THE SUBSTANCE AND THE RULES

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CIA-RDP85M00364R002204280035-9
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December 20, 2016
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January 31, 2008
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35
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June 1, 1983
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? Approved For Release 2008/01/31: CIA-RDP85M00364R002204280035-9 'At?TI E APPEARED OF FADE ' SU' 1983 Angel: Cedevilic is a professional staff member with the Striate intelligence Commiree. Previously, he was o foreign seniee olicer and a fellow at the Hoover lnstiauion, Stanford Univeuin?. Dr. Codn?illa has wrinen widely on European politics and in the field of intelligence and military policy. RM j4rxgeIo Codevifla By focusing so exclusively on rules and standards of operations, the intelligence debate of the mid-1970s did not answer the fundamental question of what the United States expects of its intelligence services or what they are to accomplish in order to meet the challenges of the 1980s. The Substance and the Rules Since the Carly 1970s, this country's intel- ligence agencies have been asking, "What does the country expect of us?" That ques. on had not arisen in the postwar period be- cause the American political system had left the agencies to the total discretion of those appointed to lead them. In the early 197Us, factional conflict among those leaders spilled over into a national debate about what America's practitioners of intelligence ought to have foremost in, mind. That debate con- tinues. Recently, Admiral Stansfield Turner, President Ca ter's Director of Central Intelli- gence, and his former special assistant, George Thibault, published an anempt both to answer that question and to indict the Rea- gan administration's handling of intelli- gence. The author's answer seems to be that WASEr cToN QUARTERLY the American people expect their intelligence agencies to be as innocuous as possible. T ey charge that the Reagan administration is undermining the agencies by loosening too many restrictions. The authors thus contend that for our civil liberties' sake, and for tlr, sake of the agencies' own standing in the country, the agencies ought to concentrate on formulating for themselves the right kinds of rules and restrictions. However? Dne would not suspect from Turner and Th;bault's arti- clesthat the rules by which intelligence offi- cers live ought to flow from the intelligence profession's substantive requirements. Nevertheless, in intelligence as in other areas of government, the American people rightly want their employees to accomplish the functions for which they are paid. This author will argue that Stansfield Turner is CON'1"IM~~' Approved For Release 2008/01/31 : CIA-RDP85M00364R002204280035-9 Approved For Release 2008/01/31: CIA-RDP85M00364R002204280035-9 wrong to assume that the key factor affecting the quality of intelligence is the quantity of intrusion into the lives of innocent people, that better intelligence -neans less civil lib. erty, and vice versa. This article will then address the real tasks which American intel- li gence must accomplish in peace and war, and the difficulties it now faces in doing so. A revolution took place in American in- telligence during the mid-1970s. That revo- lution was thorough: by the end of the Carter administration, only a minuscule percentage of the CIA's supergrade officials had held such rank in 1975. Those who became prominent in American intelligence during that period were generally not known either for achievement or technical insight in the special fields they took over. Some, e.g., the teen who took over the counterintelligence staff at CIA, were known as non-believers in the very activity for which they became responsible. These men, however, were well ammed to the priorities of the administration they would serve, and to those of the factions which had recently won out in the intelli- gcnc a community's long, intramural strug: gles: to lower America's profile abroad; to reduce the importance of clandestine ac- tivities at home and abroad; to assert the CIA's claim to primacy among providers of analytical products. They were also intent on making sure that the recent revolution in the field of intelligence would not be reversed. As a result of all this, the leading men of President Carter's intelligence community, led by Admirals Stansfield Turner and Bobby Ray Inman, argued with great M. sonal vigor for the enactment of legislative charre.rs for the intelligence co=unity. These charters would have codified and ap. proved in law, the changes in orientation which had occurred in the mid-1970s. Of course the proposed charters' chief feature was an absorbing concentration on rules and restrictions. It is essential to understand whence came this concentration on rules. The debate of the mid-1970s had concen- trated so exclusively on rules and restrictions because it had begun with public accusations that some intelligence officers had transgres. sed the bounds of propriety and legality. These accusations against the CIA's di- rectorate of operations in general and par- ticularly against counterintelligence special- ists in the CIA and the FBI had come from other intelligence officers. There had always been controversies among intelligence officers about what American intelligence should and should not be. The best outline of the views held by the CIA officials who had long fouk?bt to reduce the role of the clandestine services and of counterintelligence is an article, "Ethics and Intelligence" by E. Drexel Godfrey? in the January 1978 Foreign Affairs. William Colby's memoirs, as well as the published writings of lesser officials, e.g., Herbert Scoville, plus the reporting of books Ice Edward Epstein's Legend and Henry Hurt's Shadrin, flesh out that outline with examples of *how profoundly this intramural attack af- fected the daily workings of the intelligence system. - In sum, clandestine and eountezintelIi- gence activities were charged with being immoral and developing in theirpaactitioners devious thoughts and ways which would prove dangerous to' American civil liberties. The allegations claimed that these activities present the rest of the world with an unfavor- able picture of the United States and that they turn the intelligence community's thoughts and energies toward combat with the Soviets rather than toward accurate assessments of reality. Beginning in 1974, some intelligence officers who had been mmHg such charges gave to their allies in Congress and the press items of information embarrassing to some of the leading men in the directorate of oper- ations and in the counterintelligence ser- vices. In 1975-1976 the select committees on intelligence led by Senator Church and Rep- resentative Pike laid out these embarrassing items, along with a coherent critique of American intelligence. Understandably, the intelligence officers whose critiques of their bureaucratic adversaries were now being es- poused by congressional committees were hardly reluctant witnesses. Director Colby, Approved For Release 2008/01/31: CIA-RDP85M00364R002204280035-9 Approved For Release 2008/01/31: CIA-RDP85M00364R002204280035-9 for example, did not have to wave the fam. ous poison dart gun in the air before the cameras. When he did, the stock of some at the CIA fell, and the stock of others rose. As late as 1978, a senior CIA official, John Hart, spoke on the CIA's behalf to the House Select Comminee regarding the investigation of President Kennedy's assassination and, despite the committee's efforts to stop him, delivered a passionate indictment of a former colleague, once head of the Soviet division of the directorate of operations, for allegedly violating the rights of a Soviet defector whose bona fides was in doubt. In sum, a long-festering intramural bathe was decided when one side went outside the walls and linked up with superior political forces which, for their own reasons, were willing to help. The Church and Pike Committees had been organized as a result of years of effort by the American Civil Liberties Union and likeminded groups, e.g., the institute for Policy Studies. These organizations sup- ported able individuals like William Miller and Morton Halperin. These efforts were based on the contention that intelligence in. vestigations are inherently dangerous to civil liberties. Thus, these efforts were aimed at restricting the scope of such investigations. The proximate goal was to force the agencies henceforth to apply the standards of criminal law to intelligence investigations. These in- dividuals' work on intelligence was part of their broader campaigns for a re-direction of U.S. foreign policy toward reduced Ameri- can self-assertions, greater friendliness with revolutionary forces in the Third World, and reduce d hostility vis-i-vis the Soviet Union. The reaction of many intelligence officers, active and retired, against the Church and Pike Committees was to uphold the intelli- gence profession's good name against what they perceived as the fa- left's almost unpat- riotic attacks. They proceeded by arguing that American society must be willing to bear the burden of the agencies' intrusive exis- tence if it is to live in a dangerous world. They therefore continued to work in public and in private against every restrictive rule that was proposed. In their single-minded effort to stand up for the notion that the in- telligence agencies' role ought not to be re. duced, they put themselves in the tmenviable position of seeming to argue for the right of U.S. intelligence agencies to invade the pri- vacy of innocent Americans. The American Civil Liberties Union, Morton Halperin's Center for National Security Studies? and the Institute for Policy Studies understandably did not protest having the intelligence offi. cers' view of the world id'ernified with breaches of Americans' civil Liberties. Nor did they protest having their own preferences for American foreign policy identified with the protection of individuals' rights by impli. cation. The debate of the mid- 1970s did not touch on the quality of American intelligence, on what ought to be accomplished in each of the intelligence community's functional arras, and on precisely how well each of these areas was functioning. The anti-intelligence lobby's fundamental message was that the United States was suffering from an excess of intelligence capability, that we had mote intelligence than we needed. The agencies' defenders did not challenge the impr=sion that though the American intelligence pro- fession might have Transgressed here and there, at least it had been doing its job. So, each for their own reasons, all side of the debate agreed on the most important conclu. sions: by and large the quality of intelligence had been either acceptable or more than ac- ceptable; that the quality of intelligence de. pends on the degree of intrusion into inno- cent lives; that the only questions about in. telligence worth discussing concern what rules and restrictions shall be imposed on the agencies; and that the essential is what bal. ance should be struck between good iintelfi. gence and civil liberties. Hence, the debate which fu-st Vim. panied the Church Committee's proposed charters for intelligence was over minutiae. The public position of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIC-) was that there should be no charters and that the intelligence agencies should be allowed to do 3, Approved For Release 2008/01/31: CIA-RDP85M00364R002204280035-9 Approved For Release 2008/01/31: CIA-RDP85M00364R002204280035-9 what they thought is necessary to accomplish their job. But the written critique of the charters which AF]O submitted to the Senate consisted exclusively of minute changes in the details of the proposed rules. By not ex- pounding a full-fledged, intellectually ap. pealing contrast to the set of arguments which underlay the charters, and by disput. ing the details of individual restrictions, AFIO and its supporters confirmed those ar- guments' legitimacy, and accepted the bulk of those restrictions. Moreover, by basing their arguments on the politically unappeal- ing notions that good intelligence means in- trusion into the lives of innocent people, and that the extent of that intrusion into civil lib- erties is strictly the concern of the intelli- gence agencies, they virtually guaranteed their opponents' popularity. fact, it had undertaken. In short, the es- timators had missed a hu?e, ominous devel- opment unfolding before their very eyes. In the fall of 1978 the country learned that, even as the shah of Iran was being toppled from his throne by a movement openly or- ganized in Paris, Washington, Beirut, Teh- ran, as well as in Baku, U.S.S.R., the CIA was estimating that Iran was not in. a revolu- tionary or even in a prerevolutionary situa- tion and that the shah would be an important part of Iranian politics into the foreseeable future. That year, the public also learned about a nasty quarrel within the CIA over the trustworthiness of a Soviet defector, Yuri Nosenko, who had come to the United States to assure the CIA that the Soviet Union had had no involvement with President Ken- "The prevalent attitude in American counterintelligence today seems to be to sit and wait for indications and then check them out." By 1978, however, events had led a wholly different set of people to shift the ground of the debate and to point out that, in intelligence as in anything else, the priority of rules over substance makes no sense. Here is a sample of those events. In 1977 the country first learned that the Soviet Union's buildup of strategic weapons was rapidly achieving its objective: to pro- vide the Soviet Union with the equipment to survive, fight, and win a nuclear war. It also learned that this equipment would be largely in place by about 1980, that the Soviets had been pursuing this capability since at least the mid-1960s, and that the United States' intelligence agencies had had enough data to sound the warning. Instead, however, the National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) had been telling policymakers that the Soviet Union would not undertake efforts that, in nedy's assassin. According to public ac- counts, even though everyone agreed there. was undeniable proof that key elements of Nosenko's story were lies, he had been offi- cially believed for administrative reasons. Moreover, those intelligence officers who had resisted believing him had been de- moted. Then the public learned frotu Reader's Digest that the FBI and the CIA had had a curious reversal on another key agent, code named Fedora, who had corroborated Nosenko's Lies. First the CIA had officially deemed Fedora bad and the FBI deemed him good. Then, after a changing of the guard at the CIA, Fedora was deemed good? while at the FB4 he had become bad. This hardly had the hallmark of competence. The public also learned that the CIA had asked an American citizen, Nicholas Shadrin, to play a danger- ous double agent's game with the Soviet Approved For Release 2008/01/31: CIA-RDP85M00364R002204280035-9 Approved For Release 2008/01/31: CIA-RDP85M00364R002204280035-9 KGB, and that Shadrin had vanished without a trace while meeting the Soviets under sup. poscdlvv competent CIA control. Finally, as struggles for power in Africa, Asia, and even in nearby Nicaragua resulted in victory after victory for the Soviet Union, Americans began to ask, "Where is the CIA?" They learned that the CIA had never even suggested plans for thwarting these So. viet drives. Thus from 1977 to 1980, as Senators con. sidered passing the proposed restrictive charters, the arguments of both proponents and opponents began to sound hollow. Clearly, none of the shortcomings of Ameri. can intelligence of which the nation was painfully learning was rooted either in too much or too little intrusion. Hence, though the debate about proper safeguards against intrusion remains interesting, since the late 1970s, there has been no excuse for confus. ing that debate with discussions of what the country needs by way of intelligence. But what are those needs? What is the job to be done in the 1980s and in what areas should the professionals' habits be changed in order to ensue that the job is done? in what ways would the charters' proposed rules, or any other possible set of rules, affect the ability and motivation of intelligence operatives to do their jobs? What happens when one tries to remove chance and risk from an inherently risk., profession? No one familiar with U.S. intelligence suggests that the United States receives any thing like the kind of intelligence it needs. The public record of the few human sources the United States has enjoyed in the com- munist world strongly suggests that we do not recruit agents, so much as accept and use those who approach us. This should hardly be surprising given that the United States does . not have a really clandestine service. Al] but a handful of our clandestine officers are under rather thin official cover, that is, they are known to be employees of the U.S. government. A high percentage do not speak the language of the country they work- in. They can hardly approach someone who is required to repon his contacts with Ameri- cans and unobtrusively suborn treason or conduct false flag recruitment. Since our agents live as official representatives of the United States, it is not surprising that most of, their reports read like diplomatic dispatches. Of course, nothing prevents the United States from acquiring the service of people who can credibly pass themzselvts off as something other than Americans. But many professionals oppose this, claiming that sut:h people would be unwieldy for the prim m personnel and promotion system to handle. Thus the professionals at the CIA resisted William Casey's early efforts to change the character of the clandestine service. The op- position to the nomination of Max Hugel to the post of director of operations was due to this. Nevertheless, Casey's early efforts were on the right track. No one familiar with the subject dour the sophistication of our means of technical collection. Yet no one would conarnd that these means were conceived as an intexre_ Wed system to collect a set of data. Each of the present systems. is a technical extrapola_ tion of previous systems, and exists in ntmm- bers dictated more by the budget than by any notion of operational need. The process by which these systems have been acquired has been irrational. We have not decided what information is required and then allocated re- sources among technologies, but the oppo. site-with one significant exception, arms control. For fifteen years, much of the im- petus for buying technical intelligence de- vices has come from those who wished to monitor certain kinds of arms-control treaties with the Soviet Union. As a result, ourcurreat technical architecture is fit only for operation in peacetime and is focused to a large extent on the rather narrow parameters of past arms-control agreements. Of course, this could be changed. But that would require im- posing upon the several agencies some sort of strategic vision and a consequent coherent set of requirements. Approved For Release 2008/01/31: CIA-RDP85M00364R002204280035-9 Approved For Release 2008/01/31: CIA-RDP85M00364R002204280035-9 Collection without good operational secu- rity can be worse than' useless because it can provide channels for disinformation by hos- tile intelligence services. Today there is no reason to be complacent about the opera- tional security of American intelligence. Although nowadays the bulk of collection is through technical means, technical opera. tional security is barely in the conceptual stage. Indeed, some professionals are unwil- ling to conceive that technical means routinely might be subjected to the same kinds of checks for reliability that human agents must undergo before the information they generate is accepted. This is not to suggest that the operational security of our human collection system is sound- Traditionally, challenging and testing the aedibiliry of human sources has been the least popular and least career-enhancing job in the clandestine service, because whoever does it must question the. good judgment of higher-ranking people. In the late 1960s and early 1970s internal criticism of the CIA's cotmterintelligence staff mounted, because that staff had questioned the bona fides of too many agents, and had become bureeaucrat. icaIly too powerful to suit the strong geog- raphic divisions of the directorate of opera. tions. Beginning in 1975, the staff was dis- mantled and replaced with non-specialists from the geographic divisions who are tem- porarily assigned to counterintelligence. Thus, those responsible for catching the col- lectors' embarrassing mistakes are them- selves responsible to those very collectors for their careers. Clearly, operational security is a tltankless job which, if it is to be done well, must be done by people who are not totally dependent on those whose work they check. The division of responsibility in counter- intelligence between the FBI and the CIA is understood perhaps least of all by the two agencies themselves. Of course, each knows perfectly what it thinks it should do, and even better what the other ought not to at- tempt in its field! Both cooperate more or less satisfactorily in pursuit of known cases. But neither has the responsibility, the data, or the inclination to conceive of the overall problem of counterintelligence:. Conse- quently, not knowing the whole, their con- ception of their own parts is necessarily a hit-or-miss proposition. This is true for indi- vidual cases, but is quite undeniable as re- gards the comprehensive counterintelligence picture. Anyone who knows counttrint lli- gence realizes that gaining awareness that a case might exist is the hardest part of any case. The prevalent attitude in American counterintelligence today serzas to be to sit and wait for indications and then check them out. Awareness of possible cases sometimes comes through allegations or because the in- dividual sees before him the disastrous ef- fects of enemy intelligence- At present, that is how most of our cases begin. But there is a preferable way, countering analysis. Yet, counterintelligence analysis of serionk, - sophisticated or known intc:ULecnee threats is not possible on the basis of data as limited as the CIA and FBI separately possess. Surely we can expect a serious move by a hostile intelligence service to encompass elements both foreign and American, both human and technical. Yet the FBI does not routinely examine the take from the CIA and the Na- tional Security Agency for its countcrintelli- Bence implications, and vice versa. Without analysis of all intelligence data from a coun- terintelligence perspective, no agency can hope to do anything but stumble onto cases. The overall picture built up by this sort of fragmented, reactive counterintelligence is also quite unsatisfactory. One is limited to listing cases. But one cannot begin to esti- mate the scope of a problem-say the trans- fer of technology or the potential for agent- of-influence operations in Sector X until one takes the problem itself as a point of de- parture, and brings to bear upon it all the available data. In the case of technology transfer, we are just beginning to learn how dearly the United States has had to pay for a counterintelligence system whose structure precluded asking substantive questions and kept data in tight bureaucratic compartments. If the press is to be believed, President Approved For Release 2008/01/31: CIA-RDP85M00364R002204280035-9 Approved For Release 2008/01/31: CIA-RDP85M00364R002204280035-9 Reagan and his National Security Council have noticed these shortcomings in the an- alysis of counterintelligence. It remains to be seen whether they will have the moral and intellectual wherewithal to translate their in- tuition and their legal authority into changed behavior on the part of a recalcitrant bureau. cracy. There is no denying the low quality of all too many NIRs, nor the serious effects which some of these have had upon the nation's se- curity. The axle fact that, in the late 197&s, the public and the president, who had been reassured for fifteen years that the Soviets were not even trying to gain strategic superiority, woke up to find that the Soviets had in fact achieved it is a sufficient indict- ment of the NIEs. The American people pay billions for an intelligence community to avoid precisely this kind of surprise. More galling is the knowledge that the data for a correct assessment was not lacking and that in fact quite a few analysts in the Pentagon had pretty well figured out the nature and size of the forces the Soviets were building. But the process by which the NIEs are writ- ten smothered the correct analyses with the incorrect ones. The president and other re- sponsible officials did not have the chance to exercise their responsible judgment on the evidence. They had no idea that a view other than, the official one existed, much less a chance to decide which was correct. How does one to about improving an- alysis? Better analysts would do a better job. That is not just a truism. All too often analysts in our intelligence agencies are promoted not for being good interpreters of the real world but rather for being good sol- diers in the intelligence community's in- tramural battles. If they stoutly uphold the office view, they are often preferred to those who prefer reality. It is often better to be wrong for bureaucratically acceptable rea- sons than to be right about the facts and gal- ling to one's superiors. Strict accountability and quality control would help. But who is to control the controllers? After all, the office view of things comes from precisely those longtime officials responsible for qualify control. The insertion at high levels of numerous outsiders who are not eongeaial to the senior analysts would really help. But unless these outsiders were exceptionally honest, new office views would start forming around them. There is another way of keeping analysts honest, and of ensuring that those responsi. ble people who read intelligeisce estimatcs get to exercise their responsibility; allow both the CIA and the DIA to produce esti- mates on important subjects, each using all sources but neither coordinating with one another. The products would contain less of the bureaucratic prose which long cor- dinating sessions substitute for data- They would also be more closely argued than is now the case; they would have to be, becann they would be wTinen with the sure kx owl- edge that they would have to confront coun- terarguments. Unfortunately, that is rmenow the case. Finally, they would be complied not to try to fill with the putty of judgm,entS the gaping holes we have in our knowiiedge_ The words competitive analysis have been widely accepted. But, in the view of pio?es- sionals at the CIA; competitive analysis neatly describes the system by which Its have been produced for the past quart= c=_ tury. Again, it remains to be seen -whether the Reagan administration, having publicly accepted the concept will prove to have enough understanding of it and coat to it to make it happen. COVERT ACTION The Church Committee, echoing many professionals, characterized covert action- that is, secret activities to influence the out- come of foreign situations-as exceptio means to be undertaken when all othc s had failed or no others could be employe- The Church -Comminee maintained that the United States had resorted to covcat~ action too often. The debate within the government has been . between those who rant more Approved For Release 2008/01/31: CIA-RDP85M00364R002204280035-9 Approved For Release 2008/01/31: CIA-RDP85M00364R002204280035-9 C. coven actions and those who want fewer. I believe that history shows both sides have missed the point. The point is to achieve the ends of foreign policy. Is ally X in trouble in Country A, and has the president decided that the aim of U.S. policy is to save his office? Is move- ment Y in Country Z so menacing that the president has made it U.S. policy to reduce its influence? Affirmative answers to such questions imply nothing about the means to be employed except one thing: when all is said and done, ally X should be in office and movement Y should no longer be in a posi- tion to do harm. These objectives could be achieved by various combinations of means, overt and covert. The particular combination matters much less than the result. Today all too many people tend to ask about any given situation, "Is there anything that the CIA could do here?" In many cases, there is or could be. Nonetheless, that is the wrong question. Coven actions decided upon in answer to that question may be well-in- tensioned, but they will not be part of a co-,' herent, success-oriented plan. Rather, one should ask, "What combination of actions by various agencies can actually bring about the desired objective?" If that overall plan calls for secret acts, then there is a place for them, if not, there is not. Today, covert ac- tion is touted as one more thing going for us, or something else to push the situation in the right direction. Such categorizations are not helpful. In the international area, there are no rewards for good intentions or for pushing in the right direction or for sending signals. Policy fails if it does not succeed. The press has recently carried allegations that the United States has a covert action going against Nicaragua. The New York Times quoted a U.S. official as admitting it but jus- tifying it on the ground that it was not suffi. ciently large to topple the Nicaraguan re- gime. That official's understanding of pol- icy, if the Times reported it correctly. is pu- erile. To conduct militar ' or paramilitary op- erations against a regime by any means, oven or covert, without a plan for toppling it is against one of the most elementary norms of politics: never do your enemy a small hurt. The problem of covert action is funda- mentally that of the conception and execu- tion of foreign policy. It is impossible either to rationally discuss or to successfully use any tool of foreign policy unless the ends of policy are spelled out specifically and a seri- ous commitment is made to achieving them. Clearly, the question of what the United States expects of its intelligence services has not been answered with intellectual authority by those who have had the political authority to do so. We have made the case here that in order for the United States to meet the chal- lenges of the 1980s, American intelligence is going to have to perform quite differently from - the, way it has been performing. Bureaucracies being what they are, change is unlikely to take place-without some powerful external stimulus-such as an act of Con- gress. The intelligence agencies urgently need clear statements of what they are to ac- complish. The executive orders and ;Presi- dent Carter's proposed charters consisted of authorizations for investigations under highly specific circumstances. They did not begin to tell the agencies what kind of infor- mation they were to collect, what kinds of analysis they were to provide, what sort of security against hostile intelligence services and terrorists they were to ensure, and what son of influence they should be prepared to exercise abroad. Perhaps a legislative state- ment of these missions could begin to answer the question, "What does the U.S. expect of its intelligence services?" TWO Approved For Release 2008/01/31: CIA-RDP85M00364R002204280035-9