soviet victory. He alluded frequently in speeches to the mutual de-
structiveness of nuclear war, an emphasis that was in no way congenial to the
more militant Chinese.
It seemed to American intelligence that, in addition to the Chinese, the
Soviet generals and marshals had their doubts about the Khrushchevian thesis.
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proposal for a third out in military manpower, Defense Minister Marshal Malinov-
sky warned of the need for "all" types of forces. The turn toward a more
balanced force structure came in 1961, when the Soviets both resumed nuclear
testing and suspended their targeted one-third reduction in manpower at the
half-way point. The vital necessity of nuclear arms was accepted, but its role
was not to be determined by any simplistic criterion of "more rubble for the
ruble." The ground forces were obviously important in a non-nuclear war, and
even in a nuclear war it would take ground forces to consolidate victory. "Mis-
siles and nuclear weapons are powerful military means," Malinovsky declared
at the 22nd Party Congress in October 1961, "but they cannot conquer the ter-
ritory of another state."
The articles in the volume on military strategy edited by Marshal V. D.
Sokolovsky were similarly scrutinized by intelligence for the insights they afforded
into evolving doctrine in the Soviet Union. Despite the differences of opinion
among Soviet military men, intelligence should be able to uncover the main strains
of thought and perhaps determine which viewpoints are currently most influential
in the highest quarters. If the authorities are sharply divided, intelligence can
often uncover that too. The Sokolovsky study, for example, was fairly suggestive
of the Defense Ministry's distaste for pontification on complex matters of military
doctrine by some assertive civilian in the patry: "Military doctrine is not thought
up and codified by an individual or single group of people; it is formed on the
basis of the whole life-experience of a state, and is the result of an extremely
complex and protracted historical process of creation and development of state
ideas." 2
Geographic Intelligence
Geographers in intelligence are mostly concerned with the tangible features
of foreign environments. They inventory the location and identity of physical-
landscape features like vegetation and of cultural features like settlements. They
analyze these features in terms of practical intelligence problems.
The task calls on them often to work with analysts of several intelligence
disciplines. The economic intelligence officer, for example, may require the
cooperation of geographic intelligence for land-use maps and for studies showing
major traffic flow patterns. The political intelligence officer who is going into
depth on the subject of the Sino-Indian border dispute may need the assistance
of geographic intelligence for information on historical changes in areas of effec-
tive administrative jurisdiction, for background information on ethnic character-
istics of local populations, for a map showing a line corresponding to the natural
watershed of the area. However, geography is so much an element of military
appraisals that geographic intelligence is included for explicit attention in this
chapter.
Many facts of geography can be found in any good library, and intelligence
has its own good map libraries for quick reference. The problem areas are those
which have not been mapped in good enough detail for intelligence or which
have been mapped by authorities that guard their findings closely. Many maps
of the Academy of Sciences and of the Ministry. of Geology are sold freely in
Soviet bookstores. The Soviet Union does not, however, put most of its post-war
topographic sheets on open shelves.
'Marshal V. D. Sokolovsky (ed.), Military Strategy: Soviet Doctrine and Concepts, with an
introduction by Raymond L. Garthoff (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963), p. xvii.
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In most cases, however, some information is at hand, an the concern is to
avoid repetitions of sad experience when the available geographic intelligence
was not brought into military analysis. The ill-fated Flanders offensive was
launched by the British in 1917 without due regard to the effect of the autumn
rains. The ground reverted to bog, and cross-country movement became a trudge
in a quagmire. The loss of 400,000 men made Passchendaele the costliest battle
in British military history.
Since so much of warfare is waged on-the ground, data on terrain is a major
component of geographic intelligence. Information on street patterns and on
locations of such vital installations as utilities goes into military judgments of
trafficability and defensibility of urban areas. Valleys, basins, hills, cliffs, ridges,
lakes, ponds, swamps, marshes, soil composition, all determine what equipment
can be used and affect methods of attack or defense. Soft rock enabled the Japa-
nese in World War II to honeycomb their positions in Iwo Jima and Okinawa,
slowing down the American "island-hopping" campaign. The coral of some of
the South Pacific atolls was excellent construction material for airstrip runways.
Drainage patterns may mean problems in excavation and construction. And as
Flanders illustrated, intelligence must bring climate into the geographic equation.
The Yalu is an obstacle to troop movement in the summer. Chinese forces could
cross without bridging when the river froze over in the winter.
For naval and amphibious operation, geographic intelligence supplies hydro--
graphic information-water depth, tides, currents, swell, salinity, temperature.
As Tarawa showed, underwater topography can be crucial.3 At the Inchon
landing in the Korean War, knowledge of the extensive mud flats in the harbor
was a prerequisite to decisions about the types of landing equipment to use.
The nuclear age has forced geographic intelligence into tasks that demand
new levels of precision. A few miles of mapping error in the location of target
areas was not a serious handicap to long-range bombing operations in World
War II, when pilots could seek out their objectives. Unless some form of terminal
guidance is available, today's long-range missiles need more precise plotting of
target areas in relation to launching points. The mapping task, drawing on avail-
able data in the specialist fields of geodesy and gravimetry, is a collaborative one
for geographic intelligence and scientific intelligence.
Notwithstanding this new wine, the need for the old bottles remains.
Geographic intelligence :requirements during today's uncertain peace and during
open conflicts like Vietnam continue to emphasize the foreign environment features
of traditional interest. For the most part, all these activities of geographic intel-
ligence are in the service of the middle ranks of government. The occasions are
nevertheless not infrequent when the geographic intelligence products serves the
needs also of the summit echelon. Intelligence analyses of the geography of the
Chinese offshore islands, of the Sino-Indian border, of Kashmir, for example, were
at hand when these trouble spots appeared on the agendas of the top policy-
making councils. A study of the Ho Chi Minh trail (actually a complex of trails)
provided information relating to highest-level decision about the conduct of the
war in Vietnam.
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Chapter 8
Scientific Intelligence
The bugbear of high commands all during World War II was a spectre of the
enemy in possession of the decisive "secret weapon." The dread prospect was
a factor in America's strategy to make the defeat of Germany rather than of Japan
the objective of first priority. There were other grounds for this strategy also
but as Secretary of War Patterson told the American Chemical Society in April
1946, the apprehensions of German scientific prowess constituted as compelling
a reason as any. "There was no time to lose in eliminating German science from
the war. There was no comparable peril from Japanese science."
Wartime Scientific Intelligence
The commanding importance of science in the war led to recruitment of the
scholarly talents that would enable intelligence to take the full measure of foreign
scientific achievement. Long memories went back to the First World War, when
the Allies were unprepared for German use of chemical warfare at the Battle of
Ypres. Now in World War II, the gnawing anxiety was of still more dire con-
tingencies-that the Germans, for example, might beat out the Americans in
development of the atom bomb. Fortunately for the Allies, the findings of scien-
tific intelligence on this particular point were reassuring. The Germans were
not near matching the energies of Americans in work on the bomb; and so, the
record of German achievement was unimpressive. These findings required an
encompassing watch over all the possible input elements into an atom program.
The discovery on one occasion, for example, that the Germans were building up
stocks of thorium necessitated a thorough check-out, since thorium could go into
the building of an atom bomb. The investigation tracked the thorium stock-
piling to a German firm which was seeking a no more alarming objective than
monopoly profits from the manufacture of thoriated toothpaste.'
The Germans were more successful in other scientific endeavors that had
military applications. British files at the outset of the war indicated necessary
areas for surveillance by scientific intelligence. The files showed, for example,
that German development activities were under way on gliding bombs, pilotless
aircraft, long-range guns, and rockets. In addition, before the war was many
months old, the British found themselves faced with the problem of designing
countermeasures against German night bombers, a problem that required scientific
intelligence first to uncover the reasons for the extraordinary German success in
blind bombing.
On the basis of information from several sources, British scientific intelligence
was led to suspect a type of radio signal beam called Knickebein (bent leg) by
the Germans. The authoritative scientific opinion was that the Germans could
not send a beam on the suspected frequency from continental transmitters to
'Ladislas Farago, War of Wits: The Anatomy of Espionage and Intelligence (New York:
Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1954), p. 22.
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follows the bend of the earth's curvature. But scientific intelligence was more
suspicious than the received opinion, and the suspicions were confirmed by the
findings of British search aircraft sent up to locate the radio signals. At first
the German pilots had dropped their bombs at the intersection of two beams
on preselected targets. After the British brought up equipment to jam these
beams, the Germans switched to a system of only one beam that could tell the
pilot how far downrange he was from the transmitter and when to drop his bomb
load. British jamming soon interfered with this system also, distorting the
German radio beam so that it became too wide for accurate use or injecting
premature drop signals so that bombs fell in open countryside away from
populated areas.
Britain's scientific intelligence made another contribution to Allied victory
by preparing target doss;:ers of German radar stations. The characteristic trans-
missions of radar stations can be intercepted; in the spring of 1939, the German
Graf Zeppelin had flown over Britain in order to ferret out British radar, but
the airship's equipment did not work well. The British were more successful.
Their radio bearings of German stations showed the general location of the
German radar. Agents or photographic reconnaissance or both could then pin-
point exact locations. By the time of the landings on Normandy, British intelli-
gence had spotted more than 99 percent of the German radar stations on the
continent.
Germany's program of missile research was well along in the 1920's. Under
Hitler, the Germans began testing at Peenemunde on the Baltic coast. British
intelligence tried to stay abreast of the progress at Peenemunde through reports
from agents and through aerial photography. But the size of the rockets-about
45 feet long and nearly six feet in diameter-that showed up on the photographs
threw off some of the rocket experts in Britain. They thought such a large
rocket to be impractical and suggested it was a German hoax. Their experience
had been with rockets burning cordite in a steel case, and with this fuel the
weight of the large rockets at Peenemunde added up to an impossible 80 tons.
Scientific intelligence, however, calculated a much more feasible 12 tons on the
basis of reports from agents and prisoners indicating German advances with
fuels like liquid oxygen. Examination of a German trial rocket which fell in
Sweden in June 1944 also suggested the possibility of liquid oxygen fuel. The
intelligence was persuasive enough to set British bombers into action, and their
pounding set back the .production of German rockets for' months.
All the principal victors got their hands on German rocket scientists after
the war, and the Russians also intensified intelligence efforts that would con-
tribute to their objective of overtaking American science. The Russian intelli-
gence acquisitions included data on both the atom and hydrogen bombs, high
explosives, sonar, radar, and guided missile research. American anxieties about
Russian scientific progress were slow to develop. However, Russian explosion
of an atom bomb in 1949, the detonation of a hydrogen bomb in 1953, the
orbiting of the first earth satellite in 1957, these achievements put Soviet scientific
capabilities in better perspective for the American public. The case for a fuller
inquiry into Soviet science became clear and accepted. Since American scholar-
ship was handicapped by Soviet security controls, much of the inquiry inevitably
fell to the province of scientific intelligence.
The Postwar Area of Surveillance
Scientific intelligence is a guard against scientific surprise. The narrow ob-
jective requires a broad watch, for the frontier areas of science are in such diverse
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 A p Faprg v.t on,2antimafE04 plasmas, slim a control, molecular biology,
control over heredity and growth, computers, brain function, radio astronomy,
enzymology, low temperature physics, solar power.
The major area of watch is in the field of foreign weapons and equipment.
The scientist brings to the analysis the necessary knowledge of the laws of nature,
which apply equally in the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. With a drawing or with
photography of a Soviet helicopter before him, he can make deductions from
information on overall length, landing gear dimensions, size of rotor blades,
cross-sectional areas of various parts of the aircraft. With this start in deter-
mining lift and drag characteristics, he may also look at the outward appearance
of the helicopter to infer that it is powered by turbine or by reciprocating engine.
He will compute the probable weight of the transmission and other parts until
he arrives at an estimate of total weight. Allowing then for probable weight
of crew and fuel, he proceeds to a determination of payload capacity. The other
matters of intelligence interest-rate of climb and range, for example-similarly
require many computations, and the help of computers may be enlisted. In this
manner, scientific and technical intelligence arrives at its first approximations
in determining stage of development, characteristics, and performance capabilities
of foreign products and design systems.
Although its scrutiny covers all the sciences, intelligence has criteria for
laying on a special watch in areas of likely foreign accomplishment. One criterion
for setting up the special watch is the general knowledge that the United States
or another country already has a weapon. A large power that does not have the
weapon will now proceed to get it and may well succeed in less time than it took
the power that first developed the weapon. Once other countries had the atom
bomb, there was no doubt in Communist China that the bomb was feasible, and
so there was no opposition in Peking (at least not grounds of technical infeasi-
bility) to an all-out effort to build a Chinese bomb.
Another guide is the predictable natural event. Scientific intelligence watches
for a Soviet moon shot when earth and lunar orbits make launch conditions most
favorable for a moon shot.
Still another indication of imminent achievement is information showing that
certain preconditions for achievement are being satisfied. Does the country have
or is it producing or is it importing uranium, lithium, beryllium, graphite,
heavy water, monel, nickel, stainless steel? Have buildings been observed that
have elaborate cooling systems, that are large enough to accommodate heavy
shielding, that are at sufficient distance from other installations to permit safe
handling of radioactive materials? Are nuclear physicists and other trained per-
sonnel available in sufficient number?
The especial difficulty for scientific intelligence is that many of these indi-
cators are difficult to spot in the early phases of research and development.
One reason is that the amount of required input materials is much less than
it becomes when the country moves on to the production stage. Another reason
is that security wraps are more feasible during the early research and develop-
ment phases than during testing or full-scale production, when products are
exposed to a wider view. Yet the requirement on scientific intelligence is for
timely determination of the direction of foreign research and development.
The United States needs a lead-time of say five, seven, or more years to develop
counter systems. It does not get this lead-time if foreign weapons systems are
first spotted in the test phase, not to mention the production and deployment
stage. The achievement of British scientific intelligence in uncovering German
missile developments on Peenemunde was marred by the fact that the Germans
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were already well along in testing and were proceeding on to pro uction.
British acquired enough information to realize the importance of doing what
they could to slow down,. German production, but they did not have enough time
to develop a fully effective counter against the missiles apart from capture of the
launching sites after D-Day.
The responsibility put on scientific intelligence for the earliest reporting on
research and development trends is qualified somewhat in the case of countries
that are far behind in levels of achievement. The necessity does not here arise
of long lead-time for the United States to develop countermeasures. Yet the
political and strategic implications of nuclear proliferation and of Nth-country
advances in delivery systems are grave, and scientific intelligence must give
early enough knowledge of say Chinese Communist progress with advanced
weapons to enable political intelligence and military intelligence to make their
timely judgments. Will Communist China's progress have important effects on
the attitudes of its Asian neighbors? Are they likely, in apprehension of Com-
munist China's growing capabilities, to move away from defense arrangements
with the United States, or will they be even more impressed by the importance
of getting under the umbrella of the American nuclear deterrent? Will deploy-
ments of the Seventh Fleet have to be altered once it becomes vulnerable to
Chinese Communist air-to-surface missiles? As China takes on the trappings
of great power status, is Communism carried still further from its character
of the 1940's, when the Soviet Union was the only gravitational force to keep the
Communist countries in orbit? Will there be increasing pressure to invite the
Chinese to international councils on disarmament? Will its scientific progress
help Peking build up domestic political capital? If it can adapt a missile to orbit
a satellite, will the achievement help appreciably to refurbish a domestic reputa-
tion tarnished by poor performance in agriculture and by other economic mis-
carriages?
For scientific intelligence on Communist China and every one of the other
likely Nth countries, the methodology of scientific intelligence is much the same.
If the subject of survey is progress in development of an atom bomb, scientific
intelligence has the advantage of dealing with a program that will be costing some
hundred millions of dollars-enough to impose some visible economic strains
on the smaller or less-cleveloped of these countries. The requirements for critical
inputs like electric power and special-purpose pumps are precisely in sectors
where most of these countries are poor.
The investigation gets under way with overt or near-overt sources of infor-
mation possibly providing the starting clues. What countries have been repre-
sented in conferences on plutonium metallurgy or other nuclear-related subjects?
What purchase inquiries have been received for stainless steel (not necessarily
but possibly for an atomic program)? If the country is one with which the
United States has diplomatic relations, what attitudes have foreign officials
expressed to American diplomats on the subject of acquiring the atom bomb?
What articles have appeared in the country's press about the importance of
atomic weapons for national prestige or about the necessity of keeping up with
the progress of unfriendly neighbors in nuclear technology? What countries
refuse to sign the partial test-ban treaty of 1963?
Reports from clandestine sources will be helpful, but it will take some
winnowing of chaff. There are now nuclear reactors over the world for use in
research on peaceful applications of atomic energy. Despite safeguards against
use of these reactors for non-peaceful purposes, the situation invites unsubstan-
tiated rumors and unconfirmed reports.
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When the country gets tote point of bomb testing, it pro abb y shows its
hand. The network of stations on the lookout for nuclear tests will do the
detection. Since secrecy at this stage is so difficult anyway, the testing country
will probably make the most of the situation by some prideful and propagandistic
flourishing of trumpets in its own press. If the country is determined to maintain
secrecy, it does have the recourse of proceeding to build a stockpile of nuclear
devices without prior testing. This of course leaves the country in some uncer-
tainty about its own technical capabilities, but a decision to skip the test explosion
should probably not be ruled out. There is a rationale for testing by most powers,
particularly those which especially value the deterrent role of nuclear arms.
The rationale is less compelling for the small country looking for the surprise
weapon to use against a hated enemy before he is equipped to retaliate.
Postwar Case Histories
In 1949, the public got an inkling of America's post-war capabilities in scien-
tific intelligence. The initial evidence of the Soviet Union's first atomic explosion
appeared in reports from the stations that monitored the atmosphere for radio-
activity.3 The instance indicated the increasing importance of technical methods
of intelligence collection; but since the organization for scientific intelligence was
still embryonic, the case did not show scientific intelligence at its best. The
ability to inform after the event was helpful enough to American policy planners,
but the urgent demand on scientific intelligence was to give as much advance
notice as possible of impending developments.
Fifteen years later, when the Chinese Communists exploded their first atom
bomb on October 16, 1964, scientific intelligence gave evidence of its improved
capabilities. Secretary of State Dean Rusk gave advance notice of the atom
test in a public statement. Just seventeen days after his statement, the explosion
occurred.
Scientific intelligence does not consider that it comes off with laurels just by
predicting correctly that a bomb test is about to occur. Officials want more pre-
cise information about the explosive power and other characteristics of the bomb.
In the case of the Chinese test, intelligence had to indicate whether a plutonium
or U-235 bomb was exploded, since the choice had an important bearing on the
stage of nuclear technology in China. All other nuclear powers in their first
test had used plutonium, which was easier to produce than U-235. The diffusion
process used to produce U-235 made difficult demands for materials able to
withstand very corrosive gas, required the installation of tremendous special
pumps, and called for extraordinarily large consumption of electric power. It was
uncertain, after Khrushchev withdrew the Soviet technicians from China in 1960,
that the Chinese had the technical ability to press forward with the production
of U-235. The seemingly easier course would have been to follow the plutonium
route that other nuclear powers had taken. But examination of the radioactive
cloud after the explosion showed that the fissile material used by the Chinese
was in fact U-235.
In its watch on Soviet scientific progress, the primary focus of scientific
intelligence is no longer on capabilities to produce nuclear bombs but rather
on capabilities for "delivering" them in missile warheads. Intelligence had known
back in the 1950's that the Russians were experimenting with rockets of medium
and intermediate range at Kapustin Yar, not far from the city of Volgograd (the
'Allen Dulles, The Craft of Intelligence (New York: The New American Library, 1965),
p. 66.
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new name for Stalingrad after Khrushchev's denigration of the dead dictator).
Later a test area for the missiles of intercontinental range was established at
Tyura Tam, near the Aral Sea. Since military and space vehicles in flight report
back to base stations by electronic signals, intelligence could by its own telemetry,
as well as by other means, keep abreast of Soviet missile progress. It was
possible to follow the lengthening trajectory of Soviet flights, with the Soviets
themselves later openly confirming some of these trajectories by warning ships
during testing periods away from drop zones in the Pacific Ocean.
The usefulness of overt information to confirm other intelligence was again
illustrated on May Day of 1965, when the U.S.S.R. displayed for the first time
a three-stage solid-fueled intercontinental missile. The new missile was testimony
to the determination of the Soviet Union-dependent until recently on liquid-
fueled missiles-to catch up with capabilities that the United States had attained
with its solid-fueled Minuteman.
The competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for ad-
vantage in strategic weaponry will continue as long as the anxieties of each
country constrain it to bend so much of its energies to tilting the balance of terror
in its favor. Dramatic improvements in missile defenses may be followed by
new gear in missiles to penetrate the new defenses. Progress in precision aiming
to put missiles right on target may nullify the effectiveness of existing hardening
methods. In a century that poses these and other such possibilities, the most
vital of security interests is staked on the accuracy and analytical rigor of
scientific intelligence.
Personnel
The scientific intelligence officer knows his oceanography, if that is the
science he is covering, o l- his solid state physics or his mathematics or his chemistry
of toxic warfare or his microbiology. To enumerate the scores of fields that come
within the purview of scientific intelligence is to indicate the difficulty of full
coverage. The difficulty is compounded by today's personnel scarcities in the
job market for trained scientists. Scientific intelligence can, however, call on
the assistance of outside technical competence.
Not that outside consultants have any record of near-infallibility. The
wartime chief of Britia.n's scientific intelligence was fond of recurring to the
errors of the experts. A favorite story was of the French Academy of Sciences,
which in the 18th century ridiculed accounts of meteorites originating in outer
space. It was not a trained scientist, but a lawyer named Chladni, who kept
pressing the case for outer-space origin. The French Academy was ten years
before acknowledging lie was right. Allen Dulles cites a parallel case of error
by Dr. Vannevar Bush, the distinguished wartime head of the Office of Scientific
Research and Development, who wrote in 1949 of high-explosive guided missiles
as a "fantastic proposal." for "astronomical" expenditures on a weapon of such
inherently low precision as to raise serious questions of its being made to "hit
anything at the end of its flight." 4
However, other scientists closer to the work on missiles than Dr. Bush dis-
agreed with him. The consultant most useful to scientific intelligence speaks
from the authority of :past working experience in the problem; and from his
experience in U.S. programs, he can usually outline with justifiable confidence the
main features of comparable foreign programs. The photograph that shows a
`Ibid., pp. 152-153, citing Vannevar Bush, Modern Arrns and Free Men (New York:
Simon and Schuster Inc., 1.949).
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building suspected eing part o an atomic reactor i
shown for evaluation to a consultant who is a nuclear engineer in private industry.
The opinion of the expert consultant is an ingredient in and not a substitute
for the analysis of scientific intelligence. The experts have the occupational
failing of most individuals-the propensity to overweigh the importance of their
own experiences when evaluating information. When scientific intelligence
feels-as it did in the case of the German rocket fuel-that the information at
hand contradicts the bias of the experts it will repose greater confidence in its
own than in the consultant's opinion.5
The information at hand is a composite of agent reports, propaganda an-
nouncements, despatches from attaches who have been allowed to see foreign
weapons, aerial photographs, and other sources. The consideration of evidence
from such a variety of sources puts the scientific intelligence officer in many
cases at a far remove from the experimental and laboratory techniques he
learned in his academic schooling. He now goes at this work very much as do
the analysts in economic, political, and other social-science fields of intelligence.
This is not to deny that there are areas of scientific intelligence where
telemetry and such technical methods of monitoring are so crucial as to make
the comparison with social-science analysis less appropriate. But outside these
special areas, scientific intelligence depends more on library and other reference
sources. The intelligence research, for example, on Communist activity with
the cultivation of microorganisms will draw on the report of a refugee university
professor from Eastern Europe, on open Russian literature detailing successes
in developing nutritive media for keeping virus strains alive, on a Soviet broad-
cast about advances in microbiological chemistry, on agent information about
a certain penicillin plant.
Unfortunately for the method, the originators of source materials are too
often men of only limited competence in science. The agent who is also a
trained scientists is a rare find. With good guidance from headquarters, the
clandestine source who is not a scientist may still do creditable reporting, but
he is not likely to be quite the treasure that Klaus Fuchs or Allan Nunn May or
Bruno Pontecorvo was for the Russians. Similarly with the open information
that is freely available to the American press and the American Foreign Service
officer, the best selection and reporting presupposes a reporter who knows some
fundamentals of his subject. The precondition is not typically satisfied; neither
the American correspondent abroad nor the American Foreign Service officer
is likely to have the understanding of natural science as he does of politics
and economics, and his newspaper or diplomatic reporting for this reason tends
to slight the scientific subjects.
The State Department has gone some distance in recent years toward im-
proving matters. An Office of International Scientific Affairs has been established
within the Department, and a score of scientific attaches have been assigned to
embassy posts abroad. These attaches, all trained in science, include individuals
with reputations in the fields of chemistry, meteorology, physics, geology, physi-
ology, and polar biology. There are still many posts without scientific attaches,
but the situation here also is improving as the result of a science curriculum
that the Department has set up in its training program for Foreign Service officers.
These scientific attaches and Foreign Service officers have not of course been
posted abroad to engage in clandestine intelligence collection but rather to assist
ambassadors in a 20th century diplomacy that finds itself increasingly involved
in questions of science-collaboration in Antarctic research, education of foreign
? See supra, p. 72.
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eQi s s m he ni a totes, cultural exchanges between American and foreign
scientists, "brain drains" of foreign scientists to the United States, encourage-
ment of research and development in desalination of sea water and in other
such lines of investigation that may pay off in ameliorating problems of water
shortage. The information that is reported is a by-product of diplomacy, and
the scope of inquiry and reporting is limited by the proprieties of acceptable
diplomatic conduct. Within this limitation, the recent scientific additions to
embassy staffs have given a new dimension to diplomatic reporting, with spill-
over benefits for the many intelligence research studies that incorporate a high
proportion of overt information.
Arms Control and Intelligence
The lessons of history keep the eye of intelligence always cocked for the
menace of new hostilities, but intelligence has also another sort of role to play
today if Man's future is to be longer than all his past. The establishment of the
Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1961 attested to widespread American
hopes that arrangements were devisable for preserving the national security of
all disarming countries during the long and difficult transition period to a disarmed
world. One condition of these arrangements was the confidence of each country
that others were not evading terms of agreements. A second condition was the
confidence of each country that the surveillance to insure against evasion did
not also work to endanger national security by exposing possible areas of defense
vulnerability.
While both conditions were necessary, they could in many circumstances also
be contradictory, and agreements that ignored the elements of contradiction could
end by exacerbating; rather than relieving international tensions. If a complete
ban on nuclear testing, for example, required on-site inspections, the case was
strong-given the known sensitivities of the Communists-for turning tempo-
rarily, as the United States and Soviet Union in fact did, to a more limited
objective. A comprehensive test ban might well have been followed by post-
agreement arguments over access and by the imposition of administrative delays
on inspectors, in the end setting back rather than advancing the cause of
disarmament.
The partial test ban was possible because available methods of verifying
atmospheric tests made on-site inspection superfluous. Despite remarkable ad-
vances being made in seismology and other technical means of surveillance, on-site
inspection arrangements are still necessary to substantiate underground testing.
The record thus indicates how crucial are the resources of intelligence for
progress in arms control. Whatever form future progress takes, it will continue
to depend in important measure on the capabilities of Soviet and American
scientific intelligence to monitor mutual performance.
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Part IV
INTELLIGENCE COLLECTION
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Chapter 9
Open and Secret Sources
"It has been estimated that about 90 percent of CIA's work is no more
secret than a Carnegie library, and the bulk of its work lies simply in correlating
factual information that is lying around for anyone to pick up." 1 Statements of
this sort, found not only in the press but in past remarks of intelligence officials,
do perhaps a little injustice today to the secret input. Without secret sources
of information, human and technical, intelligence could not be nearly so well in-
formed as it is about the location of Soviet missile sites, the deployments of
Chinese military forces, and the particulars of foreign research in military appli-
cations of nuclear energy. There was no substitute for the secret intelligence
which impelled President Kennedy to his grave decisions in the Cuban missile
crisis.
The Overt Sources
There is nevertheless no disputing the fact that the clues from overt infor-
mation often constitute the most valuable part of the intelligence analyst's evi-
dence. The overt input assumes especial importance when the analyst is making
his broad estimates of national character, will, and prospects. The estimator
comes to such a task with materials drawn in large measure from his industrious
reading of the daily press and his close acquaintance with the published research
of American scholarship. And the estimator often comes away from such a task
with the admission that his sources of secret intelligence in this case afforded
him no special advantage over other experts in guessing the future. The point
impressed Roberta Wohlstetter more than once in her research on the performance
of intelligence before Pearl Harbor: ". . . in comparing the top-secret intelli-
gence evaluations of enemy intentions with estimates in the contemporary press,
one is struck by the relative soundness of the less privileged judgments. It is
hard not to conclude that general knowledgeability in the world of international
affairs, and close observation of overt developments, are the most useful ingredi-
ents in making such estimates." 2
Intelligence services of all the major powers are attentive to overt informa-
tion. Reports published in the United States after World War II gave results of
American wartime research in radar and kept the Soviets from blind alleys in
atomic research. Publications like Aviation Week and Space Technology are
'rich veins of the kind of ore that American intelligence does not find in Soviet
open literature. American newspapers publish maps of U.S. missile sites, exist-
ing and projected. The maps supplement what a foreign intelligence service can
learn by keeping up with competitive bidding for construction contracts on
' Richmond News Leader, March 30, 1953, cited in U.S., Congressional Record, March 10,
1954, pp. 2814-15.
'Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1962), p. 169.
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missile oases and by reading the news of labor disputes at missile sites. Top-
ographic maps of the entire United States can be bought from the U.S. Geological
Survey. Data on harbor and airfields are sold without restriction by the Gov-
ernment Printing Office. Road maps with detail that would be prized by any
military command a:re available free in almost every American gasoline filling
station. A small fee will purchase patent data from the U.S. Patent Office.
If there are no compulsions in the U.S.S.R. to be quite so openhanded with
information, the Soviets still consider their scientific progress to require a marked
departure from Stalinist obsessions with security safeguards. Up to Stalin's
last days, Soviet secu:rity laws effectively checked the flow of scientific periodicals
to the United States. At the 20th Party Congress in 1956, Bulganin called for
a relaxation of security "to allow freer exchange of scientific information and
opinion." By comparison with the trickle in Stalin's day, the allowable flow
of information abroad. became a flood tide, despite the well-publicized attention of
American intelligence to overt information. Even the Communist countries can-
not do their work under such prohibitions as governed the Swedes two hundred
years ago, when then began to compile their registers of population and vital
statistics but considered the data as unpublishable state secrets. There are too
many considerations of propaganda use and too many requirements of social
communication to permit modern societies to do their business under hermetic
seal. When statistics published one year by Communist governments are omitted
the next, the probable reason is the embarrassment caused by deteriorating per-
formance, not the intention to confuse foreign intelligence.
The American intelligence library has of course its files on the U.S.S.R.'s
Pravda and Izvestia, of Communist China's Jen Min Jih Pao, of North Viet-
nam's Nhan Dan, of the principal daily newspapers from all the foreign capitals
where the United States has a major intelligence interest. Provincial newspapers
are also on file, although some Communist countries attempt to prevent their
circulation abroad. The important periodicals-Peking's Red Flag and Moscow's
Red Star, for example-are other essentials of the library's acquisition program.
While there are analysts who prefer to read these sources in the original, they
can draw also on the translation services that publish English-language versions
for general circulation. The U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong makes ex-
tensive translations of the Chinese Communist press. The Current Digest of the
Soviet Press, published weekly by the joint Committee on Slavic Studies in New
York, has extensive excerpts from the important articles that have appeared in
recent Soviet newspapers. The U.S. Commerce Department's Technical Trans-
lations presents lists of translated articles from Soviet periodicals.
A convenient approach to the mass is through short abstracts of the long ar-
ticles, and here again intelligence takes advantage of services set up for other
markets. The professional abstracting societies publish such useful aids as the
Chemical Abstracts, 1:xcerpta Medica, and Biological Abstracts. The Ref era-
tivnyy Zhurnal, the abstract journal published in the Soviet Union, is also avail-
able in intelligence libraries. In addition to the abstracts, review articles are
helpful economizers of the intelligence analyst's time. The review articles in the
Foreign Science Bulletin, published each month by the U.S. Library of Congress,
survey the recent Russian literature in lasers, photosynthesis, microwaves, and
other scientific fields.
The total inflow is too muchto be read as it arrives, and a good part of the
task is simply to index the material for easy reference when needed on a particu-
lar project. For indexing as for translation, intelligence can subscribe to the
same services that are accessible to American scholarship at large. The Library
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of Congress regularly pu is es in exes o is ussian and s e -
sions, both books and magazine articles. The Soviet Union publishes its own
indexes of bibliographies, including a bibliography of Soviet bibliographies. One
of the Russian indexes, published every week, lists all the books and pamphlets
published in the U.S.S.R., whether in Russian or other languages. The weekly
indexes are cumulated in both quarterly and annual volumes. The Russians also
publish a weekly bibliography of periodical articles published in the U.S.S.R.
Still another Russian index lists the newspaper articles published in the Soviet
Union.
The drawback of these open sources is in time lapse. At the very best, the
articles and statistics published in the open literature are seen in headquarters
a few days after they are printed in the Soviet Union. Sometimes the interval
is a matter of weeks or months. The delay is no handicap to the intelligence
researcher surveying a problem in depth, but it does reduce the usefulness of the
information for the current intelligence analyst, who works with the journalist's
focus on the very latest developments. For current intelligence as for modern
journalism, wireless is the indispensable channel of information. The most
timely of overt data are transmitted in the radio broadcasts which governments
make at all hours of the day and night to domestic and foreign audiences. The
methods for monitoring foreign broadcasts are strictly speaking technical and
could appropriately be reviewed in the next chapter. However, they are so above-
board that radio broadcasts are most conveniently considered here together with
the other forms of overt intelligence. Governments make no secret of their facili-
ties for listening to foreign broadcasts. On August 30, 1961, the White House
informed assembled reporters that intercepts of Soviet news agency broadcasts
in Central Asia indicated the imminent resumption of nuclear weapons testing
by the U.S.S.R.
The British BBC was the pioneer in the field. Its program of monitoring
foreign broadcasts was organized in 1939, primarily to assure the speedy cover-
age in Britain of the most newsworthy speeches by national leaders. During
the war years of the 1940's, the British attention to the broadcasts brought divi-
dends in intelligence. When the Federal Communications Commission in the
United States also began to monitor foreign broadcasts during the war, America
too became active in the new field of "propaganda analysis."
A noteworthy feature about this field, as it developed during and after the
War, is that so many contributors were in the collection organization monitoring
the broadcasts, rather than in the segments of intelligence charged primarily
with the analysis function. One reason is that the radio monitors had more to
do from the outset than just transcribe the broadcasts; their comparative counts
of broadcast hours every week and other such elements of bookkeeping became
natural points of departure in analysis. A more important reason lies in the
nature of organizations, which want to jusify their being and growth. Like other
intelligence collectors, the radio monitors were eager to impress with the value
of their activity, and so the radio monitoring organizations became hospitable
centers for the intelligence officers who glimpsed the potential in propaganda
analysis.
The experience offers an instructive lesson in principles of effective intelli-
gence management. The lesson is the value of analytical competence in collec-
tion organizations. There are some fields of collection-discussed in the follow-
ing chapter-where the first product is so technical in form that there is no al-
ternative to preliminary interpretation in the collection organization before
dissemination to the intelligence community. But even where the product needs
no extensive processing into English-language formats, the special knowledge
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thve collectors have o their product ought to be incorporated into final in-
telligence analysis. The collection organizations have their biases, of course, but
the analysis sections of intelligence will put up their instinctive guards against
overselling by the collectors. In the net balance, the effect of encouraging the
collection organization to make its own commentaries is to ensure the analyst's
attention to important points he would otherwise miss.
Content Analysis of Open Materials
In World War 31, the main interest of propaganda analysts lay in the ques-
tion of Germany's Strategic intentions. The early years of propaganda study
yielded no remarkable results, but in 1943 the British analysts put themselves
on record with the estimate that Germany expected to have a new weapon devel-
oped for use against Britain by early 1944. Documents captured after the war
did in fact disclose that this was the German expectation at the time. British
propaganda analysts also correctly inferred that Germany would not launch
an offensive on the eastern front in 1943, when this possibility was one of the
important questions in conjecture within allied military councils. The wartime
experience left a core of intelligence officers who were impressed with the possi-
bilities of equivalent: gains from the study of Communist propaganda.
As the methodology evolved, it became clear that propaganda was not the
exclusive province of the study. The range of survey was in fact the entire
spectrum of overt communications; and while the overlay of official propaganda
was exceptionally large in Communist societies, it did not extend across the
whole spectrum. There was the popular literature, which could be sometimes
at variance with the official propaganda line and could be suggestive of emergent
trends to a discerning intelligence. The newer term of content analysis is more
connotative of the area of surveillance, which encompasses broadcasts, news-
papers, periodicals, public speeches, books, state treaties, and other overt texts.
The easiest part of the method is the tabulation of quantitative indicators-
the frequency count of broadcasts on a particular theme, for example. The most
effective of authoritarian governments are the most attentive to necessities for
public support; they whip up popular sentiment if they are to make war or initiate
massive programs of farm collectivization or harry intellectuals. The prerequisite
for action is the broadside of propaganda statements, and the number of such
statements is recorded for its value as a rough indicator of official policy.
It is the attention to qualitative indicators, however-the study of nuance and
cue-that has become the distinguishing feature of content analysis. In April
1965, the U.S.S.R. and Communist China signed their annual trade agreement.
The TASS announcement said both sides "showed a desire" to expand trade and
a "wish" to hold talks on further exchanges of goods. By contrast, all of the
announcements covering China's 1965 trade agreements with East European
countries, except Bulgaria, had explicitly mentioned plans for increased trade.
The inference of intelligence analysts was that the downward trend in Sino-Soviet
trade would continue, that the trade figures would reveal no auguries of rapproche-
ment between the U.S.S.R. and China.
The TASS announcement on the 1965 trade agreement is one of the clearer
illustration of subsurface meaning that is hidden from those who are strangers to
an idiom. The content analyst's close attention to text and context has been
the butt of some banter about modern "overanalysis" and "kremlinology," but
his method has in fact a close kinship to the kinds of practical judgments that
have been made in government councils for centuries. The drafting of aide-
memoires, for example, has always been a painstaking effort to convey shades of
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reading of an international communication to understand all its innuendo.
Nevertheless, many persons were a long time being persuaded that radio
broadcasts and other overt information deserved the sort of analysis that was
given to diplomatic communications. The words that went into the diplomatic
message were carefully weighed in the writing, and it followed that they ought
to be as carefully weighed in the reading. Braggadocio and bombast, on the
other hand, were the hallmarks of propaganda, and the proper role of analysis
in this field was considered to be more in discounting the exaggeration than in
penetrating the subtleties of wording.
Yet even the task of discounting exaggeration required the analysts to study
the manner of speech in order to infer substantive content. The economic in-
telligence officer was early with a rigorous approach to this problem, for the
boastful claim of economic achievement was the stock in trade of Communist
regimes. One of the major functions of economic intelligence became the inter-
pretation of publicly-announced Communist percentages to determine numerical
absolutes. The analysis required much reading between lines to determine base
periods on which the percentages were based and to surface other pertinent
elements of the statistics. Still, this experience was far from making the fully
persuasive case for content analysis; the economist very rarely found himself
leaning on overt sources to reach conclusions which seemed outlandish to many
elements of the intelligence community. The testing period of content analysis
came in the 1950's, when its advocates seemed to overemphasize evidences of
Sino-Soviet differences while the general prepossession in America was to respect
the solidarity of the alliance.
The case for content analysis was not helped by the fact that the Com-
munist controversy was debated in a jargon that was so foreign to the ears of
the average American. "The Communist parties believe that under present
circumstances the most formidable danger is revisionism, that is to say, right-
wing opportunism which, as a manifestation of bourgeois ideology, paralyzes
the revolutionary energy of the working class and seeks the preservation or the
restoration of capitalism." Sentences like these from the Declaration of Com-
munist Parties meeting in Moscow in 1957, as well as later references to revi-
sionism, dogmatism, adventurism, and capitulationism, seemed to be framed in a
context of philosophical disputation that many people considered to be unrelated
to basic issues of state relations. The content analyst was regarded as something
of a scholastic, whose exclusive focus on an ideological debate led him to un-
warranted conclusions about the extent of divergency at the level of governmental
relations.
There were of course contradictions in the evidence to confuse the analysts.
All through the 1950's, the Chinese were effusive in acknowledgements of indebted-
ness for the "selfless aid" of the Soviet Union. Soviet sputniks, Soviet military
might, Soviet economic growth, Soviet leadership of the Communist camp, all
were hailed by Radio Peking. The espousals of Communist solidarity were
fervent.
It is precisely when the evidence is so contradictory that content analysis
should make its worthiest contributions. A few years later, the Sino-Soviet
polemic was no longer veiled. China was then excoriating Khrushchev by name,
not just reproaching him by animadversions on the erroneous views of "some
people." And after his fall from power, the Chinese Communist party news-
paper was explicit in its denunciation of "Khrushchev's successors" in Moscow,
who were "out and out appeasers . . . plotting to sell out the basic interests of the
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people of Vietnam." When debate comes to this pass, it takes no great skills in
the painstaking examination of language to appreciate the state to which gov-
ernmental relations have deteriorated. The task of intelligence by content analy-
sis is to inform long before the modes of overt expression have reached this level
of explicitness.
This task required the analyst following the Sino-Soviet dispute to have had
some prior immersion in Marxist studies, for allusions in party polemics to
apostasies of Bernstein and Kautsky and to other departures from the faith had
meaning primarily for the reader who had more than a passing acquaintance
with the 19th and 20th century history of socialism. The task further required
the unremitting reading of the current Communist journals; only by so keeping
au courant could the analyst perceive that doctrinal formulations criticized by
the Peking press as "Yugoslav revisionism" were in fact Chinese paraphrases of
positions that had only recently been expounded in Soviet articles.
The constant attention to the current literature was also necessary for quick
perception of the significant omissions. Pravda's deletions of whole paragraphs
when reprinting Chinese editorials with seeming approval were as instructive
on the points at issue between the two countries as were the wordy elaborations
of doctrinal position. The close scrutiny of the literature also uncovered fleeting
notes of the controversy in ostensibly nonpolemical speeches. When China's
economic planner Li Fu-chun in 1957 said, "We should rely on our own strength
as far as possible," and when his colleague in econmic affairs Po I-po spoke of
diminishing China's "reliance upon foreign countries," content analysts drew
their inferences about Chinese disenchantment with Soviet economic aid.
As the doctrinal debate between the Chinese and the Russians proceeded,
content analysts began to tabulate all the points of ideological difference between
the disputants. The analysts showed that Moscow deplored world war for the
ruin it would bring to all centers of civilization, while Peking deplored the fear
of world war; that Moscow argued from the viewpoint of local wars entailing
dangers of becoming world wars, while Peking argued for the inevitability of
local wars; that Moscow editorialized in favor of disarmament negotiations, while
Peking warned about negotiations weakening revolutionary drive; that Moscow
saw gains for the Communists in advocating the line of peaceful coexistence,
while Peking favored revolutionary struggle. This attentiveness to points of
ideology inspired some criticism that content analysts neglected the overriding
importance of basic national interest in international affairs. Critics argued
that the sober calculus of national advantage and not considerations of ideological
principle would determine the course of state relations.
This criticism was beside the point. The point was that the two allies were
quarreling. In an earlier generation, the literature of the polemic between Stalin
and Trotsky had similarly elaborated the ideological points of difference, rather
than the contending personal ambitions for supreme leadership. In democratic
societies as well, parties draft political planks to suggest principled opposition to
each other when the rivalries are based on other grounds. Husbands and wives
squabble while concealing the fundamental causes of grievance from each other
and from themselves. The eavesdropping neighbor overhears given reasons
rather than real reasons. But he does learn that the face of harmony put on
the marriage in public ;is a sham, and the decibels of the wrangling do tell him
if the marriage is mending or worsening. The content analyst in the Sino-Soviet
dispute was the neighbor with his ear to the wall, and his principal achievement
was not so much to discover what the U.S.S.R. and Communist China were
basically quarreling about as to perceive so quickly that the two governments
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w quarreling. Vier the existence o the dispute became widely accepted, there
was no lack of scholarship in and out of the intelligence community assessing the
basic divergencies of national interest between the U.S.S.R. and China. There
were several theses, each plausible and each arguable. Useful as it would have
been to have certain knowledge on this point, policymaking in the United States
was still the better for early information that the U.S.S.R. and China were at
daggers drawn.
Recent books and articles in the West must have struck home to Communists
everywhere the uses of content analysis in foreign scholarship and journalism.
The Communists are not, however, moving to conceal their discourses. Appeals
for support abroad require rivals to keep taking to the air waves and other media
of journalism. The explanation to domestic audiences is also deemed essential.
These ends of influencing foreign and domestic opinion are so important to the
Communists that the amount of overt materials for intelligence scrutiny keeps
going up. Intelligence places its major reliance on content analysis for the ex-
ploitation of these materials.
Diplomatic Collection
In January 1941, Ambassador Grew in Tokyo forwarded the following in-
formation to Washington:
My Peruvian colleague told a member of my staff that he had heard
from many sources including a Japanese source that the Japanese military
forces planned, in the event of trouble with the United States, to attempt a
surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor using all of their military facilities. He
added that although the project seemed fantastic the fact that he had heard
it from many sources prompted him to pass it on.a
Ambassador Grew himself discounted this intelligence, but the information was
of such vital import for America's national security that he felt compelled to
inform Washington.
The diplomat plays this role of intelligence collector with severe restraints
on his activity. He is the accredited representative of the American government
abroad, and he is expected to report on developments that he considers to have
an important bearing on American foreign policy. The foreign government to
which he is accredited respects his exercise of this reporting function with one
major proviso-that he does not go to lengths which can be characterized as
espionage.
This means that the diplomat is not himself to act clandestinely or on false
pretenses and is not to direct operations which require others to act clandestinely
or on false pretenses. Like the American newspaper reporter in a foreign capital,
the diplomat is free to report public gossip and other overt data, as well as the
information that foreign governments give him in confidence. By virtue of
his position, he can include a larger component of confidential information in his
reporting than can the newspaper reporter. For the diplomat is a party in nego-
tiations, and he naturally reports the exchanges that take place in negotiations.
He is also frequently informed on occasions of points of view that foreign govern-
ments want communicated to the United States. The diplomat's rectitude in
behavior thus still leaves him a wide scope for legitimate reporting, and the
diplomatic report is one of the valued inputs to an American intelligence which
strives to exploit all sources of information, overt and covert alike.
' U.S., Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers, 1941,
Volume IV (The Far East), p. 17.
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One of the especial virtues of the diplomatic report is that its author combines
in one person the talents for both collection and analysis. There are no peculiar
problems of collection "trade-craft" in diplomacy that separate collection and
analysis as distinct specialties. The diplomatic report is only in rare instances
the transmittal primarily of data for later evaluation and synthesis at headquarters.
The commendations in the Foreign Service go to diplomatic reports that transmit
information with interpretive commentary and occasionally with recommendations
for courses of action:
The Department is primarily responsible, in the intelligence field, for
providing the Government with evaluated and integrated information on po-
litical, sociological, and (with a few exceptions) economic conditions in
foreign countries. Most of the underlying information is obtained from a
broad variety of overt sources. The Foreign Service gathers most of these
materials and also has the duty of collecting scientific and technical infor-
mation. Among all sources, the one that continues to be of central value
to INR is the reporting by Foreign Service officers from field posts, par-
ticularly those penetrating and comprehensive analyses of conditions abroad
which the posts are sending in more frequently than ever before. These
analyses round out the picture conveyed by the factfinding type of work
and notably facilitate the correlation of embassy reports with other sources.4
America's ambassador to Japan gave an account in 1963 of embassy re-
porting from Tokyo which is illustrative of organization and procedures generally.
The political and economic sections of the embassy bore the responsibility for
the bulk of substantive reporting on Japanese affairs. There were 33 Americans
in the political section, assisted by 23 Japanese. The economic section had 25
Americans and another 25 Japanese. The numbers, while they include clerical
personnel, are large enough to suggest the analytical competence on Japanese
developments that is assembled in Tokyo to support the ambassador and to keep
Washington up to date.
His staff, Ambassador Reischauer estimated, spent from a fourth to a half
of its time in the research and writing of reports to Washington. The research
depended heavily on public contact with informed Japanese.
You take the man that is our contact man with the Government Party.
He is constantly trying to learn as much as he can about the leaders of
this Government Party, what they are thinking. He is talking with them
all the time. And every once in a while, when he thinks he has enough
information to be of value to Washington, he writes it up as a report.r,
One or two of the Senators who listened to the ambassador wondered about
the necessity of all the paper. Ambassador Reischauer seemed to admit to a
careerist, self-publicizing, publish-or-perish motivation for some of the reporting
by Foreign Service officers, who were "eager to write . . . because it is their
way of presenting the thing they have discovered to the rest of us there, as well
as back in Washington." Nevertheless, he considered the Foreign Service re-
'Allan Evans and R. D. Gatewood, "Intelligence and Research: Sentinel and Scholar in
Foreign Relations," The Department of State Bulletin (June 27, 1960), pp. 1025-1026.
U.S., Congress, Senate, Committe on Government Operations, Administration of National
Security, Hearings before the Subcommittee on National Security Staffing and Operations,
88th Cong., 1st Sess., 1963, Part 3, pp. 205-206.
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diplomacy.
... that is the reason I am very happy when I find some of our best officers
writing long-term thinkpieces. What is happening in Japanese politics?
We have had some very good papers of that sort.
... I did a paper last summer myself, trying to think through the whole
thing, what we were really dealing with in roughly a 10-year period.
And one of our chief political officers did an extremely good analytical
piece on the nature of the development of Japanese parties ... what we
were going to have to deal with in the future.?
In addition, the ambassador found the Foreign Service reporting was ap-
parently responsive to some very insistent consumer demand. "In almost every
case where there has been a real attempt to cut down on this flow, there is
somebody back in Washington that screams in agony when it does not come
in any more." 7 The loudest screams, the ambassador indicated, were from the
"people down at the research level." The reference was presumably to the
analysts in INR, the Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. The
intelligence interest is to get all the information possible, and the intelligence
viewpoint is that economies in diplomatic collection are all too likely to violate
the economics of information collection. The least expensive information is
the least covert, and it is a false saving that narrows the overt channels only
to force intelligence into more expensive collection.
Fortunately for the intelligence community, the information needs of other
government agencies have also brought pressures to widen the purview of
embassy reporting. These agencies sometimes post their own people to American
embassies abroad. The military attache is the long-established prototype of
such civilian analogues as the Treasury attache and others. Their attention is
almost wholly to overt information-the latest balance-of-payments figures re-
leased by the Central Bank, for example. Like the Foreign Service officers, the
attaches give more than bare-bones facts for headquarters evaluation. They
are substantive experts who are reflective about the facts and can transmit
analysis that is often the most influential factor shaping the intelligence judgment
in headquarters.
Clandestine Collection
In clandestine collection, on the other hand, the emphasis is on reporting
the facts, with much more reliance on headquarters for interpretive analysis. The
secret agent is employed for his special access to certain information. The over-
riding purpose in his hire is his procurement of the information. In the typical
case, his position affords him only a narrow angle of observation. The agent
placed in one of the counties of China's Kwangsi province can report on rail-
road traffic and malnutrition in his area but not on conditions elsewhere. He
can hardly attempt more than his factual contribution to the mosaic on China
that headquarters builds up from a variety of sources.
There are broader perspectives in the upper echelons of the collection or-
ganization, but abilities at this level too relate primarily to skills of agent handling
and techniques of evading discovery. Sometimes these abilities are combined
with substantive scholarship in one man, but his training is generally so pre-
dominantly oriented toward ingenuities of safeguard against detection as to
Ibid., pp. 205-206.
Ibid., p. 204.
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give miim a quite specialize competency. He inclines in most instances to
accept the division of labor that puts on others in intelligence the burdens of
data assembly and final analysis.
This is not to say that there are water-tight walls between the analysis and
clandestine collection functions. In the crisis situation, the collector in the field
may be asked to give his own interpretation of events. His cables to Washington
then become more than transmittals of agent reporting. They become part of
a large analytical input that is solicited from embassy officials and other Americans
abroad who have a claim to expert opinion as on-the-scene observers.
In everyday reporting, the collectors are sparing with their own analytical
viewpoints, but they do contribute the crucial first element of analysis-knowl-
edgeability about degrees of reliability and margins of error in source materials.
The identity of agents is such sensitive information that it is never disclosed in
the disseminations to the intelligence community, except for general statements
that the information comes from, say, a "middle-ranking official in the Rural
Work Department of the Party." The analysts are thus very much dependent
on the intelligence officers in collection for the important preliminary analysis
that goes into evaluation of sources. Usually only the collection organization
is in a position to estimate whether the agent source is really in a position to get
the information to which he claims access. Only the collection organization has
the fullrecord of the agent's past reporting and can say whether he is a well-
tested source or still relatively untried.
The collectors again touch the region of analysis when they make their
choices about the reports which are deserving of dissemination to the intelligence
community. The bureaucratic interest of the collection organization is to market
as much of its merchandise as possible. However, there is much of trivia in
agent reporting, and the collectors do have to consign a large proportion of the
reporting to the category of "no-dissem"-that is, not worthy of dissemination.
This judgment of the collection organization about the worthiness of its product
is essentially an analytical judgment.
The judgment about dissemination can be especially important when the
occasion calls not merely for distribution to analysis sections of the intelligence
community but for direct transmission to the top echelon of government. A
country's leader can be much influenced in this way by reports received directly
from the clandestine collection service without analytical commentary. In March
1941, Churchill gave orders that raw reports suggesting the possibility of a
German attack on Russia be given him directly without evaluation.8
The intelligence analysts, for their part, tend to caution in their appraisals
of covertly-collected information. The ultimate sources in espionage are foreign
nationals, and analysts rarely get enough assurance about the real loyalties of
agents to remove all doubts about clandestine reports. There have been agents
whose primary purpose it was to stay on a payroll and who could fabricate such
plausible information on the basis of overt news as to elude discovery for years.
There have been rings organized to finance emigre causes and influence Ameri-
can policy through the operation of "paper mills" that compounded mixtures of
valid secret information, overt data, and propaganda. There have been spies
passing information deliberately planted by foreign governments to deceive
and confuse. The instances of false or misleading information are so numerous
that analysts approach, the clandestine report with more reserve than they do
products from other methods of intelligence collection.
8 Ladislas Farago, War of Wits: The Anatomy of Espionage and Intelligence (New York:
Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1954), pp. 90-91.
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The working rue is to to e t e clan estme rerr
salt until confirming reports or other corroborative evidence is in hand. Even
corroboration may be suspect, since foreign governments can contrive false con-
firmations by planting the same information with several sources.or by technical
methods of deception. In World War I, for example, the Germans were properly
prudent about a chart of Russian mine fields and coastal defenses acquired by
the agent Anna of Lubau. The Germans carefully sent out minesweepers,
which confirmed that the channel indicated as clear on the chart was in fact free
of mines. The gun flashes that the German naval officers saw on shore also
jibed with the shore defense positions given on the chart. When a strong
force of German ships moved in the next day, however, they moved in to defeat.
The chart was a plant, the Russians sowed their mines in the channel right
after the German minesweepers completed their investigation; the gun positions
on shore were dummies far from the actual locations of the Russian gun batteries.
The difficulty of evaluating bona fides notwithstanding, analysts are ap-
preciative of the occasions when clandestine collection is exceptionally valuable.
Accredited representatives in some countries cannot have contacts with op-
position groups. It falls then on the clandestine services to find sources of
information in the opposition. Intelligence does not always forewarn of govern-
ment overturns abroad, but when it does, the success is generally attributable to
clandestine reporting.
These and most other accomplishments of clandestine collection are of
course known only in circles that are privileged to secret information. One of
the accomplishments that has been publicized was the acquisition of Khrush-
chev's secret speech to the Party in 1956 denigrating Stalin. Western journalists
had gotten wind of the speech, but the Communist would not release a verbatim
text. When clandestine collection finally acquired the text, it found a docu-
ment that gave indications of marking a veritable watershed in Soviet political
development. Allen Dulles wrote of the acquisition as "one of the major coups
of my tour of duty in intelligence." 9
Major coups do not naturally characterize the bulk of clandestine collection
activity. There are agents, like those who procured Khrushchev's secret speech,
who are well enough placed to obtain information that is directly responsive to
a major headquarters interest, but the more typical collection "asset" forwards
pieces of a jigsaw puzzle rather than whole pictures. He can be asked how
many railroad cars are passing through a certain location every day; he can be
directed to observe the ingot deliveries to a metal fabricating plant; he can be
told to report the number of workers going through the factory gates every
morning and evening; he can be requested to relate the main themes of political
indoctrination lectures to civil servants in one of the offices of the Foreign Trade
Ministry; he can be instructed to identify unit designations of recent troop ar-
rivals in his locality. There is little point in asking such an agent to duplicate
Hollywood heroics and uncover information from the topmost echelon of the
foreign government. The prodigious successes of the fiction spy notwithstand-
ing, clandestine intelligence most of the time contributes bits and pieces-valua-
ble only as part of an aggregate from which headquarters analysis infers the
large picture.
'Allen Dulles, The Craft of Intelligence (New York: The New American Library, 1965),
p. 80.
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Chapter 10
Technical Collection
To begin with a clarification of terms, this chapter will not detail the variety
of technical aids with which clandestine collection services can equip secret
agents. The devices are varied, and a few have been publicized. In June
1960, Ambassador Lodge stood up in the United Nations to give proof of how
the Russians had concealed tiny transmitters in the U.S. Embassy at Moscow
and thereby overheard American conversations. In its broad definition, technical
collection includes such audio surveillance, but there is a narrower use of the
term that distinguishes it more sharply from traditional forms of espionage.
In this narrower sense, technical collection is characterized by the use of
equipment which is situated at ever increasing distances from the targets of
observation. This factor of distance raises questions about concepts of espionage.
Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere or under water can be detected far from
the site of the event by acoustic instruments, by hydracoustic equipment, and
by devices for sampling radioactive debris. In the case of nuclear explosions
under ground or under waters not linked hydracoustically with the oceans, seismic
instruments are reliable detectors even at distances of several thousand miles,
although there are still problems of possible confusion with the signals generated
by earthquakes. On October 8, 1965, a new American station in southern Mon-
tana clearly detected a Soviet underground nuclear explosion near Semipalatinsk
in Soviet Central Asia. The Montana station is America's newest, designed to
monitor explosions against the confusing background of seismic "noise" and
hopefully to be a milestone toward a detection network that can separate all
earthquake signals from the indicators of nuclear explosions.
Changing Soviet Attitudes
During test-ban treaty negotiations, the Soviet argument against on-site
inspections of nuclear explosions explicitly asserts that other methods of detection
are adequate. It is implicit in the Soviet logic that detection from the territory
of the surveillant country is legitimate, not in the category of espionage. Moscow
apparently condones at least this limited Western surveillance over its nuclear
activities.
The Soviet attitude is not quite so determinate on the subject of intelligence
collection from outer space. For the formal record, the Soviet position is to
condemn reconnaissance by means of orbiting satellites. In 1962, the American
delegate to the U.N.'s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space drew this
contrast between the Soviet view and the U.S. position:
The Soviet draft seeks to deny the use of outer space for observation and
photography, despite the fact that at least one of its astronauts has taken
photographs over the United States without the slightest objection on our
part. Such observation and photography from outer space are fully com-
patible with international law and the Charter and can provide an important
safeguard for peace and security against the threat posed by a closed society.'
'F. B. Schick, "Aerospace in the Nuclear Age," The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (De-
cember 1963), pp. 48-49.
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The American argument was in line o escent rom resi ent isenhower s
"open skies" proposal. The essence of the proposal, as the President put it to
the Russians in July 1955, was an international system of mutually supervised
overflights, which involved first of all the exchange of blueprints showing the
locations of military establishments in each country.
Next, to provide within our countries facilities for aerial photography to
the other country-we to provide you the facilities within our country,
ample facilities fo:r aerial reconnaissance, where you can make all the pictures
you choose and take them to your country to study, you to provide exactly the
same facilities for us and we to make these examinations, and by this step to
convince the world that we are providing as between ourselves against the
possibility of great surprise attack .. .
Khrushchev characterized the proposal as an attempt to legalize espionage.
The year 1955 was pre-Sputnik, and the U.S.S.R. took its position on over-
head reconnaissance in the context of the pre-Sputnik technology. The high
contracting parties to the Convention of Paris of 1919 had specified that each
power "has complete and exclusive sovereignty over the airspace above its terri-
tory." The U.S.S.R. was not a party, but the principle was incorporated in in-
ternational law and consolidated in international custom.
The advent of the space age complicated the Russian position. By May
1964, Khrushchev had come around to the logic that the moral turpitude of U-2
overflights might not apply to Soviet space satellites. He suggested the termi-
nation of U.S. airplane reconnaissance over Cuba; the job, after all, could be
done equally well by satellites, and he offered to prove this statement by supply-
ing President Johnson with photographs from space taken by the Soviets.3
The signs of Soviet shift may well reflect the sort of working realism that
has modified Moscow's attitudes on modern journalism. Persons who can read
today have access to international news for which intelligence services would
have paid well in another time. Now and then the Communists will choose
to regard this kind of information as privileged and to expel a Western journalist
for his initiative in news-gathering. By and large, however, the Western news-
man in a Communist country has an easier time of it than he used to have.
Soviet realism lies in recognition of the fact that the legitimacy of statutes
is impugned when they presume to proscribe an activity that is in fact beyond
their reach. The Soviet Government might prefer to withhold the information
that foreigners obtain by monitoring nuclear explosions, but its only choice is to
come to terms with the fact that it cannot keep covert what forces of change
have made overt. This is not to say that governments will reconcile themselves
quickly to each of the new technical forms of intelligence collection; they will
move faster whenever the contribution of each intelligence collection method
to preservation rather than upset of the power balance is as clear as it is in the
case of nuclear test detection. In the meantime, signs of rethinking and of
movement from the traditional espionage concepts are discernible.
Photo Intelligence
The discernible signs do not appear in every field of photo intelligence,
and it is necessary therefore at the outset of this section to make explicit its
' The New York Times, July 22, 1955, p. 3.
'Allen Dulles, The Craft of Intelligence (New York: The New American Library, 1965),
pp. 67-68.
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i eyed o survey. is arc oes not tae in ground-level photographs-
overtly or covertly collected-that make up the important graphics libraries of
intelligence organizations. The photograph of the man is one of the first re-
quirements of biographic intelligence. The photo of terrain is a valued con-
tribution to military intelligence, which must be ready to answer sudden requests
for topographic information on strange places.
The discussion in this section is limited to the subject of overhead photo
reconnaissance, for the technological advance in this field is such that it may one
day become, like scientific monitoring of nuclear tests, invulnerable to hindrance
from counterespionage. As yet, photo intelligence does not make claims of moral
justification that are as persuasive to world opinion as nuclear test detection.
However, America's "open skies" proposal did direct attention to the moral
purposes that mutual intelligence surveillance from the skies would serve.
These purposes are of course not nearly so well served by unilateral sur-
veillance, which can disturb the peace by provoking punitive retaliation. One
of President Truman's first concerns in July 1950 on the outbreak of the Korean
conflict was that it might detonate a general war. He was sensitive enough
about the danger to veto Air Force suggestions for high-altitude photo missions
over Dairen, Port Arthur, Vladivostok, and other Soviet territory or spheres of
infiuence.4
President Eisenhower's decision to approve the U-2 reconnaissance deep into
Russian airspace was made in the 1950's after the Korean War. The President
was no less sensitive than his predecessor to the element of provocation. But
the signs of the late 1950's seemed reassuring; despite the overflights, progress
continued toward detente between the two governments.
Changing circumstances thus modify the calculations of risk and compen-
sating advantage. The circumstance that will most differentiate calculations in
the future from those of the past may be the increasing capability of future tech-
nology to conduct overhead reconnaissance without intruding into foreign air-
space. The rate of technological development in the field of long-distance pho-
tography has been remarkable even for an age of accelerated scientific develop-
ment. The United States detailed some features of the impressive advance in
the "open skies" publicity of 1955.
The Russian shoot-down of Gary Powers' U-2 plane on May 1, 1960 afforded
the general public additional insights into the burgeoning capabilities of photo
intelligence. In the days that followed, both the Russian and American authori-
ties displayed prints of U-2 photography. When he passed out the pictures
taken from the Powers' plane to a session of the Supreme Soviet, Khrushchev
claimed that "our cameras produce better, sharper pictures, so that in this respect
we acquired very little ..." r, The Russian press reported laughter in the
audience, and one cannot be sure whether Khrushchev was speaking with candor
or with his humorist's license for stretching the truth. He had spoken more
modestly on an earlier occasion: "Americans have all the secrets of photography
and we have all the secrets of rockets. We should exchange.""
By the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, when American officials
again displayed U-2 photographs to the public, the world was well into the
`Harry S. Truman, Memoirs: Volume 11, Years of Trial and Hope (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday and Company, 1956), pp. 346-347.
'Amrom Katz, The Soviets and the U-2 Photos-An Houristic Argument Memorandrum
RM-3584 (Santa Monica, Calif.: The RAND Corporation, March 1963), p. 15. See also
The York Times, May 8, 1960, p. 24.
'J. S. Butz, Jr., "The Need to Know," Air Force Magazine (January 1963), p. 70.
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space age and thinking seriously about the feasibility of photography from
earth satellites. A Congressional report in 1959 had taken note of the eventual
value of spaceborne reconnaissance for intelligence and had discussed the prob-
lem of cameras suitable for satellites.? A UN-sponsored conference of experts
had expressed optimism about the potential uses of satellite photography for
deterring surprise attacks. It should be possible, the conference report noted,
to detect from earth satellites "missile launch pads under certain conditions, as
well as the location and gross characteristics of all major airfields. . . It will
be possible to detect large moving ships at sea due to their conspicuous wakes." 8
The published technical literature on improvements in film resolution quality,
in conjunction with progress in lengthening camera focal lengths, is indicative
of the remarkable advances in long-distance photography since World War H.
The camera will never be an X-ray instrument to probe inside of structures and
reveal factionalism in politburos, unruliness among intelligentsia, and purposes
of foreign policy maneuver. Photography of the future, however, could be
highly informative about the external outlines of facilities that attest to military
readiness, economic strength, and scientific capability. It could show sizes
of atomic reactor installations, dimensions of airfields, numbers of missile sites,
production capacities of steel plants, clusters of military barracks, extensions of
railroad track, deployments of armored vehicles, movement of naval squadrons,
presence of fighter aircraft, construction of port facilities, deck cargoes on mer-
chant ships, ravages of natural disaster, state of activity at shipyards, massing
of armed forces, location of important factories. It could map the world and
render irrelevant all the secretiveness of some governments about terrain and
topography. As technological advance made obsolete many fortress walls of
an earlier time, overhead photography could come to antiquate some walls of
secrecy that governments today regard as necessary for state security.
Signal Intelligence
In signal intelligence, as with overhead photography, the future potential
can be glimpsed from the past record. The open literature on signal intelligence
is fullest on the subject of communications intercept, that is, the information
obtained by tuning in on voice and telegraphic communication carried over lines
or wireless. For the most part, it is the wireless communication that is vulnerable
to intercepts. This means that the collection of communications intelligence can
be generally done from home or friendly territory, without trespass across
boundaries.
The task is much more than one of listening in. At the opening of World
War I, German intelligence had a windfall of readable intercepts when the
Russians sent many of their military orders "in the clear" or in a very simple
code. Every major government today, however, operates its communications
under strict security rules. The most important messages are encoded. Cryp-
tography will break a few codes, not all. Capture of code books in wartime can
help. When the codes are acquired by one means or another, intelligence is
more informed than it could be by a thousand agents. America's naval vic-
tory over Japan at Midway six months after Pearl Harbor was attributable in
large part to American possession of the Japanese naval code. The American
shootdown of the airplane carrying the chief of the Japanese naval fleet in 1943
was made possible by a radio intercept which revealed the itinerary the Japanese
1 U.S., Congress, House, Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration, Space
Handbook: Astronautics and Its Applications, Stag Report, 85th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1959, p. 172.
8 United Nations, General Assembly, Report of the Conference of Experts for the Study of
Possible Measures Which Might Be,Helpful in Preventing Surprise Attack and for the Prepara-
tion of a Report thereon to Governments; A/4078, S/4145, 5 January 1959, Annex 6, p. 3.
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a a would to ow on an Inspection rip. a ni a ates move a s ep
closer to its declaration of war against Germany in World War I after the
British passed to Washington their intercept of the Zimmerman message; the
message transmitted the German foreign minister's suggestion to the Mexican
government that it could get back its "lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and
Arizona."
"
If codes were the only communication disguises that intelligence had to
penetrate, its task would be difficult enough. But there are other techniques
for concealing messages from unwanted listeners. During World War I, one
of the German radio broadcast stations used to follow its regular evening broad-
cast with a rapid succession of gibberish signals. The British monitors could
make nothing of the signals until one day the officers aboard a monitor ship in
the Mediterranean took to amusing themselves by playing back a record of the
German squeaks. When an officer who put the record on the phonograph forgot
to wind it, the screech became a distinguishable sequence of transmission groups,
easily readable because it happened to be in an old German army cipher that
the British already held.
A point previously mad that the line between collection and analysis is
often a blurred one-is especially worth repeating here. The interpretation of
radio beeps is a job for the technical specialist who is to be found in the collection
organization. Garbles are not infrequent in reception of the signals. The col-
lection organization is the best equipped to make the technical judgments about
reliability of evidence and often to suggest the lines of analysis that the evidence
will support.
Little need be added in this discussion to what is abundantly clear from the
public record-that the family of electronic intercept includes many forms of
data other than voice and telegraphic communication. The electronic signals
that emanate from Soviet missiles in flight and from orbiting earth satellites are
picked up not only in Soviet ground stations but at other installations with the
necessary receiving equipment. Technology in our age is so increasingly a
matter of remote control and guidance that such opportunities for signal intercept
keep going up at rates of geometric progression.
There is a story of the American Secretary of State who was outraged on
taking office in 1929 to learn of the electronic facilities to which his department
had access for reading intercepts of foreign messages." His view of the pro-
prieties did not prevail against the advances of the electronic age. Today,
Britain's observatory at Jodrell Bank can intercept pictures of the moon radioed
back from Soviet Luna space probes without inspiring charges of espionage.
And there is little questioning of the necessity for an are of electronic eyes and
ears across North America to guard the continent against surprise attack. The
observation activity, not involving infringement on foreign territory, is openly
acknowledged by the responsible observers and more or less accepted with
shoulder shrugs by the observed. The most hopeful aspect of the change in
attitudes is that it may incline nations to inquire more earnestly into the pro-
spective uses of technical surveillance for relaxing international tensions. The
partial test-ban treaty, whose underpinning is the confidence of the United
States and the Soviet Union in their technical detection capabilities, breaks a
path to the future possibilities.' 0 In the meantime, intelligence will incorporate
the latest technologies to collect an ever rising proportion of its information by
technical methods.
'Herbert 0. Yardley, The American Black Chamber (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Com-
pany, 1931), p. 370.
10 See supra, p. 78.
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Part V
INTELLIGENCE IN THE DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY
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Chapter 11
Roles and Image
The work of intelligence projects two public images. One is the image of
intellect and knowledge. The other is of secret-agent activity. The focus of
this inquiry has been on the first rather than the second-the intellectual con-
tributions of intelligence analysis rather than the field of secret action. However,
the reputation of headquarters analysis is affected by its organizational link to
other activities, and the nexus deserves discussion.
In the deliberations that preceded the establishment of the CIA in 1947,
there was one point of unanimous agreement: no intelligence organization in
America could have so many spheres of assigned responsibility as to give it
virtually Gestapo powers. The Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times
Herald raised the specter in 1944, when they published General Donovan's
proposal to President Roosevelt for a peacetime intelligence agency. The lan-
guage of the headlines and editorials ran to such phrases as "superspy system"
and "bigger and better spying" and "police state." Members of Congress echoed
the journalism with their own rhetoric about a "super-Gestapo." A year later,
President Truman, sensitive to all political overtones, told his Director of the
Bureau of the Budget that it was "very important to this country to have a
sound well-organized intelligence system" and then added the proviso that "this
country wanted no Gestapo under any guise or for any reason."-'
The anxieties were grounded in the historical record of tryrannies served
by all-purpose secret services. Since domestic conspiracy was the only recourse
against tyrant governments, these regimes needed their efficient internal security
arms to combat the conspirators. Since the conspiratorial groups included
emigres aligned with others operating from foreign bases, the security arm
found itself in foreign operations. Thus did Cromwell's internal security service
get into foreign intelligence, and thus did the Okhrana of the Russian czars
despatch agents to infiltrate emigre groups abroad, both to spy on them and
to sabotage their operations.
In Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, the agencies of repression were
empowered to engage in both foreign and domestic operations. ? The amalga-
mation of functions in the same organization subjected citizens at home to the
same standards of operational action that were applied against foreign enemies.
The system was in keeping with the form of government, which disdained to
guarantee any private areas of immunity from the reach of state authority.
In the United States after World War II, the general aversion to creation
of a unified police-intelligence complex defeated hopes in some quarters that
the FBI would become the agency for peacetime intelligence operations. The
'Harry S. Truman, Years of Decision (New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1955), p. 98,
quoted in Allen Dulles, The Craft of Intelligence (New York: The New American Library,
1965 printing), p. 43.
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FBI s credentials were widely conceded-among t em its experience in the
conduct of foreign intelligence operations in the Western Hemisphere during
the war. The best judgments in Washington, however, were intent on drawing
the line between internal security operations and foreign intelligence. The
1947 Act creating the Central Intelligence Agency was explicit on the point
that the new organization had "no police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers,
or internal security functions."
Intelligence and Covert Action
So the sentiment of the country led to division of the jurisdictional areas
between internal security and foreign intelligence. Another jurisdictional issue
relates to field operations of intelligence that go beyond mere fact-gathering.
In World War I, the contacts of Lawrence of Arabia in the Middle East were
not only his sources of intelligence but his instruments also for inciting insur-
rection against the Turkish government. In World War II, the OSS teams that
parachuted into France to gather tactical intelligence did their best work if they
undertook concomitant engagements to organize, train, and supply local guer-
rillas. As an undercover agency, OSS was also a convenient choice for certain
psychological warfare assignments.
The objectors to such arrangements for organizational integration of in-
telligence collection and other secret operations fall into two groups. One
simply takes exception to U.S. Government involvement in covert political and
paramilitary action. The point of view is principled but not persuasive to a
majority that has always shied from proposals for unilateral disarmament. The
majority view draws on precedents that go back to the earliest days of the
Republic. The very first Congress in 1790, when it legislated on "the means of
intercourse between the United States and foreign nations," gave the President
the authority to make certain expenditures which, in his judgment, would not
have to be made public.2
The second class of objector concedes the necessity of covert political and
paramilitary action but argues for organizational separation from intelligence.
'When he briefed President Kennedy before the Bay of Pigs, Allen Dulles had
in effect to wear two hats, one as an informed authority on Cuban capabilities
and another as the head of an organization that had engaged its prestige in a
particular plan for overthrowing Castro. Did the responsibilities for planning
the attack entail some loss of personal objectivity about Cuban capabilities?
Senator Pell of Rhode Island would answer in the affirmative:
My own personal view is that a complete, fair assessment would show that
the United States would have, on balance, gained greatly as the result of its
intelligence collection and assessment activities. But . . . when decisions
to carry out operational activities have gone sour, the reason for clouded
judgments has simply been that the same group assesses the intelligence and
then proceeds to carry out the operation.'
The Senator was restating a judgment which Walter Lippman, writing on
intelligence, had made four decades before:
The only institutional safeguard is to separate as absolutely as it is pos-
sible to do so the staff which executes from the staff which investigates.
The two should be parallel but quite distinct bodies of men, recruited dif-
' James D. Richardson (comp.), A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presi-
dents: 1789-1897 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1897), Vol. IV, p. 433.
' U.S., Congressional Record, October 9, 1963, p. 18143.
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ferently, paid if possible from separate funds, responsible to erent ea s,
intrinsically uninterested in each other's personal success.4
Senator Pell suggested a study drawing on experience "in other countries
where intelligence and operational activities are lodged with separate organiza-
tional entities . . ." The British in World War II did in fact set up a separate
Special Operations Executive for such activities as guerrilla-support. There
were instances when the British organizations tripped over each other's cloaks
and daggers, but there were mishaps also under the more unified operations of
America's OSS. It is a moot point that the war experiences argue especially
for splitting the functions or keeping them together.
It is a certain point, however, that organizational division would have to
allow for very vague boundaries of jurisdiction. An agent can both inform and
manipulate. If he is in a position to do both, is he to do only one? Or, if he
is to do both, is he to be handled by two different organizations? The latter
recourse invites more complications in undercover work than solutions. The
former invites other managerial absurdities. Frogmen can reconnoiter and they
can employ their talents at demolition. It would be nonsense to incur the risks
of sending in a second team of frogmen to do demolition if the reconnoitering
team were already in place. The intelligence professional can argue from a
host of analagous cases. The findings of the board of inquiry that President
Kennedy established after the Bay of Pigs decided him in favor of union rather
than division of functions.
The searching critic who argues for organizational change tends also to
concede the logic of existing arrangements once he has thought deeply about
the subject. "Unfortunately," Mayor Lindsay (then Congressman) regretfully
put it in 1963, "the people in the most favorable position to collect clandestine
information are often also the people best placed to engage in subversive po-
litical activities."" He reflected on the point again the following year: the prob-
lem, he said, "eludes organizational formulas.""
If the balance of pros and cons favors the organizational union of intelligence
and special operations, the Bay of Pigs still carries its instructive lessons. One
which makes its hindsight impression on intelligence analysts is that the operation
might well have called on the collaborative procedures of national intelligence.
The merit of these procedures is in their tendency to correct for the bias arising
from the undue proximity of one of the intelligence organizations to a particular
policy interest. If the government is engaged in a major undertaking involving
special operations, this undertaking could benefit from the same sort of collective
intelligence evaluation that is given to other government operations. Before the
event, this would mean an intelligence estimate of probable effects. After the
event, further estimates may be called for to evaluate the results. The published
evidence, however, is that such intelligence evaluation was not incorporated into
the planning for the Bay of Pigs.7
Walter Lippman, Public Opinion (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922), p. 384,
cited in Sherman Kent, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1949), p. 200.
'U.S., Congressional Record, August 15, 1963, p. 14263.
' John V. Lindsay, "An Inquiry Into the Darkness of the Cloak, The Sharpness of the Dagger,"
Esquire (March 1964), p. 107.
'Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965), p. 248.
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Analysis and Collection
There still remains to consider a scheme for reorganization that would respect
the arguments for union of clandestine collection and special operations. This
is the scheme that would separate research and analysis on the one hand from
all undercover activities on the other. During the hearings on the legislation
that set up the Central Intelligence Agency, there was considerable sentiment
for giving the Agency research and analysis functions only.
This sentiment persists in some quarters. The concern is that the informa-
tion collection responsibilities of intelligence, no less than its other secret action
responsibilities, can make it the advocate of an operation which has policy im-
plications. "The decision to seek information by clandestine means," editori-
alized the Washington Post on February 20, 1963, "often is, in itself, a policy
decision." The Post went on to observe, that "the U-2 episode in the Soviet
Union is only the most dramatic illustration of the impact of intelligence activi-
ties on policy."
The point is apt, but it has still to be weighed against the advantages of
organizational union--the facilitation of communication necessary to make clan-
destine collection quickly responsive to the requirements of analysts, the as-
sistance that proximity to the analysts offers the collectors in evaluation of the
clandestine reports, the invariable necessity for close analysis-collection team-
work in manning the round-the-clock task forces that are set up to monitor
crisis situations.
The subject is further complicated by the fact that collection and analysis
are not organically separable, however earnestly the attempt is made to separate
them organizationally. The diplomat has license to make lengthy analysis of his
collected data. In technical collection, the lines between data-reduction and
analysis are blurred. And the clandestine collector has to decide at the least
which of his reports are worth disseminating. There is no escaping reliance on
the collectors for some interpretation.
It is also deserving of note that intelligence in the United States is already
an enterprise in which several agencies participate. How much further splitting
of intelligence is possible without carrying the fragmentation process to a point
of diminishing returns? There are other ways to keep analysis honest than to
separate it from collection. The present arrangements rely on the checks and
balances of the community system-the procedures for consultation in the U.S.
Intelligence Board and other intelligence forums.
This is a guard against the particular bias of any one agency in the intel-
ligence community. Admittedly, it is less effective a guard against a bias that is
distinctive to the community as a whole. While the collectors may be the
most ardent promoters of their wares, the intensity of its interest in these wares
can dispose intelligence generally to belittle protocol embarrassments and other
possible policy ramifications of collection activity. The Hoover Commission
was rather approving of this intelligence bias:
. . . among some of those responsible for implementation of our foreign
policy by diplomacy and negotiation, there seems to exist an abhorrence to
anything that might lead to diplomatic or even protocol complications .. .
This negative attitude, usually at the desk level, at times has stifled initiative
and action in the collection of intelligence. Some of these efforts, if per-
mitted to proceed properly, might have brought direct and immediate results
and made positive contributions to the national welfare that would have
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matic embarrassments."
The Commission's barbs at the diplomats were probably inspired by the
insatiable hunger of intelligence to get all the facts it is possible to get. This is
not a hunger, be it noted, that is diminished by separating analysis from col-
lection. Intelligence analysts value hard information uncovered by overhead
reconnaissance, no matter what agency is charged with the reconnaissance re-
sponsibility. The analyst is always laying requirements on collection that are
impelled by his urgent need to know more. The felt need to know more is
the overriding intelligence bias, and a restructuring within the community will
not correct for this bias, which derives from the innate character of the intel-
ligence interest. If intelligence has to be checked in its ingrained enthusiasms,
it must be by outside judgment.
More extended discussion on the arrangements for outside review of intel-
ligence is reserved for the next and final chapter. This advance word about
outside review is injected only for its bearing on the subject here under dis-
cussion-the alertness of the organization whose absorbing interest is information
to the possible policy consequences of information collection. The instructive
case history is a recent contretemps of overt collection, not because examples
in clandestine collection are lacking, but because an authoritative inquiry has
made public many of the facts about Project Camelot. This aborted research
study was designed to help build a generalized model of a developing society:
On the one hand, Project Camelot was intended to assist in identifying the
forerunners of social breakdown and the resultant opportunity for Com-
munist penetration and possible takeover; on the other hand, it was also
expected to produce basic information which would furnish some guide-
lines with respect to actions that might be taken by or with the indigenous
governments to foster constructive change within a framework of relative
order and stability.9
The research design of Project Camelot provided for extensive field work
that would hopefully conclude with a valuable contribution to the open litera-
ture on social forces in the developing countries. The organization that con-
tracted to do the research for the U.S. Army was the Special Operations Research
Office (SORO) of American University. The project was still in early prepara-
tory stage in the summer of 1965 when a SORO representative traveling in
Chile made inquiries to determine if that country ought to be covered in the
research program. A left-wing Chilean newspaper distorted this display of in-
terest in Chilean social problems to promote a political tempest. The U.S.
Army was persuaded that Camelot could go forward now only with a running
backfire that would debar any fruitful field research. Reluctantly, the Army
cancelled the project.
Project Camelot is one of many overt research programs on foreign areas
and international problems sponsored by the government. An interagency group
chaired by a State Department intelligence representative, the Foreign Area
Research Coordination Group, has kept tabs on projects of this sort. The sur-
veillance did not originally carry with it any powers of veto over an agency's
'U.S., Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, Intelli-
gence Activities: A Report to the Congress, Washington, 1955, pp. 68-69.
8 U.S., Congress, House, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on International
Organizations and Movements, Behavioral Sciences and the National Security, 89th Cong., 1st
Sess., 1965, p. 3R.
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decision to undertake a particular line of research, the purpose rather was co-
ordination of research efforts in the government and avoidance of duplication.
The Camelot furor, however, struck home the desirability of stronger con-
trols. Probing of any sort abroad touched on sensitivities of foreigners. The
activity was therefore one of especial interest to the State Department, not only
to State intelligence but also to officials charged with administering policy.
These officials were c:aagrined after the event to find that the American am-
bassador in Chile had been uninformed about Camelot and had felt compelled
in his cables home to protest his lack of knowledge. The general feeling in
Washington was that State policy officials should keep fully informed about
projects like Camelot. In July 1965, the Secretary of Defense directed that
.,all studies done in o:r for the Department of Defense, the conduct of which
may affect the relations of the United States with foreign governments, are to
be cleared with the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (International
Security Affairs) before they are initiated." 10 This clearance ensured review
and control at the Defense Department's major contact point with State.
President Johnson gave further sanction to State's powers of review in a
letter he wrote Dean Rusk in August:
Many agencies of the Government are sponsoring social science research
which focuses on foreign areas and peoples and thus relates to the foreign
policy of the United States. Some of it involves residence and travel in
foreign countries and communication with foreign nationals. As we have
recently learned, it can raise problems affecting the conduct of our foreign
policy.
For that reason I am determined that no Government sponsorship of_for-
eign area research should be undertaken which in the judgment of the Secre-
tary of State would adversely affect United States foreign relations. . .11
The direct consequence of the President's letter was the establishment within the
State Department of -the Foreign Research Council. The Council, on which
both intelligence and policy officials of the Department were represented, was
to exercise powers of supervision which, in effect, gave State a veto power over
any Government-sponsored research project on a foreign area.
In his testimony before Congress, Secretary Rusk indicated some of the
considerations which would govern State's new checkrein powers. He had
brought with him to State some nine years of experience with a private founda-
tion that supported research all over the world. "We found, for example, in
Latin America that whereas research in medicine and public health and agricul-
ture and the physical sciences was readily received and created no problems,
research that moved into the social sciences and humanities field, even for
a private agency with no Government connections whatever, was a matter of
considerable sensitivity." 12
He thought that tie United States Government had a responsibility to con-
sider the impact of its research activities on the already difficult position of
American scholarship at large:
We are aware that large and highly visible official U.S. projects probing into
delicate social and political matters may, unless they are carefully planned
to take full account of foreign sensibilities, help to create or increase hos-
"Ibid., p. 7R.
"Ibid., p. 107.
"Ibid., p. 111.
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tii ty not only toward researchers 1 enti ed wit t e overnment but
also toward American scholars who are completely unconnected with Govern-
ment agencies. We must take care that official sponsorship of research does
not increase the difficulties of independent American scholars who are doing
or plan to do private research abroad.13
The sensitivity of foreigners, the Secretary suggested, was related to the particular
agency which sponsored the research. "I think there is still a somewhat greater
level of sensitivity if the Armed Forces are involved in such research ..." 14
The moral of Project Camelot is that the agency which is most desirous of
having research done cannot safely be the only one to make the judgment about
getting it under way. Secretary Rusk was clear on this point:
There cannot be a satisfactory answer unless we in our Department have
a chance to look into the impact of such research projects on foreign policy
and have a chance to take them up with other governments to see whether
special problems of that sort exist. Because if the problems do exist, then
it is just unfeasible to suppose the research can proceed. The very possi-
bility evaporates. Unless the way can be cleared for successful conclusion,
successful execution of such research, then we may be faced with the fact
that there are some questions on which we would like to have answers, but
we can't just get them this way.15
The Intelligence Personality
The government organization is created by law and administrative regu-
lation, but these do not alone shape their offspring. A word is in order about
the political drives of the intelligence personality. Enough has been written
about the Himmlers and Berias of totalitarian societies to raise questions about
the intelligence environment and about the type of personality it attracts. The
intelligence-security complex in these societies houses a special sort of elite.
Its high officials and rank and file are persons who pass especially severe tests
of ideological commitment. They are the most reliable of political reliables,
allowing for the few defections that demonstrate the inevitability of error creep-
ing into human appraisal. They are by and large uncritical agents of the
totalitarian power structure, with a presumptive professional prejudice against
any liberalizing trend that might diminish them in function and prestige.
The biography of Peter Deriabin suggests the personality profile of the
type of man sought out for service in Soviet security and intelligence under
Stalin.16 Deriabin entered this field at the age of 23. He brought with him
a distinguished record as a front-line officer during World War II. He was a
member of the Communist Party. He had been in his teens a member of the
Komsomol, the party's youth organization, and he was before that a Young
Pioneer. He had a record as a propaganda activist for the faith. He was,
in short, an exemplar of Soviet society, with seemingly the desired rigidity of
attitude to keep him hostile to any unconventional view.
Much of the misgiving about security and intelligence functions in demo-
cratic societies derives from surmises that the very character of the activities
requires the recruitment of Deriabin counterparts. A few mutations (the real-
" Ibid., p. 109.
"Ibid., p. 112.
"Ibid., pp. 113-114.
"Peter Deriabin and Frank Gibney, The Secret World (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday &
Company, Inc., 1959), 334 pp.
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life Deriabin eventually broke away to the West) may appear in the natural
selection process, but the breed by and large is allegedly one with a perspective
that grossly overestimates threats to national security. This is not the invariable
stereotype of the intelligence officer; it is certainly not the one that Senator
Joseph McCarthy drew in the 1950's when he charged Communist infiltration
into the CIA. But it is the image represented in recent commentary. "What
worries a good many people is the likelihood that CIA personnel practices, geared
to a narrow view of national security needs, tend to produce a staff representing
a very limited and partisan range of the political spectrum." 17
There is no persuasive way to dispel this impression, since the public record
of intelligence analyses--both of those which turned out right and of those which
proved wrong-is thin. What there is of the public record, does not suggest
subservience to any particular partisan bias. An intelligence report that high-
lighted the dangers of :population growth in the developing countries was pub-
lished in 1959, at a time when the thesis carried a higher political charge than
it would today.18 The estimate in 1962 that Khrushchev would not put offensive
missiles in Cuba was outside the sector of political opinion which is prone to
anticipate every possible villainy from the Communists. The partisans of this
political sector would also have been irritated by the projection in 1964 of a
worsening trend in South Vietnam, although others could also have taken honest
objection.19 The early perception of the Sino-Soviet rift clashed with a wide-
spread antipathy in America to any subtlety that seemed to make distinction be-
tween "good" and "bad" Communists.
The disclosure by intelligence of lowered economic growth rates in the Soviet
Union was initially received with unsympathetic reserve by many fair-minded
students, who were concerned about keeping analysis untouched by anti-Com-
munist propaganda 20 Subsequent evidence of Soviet economic problems perhaps
persuaded many of the skeptics that the intelligence assessment was close to the
mark, not a cold-war flimflam.
Conceding that they intelligence analyst at headquarters is not especially to
be faulted for his political leanings, one may still ask about the officers in clan-
destine operations. Congressman Lindsay's impression in 1963 seemed to be
that the clandestine operators are so politically unperceptive a lot that they
cannot comprehend the liabilities America incurs by cooperating with reactionary
groups.
... one of the things that went wrong with the abortive Cuban in-
vasion . . . was that much of the CIA personnel responsible for the opera-
tion consisted of the sort of people who could not distinguish between the
reactionary and the democratic elements in the anti-Castro camp, between
the opponents of Castro who were acceptable to the Cuban people and those
who, as former supporters of Batista, were anathema to them. . . I have
a hunch that CIA recruitment policy has had an effect on CIA's perform-
ance.21
The analyst and the operator may differ in political temperament, not be-
cause of recruitment policy but because the occupations are so different. If
1T Letter to the Editor, The New York Times, May 14, 1966, p. 30.
1B U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, World Population Trends
and Problems, July 23, 1951). (Unclassified.) See also supra, p. 58.
1? The New York Times, August 23, 1964, p. 1.
10Ibid, January 10, 1964, p. 1.
11 U.S., Congressional Record, August 15, 1963, p. 14269.
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 thererareecomparative otlStewer rlett-w0in eCIQ-RbDPk$0-00317A eOhi007t is no
Y g g than in g
because banks give different loyalty tests before hiring than do schools but
because individuals from the left are much less attracted to banking careers.
Individuals who are attracted to clandestine operations probably tend to be more
outgoing and physical in their interests than the analysts. The difference in
personality may be associated with some difference of political complexion, but
the exceptions are so numerous as to make the generalization suspect.
If this discussion betrays a certain defensiveness on behalf of the intelligence
personality in America, it is not to criticize debate about the place of intelligence
in the democratic society. The nature of the activity will always be an area of
legitimate concern, for it is activity which is necessarily placed outside the range
of full public scrutiny and review. Congress has never been comfortable about
areas of executive privilege to which it was debarred access, and it recurrently
contemplates proposals for greater surveillance over intelligence. The final
chapter turns to this issue, which is at the center of most of the recent thoughtful
discussion about intelligence roles consistent with the country's democratic tra-
dition.
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Chapter 12
Surveillance Over Intelligence
In the year 1801, Congress instituted an inquiry into "the unauthorized dis-
bursement of public money" in the executive branch. Secretary of the Treasury
Wolcott reared his back.
Is it then seriously asserted that in the War and Navy Departments-
establishments which from their nature presuppose an actual or probable
state of war, which are designed to protect our country against enemies-that
the precise object of every expenditure must be published? Upon what
principle are our Generals and Commanders to be deprived of powers which
are sanctioned by universal usage and expressly recognized as lawful by all
writers of the Law of Nations? If one of our Naval Commanders now in
the Mediterranean should expend a few hundred dollars for intelligence re-
specting the force of his enemy or the measures meditated by him, ought the
present Administration to disallow the charge, or publish the source from
which the intelligence was derived? i
The question was rhetorical, making a point which was already respected
in legislation of the day. Congress characteristically appropriated special funds
for "contingent expenses" of the State, War, and Navy Departments. The rule
was to require only Presidential certification of amounts spent. No detail was
demanded with respect to the specific object of expenditure.
In this tradition, the National War Agency Appropriation Act of 1945
provided OSS with a $35 million fund, from which disbursements could be
made on "the certificate of the Director of the Office of Strategic Services .. .
such certificate . . . deemed a sufficient voucher for the amount therein cer-
tified." Similarly, the legislation setting up the CIA gave the Director of
Central Intelligenc6 authority to make disbursements "without regard to the
provisions of law and regulations relating to the expenditure of Government
funds," although he could not of course spend more than the amounts ap-
propriated to his Agency by Congress. The Director was particularly free from
restraints in the case of expenditures of "a confidential, extraordinary or emer-
gency nature." In such case, his own certifying voucher was to constitute suffi-
cient authority for the expenditure.
The record thus attests to Congressional consideration for the needs of
intelligence to enjoy certain exemptions in its financial accounting. The record
also attests to some anxieties about exemption giving rise to abuse. In 1842,
Secretary of State Daniel Webster negotiated an agreement with the British
representative Lord Ashburton on the long-disputed boundary between Maine
and Canada. Secretary Webster then spent money out of a $17,000 "secret
'Fred Wilbur Powell (comp.), Control of Federal Expenditures: A Documentary History
1775-1894 (Washington: Institute for Government Record of the Brookings Institution, 1939),
p. 329.
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service" fund to elicit favorable comment on the agreement from the Maine
press .2 In the next administration of President Polk, Congress requested an
accounting of these secret expenditures. The President turned down the request.
He acknowledged the "correct public feeling throughout the country against
secrecy of any kind in the administration of Government," He pointed, neverthe-
less, to the privileged character of certain funds appropriated by Congress.
These funds, he noted, were used to employ "individuals for the purpose of
obtaining information or rendering other important services who could never
be prevailed upon to act if they had the least apprehension that their names or
their agency would in any contingency be divulged." 3
The noteworthy feature of this particular case was the extraordinary purpose
of the secret expenditure. It was not to elicit foreign intelligence or to conduct
a covert operation abroad but rather to manipulate domestic opinion. Today,
intelligence is categorically debarred from any such domestic operation. No
law or regulation is ,self-enforcing, however, and intelligence is made subject
to surveillance arrangements in both the legislative and executive branches of
government.
Congressional Surveillance
Some of the present arrangements for surveillance were specified in 1953
by the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. Before what Congressional com-
mittees, Senator Mansfield of Montana had asked, do CIA representatives appear
on Agency business? The Deputy Director's letter of reply gave a fairly long
list: Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, Government Operations, and Un-American
Activities in the House; Armed Services, Government Operations, and Judiciary
in the Senate. In addition, the joint Committee on Atomic Energy was kept
regularly advised of CIA activities in the atomic energy field. Certain members
of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, the letter also noted, re-
ceived detailed briefings on the various aspects of CIA work at the annual review
of CIA's budget requirements.4
The main surveillance responsibilities in Congress devolve on four sub-
committees drawn frcm the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees of
the House and the Senate. Members of these subcommittees are privileged to
receive information that is not made available to other members of Congress.
Is this situation of limited oversight peculiar to intelligence? In form at least,
the situation is somewhat different for other subcommittees, whose findings are
more open to review and challenge in their parent committees or in Congress as
a whole. In practice, the situation is not so different; what is passed up to Con=
gress and then passed by Congress reflects generally the subcommittee view-
point. Subcommittees of the House Appropriations Committee, for example,
hold their hearings often in "executive session," and the decisions of these sub-
committees are seldom changed, either in the Appropriations Committee or on
the House floor.
Since subcommittees can and do bring weight to bear, Congress cannot be
faulted for failure to create the institutional arrangements for bringing off ade-
quate surveillance over intelligence activities. Yet the charge is frequent that
the surveillance has been less than adequate. By way of defense, Senator Salton-
'Richard N. Current, "Webster's Propaganda and the Ashburton Treaty," Mississippi Valley
Historical Review, Vol. X.XXIV, No. 2 (September 1947), p. 189.
'James D. Richardson (comp), A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presi-
dents, 1789-1897 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1897), Vol. IV, pp. 434-435.
`U.S., Congressional Record, March 10, 1953, p. 2988.
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ssac uses sugges a in 19b 5 that responsible Congressional over-
sight in the case of intelligence simply had to be self-limiting: ". . . it is a ques-
tion of our reluctance, if you will, to seek information and knowledge on subjects
which I personally, as a Member of Congress and citizen, would rather not
have, unless I believed it to be my responsibility to have it, because it might
involve the lives of American citizens." 6 The Senator's quite proper point was
that Congressional overseers should not be getting into such matters of sensitive
detail as say the identity of agents.
The evidence of recent press reports is that the subcommittees' surveillance
over intelligence today is more embracing and interrogative than it used to be
and that the Director of Central Intelligence is responsive to subcommittee re-
quests for information. The responsiveness derives from the confidence that
the information will not go beyond the subcommittee chambers. Were Congress
as a body to request the information, the executive branch would look to the
historical precedents on the subject of executive privilege.
The precedents date from the eighteenth century. The position of Presi-
dent Washington's Administration, when the House of Representatives requested
information about the disastrous military expedition in 1792 under Major Gen-
eral St. Clair against the Northwest Indian tribes, was that "the Executive ought
to communicate such papers as the public good would permit and ought to
refuse those the disclosure of which would injure the public."e In our own
time, President Eisenhower stood on ground of executive privilege when he
denied Senator Joseph McCarthy access to Army files in 1954. President Ken-
nedy also invoked the doctrine in 1962, when he forbade the release by the
Department of Defense of information desired by Senators investigating the
Department's censorship of public speeches by military officers.
The courts are sympathetic to executive concerns about sensitive informa-
tion. The Supreme Court's ruling is that "even the most compelling necessity
cannot overcome the claim of privilege if the court is ultimately satisfied that
military secrets are at stake." 7 This judicial principle, like most, is no unfailing
guide to the verdict in any particular litigation involving intelligence. In gen-
eral, the courts will not compel the Government to give information if it is not
a party to the suit. If the Government is a party, the courts consider claims
of privilege more carefully. However, if the Government is prosecutor in a
criminal case, it must accept the priority of a defendant's claim to personal
liberty over the doctrine of executive privilege. The Government may find it-
self with no choice between disclosure and dropping the case.
The precedents then are well-established; the executive branch can set limits
on disclosure. Since Presidential discretion in intelligence matters is so deter-
mining, an integral part of the surveillance question is the effectiveness of the
watchdog procedures that have been set up within the executive branch itself.
Executive Surveillance
Intelligence in America up to World War II was a service that placed low
on the bureaucratic totem pole. State had no intelligence analysis service at all
as a distinctive organization, and military intelligence was a staff function sub-
ordinated to operational command. The wartime OSS represented intelligence
'U.S., Congressional Record, April 9, 1956, p. 5924.
'Joseph P. Harris, Congressional Control of Administration (Washington: The Brookings
Institution, 1964), p. 251, citing Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. I (1950 ed.), pp. 189-190.
'U.S. v. Reynolds 345 US 1 (1952).
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for the first time at the level of an independent agency, a though it operate
under the joint Chiefs of Staff.
The legislation of :1947 setting up the CIA firmly established intelligence at
the independent agency level, subject, however, to the reviewing authority of
the National Security Council. The NSC had other tasks besides the supervision
of intelligence, and in its performance of these other tasks, the Council conceived
its role as limited strictly to advising the President. Only in intelligence did the
NSC technically have more than an advisory role; for the 1947 Act devolved on
the Council members a corporate responsibility for the organization and co-
ordination of intelligence activities.
The NSC began early to discharge this responsibility. It issued its first
directives on the organization and coordination of intelligence in December
1947. The following month, it initiated a general survey of intelligence activities,
drawing on the services of outside consultants (one of whom, Allen Dulles, was
later to become Director of Central Intelligence). These energetic beginnings
were auguries of an attentive surveillance over intelligence. The evidence, how-
ever, is that the NSC was so much more concerned with substantive policy
issues of the day that it deferred to the judgment of the intelligence professionals
when it came to consider questions of intelligence procedures and organization.
Writing in 1952, the Ccuncil's Executive Secretary alluded to the NSC intelligence
directives, issued "usually on the recommendation of the Director of Central In-
telligence and the Intelligence Advisory Committee." 8
Over the years, there has been some evolution of procedures for executive
surveillance over intelligence by agencies other than the NSC. One of the
notable recommendations of the Hoover Commission's Task Force which in-
vestigated intelligence in 1954 was for a "watchdog commission" composed of
both members of Congress and "other public spirited citizens commanding the
utmost national respect and confidence." 9
The full Hoover Commission, in its 1955 report, modified this recommenda-
tion by splitting it into its twin parts. Instead of one supervising agency, the
Commission recommended two, a Congressional watchdog committee and a
committee in the executive branch reporting to the President. The reaction of
the Eisenhower Administration to the suggestion of a new Congressional watch-
dog was cold, but it did accept the idea of a board of review within the executive
branch. In February 1956, the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign
Intelligence Activities was formally established. The first chairman of the eight-
man board was Dr. James R. Killian, President of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. The President requested that the board meet for several days
not less than once every six months.
The board lapsed into inactivity after President Eisenhower left office.
President Kennedy reactivated it after the Bay of Pigs, renaming it the President's
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Like his predecessor, President Kennedy
envisaged periodic rather than standing review, and the members of the board
have not given anything approaching their full time to oversight of intelligence.
James S. Lay, Jr., "National Security Council's Role in the U.S. Security and Peace Program,"
World Affairs, Summer, 7.952, reprinted in U.S., Congress, Senate, Committee on Government
Operations, Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery, Organizing for National Security,
Vol. 2, p. 157. The Intelligence Advisory Committee is now known as the United States
Intelligence Board. See a-upra, p. 4.
U.S., Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, Intelligence
Activities: A Report to the Congress, Part II, Task Force Report on Intelligence Activities in
the Federal Government, May 1955, p. 71.
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 Likc eroved too rof a lco orattiion /who0convene p ~ o ~ a1Py, th A0can interrag~atc -0
management sharply and regard with skepticism. Their dissatisfactions can be
a prod to improved performance, reorganizations, and personnel changes. But
they are informed only well enough to raise questions about broad programs.
They necessarily allow a long leash to those who make the operational decisions.
The shorter leashes are held elsewhere in the executive branch.
For example, the authority granted the Director of Central Intelligence to
disburse certain funds on his own voucher is far from a license for profligate
expenditures. The disbursements are still subject to the accounting controls
of CIA's own auditors. No intelligence officer can make unjustifiable outlays
without making himself liable to the same claims for refund that would be
levied against him if his books were subject to examination by the General Ac-
counting Office.
Whatever its comparative freedom from external audits of expenditures, the
CIA is subject to the usual executive checkreins when it comes to getting its
funds. The ordeal of the budget cycle is the same in intelligence as elsewhere,
always involving the tearless screening of proposals by the Bureau of the Budget.
The one difference is that the CIA's budget does not become a matter of public
record; but the Bureau does know the figures, does weigh them against the
needs or claims of other government agencies, and does exert the usual pressure
for cutbacks in order to keep the total submitted by the President to Congress
within bounds.
Even before a Congressional subcommittee sees the CIA budget, there is
a review by the Bureau of the Budget, which must approve the amount set
aside for CIA, and this, of course, includes Presidential approval. Then
the budget is considered by the subcommittees of the Appropriations Com-
mittees of the House and of the Senate, as is the case with other executive
departments and agencies. The only difference in the case of the CIA
is that the amount of its budget is not publicly disclosed, except to these
subcommittees.
... This subcommittee is entitled to see everything it wishes to see with
regard to the CIA budget and. to have as much explanation of expenditures,
past and present, as it desires.10
The appropriation of funds constitutes only .the most general authorization
for an intelligence program. The established procedures currently require the
CIA to submit to a project-by-project check by a special group of top officials
from State and other offices. This group meets often enough to be informed on
operational problems, and it thus gives more than the broad oversight for which
the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board was set up. So the CIA does
not have such independent powers of decision that it can present the government
with faits accompli. The President does not wake up one morning to learn by
surprise of a CIA-financed caravel on the high seas approaching the Bay of Pigs.
When there are failures, post-mortems do establish blameworthy reasons but do
not substantiate common impressions of intelligence acting on its own.
The reference is to recent not distant history. Clandestine intelligence has
always pinned diplomacy on the horns of dilemma. On the one hand, the diplo-
mat wants to be able to disavow any involvement in clandestine operations; on the
other hand, he knows that his ignorance of intelligence operations can expose
10 Allen Dulles, The Craft of Intelligence (New York: The New American Library, 1965),
pp. 242-243.
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1ppto even greater embarrassments than his invo vement. Until fairly recent
years, the dilemma was one which he had little chance of resolving himself; intel-
ligence could conduct its operations so that the ambassador would not have
enough knowledge to interpose his veto when he thought the diplomatic interest
dictated suppression of intelligence ardor. In this respect, American intelligence
was following the European precedents. An illustrative case is of British intel-
ligence during World War II, when it shipped high explosives in plastic form
to its operatives in neutral Sweden for possible use in sabotaging Swedish iron
ore shipments to Germany. The British Minister to Sweden was not informed,
although the explosives and detonators were transported in diplomatic bags by
an officer travelling on a diplomatic courier's passport. Nor was the Minister
informed that the material was being stored in the cellar right under his office
in the legation building. The intelligence attitude was that "if he had had any
inkling of what he was sitting on top of, the accustomed even flow of his des-
patches to the Foreign Office might have been somewhat disturbed." 11
Depending on hi;; perspective, one could be either amused or outraged by
this sort of dissimulation, but the alternative of directly implicating the diplomat
by making him privy to the operation did not commend itself either. The course
that did commend itself to many thoughtful people was to enforce apartheid
between clandestine intelligence and diplomacy. American Senators articulated
the principal in 1960: "The conduct of diplomacy must be insulated from sensi-
tive intelligence operations. Intelligence is a source of information for diplo-
macy-not a part of it." 12
The proposition as thus stated seemed to urge close liaison between intel-
ligence analysis and diplomacy but strict separation between diplomacy and secret
operations. The difficulty with the doctrine was the scope it gave for uncoordi-
nated activities in the area of foreign policy. Recent administrations in Wash-
ington have been at pains to eliminate possibilities of confusion. The President,
McGeorge Bundy wrote in 1961 to Senator Jackson, did not wish "any question
to arise as to the clear authority and responsibility of the Secretary of State, not
only in his own Department, and not only in such large-scale related areas as
foreign aid and information policy, but also as the agent of coordination in all
our major policies toward other nations.18
President Johnson went even farther to underline State's primacy. On March
4, 1966, he designated the Secretary of Stateas his agent not only for coordination
but also for direction and supervision of overseas activities (excluding military
operations under area military commands). To assist the Secretary of State in
interdepartmental matters, "including those of the Intelligence Community," a
Senior Interdepartmental Group (SIG) was set up under the chairmanship of
the Under Secretary of State.14 Other members of SIG were to include the
Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Administrator of AID, the Director of Central
Intelligence, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Director of USIA, and
the Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.
n H. Montgomery Hyde, Room 3603: The Story of the British Intelligence Center in New
York During World War 17 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1962), pp. 21-22.
" Committee on Government Operations, op. cit., p. 483.
'$ U.S., Senate, Committee on Government Operations, Subcommittee on National Security
Staffing and Operations, Administration of National Security: Basic Issues, 88th Cong., 1st
Sess., 1963, p. 8.
" U.S., Congress, Senate, Committee on Government Operations, Subcommittee on National
Security and International Operations, The Secretary of State and the Problem of Coordina-
tion: New Duties and Procedures of March 4, 1966, 89th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1966, p. 5.
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could act only on the basis of consensus judgment. Rather, the Under Secretary
of State, acting as "Executive Chairman," had the deciding voice, although other
agencies had the right of appeal to higher authority. Under the SIG, counter-
part bodies were set up at regional levels-for each region an Interdepartmental
Regional Group (IRG). Like the Under Secretary on SIG, the respective Assistant
Secretaries of State were to act with the powers of decision of Executive Chair-
men. Other representatives on each IRG were to be from Defense, AID, CIA,
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, USIA, and the White House or National Security Staff.
Control is a complex process in the large organization. The most that surveil-
lance of the sort here described can amount to is what might be called off-line con-
trol. The controlling authority can approve a project, but it cannot preclude
errors of judgement in the execution of operations. The authority does not have
the online control capabilities that enable the central computer in an automated
factory to take immediate cognizance of every development in the production
process and to feed back adjustments before minuscule errors become serious.
This degree of computer control is no more possible today in intelligence than
in other areas of human behavior. The closest approach to on-line control over
centain intelligence activities requires that the controlling authority be nearer
than Washington to the scene of action. The scene is abroad, the highest au-
thority abroad is the ambassador, and the noteworthy development of recent
years has been his acquisition of checkrein powers over intelligence activity in
his geographic bailiwick.'
One of the charters for his authority is President Kennedy's letter of May
29, 1961 to all American ambassadors abroad:
You are in charge of the entire U.S. Diplomatic Mission, and I shall ex-
pect you to supervise all of its operations. The Mission includes not only the
personnel of the Department of State and the Foreign Service, but also the
representative of all other U.S. agencies which have programs or activities
in (name of country). I shall give you full support and backing in carrying
out your assignment.16
The only American government personnel not falling under the ambassador's
authority were "United States military forces operating in the field where such
forces are under the command of a United States area military commander."
With respect to all other personnel, it was their responsibility "to keep you fully
informed of their views and activities and to abide by your decisions unless in
some particular instance you and they are notified to the contrary."
Personnel did retain both the right of communication with their own agencies
in Washington and the right of appeal for review of the ambassador's decisions.
Yet the principle of the ambassador's right to knowledge was established. Each
ambassador had to decide for himself how energetically he was to exercise the
right. He presumably did not want to get into the level of detail that would
make him in effect the working executive in charge of the operations of every
agency represented at his Mission. On the other hand, he had to know when
to step in to safeguard the diplomatic interest.
The principle of ambassadorial primacy can be circumvented if the ambas-
sador is irresolute and pliant. However, few ambassadors rise to their eminent
positions with records indicating infirmity of will or purpose. The ambassador
can be mistaken but he is not unassertive. He evidently encounters resistance
'U.S., Congress, Senate, Committee on Government Operations, Subcommittee on National
Security Staffing and Operations, Administration of National Security: Selected Papers, 87th
Cong., 2nd Sess., 1962, p. 9.
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to s increased authority, but he is much more in comm.an o airs than he
used to be.
Very few of the ambassadors reported problems of coordination at their
posts; those that did had usually encountered some difficulty with respect
to either military or foreign-assistance personnel ... On the whole, however,
the replies .. , showed that coordination in the field was good . . .18
The Joint Committee Idea
In April 1965, a team of New York Times newsmen authored a series of
five articles on the CIA. The agency, the journalists found, was "under far more
stringent political and budgetary control than most of its critics know or con-
cede." 17 Yet the most earnest affirmations of informed opinion cannot fully
persuade when so few can witness the operation of the control machinery. The
necessity for open discussion in the democratic society is one of the horns of the
American dilemma. Security is the other. There is no resolving the dilemma,
but there is presumably a best possible solution that comes closest to satisfying
the democratic ideal. The joint Congressional committee idea is a proposed
solution that has been introduced in every session of Congress for more than a
decade.
The proposal goes back even further. In April 1948 (the new Central In-
telligence Agency was still in its first year), Congressman Devitt of Wisconsin
took the floor to propose an 18-member joint committee, nine from each House
of Congress, which was to be charged with responsibility for the continuing
study of the programs and activities of CIA and other intelligence organizations
in the government. The Congressman acknowledged the especially sensitive
nature of intelligence, but he suggested that atomic energy, over which Congress
had already set up a joint committee, was no less sensitive a field.
Support for the idea spread in the 1950's. Senator Mansfield was a prime
mover, introducing joint committee proposals in the 1953 and succeeding ses-
sions. In his remarks on the floor, the Senator acknowledged that intelligence
organizations of other countries were not subject to legislative oversight, but
he did not believe that intelligence activities by the United States ought to
escape the American system of checks and balances. Like Congressman Devitt,
Senator Mansfield and his supporters cited the surveillance over the AEC by
Congress through its joint Committee on Atomic Energy as the desirable prece-
dent.
The Hoover Commission's 1955 report attracted new support to the proposal
for a joint committee. The Commission's recommendation was that "the Con-
gress consider creating a Joint Congressional Committee on Foreign Intelligence,
similar to the joint Committee on Atomic Energy." 18
The proposal finally came to a vote in 1956. Senator Mansfield's resolution
for a joint Committee on Foreign Intelligence, co-sponsored by 34 other Senators,
proposed a committee drawn from six members of each House. President Eisen-
hower was opposed, and ten of the co-sponsors switched sides. On April 11,
1956, the resolution was voted down 27 to 59. All Presidents since then have
opposed joint committee proposals, and they never got out of committee again.
'? U.S., Congress, Senate, Committee on Government Operations, Subcommittee on National
Security Staffing and Operations, The Ambassador and the Problem of Coordination, 88th
Cong., 1st Sess., 1963, p. 37.
I The New York Times, April 25, 1966, p. 20.
7? U.S., Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, op. cit.,
Part I, p. 2.
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In 1956, Senator Kennedy voted for the Mansfield Resolution. In 1963, President
Kennedy took the opposite view when asked how he felt about the idea:
I think the present committee-there is one in both the House and Senate
which maintains very close liaison with the CIA-is best ... They meet
frequently with Mr. McCone . . . I am well satisfied with the present ar-
rangements.19
The President did not elaborate on the reason for his change of mind.
Looking at matters from the inside, he could certainly see in operation the con-
trols over CIA which he had not seen before. He had, moreover, probably taken
on with his higher office the conviction, so natural to its incumbents, that there
was as much solicitude for the American freedoms in the White House as in
the Capitol. He almost certainly had acquired a deeper respect for the prin-
ciple of executive privilege in sensitive areas of administration.
Within the Intelligence Community, opinion is not-as common impres-
sion mistakenly conceives it to be-monolithic in its opposition to the joint
committee idea. The prevailing view of many years in the community was that
existing arrangements were working well, and that if critics knew how well,
they would be much less critical. One.of the currents of thinking today is that
image may be as important as substance: not only must the controls over in-
telligence be working, but American public opinion must believe they are work-
ing. Allen Dulles, never an enthusiast for establishing a joint committee, is most
recently of the mind that its establishment might be worthwhile now to "quiet
public fears." 20
The intelligence professional in America is tinged with a certain envy of
his British counterpart, who is shielded from mischievous publicity by the work-
ings of an effective party discipline. The government is in office by virtue of
its majority in Parliament, and this majority in Britain does not challenge the
government without jeopardizing its own tenure. The characteristic parameters
of the political behavior system are parliamentary supremacy in form and dis-
ciplined parliamentary support of the executive in reality. In this situation, in-
telligence can indulge its "passion for anonymity," secure under the wing of
executive protection against external inquisition.
In America, however, the prudent dictates of anonymity do not invariably
prevail against political pressures for open debate. Members of the President's
own party may press even more ardently than the opposition for a new form of
legislative oversight. The American political system being what it is, intelligence
in the United States does not so much seek to escape legislative oversight as to
find common ground with its advocates.
The terrain of this common ground must be sure, in the intelligence view, to
include one feature as fundamental: Congressional surveillance must not equate
to surveillance by all the members of the Congress. This is a requirement that
Congress has in fact always respected in the very sensitive areas of national se-
curity. During World War II, Congress as a body appropriated the funds for
the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb, but only a handful of Senators
and Congressmen were "witting" about the project. It is a requirement, more-
over, that Congress still respects when it allows the joint Committee on Atomic
Energy to act as its agent for supervision over the AEC. If the tradition is
'? The New York Times, October 10, 1963, p. 18.
?? The New York Times, April 25, 1966, p. 20.
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not mean an enlargement in the number of Senators and Congressmen who now
exercise the surveillance responsibilities. Whatever the pattern of oversight,
there is no escaping the, necessity to keep secrets secret.
One of the apothegms much quoted in discussions of legislative oversight is
that secret knowledge is secret power. The thought deserves our closing exami-
nation. Knowledge is secret which is restricted to a small group. Yet in an
age of science and specialization, restriction of access is the characteristic also
of much knowledge that is not secret in the common meaning of the word.
The knowledge is secret in a working sense because the fields of learning today
are many and are comprehended only in their relatively small circles of experts.
Under the circumstances, the opinions of government experts-in intelligence
and in other fields-can be exceptionally influential in shaping the decisions of
those who govern. In this situation, the concern to keep intelligence honest, so
to speak, is really part of a broader concern to keep American legislation and
policy in all areas from becoming mere ratification of specialist biases. The
intelligence profession, made all the more introspective by its understanding of
foreign political systems, is alert to this flaw line of specialization in the modern
democratic structure. Since the field of intelligence is so sensitive, the intelli-
gence professionals caution that surgical skill and care must go into the fashion-
ing of any counterweight controls. Their cautions are bound up with their
acceptance of the principle that balancing mechanisms in our political life are
necessary to contend with the increasing segmentation of knowledge in our age.
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31
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