FUTURE OF U.S. INTELLIGENCE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-01448R000401950003-7
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 22, 2012
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: February 15, 1995
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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FOR
PROGRAM
DATE
SUBJECT
STATION WETA-TV
PBS Network
The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour CITY
February 15, 1995 7:00 PM AUDIENCE
New York: 212-309-1400
Chicago: 312-541-2020
Detroit: 313-344-1177
Los Angeles: 213-466-6124
Washington, D.C.: 301-656-4068
Boston: 617-536-2232
Philadelphia: 215-567-7600
San Francisco: 213-466-6124
Miami: 305-358-3358
Washington, D.C.
Future of U.S. Intelligence
BROADCAST EXCERPT
ROBERT MACNEIL: Finally tonight, another in our series of
conversations on the future of U.S. intelligence.
Margaret Warner has more.
MARGARET WARNER: There's a special breed of spy novelist:
former spies, like John le Carre, who practiced espionage, then
left the active arena to write books about it. One leading
American spy-turned-author is Charles McCarry. While a magazine
writer overseas in the 1950s and '60s, McCarry also served as a
covert agent for the CIA. He then turned to writing full-time,
producing such novels as "The Tears of Autumn," "Better Angels,"
and "Second Sight."
Thanks for being with us, Mr. McCarry.
CHARLES MCCARRY: Nice to be here, Margaret.
WARNER: Tell me, do you think that the United States still
has a need for secret intelligence and secret intelligence agencies
in this new, post-Cold War environment that we find ourselves in?
MCCARRY: Yes, of course.
WARNER: For what? Why?
MCCARRY: Well, the world is not yet a safe place, is it. The
primary target of American intelligence throughout the Cold War was
Russia. It's still an unpredictable place, still in possession of
enough nuclear weapons to blow up the United States, and I suppose
most of the world with it. There are other problems around the
world. I think that intelligence-gathering is changing, economic
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intelligence, intelligence about the environment. I think the
government needs to know what people are likely to do.
WARNER: But why do those functions have to be carried out by
a special agency like, say, the CIA? Senator Moynihan we had on
this show on Monday, and he said we should just abolish the CIA.
Let the State Department and the Defense Department do -- you know,
divvy up the work between them.
MCCARRY: Well, the original concept was that the President
would have a source of information that was unpolluted by politics
and unpolluted by political agendas or bureaucratic agendas. And
I think that's generally been true, in terms of the intelligence
that's presented to the President. It takes up half an hour of his
day in the morning and he gets this wonderful sheet of gossip that
tells him what he might expect that day or that week or at some
point in the future. And then he goes on with the rest of the day.
WARNER: Now, of course, since you left the agency, we've
entered the age of the spy satellites and all this technical means
of surveillance. What is the special role that remains, do you
think, for the kind of what they call human intelligence, the kind
of old-fashioned spying you write about?
MCCARRY: It's often said you can't photograph the human mind.
All you can know about it is what is revealed to another human
being.
Intelligence is really based on relationships. You make
friends with people. You win their trust. They tell you things.
Very often they have a motive for telling you. You check what they
tell you against what someone else tells you. You check it against
other sources.
If I remember the classification system that was in force when
I was in the agency, it was: one, documentary, absolutely true;
two, probably true; three, possibly true; four, possibly false. I
never saw a report that wasn't labeled three, possibly true. Which
of course meant that it was also possibly false.
So, you can never be sure. But if you have 80 percent of the
information, then you can guess at the rest.
MCCARRY: Yes. And make an educated guess instead of guessing
in the dark.
WARNER: And then, of course, there's the most cloak-and-
dagger aspect of human intelligence, covert operations. And I
guess by that I mean not just collecting information or
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intelligence, but actively trying to change the political situation
or foil a political attempt by the target country.
Is that -- one, do you think that's still going on? And two,
is there still a role for that?
MCCARRY: That's always been the rub.
WARNER: [Laughter] What do you mean?
MCCARRY: Well, I mean, as someone else pointed out, this is
a very, very old profession. And in "The Book of Numbers," Chapter
13, if I may quote a little Scripture, the Lord instructs Moses to
send a reconnaissance party of 12 Israelites, one from each tribe,
into the Land of Canaan, the Promised Land, to make -- to spy out
the land. They did so. Eleven of them came back and said, "Well,
it certainly is a land of milk and honey. But the cities are well-
fortified and the people are giants. We felt like grasshoppers,
seeing them. And we seemed grasshoppers to them."
But one, Caleb, said, "All that may be true, but we can still
conquer the Promised Land, as the Lord has instructed us to do."
The Lord was very angry at the other eleven and struck them
dead, but He gave Caleb and his descendants the Land of Canaan,
which was the Promised Land, in perpetuity.
I think there's a lesson in that. Caleb told the chief
executive what he wanted to hear. And that's the built-in
difficulty with hot-wiring, covert action in particular, to the
President. I think the cases in which the agency has gotten into
difficulties in the media and in the public mind have usually
involved things like the Bay of Pigs or the overthrow of Diem in
Vietnam or the secret war on Castro or Nixon's attempt to blame the
agency for the Watergate break-in. These have been cases where
Presidents have instructed the agency to do things which are:
accomplish domestic political objectives for the President.
It's very difficult to resist that. So I suppose -- and this
has always been. In my novels I've solved it, of course, by
separating the espionage service from the rest of the agency. But
in real life, of course, you have to deal with Congress and you
have to deal with reality. And it may be more difficult to do
that.
WARNER: So, do you think that -- what do you think
appropriate targets for covert operations would be today,
operations designed to foil something, to actively take some kind
of a role?
MCCARRY: Well, what we know from...
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WARNER: Are you talking about terrorist organizations, or
MCCARRY: I think what every American knows, from long
experience, is that covert action on a large scale really doesn't
work out. It's virtually impossible in this society to keep
something that large quiet and secret.
On the other hand, as I said, intelligence work is a matter of
small accomplishments achieved with great difficulty and expense.
If we can -- someone once said to me when I was working, the job of
an intelligence service is to stay in with the outs.
MCCARRY: I think that that sort of, that sort of covert
action, in which you help people who may in the future take power
in a country which is a one-party state or is ruled by a despot, is
acceptable. But I think you keep it small and you keep it
personal, and you remember that it may be exposed.
WARNER: And how good do you think the CIA's balance sheet is
after 50 years? How good have they been at this, on balance?
MCCARRY: I think they're unquestionably the best intelligence
service in the world.
WARNER: And how would you answer, again, Senator Moynihan,
who says we should abolish the agency 'cause they missed major
political developments, like the demise of the Soviet Union's
economic system, for instance?
MCCARRY: Well, of course, you know, all of these bits and
pieces come in from all over the world every day and they're put
into the hopper, and it's sort of like getting a lot of parts for
a watch. And if you shake the bucket hard enough, you don't
necessarily get a Rolex.
Mistakes are made. You can't possibly know everything, but
it's better to know something than to know nothing.
WARNER: Now, the CIA you write about in your books, or the
characters in your books are these dashing, romantic figures who
are also really smart, really canny, very effective. And it
doesn't quite jibe with the picture we got of, say, Aldrich Ames,
who came off as kind of a bumbling careerist whose drinking and
sloppiness was overlooked by his superiors.
Has the CIA changed since the days you were in the agency?
MCCARRY: Well, I don't know, but I can say that I didn't know
anybody like Aldrich Ames in the days that I was in the agency.
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WARNER: Really.
MCCARRY: I thought it was the most intelligent group of
people with whom I had ever been associated. They were devoted,
they were patriotic, they were intellectually honest. And I might
say, also, that it was a very humane organization in its personnel
policies, probably the most humane I've ever known.
WARNER: What do you mean, humane?
MCCARRY: I mean they took care of their own. It was a
wonderful atmosphere back in the '50s and the '60s, a kind of
absolute freedom of speech and thought. It was a kind of Republic
of IQ. I suppose that -- I would say that the men and women that
I knew in the agency had -- you know, were 20 points above almost
anybody else I'd ever worked with, as a group. And I think that
that was Allen Dulles' recruiting. He appeared to want to recruit
every bright young man in America, and I think that he pretty...
WARNER: Including you.
MCCARRY: ...nearly succeeded in that.
WARNER: Well, I'm sure, though, you've probably read, at
least, the stories involving Ames and his behavior and so on. I
mean, can you explain why someone like an Aldrich Ames did flourish
at the CIA of the '80s and '90s?
MCCARRY: Well, he says it was the money. If I were writing
a novel about it, fiction, I would make it come out slightly
different.
MCCARRY: I would make it a CIA operation and I would make him
a dupe of a tremendously clever control who fed him information,
which he fed to the Russians.
WARNER: But I don't think that is what happened, of course,
as we know.
MCCARRY: No. I don't think it is, either.
WARNER: And why, why do you think his behavior was overlooked
by his superiors? I mean...
MCCARRY: I simply can't answer that. My guess is
incompetence on the part of some of the people, inattention. The
explanation that I've read in the press is the old boy network.
You know, a kind of sense that once you're in, you're worthy of
trust, and your motives and your behavior can't be questioned.
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I think that there's some of that in an organization in which,
theoretically, everything is known about everyone. And that's a
very liberating thing, to have been investigated to a fare-thee-
well and to have no secrets and to be, you know, working with
people and thinking with people who also have no secrets. It
relieves you of a good deal of tension.
In Ames' case, obviously, he had a secret.
WARNER: Some critics feel it's just become too big a
bureaucracy. It's sort of become like any other department. Is
that different from the way it was when you were there or when you
were in the field?
MCCARRY: Yes. In those days it was scattered all over town.
You know, they -- what is Parkinson's proposition, the first or the
second? Dying institutions build monuments to themselves. You
know, the British Admiralty built that great big building for
itself in London at the very moment when the British Fleet ceased
to count for very much, strategically.
I think the agency continues to account for a good deal. But
in the old days they were scattered all over town in temporary
buildings and in rented offices, and there was less propinquity and
less chance to bureaucratize. And I thought that that was a good
thing. It led to independent thinking and independent action and
a lot of initiative, which is very difficult to achieve if you're
in a row of five offices and you have to pass the piece of paper,
you know, from the first to the fifth.
WARNER: So, what would be your advice to the new Director of
the CIA who's coming in?
MCCARRY: [Takes deep breath]
WARNER: I mean, could he take it back to that kind of
organization of like-minded but independent and scattered
operators?
MCCARRY: I think they might consider breaking off the
espionage services, the clandestine services from the rest of the
agency -- it's a rather small part of everything that happens --
and putting it in Utah or somewhere.
[Laughter]
WARNER: You might have some major defections at that point.
Well, Mr. McCarry, I'm sorry, that's all the time we have.
But thanks for being with us.
MCCARRY: Thank you very much, Margaret.
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