LACK OF INTELLIGENCE ON GRENADA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000200940002-3
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 21, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 27, 2008
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: November 2, 1983
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Michel speaks with some authority as an ex-officio
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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
Morning Edition
DATE November 2, 1983 6:00 AM
Lack Of Intelligence On Grenada
STATION WAMU-FM
NPR Network
Washington, DC
BOB EDWARDS: A frequently raised question about the
U.S. invasion of Grenada is whether U.S. forces had adequate
advance information about the situation on the island.
Administration officials say U.S. forces encountered
more resistance than expected, especially from Cubans on the
island. Once there, a U.S. intelligence failure.
report.
NPR's Ted Clarke explores that question in this
TED CLARKE: In responding to charges that there was
an intelligence failure, the President's supporters do some-
thing rather unusual. Instead of refusing to talk about
intelligence sources as is customary, they say quite openly
that the U.S. had no agents on the ground in Grenada.
Here's how National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane
put it last Thursday.
ROBERT McFARLANE: Well, I think when you don't have
any intelligence resources there at all something can't fail
that isn't there.
CLARKE: And yesterday, House Minority Leader Robert
Michel left the White House meeting prepared, like McFarlane,
to tell reporters that no one was gathering intelligence for
the U.S. in Grenada.
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member of the House Intelligence Committee.
CONGRESSMAN ROBERT H. MICHEL: As a member who knows
so little bit about how we're gathering information these days
that a sole reliance on technical equipment is not sufficient.
The human on-site intelligence is really required to buttress
what you get from your technical means, and that was not done
in any way shape or form, frankly, in Grenada, and it was one
of those quickly organized operations.
CLARKE: Here's one possible explanation for this
unexpected willingness to declare openly that America had no
spies in Grenada.
It helps to explain away some major miscalculations in
the American invasion effort. It was cited by Congressman
Michel as one reason for the accidental U.S. bombing of a
civilian hospital last Tuesday. It was cited by Robert
McFarlane as one reason the U.S. didn't know that Cubans were
on the island in such force.
But, if it's true that no intelligence agents were
working for the U.S. in Grenada, and you can never be sure
about such things, but if it's true you have to wonder why not.
After all, President Reagan has said for some time that
developments in Grenada posed a threat to U.S. national
security.
In a nationwide address last March, he said....
THE PRESIDENT: On the small island of Grenada, at the
southern end of the Caribbean chain, the Cubans, with Soviet
financing and backing, are in the process of building an
airfield with a 10,000-foot runway. Grenada doesn't even have
an air force. Who is it intended for?
The Caribbean is a very important passageway for our
international commerce and military lines of communication.
More than half of all American oil imports now pass through the
Caribbean.
CLARKE: Given this concern on the part of the
President, shouldn't the CIA have made sure that people were
put in place in Grenada to provide intelligence?
Ray Cline, who was Deputy Director of the CIA from
1962 to 1966, says it's not that easy, not nearly that easy.
Dr. Cline is now a Senior Associate with the Georgetown Center
for Strategic and International Studies. He says one problem
is the small size of Grenada and the small number of people who
could be recruited as spies.
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DR. RAY CLINE: How many Grenadians do you suppose
there are who could be found outside Grenada who could be
persuaded to go back and be an agent for the United States
Government? That's what you would have to do in order to
infiltrate this society, and I think it's unreasonable to
expect that, with the resources we have and the money we spend,
which is -- we're outspent compared to what the totalitarian
countries spend -- to expect our intelligence agencies to cover
all the countries in the world in advance as you have to do to
have agents in place when crises occur is just unreasonable.
CLARKE: But, in this case, we had some warning. The
President had those photographs that he showed the nation last
March.
DR. CLINE: That was months ago.
CLARKE: Are you saying that's not enough time?
DR. CLINE: God, man, surely you understand that to
take an agent, to train him, to brief him, to tell him how to
behave securely, to give him a good covery story as to why he's
in the place he's in in a society that's run by a military
dictatorship, it's very likely to take years. That's' the way
the Soviet Union does it. They spend 10, 12 years putting an
agent in place.
We tend not to have very deep agent resources because
we find that's hard to do. But if you -- the idea that you
could have taken the pictures of an airport and then dispatched
a bunch of agents down there to find out what was going on is
so naive it just makes me wonder what the media thinks you do
in gathering intelligence.
It's not sending a reporter to take a television
picture. It's sending someone to pretend to be a part of the
military dictatorship in that area and worm his way into the
confidence of the highest command and then tell him secrets and
then let him get back to the United States safely. That's a
tough job, and it can't be done overnight.
CLARKE: Other intelligence experts agreed with Dr.
Cline that it would be tough to cultivate sources in Grenada
quickly. At least one said it was not outside the realm of
possibility. And, of course, it's always possible that spies
could be recruited in ways other than the one Dr. Cline
described, especially if reports of widespread dissatisfaction
with the Grenadian military council are true.
This is Ted Clarke, in Washington.
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