POST-RETIREMENT ACTIVITY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP86M00886R002300120026-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 11
• Document Creation Date: December 21, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 3, 2008
• Sequence Number: 26
• Publication Date: March 26, 1984
• Content Type: MEMO

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-The-Deputy-Director of Central telli ence
Washington, D. C. 20505 Executive Rcgis ry
3 April 1984
NOTE TO
John looked at the attached and wishes
you well in whatever you pursue in your
"next life." As I'm sure you can understand,
he cannot endorse any plans you might have
one way or the other.
I'm sure you also realize that any speak-
ing or writing you might decide to do will
have to be vetted through the normal channels
on a case by case basis.
From a.personal point of view, sounds
like you have been doing some fun things and
will continue to do so later. I wish you
well.
Attachment
EAJDDCI
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INFORMATION
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Executive- Registry
84-14q(,=.
ROUTING AND RECORD SHEET
SUBJECT: (Optional)
Post-Retirement Activity
FROM:
EXTENSION
NO.
STA
Intelligence Community Staff
DATE 26 March 1984
TO: (Officer designation, room number, and
building)
DATE
OFFICER'S
COMMENTS (Number each comment to show from whom
RECEIVED
FORWARDED
INITIALS
to whom. Draw a line across column after each comment.)
1?Deputy Director of
Central Intelligence
7E-12 Hq-,-
2.
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4.
5.
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7.
8.
9.
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DCI
EXEC
REG
FORM 61 0 USE PREVIOUS
I-79 EDITIONS
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26 March 1984
MEMORANDUM FOR: Mr. John N. McMahon
Deputy Director of Central Intelligence
Intelligence Community Staff
SUBJECT: Post-Retirement Activity
1. At the end of April I'll retire from the Agency. It's been the kind
of experience that I'd hoped for thirty years ago. Now I'm anxious to become
a part of the private sector, complete a novel that I've been working on for
some time, and delve into a second career of some sort. But I depart with a
thought that has nagged at me for several years. I'd like your reaction to it
if and when you have a spare moment.
2. The one thing that the Agency does not need, I believe, is a public
relations arm--an image builder. But there is in my opinion a responsibility
(I'm not sure whose) that is being ignored--something that is owed to the
American people generally and to higher education in particular. That is, a
better understanding of US foreign intelligence as part of the national
decision process. Sure, literature abounds in public libraries on
intelligence--some good, some bad--for anyone who cares to investigate. But
there are no forums, preferably academic, where this topic can be discussed
and examined informatively and authoritatively as part of the learning process.
3. I have five college-educated children and not one has ever come across
anything on intelligence in curricula at four different colleges. Moreover, I
have been reading college texts aloud once each week for the past two years to
a blind student who is majoring in international relations at American
University; he happens to be president of the entire student body. During
this time I've become acquainted with quite a few students and have joined in
many of their late-night rap sessions. I enjoy it immensely and it is a
learning experience for me. Conversation roams all over life's spectrum but
never far from politics and Washington as the center of global interaction.
Occasionally, the subject of intelligence and CIA creep into discussions. At
such times I usually find myself gritting my teeth quietly. Like so many of
their peers, these bright young people treat intelligence as an enigma in our
midst--a curiosity, feared by some and damned by others.
STAT
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4. Graduating these days with a baccalaureate degree in political
science, government, international relations, and such without a useful
understanding of intelligence--its role, structure, and decision
mechanisms--is, to me, an incomplete degree. I find it disappointing that
these young people and thousands like them across the country are left pretty
much in the dark regarding one of the nation's most vital assets and one of
international politics' inherent features.
5. I'd often thought that when I would retire from government, how much I
would.enjoy soliciting colleges and universities for a chance to lecture or
conduct small seminars under personal contract (unaffiliated with CIA) on the
role of intelligence--what it is, why it is, what kind of people man the
business and so on. I know that the Agency gives talks at colleges as part of
the recruitment effort--but they are Agency people doing the talking. To have
someone who knows the business and is no longer affiliated with CIA address
groups that would almost naturally include skeptics and cynics would, I think,
add credibility. (Recently, I briefed a class at the Defense Intelligence
College and was amazed to find a clear absence of knowledge about the national
intelligence decision process among military intelligence officers; some of
these officers were not fledglings.)
6. If you think there is something here worth pursuing, I'd be pleased to
work up an outline--a complete syllabus, if you like--for review and approval
by appropriate offices of the Agency. I really enjoy working with young
people and seem to develop a good rapport. I can't think of a post-retirement
activity that I would enjoy more. I've been around the top echelons of CIA
and the Community Staff for ten years and I believe I know what story to tell
(and how) without compromising sources and methods, or getting involved in
operational specifics. I take my secrecy agreement seriously.
7. If you think that this is not such a good idea, I'll accept of
course. Lastly, I commend to you the essay attached. It was written by a
young graduate student in 1980
before entering Oxford as a Rho es Scholar. in eloquent style, it heralds my
concern.
Attachment: a/s
STAT
STAT
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IN DEFENSE OF THE CIA?
ConfessionA Y A Change of Heart
Writing this is quite painful for a card-carrying liberal weaned on
the idealistic rhetoric of the 1960s and the moral zeal of the Watergate
years. I am instinctively distrustful of big business, be it oil company
or ITT. I fought like a Marine to keep ROTC out of my college. I have
faithfully read Karl Marx and Carlos Castenada and Baba Ram Dass and
Robert Pirsig. In short, my credentials are almost impeccable.
Almost. For I am about to defend one of the most, popular targets of
my generation: the CIA.
The nest of vipers one expects to find at the Langley, Virginia-based
headquarters turns out to be much like a colony of respectable, hard-working...
well, earthworms. The people employed at the CIA--and there are thousands
of them--are reassuringly normal. Forget James Bond. Forget your image of
shifty-eyed scoundrels wiring your wastebasket for sound and snooping
through your underwear drawer. The truth is ever so dull in comparison.
CIA employees go to Sunday school and watch Sixty Minutes. They have
studied at Georgetown and Stanford and Florida Tech. They play softball,
drink beer, write poetry, raise children, read Kant, and forget to feed the
dog.
When they don blue government badges and enter the seven-story white
fortress which is headquarters, they do not check their individual aspira-
tions, disappointments, convictions, and prejudices at the door. They
carry with them precisely the same ethical baggage as does any other more
or less representative cross-section of the American public.
To be sure, their jobs make them a bit more insular and secretive than
most Americans. An extra defensiveness about their work sets them apart.
And their speech is often like a foreign tongue: the astonishing and
sometimes incomprehensible lingua franca of the bureaucrat who "massages
data, interfaces with other shops, and then torques the estimates before
the other shoe falls." But in all the fundamentals--axes, cavities, ring
around the collar--they are just like the rest of us. Indeed, they are
us.
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The point may seem banal and obvious. Yet it is a terribly important
one to make to the majority of Americans who treat the CIA, after years of
damaging public disclosure and embarrassment, as a surprising, inexplicable
aberration to be disdained and disowned. It is as though CIA employees are
somehow "them" and not "us."
The prevailing American attitude toward 'the CIA today borders on the
smug. Public opinion runs roughly thus: To believe what the CIA says is
naive. To expect competence or high achievement from them is simply
foolish. To work for them is to make a profound ethical compromise. To
endorse them is to demonstrate pathological mental disturbance.
The press (admittedly another popular target) does little to alter
this remarkably superficial and parochial view. There are some journal-
ists involved in what William James called "the stubborn attempt to think
clearly" about the events that are making headlines. But the very struc-
ture of daily reporting in the print and electronic media, which favors
brevity and sensationalism, generally promotes the painting of a distorted
and apocalyptic picture of the world. Even if the press were always able
to take sufficient account of the complexities of events, it is hardly
clear that journalists could lead the public through the newsprint curtain
to a more lucid and sophisticated awareness. Long-time columnist Walter
Lippmann confessed in a less than sanguine moment: "It would be sheer
hypocrisy to pretend...that any large section of the American public is
informed, or interested, or thoughtful about international relations." Or
that they want to be.
But when the press and the public have been at all shrewd in their
assessments of the institutions involved in the shaping of American policy,
they have had salutory effect. There is no question that revelation of the
government scandals of the last decades has taught us valuable lessons
about the moral shortcomings of political expediency. There is no question
that the CIA deserved--and may. even benefit from, in the long run--some of
the regulation, such as the strict prohibition of assassination, it has
been subjected to recently. These points are no longer at issue. President
Carter has issued executive orders, and Congress is considering charter
legislation to curb past abuses. What is of concern now is how long open
season on the CIA will continue. Watergate gave a new legitimacy to public
censure of government wrongdoing. But it has also spawned a generation
of petty moral snipers who fire from positions-of unexamined outrage and
and indignation at whatever targets are most visible. The fact that the
CIA rarely defends itself makes it particularly attractive. Sniping at
the CIA has become fashionable--and by logical progression, indiscriminate,
irresponsible, and frankly, quite cheap.
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Office safety, floor tiles, and government parking lots elicit
mammoth yawns from editors until any of these are connected with the
CIA. The elimination of 820 jobs over the course of 26 months--most
by a simple process of attrition in which some positions vacated by
routine resignations and transfers are not refilled--becomes in the
parlance of headlines and national newsbriefs a large-scale peremptory
firing of key CIA personnel. Convicted criminals claim CIA sponsorship
for killings and others inexplicably charge that Agency personnel are
infiltrating UFO-watching organizations. With the exception of a few
responsible journalists, very little effort is made by press or public
to check out such claims before they are given absolute credence and
printed legitimacy.
There is a limit to how much criticism a government agency can take
without somehow buckling. Largely unfounded or exaggerated charges do
little to forward the very serious business of bringing U.S. intelligence
under legitimate regulation. If you will pardon a metaphor of doubtful
taste, it is foolish to pick incessantly at a healing wound when it is
recovering from major surgery.
If the CIA is peopled, as I have suggested, by bright, well-meaning,
perfectly normal individuals, then its most likely course in the face of
this critical zeal is a simple retreat. It can shrink from conflict. It
can stop taking risks and sacrifice everything to keeping a low profile.
It can become inured to accusations and protests, and learn to ignore
everyone but the policymakers to whom it is responsive. With classic seige
mentality, it can divide those policymakers into friend or foe. And so on.
What good is an intelligence service that is hounded until it entrenches
itself in its own bureaucratic paranoia and inertia?
We will not avoid provoking such a retreat until we clear up a more
basic problem: some very muddled thinking about international politics.
.The common American view of political reality is astonishingly sentimental
and naive.
First, there is the natural inclination to desire unequivocal answers
and absolute judgments. We like our government to be either right or
wrong--preferably right, of course--and are more than a little bewildered
when those simple terms of reference are insufficient for judging the very
complex stuff of international relations. The bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki at the close of World War II brought childhood's end, but we still
forget the terrible truth that made such destruction possible: acting
morally is never simply applying absolute principles in a vacuum. It
involves an agonizing weighing of conflicting choices in the gray area
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somewhere between ineffectual, rigid morality and vulgar expediency.
Hiroshima's most troubled offspring, the SALT talks, provides a good
example today. Strict morality demands that we abjure completely the
stockpiling of nuclear weapons, whether the Soviets do so or not, because
even the development of such a horrible killing device is a deep betrayal
of humanity. Pure self-interest would probably suggest that we do unto the
Soviets before they do unto us. Neither extreme, of course, is really
conscionable--and so we take only small steps, using the diplomatic arts of
adjustment, accommodation, and compromise, toward limiting the possibility
of nuclear holocaust. That isn't all that we hope for, but it is all we
can reasonably expect.
Second, there is the temptation to pillory others for wrongdoing in
situations in which we ourselves are never tested. Goethe suggested that
"conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action." Back
seat drivers, arm chair athletes, and peanut gallery politicians are
notoriously strong on criticism and weak on practical action. There is a
widespread failure to see that those involved in international relations,
including the CIA, work in the uncomfortably real world--the region of the
contingent and unforseen in which proximate solutions are often the best
that may be achieved. From the perspective of a comfortable Washington
townhouse, for example, I am shocked and horrified at the plight of the
Indochinese boat people, and I find the callousness of ASEAN states incompre-
hensible. Such a reaction is understandable and perhaps even justified, but
it fails to take into account all the facts: that first asylum countries
such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand are deeply convinced that the
refugees constitute a threat to racial and economic balance and national
security; that Hongkong's reward for humanely refusing to repulse refugees
has been the additional burden of 65,000 new boat arrivals this year. But
these are the kinds of intractable problems that policymakers must deal
with daily, continually forced by events to recognize that a world of
harmony and peace devoid of conflicting self-interest is not a reflection
of reality but a cherished hope and goal of humanity.
The fact that such hopes and goals are only hopes and goals should not
discourage us from honestly seeking to bring them about. But it ought to
dissuade us from horrified outrage when those entrusted with the responsi-
bility of coping with current events, and forseeing and preparing to deal
with future ones--among them, the CIA--fall short of those goals by them-
selves overstepping the bounds of morality. We learn as children that
evil human beings will do evil.. Maturity teaches the crushing lesson that
even high-minded and intelligent human beings will act unethically when
national interests appear to them to be at stake. No one has to like the
fact of well-intentioned wrongdoing- Where possible it is to be indicted
and shunned, where necessary it is to be endured and thereafter prevented.
But in either case, it must be understood.
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Understanding requires a new look at the international situation,
the United States' position in it, and the kind of work we are expecting
the CIA to do. What the furor over CIA "covert action"--attempts to
influence or alter events in other countries, such as Vietnam or Iran--
should teach us is not that all CIA employees are evil interventionists,
but that the U.S. has a very ambivalent attitude toward its international
role.
Confident in our own sense of moral superiority, comparatively progres-
sive and fair-minded as nations go, we like to claim that our foreign policy
is conducted in accord with the highest ethical principles. Moral conviction
has prompted our championing of the causes of those as disparate as Soviet
dissidents, Indochinese refugees, and victims of South African apartheid.
So far, history has conspired to support our affirmations of ethical purity:
geographic isolation from the "Old World" has tended to make our involvement
in global disputes more a matter of choice than necessity, and the superiority
of our national resources and technology have made us rich and powerful enough
to afford a degree of self-righteous morality and noblesse oblige.
Yet the fact is that the Hobbesian side of human nature does exist,
and it is especially visible in international affairs. Political life is
hopelessly full of the people we love to hate: Idi Amin, the Ayatollah-
Khomeini, even the Ghandi's and Zia's of the world. George Kennan's list
of the lengths to which such leaders will go probably doesn't cover all
the options: "persuasion, intimidation, deceit, corruption, penetration,
subversions horse-trading, bluffing, psychological pressure, economic
pressure, seduction, blackmail, theft, fraud, rape, battle, murder, [and]
sudden death" are among them. At the very same time that America asserts
her selflessness and high-minded devotion to morality, she is attempting to
deal successfully with this less than pleasant underside of international
relations. The luxury of "splendid isolation" drifts farther from our
reach as the world grows smaller, more interdependent, and more complex,
and the locus of decision shifts from Washington and Moscow to capitals
such as Cairo, Bonn, and New Delhi. We want desperately to be moral and to
remain powerful at the same time, and when the two impulses conflict, it
is often the game of power that goes underground, so inept are we at openly
coming to terms with the fact of the ambition, greed, injustice, and
selfishness of states. Where has the nation traditionally looked for the
expertise and resources to play this underground game of power and influence?
To the CIA, of course.
But three decades after the CIA's founding, we begin to be uncomfortable
about the necessary but unattractive game of power and influence. The
public knows too many of the details of playing it to continue as before in
blissful and untroubled ignorance. The question now becomes: Where do we
go from here? Shall we simply make scapegoats of those who undertook, with
very little explicit direction, to interpret and execute the will of the
people in foreign policy? Or can we make our own demands precise and a bit
more reasonable?
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Legitimate, constructive criticism of the CIA is of crucial importance,
and deserves encouragement and protection. But attacks and suspicion based
on an unexamined immaturity about affairs of state, on false expectations
and irresponsible recriminations, simply complicate matters further and
reduce our chances of success at molding an intelligence service that
American can live with. If we cannot marshall-enough collective awareness
and sensitivity to aid that process rather than blocking it, then I am
afraid we will deserve what we get.
STAT
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