Inside the CIA (32 page)

B
ECAUSE OF THE WAY
A
MERICA HAD BEEN CAUGHT OFF
guard at Pearl Harbor, President Truman and Congress wanted to make sure that in the future U.S. intelligence would be coordinated. For that reason, Congress created a director of Central Intelligence who wore three hats: one as the head of the CIA, one as the coordinator of the other intelligence agencies in the government, and one as the primary adviser to the president, through the National Security Council, on foreign intelligence matters.
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Since the Eisenhower administration, the panoply of U.S. intelligence agencies has been known as the intelligence community, suggesting a benign gathering of neighbors. Besides the CIA, the intelligence community consists of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the intelligence components of the Energy and Treasury departments, the National Security Agency, the counterintelligence component of the FBI, the National Reconnaissance Office,
the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the intelligence elements of the Army, Air Force, Navy, and the Marine Corps. Other agencies that have intelligence-related functions, such as the Commerce Department, participate in some community councils but are not considered full-fledged members of the community.

To help in coordinating the intelligence community, the director of Central Intelligence has a separate intelligence-community staff with its own director. The DCI also sits on a dizzying array of interagency groups and committees that coordinate specific activities of the intelligence agencies. The most important is the National Foreign Intelligence Board (NFIB), whose membership includes the senior official of each agency in the intelligence community. Through this group, the intelligence community approves National Intelligence Estimates that represent the views of the entire community. Through various committees, the board also decides what priorities to focus on and what classified information should be given to allies.

The DCI is appointed by the president with the advice and consent of the Senate. The president may also fire him. In carrying out his intelligence community role, the DCI has a deputy director of Central Intelligence. He serves both as deputy director of the CIA and as the DCI’s deputy in coordinating the intelligence community. Like the DCI, he is appointed by the president with the advice and consent of the Senate.

In directing the CIA, the DCI has four deputy directors who head each of the four directorates. The DCI also has a number of staff offices that are not part of any directorate and report directly to him. These are the offices of General Counsel; Public Affairs; Congressional Affairs; Comptroller; the Special Assistant for Arms Control, who monitors compliance with arms control agreements; the National Intelligence Council, which prepares estimates; and the director of the Intelligence Community Staff, which coordinates a number of intelligence community committees on such matters as security, information handling, and counterintelligence. In addition, a deputy director for planning and coordination reports
directly to the DCI and has a staff of sixteen people. Taken together, these staff offices represent the fifth segment of the CIA.

As a result of legislation passed in 1990, the CIA’s inspector general is on the same level as the DCI on the agency’s organization chart. Like the DCI, he is appointed by the president with the consent of the Senate. Overseeing the entire octopuslike community are not only the congressional oversight committees but the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), a citizen panel that investigates shortcomings and reports its findings to the president. Finally, the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board, consisting of three members from outside the government appointed by the president, is supposed to report to the president any intelligence activities that appear to be improper or illegal.

Most of the directors of Central Intelligence had no previous intelligence experience. Two of those, John A. McCone and Walter Bedell Smith, are remembered as being among the best DCIs. Smith, who served from 1950 to 1953, established the machinery for preparing National Intelligence Estimates to better coordinate the analytical work of the agency. McCone, who served from 1961 to 1965, sharpened the process for preparing estimates and established a fourth directorate for Science and Technology. On the other hand, William F. Raborn, Jr., who served from 1965 to 1966, is remembered as one of the worst DCIs. Like McCone, Raborn had no previous intelligence experience beyond what he’d picked up during his career in the Navy.

Russell Jack Smith, a former deputy director for intelligence, recalled that when Lyndon Johnson intervened with U.S. forces in the Dominican Republic in 1965, Raborn decided that he could best contribute by rushing every piece of paper received by the CIA to the president. But Richard Helms, then deputy director of Central Intelligence, calmed him down.

“Dick Helms’s smooth intervention prevented the disaster that is risked when raw, unevaluated intelligence reports are placed in a president’s hand,” Smith said.
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“I never worked for a nicer guy who was more out of his
element,” said Walter N. Elder, who was executive assistant to Raborn. “I thought President Johnson did him a disservice by naming him DCI.”
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Other DCIs, such as Sidney W. Souers, William J. Casey, and William H. Webster, had some intelligence experience in predecessors of the CIA or in other intelligence organizations. Only three, Allen W. Dulles, Richard Helms, and William Colby, had served in the CIA before being appointed director.

Each director approached the job differently. Dulles, who served from 1953 to 1961, and Casey, who was DCI from 1981 to 1987, became highly involved in clandestine operations.

“Dulles always thought he was an excellent practitioner,” Robert T. Crowley, a CIA officer at the time, said. “I have no evidence to support that.”
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Adm. Stansfield Turner, who served from 1977 to 1981, felt the CIA emphasized human spying too much, to the detriment of technical collection. Turner devoted a great deal of his time to the analytical side, sometimes substituting his own opinions for the estimates presented to him.

“They [the operations people] were the elite directorate—the untouchables,” Herbert E. Hetu, Turner’s director of public affairs, said. “I think he [Turner] felt we got more bang for the buck from technical intelligence. You can’t get intentions through it, though. He thought they [the operations officers] were important but overblown. They totally overreacted to that.”
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By his quiet, princely manner, Helms, who was DCI from 1966 to 1973, gave an impression of harboring vast knowledge. He supported his troops while doing his best to deflect White House pressures to involve the agency in cover-ups, politically inspired estimates, and illegal activities. On the other hand, he approved the incarceration of Yuri I. Nosenko, the KGB defector mistrusted by James Angleton.
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Aside from strongly supporting CIA operations and improving congressional relations, George Bush is remembered for doing very little during his one-year tenure as DCI, from 1976 to 1977.

Turner is roundly hated for trying to diminish the importance of the clandestine side of the CIA and for cutting the staff of the Directorate of Operations in a crude manner. While the directorate was overstaffed because of staff increases during the Vietnam War, the reductions could have been accomplished over five years through attrition. But Turner was impatient and decided to reduce the staff over two years. This meant 17 people were dismissed and 147 people were forced into early retirement. Many others were told to find jobs in other directorates or be fired. Those affected were told to find new jobs on October 31, 1977. The two-paragraph letter said, “It has been decided that your services are no longer needed.” The action came to be known as the Halloween Massacre.
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In his book,
Secrecy and Democracy,
Turner admitted that the wording of the notices was unfortunate but defended speeding up the retirement process. He said complaints about the 147 forced into early retirement “were beside the point. Almost all of them would have retired within a year or two anyway.”

Robert (Rusty) Williams, one of Turner’s aides, spent his first few months at the agency looking into whether operations officers were having “nooners” or were drinking at work.
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“Rusty Williams asked [subordinates] who I was sleeping with,” a former station chief said. “People said they presume my wife.”

After creating tremendous resentment within the operations directorate, Williams decided the staff operated ethically and soundly.
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“I don’t think people should be drinking at lunch,” Turner said recently. “They can have one if they want to, but he [Williams] found people who couldn’t come back. They were drinking when they came into the building. They were genuine alcoholics and were producing only a small percentage of the time.”
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But even Turner’s aides conceded that his approach created unnecessary resentment. Any organization has its share of alcoholics, and by assigning an assistant to investigate the problem—rather than handling it through the chain of
command—Turner seemed to be suggesting that he thought the CIA was full of drunks.

“Stan was book smart but street dumb,” one of his former assistants said. “He didn’t understand how things would be perceived.”

In his five months as DCI in 1973, James R. Schlesinger never had time to get a handle on the agency, but he opened it up to public scrutiny by ordering the compilation of the “family jewels,” the list of the agency’s past abuses. Colby ushered the agency into the modern era by emphasizing the need to operate lawfully and be accountable to Congress and the public. But Casey moved the agency backward by again involving it in illegal and improper activities. While he temporarily improved morale by acting as the agency’s cheerleader, most CIA officers—including those in the Directorate of Operations—look back on his tenure overall as a blemish on the agency.

“Casey had a lot of problems and did a lot of things that didn’t do a lot of people any good,” a former CIA operations officer said. “He did care about the agency.”

The amount of influence the DCIs have had with presidents has depended on their relationships with them. After the CIA foresaw the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli Six Day War in 1967 and predicted it would last seven to ten days, President Johnson invited Helms to attend his Tuesday lunches with his inner circle of foreign policy advisers. Casey served not only as an intelligence adviser to President Reagan but also—having worked in his presidential campaign—as a political adviser.

Unlike Casey, Webster specifically asked not to have cabinet rank, feeling that the DCI should be an impartial disseminator of intelligence rather than a policymaker. Colby had a distant relationship with President Ford, exacerbated when he did not inform Ford of the existence of the “family jewels” before congressional committees and the press found out about them.

To some extent, the business of the CIA goes on regardless of who is DCI. Like any bureaucracy, the agency has a life of its own, responding to events and pressures based on values instilled over time. But most of the DCIs have made their
own marks on the agency, rearranging its various parts, establishing new offices, changing emphasis here or there, and in most cases, imposing new regulations and controls.

In that respect, William Webster, who took over as DCI in May 1987, was no different from his predecessors. What made his term distinctive was that he was the ultimate outsider, a lawyer who had been a federal judge prior to becoming FBI director. Webster had no political constituency, no political obligations, and no ties to the intelligence community. Because of that, what happened during Webster’s four-year term as director of Central Intelligence provides an unusual opportunity to gain insight into the character of the modern CIA.

W
HEN A DIRECTOR OF
C
ENTRAL
I
NTELLIGENCE IS TO BE
nominated, each directorate hopes that one of its own will get the job. If a former analyst is nominated, the operations people grumble. If an operations officer gets the nod, he can never satisfy the expectations of the other directorates.

As an outsider, William H. Webster—like most CIA directors—was from none of the directorates. Moreover, he had been FBI director for nearly ten years. There is an instinctive rivalry between the bureau and the CIA. Their jobs are similar and yet different, and bringing in someone from the FBI was like choosing the editor of the
New York Times
to head its natural competitor, the
Washington Post.

The idea that a former judge could direct the activities of an agency whose mission was to break the laws of other countries sent shivers up the spines of many in the Directorate of Operations. For all the harm William Casey had done to the
CIA’s reputation, Casey had still strongly supported the clandestine service.

At the FBI, Webster had done a first-rate job of putting into place procedures that would prevent abuses such as Cointelpro, a program approved by J. Edgar Hoover that included illegal mail openings and break-ins to gain information on the antiwar movement. Webster upgraded the bureau’s counterintelligence program from a neglected and shunned sideline to one of the most respected lines of work in the FBI. He approved such controversial sting operations as Abscam, which targeted members of Congress, and he emphasized pursuit of white-collar and organized crime. While the FBI under Webster overreached its authority in investigating the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), the abuses never reached the point of illegality. The FBI investigated the group when it received allegations, which proved to be unfounded, that CISPES was involved in supporting terrorism. In the CISPES investigation, the abuses—which included inquiring into political beliefs—had not been approved by the director, as had been the case with abuses that took place under Hoover.