LETTER TO BARRY M. GOLDWATER FROM WILLIAM J. CASEY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP86B00885R000600970079-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 10
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 21, 2010
• Sequence Number: 79
• Publication Date: August 27, 1983
• Content Type: LETTER

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Central Intelligence Agency
The Honorable Barry M. Goldwater, Chairman
Select Committee on Intelligence
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
27 AUG 1983
Dear Mr. Chairman:.
It is with considerable unhappiness that I raise to you
the subject of Committee staff member Angelo Codevilla's
critical article that appeared in the summer issue of
WASHINGTON QUARTERLY, juxtaposed as it was to your own
constructive appraisal of the oversight process.
Particularly distressing is the fact that Mr. Codevilla's
distorted or at least incomplete presentation as reported
will lead most readers to conclude that they are.--:the views
and conclusions of the Committee, when in fact aswe both
know many members and staff strongly disagree. That readers
will attach great credibility and authoritativeness to his
views is borne out by the fact that they were immediately.
reported in the press. Moreover, we can expect they wilk also find their way into the growing number of intelligence
courses being given at colleges and universities. His
indictment also; will be read by our liaison services with
unpredictable consequences. I am especially appalled at the
article's reliance on events and assessments that are now a
number of years behind us while, at the same time,-failing to
take account of changes and improvements that have been made
in recent years in all the measures he addresses -- in no
small way thanks to the suggestions and support of the-SSCI
itself.
While we have worked hard to foster the effective and
responsible oversight begun by our respective predecessors
and have achieved a relationship that clearly serves the
STAT
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American people well, irresponsible and nonauthoritative
indictment in the name of the Committee can only undermine
its good work and this Agency's relationship with the
Committee.
.. our continued good relationship.
Out of respect for your many contributions and those of
your colleagues I can only deplore Mr. Codevilla's actions
and the inevitably counterproductive effect it must have on
You may wish to discuss this matter with Senator Wallop.
expect to do the same.
With best personal regards.
William J. Casey
cl-
Director of Central Intelligence
cc; . The RonoK~kble Daniel P._ 2ioyn.&han,
Vice Chairman, Select' Committee
on Intelligence
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ort PACE ,, a_ S-t 1983 `
Angelo Codevilla is a professional staff
member with the Senate Intelligence
Committee. Previously. he was of-reign
service officer and a fellow at the Hoover
Institution. Sword University. Dr.
Codevilla has written widely Vol European
politics and in the field of intelligence and
tnititary policy.
Ar ge o Coc rilla
By focusing so exclusively on
rules and standards of
operations, the intelligence
debate of the mid-1970s did not
answer the fundamental
question of what the United
States expects of its intelligence
services or what they are to
accomplish in order to meet the
challenges of the 1980:.
Since the early 1970s, this country's intel-
ligence agencies have been asking, "What
does the country expect of us?" That ques-
tion bad not arisen in the postwar period be-
cause the American political system had left
the agencies to the total discretion of those
appointed to lead them. In the early 1970s,
factional conflict among those leaders spilled
over into: a national debate about what
America's practitioners of intelligence ought
to have foremost in mind. That debate con-
tinues.
Recently, Admiral Stansfield Turner,
President Carters Director of Central Intelli-
gence, and his former special assistant,
George Thibault, published an attempt both
to answer that question and to indict the Rea-
gan administration's handling of intelli-
gence. The authors answer seems to be that
the American people expect their intelligence
agencies to be as innocuous as possible.
They charge that the Reagan administration
is undermining the agencies by loosening too
Many restrictions. The authors thus contend
that for our civil liberties sake, and for the
sake of the agencies' own standing in the
country, the agencies ought to ecincentrate on
formulating for themselves the tight kinds of
rules and restrictions. However, bne would
not suspect from Turner and Thibault's arti-
ele,that the rules by which intelligenm offi-
cers live ought to flow from the intelligence
profession's substantive requirements_
Nevertheless, in intelligence as in other
areas of government, the American people
rightly want their employees to accomplish
the functions for which they are paid.. This
author will argue that Stansfield Turner is
VON7-DYU
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wrong to assume that the key factor affecting
the quality of intelligence is the quantity of
intrusion into the lives of innocent people,
that better intelligence .means less civil lib-
erty, and vice versa. This article will then
address the real tasks which American intel-
ligence must accomplish in peace and war,
and the difficulties it now faces in doing so.
A revolution took place in American in-
telligence during the mid-1970s. That revo-
lution was thorough by the end of the Carter
administration, only a minuscule percentage
of the CIA's supergrade officials had held
such rank in 1975. Those who became
prominent in American intelligence during
that period were generally not known either
for achievement or technical insight in the
special fields they took over. Some, e.g., the
than who took over the counterintelligence
staff at CIA, were known as non believers in
the very activity for which they became re-
sponsible. These men, however, were well
attuned to the priorities of the administration
they would serve, and to those of the factions
which had recently won out in the intelli-
gence community's long, ' intramural strug-
gles: to lower America's profile abroad; to
reduce 'the importance of clandestine ac-
tivities at home and abroad; to assert the
CIA's claim to primacy among providers of
analynealproducts. They were also intent on
Making sure that the r ecent revolution in the
,field of intelligence would not be reversed.
As a result of all this, the leading men of
President Carters intelligence community,
led by Admirals Stansfield Turner and
Bobby Ray Inman, argued with great per-
sonal vigor for the enactment of legislative
charters for the intelligence community.
These charters would have codified and ap-
proved in law the changes in orientation
which had occurred in the mid-1970s. Of
course the proposed charters' chief feature
was an absorbing concentration on rules and
restrictions. It is essential to understand
whence came this concentration on rules.
The debate of the mid-1970s had concen-
trated so exclusively on rules and restrictions
because it had begun with public accusations
that some intelligence officers had transgres-
sed the bounds of propriety and I ogality.
These accusations against the CIA's di-
rectorate of operations in general and par-
ticularly against counterintelligence special-
ists in the CIA and the FBI had come from
other intelligence officers.
There had always been controversies
among intelligence officers about what
American intelligence- should and should not
be. The best outline of the views held by the
CIA officials who had long fought to reduce
the role of the clandestine services and of
counterintelligence is an article, "Ethics and
Intelligence" by E. Drexel Godfrey, in the
January 1978 Foreign Affairs. William
Colby's memoirs, as well as the published
writings of lesser officials, e.g., Herbert
Scoville, plus the reporting of books Ice=
Edward Epstein's Legend and Henry Hurt's
Shadrin, flesh out that outline with examples
of *how profoundly this intramural attack a?
fected the daily workings of the intelligence
system.
In sum, clandestine and counterintelli-
gence activities were charged with being
immoral and developing ii eir practitioners
devious thoughts and ways which would
-prove dangerous to Am-..rican civil liberties.
The allegations claimed that these activities
present the rest of the world with an unfavor-
able picture of the United States and that they
rum the intelligence community's thoughts
and energies toward combat with the Soviets
rather than toward accurate assessments of
reality. Beginning in 1974, some intelligence
officers who bad been snaking such charges
gave to their allies is Congress and the press
items of information embarrassing to some _
of the leading men in the directorate of oper-
ations and in the counterintelligence ser-
vices.
In 1975-1976 the select committees on
intelligence led by Senator. Church and Rep-
resentative Pike laid out these embarrassing
items, along with a coherent critique of
Americdn intelligence.. Understandably, the
intelligence officers whose critiques of their
bureaucratic adversaries were now being es-
poused by congressional committees were
hardly reluctant witnesses. Director Colby,
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for example. did not have to wave the fam-?
ous poison dart gun in the air before the
cameras. When he did, the stock of some at
the CIA fell, and the stock of others rose. As
late as 1978, a senior CIA official, John
Hart, spoke on the CIA's behalf to the House
Select Committee regarding the investigation
of President Kennedy's assassination and,
despite the committee's efforts to stop him,
delivered a passionate indictment of a former
colleague, once head of the Soviet division
of the directorate of operations, for allegedly
violating the rights of a Soviet defector
whose bona fides was in doubt. In sum, a
long-festering intramural battle was decided.
when one side went outside the walls and
linked up with superior political forces
which, for their own reasons, were willing to
help.
The Church and Pike Committees had
been organized as a result of years of effort
by the American Civil Liberties Union and
Izkeminded groups, e.g., the Institute for
Policy Studies. These organizations sup-
ported able individuals like William Miller
and Morton Halperin. Those efforts were
based on the contention that intelligence in,
vestigations are inherently dangerous to civil
liberties. Thus, these efforts were aimed at
restricting the scope of such investigations.
? T'hc proximate goal was to force the agencies
henceforth to apply the standards of criminal
law-to intelligence- investigations: Those- in=
dividiiais' svolic on iniellige%ce was part of
their broader campaigns for a re-direction of
U.S. foreign policy toward reduced Ameri-
can self assertions, greater friendliness with
revolutionary forces in the Third World, and
reduced hostility vis-i-vis the Soviet Union.
The reaction of many intelligence officers,
active and retired, against the Church and
Pike Committees was to uphold the intelli-
gence profession's good name against what
they perceived as the far left's almost unpat-
riotic attacks. They proceeded by arguing
that American society must be willing to bear
the burden of the agencies' intrusive exis-
tence if it is to live in a dangerous world.
They therefore continued to work in public
and in private against every restrictive rule
that was proposed. In their singie-rninded
effort to stand up for the notion that the in-
telligence agencies' role ought not to be re-
duced, they put themselves in the unenviable
position of seeming to argue for thc= right of
U.S. intelligence agencies to invade the pri-
vacy of innocent Americans. The American
Civil Liberties Union, Morton Halperin-6
Center for National Security Studies, and the
Institute for Policy Studies understandably
did not protest having the intelligence offi-
cers' view of the world identified with
breaches of Americans` civil liberties- Nor
did they protest having tbeirown prefaene=
for American foreign policy identified with
the protection of individuals' rights by imph -
cation. _ ?
The debate of the raid-1970s did not touch
on the quality of American intelligences, on
what ought to be accomplished in each of the
intelligence community's functional areas,
and on precisely how well each of these
areas was functioning. The anti-lntell!g
lobby's fundamental message was that, The
United States was suffering from an ?cxcess
of intelligence capability, that we had more
intelligence than we neede4., The ag~ca?
defenders did not challenge the impression
that though the American intelligence pro-
fession might have t ansgressed hero and
there, at least it bad been doing its job. So,
each for their own reasons, all sides of the
debate-arreed onthe_most important conau-
siontil. by and lazge the quality of intellirR-t =
had been either acceptable or more than ac-
ceptable; that the quality of intelligence &--
ponds on the degtu of inausion into inno..
cent lives; that the only questions about in-
telligence worth discussing concern what
rules and restrictions shall be imposed on the
agencies; and that the essential is what bal_
ante should be struck between good intelli-
gence and civil liberties.
Hence, the debate which first accom-
panied the Church Cornulince's pnopose(l
charters fpr intelligence was over minutiae.
The public position of the Association of
Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) was
that there should be no charters and that the
intelligence agencies should be allowed to do
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what they thought is necessary to accomplish
their job. But the written critique of the
charters which AFIO submitted to the Senate
consisted exclusively of minute changes in
the details of the proposed rules. By not ex-
pounding a full-fledged, intellectually ap-
pealing contrast to the set of arguments
which underlay the charters, and by disput-
ing the details of individual restrictions,
AFIO and its supporters confirmed those ar-
guments' legitimacy, and accepted the bulk
of those restrictions. Moreover, by basing
their arguments on the politically unappeal-
ing notions that good intelligence means in-
trusion into the lives of innocent people, and
that the extent of that intrusion into civil lib-
erties is strictly the concern of the intelli-
gence agencies, they virtually guaranteed
? their opponents' popularity.
fact, it had undertaken. In short, the es-
timators had missed a huge. ominous devel-
opment unfolding before their very eyes.
In the fall of 1978 the country learned that,
even as the shah of Iran was being toppled
from his throne by a movement openly or-
ganized in Paris, Washington, Beirut, Teh-
ran, as well as in Baku, U.S.S.R,., the CIA
was estimating that Iran was not in a revolu-
tionary or even in a prerevolutionary sit=_
lion and that the shah would be an important
part of Iranian politics into the foreseeable
future. - .
That year, the public also learned about a
nasty quarrel within the CIA over the
trustworthiness of a Soviet defector, Yuri
Nosenko, who had come to the United States
to assure the CIA that the Soviet Union bad
had no involvement with President Ken-
'"The prevalent attitude in American -
counterintelligence today seems to be to sit
and wait for indications and then check therm
' out."
By_ 1978, -however;_events. had .led a ; _ttcdX's ass~ssir,:..According-t4--public ac-
g=
holl
dif
?
w
y
ferent-set
of -people shift the
ground of the debate and to point out that. in
intelligence as in anything else, the priority
of rules over substance makes no sense. Hen:
is a sample of those events.
In 1977 the country first learned that the
Soviet Union's buildup of strategic weapons
was rapidly achieving its objective: to pro-
vide the Soviet Union with the equipment to
survive, fight, and win a nuclear war. It also
learned that this equipment would be largely
in place by about 1980, that the Soviets had
been pursuing this capability since at ]cast
the mid-1960s, and that the United States'
intelligence agencies had had enough data to
sound the warning. Instead, however, the
National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) had
been telling policymakers that the Soviet
Union would not undertake efforts that, in
counts, even though everyone agreed there.
was undeniable prof that key elements of
Nosenko's story were lies, he had been offi-
cially believed for administrative reasons.
Moreover, those intelligence officers who
bad resisted believing him had bccrr de-
moted. Then the public learned from
Readers Digest that the FBI and the CIA had
had a curious reversal on another key agent,
code named Fedora, who had corroborated
Noscriko's lies. First the CIA had officially
deemed Fedora bad and the FBI deemed him
good. Then, after a changing of the guard at
the CIA, Fedora was deemed good, while at
the FBI he had become bad. This hardly had
the hallmark of competence. The public also
learned that the CIA had asked an American
citizen, Nicholas Shadrin, to play a danger-
ous double agent's game with the Soviet
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KGB. and that Shadrin had vanished without
a trace while meeting the Soviets under sup-
posedly competent CIA control.
Finally. as struggles for power in Africa,
Asia. and even in nearby Nicaragua resulted
in victory after victory for the Soviet Union,
Americans began to ask, "Where is the
CIA?" They learned that the CIA had never
even suggested plans for thwarting these So-
viet drives.
Thus from 1977 to 1980, as Senators con-
sidered passing the proposed restrictive
charters, the arguments of both proponents
and opponents began to sound hollow.
Clearly, none of the shortcomings of Ameri.
can intelligence of which the nation was
painfully learning was rooted either in too
much or too little intrusion. Hence, though
the debate about proper safeguards against
intrusion remains interesting, since the late -
1970s. there has been no excuse for confus-
ing that debate with discussions of what the
country nerds by way of intelligence, .
But what are those needs? What is the job
to be done in the 1980s and in what areas
should the professionals' habits be changed
in order to ensure that the job is done? In
what ways would the charters' proposed
rules, or any other possible set of rules, affect
the ability and motivation of intelligence
operatives to do their jobs? What happens
when one tries-to. remove- chance.apd-risk
from an inherently riskv profession?
No one familiar with U.S. intelligence
suggests that the United States receives any-
thing like the kind of intelligence it needs.
The public record of the few human sources
the United States has enjoyed in the corn.
munist world strongly suggests that we do
not recruit agents, so much as accept and use
those who approach us. This should hardly
be surprising given that the United States
does. not have a really clandestine service.
All but a handful of our clandestine officers
are under rather thin official cover. that is,
they are known to be employees of the U.S.
government. A high percentage do not speak
the language of the country they work in.
They can hardly approach someone who is
required to report his contacts with Amrri_
cans and unobtrusively suborn treason or
conduct false flag recruitment. Since our
agents live as official representatives of the
United States, it is not surprising that most of.
their reports read like diplomatic dispatches.
Of course, nothing prevents the United
States from acquiring the service of people
who can credibly pass themselves off as -
something other than Americans. But many -
Professionals oppose this, cl aiming that such
people would be unwieldy for the present ?
personnel and promotion system to handle
Thus the professionals at the CIA resisted
William Casey's early effortxto change the
character of the clandestine service. The op-
position to the nomination of Max Huge] to
the post of director of operations was due to -
this. Nevertheless. Casey's early efforts were: J
on the right track.
No one familiar with the subject ;doubts
the sophistication of our means of technical
collection. Yet no one would contend that
these means were conccivr~".d' as an interre-
lated system to collect a set of data. Each of
the present systems-is a technical extrapola-
tion of previous systems, and exists in ratan-.
bets dictated more by the budget than by any
notion of.operational ue p ss b3,._
which these-systems have been acquired has
been irrational. We have not decided what
information is required and then allocated re-
sources among technologies, but the oppo-
site-with one significant exception, arms
control. For fifteen years, much of the im-
petus for buying technical intelligence de-
vices has come from those who wished to
monitor certain kinds of arms-control treaties
with the Soviet Union. As a result. ourcurrent
technical architecture is fit only for operation
in peacetime and is focussed to a large extent
on the rather narrow parameters of past
arms-control agreements. Of course, this
could be changed. But that would regttirc im-
posing upon the several agencies some sort of
strategic vision and a consequent coherent s:rt -
of requirements.
S_
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Collection without good operational secu-
rity can be worse tharruseless because it can
provide channels for disinformation by hos-
tile intelligence services. Today there is no
reason to be complacent about the opera-
tional security of American intelligence.
Although nowadays the bulk of collection is
through technical means, technical opera-
tional security is barely in the conceptual
stage. Indeed, some professionals are unwil-
ling to conceive that technical means
routinely might be subjected to the same
kinds of checks for reliability that human
agents must undergo before the information
they generate is accepted.
- This is not to suggest that the-operational
security of our human collection system is
sound. Traditionally, challenging and testing
the credibility of human sources has been the
least popular and least career-enhancing job
in the clandestine service, because whoever
does it must question the good judgment of
But neither has the responsibility, the data,
or the inclination to conceive of the overall
problem of count crintelligence. Conse_
quently, not knowing the whole, their con-
ception of their own parts is necessarily a
hit-or-miss proposition. This is true for indi-
vidual cases, but is quite undeniable as rc_
gards the comprehensive counterintelligence
picture. Anyone who knows counterintelli-
gence realizes that gaining awareness that a
case might exist is the hardest part of any
case. The prevalent attitude in Amcdcan
counterintelligence today seems to be to sit
and wait for indications and then check them
out. Awareness of possible cases sometimes
comes through allegations or because the in-
dividual sees before him the disastrous ef-
fects of enemy intelligence- At present, that
is how most of ourcases begin. But thew a
preferable way, counterintelligence analysis.
Yet, counterintelligence analysis of seriiou's, -
sophisticated or known intelligence threats is
not possible on the basis of darn as limited as
the CIA and FBI se
a
t
l
p
ra
e
y possess.. Surely
higher-ranking people. In the late 1960s and we can expect a scrious~-tn we by a home
early 1970s internal criticism of the CIA's intelligence service to encompass elements
counterintelligence staff mounted, because both foreign and American, both human and
that staff had questioned the bona fides of too ' technical. Yet the FBI does not routinely
ninny agents, and had become bureaucrat- examine the take from th
CI
e
A and the ~Ta-
- Jcally too powerful to suit the strong geog- ' tional=S - , __
cu
e
rny_ gurney foxs-counterratrlli
-raphic divisions ofthe dircctoratcof opera- gencc-implications, and vice versa. Wathoat
lions. Beginning in 1975, the stz.ff was e.is- analysis of a3 intelligence data from a coun-
mantled and replaced with non-specialists terintelligence perspective, no agency can I
from the geographic divisions who are teat. hope to do anything but stumble onto cases.
porariiy assigned to counterintelligence. The overall picture built up by this sort of
Thus, those responsible for catching the col- fragmented, reactive counterintelligence: is
lectors' embarrassing mistakes are them- also quite unsatisfactory. One is limited to
selves responsible to those very collectors for listing cases. But one cannot begin to esti-
their careers Clearl o t
ern
l
? y, k
a
on 5=u LY is
a thankless job which, if it is to be done well,
must be done by people who are not totally
dependent on, those whose work they check.
The division of responsibility in counter-
intelligence between the FBI and the CIA is
understood perhaps least of all by the two
agencies themselves. Of course, each knows
perfectly what it thinks it should do, and
even better what the other ought not to at-
tempt in its field! Both cooperate more or
less satisfactorily in pursuit of known cases.
mate the scope of a problem--say the trans-
fer of technology or the potential for agent-
of-influence operations in Sector X---until
one takes the problem itself as a point o? de-
parture, and brings to bear upon it rii the
available data. In the case of technology
transfer) we are just beginning to learn how
dearly the United States has bad to pay for a
counterintelligence system whose structure
precluded asking substantive questions and
kept data in tight bureaucraticcompartments-
I f the press is to be believed, President
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Reagan and his National Security Council
have noticed these shortcomings in the an-
alysis of counterintelligence. It remains to be
seen whether they will have the moral and
intellectual wherewithal to translate their in-
tuition and their legal authority into changed
behavior on the part of a recalcitrant bureau-
cracy.
There is no denying the low quality of all
too many NIEs, nor the serious effects which
some of these have had upon the nation's se-
curity. The mere fact that, in the late 1970s,
the public and the president, who had been
reassured for fifteen years that the Soviets
were not even trying to gain Strategic
superiority, woke up to find that the Soviets
bad in fact achieved it is a sufficient indict-
ment of the NIEs. The American people pay
billions for an intelligence community to
avoid precisely this kind of surprise. More
galling is the knowledge that the data for a
correct assessment was not lacking and that
in fact quite a few analysts in the Pentagon
had pretty well figured out the nature and
size of the forces the Soviets were building.
But the process by which the NIEs are writ-
ten smothered the correct analyses with the
incorrect ones. The president and other re-
sponsible officials did not have the chance to
exercise their responsible. judgment on the
eyrdence. They had naidea that?a view other
than the official one existed, much less a
chance to decide which was correct.
How does one go about improving an-
alysis? Better analysts would do a better
job. That is not just a truism. All too often
analysts in our intelligence agencies are
promoted not for being good interpreters of
the real world but rather for being good sol-
diers in the intelligence community's in-
tramural battles. If they stoutly uphold the
office view, they are often preferred to those
who prefer reality. It is often better to be
wrong for bureaucratically acceptable rea-
sons than to be right about the facts and gal-
ling to one's superiors. Strict accountability
and quality control would help. But who is to
control the controllers? After all, the office
view of things comes from precisely those
longtime officials responsible for qualify,
control. The insertion at high levels of
numerous outsiders who are not congenial to
the senior analysts would really help. But
unless these outsiders were exceptionally
honest, new office views would start forming
around them.
There is another way of keeping analysts
honest, and of ensuring that those responsi-
ble people who read intelligence estimates
get to exercise their responsibility. allow
both the CIA and the DIA to produce esti-
mates on important subjects, each using all
sources but neither coordinating with one
another. The products would contain less of
the bureaucratic prose which long coor-
dinating sessions substitute for data. They
would also be more closely argued tirm is
now the case; they would have to be, because
they would be written with the sure; knowl-
edge that they would have to confront coun-
terarguments. Unfortunately, that is not now
the case. Finally, they would be compclCd
not to try to fill with the putty of judd_ments
the gaping holes we have in ourknowkx-
The words compe-titive 1ysis have been
widely accepted. But, in the view of profes-
sionals at the CIA; competitive analysis
neatly describes the system by which NIEs
have been produced for the past quarter ten-
tury.Again, it remains-to be Seen whether--
the R&agar administration, having pab'ic;y
accepted the concept will prove to have
enough understanding of it and corn m ent
to it to make it happen.
COVET rACfl j
The Church Committer, echoing many,
professionals, characterized covert action--
that is, secret activities to influence the out-
come of foreign situations---as exccplional
means to be undertaken when all others had
failed or.no others could be employed. The
Church -Committee maintained that the
United States had resorted to covert action
too often. The debate within the government
has been.between those who, want more
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covert actions and those who want fewer. I
believe that history shows both sides have
missed the point.
The point is to achieve the ends of foreign
policy. Is ally X in trouble in Country A, and
has the president decided that the aim of
U.S. policy is to save his office? Is move-
ment Y in Country Z so menacing that the
president has made it U.S. policy to reduce
its influence? Affirmative answers to such
questions imply nothing about the means to
be employed except one thing: when all is
said and done, ally X should be in office and
movement Y should no longer be in a posi-
tion to do harm. These objectives could be
achieved by various combinations of means,
overt and covert. The particular combination
matters much less than the result.
Today all too many people tend to ask
about any given situation, "Is there anything
that the CIA could do here?" In many cases,
there is or could be. Nonetheless, that is the
wrong question. Covert actions decided upon
in answer to that question may be well-in-
tentioned, but they will not be part of a co-,'
herent, success-oriented plan. Rather, one
should ask, "What combination of actions
by various agencies can actually bring about
the desired objective?" If that overall plan
-calls for secret acts, then-there-is a place for
them, if not, there is not. Today, covert ac-
tion is touted as one more thing going for us.
or something else to push the situation in the
right direction. Such categorizations are not
helpful. In the international area, there are no
rewards for good intentions or for pushing in
the right direction or for sending signals.
Policy fails if it does not succeed. The press
has recently carried allegations that the
United States has a covert action going
against Nicaragua. The New York Times
quoted a U.S. official as admitting it but jus-
tifying it on the ground that it was not suffi-
ciently large to topple the Nicaraguan re-
gime. That official's understanding of pol-
icy, if the Times reported it correctly. is pu- -
crile. To conduct. military or paramilitary op-
erations against a regime by any means,
overt or covert, without a plan for toppling it
is against one of the most elementary norms
of politics: never do your enemy a small
hurt.
The problem of covert action is funda-
mentally that of the conception and execu-
tion of foreign policy. It is impossible either
to rationally, discuss or to successfully use
any tool of foreign policy unless the ends of
policy are spelled out specifically and a seri-
ous commitment is made to achieving them.
Clearly, the question of what the United
States expects of its intelligence services has
not been answered with intellectual authority
by those who have had the political authority
to do so. We have mad-- the case here that is
order for the United States to meet the chal-
lenges of the 1980s, American intelligence is
going to have to perform quite differently
from the way it has berm performing.
Bureaucracies being what they are, change is
unlikely to take place without some powerful
external stimulus such as an act of Con-
gress.
The intelligence agencies urgently need
clear---statements of-what they an ro. ac -
cotnplish. The executive orders and Presi-
dent Carter's proposed charters consisted of
authorizations for investigations under
highly specific circumstances. They did not
begin to tell the agencies what kind of infor-
mation they were to collect, what kinds of
analysis they were to provide, what sort of =
security against hostile intelligence services
and terrorists they were to ensure, and what
sort of influence they should be prepared to
exercise abroad. Perhaps a legislative state-
ment of these missions could begin to answer
the question. "What does the U.S. expect of =
its intelligence services?" Two
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