Inside the CIA (10 page)

The KGB also does its homework better.

“Americans,” the former officer said, “will go to a cocktail party and start something. The Soviets will say, ‘That guy is of interest, find out everything you can, and approach him.’ They go about it differently. They do their homework before meeting him. When they decide to go after him, they know he’s of interest.

“I think by nature, we are more impatient than other people,” the former officer said. “The recruitment process, if done classically and well, should take a long time. If it’s done in three sessions, he may not be worth a lot and he’s probably
not yours anyway. It should take a long time for assessment and vetting.”

On the other hand, the CIA has the natural advantage of representing America. KGB officers are far more likely to want to work for the U.S. than the other way around. In the area of human spying, both the CIA and KGB have scored tremendous coups against each other.

“A lot of people recruit themselves,” a former officer said. “A lot of people walk in.”

“One of the problems you run into throughout the agency is quantity versus quality. Everyone preaches quality, but most of the time you get quantity,” a former operations officer said. “Numbers have always been important. It’s competition. They keep track, they count. ‘What happened? You only got forty-six reports [from officers in one station] this month.’”

“That was how careers were measured and made—by the numbers,” Tom Gilligan, another former CIA operations officer, said in his book
CIA Life.
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To expand their own empires, some officers at headquarters constantly ask for more information about trivial subjects. The more information they obtain, the more they can justify requests for larger budgets.

“A lot of it is information for information’s sake,” a former officer said. “There are all sorts of little men sitting around, and their job is to keep track of iron ore production in Brazil.”

In September, station chiefs write progress reports about the previous fiscal year and outline their budget needs for the next fiscal year. A shorter interim report is also prepared in March. The reports include a listing of each asset or agent by cryptonym. As the report is forwarded up the chain of command, the cryptonyms are deleted and are replaced by aggregate numbers to further conceal identities.

“What you want to do basically is to show that you did better in the last six months than the previous six,” a former operations officer said. “If you are a new station chief or section chief, you want to show you did better than the last one. So you show you recruited x number of agents and got rid of x number of bad ones.

“In the end,” he said, “quality is not taken into account as
much as it should be. One good agent is not necessarily given more weight than a mediocre one.”

One of the gravest problems confronting the CIA is the possibility that agents may in fact be double agents, meaning they work for the other side. This happened in Cuba, where nearly all the agents recruited by the CIA back to the early 1960s were found to be plants taking instructions from Cuban premier Fidel Castro. It was not until Juan Antonio Menier Rodriguez, who had worked for both Cuban intelligence and counterintelligence, defected in 1987 that the CIA began to learn of the deception. The real shock came a year later, when Maj. Florentino Aspillaga Lombard, who also had worked in Cuban intelligence, defected. He had far more detail than Rodriguez and identified as doubles thirty-eight Cuban agents working for the CIA—practically all of the agency’s complement at the time. Nearly all of the agents had taken polygraph tests, and most had passed. The test results of many of the other agents were deemed inconclusive, meaning there was not sufficient evidence to show they were lying.

The revelation sent shock waves through the CIA and particularly the Latin American Division, which handles Cuba. Some could point to warnings they had previously made. For example, as early as 1976, the CIA’s counterintelligence staff expressed concern that some Cubans on the CIA’s payroll might be double agents. Their information was superficial and generally unhelpful. They also seemed to know too much about the operations of the CIA’s Madrid station, the hub for operations against Cuba over the years. This was an indication that at least some operations had been compromised or were under Cuban control. The warnings were not heeded.

According to Rodriguez, the Cuban agents had all received extensive training in beating the polygraph. They were told that polygraph tests do not work and that if the agents failed the tests, they could always convince CIA operations officers that there was something wrong with the machine. As a result, most did not show any signs of increased tension—interpreted as deception—when they lied.

Rodriguez said the problem was that the American CIA officers who debriefed the Cubans were not themselves Cubans
and did not understand their culture enough to interrogate them effectively.

“The polygraph is a big mistake,” Rodriguez said. “We [in Cuban intelligence] get Chinese to recruit Chinese. We are not arrogant. They [the CIA] should use Cubans. If not, you will not detect [double agents].”
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Rodriguez compared the CIA’s mistakes to its decision to mount the Bay of Pigs invasion.

“They didn’t understand Cubans. Only a crazy would have thought in 1961 that the people would have gone against Fidel,” Rodriguez said.

A former CIA operations officer familiar with what happened agreed.

“The relationship develops between the source and case officer,” he explained. “There’s a tendency to try to work out problems with the source. The Cubans knew this and told the agents that if they have a problem with a polygraph, appeal to the case agent. ‘Don’t get upset over this thing. Say you were harassed. After all, you gave them good information. There’s something wrong with the polygraph.’”

The CIA’s emphasis on quantity over quality also played a role.

“You want your agent to get through the polygraph successfully because you don’t want the hassle of trying to establish by other means he is okay,” a former operations officer said.

In general, “it’s not uncommon for a case officer to fall in love with an agent,” former CIA officer Saunders said. “Whenever a special bond develops, as it must between case officer and agent, there is some unique chemistry.”

If the agent turns out to be bad—a double or a fabricator—the officer may not want to believe it.

“It’s like a husband coming home at three
A.M
. and saying he was out selling encyclopedias,” Saunders said. “[His wife] wants to believe him so badly that she does. A prudent case officer, however, is constantly vetting, checking, always cynical, often asking questions to which he already knows the answer. He doesn’t trust easily, and if he doesn’t pay attention, he may pay a price.”

The result of the Cuban deception was that the CIA wasted a lot of time and money and was not able to get the information it really wanted. Much of the information given to the CIA by the double agents was true but not particularly damaging to Cuba.

“They [the Cubans] said, ‘Tell them anything they want to know.’ It wasn’t that it was bad information. It was true and did not cause great policy errors to be made,” according to a former operations officer familiar with the CIA’s analysis of what happened.

After Aspillaga’s defection was publicized, Cuban television aired a series that exposed many of the CIA’s operations on the island over the years. The program showed CIA operations officers picking up documents left for them by double agents in a variety of out-of-the-way places, dropping off sophisticated communications equipment for their agents, and meeting with agents in foreign countries to give them instructions.

While some of the American diplomats the program claimed were CIA officers were not in the agency, most of them were. Some of the wilder schemes being discussed by CIA officers—such as substituting flimsy tanks to store ammonia so that the chemical would leak out and destroy crops—were presented as current plans but had actually been discarded by 1964.

Richard F. Stolz was the CIA’s deputy director for operations when the double agents were exposed. A respected CIA veteran, Stolz had served in Rome, Moscow, Munich, Istanbul, Belgrade, and London and had been chief of the Soviet/East Europe Division. He told his officers that Cuba was able to fool the CIA with phony agents because of enormous pressure from the White House and from within the CIA to recruit. In addition, he blamed “ethnic egotism,” saying that the ability of Latinos had been underestimated. Finally, he blamed overreliance on the polygraph, pointing out that polygraphy is an art, not a science.

During Stolz’s tenure, the CIA began weeding out unproductive agents worldwide in an effort to improve quality and cut costs.

As the Cold War began to wind down, the CIA began concentrating even more than before on uncovering plans to develop nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons—one of the CIA’s traditional and most important roles. Once evidence of these weapons is uncovered, the U.S. government can use diplomatic pressure, trade sanctions, or other economic weapons to halt the weapons programs. For example, in 1988, Taiwan had been working on a secret installation that could have been used to obtain plutonium, a main ingredient in the production of nuclear weapons. The effort to build an installation capable of extracting plutonium violated Taiwan’s secret commitments to the United States that it would undertake no research for developing atomic weapons. Moreover, the Communist Chinese had warned that if Taiwan were to develop a nuclear weapon, they would invade the island.

As the work progressed, the CIA recruited Col. Chang Hsien-Yia, a scientist working on the project, and eventually he defected to the U.S. Based on his information, the State Department successfully applied pressure on the Taiwanese in 1988 to dismantle the operation.
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While there are five declared nuclear powers, a number of other countries have the atomic bomb and refuse to acknowledge it.

“Several countries either possess a nuclear device or can fabricate one on short notice,” William Webster has said. “Others are developing key nuclear technology that could later be used for a nuclear explosive, should the decision be made to do so. And there are still other countries which are in the early stages of nuclear technology research and development.”
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In addition, the CIA tracks development of ballistic missiles. According to Webster, at least fifteen developing nations could be producing their own ballistic missiles by the year 2000.

Even the possibility of life on other planets has been considered by the CIA to be within its purview. When he was CIA director, Walter Bedell Smith authorized a CIA study of unidentified flying objects, declaring that they have “possible implications for our national security.”

Other intelligence gathered by the CIA helps the U.S. to foresee coming events or to gain an advantage in trade or arms talks. The CIA is perennially interested in the health of foreign leaders. When they visit the U.S., the CIA has arranged to obtain samples of their feces, hair, and other bodily fluids so they can be analyzed back at Langley for health problems. Kim II Sung, the aging strongman in North Korea, has a growth on his neck that has never appeared in photographs. The CIA arranged to have an agent report firsthand on its appearance. It was benign.

The CIA has always tried to obtain the negotiating positions of other countries before arms talks or trade talks begin. Stations plant bugging devices in hotel rooms or tap telephones so that the State Department will know what it is facing before negotiations begin.

Like the problem of weapons proliferation, economic matters have been given higher priority by the CIA since the end of the Cold War. The CIA tries, for example, to find out overseas what kinds of computers the Japanese are developing. For years, the CIA had an official in the entourage of the prime minister of Japan on its payroll. Armed with inside information on what Japan’s negotiating position will be on, say, imports, the State Department can make more informed counterproposals. It is something like being able to eavesdrop on a seller and his broker when negotiating to buy a house.

“When the Japanese prime minister is here to see the president or secretary of state, they’d like to know what he is going to talk about,” a former operations officer said.

While the CIA cannot be in the position of handing over commercial secrets to selected American companies, it can pass the information along to the Commerce Department so that it can issue broad guidance to all companies. For example, the Commerce Department might issue an advisory on the direction of the Japanese computer industry.

But what happens when finding out what the other side is doing is not enough, when the U.S. government wants to take a more active role? That is when covert action is used, a term that covers any clandestine means to influence or overthrow a foreign power, leader, or political party.

A
S A RULE, COVERT ACTION IS CARRIED OUT BY THE SAME
officers in each station who normally collect intelligence. It is coordinated by the Covert Action Staff within the Directorate of Operations. In addition, the directorate has a Special Activities Operations staff that conducts paramilitary activities, such as those in Afghanistan.

One officer estimates that overall, 75 percent of the time of operations officers in the field is devoted to gathering intelligence and the rest to covert action.

Today, covert action accounts for only 3 percent of the national foreign intelligence budget—roughly $500 million—or 15 percent of the CIA’s budget. But covert action accounts for most of the black eyes the agency has received.

In the beginning, there were many successes—or what seemed to be successes. In 1948, the CIA funded the Christian Democrats in Italy, helping to prevent communists from taking over the Italian government. In 1950, Col. Edward G.
Lansdale, who was on loan to the CIA from the Air Force, helped the Philippine leader Ramon Magsaysay overcome the communist-backed Huk guerrillas. On August 21, 1953, the CIA, led by Kermit Roosevelt, overthrew the left-wing government of Prime Minister Mohamed Mossadeq in Iran after he nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. Three days later the shah, who had fled the previous week, returned to the palace.