The Craft of Intelligence (26 page)

There is evidence of long debate in the Praesidium during the first two weeks of May, after the U-2 fell and before the date of the Paris Conference. The question was, I believe, whether to push the U-2 issue under the rug or use it to destroy the conference. There are also reports that Khrushchev was asked why he had not mentioned the overflight issue when he visited the President in 1959, more than six months before the U-2 came down. He is said to have remarked he didn’t wish to “disturb” the spirit of Camp David.

Finally, to conclude the U-2 discussion, I should deal with one other myth, namely, that when Powers was downed on May 1, 1960, everybody should have kept their mouths shut and no admissions of any kind should have been made, the theory being that you don’t admit espionage.

It is quite true that there is an old tradition, and one which was excellent in its day and age, that you never talk about any espionage operations and that if a spy is caught, he is supposed to say nothing.

It does not always work out that way in the twentieth century. The U-2 is a case in point. It is, of course, obvious that a large number of people had to know about the building of the plane, its real purposes, its accomplishments over the five years of its useful life and also the high authority under which the project had been initiated and carried forward. In view of the unique nature of the project, its cost and complexity, this proliferation of information was inevitable. It could not be handled merely like the dispatch of a secret agent across a frontier. Of course, all these people would have known that any denial by the executive was false. Sooner or later, certainly, this would have leaked out.

But even more serious than this is the question of the responsibility of government. For the executive to have taken the position that a subordinate had exercised authority on his own to mount and carry forward such an enterprise as the U-2 operation without higher sanction would have been tantamount to admission of irresponsibility in government and that the executive was not in control of actions by subordinates which could vitally affect our national policy. This would have been an intolerable position to take. Silence on the whole affair, which I do not believe could have been maintained, would have amounted to such an admission. The fact that both in the U-2 matter and in the Bay of Pigs affair the Chief Executive assumed responsibility for what was planned as a covert operation, but had been uncovered, was, I believe, both the right decision to take and the only decision that in the circumstances could have been justified. Of course, any subordinate of the executive, such as the Director of Central Intelligence, would have been ready to assume all or any responsibility in either of these affairs—even the responsibility of admitting irresponsibility if called upon to do so. In theory, this may have appealed to some. In actual practice, I believe it was quite unrealistic.

Today in the field of intelligence, many admissions are made, either tacitly or by deeds and actions, as well as in words. When the Soviet Union agreed to exchange Francis Powers for their spy, Colonel Rudolf Abel, they were admitting what he was and who he was, just as clearly as if they had published the facts in the newspaper.

Intelligence has come a long way since the good old days when everything could be shoved under the rug of silence.

CIA, THE BAD BOY OF GOVERNMENT

There are other kinds of myths, more of the spiteful or backbiting sort, that one sometimes hears in more restricted and “knowing” circles. I doubt if many readers outside Washington have ever even encountered them, and so I will deal with them only in passing. They have to do primarily with CIA’s relations with other parts of our government, especially those with whom it works most closely. First of all, it is in the nature of people and institutions that any “upstart” is going to be somewhat frowned upon and its intrusions resented at first by the more well-established and traditional organizations. CIA had to prove itself and gain the respect of its elders by showing what it could do and by submitting its employees and its work to the test of time. It has, in my opinion, withstood this test and earned the respect of its fellows in government. It has, at the same time, not swallowed up the personnel, the property or the functions of any other agency, despite its reputed size and its reputed budget. The statement that there are American embassies where the CIA personnel outnumber the Foreign Service personnel is a rather typical troublemaking bit of malice, as is the one that the CIA personnel in embassies can do what they please. The Soviets, it is true, have many embassies where the intelligence personnel outnumber the diplomats, but we do not. The Soviet ambassador is himself sometimes an officer of the KGB. I have yet to hear of a case where the American ambassador was a CIA man.

The American ambassador is the commanding officer of all American officials in the country to which he is assigned, including any CIA personnel. This is subject, however, to the overriding authority of the President and the Secretary of State, who are responsible for the conduct of our foreign relations and decide how our policy should be carried out. It is they, of course, who instruct the ambassadors and determine the roles and mission of the various segments of our overseas missions, which often include AID, USIA, military, intelligence and other official personnel. There have been times when, under instructions of the State Department, the CIA has carried on certain operations which were not disclosed to the ambassador in the country in which the operations may have originated. This is the exception rather than the rule and generally happens only in a situation where an intelligence operation may be in part based in country A but more directly affects the situation in country B.

THE CIA AND THE FBI ARE AT LOGGERHEADS

This is one of the favorite myths. Nothing is more newsworthy than an internecine war between government agencies, and the press likes to tell us that these two organizations—the FBI working in the domestic field and the CIA in the foreign field—are literally knifing each other. As a matter of fact, one of the most satisfactory features of my work as Director of Central Intelligence was the close relationship established with Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, particularly in the field of counterintelligence work. Each agency, of course, also furnished the other a mass of related positive intelligence material. Their respective areas and roles are clearly defined and conscientiously respected. The often-cited case of Col. Rudolph Abel is one where close cooperation between the two agencies paid off handsomely. This is only one instance of many where our information has been pooled and Soviet espionage operations have been checkmated, both at home and abroad.

CIA—THE INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES

And now comes the latest and most horrendous myth of them all—that CIA and its cohorts in intelligence, particularly the military intelligence services, constitute the invisible government of these Untied States. Such is the thesis which two authors developed in 1964 for the edification of friend and foe alike, in some 350 pages of scuttlebutt.
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Mixing fact and fiction, accusing the intelligence services of spending some four billion dollars a year—a fantastic exaggeration—the authors pose as knight-errants of the press to kill once and for all the dragon of “secrecy” in government affairs. They purport to expose to the public and to the Kremlin and Mao the inner workings of intelligence, particularly in so-called “cold war” operations directed against Communism. In doing all this, they have also endeavored to surface to the world the names of intelligence and cold war operatives insofar as they have been able to uncover them.

But if one reads with care and perception what these authors have to say, you will see that they are trying to prove that the government of the United States itself has, from time to time, during the last four administrations, engaged, sometimes with success and sometimes without it, in certain operations, all approved at the highest level in government, to thwart the cold war tactics of Communism. In their “disclosures,” they have offered to our antagonists the greatest propaganda bonanza since
Sputnik
. Fortunately, however, there are so many patent errors in what they say that neither Moscow nor Peking is likely to credit their story or believe that American correspondents could be so naïve as to publicize such secrets of government. Misunderstanding our system as the Communists do and not appreciating the limitations on government to do anything about what is printed, they could not conceive that any government in its senses would allow monstrous violations of security to appear in public print unless this government had the sinister purpose of deceiving them.

The one thing these authors may well have demonstrated is this: under our system of government, there is precious little which can be kept secret and hence it is a myth that any “invisible government” exists.

LITERARY MYTHS—THE SPY IN FACT AND IN FICTION

The spy heroes of the novelists rarely exist in real life—either on our side of the Curtain or on the other. The staff intelligence officer, at least in time of peace, is hardly ever dispatched incognito or disguised into unfriendly territory on perilous or glamorous missions. Except for the Soviet illegal who is placed abroad for long periods of time, there is no reason for an intelligence service to risk the capture and interrogation of its own officers, thereby jeopardizing its agents and possibly exposing many of its operations.

There was little resemblance between the exploits of Ian Fleming’s hero, the unique James Bond, in
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
, which I read with the greatest pleasure, and the retiring and cautious behavior of the Soviet spy in the United States, Colonel Rudolf Abel. The intelligence officer, as distinct from the agent, does not usually carry weapons, concealed cameras or coded messages sewed into the lining of his pants, or, for that matter, anything that would betray him if he should be waylaid. He cannot permit himself, as do the lucky heroes of spy novels, to become entangled with luscious females who approach him in bars or step out of closets, lightly clad, in hotel rooms. Such lures might have been sent by the opposition to compromise or trap him. Sex and hardheaded intelligence operations rarely mix well.

The Soviet “new look,” which uses socialite spies, like Ivanov in London and Skrypov, mentioned in an earlier chapter, in Australia, represents an exception to this general rule. It may well be that the Soviets, having found pay dirt in the Profumo affair with its disruptive consequences, may see some advantages in using vice rings to aid blackmailing operations in later intelligence exploitation or merely to discredit persons in government positions in the Free World. This would fit in with general purposes of bringing such governments into disrepute with their own people. Certainly, from the intelligence angle, one would not expect to find items of intelligence passed via call girls to be of high reliability.

If there are dangers, tricks, plots, it is the agent who is personally involved in them, not the intelligence officer, whose duty it is to guide the agent safely. Even in the case of the agent and his own sources, the disciplines of intelligence today call for a talent for inconspicuousness that should rule out fancy living, affairs with questionable females and other such diversions. Alexander Foote, who worked for the Soviets in Switzerland, describes his first meeting during World War II with one of the most valuable agents of the Soviets. This was the man known by the code name Lucy, whose exploits I have already given.

I arrived first and awaited with some curiosity the arrival of this agent who had his lines so deep into the innermost secrets of Hitler. A quiet, nondescript little man suddenly slipped into a chair at our table and sat down. It was “Lucy” himself. Anyone less like the spy of fiction it would be hard to imagine. Consequently he was exactly what was wanted for an agent in real life. Undistinguished looking, of medium height, aged about fifty, with his mild eyes blinking behind glasses, he looked exactly like almost anyone to be found in any suburban train anywhere in the world.
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Most spy romances and thrillers are written for audiences who wish to be entertained rather than educated in the business of intelligence. For the professional practitioner there is much that is exciting and engrossing in the techniques of espionage, but those untutored in the craft of intelligence would probably not find it so. And that part of actual espionage which is crucial—the successful recruitment of an important agent, the acquisition of critical information—for security reasons only finds its way into popular literature when it is seared with age.

A useful analogy is to the art of angling. In fact, I have found that good fishermen tend to make good intelligence officers. The fisherman’s preparation for the catch, his consideration of the weather, the light, the currents, the depth of the water, the right bait or fly to use, the time of day to fish, the spot he chooses and the patience he shows are all a part of the art and essential to success. The moment the fish is hooked is the moment of real excitement, which even the nonfisherman can appreciate. He would not be intrigued by all the preparations, although the fisherman is, because they are vital to his craft and without them the fish is not likely to be lured and landed.

I have always been intrigued by the fact that one of the greatest author-spies in history, Daniel Defoe, never wrote a word about espionage in his major novels. In the eyes of many, Defoe is accounted one of the professionals in the early history of British intelligence. He was not only a successful operative in his own right but later became the first chief of an organized British intelligence system, a fact which was not publicly known until many years after his death. His most famous literary works, of course, are
Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders
and
Journal of the Plague Year
. Try if you will to find even the slightest reference to spies or espionage in any of these books. No doubt Defoe carefully avoided writing about any actual espionage plots known to him because of political considerations and an ingrained sense of secrecy. But a man with his fertile mind could easily have invented what could have passed as a good spy story and projected it into another time and another setting. I cannot dispel the conviction altogether that he never did this because, having the inside view, he felt that for security reasons he could not give a true and full story of espionage as it was really practiced in his day, and as a novelist Defoe was above inventing something at variance with the craft.