The Craft of Intelligence (20 page)

When one deliberately misleads, sometimes friend as well as foe is misled. And later the deceiver may not be believed when he wishes to be. This is the situation of the Soviets today after Cuba.

Often the very fear of deception has blinded an opponent to the real value of the information which accidents or intelligence operations have placed in his hands.

As Sir Walter Scott wrote:

Oh, what a tangled web we weave,

When first we practice to deceive!

If you suspect an enemy of constant trickery, then almost anything that happens can be taken as one of his tricks. A collateral effect of deception, once a single piece of deception has succeeded in its purpose, is to upset and confuse the opponent’s judgment and evaluation of other intelligence he may receive. He will be suspicious and distrustful. He will not want to be caught off guard.

On January 10, 1940, during the first year of World War II, a German courier plane flying between two points in Germany lost its way in the clouds, ran out of fuel and made a forced landing in what turned out to be Belgium. On board were the complete plans of the German invasion of France through Belgium, for which Hitler had already given marching orders. When the
Luftwaffe
major who had been piloting the plane realized where he had landed, he quickly built a fire out of brush and tried to burn all the papers he had on board, but Belgian authorities reached him before he could finish the job and retrieved half-burned and unburned documents to be able to piece together the German plan.

Some of the high British and French officials who studied the material felt that the whole thing was a German deception operation. How could the Germans be so sloppy as to allow a small plane to go aloft so close to the Belgian border in bad weather with a completely detailed invasion plan on board? This reasoning focused on the circumstances, not on the contents of the papers. Churchill writes that he opposed this interpretation. Putting himself in the place of the German leaders, he asked himself what possible advantage there was at that moment in perpetrating a deception of this sort, i.e., alerting Belgium and Holland by faking invasion plans. Obviously, none. As we learned after the war, the invasion of Belgium, which had been set for the sixteenth of January—six days after the plane came down—was postponed by Hitler primarily because the plans had fallen into the Allies’ hands.

Accidents like this are not the only events that raise the specter of deception. It has already been pointed out that if you send a deception agent to the enemy, you have to make him credible. Bona fide windfalls have sometimes been doubted and neglected because they were suspected of being deception. This happened to the Nazis late in World War II in the case of “Cicero,” the Albanian valet of the British Ambassador to Turkey. He had succeeded in cracking the ambassador’s private safe and had access to top-secret British documents on the conduct of the war. One day he offered to sell them to the Germans as well as to continue supplying similar documents.

His offer was accepted, but some of Hitler’s experts in Berlin could never quite believe that this wasn’t a British trick. Their reasons, however, were more complex than in the cases where deception alone is feared. The incident is also an excellent example of how prejudice and preconception can cause failure properly to evaluate valid intelligence. For one thing, the Cicero documents gave evidence of the massive Allied offensives to come and the growing power of the Allies—information which collided head on with illusions cherished in the highest Nazi circles. Second, competition and discord among different organs of the German government prevented it from making a sober analysis of this source. The intelligence service under Himmler and Kaltenbrunner and the diplomatic service under Ribbentrop were at odds and, as a result, if Kaltenbrunner thought information was good, Ribbentrop automatically tended to think it was bad. An objective analysis of the operational data was out of the question in a situation where rival cutthroats were vying for position and prestige. In the Cicero case, Ribbentrop and the diplomatic service suspected deception. The net effect was that, as far as can be ascertained, the Cicero material never had any appreciable influence on Nazi strategy. Contrary to the general impression, there is also no evidence that the Nazis gained from Cicero any information about the planned invasion of Europe except possibly the code work for the operation—“Overlord.”

A further ironical twist to this famous case is that the Nazi intelligence service paid this most valuable agent hundreds of thousands of pounds in counterfeit English notes. Cicero has been trying ever since to get restitution from the German government for services rendered—in real money.

How Intelligence Is Put to Use

Information gathered by intelligence services or compiled by the analyst is of little use unless it is got into the hands of the “consumers,” the policymakers. This must be done promptly and in clear, intelligible form so that the particular intelligence can easily by related to the policy problem with which the consumers are then concerned.

These criteria are not easily met, for the sum total of intelligence available is very great on many subjects. Thousands of items come into CIA headquarters every day, directly or through other agencies of government, particularly the State and Defense departments. Many other items are added from the research work of scholars. When we consider all we need to know about happenings behind the Iron Curtain and in over a hundred other countries, this volume is not surprising. Anywhere in the world events could occur which might affect the security of the United States. How is this mass of information handled by the various collection agencies, and how is it processed in the State Department, the Defense Department and the CIA?

Between these three agencies there is immediate and often automatic exchange of important intelligence data. Of course, someone has to decide what “important” means and determine priorities. The sender of an intelligence report (who may be any one of our many officials abroad—diplomatic, military or intelligence) will often label it as being of a certain importance, but the question of priority is generally decided on the receiving end. If a report is of a particularly critical character, touching on the danger of hostilities or some major threat to our national security, the sender will place his message in channels that provide for automatic dissemination to the intelligence officers in the State and Defense departments and the CIA. The latter, as coordinator of foreign intelligence, has the right of access to all intelligence that comes to any department of our government. This is provided for by law.

There is a round-the-clock watch for important intelligence coming into the State and Defense departments and the CIA. During office hours (which in intelligence work are never normal), designated officers scan the incoming information for anything of a critical character. Through the long night hours, special watch officers in the three agencies do the monitoring. They are in close touch with each other, come to know each other well and continually exchange ideas about the sorting of clues to any developing crisis. In the event that any dramatic item should appear in the incoming nightly stream of reports, arrangements have been made as to the notification of their immediate chiefs. The latter decide who among the high policy officials of government—from the President at the top to the responsible senior officers in State, Defense and the CIA—should be alerted. The watch officers also follow the press service and radio reports, including those of Soviet and Chinese Communist origin. News of a dramatic, yet open, character—the death of a Stalin, a revolt in Iraq, the overthrow of a political leader—may first become known through public means of communication. Our officials abroad today have access to the most speedy means of transmission of reports from our embassies and our overseas installations, but these messages must go through the process of being enciphered and deciphered. As a result, news flashes sometimes get through first.

After there has been an important incident affecting our security, one that has called for policy decisions and actions, there is usually an intelligence postmortem to examine how effectively the available information was handled and how much forewarning had been given by intelligence. Incidents such as the Iraqi revolution of 1958 or the erecting of the wall dividing Berlin on August 13, 1961, required such treatment, since neither had been clearly predicted through intelligence channels. The purpose of the postmortem is to obtain something in the nature of a batting average of the alertness of intelligence services. If there has been a failure, either in prior warning or in handling the intelligence already at hand, the causes are sought and every effort is made to find means of improving future performance.

The processing of incoming intelligence falls into three general categories. The first is the daily and hourly handling of current intelligence. The second is the researching of all available intelligence on a series of subjects of broad interest to our policymakers; this might be given the name “basic intelligence.” For example, one group of analysts may work on the information available on the Soviet economy, another with its agriculture, a third with its steel and capital goods production and still another with its aircraft and missile development. The third type of processing involves the preparation of an intelligence estimate, which is described below.

There is, of course, not time to submit every important item of current intelligence to detailed analysis before it is distributed to the policymakers. But “raw” intelligence is a dangerous thing unless it is understood for what it generally is—an unevaluated report, frequently sent off without the originator of the message being able to determine finally its accuracy and reliability. Hence the policymakers who receive such intelligence in the form of periodic bulletins (or as an isolated message if its importance and urgency require special treatment) are warned against acting on raw intelligence alone.

Bulletins, both daily and weekly, summarize on a world-wide basis the important new developments over the preceding hours or days; they include such appraisal as the sender may give or as the CIA is able to add in consultation with representatives of the other government intelligence agencies. These representatives meet frequently for that purpose, going over the items to be included in the daily bulletin. New information may still be added to the daily bulletin up until the early morning hours of the day on which it is issued. When this intelligence is sent forward, explanatory material is often included as to source, manner of acquisition and reliability. Some messages carry their own credentials as to authenticity; most do not.

In addition to the current raw intelligence reports and the “basic intelligence” studies, there are the position papers, generally called “national estimates.” These are prepared by the intelligence community on the basis of all the intelligence available on a certain subject along with an interpretation of the “imponderables.” Here we come to a most vital function of the entire work of intelligence—how to deal with the mass of information about future developments so as to make it useful to our policymakers and planners as they examine the critical problems of today and tomorrow. Berlin, Cuba, Laos; Communist aims and objectives; the Soviet military and nuclear programs; the economics of the U.S.S.R. and Communist China—the list could be almost indefinitely extended and is, of course, not exclusively concerned with Communist bloc matters. Sometimes estimates must be made on a crash basis. Sometimes, particularly where long-range estimates are involved, they are made after weeks of study.

One of the major reasons for the organization of the CIA was to provide a mechanism for coordinating the work of producing intelligence estimates so that the President, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense could have before them a single reasoned analysis of the factors involved in situations affecting our national security. President Truman, who, in 1947, submitted the legislation proposing its creation, expressed in his memoirs the need for such a mechanism:

The war taught us this lesson—that we had to collect intelligence in a manner that would make the information available where it was needed and when it was wanted, in an intelligent and understandable form. If it is not intelligent and understandable, it is useless.

He also describes the system by which intelligence was coordinated and passed on to policymakers:

Each time the National Security Council is about to consider a certain policy—let us say a policy having to do with Southeast Asia—it immediately calls upon the CIA to present an estimate of the effects such a policy is likely to have. The Director of the CIA sits with the staff of the National Security Council and continually informs as they go along. The estimates he submits represent the judgment of the CIA and a cross section of the judgments of all the advisory councils of the CIA. These are G-2, A-2, the ONI, the State Department, the FBI, and the Director of Intelligence of the AEC. The Secretary of State then makes the final recommendation of policy, and the President makes the final decision.
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What President Truman refers to as “the advisory councils of the CIA” was established in 1950 as the Intelligence Advisory Committee, which later became the United States Intelligence Board (USIB) and is often referred to as “the intelligence community.” USIB now has an additional member to those listed above—the head of the newly created Defense Intelligence Agency, which coordinates the work of Army, Navy and Air Force intelligence and is playing an increasingly important role in the intelligence community. So too is the intelligence unit of the State Department, whose head ranks as an Assistant Secretary of State. The USIB meets regularly every week and more frequently during crises or whenever any vital new item of intelligence is received. The Director of Central Intelligence, who is chairman of the board, is responsible for the estimates produced by the board. However, if any member dissents and desires his dissent to be recorded, a statement of his views is included as a footnote to the estimate that is finally presented to the President and interested members of the National Security Council.

Arrangements are made so that the President and other senior officers of government, as required, can be instantly reached by the Director of Central Intelligence or by their own intelligence officers in any emergency. Experience over the years has proved that this system really works. There was not a single instance during my service as Director when I failed to reach the President in a matter of minutes with any item of intelligence I felt was of immediate importance.

The CIA has also set up a Board of National Estimates within the Agency, on which sits a group of experts in intelligence analysis, both civilian and military. The board prepares initial drafts of most estimates, which are then coordinated with USIB representatives. To deal with highly technical subjects, such as Soviet missiles, aircraft or nuclear programs, competent technical subcommittees of USIB have been established. And, in certain cases, experts outside of government may be consulted.

Obviously, the procedure of preparing and coordinating an initial draft of an estimate, presenting it to the USIB, formulating the latter’s final report along with any dissenting opinions and submitting it to the policymakers is time-consuming. There are times when “crash” estimates are needed. One of these occasions was the Suez crisis of November, 1956. I had left Washington to go to my voting place in New York State when I received early on election eve a telephone message from General Charles P. Cabell, Deputy Director of the CIA. He read to me a Soviet note that had just come over the wires. Bulganin was threatening London and Paris with missile attacks unless the British and French forces withdrew from Egypt. I asked General Cabell to call a meeting of the intelligence community and immediately flew back to Washington. The USIB met throughout the night, and early on election morning I took to President Eisenhower our agreed estimate of Soviet intentions and probable courses of action in this crisis.

The contents of this and other estimates are generally kept secret. However, the fact that this mechanism exists and can operate quickly should be a matter of public knowledge. It is an important cog in our national security machinery.

When, on October 22, 1962, President Kennedy addressed the nation on the secret Soviet build-up of intermediate-range missiles in Cuba, the intelligence community had already been receiving reports from agents and refugees indicating mysterious construction of some sort of missile bases in Cuba. It was a well-known fact that for some time past, Castro—or the Soviets purporting to be acting for Castro—had been installing a whole series of bases for ground-to-air missiles. These, however, were of short range, and their major purpose apparently was to deal with possible intruding aircraft. Since the reports received came largely from persons who had little technical knowledge of missile development, they did not permit a firm conclusion to be drawn as to whether all the missiles on which they were reporting were of the short-range type or whether something more sinister was involved.

The evidence that had been accumulated was sufficient, however, to alert the intelligence community to the need for a more scientific and precise analysis. Reconnaissance flights were resumed, and the concrete evidence was obtained on which the President based his report to the nation and his quarantine action. This required, of course, not only the most careful intelligence analysis but prompt intelligence judgments. As the President stated, the air reconnaissance established beyond a doubt that more than antiaircraft installations were being constructed on Cuban soil. This was a case, incidentally, in which it was obviously necessary to give publicity to intelligence conclusions. Khrushchev’s subsequent statements and actions testified to their accuracy.

Here was another case where a “crash” estimate was required. Most of the estimating can be done on a more ordered basis, although there is usually a sense of urgency in the whole field of intelligence.

But whether as estimate has had weeks of analytical work behind it or is produced “overnight,” years of training in the whole tradecraft of intelligence analysis are part and parcel of the final product. For example, in the Cuban case, the estimate could only have been produced quickly because of devoted work over many years by the highest qualified technicians in photoanalysis. These men and women had reached such competence from the study of earlier photographs of missile sites that what would be entirely unintelligible or subject to likely misinterpretation in the hands of the novice produced clear and reliable intelligence for the experts.