Inside the CIA (20 page)

After a year, the Coordinator of Information evolved into the OSS, which became the model for the CIA. During the war, OSS organized resistance movements and sabotage operations behind enemy lines. The OSS also tried unsuccessfully
to centralize intelligence functions within the government through an analytical section known as Research and Analysis.

At the end of the war, OSS was disbanded, and the State Department absorbed many of its functions. But again at Donovan’s urging, it was reconstituted when President Truman agreed to the creation first of the Central Intelligence Group and then, a year later, the CIA. The National Security Act of 1947 establishing the agency took effect on September 18, 1947, a birthday celebrated by the modern CIA with a family day. While Donovan never served as director of the CIA, the new agency absorbed the institutional values of the OSS, including the “can do, try anything” approach that Donovan had instilled.

Both before and after Pearl Harbor, the idea of centralized intelligence drew stiff opposition from many in the War Department, who saw it as an infringement on their turf. As one general said, a central agency would be “very disadvantageous, if not calamitous” from the point of view of the Pentagon. That was why it was so important to Truman that the new intelligence agency be independent and not tied to the interests of the military. When the Defense Intelligence Agency was later created in 1961 to focus more on tactical questions, it often exaggerated Soviet prowess, reflecting biases of a military that constantly sought bigger budgets.

This concept of a centralized intelligence agency—one that would bring together all the available information on a subject and analyze it objectively—is embodied in the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence. With three thousand employees, it is the CIA’s smallest directorate.

The directorate is the analytical side of the house, where Ph.D.’s who could just as easily be college professors pore over all the available information and produce estimates on what they think will be the future course of events. Eggheads rather than spooks, the analysts openly identify themselves as CIA employees and contribute to academic publications and attend conferences in their field just like university professors.

“Most of us on the estimative side had little or no knowledge
of the techniques of clandestine work and were prone to scoff at the excessively tight security about operations and to sneer at the bumbling of ‘the spooks.’ They were doers, not contemplators, and they approached foreign affairs from precisely the opposite vantage point,” R. Jack Smith, a former deputy director for intelligence, said in his book
The Unknown CIA.
“Also, they could point to several loose-lipped indiscretions by one or more senior estimative people that they claimed had blown operations. So there was a wall between the two sides on all operational matters.”
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Typically, the analysts want to disseminate material obtained by the operations side, and the operations officers object because they are afraid it will expose a source.

The intelligence directorate brings together information from all sources—satellites, human spies, intercepts of communications, the press, foreign broadcasts, trade publications, newsletters, computer bulletin boards, and scientific publications. That information—at least 80 percent of it from open sources—is used to prepare daily research and intelligence reports, as well as long-range analyses. In addition, the information is used by the National Intelligence Council, a component of the intelligence community that reports directly to the director of Central Intelligence, to prepare estimates of future events that are presented to the president. While each of the agencies in the intelligence community may contribute to the estimates, the most important source of information generally is the Directorate of Intelligence. Therefore, the work of the directorate is critical. The other directorates can do marvelous work, but it will languish if it is not presented to the president and policymakers. If the analysis is wrong, the foreign policy of the U.S. will suffer.

In the early days, there were a number of failures. In Korea, despite ample evidence, the CIA did not clearly alert senior policymakers in June 1950 that North Korea was about to invade the Republic of Korea. Nor did the CIA warn that tens of thousands of Communist Chinese troops, who had been infiltrating North Korea, were about to attack U.S. and United Nations troops.

In September 1962, the CIA said placing ballistic missiles
in Cuba would not fit into the Soviet Union’s known behavior patterns, and Nikita Khrushchev “would not do anything so uncharacteristic, provocative, and unrewarding.” Prompted by contradictory and fragmentary eyewitness reports that such a deployment might be taking place, the estimate was produced just before photographs taken by a U-2 on October 14, 1962, showed conclusively that the Soviets were moving missiles into Cuba.

This was a good example of “mirror-imaging”—assuming that another country would think the same way America thinks. While an estimate cannot predict with absolute certainty events that have not yet taken place, they can lay out the possibilities and assign probabilities. This allows smart policymakers to ready options to cope with the most likely outcomes. Yet it is not unusual for heads of state to ignore intelligence, as Joseph Stalin did in 1941 when told that the Nazis were about to invade the Soviet Union, costing the Soviets tens of thousands of lives.
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“The most important thing was not whether we were right or wrong about the occurrence of events, but to help the people making policy decisions by giving them background information,” Edward W. Proctor, a former CIA deputy director for intelligence, said. “Sometimes you give them information that is right, and they make the wrong decisions. Sometimes you give them information that is wrong, and they make the right decisions for different reasons. Sometimes you give them information that is right, and they make the right decisions. Sometimes you make a prediction on something coming up, and the policymakers take an action which, in effect, makes your prediction wrong, but it was the right thing to do based on your prediction. The whole purpose is to help these people make better decisions.”
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Another example of mirror-imaging occurred in 1973, when the CIA and the rest of the U.S. government failed to warn that Egypt and Syria were about to launch major attacks on Israel in what came to be known as the Yom Kippur War.

“We did not predict it, period. We had seen the same thing occur several times before, including a year before, and nothing had happened,” Proctor, then deputy director for intelligence,
said. “It was a buildup of forces and threats. We did not understand what the purpose was from the Egyptians’ point of view. They knew they couldn’t win, but it was one way of breaking the deadlock.”
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Probably the most well-known failure came in February 1979, when the CIA did not foresee that the shah of Iran might be overthrown. In fact, in mid-August 1978, a CIA analyst reported to President Carter, “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even prerevolutionary situation.”
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In this case, the Directorate of Intelligence disregarded reports coming in to the CIA from the operations officers in Iran, who were reporting growing opposition to the shah. The analysts assumed that the shah would crush the opposition, as he had in the past. But the shah’s bout with cancer had weakened his resolve.

“We were aware the shah had opposition,” Stansfield Turner, who was director of Central Intelligence at the time, said. “One difficulty was it was hard to appreciate that a man with the military and SAVAK [the shah’s secret police] would be toppled by people parading in the streets. When you make an intelligence forecast, you make an assumption. We thought he would use the powers he had, but he didn’t.”
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It is always easier, of course, to assume that the status quo will continue. Far less risk is involved. Without hard data on Mikhail Gorbachev’s intentions, for example, anyone who predicted that Gorbachev would release the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe and allow East Germany to reunite with West Germany may well have been referred to the agency’s Office of Medical Services for psychiatric consultations. Anyone who said the Soviet people would vote to change the name of Leningrad back to the original St. Petersburg would have been thought to be similarly mad.

“There is almost never enough firm intelligence to support a solid, definitive statement,” Smith, the former deputy director for intelligence, said. “If there were, there would be no need for an estimate; the threat would be self-evident.”
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Unless prodded from within or without, organizations tend to become more bureaucratic as they mature and Less willing to take risks. The CIA is no exception.

“It takes more people to get things done, and they don’t do them as well,” a former CIA analyst said. “There is a concern with warm bodies, production schedules, concern with pleasing the boss and not getting out of line, a process of homogenization so strong personalities or characters get shunted aside.”

In those cases, the former analyst said, “the going evaluation is such and such, and the head of the office and his boss has said so. Someone says, ‘This is one hundred and eighty degrees different.’ In the coming days or weeks, the situation plays out, and the dissident is shown to be right. Often, instead of being rewarded, he is put off to the side.” It is a case, the former analyst said, of causing embarrassment by being “too accurate too soon.”

“One thread that runs through the whole story from the beginning of the CIA to the present is the gradual bureaucratization of the CIA,” Russell J. Bowen, a retired analyst who continues to consult for the CIA, said. “There is a certain momentum that carried from World War II and OSS type thinking into the early sixties. The idea was you had a job to do, and you go out and do the job, and you clean up the problems later. Now we say, ‘If we do this job, what are all the problems we might get into?’ So the motivation for go-go-go is long gone.”
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Another perennial problem is the way CIA reports are written. Often, they do not state conclusions clearly enough to attract attention. Besides the president, the National Security Council is the CIA’s major customer. Staffers there often complain that they find CIA estimates too balanced or boring compared with those by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, a much smaller outfit that prepares analyses for the State Department. Since the State Department is engaged in making policy, its analysts tend to tailor their work to the specific needs of the moment. In effect, State has the inside track on what the president and his aides want to read—aides who are already burdened with too much material.

“You have a super editor at State, who says, ‘These are the subjects I am interested in. The secretary of state is involved
in these issues,’” an NSC staff member from the Reagan administration said. “They [the State Department] share the same short-term interests as the NSC and White House.

“You have overload,” the former NSC staff member said. “There is a limit to what those people [at the NSC] can handle. So you go with what is really relevant. You get a mediocre report, but it’s relevant, and you read it. If it’s a super report but not relevant, it doesn’t get read very much.”

Because of the size of its analytical side—more than two thousand analysts—the CIA tends to have more specialists who become immersed in their subjects.

“Steeped in the minutiae of their field, in this instance the daily flow of events in a country, they frequently mistake backpage filler items for front-page banner-headline stories,” according to Smith. “Moreover, they have a persistent tendency to believe that their sometimes arcane thought processes will be transparent to their readers.”
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In contrast to President Reagan, President Bush read CIA reports avidly. In part, that has contributed to a sharpening of the CIA’s writing style.

“One of the things that has changed for the better over the last several years is they write it more to the point,” said Robert Gates when he was still deputy assistant to the president for national security under Bush. “The president reads the estimates and rereads them, which is a change from the past.”
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Still, Army General H. Norman Schwarzkopf complained to Congress after the Persian Gulf War that while intelligence during the war was excellent, the analyses on the Iraqi military had been “caveated, footnoted, and watered down” to the point that they became useless.
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He thus appeared to distinguish between the hard facts provided by intelligence and the analyses that sought to draw conclusions from the facts and predict the future. Schwarzkopf did not specify whether he was referring to CIA or military analysis.

William Webster encountered the same problem when confronting the question of whether economic sanctions would drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. According to an aide, he had to beat the analysts into being more precise about the
effect of the sanctions. The analysts were being too vague One said sanctions would cause “belt tightening.” What did that mean? Webster wanted specifics on when they would work. In six months? In a year? he wanted to know. If an estimate covers all bases, it will always be right—but also close to useless. Webster finally got what he wanted, a statement that the sanctions would take at least a year to have any chance of working.

Webster also browbeat Dr. Fritz W. Ermarth, then chair man of the National Intelligence Council, over the use of the words
probably, likely,
and
possible
in estimates. Webster wanted to know what these words meant in terms of the percentage chance that certain events would occur.

Over the years, the national estimating structure has been changed several times to try to sharpen its work. After the CIA failed to predict the North Korean invasion of the South, CIA director Walter Bedell Smith established an Office of National Estimates to focus more attention on the process. The estimates were developed collegially, based on information presented by CIA analysts and the entire intelligence community. In the fall of 1973, Colby replaced the old board with the National Intelligence Council.