STUDIES IN INTELLIGENCE [Vol. 22 No. 2, Summer 1978]

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80-00630A000100030001-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 49
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 10, 2004
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: January 1, 1978
• Content Type: STUDY

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VOL. 22 No. 2 SUMMER 1978
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Materials in the Studies are in general to be reserved to US
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is to be treated as information privy to the US official community. All
copies of each issue beginning Summer 1964 are numbered serially
and subject to recall.
All opinions expressed in the Studies are those of the authors.
They do not necessarily represent the official views of the
Central Intelligence Agency or any other component of the
intelligence community.
Warning Notice
Sensitive Intelligence Sources and Methods Involved
NATIONAL SECURITY INFORMATION
Unauthorized Disclosure Subject to Criminal Sanctions
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NOFORN
The tumult and the shouting dies?
THE MYTH OF THE ROGUE ELEPHANT INTERRED
John Waller
As the first session of the 95th Congress came to a close, Senator Daniel K. Inouye
of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reported to the Senate on the work of
the Committee which he had chaired for a year and a half. His remarks were a good
tonic to a long-beleaguered CIA. While he commented that "There is no question that
a number of abuses of power, mistakes in judgment, and failures by the intelligence
agencies have harmed the United States," he made the significant point: "In almost
every instance, the abuses that have been revealed were a result of direction from
above, including Presidents and Secretaries of State." "Further," he added, "in almost
every instance, some members of both Houses of Congress assigned the duty of
oversight were knowledgeable about these activities."
These remarks should have finally laid to rest the myth of the "Rogue Elephant."
What seems to have been lost to the press and public in the welter of sensational
sounding disclosures was essentially the same conclusion reached by the Church
Committee in its final report following the intensive investigation of CIA. It may be
interesting and currently useful to revisit some of the key conclusions of the 1976
Congressional investigations of CIA. This may serve as a reminder that the employees
of CIA never deserved the image of amoral practitioners, much less uncontrolled
delinquents, and the excesses committed by the Agency were not the prods ct of
inadequate control. If anything, the Agency's problems could be traced to the tradition
of strong discipline and responsiveness to direction from above.
The Senate Select Committee chaired by Senator Church, in pursuing its
mandate, focused on three broad questions, one of which bore on command and
control: "whether the processes through which the intelligence agencies have- been
directed and controlled have been adequate to assure conformity with policy and the
law."' The processes referred to are of two kinds: (1) the process of external control,
and (2) the process of internal control.
A general conclusion which appeared in the Senate Select Committee's final
report is: "The Central Intelligence Agency in broad terms is not `out of control,'
although the Committee found that "there were significant limits to this control" 2
from above 8 the CIA. Pursuing farther the thesis that the problem lay in external, not
internal, control are the following additional quotes from the "General Findings" of
the SSC Report:
The Committee finds that United States foreign and military
intelligence agencies have made important contributions to the nation's
security, and generally have performed their missions with dedication and
'Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to
Intelligence Activities-United States Senate, Book I, "Foreign and Military Intelligence;" 26 April 1976,
(Report No. 94-755) (hereafter cited by short title, SSC Final Report), V. 4.
2 Ibid., p. 427.
3 All emphasis in this article has been added by author.
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distinction.' The Committee finds that Congress has failed to provide the
necessary statutory guidelines to ensure that intelligence agencies carry
out their missions in accord with constitutional processes.'
In addition to blaming Congress for inadequate external control, the Senate Select
Committee, in its final report, blames the Office of the President:
The degree of control and accountability exercised regarding covert
action and sensitive collection has been a function of each particular
('resident's willingness to use these techniques .... 0
1residents have not established specific instruments of oversight to
prevent abuses by the Intelligence Community. In essence, Presidents have
not exercised effective oversight.'
In general terms, the Senate Select Committee's History of the Central
Intelligence Agency (Section IV) states at the outset a conclusion which suggests that
CIA activities have not always been viewed in relationship with foreign policy:
The current political climate and the mystique of secrecy surrounding
the intelligence profession have made it difficult to view the CIA in the
context of foreign policy.'
Book I of the Senate Report admits to misconceptions about CIA and states:
The CIA has come to be viewed as an unfettered monolith, defining and
determining its activities independent of other elements of government and
of the direction of American foreign policy. This is a distortion. During its
twenty-nine year history, the Agency has been shaped by the course of
international events, by pressures from other government agencies, and by
its own internal norms. An exhaustive history of the CIA would demand an
equally exhaustive history of American foreign policy, the role of Congress
and the Executive, the other components of the intelligence community, and
an examination of the interaction among all these forces.'
The House Committee on Intelligence (Pike Committee), although failing to gain
Congressional approval for release of its final report, arrived at the following even
more categoric conclusions concerning the control of CIA (if we are to believe drafts
of its report shown the CIA and the version of the report appearing in The Village
Voice):
All evidence in hand suggests that the CIA, far from being out of
control, has been utterly responsive to the instructions of the President and
the Assistant to the President for Security Affairs.10
Congressman Pike, in effect, accused CIA of being a supine elephant, not a rogue
elephant. In his eyes, CIA was too responsive to higher authority-its abuses were
committed as a result of too demanding command control, not too passive or
permissive control.
' Ibid., p. 424.
Ibid., p. 425.
, Ibid., p. 427.
' Ibid., p. 429.
' SSC Final Report, Book IV, "Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Foreign and Military
Intelligence," P. (1).
'[bid;, Book 1, p. 97.
"The Village Voice, 16 February 1976. This passage refers mainly to covert action.
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What neither Congressional committee stressed adequately was the significant
fact that all abuses or illegal activities, except two specific cases in the drug
experimentation field, were identified, decried, and corrected by CIA itself before the
investigations began, and before the press published its sensational charges. The role of
the committees, essentially, was not one of original discovery but one of airing past
abuses, already discovered and rectified. While this may have been useful to serve as a
basis for new legislation, it would have been helpful to the Agency's image if more
credit could have been given in the Senate's report to CIA's own efforts to get its house
in order.
Described below are some Congressional conclusions of a more specific nature.
First, the subject of control over covert actions' is summarized. The Senate Select
Committee found:
The CIA has not been free ... to carry out covert action as it sees fit.
The Committee's investigation revealed that, on the whole, the Agency has
been responsive to internal and external review and authorization
requirements. 12
In the case of Chile, singled out for a separate, in-depth report, the Senate blamed
the President for by-passing the 40 Committee machinery in the case of the so-called
"Track II" part of the operation, but did not consider this to be an example of CIA out
of control. It was noted that other aspects of the Chile operation were carefully cleared
by the 40 Committee. And the SSC's question: "Did the threat to vital U.S. national
security interests posed by the Presidency of Salvador Allende justify the several major
covert attempts to prevent his accession to power?" was answered in its report by the
statement: "Three American Presidents and their senior advisors evidently thought
SO." I' The SSC report on Covert Action (Volume 7) states categorically: "Executive
command and control of major covert action was tight and well-directed. " 14 The SSC
did criticize the procedures in which CIA itself determined which covert action
projects were submitted to the 40 Committee, and it felt that certain intelligence
operations not submitted to the 40 Committee had political action implications
requiring 40 Committee approval. But the Senate did not charge that covert action
operations had been carried out without the knowledge and approval of at least the
Director.15
The House Committee disagreed with some of the covert action operations
performed by CIA but concluded, as mentioned above, that the Agency was "utterly
responsive to the instructions of the President and the Assistant to the President for
National Security Affairs" and was not "out of control." The draft report added: "It is
further clear that CIA has been ordered to engaged in covert action over the Agency's
strong prior objections." 16
The draft Pike Committee report allegedly made the following comment which
makes clear that in those instances in which the 40 Committee did not specifically pass
on CIA's recruitment of individual stand-by covert action assets (sometimes called
"Covert action was not considered by the Senate in the abuse category except in the case of
assassination plots.
12 SSC Final Report, Book I, p. 447.
13 Senate Select Committee Report, "Intelligence Activities," Senate Resolution 21, Volume 7, "Covert
Action," p. 198.
11 Ibid., p. 199.
"Ibid., p. 199.
" The Village Voice, loc. cit., p. 84, "Covert Action."
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"infrastructure") or other minor action operations, at least the Director-not
subordinate officials-provided approval:
. . . the CIA Director determines which CIA-initiated covert action
projects are sufficiently `politically sensitive' to require Presidential
attention."
Assassination planning was an especially reprehensible case of abuse in the covert
action field. These cases were completely aired by the SSC. There were split opinions
on whether or how much successive Presidents knew and approved such operations.
While the SSC quite correctly believed that the doctrine of plausible denial, the use of
euphemisms to describe "assassination," and the theory that authorities granted to one
Director could be assumed to cover subsequent Directors all created "the risk of
confusion, rashness and irresponsibility in the very areas where clarity and sober
judgments were most necessary," 'R it did not suggest that such actions ever took place
without at least approval at the top of the Agency.'9
Intelligence activities affecting the rights of American citizens understandably
loomed large in the abuse category of the Senate Select Committee. This included
infiltrating and surveilling groups of American dissidents, dissemination of material
collected on these groups, and covert action designed to disrupt or discredit such
groups. The following general statement by the SSC seems to be a fair one and one
which places the blame where it belongs:
We must acknowledge that the assignment which the Government has
given to the intelligence community has, in many ways, been impossible to
fulfill. It has been expected to predict or prevent every crisis, respond
immediately with information on any question, act to meet all threats, and
anticipate the special needs of Presidents. And then it is chastised for its zeal.
Certainly, a fair assessment must place a major part of the blame upon the
failures of senior executive officials and Congress. 10
The SSC blamed the excessive power of the Executive built up over the years and
the failure of Congress to exercise the Congressional check and balance role which is
essential. But whatever the problem, the picture here is not one of a Central
Intelligence Agency out of control.
The CIA did not restrict itself to servicing FBI requests for information on
Americans, but "under White House pressure" 21 the CIA developed its own domestic
counterintelligence program-Operation CHAOS. According to the Senate Select
Committee final report (Book II), "Former CIA Director Richard Helms testified that
he established the program in response to President Johnson's persistent interest in the
extent of foreign influence on domestic dissidents." 22 In 1969, President Nixon's
Ibid.
Senate Select Committee Report, "Alleged Assassination Report Involving Foreign Leaders,"
20 November 1975, Report No. 94-465, p. 277. CIA took exception to the SSC definition and application of
"plausible deniability." CIA felt it was legitimately intended to make it possible for the government,
including the President, to disclaim something, while the SSC tended to say it permitted internal CIA
records to cloud the facts.
19 In the case of the assassination plot against Lumumba, the Senate found that when Mr. McCone
became Director, he may not have been informed by the Deputy Director of CIA of this plan.
SSC Final Report, Book 11, "Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans," p. 290.
Ibid., p. 99.
'.2 Ibid., p. 100. The MHCHAOS domestic counterintelligence was concerned with making file entries
on certain dissident Americans. The operational aspect of MHCHAOS was overseas, i.e., investigation of
dissident Americans overseas who might have foreign intelligence ties.
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White House required the CIA to study foreign Communist support to American
protest groups. "In 1972, the CIA Inspector General found `general concern' among
the overseas stations `over what appeared to constitute a monitoring of the political
views and activities of Americans....... 23 This led to a reduction in the program, but
it was not terminated until March 1974.
However questionable this program may have been, even considering the context
of the times, it is clear that it was undertaken and sustained by two successive
Presidents, and the Inspector General machinery did at least what it could to mitigate
the program despite Presidential pressure. Inadequate control was not the problem.
The opening of mail in the U.S. Postal Service was understandably criticized by
the Senate Select Committee. This program, however, was condoned by the FBI and
Justice Department for many years. The FBI not only was aware of this program, but
relied on the CIA for the product from it. The FBI, in fact, tasked the CIA.24
The Attorney General's findings on this program 25 are interesting. The report
dated 14 January 1977 (White Paper) concluded that it was highly unlikely that
prosecutions based on CIA mail openings would end in criminal convictions and
recommended, therefore, that no indictments be sought:26
... prosecution of the potential defendants . . . would be unlikely to
succeed ... because of the state of the law that prevailed during the course
of the mail openings.... It would be mistaken to suppose that it was always
clearly perceived that the particular mail opening programs of the CIA were
obviously illegal.27
The report continues:
... this case involves a general failure of the government, including the
Department of Justice itself, over the period of the mail opening programs,
ever clearly to address and to resolve for its own internal regulation the
constitutional and legal restrictions on the relevant aspects of the exercise of
Presidential power. The actions of Presidents, their advisors in such affairs,
and the Department (of Justice),itself might have been thought to support
the notion that the governmental power, in scope and manner of exercise,
was not subject to restrictions that, through a very recent evolution of the law
and the Department's own thinking, are now considered essential. In such
circumstances, prosecution takes on an air of hypocrisy and may appear to
be the sacrifice of a scapegoat.28
The report chronicles the authority implicit in successive high officials' actions. In
1958, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover approved the program. In 1961, Postmaster
General Day was informed in some degree.20 Director Helms, "a cabinet officer," and
a person then serving on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB)
have all stated that Presidents Kennedy and Johnson were aware of the East Coast
mail opening program.30 In July 1969, the CIA Inspector General recommended that
22 Ibid., p. 102.
24 Ibid., p. 107.
21 Report of the Department of Justice Concerning its Investigation and Prosecutorial Decisions with
Respect to Central Intelligence Agency Mail Opening Activities in the United States, 14 January 1977.
26 Ibid., p. 2.
2' Ibid., p. 3.
25 Ibid., p. 5.
29 ibid., p. 13.
"Ibid., p. 15.
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Rogue Elephant
senior officials of the Nixon Administration should be informed, and in June 1971,
Director Helms briefed both Attorney General John Mitchell and Postmaster General
Blount.31 Former President Nixon has stated he was aware of CIA's monitoring of mail
between the U.S. and the USSR and PRC, but there is no direct evidence that he was
specifically informed of mail openings. The product available at the White House,
however, made it quite clear that such had to be the case.32
In sum, CIA was acting with both implicit and explicit higher authority in the
mail opening programs.
The program for testing chemical and biological agents was the only area where
clearly inadequate control was found by the Senate Select Committee. It concluded
that this program raised
. . . serious questions about the adequacy of command and control
procedures within the Central Intelligence Agency and military intelligence.
. . . The CIA's normal administrative controls were waived for programs
involving chemical and biological agents to protect their security.... They
prevented the CIA's internal review mechanism . . . from adequately
supervising the programs.33
Excessive compartmentation of the program was also criticized by the Senate
Select Committee. An observation made by the CIA Inspector General that "the
knowledge that the Agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have
serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles . . ." 34 went unheeded.
Early drug-testing programs such as Project BLUEBIRD in 1950 and Project
ARTICHOKE in 1951 were approved by the Director and enjoyed good intra-Agency
coordination and control. MKNAOMI, begun in 1967 and ended in 1970, had Director
approval and was conducted with the cooperation of the Army's Special Operations
Division at Fort Detrick.
MKULTRA, the principal CIA program involving the research and development
of chemical and biological agents capable of being used in clandestine operations to
control human behavior, was approved by the Director on 13 April 1953. Various
aspects of the program were carried out in cooperation with universities,
pharmaceutical houses, hospitals, state and federal institutions, and private research
organizations, although some of the activities were conducted without their CIA
sponsorship being known. The National Institute of Mental Health and the Bureau of
Narcotics also played important roles.
In 1963, the Inspector General learned that under the MKULTRA program
surreptitious administration of LSD to unwitting, non-voluntary human subjects was
being carried out. This program was then known to and approved by the then-
Director. As a result of the Inspector General's protest, the testing was halted and
tighter administrative controls imposed. The program was completely terminated in
the late 1960s.
The tragic case of Dr. Frank Olson in 1953 does reveal a problem of command
and control. Despite explicit warnings by the Deputy Director for Plans (DDP) that
his approval had to be given before LSD human experiments were conducted, the
head of the Technical Services Division (TSD) of the DDP without such authorization
Jl Ibid., o. 17.
Ibid., p. 18.
as SSC Final Report, Book I, p. 386.
Ibid., pp. 385-386.
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went ahead with an experiment in which Dr. Olson unwittingly ingested LSD without
being told in advance. Olson had a severe emotional breakdown shortly afterward and
either jumped or fell to his death from a hotel room in New York. The atmosphere of
the times probably led the approving officer to believe that he had implicit license to
conduct such experiments. He has testified that he does not remember a DDP
memorandum requiring DDP authorization.35 The General Counsel concluded,
however, that there seemed "to be a very casual attitude on the part of TSD
representatives to the way this experiment was concluded.. . . ." 36
The shellfish toxin case was cited by the Senate Select Committee as the other
specific failure of command and control in the drug experiment area. That an Agency
scientist failed to do away with 11 grams of shellfish toxin and instead kept it in CIA
classified storage despite a Presidential order that all such material had to be destroyed
is indeed a lapse of control. Yet this seems to be an individual human failing, not an
organizational failing.37 It should also be noted that it was the CIA itself which
discovered the store of toxin and brought it to the Senate Select Committee's attention.
Abuses committed by CIA over the years which were subjected to close scrutiny
by the Church committee investigation should not be minimized, much less condoned.
Nor should misjudgments of any kind, which took place through the years, be allowed
to recur. There were certainly instances of reprehensible conduct on the part of
individual officers and examples of the Agency taking advantage of lax oversight or
loosely defined authority to commit excesses. It is not the purpose of this paper to
chronicle past faults, however, but rather to put into perspective the issue of past
control and accountability as seen objectively by Congress.
The problems facing the Agency today are enough without adding to them an
unwarranted burden of guilt, or stifling CIA with the incubus of additional
restrictions. The findings of the 1976 Congressional investigations, confirmed by the
statement of Senator Inouye at the conclusion of a year and a half of Senatorial
oversight, should be persuasive confirmation of CIA's own views of past abuses and
their causes. As charter legislation is being formulated, it may be hoped that the
lessons of the past will not be misread, and that oversight machinery and law will not
go beyond that which is constructive and necessary.
as Ibid., p. 395, footnote 34.
-ibid., p. 398 (Memorandum to the Inspector General from the General Counsel dated 1/4/54).
37 With the perspective of time, the knowledge that this rare multi-million dollar item now is being
used for the good of humanity by a U.S. Government public health laboratory perhaps mitigates to some
extent the scientist's failure to carry out orders.
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No Foreign Dissem
The economic analyst as middleman
between collector and consumer in
narcotics intelligence
ANALYST IN A HELICOPTER
I was used to the jungle and the mountains. My nerves were steady, and my heart
no longer jumped to see the rocky clearing-surely too small for our assault
helicopter-rushing up at us. Still, thought and breath stopped as the pilot sideslipped
between the mountains and out us down on a barren knoll among the trees. While my
companion collected her purse, I pushed open the door, partially blocked by the thick
vegetation, and helped her to the ground.
Heavily armed Thais emerged from the silence of the jungle. "It's okay," I said,
more to myself than to Mathea. "They're our escort."
The clandestine morphine refinery was only a few hundred yards away, but it
was a good 20-minute sludge down the rain-slippery mountain path. The elephant
grass closed over our heads as we slithered through the mud. It would be hard going
for Mathea's dress and high heels, I found myself thinking.
Suddenly, I was sliding, gaining momentum, headlong toward the precipice
where the path turned sharply to the right. I clawed at the grass and the rocks, but
could get no grip. This time you've done it, Eddie, I said to myself. Film clips of past
missions passed before my eyes-the party circuit in Geneva, facing the machine guns
of nervous soldiers on the Singapore waterfront, listening to the beep of a secret
transmitter hidden in an opium-carrying wooden saddle, chasing pigs and cows off a
precipitous mountain runway.
Then I felt Mathea's fingernails gripping my arm. My slide slowed and stopped
only feet from the edge of the cliff. Mathea's spike heels, dug inches into the mud, had
saved me. Thank God for elegant women, I thought.
Sound like something out of James Bond? Or a war story spun by a DDO veteran
at the end of a cocktail party? Well, it's nothing of the sort; it's just a day in the life of
an analyst in NFAC's Office of Economic Research. Let me tell you how it all started.
Hooked by the Drug Trade
For eight years I have had a rare-for an NFAC officer-and interesting
assignment in the field of narcotics intelligence. My responsibility has been research
and reporting on the narcotics situation in the Golden Triangle. Over the years, the
assignment has widened and now covers the spectrum of the intelligence production
process from personal involvement in intelligence collection activites with case officers
in the field to presentation of finished analysis to policy makers in the White House
and in the Department of State.
My involvement in the narcotics intelligence effort grew out of a decision made
by the White House in the late 1960s to try to stem the flow of illicit narcotics into the
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United States by attacking the foreign sources of these products. The role played by
the Golden Triangle in supplying the U.S. military market in South Vietnam was of
particular concern to the President. I was initially selected to work on the program
because of my experience, as a China agriculture analyst in OER, with projects
utilizing overhead photography for crop detection and measurement and because I
had also written one of the earliest CIA reports on narcotics production in Communist
China. My job was to start from scratch in developing an intelligence resource base for
the U.S. Government's new initiative in this area.
The Golden Triangle is the term used to describe the conjunction of the borders
of Burma, Thailand, and Laos, one of the largest illicit narcotics producing areas in the
world. (See Map.) Since World War II this vast acreage of opium poppy cultivation
has been controlled or contested by Communist, Nationalist Chinese, and various
insurgent organizations, by independent traffickers, and various tribal groups. The
area has been a cockpit of anti-Burmese government insurgency for years, much of it
financed by earnings from narcotics trafficking. The situation is further complicated
by political and military relationships between local governments and the insurgents
and tribal groups in the area, relationships shot through with official corruption at all
levels.
The type of information required for analyzing the narcotics situation could be
obtained only through penetration of the narcotics syndicates and smuggling markets
involved in the traffic, and at first we were forced to rely almost exclusively on human
source reporting. Fortunately the DDO had a number of fairly reliable assets in
Southeast Asia who could be assigned to narcotics targets in addition to their other
responsibilities. Soon thereafter, many of these assets were assigned exclusively to
narcotics targets.
One of the first priority intelligence requirements placed on the field when I was
assigned to this task was the collection of wholesale narcotics prices at various locations
within the Golden Triangle and adjacent areas. It was our contention that to measure
the impact of narcotics control programs effectively, it was necessary to develop some
understanding of the factors affecting prices of illicit narcotics. In time, a standardized
monthly price report developed by the DDO and subsequent "fine-tuning" of
requirements would provide a steady source of basic raw data for analysis.
Requirements have since been tailored to meet the needs of current intelligence
analysts for rapid responses to policy makers' requests. The overall result has been a
collection program uniquely satisfactory to collectors, analysts, and consumers.
The success of the Southeast Asia effort derived in no small measure from the fact
that the middleman-in this case, myself-was allowed to make direct personal
contacts in the field and at the policy levels in Washington. DDO case officers and
reports officers facilitated TDY tours in the field, where I was able to provide direct
feedback to field representatives from my contacts with State and NSC officers
involved in day-to-day direction of the administration's international narcotics policy.
Instead of brushing me off as a Headquarters junketeer, field oficers welcomed the
chance to discuss the relevance of their collection efforts and were willing to let me see
many of their problems at first hand.
Out of this experience has grown a collection of personal "war stories" which,
though hardly rivaling those of the experienced operations officer, show some of the
personal and professional benefits from an analyst's happy menage a trois with the
collector and the policy maker. Most of the anecdotes that follow are from TDY trips
requested by the Department of State, generally as part of a mission to give
substantive briefings at annual meetings of State and Drug Enforcement Agency
representatives in the field.
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Narcotics Intelligence SECRET
Chin Special
Division
I n d i a
13 ay
Of
Beit ,gal
China
Kachin
State
Kayah
State
r^'
RANGOON e
to
p +Hsipaw
B u r- a Tangyan-
Shan State
".Ban Hin Taek
Ban Doi Long
Mae Sa LFri~ ? ?,
- International boundary
- Province or state boundary (Burma
and northwest Thailand only)
Chiang Chia
Mai +
Mae Lampang
Hong
Son fil
ULLaradit
4ittaradit ,
"Golden Triangle"
Muang
Sing
Bung Ka
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Geneva, Switzerland, October 1971
In 1971, I traveled to Geneva on my first narcotics TDY assignment
Narcotics Intelligence
to attend the 24th session of the
United Nations Commission on Narcotics Drugs (UNCND) in support of the U.S.
delegation. It was my first opportunity to observe this UN body in action and to gather
information on the narcotics situation from contacts with UN officials and foreign
nationals.
The daily meetings were dull; most of the sessions bogged down over procedural
questions, and it was immediately apparent that nothing of intelligence interest was to
be gained from them. So I cajoled our representative to include me on the guest lists
for the nightly social functions among the various delegations. Despite some initial
concern over my cover because of my overt status in the CIA, invitations were soon
forthcoming and I had the entree I needed to circulate and listen. These social
occasions produced valuable contacts with representatives from Iran, Thailand, the
International Police Organization (INTERPOL), and the International Narcotics
Control Board (INCB) of the UN.
There was an immediate intelligence payoff on narcotics production in Iran and
the extent of the illicit traffic through that country, including a very detailed briefing
map used by the Iranian delegation in a closed meeting of the INCB. Again, while
exchanging toasts with the Thai delegation I was given some rather startling
information concerning the closeness of political relationships then existing between
high-level Thai government officials and the former Chinese Nationalist generals who
were in command of the two major narcotics trafficking organizations operating in the
Burma/Thailand border area. Here, too, the information filled some very important
intelligence gaps.
During the three-year interlude before my next overseas TDY, I was busy
expanding our narcotics research data base in order to determine the magnitude and
trends of the narcotics market. My assignment as an Agency representative to the East
Asia Interagency Working Group on Narcotics Control added to my responsibilities a
direct policy support role. The Working Group met weekly at the Department of State
and was responsible for determining the feasibility of various narcotics control
programs in Southeast Asia. The role also brought me into closer contact with policy
makers at the Department of State and the White House, for whom I was frequently
called upon to provide substantive briefings.
My responsibility for narcotics intelligence also brought me into official contact
with foreign nationals in the Washington area for various political and substantive
reasons. In 1973, for example, I was asked to sit in on a meeting with members of the
Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) arranged by former OSS operatives who
had been in Burma during World War II. The Kachins, who played a major role in
OSS actions against the Japanese, have been fighting the Burmese government ever
since for an autonomous Kachin State. All I knew about this meeting was that the
Kachins wanted to talk to someone from the U.S. Government and that the subject of
narcotics would be brought up during the conversation.
After some exploratory questions about U.S. policy toward Burma and the Kachin
insurgency, and repeated references to the U.S.-Kachin friendship during the war, the
Kachins raised their main question: Would the U.S. Government provide financial and
military aid to the KIO? The Kachin people could not succeed against the Ne Win
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regime without outside assistance, and without U.S. help the Kachins might be forced
into the Communist camp.
This kind of thing may have been old hat to my DDO associates, but it was clear
to me that I, at least, had no business discussing such issues with these people. We told
them that only the State Department could give them an official answer, but we
added our private advice that the United States was unlikely to provide even covert
support for any insurgency in Burma. We reminded them that threats of alliance with
the Communists would most likely have a negative effect on both U.S. and Burmese
official attitudes. They appeared to accept this advice, but glumly reiterated that if
the Kachins were allowed to run their own region as an autonomous state the
cultivation of opium poppies could be eliminated. The Burmese, on the other hand, do
not have the resources to gain complete control of the remote countryside and could
never hope to stop poppy cultivation. This was their most persuasive and effective
argument, for it is clear that some sort of rapprochement between the Government of
Burma and its ethnic minorities would be the best long-run solution to the narcotics
problem in Burma.
Singapore, January 1974
As I prepared for my first trip to Southeast Asia on a narcotics assignment, I was
asked to provide some collateral support to the National Photographic Interpretation
Center, which was in the process of updating its ground coverage of the Singapore
Straits region. I was to be in Singapore for the 1974 narcotics conference, and I was
asked, as a semiofficial tourist, to try to photograph oil refineries and containerization
facilities in the port. A private launch was provided by the naval attache for a tour of
the port and straits area. Unbeknownst to us, a Japanese Red Army terrorist group
chose to attack one of the oil refineries just as we approached the harbor. While we
cruised among the islands and installations, the terrorists were hijacking a ferry boat
with some 100 passengers as hostages. We gradually became aware of an abrupt drop-
off in harbor activity, and by the time we headed for shore the area was crawling with
heavily-armed troops. Upon docking, we were challenged by a large band of nervous
soldiers, each of whom seemed to be pointing his submachinegun at my head. Their
commander finally accepted, with some astonishment, our plea that we had been
oblivious of the terrorist action despite the explosions and the assault on the ferry. The
excellent photographs we got have since been used in an update of the CIA Gazeteer
for the region.
Chiang Mai and the North, January 1974
After the excitement of my Singapore diversion, it was a relief to be on my way to
Thailand and back on the track of narcotics intelligence. The impact of a visit to the
Golden Triangle on a normally chairbound analyst was profound. Chiang Mai is a
major center of narcotics trafficking and a front-line intelligence collection post;
within a few miles of the city one can see opium poppies swaying in the breeze. At
I had a very candid exchange of information with
and first-hand observations of many facets of the narcotics situation. I was
allowed to observe the field-testing of some improved aerial electronics equipment
specially designed for locating opium caravans. The object was to have an agent in the
caravan plant a radio beacon in a saddle compartment used for carrying narcotics.
Aircraft would then home in on the radio signal and break up the caravan with
gunfire. During our test flight we played a cat-and-mouse game with a jeep carrying
the beacon and readily located its hiding place along a heavily tree-canopied jungle
road. When used in anti-narcotics operations the beacons were instrumental in
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dispersing or destroying several large caravans. Beacons were also used to pinpoint
narcotics refineries during Burmese army operations in the border area.
During my stay in Chiang Mai, I was invited by the Thai Border Patrol Police
(BPP) to observe the planning phase of an interdiction operation against an opium
convoy reported to have crossed into Thailand from Burma. The East Asia
Interagency Working Group on Narcotics Control, of which I was a member, had
before it a request from the BPP for additional aircraft, and we had had several
discussions before I left Washington. The BPP operation was intended to airlift a
company of heavily-armed troops into a blocking position along the Thai-Burma
border; speed was of the essence. But with only two helicopters and one Porter
aircraft, it took an entire day to move the troops into position. By the time the troops
were in place, the caravan had been alerted to the movement, and was able to disperse
into the jungle and escape back across the border into Burma.
My most exciting adventure during the 1974 visit, however, occurred during a
flight by our Porter aircraft to a Lisu tribal village close to the Burmese border. This
was one of the opium-growing villages chosen by the United Nations to test the
feasibility of crop substitution programs. The village was a model of inaccessibility. It
was nestled on a ridge between two peaks, and as we approached the pilot pointed out
that our landing strip would be a very narrow, somewhat vertical path leading up the
side of a hill. He had already told me at a party the night before that it was the most
hazardous landing strip in North Thailand. With his passenger thus prepared to be
appreciative, he slipped the old reliable Porter onto the ridge to an uneventful uphill
landing. We toured the village poppy fields observing long rows of women, many with
infants slung on their back, harvesting the opium. The only men we saw were in the
village socializing.
As we got ready to leave, the pilot confided that the wind was blowing in the
wrong direction and the plane was probably overloaded for the wind conditions. He
pointed out that the takeoff had to be made downhill with a very sharp right turn to
avoid two menacing peaks. Stray cows, pigs, chickens, and other assorted beasts were
now observed foraging along the strip, and the antics of these animals as our pilot
taxied the aircraft up and down the runway trying to scare them was amusing but not
reassuring. Thus prepared, I was then given the unwelcome job of handling the wing
flap controls during the critical first stage of the lift-off, after which I was to turn the
control over to the pilot for a quick adjustment during the turn between the peaks. It
was the scariest takeoff I have ever experienced, and that includes three years with
U.S. Army Air Force bombers during World War II. (1 doubt my trip report had
anything to do with it, but Porters now are barred from flying to this village because
of the dangerous conditions and because the United States eventually agreed to
provide the helicopters the Thais had requested.)
Visit to a Frontier Town, February 1974
I jumped at the opportunity to visit Mae Sai, T 'hailand, a notorious border town in
the Golden Triangle. Mae Sai was the headquarters for many narcotics traffickers in
the Golden Triangle, and our intelligence indicated that commercial stores in the town
were fronts for all types of illegal activities. The town has historically been a major
entry point for narcotics produced in Burma for distribution to international markets.
Its reputation was evident in the heavy police guard assigned us for the trip. We flew
to Chiang Rai and then transferred to police vehicles for the final run into Mae Sai.
Mae Sai had an air about it reminiscent of the frontier towns of the old American
west. There was a hustle and bustle of people coming and going without any apparent
destination, all seemingly swallowed up in the many commercial establishments of the
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town. Most of this traffic at one time or another could be observed crosssing the
narrow foot bridge between the town and Tachilek in Burma. There were customs
posts at both ends of the bridge, but the traffic flowed unchecked and barely
acknowledged by the numerous officials lounging around the posts. Had checks been
made, smugglers could easily circumvent the checkpoint by crossing the river at
numerous fords up and down stream.
Before I left Mae Sai, I was invited by my police escort to visit a jade store where
one could get "a real bargain." The best jade is produced in Burma and Mae Sai is the
principal entry point for smuggling these stones into Thailand, so there was no
question that these were smuggled gems. Everyone got a good laugh when, after
making a small purchase, I asked for a receipt to show U.S. customs.
During the years between visits to the field, I continued to improvise by using our
computer program to enlarge the data format and make possible more sophisticated
analysis of the narcotics situation in the Golden Triangle. Our missions in Thailand
and Burma were especially eager to get the statistical results, which we published
every three months. Inasmuch as the various missions differed over the value of each
other's intelligence collection effort and their estimates of production and trade, the
more objective Washington data were in great demand. This was particularly
apparent during my 1976 and 1977 trips to'Asia when the chiefs of mission in Bangkok
and Rangoon asked for briefings on Washington's evaluation of narcotics control
programs in their countries of responsibility. The continuing debate over the
effectiveness of narcotics control programs in Burma and Thailand made me more
determined than ever to take a closer look at the target areas to obtain a better
understanding of the problems involved. The 1977 and 1978 trips were the highlights
of this effort.
Assault on a Refinery, April 1977
During my 1977 visit to the Golden Triangle Mathea Falco, senior advisor to the
Secretary of State and Coordinator for International Narcotics Matters, invited me to
accompany her on an inspection trip of north Thailand arranged by the Thai
government. Inasmuch as our purpose was to observe the numerous insurgent bases
located along the Thai-Burma border, our escort for the trip was the local commander
of the Border Patrol Police, a major general who placed his helicopter at our disposal.
In the course of our day-long flight, as we flew over the major base camps of the
Chinese Irregular Forces (CIF), Shan United Revolutionary Army (SURA), the Kachin
Independence Army (KIA), and the Shan United Army (SUA), the general maintained
radio contact with an assault force which was combing the jungles of Chiang Rai
Province for a reported narcotics refinery. After we left Mae Sai, a lunch stop, the
general received a message confirming the location of the narcotics refinery; the
assault team was being airdropped into the area. We accepted his invitation to follow
the attack force into the landing zone and proceeded southwesterly with the assault
helicopter, circling the area repeatedly before we found an area flat enough to land.
Our pilot sideslipped us into a mountain clearing and put us down on a knoll
barely large enough to allow egress from the aircraft. It was during the hike from this
landing zone to the refinery that Ms. Falco's spike heels kept me from sliding over the
precipice, as described at the outset of this article. The refinery was completely
hidden from the air by a jungle canopy; it was not unlike an Appalachian whiskey still.
There were large vats, copper cooling and mixing bowls, and associated implements
and chemicals. I was able to determine that this refinery had been producing
morphine base, and intermediate product in the heroin production process.
Confirmation was provided when we found brass plates etched with the numerals
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999," used to form morphine base into bricks. The "999" imprint on morphine bricks
had been the trademark of refineries which produced a very high quality product. In
recent years, however, this trademark has been copied by most refiners in the area
regardless of the quality of the product.
Despite the police efforts at surprise, the operators of the refinery had escaped
into the bush when they heard the helicopters roaring into the zone. Nevertheless, the
troops maintained an armed guard around us as we made the arduous climb back to
the landing zone. At Chiang Mai we boarded a waiting defense attache plane for our
flight back to Bangkok. Muddied and shoeless, Ms. Falco and I spent the flight
exchanging observations from our tours of north Thailand.
On the Road to Mandalay, April 1977
My next stop in 1977 was in Rangoon, where Ambassador Osborn was most
interested in Washington's assessment of Burma's narcotics control program. After a
day of consultations and briefings at the mission, I was given a plane ticket to
Mandalay and told to make contact with I the U.S. Consulate.
The consulate in Mandalay is the northernmost extension of the U.S. Mission in
Burma, and it was and remains the source of considerable intelligence on narcotics
activities in the northern and central Shan States.
Despite the shortness of my stay in Mandalay, I got a very detailed briefing oil
the narcotics intelligence support, provided by the consulate, and then I debriefed a
knowledgeable Burmese government official on the 1977 opium poppy harvest. The
information I obtained was decisive in adjudicating a heated disagreement between
Rangoon and Washington over the size of the harvest. This source also provided me
with useful background information on the load capacities of narcotics caravans,
which has continued to serve as the basis for estimating the quantity of narcotics
moving between the Shan State of Burma and the Thai border.
Mission Across the Border, January 1978
Returning to Chiang Mai, Thailand in January 1978 1 had expected a rather
routine visit to discuss intelligence gaps and Washington priorities. I was pleasantly
surprised when I invited inc to accompany him on two aerial
photographic intelligence collection missions along the Burma-Thailand border. These
missions were in response to a request from Rangoon for an update on the location of
heroin refineries in the area.
Our first mission departed Chiang Mai by Porter aircraft early Sunday morning.
Our flight path took us due north over the military bases of the Third and Fifth
Chinese Irregular Forces, the Shan United Revolutionary Army, the Shan United
Army, and the Shan States Revolutionary Army. (SSRA). Our primary targets were on
the Burmese side of the border around Lao Lo Chai and Doi Long, where centers for
the refining of illegal heroin had long been concentrated. To get good vertical and
oblique photography we had to make a broad sweep across the border, climbing to
5,000 feet over the target area to avoid hostile fire. Around Doi Long we spotted a
refinery run by the SSRA and photographed it from every angle. Flying on a northeast
heading we covered the Fifth CIF headquarters at Mae Salong and the SUA
headquarters at Bari Hill Taek, where we observed a considerable number of fortified
positions and communications structures. We then approached our primary target in
the Lao Lo Chai area, photographing what appeared to be several narcotics-related
facilities. Some of these buildings were no more than 10 to 30 kilometers west of the
Mae Sai highway, a major road linking north and south Thailand. After two sweeps
across the area with color and infrared cameras we returned to Chiang Mai.
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Three days later I accompanied I n a mission to the Huai Pa
Dam area on the border. This area had been the target of a military operation by the
Burmese army only the year before. :Heading northwest to the border, we found
numerous defensive positions and narcotics-related facilities indicating the resumption
of a high level of activity, probably by the SUA. New buildings appeared to confirm
this judgment, and I observed a considerable concentration of opium poppy fields
adjacent to the SUA military camps. We crossed the border into Burma and began our
sweep over Mong Mah. We immediately observed a new defensive position with six
huts ringed by 14 foxholes at the peak of Man Thong Mountain. All indications were
that the refineries put out of operation by previous Burmese attacks had again
reopened.
The photographic intelligence gathered on these missions has since been used by
the Burmese army in an attack on the Doi Long area during which they destroyed
three of the refineries targeted. Additional Burmese operations against the
photographed targets in the Lao Lo Chai and Mong Mah areas will probably have
taken place by the time this article is published.
In a conversation with relating to the opium poppy
crop estimate for 1978, we decided to test the validity of human source reporting
against an aerial survey of the poppy fields in northern Thailand. I volunteered for a
flight over the test area so that we could compare our photographic coverage with the
area reported in the ground survey. We flew out of Chiang Mai and made a northwest
sweep across northern Thailand. The condition of the fields indicated to me that the
crop had been severely damaged by late rains, and although extensive acreage
appeared to have been planted, the sowing patterns were very irregular due to the
damage. Since the plants had not yet flowered, it was obvious that the crop would be
harvested late in 1978, and perhaps no earlier than the end of February 1979. A bonus
earned on this flight was the discovery of a new and extensive area of poppy
cultivation in which a considerable amount of acreage appeared to have been planted.
The targets identified on this mission were subsequently checked out and
substantiated by collateral intelligence.
This eyeball-and-camera survey of the poppy areas produced a long-needed
statistical base for estimating 1978 opium production in Thailand. Such surveys are
also valuable for accumulating additional background data to test the feasibility of
overhead photography for monitoring the narcotics control effort.
Visit to the Thai-Lao Border, January 1978
At I was given the opportunity to review intelligence files
containing new information received from northeast Thailand. Information in these
files indicated a significant increase in narcotics traffic out of Laos. There had been
considerable debate within the Washington intelligence community over the role the
Communist government of Laos might be playing in narcotics production and trade.
The issue was particularly sensitive because the UN Commission on Narcotics Drugs
(CND) was considering a request from Laos for narcotics control funds. It was
suggested that I fly to Udorn, Thailand to review and evaluate this intelligence.
At Udorn, I was met by with a car and driver to take us to Nong
Khai, a major ferry crossing on the Mekong River between Vientiane and Thailand.
Nong Khai is often mentioned in intelligence reports as a principal entry point for
narcotics from Laos. The Lao border actually lies along the high water mark on the
Thai side of the river.
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After observing the activity at the ferry crossing, we made a 150-mile round trip
by car along the Laos-Thailand border to the town of Ring Kan, Thailand, another
major narcotics entry point. The highway between Nong Khai and Bung Kan is a
fairly good one-too good, because it enabled our driver to weave between oncoming
trucks and around water buffaloes at speeds approaching 90 miles per hour, ignoring
the constant shouts of my escort. I kept my panic in check by focusing on the side of
the road, observing that we were traversing what had to be the poorest and most
desolate countryside in all of Thailand. There were only a few pockets of villages
along the way and only two check points, where the police simply raised the barriers
at the approach of a vehicle; no one was stopped for interrogation or vehicle checks. It
was easy to see that narcotics could be packed from Laos into Thailand at any point
along the border to be picked up by a vehicle along the highway for shipment into
Bangkok. Part of our trip took us through an area controlled by Communist terrorists,
where we moved even faster except for a detour around a dynamited bridge.
At Rung Karr we visited the local police post to meet the new area commander.
The police post had a clear view of the Mekong which, this being the dry season, had
receded to a narrow ribbon of water which could most likely be crossed by wading. I
was informed that the local jail contained no narcotics offenders but rather was
packed with Lao refugees who had recently fled across the river at these narrow
points.
Before leaving northeast Thailand, I accompanied o Khon Kaen,
the provincial capital, to meet the commandant of Zone Six, which included the
Thailand-Laos border area. In exchange for our briefing on the narcotics situation in
the border area, we asked him to provide a communication channel for regular
exchanges with Washington on narcotics trafficking. He said he would be happy to
cooperate but that his forces were spread quite thin and lacked adequate equipment.
What he wanted from Bangkok and particularly from Washington was more emphasis
on northeast Thailand's anti-narcotics control programs, including funds to provide
incentive awards to his personnel for apprehending narcotics traffickers. He feared
that Laos could supplant the traditional areas of the Golden Triangle in magnitude if
Washington failed to support a greater anti-narcotics effort in the area. So again I
found myself a not unwilling message bearer from the field to officials in Washington.
With the Victims in Hong Kong, January 1978
A fitting climax to my 1978 tour of Southeast Asia came in Hong Kong, where I
was briefed on the local drug situation by the Commissioner for Narcotics and then
given a four-hour tour of a drug addict treatment center on one of the outlying islands.
I had ample cause to reflect on the drug problem and my involvement in the battle as
I sat among the pitiful crowd of heroin addicts being ferried to this facility.
Reflections
Most of the events described here were not outlined or even foreseen in the
formal travel prospectus prepared for each of my trips. In every instance, these
experiences added to our knowledge of the international drug trade arid related
subjects. On many occasions chance lent a hand in helping fill an intelligence gap or
clarify issues.
In assessing my role as a link between Washington and the field it became
apparent that the opportunities provided me were not always motivated by
intelligence needs. It was not unusual to find myself a conduit to Washington for
narcotics aid assistance requests from foreign countries, and often I had to provide a
filter as well. There were occasions when I was asked by various U.S. missions to help
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grind their particular axes or increase their share of the narcotics control budget. Even
within our own organization, I sensed that at times motives unrelated to orientation
purposes were behind my involvement in some of the operational situations. Whatever
the motivation, the opportunities afforded me resulted in a comprehensive exposure to
an intelligence problem that is rare for an NFAC analyst and which benefited the
entire narcotics intelligence program.
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Our past intelligence judgments were
neither as good as we think they
were, nor as bad as others believe.
COGNITIVE BIASES: PROBLEMS IN HINDSIGHT ANALYSIS
Psychologists observe that limitations in man's mental machinery (memory,
attention span, reasoning capability, etc.,) affect his ability to process information to
arrive at judgemental decisions. In order to cope with the complexity of our
environment, these limitations force us to employ various simplifying strategies for
perception, comprehension, inference, and decision. Many psychological experiments
demonstrate that our mental processes often lead to erroneous judgments. When such
mental errors are not random, but are consistently and predictably in the same
direction, they are known as cognitive biases.
This article discusses three cognitive biases affecting how we evaluate ourselves
and how others evaluate us as intelligence analysts.
? The analyst who thinks back about how good his past judgments have been will
normally overestimate their accuracy.
? The intelligence consumer who thinks about how much he learned from our
reports will normally underestimate their true value to him.
? The overseer of intelligence production who conducts a postmortem of an
intelligence failure to evaluate what we should have concluded from the
information that was available will normally judge that events were more
readily foreseeable than was in fact the case.
Evidence supporting the existence of these biases is presented in detail in the
second part of this article. None of the biases is surprising. We have all observed these
tendencies in others-although probably not in ourselves. What may be unexpected is
that these biases are not solely the product of self-interest and lack of objectivity. They
are specific examples of a broader phenomenon that seems to be built into our mental
processes and that cannot be overcome by the simple admonition to be more objective.
In the experimental situations described below, conscious efforts to overcome these
biases were ineffective. Experimental subjects with no vested interest in the results
were briefed on the biases and encouraged to avoid them or compensate for them, but
there was little or no improvement in their estimates. While self-interest and lack of
objectivity will doubtless aggravate the situation, bias is also cause by mental processes
unrelated to these baser instincts.
The analyst, consumer, and overseer evaluating estimative performance all have
one thing in common: they are exercising hindsight. They take their current state of
knowledge and compare it with what they or others did or could or should have
known before the current knowledge was received. Intelligence estimation, on the
other hand, is an exercise in foresight, and it is the difference between these two kinds
of thought-hindsight and foresight-that seems to be the source of the bias.
The amount of good information that is available obviously is greater in hindsight
than in foresight. There are several possible explanations of how this affects mental
processes. One is that the additional information available for hindsight apparently
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Cognitive Biases
changes our perceptions of a situation so naturally and so immediately that we are
largely unaware of the change. When new information is received, it is immediately
and unconsciously assimilated into our prior knowledge. If this new information adds
significantly to our knowledge-if it tells us the outcome of a situation or the answer to
a question about which we were previously uncertain-our mental images are
restructured to take the new information into account. With the benefit of hindsight,
for example, factors previously considered relevant may become irrelevant, and
factors previously thought to have little relevance may be seen as determinative.
Once our view has been restructured to assimilate the new information, there is
virtually no way we can accurately reconstruct our prior mental set. We may recall
our previous estimates if not much time has elapsed and they were precisely
articulated, but we apparently cannot reconstruct them accurately. The effort to
reconstruct what we previously thought about a given situation, or what we would
have thought about it, is inevitably influenced by our current thought patterns.
Knowing the outcome of a situation makes it harder to imagine other outcomes that
we might have considered. Simply understanding that our mind works in this fashion,
however, does little to help us overcome the limitation.
The overall message we should learn from an understanding of these biases is that
our intelligence judgments are not as good as we think they are, or as bad as others
seem to believe. Since the biases generally cannot be overcome, they would appear to
be facts of life that need to be taken into account in evaluating our own performance
and in determining what evaluations to expect from others. This suggests the need for
a more systematic effort to:
? Define what should be expected from intelligence analysis.
? Develop an institutionalized procedure for comparing intelligence judgments
and estimates with actual outcomes.
? Measure how well we live up to the defined expectations.
Discussion of Experiments
The experiments that demonstrated the existence of these biases and their
resistance to corrective action were conducted as part of a research program in
decision analysis funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Before
examining these experiments, it is appropriate to consider the nature of experimental
evidence per se, and the extent to which one can generalize from these experiments to
conclude that the same biases are prevalent in the intelligence community.
When we say that psychological experiments demonstrate the existence of a bias,
we do not mean the bias will be found in every judgment by every individual. We
mean that in any group of people, the bias will exist to a greater or lesser degree in
most of the judgments made by a large percentage of the group. On the basis of the
kind of experimental evidence discussed here, we can only generalize about the
tendencies of groups of people, not make statements about individual analysts,
consumers, or overseers.
All the experiments described below used students, not members of the
intelligence community, as test subjects. There is, nonetheless, ample reason to believe
the results can be generalized to apply to the intelligence community. The
experiments deal with basic mental processes common to everyone, and the results do
seem consistent with our personal experience. In similar psychological test using
various experts (including intelligence analysts) as test subjects, the experts showed the
same pattern of responses as students.
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Cognitive lases
Our own imperfect efforts to repeat one of these experiments using CIA analysts
support the validity of the findings. In order to test the assertion that intelligence
analysts normally overestimate the accuracy of their past judgments, there are two
necessary preconditions. First, analysts must make a series of estimates in quantitative
terms-they must say not just that a given occurrence is probable, but that there is, for
example, a 75-percent chance of its occurrence. Second, it must be possible to make an
unambiguous determination whether the estimated event did or did not occur. When
these two preconditions are present, one can then go back and test the analyst's
recollection of his or her earlier estimate. Because CIA estimates are rarely stated in
terms of quantitative probability, and because the occurrence of an estimated event
within a specified time period often cannot be determined unambiguously, these
preconditions are rarely met.
We did, however, identify several analysts in CIA's Office of Regional and
Political Analysis who on two widely differing subjects had made quantitative
estimates of the likelihood of events that we now know either did or did riot occur. We
went to these analysts and asked them to recall their earlier estimates. The conditions
for this miniexperiment were far from ideal, and the results were not clear-cut, but
they did tend to support the conclusions drawn from the more extensive and
systematic experiments described below.
These reasons lead us to conclude that the three biases are found in intelligence
community personnel as well as in the specific test subjects. In fact, one would expect
the biases to be even greater in foreign affairs professionals whose careers and self-
esteem depend upon the presumed accuracy of their judgments. We can now turn to
more detailed discussion of the experimental evidence demonstrating these biases
from the perspective of the analyst, consumer, and overseer.
The Analyst's Perspective '
Analysts interested in improving their own performance need to evaluate their
past estimates in the light of subsequent developments. To do this, an analyst must
either recall (or be able to refer to) his past estimates, or he must reconstruct his past
estimates on the basis of what he remembers having known about the situation at the
time the estimates were made. The effectiveness of the evaluation process, and of the
learning process to which it gives impetus, depends in part upon the accuracy of these
recalled or reconstructed estimates.
Experimental evidence suggests, however, a systematic tendency toward faulty
memory of our past estimates. That is, when events occur, we tend to overestimate the
extent to which we had previously expected them to occur. And conversely, when
events do not occur, we tend to underestimate the probability we had previously
assigned to their occurrence. In short, events generally seem less surprising than they
should on the basis of past estimates. This experimental evidence accords with our
intuitive experience; analysts, in fact, rarely seem very surprised by the course of
events they are following.
In experiments to test the bias in memory of past estimates, 119 subjects were
asked to estimate the probability that a number of events would or would not occur
during President Nixon's trips to Peking and Moscow in 1972. Fifteen possible
outcomes were identified for each trip, and each subject assigned a probability to each
of these outcomes. The outcomes were selected to cover the range of possible
developments and to elicit a wide range of probability values.
This section is based on research reported by Baruch Fischhoff and Ruth Beyth in "'I Knew It Would
Happen'; Remembered Probabilities of Once-Future Things," Organizational Behavior and Human
Performance, 13 (1975), pp. 1-16.
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Cognitive Biases
At varying time periods after the trips, the same subjects were asked to recall or
reconstruct their predictions as accurately as possible. (No mention was made of the
memory task at the time of the original prediction.) Then the subjects were asked to
indicate whether they thought each event had or had not occurred during these trips.
When three to six months were allowed to elapse between the subjects' estimates
and their recollection of these estimates, 84 percent of the subjects exhibited the bias
when dealing with events they believed actually happened. That is, the probabilities
they remembered having estimated were higher than their actual estimates of events
they believed actually occurred. Similarly, for events they believed did not occur, the
probabilities they remembered having estimated were lower than their actual
estimates, although here the bias was not as great. For both kinds of events, the bias
was more pronounced after three to six months had elapsed than when subjects were
asked to recall estimates they had given only two weeks earlier.
In sum, knowledge of the outcomes somehow affected most test subjects' memory
of their previous estimates of these outcomes, and the more time was allowed for
memories to fade, the greater was the effect of the bias. The developments during the
President's trips were perceived as less surprising than they would have been if actual
estimates were compared with actual outcomes. For the 84 percent of the subjects who
showed the anticipated bias, their retrospective evaluation of their estimative
performance was clearly more favorable than was warranted by the facts.
The Consumer's Perspective 2
When the consumer of intelligence reports evaluates the quality of the
intelligence product, he asks himself the question, "How much did I learn from these
reports that I did not already know?" In answering this question, there is a consistent
tendency for most people to underestimate the contribution made by new
information. This kind of "I knew it all along" bias causes consumers to undervalue
the intelligence product.
That people do in fact commonly react to new information in this manner was
confirmed in a series of experiments involving some 320 people, each of whom
answered the same set of 75 factual questions taken from almanacs and encyclopedias.
They were then asked to indicate how confident they were in the correctness of each
answer by assigning to it a probability percentage ranging from 50 (no confidence) to
100 (absolute certainty).
As a second step in the experiment, subjects were divided into three groups. The
first group was given 25 of the previously asked questions and instructed to respond to
them exactly as they had previously. This simply tested the subjects' ability to
remember their previous answers. The second group was given the same set of 25
questions but with the correct answers circled "for your [the subjects'] general
information." They, too, were asked to respond by reproducing their previous
answers. This tested the extent to which learning the correct answers distorted the
subjects' memory of their previous answers, thus measuring the same bias in
recollection of previous estimates that was discussed above from the analyst's
perspective.
The third group was given a different set of 25 questions that they had not
previously seen, but of similar difficulty so that results would be comparable with the
2 The experiments described in this section are reported in Baruch Fischhoff, The Perceived
Informativeness of Factual Information, Technical Report DDI-1 (Oregon Research Institute, Eugene,
Ore., 1976).
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Cognitive Biases
other two groups. The correct answers were indicated, and the subjects were asked to
respond to the questions as they would have had they not been told the answer. This
tested the subjects' ability to remember accurately how much they had known before
they learned the correct answer. The situation is comparable to that of the intelligence
consumer who is asked to evaluate how much he learned from a report and who can
do this only by trying to reconstruct the extent of his knowledge before he read the
report.
The most significant results came from this third group of subjects. The group
clearly overestimated what they had known originally and underestimated how much
they learned from having been told the answer. For 19 of 25 items in one test and 20
of 25 items in another, this group assigned higher probabilities to the correct
alternatives than it is reasonable to expect they would have assigned had they not
already known the correct answers.
The bias was stronger for deceptive questions than for easier questions. For
example, one of the deceptive questions was:
(a) Persian
(b) Chinese
The correct answer, which is surprising to most people, is Chinese. The average
probabilities assigned to each answer by the three groups varied as follows:
? When subjects recalled their previous response without having been told the
correct answer, the average of the probabilities they assigned to the two possible
responses was:
(a) .838
(b) .134
As these subjects did not know the correct answer, they had no opportunity to
exhibit the bias. Therefore, the above figures are the base against which to
compare the answers of the other two groups that were aware of the correct
answer.
? When subjects tried to recall their previous response after having been told the
correct answer, their average responses were:
(a) .793
(b) .247
? When subjects not previously exposed to the question were given the correct
answer but asked to respond as they would have responded before being told
the answer, their average responses were:
(a) .542
(b) .321
In sum, the experiment confirms the results of the previous experiment showing
that people exposed to an answer tend to remember having known more than they
actually did, and it demonstrates that people tend even more to exaggerate the
likelihood that they would have known the correct answer if they had not been
informed of it. In other words, people tend to underestimate how much they learn
from new information. To the extent that this bias affects the judgments of
intelligence consumers-and there is every reason to expect that it does-these
consumers will tend to underrate the value of intelligence estimates.
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Cognitive Biases
An overseer, as the term is used here, is one who investigates intelligence
performance by conducting a postmortem examination, for example, of why we failed
to foresee the 1.973 Yom Kippur War. Such investigations are carried out by Congress
and by our own management, and independent judgments are also made by the press
and others. For those outside the executive branch who do not regularly read the
intelligence product, this sort of retrospective evaluation in cases of known intelligence
failure is a principal basis for judgments about the quality of our intelligence analysis.
A fundamental question posed in any postmortem investigation of intelligence
failure is: Given the information that was available at the time, should we have been
able to foresee what was going to happen? Unbiased evaluation of intelligence
performance depends upon the ability to provide an unbiased answer to this question.
Once an event has occurred, it is impossible to erase from our mind the knowledge
of that event and reconstruct what our thought processes would have been at an earlier
point in time. In reconstructing the past, there is a tendency toward determinism,
toward thinking that what occurred was inevitable under the circumstances and
therefore predictable. In short, there is a tendency to believe we should have foreseen
events that were in fact unforeseeable on the basis of the available information.
The experiments reported here tested the hypotheses that knowledge of an
outcome increases the perceived probability of that outcome, and that people who are
informed of the outcome are largely unaware that this information has changed their
perceptions in this manner.
A series of sub-experiments used brief (150-word) summaries of several events for
which four possible outcomes were identified. One of these events was the struggle
between the British and the Gurkhas in India in 1814. The four possible outcomes for
this event were (1) British victory, (2) Gurkha victory, (3) military stalemate with no
peace settlement, and (4) military stalemate with a peace settlement. Five groups of 20
subjects each participated in each sub-experiment. One group received the 150-word
description of the struggle between the British and the Gurkhas with no indication of
the outcome. The other four groups received the identical description but with one
sentence added to indicate the outcome of the struggle-a different outcome for each
group.
The subjects in all five groups were asked to estimate the likelihood of each of the
four possible outcomes and to evaluate the relevance to their judgment of each fact in
the description of the event. Those subjects who were informed of an outcome were
placed in the same position as our overseer who, although knowing what happened,
seeks to estimate the probability of that outcome without the benefit of hindsight. The
results are shown in the table below.
Experimental Groups
Average Probabilities
Assigned to Outcomes
I
2
3
4
Not Told Outcome
33.8
21.3
32.3
12.3
't'old Outcome 1
57.2
14.3
15.3
13.4
Told Outcome 2
30.3
38.4
20.4
10.5
Told Outcome 3
25.7
17.0
48.0
0.9
Told Outcome 4
33.0
15.8
24.3
27.0
The experiments described in this section are reported in Baruch Fischhoff, "Hindsight # Foresight:
The Effect of Outcome Knowledge on Judgment Under Uncertainty," Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1, 3 (1975), pp. 288-299.
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Cognitive Biases
The group not informed of any outcome judged the probability of Outcome 1 as
33.8 percent, while the group told that Outcome 1 was the actual outcome perceived
the probability of this outcome as 57.2 percent. The estimated probability was clearly
influenced by knowledge of the actual outcome. Similarly, those informed that
Outcome 2 was the actual outcome perceived this outcome as having a 38.4 percent
probability, as compared with a judgment of only 21.3 percent for the control group
with no outcome knowledge. An average of all estimated outcomes in six sub-
experiments (a total of 2,188 estimates by 547 subjects) indicates that the knowledge or
belief that an outcome has occurred approximately doubles the perceived probability
that that outcome will occur.
The relevance that subjects attributed to any fact was also strongly influenced by
which outcome, if any, they had been told was true. As Wohlstetter has indicated, "It
is much easier after the fact to sort the relevant from the irrelevant signals. After the
event, of course, a signal is always crystal clear. We can now see what disaster it was
signaling since the disaster has occurred, but before the event it is obscure and
pregnant with conflicting meanings."' The fact that knowledge of the outcome
automatically restructures our judgments on the relevance of available data is
probably one reason it is so difficult to reconstruct what our thought processes were or
would have been without this outcome knowledge.
In several variations of this experiment, subjects were asked to respond as though
they (lid not know the outcome, or as others would respond if they did not know the
outcome. The results were little different, indicating that subjects were largely
unaware of how knowledge of the outcome affected their own perceptions. The
experiment showed that subjects were unable to empathize with how others would
judge these situations. Estimates of how others would interpret the data were virtually
the same as the subjects' own retrospective interpretations.
These results indicate that overseers conducting postmortem evaluations of what
CIA should have been able to foresee in any given situation will tend to perceive the
outcome of that situation as having been more predictable than it in fact was. Because
they are unable to reconstruct a state of mind that views the situation only with
foresight, not hindsight, overseers will tend to be more critical of intelligence
performance than is warranted.
Can We Overcome These Biases?
We tend to blame biased evaluations of intelligence performance at best on
ignorance, at worst on self-interest and lack of objectivity. These factors may also be at
work, but the experiments described above suggest that the nature of our mental
processes is a principal culprit. This is a more intractable cause than either ignorance
or lack of objectivity.
The self-interest of the experimental subjects was not at stake; yet they showed
the same kinds of bias with which we are familiar. Moreover, in these experimental
situations the biases were highly resistant to efforts to overcome them. Subjects were
instructed to make estimates as if they did not already know the answer, but they were
unable to do so. In the experiments using 75 almanac and encyclopedia questions, one
set of subjects was specifically briefed on the bias, citing the results of previous
experiments; this group was instructed to try to compensate for the bias, but it too was
unable to do so. Despite maximum information and the best intentions, the bias
persisted.
' Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford University Press, Stanford
Calif., 1962), p. 387.
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Cognitive Biases
This intractability suggests that the bias does indeed have its roots in the nature of
our mental processes. The analyst who tries to recall his previous estimate after
learning the actual outcome of events, the consumer who thinks how much a report
has added t,) his prior knowledge, and the overseer who judges whether our analysts
should have been able to avoid an intelligence failure, all have one thing in common.
They are engaged in a mental process involving hindsight. They are trying to erase the
impact of knowledge, so as to recall, reconstruct, or imagine the uncertainties they had
or would have had about a subject prior to receiving more or less definitive
information on that subject.
It appears, however, that the receipt of what is accepted as definitive or
authoritative information causes an immediate but unconscious restructuring of our
mental images to make them consistent with the new information. Once our past
perceptions have been restructured, it seems very difficult, at best, to reconstruct
accurately what our thought processes were or would have been before this
restructuring.
There is one procedure that may help to overcome these biases. It is to pose such
questions as the following. The analyst should ask himself, "If the opposite outcome
had occurred, would I have been surprised?" The consumer should ask, "If this report
had told me the opposite, would I have believed it?" And the overseer should ask, "If
the opposite outcome had occurred, would it have been predictable given the
information that was available?" These questions may help us to recall the degree of
uncertainty we had prior to learning the content of a report or the outcome of a
situation. They may help us remember the reasons we had for supporting the opposite
answer, which we now know to be wrong.
This method of overcoming the bias can be tested by readers of this article,
especially those who believe it failed to tell them much they had not already known. If
this article had reported that psychological experiments show no consistent pattern of
analysts overestimating the accuracy of their estimates, and of consumers
underestimating the value of our product, would you have believed it? (Answer:
Probably not.) If it had reported that psychological experiments show these biases to
be caused only by self-interest and lack of objectivity, would you have believed this?
(Answer: Probably yes.) And would you have believed it if the article had reported
that these biases can be overcome by a conscientious effort at objective evaluation?
(Answer: Probably yes.)
These questions may lead the reader to recall the state of his knowledge or beliefs
before reading this article, and thus to highlight what he has learned from it-namely,
that significant biases in the evaluation of intelligence estimates are attributable to the
nature of human mental processes, not just to self-interest and lack of objectivity, and
that they are, therefore, exceedingly difficult to overcome.
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COMMUNICATIONS INTELLIGENCE AND TSARIST RUSSIA
Western publications in recent years have been providing frequent revelations
about the use of communications intelligence (COMINT) by major nations of the
world.' The one notable exception, at least in English-language publications, has been
Russia. At the logical source, the natural secrecy attached to COMINT information in
general, combined with the traditional Russian obsession with secrecy throughout its
society, has held discussion of the subject to a minimum. Outside the USSR, such
Imperial Russian failures in communications security as Tannenberg in World War I
have contributed to the impresssion that the Russians must have known little about
COMINT. Despite these constraints, however, since the early 1960s several rather
specific articles concerning COMINT organizations and operations under the Tsars 2
and even on the early development of a radio intelligence service in the Soviet Army 8
have appeared in Soviet journals. When supplemented with information available
from non-Soviet sources, a general picture emerges of an early Tsarist COMINT effort
approaching, if not on a par with, similar efforts in the West. This article is an initial
attempt to shed some historical light on this little-known area of Tsarist intelligence.
It should be noted that the absence of any discussion in this present article
concerning Russian military COMINT activities before World War I or Ministry of
Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Internal Affairs COMINT operations during WW I
itself does not necessarily mean such activities did not exist, but merely that
insufficient documentation was available from which to draw any conclusions. It
should also be noted that the early Russian COMINT efforts apply to communications
in their broadest sense, including secret or coded written messages.
Early Development of Russian COMINT
Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID)
Traditionally, communications intelligence involving foreign governments and
their representatives fell within the purview of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID).
This tradition has been traced back to at least the reign of Peter the Great.' The
methods used, of course, involved gaining access to the diplomatic correspondence,
opening it (perlustration), and if found to be encrypted, either purchasing the
necessary cryptographic materials from a willing employee or actually engaging in
operational cryptanalysis to exploit the document. Even so wily a statesman as the
"Iron Chancellor," Otto von Bismarck, while serving as Prussian Ambassador to St.
' David Kahn, The Codebreakers (Macmillan, New York, 1967); F. W. Winterbotham, The Ultra
Secret (Harper & Row, New York, 1974); Patrick Beesly, Very Special Intelligence (Hamish Hamilton,
London, 1977); and Ewen Montagu, Beyond Top Secret Ultra (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, New York,
1978) to list just a few.
2 "On the Origins of Radio Intelligence in the Russian Navy" by V. Yankovich, Voenno-Istoricheskij
Zhurnal (Journal of Military History), February 1961; Marshal I. T. Peresypkin, Voennaya Radiosvyaz'
(Military Radio Communications), Moscow, Voenizdat, 1962; "The Communications Service in the Russian
Navy during World War I" by M. Zernov and N. Trukhnin, Voenno-Istoricheskij Zhurnal, March 1966.
s "The Organization and Combat Use of Radio intelligence during the Civil War" by Yu. Ural'skij,
Voenno-?Istoricheskij Zhurnal, November 1972.
'For instance, see Kahn, op. cit., V. 614.
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Tsarist COMINT
Petersburg (1859-63), fell victim to MID's COMINT operations in reading Prussian
ciphers.' MID was aided in its COMINT efforts by the so-called "Black Cabinets" of
the Imperial Russian Postal Service.
Black Cabinets were set up at post offices in major cities of the Russian Empire.
One of their important functions appears to have been opening suspect correspon-
dence, photographing the contents, and disseminating the information to the
appropriate ministry, i.e., information of "general State interest" (usually comments
about the Imperial Family made by segments of the Tsarist nobility) to the Minister of
Internal Affairs; "political" correspondence to the Department of Police; "diplomatic"
correspondence to the Minister of Foreign Affairs; and "espionage" correspondence,
presumably during wartime, to the Army and Navy General Staffs. According to one
former Black Cabinet employee, there was never much of a problem gaining access to,
or photographing the contents of, foreign diplomatic pouches. When the diplomatic
correspondence was found to be encrypted, it was not worked on at the Black Cabinet
itself but sent to a "... similar establishment attached to the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs." Copies of all encrypted telegrams sent and received by embassies in St.
Petersburg were delivered to this MID organization. In important cases, even copies of
reports carried in locked leather briefcases by special diplomatic couriers were
forwarded to this same unit.' As most couriers and embassy employees were
underpaid by their governments, they could be prevailed upon for a small bribe to
allow the contents of their briefcases to be photographed by Black Cabinet specialists.
The fact that diplomatic documents were encrypted only served to intensify
MID's efforts to discover their contents. One Black Cabinet official described the ease
with which foreign cryptographic materials could be obtained, even on the open
market, in the following manner:
Codebooks were acquired not only with the assistance of embassy
employees but also in the cities of Brussels and Paris, where well-known
persons engaged directly in open trade of foreign codebooks for a fixed
price. The situation was completely identical in both cities. Codebooks which
were of less interest to us, e.g., Greek, Bulgarian, and Spanish, and could be
obtained rather easily cost 1,500 to 2,000 (rubles). Such codebooks as those of
the Germans, Japanese, or U.S.A. cost several tens of thousands. The prices
for the remaining countries fluctuated between 5,000 and 15,000. It was
possible with this trading in codebooks to place an order for this or that new
codebook, and these orders were filled within a short period of tirne.7
The "similar establishment" of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to which the
encrypted diplomatic correspondence was sent by the Black Cabinets was, of course,
the main COMINT organization within MID responsible for diplomatic cryptanalysis.
Little information is available on the specific structure and operations of this
organization. Purportedly it could read the encrypted correspondence of many
countries, including France, England, Turkey, Austro-Hungary and Sweden. Shortly
before World War I, according to one source, this cryptanalytic organization was
reorganized by Aleksandr A. Savinskij, chief of the MID Cabinet (1901-10), and
brought directly under control of the foreign affairs minister himself.8
Cited in Richard VJ Rowan, Secret Service (Literary Guild, New York, 1937), p. 699.
"Black Cabinet: Recollections of a Former Tsarist Censor" by S. Maiskii, Byloe (The Past), July 1918,
p. 191.
Ibid., p. 192.
'Swedish Cryptanalyst Yves Gylden, cited in Kahn, op. cit., p. 621.
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Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD)
Like the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD),
through the cryptanalytic organization of its Department of Police, was an important
component of the Tsarist Russian COMINT "community." The internal security and
surveillance functions of the MVD, including the monitoring of communications of
both anti-Tsarist revolutionary groups and the general populace of the Empire as a
whole, have been rather well-documented elsewhere.' What is not generally well-
known is that for at least a short period of time, the MVD expanded its jurisdiction to
include monitoring the communications (as well as the movements) of foreign
ambassadors, ministers, and military attaches based in Russia. This extension of the
MVD into an area normally under sole control of the MID occurred between 1904 and
1906. Included among those whose communications were being monitored by the
MVD was the U.S. Ambassador. The monitoring of U.S. diplomatic communications,
according to the former chief of this "Top Secret" MVD bureau, Colonel M. S.
Komissarov, had "enormous significance" for Tsarist diplomatic initiatives. On 4 May
1917, in testimony before the Extraordinary Investigating Commission of the
Provisional Government," Komissarov stated:
During the Portsmouth Treaty (conference), we knew all the American
conditions (positions) earlier than the American Ambassador in Petrograd."
This statement may have been only post-revolutionary bluster on the part of
Komissarov, but it might be added that the principal Russian delegate to the
Portsmouth conference, Sergej Witte, received the title of "Count" from the Tsar
upon Witte's return to Russia specifically for his work at Portsmouth.
Army Radio Intelligence
The integration of radio communications into the military forces of the major
world powers at the beginning of the twentieth century greatly expanded the horizons
of COMINT in obtaining information on one's adversaries. It is unknown precisely
when a radio intelligence service was first established in the Russian Army, but it
undoubtedly was connected with the successful radio intelligence services set up by
the Baltic and Black Sea Fleets in the autumn of 1914.12 Although there does not
appear to have been any centralized control of intelligence, COMINT or otherwise,
within the military command structure overseeing both Army and Navy operations,
according to a former Soviet Communications Service chief close cooperation did in
fact exist between the army radio intelligence services of Russia, Great Britain and
France. This cooperation included frequent exchange of information on the operating
characteristics of enemy radio stations, callsign constructions, and signal codes.13
'For example, Kahn, op. cit., pp. 618-621.
" ? The Extraordinary Investigating Commission was set up by the Provisional Russian Government after
March 1917 to take testimony from former Tsarist officials on the functioning of the old regime. Its
operations were ended with the Bolshevik Revolution.
" Cited in "The Revolution of 1905-06 in the Reports of Foreign Diplomats" by M. G. Fleer, Krasnyj
Arkhiv (Red Archive), Vol. 3 (16), 1926, p. 220. The Portsmouth Peace Conference (August--September
1905), which took place at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, ended the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05.
President Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for his mediation efforts at the conference.
12 See "Navy Radio Intelligence," below.
" Peresypkin, op. cit., p. 57. The existence of Russian Army COMINT liaison with the COMINT
services of Great Britain and France has not heretofore been acknowledged in any western publication
concerning Allied COMINT activities in WW I.
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Tsarist C Ml T
In the Russian Army, at each Army Headquarters, radio intelligence operations
were controlled by the chief of army communications through his assistant for
technical matters. Each army's radio battalion had a radio intelligence squad, or
section, which operated two radio stations: one station monitored the radio waves for
enemy communications and, once detected, the other station then recorded them.
Presumably, the radio direction finding (RDF) stations also located at each Army
Headquarters were controlled via the assistant for technical matters too. (See Chart I.)
Although information on Russian Army radio intelligence operations is almost nil,
one example can be cited. In April 1915, on the eve of the German breakthrough in
Galicia, Russian Army COMINT-provided information revealed the appearance of
several new German Corps at the front, including a Guards Corps which had just been
transferred from other areas in Galicia. The radio intelligence service had discerned
this information on the basis of certain peculiar operating characteristics of these
Corps radio stations and by the distinctive "fists" of their radio operators. Russian
radio direction finding stations were also being used extensively at this time.
By the end of 1915, encrypted German Army radiograms were being intercepted
on at least the Northern Front and sent to a "special bureau (SPETsIAL'NOE BYuRO)
of the Chief Directorate of the General Staff in St. Petersburg" for cryptanalysis.
According to one former high-ranking Tsarist Army intelligence officer, however,
tangible results of the work of this bureau were not passed on, and the radio
intelligence work itself was poorly organized in the Army when compared to similar
work in the Russian Navy."
Navy Radio Intelligence
If communications intelligence was organized and operated poorly in the Army,
the exact opposite was the case in the Russian Navy. In fact, the organizational
structure of the radio intelligence service was so thoroughly developed in the Baltic
Sea Fleet that operations undertaken by the fleet were almost always successful. Like
the Baltic Sea Fleet, the Black Sea Fleet also had an effective, if somewhat less well-
developed, radio intelligence effort. From available evidence, it appears that each
fleet's radio intelligence service was independent and responsible ultimately only to its
respective fleet headquarters.
The decision to set up radio intelligence services in the Navy (and probably in the
Army as well) stemmed from the Russian recovery of German naval radiotelegraphic
codebooks from the cruiser Magdeburg, which had been sunk by Russian ships on 26
August 1914 in the Baltic. Shortly thereafter Captain 1st Rank M. A. Kedrov and
Captain 2nd Rank M. I. Smirnov were sent to England with copies of the German
codebooks, 15 which they handed over personally to the First Lord of the Admiralty,
Winston Churchill. '6
Probably following consultations with the English, the Commander-in-Chief of
the Baltic Fleet, Admiral N. O. von Ehssen, jointly with the Baltic Fleet's chief of
Communications Service, Captain 1st Rank (later Vice-Admiral) A. I. Nepenin,
decided on the immediate establishment of the first "special purpose (OSNAZ) radio
intercept station" in the western part of the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland,
between Baltijskii Port (now Paldiski) and Revel (now Tallin). The chosen site was
" General-Major N. Batyushin, Tajnaya Voennaya Razvedka i Bor ba s Nej (Secret Military
intelligence and the Struggle with it), Sofia, Nov'Zhivot' Press, 1939, p. 73.
15 According to Yankovich, op. cit., p. 116, the French also received a photocopy of the German naval
, odebooks from the Russians.
'1 "Mine Warfare in the Black Sea" by Senior Lieutenant 1. I. Steblin-Kamenskij, La Revue Maritime
(Naval Revue), November 1932, p. 620.
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BASIC COMINT STRUCTURE IN RUSSIAN ARMY(ca. 1915)
ARMY Has
RADIO BATTALION
-(ASSISTANT FOR TECHNICAL MATTERS)
RADIO INTELLIGENCE
SQUAD/ SECTION
RDF STATIONS
RADIO STATION
(2 SEARCH RECEIVERS)
RADIO STATION
(2 SEARCH RECEIVERS)
-------- Postulated Control
-- -- Actual Control
(From Peresypkin, off. cit.,p.56)
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Tsarist COMINT
located in the woods, far away from populated areas, in order to achieve better
monitoring of the radio waves. The secluded location was also selected in order to
protect the station from German espionage activities and to create an ideally quiet
place for carrying out the work of radio intercept and cryptanalysis. The buildings
were hidden from outside view, and the station's personnel were allowed no contact
with the outside world. A reinforced guard was set up around the station for added
protection. The necessary supplies were delivered to the station at specified times by
car from Revel. Captain 2nd Rank Przhilenskii was placed in charge of this OSNAZ
station, with his closest collaborator a Ministry of Foreign Affairs cryptanalyst named
Fetterlein.' Several naval officers who knew the German language well and had some
experience in cipher work were detailed to assist Fetterlein in attacking the encrypted
German communications. All information obtained by the intercept station was then
sent by underground cable to Captain Nepenin at the southern region administration
of the Communications Service in Revel. During World War I, the chief of the fleet's
Communications Service wore two hats: communications and naval intelligence." A
similar radio intercept station was set up about the same time at Sevastopol in support
of the Black Sea Fleet.'s
Before going into specific examples of the use of COMINT information by the
Russian Navy, let's look at the radio intelligence structure as it was set up in the Baltic
and Black Sea Fleets.
At the beginning of the war, the Baltic Fleet Communications Service was
divided into three regions: northern, stretching from Helsingfors to the Abo-Aland
Islands; southern, from the Kunda Inlet in the west to the German border; and eastern,
covering the Gulf of Finland east of Helgoland Island. Each of these regions had a
Central Radio Station (CRS) attached to it which not only provided communications
support to the fleet but also received intelligence information from aerial
reconnaissance and shore-based observation posts in addition to radio intelligence from
intercept and RDF stations. Except for the southern region, which served as the
headquarters for the chief of the Baltic Fleet's Communications Service, it is unknown
when the other regions first set up their COMINT stations. By the autumn of 1916,
however, the northern region had five RDF and five radio intercept stations in
operation, while the southern region had expanded its operation to five RDF and four
radio intercept stations. It is possible that the eastern region did not have a COMINT
effort at all, or the effort was only of limited duration. In March 1915, a so-called
"Radio Intelligence Center" was set up at Revel, subordinate to the CRS of the
southern region. This "Center" was probably connected with all radio intercept and
RDF stations within the southern region by underground cable. It is possible similar
"(,enters" were established within the other regions to deal strictly with COMINT-
related data before forwarding the information on to their respective CRSs. Once the
(:OMINT information reached the CRS, if it was extremely urgent and time-sensitive
it would be transmitted immediately to commanders of Russian ships operating in the
Baltic. (See Chart II.)
" After the Revolution in 1917, Fetterlein apparently was employed by the British Government Code
and Cipher School as a cryptanalyst, a position he was still occupying in World War H. See Patrick Seale
and Maureen McConville, Philby: The Long Road to Moscow (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1972),
pp. 152, 158. One former employee of the Tsarist Ministry of Foreign Affairs has characterized Fetterlein as
a most gifted cryptanalyst. See Vladimir Korostovetz, Lenin Im House Der Vater (Lenin in the House of
the Fathers) (Verlag fur Kulturpolitik, Berlin, 1928), pp. 50-51.
18 Rear Admiral S. N. Timirev, Vospominaniya Morskogo Ofitsera (Recollections of a Naval Officer),
New York, American Society for Russian Naval History, 1961, pp. 46-47; Yankovich, op. cit., p. 116.
's Steblin-Kamenskii, op. cit., p. 620.
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Although the Black Sea Fleet's radio intelligence organization was similar to the
Baltic Sea Fleet's, there are fewer details available. The Communications Service of
the Black Sea Fleet was divided into a northern region, stretching from the mouth of
the Danube to Fedosiya, and an eastern region, extending from Fedosiya to Batumi.
Except for the initial radio intercept station set up at Sevastopol early in the war, it is
unknown if or when other similar stations were established. (See Chart III. )
It might be added that while some of the equipment for the radio intelligence
services was provided to the Russians by foreign firms, some of the equipment was
constructed by specialists of the Russian Navy Department itself,20 possibly associated
with the Naval Ministry's own radiotelegraphic equipment factory (now called
"COMINTERN" factory).21
The use of COMINT information by the Russian Navy during the war, especially
in the Baltic Sea Fleet, proved to be very effective. Part of the reason for this
effectiveness, according to a former high-ranking Tsarist Baltic Fleet officer, lay in the
analytical judgments of Captain Nepenin as chief of the Baltic Fleet Communications
Service.
Nepenin had developed to the highest degree the gift of establishing a
complete picture of the movements of enemy ships and from this
determining the plans and intentions of the enemy. Nepenin was able to
accomplish this task by logically comparing facts and conjectures, which had
been provided to him by Communications Service posts, both on the basis of
decrypted German radiograms and bearings obtained by radio direction
finding. His predictions of enemy movements, sometimes very bold and
apparently with little basis, almost always were vindicated.... Not one
operation was undertaken (by the fleet) without first receiving a detailed
and almost always correct interpretation (of information) on the requested
area from Nepenin.22
The information provided by the radio intelligence service, under Nepenin's
direction, was looked upon with such favor by the Russian Naval Command that it
was one of the reasons Nepenin was designated as the new Commander-in-Chief of
the Baltic Fleet in 1916. Nepenin was probably succeeded at that time as chief of the
fleet's Communications Service by Captain 1st Rank Novopashennyj,23 who was noted
as chief of the Baltic Fleet Communications Service in 1917.24
In the Baltic Fleet, the first operation known to have been undertaken on the
basis of COMINT information took place on 14 February 1915, when the Russians
learned in advance the scheduled times for the arrival and departure of a German
cruiser at the port of Libau (now Liepaya). A Russian submarine was immediately
dispatched and sank the cruiser as it left Libau. COMINT information also played a
major role in mine-laying operations against German ships entering and leaving the,
Gulf of Riga. One example of the utilization of time-sensitive COMINT by Russian
ships afloat occurred on 1 July 1915. A detachment of Russian cruisers, while in transit
to bombard German targets in Memel (now Klaipeda), received a report on the
location of a projected rendezvous between the cruiser Augsburg and a group of other
Ural'skij, op. cit., p. 84.
Zernov and Trukhnin, op. cit., p. 107.
L2 Timirev, op. cit., pp. 14-15.
23 Possibly the same Novopashennyj who " ... had rendered good service during WW I in the Imperial
Russian Navy ..." and, from 1922 on, served as a senior assistant to the chief of a German cryptanalytic
organization. See Wilhelm F. Flicke, War Secrets in the Ether: Volume II (Aegean Park Press, Laguna
Hills, 1977), pp. 292-293.
14 Timirev, op. cit., p. 165.
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Tsarist COMINT
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Tsarist COMINT
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Tsarist COMINT
German ships. The Russian detachment then broke up the rendezvous by forcing the
German ships to retreat.25 The high point in the operations of the Baltic Fleet's radio
intelligence service was reached on 31 July 1915, when the Russians obtained
foreknowledge of the German Navy's proposed forcing of the Gulf of Riga in
conjunction with the German Army's seizure of the city of Riga. Information obtained
by cryptanalysis as well as from aerial reconnaissance and shore-based observation
posts provided the proposed time and date of the offensive, including deployment of
enemy forces. When the German Navy attempted to carry out the operation on 8
August 1915, ships of the Baltic Fleet were already in place and broke up the attack.-
The earliest known example of an operation undertaken by the Black Sea Fleet
based on COMINT occurred in September 1916, although undoubtedly there must
have been earlier operations. The Russians were aided in their Black Sea Fleet radio
intelligence effort by the Turkish Navy's reliance on the Germans for cryptographic
material, which the Russians already had in their possession. On 15 September 1916,
Black Sea Fleet radio intelligence units (subdivisions) intercepted information from a
shore-based Turkish radio station regarding the sweeping up of Russian mines
obstructing the approaches to the Bosporus. A large Turkish transport ship was to pass
through the swept area with a cargo of coal from Zonguldak. Russian ships were
quickly sent to re-lay mines, and the Turkish ship was sunk. In December 1916, the
Russians decrypted an order for a German submarine to return to Constantinople
(now Istanbul), along with the coordinates of the mine-swept channel through which
the submarine was to pass. Torpedo boats were immediately dispatched from
Sevastopol to re-mine the area. It was learned by the Russians within 48 hours, through
another decrypted radiogram, that the submarine had been sunk by the mines. This
was the last German submarine to embark for the Black Sea during the war.27
It is clear from the above that communications intelligence was an integral part of
information-gathering under the Tsars. The invention of radio and its integration into
the military forces of the major powers at the turn of the century also opened up a
new horizon for Tsarist COMINT activities, although the Russian Military Command
appears to have been somewhat slow in recognizing the possibilities inherent in using
the radio for intelligence purposes. Nevertheless, Tsarist Russia for all of its faults was
not totally inept in intelligence-gathering, as implied by some historians, and despite
its slowness, it did achieve some success, at least in the Navy, with its use of COMINT.
zs Zernov and Trukhnin, op. cit., p. 107; Yankovich, op. cit., p. 117.
zfi Vladimir Korostovetz, Seed and Harvest (Faber and Faber Limited, London, 1931), pp. 220-221;
Yankovich, op. cit., p. 117; Zernov and Trukhnin, op. cit., p. 108.
1' Steblin-Kamenskii, op. cit., pp. 621-622; Zernov and Trukhnin, op. cit., p. 110.
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At a time when there is considerable
opinion that CIA's tribulations of
recent years have eroded our security
consciousness, a Chinese report
on security regulations below may
be of interest-and even useful.
CHINESE SECURITY REGULATIONS
Report by NCNA
Peking, 20 May-The Military Commission of the CCP Central Committee
recently published the "Regulation on PLA Safeguarding of State and Military
Secrets"; it also issued a circular calling on all PLA units to take class struggle as the
key link, carry out in-depth education on military security according to the regulation
and in light of each unit's actual conditions, increase awareness of keeping military
secrets, and resolutely prevent secret information or documents from being leaked or
lost.
The regulation points out that the PLA shoulders the great responsibility of
defending the Motherland and safeguarding socialist revolution and construction.
Military building, national defense construction, and army operations and movements
are top secret. Safeguarding state and military secrets concerns the best interests of the
entire party, army, and people of the nation. It plays an important role in the struggle
against all class enemies-domestic and foreign-and is a guarantee for consolidating
the dictatorship of the proletariat and winning future wars against aggression. All PLA
personnel must unreservedly and wholeheartedly safeguard secrets.
The regulation requires all PLA personnel to follow these rules:
Never discuss military secrets you shouldn't discuss.
Never ask questions about secrets you shouldn't know.
Never read secret documents you shouldn't read.
Never mention a secret in personal correspondence.
5. Never record secret information in anything other than secret
information files.
6. Never discuss military secrets in places where such secrets should not
be discussed.
7. Never take secret documents to public places or to the homes of
relatives or friends.
8. Never discuss party, state, or military secrets in front of family
members, including your own children.
9. Never use public telephones, clear-language telegrams, or regular
post offices for handling secret information.
The regulation calls on personnel working in departments of top secret, security,
secret file, and key leading offices to follow strictly regulations that forbid removal of
secret documents from the working area, reading of secret documents by people who
have no need to know, use of one's position to peruse secret documents privately,
clandestine listening to secret information, copying of secret documents, duplication of
documents or telegrams without authorization, making friends indiscriminately or
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Chinese Security
establishing dubious connections, practice of bourgeois factionalism, and use of secret
documents to engage in illegal activities.
The regulation outlines the requirements for education in military security and
sets forth the security inspection system.
It points out that to safeguard secret information, it is necessary to begin with
ideological education in security. Party committees and political departments at all
levels must regard this education as an important part of a unit's political and
ideological education; educate units in order to enhance their revolutionary vigilance;
oppose anarchism and liberalism; consciously struggle against all bad practices and
habits that endanger the safeguarding of secrets; and guard against the use of secret
information for illegal and conspiratorial activities and against enemy attempts to steal
secrets.
The regulation also calls on leaders at all levels to set examples by following the
rules and systems for safeguarding secrets and to insist that their subordinate units
strictly implement these rules and systems. Each unit must conduct annual or
semiannual general security inspections and hold security inspections regularly prior
to major festivals and national holidays. Any cases of leaked or lost secret information
or documents must be promptly reported, seriously investigated, and strictly handled.
The regulation stresses that in carrying out security work it is necessary to reward
and punish impartially. Commendations or awards should be given to those who have
made marked achievements in consistently and strictly implementing security
systems, regulations, and rules, and safeguarding state and military secrets; those who
have invented new security techniques or equipment or have contributed to the study
arid improvement of security work; those who have resolutely safeguarded state and
military secrets by adhering to principles, no matter what the situation and
irrespective of threats or inducement; and those who have performed meritorious
deeds by daring to struggle, or by giving timely information on, or discovering acts of
stealing, looting, sabotaging, and selling state and military secrets. Disciplinary action
should be taken or criminal punishment meted out, according to the merits of the case,
against those who violated security discipline, neglected duties, and lost or divulged
important state and military secrets; those who failed to prohibit, struggle against, or
report instances of stolen secrets and lost or divulged secrets in more serious cases;
those who caused damage by leaking secrets because they thought only of their own
safety; and those who engaged in illegal activities by taking advantage of state and
military secrets in their possession. Those counterrevolutionaries and other bad
elements who have stolen, looted, sabotaged, and sold state and military secrets must
be punished in accordance with the law and sternly suppressed.
The regulation also provides that party committees throughout the army, at and
above the regimental level, should all establish their own security commissions which,
led by party committees and leading officers, should study the implementation of
principles, policies, instructions, and rules of the CCP Central Committee's Military
Commission and superior leading organs concerning security work; study security
work conditions in subordinate units and recommend necessary measures for
strengthening and improving this work; conduct and supervise security education and
inspection; study security conditions and report on security work to party committees,
leading officers, and superior security commissions; and organize and supervise
activities to investigate cases of stolen secrets and serious divulgence of secrets.
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INTELLIGENCE IN RECENT PUBLIC LITERATURE
PRACTISE TO DECEIVE. By David Mure. (William Kimber, London, 1977).
This is an intriguing and provocative book. If the author is to be believed-and,
despite any formal supporting evidence or endorsement, there is a ring of truth about
much of what he says-then he has provided us with a priceless view of the origins of
Allied deception operations in World War II. From his first-hand account as manager
of a middle-level field deception center, we have a seat at ringside on the critical
Middle East operations designed to convince the German High Command that a major
offensive was to be mounted against the Balkans through Greece. It is an accepted
historical fact that this supposed threat, which continued during 1943 and 1944,
succeeded first in diverting German attention from Sicily as the initial point of Allied
entry into southern Europe, and then in tying down large numbers of German troops
in southeastern Europe until the Normandy invasion was well-launched on the road to
success.
Truly, this well-written set of personal reminiscences has the appearance of being
a valuable complement to Anthony Cave Brown's Bodyguard of Lies,' that epic of
investigative journalistic enterprise, with the added advantage that we are dealing
here with on-the-scene descriptions of what actually happened in major deception
operations, as told by one of the key participants. Alas, where Cave Brown had his
failings in the form of excessive errors of detail, questionable interpretation of
interviews taken decades after the fact, and the assumption that official plans
represented actual accomplishments, David Mure is open to even more fundamental
attack as to credibility, albeit based mainly on circumstantial evidence.
Thus, Mure tells us that since 1944 he has had no access to any records other than
those available to the general public. Indeed, he cites some fifteen conventional
secondary references without keying them to the text. He relies on a self-
acknowledged "photographic memory" to reproduce the details of messages and
incidents from more than three decades in the past. Moreover, his own description of
himself, if intended to be disarming, is scarcely reassuring:
I was-and am-by nature a congenital liar and romancer-a veritable
Bulpington of Blup-so much so that, in writing these recollections, I have
the greatest difficulty in distinguishing between what we actually did and
what we would have liked to have done. This made me an eminently
suitable figurehead for a deception unit. Since the notional (i.e., imaginary)
world was just as real to me as the factual one, there was really very little
difficulty for me to put it over on our clients, since I half believed in it
myself ...
We are faced, then, with the necessity of taking on faith the statements of a devious
(by definition) individual of obvious intelligence, whose background is unknown to us,
beyond his assertion that, although not college-educated and lacking in any language
skills, he was the product of a "good school" and was seconded to intelligence duties as
a captain from a "good regiment." That he soon graduated from the somewhat
humdrum administrative and support duties of a junior intelligence officer in a field
army headquarters to the inner sanctum of deception operations must indicate a
recognition by someone in authority that he possessed special qualifications for the
task.
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Books
Certainly David Mure's easy-going, self-deprecating air of good humor, his
understanding of people, willingness to work hard when necessary, sense of purpose in
his job, and, above all, clear ability to calculate an enterprise's chances of success or
failure, all seem to have stood him in good stead during his two years of participation
in a program of deception that appears to have been singularly successful. As he
wandered into the deception game at the beginning of 1943, so he seems to have
wandered out of it at the end of 1.944, an unsung, anonymous major with no (apparent
at least) subsequent ties to the intelligence establishment.
Mr. Mure exhibits strong patriotic sentiments and a sense of discretion with
respect to both security and the privacy of his former associates. He has waited the
prescribed period of time before unburdening himself of his story and, save for his
personal idols in the enterprise, of whom more later, has used pseudonyms for most of
the participants. (A less charitable view of the author's reticence toward earlier
publication might suggest that he waited until there were enough versions of related
history available to permit him to flesh out his own rather limited portion of the story
into a publishable account. But this is mere speculation.)
It is remarkable that there have been so few reviews of this book, particularly by
the former British intelligence types who so ferociously attacked Cave Brown when he
issued Bodyguard of Lies. Their purported aim was to excoriate Brown for having
written an inaccurate book, but, in fact, one suspects they were more concerned with
punishing him verbally for "jumping the gun" in the revelation of since-declassified
state secrets. If the latter is true, Mure should be safe from their wrath. More likely,
the silence from the intelligence community derives from an unwillingness of former
members of the deception "establishment" in London to give recognition to any such
paean of praise for "A" Force in Cairo, which they regarded with tolerance as
something of an upstart organization lacking in high-grade agents but demonstrating
some competence in the technical aspects of deception.' In fact, one can probably
attribute some of David Mure's unrelenting public relations approach where "A"
Force is concerned to an attempt on his part, at long last, to "set the record straight."
All else aside, however, the book is entertaining and easy reading, somewhat
reminiscent of the writings of Compton Mackenzie concerning his secret service
experiences in the same part of the world during World War I. While quite unlikely to
impress a professional historian, the book tells a cracking good story that is
interspersed with many useful intelligence insights. With due allowance for the
author's judgments on certain controversial matters, this reviewer, at least, tends to
give it considerable credence, particularly as it concerns itself with those operational
activities and events in which the author himself participated.
Mr. Mure introduces us to British deception operations in the Middle East by
bringing us up to date on events which had transpired prior to his arrival on the scene
in mid-1942. He retells the story of the victory of General Wavell's "Desert Rats" over
the Italian army at Sidi Barrani, Egypt, at the end of 1940. In that encounter, a largely
untrained ragtag British force of initially less than 50,000 men stood off, and after the
arrival of modest reinforcements, managed to put to flight and capture large portions
of a well-equipped army of more than 200,000. The difference was provided by
deception: the use of great quantities of dummy equipment to represent non-existent
British forces, and the use of false intelligence reports from controlled German agents
to convince the Italian commander that British reinforcements were close at hand long
before they actually arrived on the scene.
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o s
The hero of this engagement, which many regard as critical for the later success
of the Allies, was one Brigadier Dudley Wrangel Clarke, General Wavell's deception
specialist and, in civilian life, a wealthy London solicitor. It is the author's contention
that this individual was the guiding genius of all deception operations against Western
Europe and in the Mediterranean area, despite his continued association throughout
the war with "A" Force, nominally the deception element for eastern Mediterranean
operations. Thus, the author is convinced that Wavell, and not Churchill, was the
originator of strategic deception in World War II, and that the former's handpicked
assistant, Brigadier Clarke, operating under the cover name of Major Galveston, was
its most skilled practitioner. In support of this view, Mure points out that Galveston
was the highest ranking member of the deception community and that when General
Eisenhower required a chief of deception for his SHAEF Headquarters, he was given
Colonel Noel Wyld, Brigadier Clarke's deputy at "A" Force, and the individual
largely responsible for the planning of Montgomery's successful deception of Rommel
at El Alamein.
We are led to believe that Middle East deception was built on the foundation of a
walk-in agent, the chief German spy sent to Cairo in July of 1940 with instructions to
set up a spy network. On this base, the British built up and operated until late in 1944
a large deception operation throughout the Middle East involving some 50 captive or
notional agents reporting back through a few trusted operatives controlled by British
intelligence to the Abwehr stations in Athens, Sofia and Istanbul. A sub-element of the
Ultra code-breaking operation, known as Triangle, provided access to local Abwehr
radio communications traffic, as did Ultra itself to German strategic communications
in Western Europe. This permitted deception teams operating out of several centers in
the Middle East to monitor the effects of their spurious messages and to guide their
future plans and actions accordingly. As in Western Europe, where the Twenty (or
Double Cross) Committee supervised the employment of controlled enemy agents, so
in the Middle East, the Thirty Committee, located in Cairo, with its sub-elements,
Thirty-one Committee in Beirut, Thirty-two Committee in Bagdhad, Thirty-three
Committee in Cyprus, and Thirty-four Committee in Teheran, performed a like
function. Eventually, Mure ran Thirty-two Committee and supervised the relatively
inactive Thirty-four Committee.
A factor of great importance to the ultimate success of deception operations in the
Middle East was the overrunning of Rommel's communications intelligence center in
July of 1942. From this, it was learned that much of Rommel's previous success had
been due to effective communications intercept and to lax British communications
discipline. It also led to the uncovering of another major German field agent in Cairo,
known as Kondor.
This knowledge was employed to plant false information on the Germans as to
the timing of the British attack at El Alamein. Rommel was so thoroughly deceived
that he was actually visiting Germany when the attack began. Thus, the British were
aware of the German distribution of forces through Ultra intercepts and the Germans
were fooled as to both the time of attack and the strength and dispositions of British
forces through the use of communications deception and dummy equipment. The
latter were provided by the second of Mure's heroes, Major Jasper Maskelyne, the
British magician, whose inflatable tanks, guns, trucks, and boats had been an integral
part of "A" Force's deception operations since the time of Sidi Barrani. It would
appear, then, that General Montgomery's reputation as a field commander owes a
considerable debt to the men of "A" Force.
Actually, the author did not officially enter the deception game until near the
end of 1942, after many of the important North African operations had already taken
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Books
place. Moreover, the strategic importance of his area had declined after the German
defeat at Stalingrad in November of 1942. It became his task to be concerned with
deceptions which were related to the invasion of Sicily and, later, the invasion of
Western Europe. He had the job of trying to put across such concepts as the idea that
Turkey was preparing to abandon its neutrality and enter the war on the side of the
Allies, and trying to make very nominal Allied forces stationed in Iraq and elsewhere
in the Middle East look like part of a buildup in support of a large-scale attack on the
Balkans. The ultimate objective of all this, of course, was to pin down a couple of
dozen German divisions in southeastern Europe and thereby deny their availability to
the defense of Sicily, Italy or Western Europe. In this, his efforts were apparently a
complete success until well after the landings in Normandy. The core of the deception
in his part of the Middle East was a largely mythical 10th Indian Army which was
perennially being "requested" by Southeast Asian Theater, where Peter Fleming was
the cooperating chief of deception operations, and being "reassigned" to the group of
forces threatening Greece and the Balkans. Much of the book deals with the ebb and
flow of deception messages related to this subject.
While the author says he only met "Galveston" three times during the two years
that he served under his tutelage, he describes that gentleman as "certainly the most
unusual Intelligence officer of his time, very likely of all time. His mind worked quite
differently from anyone else's and far quicker; he looked out on the world through the
eyes of his opponents." Mure sums up Galveston's record, as follows:
Sidi Barrani: An army of 50,000 men and 60 tanks exagger-
ated to two armies of 250,000 and 400 tanks won
a virtually bloodless victory over an army of just
this size.
Alain Halfa: The enemy was hypnotized into attacking our
strongest point-our first victory in the desert
since 1940.
El Alamein: Rommel was so misled as to date of battle that he
was away in Europe; 1,000 tanks, 1,200 guns and
2,000 vehicles were concealed on a flat surface,
and the Germans were completely misled as to
the place of attack.
Sicily: Total and really absurd success. Rommel arrived
in Athens to take command of anti-invasion
armies on the day we landed in Sicily.
Anzio: We attained complete surprise and no Germans
showed up on the beaches for 49 hours. (It is a
pity that the American General Lucas was so
taken by surprise himself that he sat down and
waited for a counter-attack for 48 hours.)'
l)-Day: We did it again in the Balkans. The total of 19
first-line two L.O.C. (presumably Line of
Communication) German divisions identified
there in September 1943, were increased by D-
Day to 25 first-line divisions, three of them
armored and two motorized, opposed by a
' Anthony Cave Brown, op. cit., p. 420, notes that Lucas was merely acting in accordance with orders
given to him by General Mark Clark.
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factual five brigades scattered between Teheran
and Benghazi. Galveston's Deputy took over
deception in London, and the German 15th
Army remained with 17 divisions in the Pas de
Calais area until after the breakout.
Surely, no one could ask for a more faithful and devoted press agent. Moreover,
Mure goes on to point out the lack of success in the battles at which Galveston was not
invited or able to assist: Wavell's August offensive in 1941; Auchinleck's Crusader
operation; Auchinleck's Gazala battle; Salerno; the Aegean Islands in 1943; the
"slogging matches" in Italy; and the post-August 1944 operations in France. He makes
a good case.
"Without," he says, "wanting in any way to belittle the work of the LCS,' who,
from all accounts, performed a most difficult and essential task of coordinating
worldwide deception operations with enormous skill and tact, credit for the successful
implementation of the plans decided upon, especially in the Mediterranean area, must
belong principally to Galveston ... He was incomparably the most effective as well as
the most senior executant in strategic deception."
Mure points out that Galveston insisted on strict adherence to his rules (see below)
for the use of double agents in support of "A" Force operations, and is of the opinion
that whenever elsewhere any of these rules was departed from the results were
regrettable. In general, Mure feels that Galveston's plans succeeded because they were
what both the Nazis and the Schwarze Kapelle5 for their different reasons expected
and hoped for-this was in accordance with his last and most vital rule of the
following set:
1. The contacts of an agent used for passing deception information
should be entirely notional, as should be his own espionage activities.
2. Following from the above, a deception agent must not be allowed
access to the outer world, no matter what his own allegiances.
3. No deception link should ever be used for any intelligence purpose
other than deception. Should it become so involved for reasons beyond our
control, then it should cease to be used for deception.
4. No deception material should on any account be passed through a
double agent to anyone known to be in the service of any neutral or Allied
country other than the Americans.
5. All cover plans should follow, not dictate, the real plan. Any attempt
to fit reality to the deception is doomed to failure.
6. All cover plans should be based on what the enemy himself not only
believes but hopes for.
Galveston, we are told, had another cardinal principle. Whereas Winston
Churchill is quoted as having said at Teheran that in wartime "truth is so precious that
she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies," Galveston's principle was the
opposite. His thesis was that the lie-the cover plan-was so precious that it should be
flanked with an escort of truths. Truths should make up at least 90% of the
information fed to the enemy, even if these "truths" stemmed from Galveston's
'London Controlling Section.
' Literally, Black Choir, the designation given by Reinhard Heydrich, chief of German security
services, to the "Generals' Plot" against Hitler.
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Books
dummy fleets and tanks, or his false divisional signs painted conspicuously in places
where Allied troops were practically non-existent. The point was that 90% or so of the
material in agents' reports was confirmable by the Germans from other sources of
information. By changing the emphasis with "masterly skill," however, what were
mostly confirmable truths added up to a picture so "lethally false" as to make possible
the enemy's defeat, "irrespective of the merits or otherwise of the operational plan to
be covered."
Aside from ascribing the lion's share of the credit for Allied deception policy to
his idol Galveston of "A" Force in Cairo, Mure makes the following major
controversial judgments and assertions:
1. Although not directly involved with the Cicero operation in Istanbul,
as a result of oblique remarks made by Galveston and other circumstantial
evidence, Mure was led to believe that if Cicero was not under British
control from the outset, he became so immediately thereafter through the
medium of the Triangle intercepts of Abwehr messages from Istanbul. He
believes that Galveston used Cicero to feed the Germans important
deception material concerning the invasion of Western Europe. Mure's
reasoning involves the "common-sense" judgment that Cicero as a German
agent was simply "too good to be true," given British security regulations
and procedures. This is consistent with Cave Brown's quotation of Sir
Stewart Menzies, head of MI-6, to the effect that Cicero was indeed under
British control.' However, other Cave Brown material and David Kahn's
recent book' point strongly to the possibility that the identity of Cicero was
not discovered until near the end of his six-month period of activity. While
communications intercept is thought to have played a role, the reason for its
failure to uncover Cicero earlier could well have been the fact that the stolen
documents were forwarded in the form of film in the diplomatic pouch or as
telegraphed excerpts.
2. Mure's main point of controversy concerns his belief that Admiral
Canaris, head of the Abwehr, must have been consciously aiding the British
by turning a blind eye to evidences of deception and the activities of double
agents. Thus, in Mure's estimation, far too many minor errors occurred in
the deception operations which were simply ignored by the other side. He
cites the fact that not a single double agent was blown in the Mediterranean
or in Western Europe as simply inconceivable to him. The fact that this
situation continued even after the Sicherheitsdienst took over from the
Abwehr late in 1943 would seem to argue against his view of Canaris. He
explains this away, however, by noting that by then no agent handler, or
even Schellenberg himself, would have been willing to risk embarrassment
and a possible one-way trip to the Russian front by pointing out that one or
more of his agents had been doubled, let alone whole networks. Neither
Cave Brown nor Kahn 8 shares Mure's view of Canaris, nor does this
reviewer.
3. Mure's treatment of the Bonner Fellers case is consistent with Cave
Brown's version. That is, Col. Fellers, as the U.S. Military Attache in Cairo,
had his almost daily coded transmissions to the United States on the progress
' Anthony Gave Brown, op. cit., p. 404.
' David Kahn, Hitler's Spies (Macmillan, New York, 1978).
' David Kahn, op. cit. In his encyclopedic treatment of German military intelligence in World War II,
Kahn comments frequently on the surprising tendency of German military and political leaders to gross self-
deception in matters relating to intelligence.
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of the war, between September of 1941 and August of 1942, read by
Rommel's wireless intercept service. Thereafter, a portion of his transmis-
sions were continued in the old code in support of the British deception
operation for El Alamein, which did not take place until November of 1942.
Kahn verifies the first part of the Fellers story, but makes no mention of a
subsequent deception effort.
In the last analysis, we are entitled to ask again, just who is David Mure? He
comes to us with self-generated credentials and without apparent sponsor. (He even
misspells the first name of the wartime head of MI-6.) We know nothing of his
background prior to his short stint in intelligence in World War II, nor do we know
anything of him since. For all we know, he may be the figment of someone's
imagination, invented to put across a good story. Taken together with Bodyguard of
Lies, Practise to Deceive can only serve further to whet our appetites for the official
history of World War II deception, which is reportedly in preparation by one of the
main practitioners of that art.
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