The Wizards of Langley (47 page)

When he left the Maryland field site, Durrell had a cover story, foreign currency, and business cards, with the phone number of a notional boss who would vouch for him. Durrell had also studied photographic albums showing the landmarks and intersections in what was to be his new neighborhood, so as to eliminate the need to ask directions or otherwise call attention to himself.
To further enhance his State Department cover, he memorized his purported travel route to the department’s Foggy Bottom headquarters, including the bus route and closest Metro stop. He probably, as was usually the case, had also been formally appointed to the United States Foreign Service, with a certificate signed by President Reagan and his Secretary of State as proof.
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In the first five years after joining the SCS, Durrell worked under State Department cover in Bangkok, Bombay, and Djibouti. His reports were sent via satellite to a complex of antennae adjacent to the Maryland field site. Inside the consulate in Karachi, Durrell spent four months intercepting communications concerning narcotics trafficking, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation.
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That mission came to an end on March 8, 1995. As he was riding in a consulate van on his way to work, terrorists leaped from a stolen taxi and fired their AK-47 assault rifles at the van. Sixteen bullets ripped into the van, killing Durrell and a consulate secretary and wounding another employee. The attack may have been a response to the arrest in Pakistan of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who would be convicted in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York.
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When the CIA ended its support for remote viewing and other parapsychology research in 1976, other agencies were willing to take its place. Until 1995, either Army Intelligence or the Defense Intelligence Agency supported such activities as part of projects with exotic names such as GRILL FLAME and STARGATE. In 1979, the DIA asked alleged psychics to provide information on a Soviet submarine program as well as the functions of key buildings in foreign countries. Psychics were also asked to help locate some missing Americans in Iran during the 1979–1980 hostage crisis. The Army’s Special Operations Division asked a psychic to help them locate Brig. Gen. James Dozier, who was kidnapped in Italy in December 1981.
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In 1986, the military’s psychic friends were asked to locate Muammar Gadhafi before the U.S. bombing raid on Libya. The next year, the DIA requested some of the purported psychics to divine the purpose of a Soviet facility at Dushanbe, and in 1989 the Joint Staff asked for help in determining the exact function of a suspected terrorist training facility in Libya. In 1993, the DIA asked the psychics to locate tunnels that the
agency suspected the North Koreans were digging under the demilitarized zone separating their country from South Korea. In 1994, some of the alleged psychics were tasked to find plutonium in North Korea.
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In 1995, despite its claim that the program produced some successes—including the 1979 prediction that a new Soviet submarine would be launched within 100 days and the identification of a building where Lt. Col. William Higgins was being held in Lebanon—DIA was planning on terminating its STARGATE program.
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By that time, CIA supporters such as Carl Duckett and John McMahon were gone, and James Hirsch had not grown any less skeptical than when he headed the research and development office. There was, however, pressure on the CIA from influential members of Congress and staffers—including Senators Daniel Inouye (D.–Hawaii), Robert Byrd (D.–West Virginia), and Claiborne Pell (D.–Rhode Island). For Pell, sometimes referred to as “The Senator from Outer Space,” STARGATE was not the first New Age program he had supported.
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Several staffers from the intelligence oversight committees who believed, according to Hirsch, that the program had “tremendous potential” pressed the CIA to resume funding. In the late 1980s, the CIA had asked the National Research Council for an assessment of the intelligence value of paranormal spying, and was told there was no reason to support such activities. With Congress mandating that the CIA review the possible utility of remote viewing for intelligence collection, Hirsch, who believed there was “absolutely zero intelligence payoff,” decided to obtain an updated, outside assessment of the military’s use of psychic spies.
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In June 1995, ORD contracted with the nonprofit American Institutes for Research (AIR) for a review of the STARGATE program.
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An assessment was to be made of two of the three components of STARGATE—the operations program, which relied on remote viewers to provide intelligence on foreign targets, and the research and development program, which used laboratory studies in an attempt to find improved methods of remote viewing for intelligence purposes. (The third component of STARGATE was “foreign assessment,” which focused on foreign activities to develop or exploit purported paranormal phenomena in ways that might affect U.S. national security.)
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The CIA asked AIR to produce a comprehensive evaluation of the research and development in this area, with a focus on the scientific validity of the technical approaches. In addition, AIR was to evaluate the overall utility of the program to the government and consider whether any
changes in the operational or research and development activities of the program might produce better results. Finally, AIR was to provide the CIA with recommendations “as to appropriate strategies for program activity in the future.”
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Focusing on the laboratory component of the program were two outside experts—Dr. Jessica Utts, a professor of statistics at the Davis campus of the University of California, and Dr. Ray Hyman, of the University of Oregon’s psychology department. Utts had written articles that supported the existence of paranormal phenomena, whereas Hyman was a well-known skeptic. In 1986, he had published a lengthy review article on parapsychological research that questioned whether any of the claims of positive results from paranormal experimentation could stand up to scientific scrutiny. In 1989, he had written a highly skeptical report for the NRC on DIA’s remote-viewing activities, noting that experiments conducted by DIA had been graded solely by DIA officials and the results had not proven replicable by independent experts. Meanwhile, two senior AIR scientists examined the operational aspect of the STARGATE program.
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Utts and Hyman prepared written reviews of the laboratory studies, which echoed their previous work and formed the basis of the AIR report’s observation that although the laboratory results were statistically significant, in that hits occurred significantly more often than by chance, it was “unclear whether the observed effects can unambiguously be attributed to the paranormal ability of the remote viewers.” Other possible explanations included the characteristics of the judges or the targets. The report noted that “use of the same remote viewers, the same judge, and the same target photographs makes it impossible to identify their independent effects.” The report further noted that the laboratory experiments had not identified the origins or nature of the remote-viewing phenomenon, “if, indeed, it exists at all.”
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In an attempt to assess the operational component of STARGATE, the two AIR representatives interviewed users of the information produced, the remote viewers, and the program manager. The report noted that although the end users found some accuracy with regard to broad background characteristics, the “remote viewing reports failed to produce the concrete, specific information valued in intelligence reporting.” The study also observed that the information provided by the remote viewers was “inconsistent, inaccurate with regard to specifics, and required substantial subjective interpretation.” Finally, it reported that “in no case had
the information provided ever been used to guide intelligence operations,” and that “remote viewing failed to produce actionable intelligence.”
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The report concluded that such observations “provide a compelling argument against continuation of the program within the intelligence community.”
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Not surprisingly, Hirsch agreed. He went to Nora Slatkin, the agency’s Executive Director, who accepted his recommendation that the CIA should remain out of the paranormal field. If DIA officials wanted to reorient the program to give it some scientific validity, they could continue it, but DIA was not interested, and the government’s psychic friends network was shut down.
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*The program was so secret that there was a special compartment, designated ZIRCONIC, established within the already highly secret BYEMAN Control System to designate information relating to stealth satellites. Within ZIRCONIC, yet another term, NEBULA, designated stealth satellite technology.

*It was not the first time CIA research had benefited medical science. In the 1970s, CIA research into lithium iodine batteries, conducted to ensure the prolonged operation of reconnaissance satellites, was made available to the medical community. It subsequently became the dominant technology used in heart pacemakers. (Interview with senior DS&T official, 1996.)

During his years as associate deputy director and then deputy director for science and technology, Jim Hirsch had witnessed turmoil not only throughout the world but at the CIA. From Bill Casey’s death in 1987 through 1995, there had been a parade of DCIs. Casey’s replacement, William Webster, was succeeded by Robert Gates. When Bill Clinton took office, he replaced Gates with James Woolsey—who after two years of finding it hard to get an appointment with his boss, decided to call it quits. Woolsey’s proposed successor, national security adviser Anthony Lake, withdrew in the midst of a very hostile reception from the Republicans on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Then, after having to withdraw the nomination of his next candidate, a former Air Force general, Clinton turned to Deputy Secretary of Defense John Deutch, whose longer-term goal was to become Secretary of Defense.

Not long after Deutch arrived, Hirsch was planning his departure. His replacement was an outsider. Unlike previous deputy directors for science and technology, Ruth David had no previous experience within, or even contact with, the agency. Her tenure at the head of the directorate was the shortest since Bud Wheelon’s and was marked by turmoil and change.

Several new offices were created, and one of the original three established in 1962 was abolished. There was internal strife due to David’s plan for funding the new offices. The directorate also lost responsibility for national photographic interpretation as a result of a major reorganization orchestrated by Deutch. To some, David’s tenure marked a decline in the importance and status of the directorate—in part, due to her own decisions.

Before Hirsch departed, he appointed two blue-ribbon panels to take a look at the directorate. One was headed by Ed McMahon, the executive
vice-president of MRJ, a high-technology company whose president was Donald Haas—the former head of the research and development and development and engineering offices who had also served as NRO deputy director. McMahon’s group focused on the organization and management of the directorate.
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Gordon J. MacDonald, a geophysicist at the University of California, San Diego, who had been one of the first scientists recruited by the CIA to help it employ the intelligence community’s technical systems in support of environmental research, chaired the second panel. Joining Mac- Donald in trying to identify technologies the directorate should pursue was longtime adviser Richard Garwin; William Dally, a professor of computer science at MIT; William Press, a professor of astronomy at Harvard; and Steven Koonin, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. Press, Dally, and Koonin were all members of the JASON group of scientists who advised the Defense Department.
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According to Koonin, who had become a full professor at Cal Tech in 1981 at the age of thirty, his group received briefings during summer 1995 at secure facilities in northern Virginia, where they held a couple of all-day meetings. It was “a whirlwind look at all pieces of the DS&T.” The impression he took away from the briefings was that although there was “isolated . . . technical excellence,” the directorate was “somewhat fragmented and in disarray.” There were several specific problems—technologies that had evolved in the Cold War were less useful with respect to post–Cold War targets and threats; there was poor interaction between the directorate and the agency’s intelligence and operations components (including between the Office of Technical Service and the Directorate of Operations); there was a lack of new talent; and analysts were disappointed with respect to the information support available to them.
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Ultimately, the two separate panels came together to give a joint briefing on their findings. With respect to organization and management, the scientists recommended flattening the organizational structure of the directorate, which could involve establishing new offices directly under the deputy director. They also suggested an increased reliance on use of outside consultants to help deal with vastly different issues such as diseases, chemical and biological warfare, and the environment. Perhaps most significant, they suggested placing greater emphasis on information technologies.
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In September, as Hirsch was preparing to leave, he discussed the two panels’ findings with his successor—findings that probably reinforced some of her basic notions about what needed to be done.

In his search for a successor to Hirsch, Deutch looked in a number of places and asked the national labs, which included Sandia, Los Alamos, and Livermore, for nominations. Sandia’s nominee, and Deutch’s choice, was Ruth David, who at the time was director of Sandia’s Strategic Thrust in Advanced Information Technologies.
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David was truly an outsider, although one with an impressive résumé. She held a doctorate from Stanford in electrical engineering and had taught at the University of New Mexico. Her academic credentials included a number of technical papers and coauthorship of two reference works on digital signal processing. At Sandia she had managed the development of data acquisition systems to monitor underground nuclear testing at the Energy Department’s Nevada test site, as well as the development of various engineering test facilities for Sandia programs. But she had never had any contact with the CIA, either as an employee or consultant.
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David’s selection was announced on the last day of July; on September 15, ten days after Jim Hirsch’s last day as deputy director, she started work as his successor.
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Her deputy at the time was Gary W. Goodrich, who had become associate deputy director in October 1989. But he would not be around for long—December 31 would be his last day at the agency. On January 1, Pete Daniher, chief of the Office of Technical Collection, who had long coveted David’s job and whose chance to get it may have left the building with Jim Woolsey, became her deputy.
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While still at Sandia, David had participated in the “Agile Enterprise Manufacturing Forum” at Lehigh University. The meeting focused on how corporations could deal with a rapidly changing business environment—forming teams quickly to solve problems and then moving on to the next problem.
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David brought the concept with her to her new job. When she arrived in Washington, she noted that the distinct organizations that made up the intelligence community faced rapidly changing priorities, tight budgets, and consumers who wanted intelligence tailored to their needs. Part of the answer, she believed, was to form new alliances within the community and with consumers as well as with individuals and groups from academia and think tanks. She was soon giving briefings on the notion of “Agile Intelligence.”
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A key to being able to operate an agile intelligence community was to increase the directorate’s focus on information technology, as the blue-ribbon panel had suggested. She believed that it had not received sufficient attention but “touch[ed] every aspect of what we do.”
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Even as resources were becoming tighter, the volume of information was continuing to expand dramatically—due to the Internet, the loosening of political constraints in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere, and increased volumes of radio, television, and other telecommunications and of scientific and technical data. In addition, demand grew for the intelligence community to provide its product with greater speed. Further, there was the growing U.S. involvement in military and humanitarian missions in areas of the world not traditionally of great concern—which meant rapidly shifting priorities.
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Traditionally, analysts received data only after the information had gone through one or more stages of human processing. Open source data, for example, were “once carefully selected, translated, edited, and organized by people who brought . . . a great deal of knowledge” to the task.
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David later noted in a 1998 speech that on one occasion the CIA received a collection of 100 diskettes containing information of potential interest. Examining their content required two to three dozen analysts and technical experts.
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In today’s world, she observed in the same speech, an analyst might need to sort through a vast volume of data, possibly data whose content was completely unknown, looking for relevant information. Even if the general content was familiar to the analyst, the volume of data could make any search tedious and time-consuming. Or the analyst might need to identify a pattern in a huge data set. Such jobs might use so much of an analyst’s time that they simply could not be done. Automated processing, using keywords, was one solution.
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Such concerns and her belief that improved information technology capabilities held the solution led David in 1996 to establish three new offices in the directorate—the Office of Advanced Analytical Tools (OAAT), the Office of Advanced Projects (OAP), and the Clandestine Information Technology Office (CITO).
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The advanced analytical tools office was established as a joint effort with the Directorate of Intelligence—combining technology push with user pull. The CIA described the office as having been chartered “to investigate, develop, and deploy innovative information systems to enhance . . . capabilities to collect, process, and disseminate intelligence.” Solutions would “reduce information overload, increase analyst collaboration,
improve the intelligence knowledge base, and automate foreign text translation.”
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Appointed to head the office was Susan Gordon, an intelligence analyst who had specialized in foreign weapons and space systems. By the time David departed the agency in fall 1998, the office had a staff of 100 and was focusing on five areas: information extraction, data mining, data visualization, machine translation, and security.
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The office’s work on information extraction sought to give analysts a means of picking out data they would want to enter in a database from a collection of intelligence reports. As Gordon expressed the problem, “spotting trends in the data is an area where we really need extractors.” Data-mining efforts are geared to developing tools to employ keywords to build a database or bases from a number of large databases designed for uses different from those required by the analyst. Software that could prowl through a body of data and respond by isolating specific information for an analyst to review could ease the analyst’s task.
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Developing machine translation capabilities had become more pressing, due to the multitude of languages that have become important in recent years. The CIA is short of human translators, particularly in languages such as Farsi. At the same time, there is no significant commercial market for such a translation capability in many of the required languages, which requires the analytical tools office to oversee development of such a capability.
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The advanced projects office was established to overcome problems in inserting technology into the intelligence process, transferring technology from the research and development stage to operational use. It was to provide a bridge between development and use by “taking things out of R&D and deploy[ing them] quickly,” David recalled.
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Doing that job required the office to look ahead to what technologies would be needed for the collection and analysis of information, identify relevant commercially developed technologies, and seek to develop required technologies when none were commercially available.
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The Clandestine Information Technology Office was established as a joint office with the Directorate of Operations. According to a CIA press release, the office would “address collection capabilities within emerging information technologies”—including fiber optics and the Internet.
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Robert Phillips, who served in the directorate for over thirty years, “liked Ruth a lot,” but felt that as the deputy director for science and technology
she was “way in over her head” and had “no feel for the politics of the agency.” There were “things going on in the CIA that none of her experiences ever prepared her for” and “things [that she did] that turned out awkward.”
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One of those things was her creation of “new offices without [any] idea as to how to staff them” and pay for them. Phillips’s views were echoed by former ORD director Philip Eckman, who noted that David’s creation of the new offices was done “without any real understanding of or caring about the culture of the organization,” and without taking the necessary steps to ensure funding. Ultimately, the new deputy director found a directorate component that she felt could be cut back in order to help fund the new offices—the Foreign Broadcast Information Service. Her plans apparently called for a 20 percent cut in personnel and a 38 percent cut in the nonpersonnel budget. Approximately one-third of FBIS’s fourteen foreign bureaus would be closed as part of a plan to save $20 million.
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FBIS was older than the agency itself—the “purveyors of fine open source intelligence since 1941”—according to an FBIS briefing slide. It had been nearly exempt from cuts, because its cost was minimal and it made an enormous contribution, according to Phillips and others. David believed the FBIS mission was important but not as important as the new offices she was establishing.
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Naturally, many in FBIS were annoyed with their new directorate head. One of David’s early actions had been to establish a Lotus Notes system that enabled personnel to send her anonymous e-mail, which she promised she would read and answer. Her unpopular decision, at least with FBIS personnel, to slash funding for the unit, led to “some very cruel messages” calling her an amateur and an interloper.
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