Secrecy Still Has Place in Foreign Policy

“Great secrecy was necessary,” Winston Churchill told a cheering Parliament, as he revealed the first Nazi surrender at the close of World War II, capitulation in Italy. It followed months of top-secret talks between German commanders and Office of Strategic Services “spy master” Allen Dulles, later the celebrated director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Historians have suggested that Dulles’ triumph, code-named Operation Sunrise, was diplomatically flawed, that excluding the Soviets from those meetings--for the sake of secrecy--triggered the initial distrust between Allies that led to Cold War. But in 1945, few Americans would have doubted that ending the fighting was worth a spat with “Uncle Joe” Stalin.

Sunrise was a milestone in the annals of U.S. secret intelligence, marking the start of that postwar crypto-diplomacy twilight zone where secret agents often supplant striped-pants ambassadors. And William J. Casey was there, privy to the secret as one of the best and brightest of young OSS executives. Now, 40 years later, he is the latest of Dulles’ unenviable successors as head of the CIA. Though reportedly a reflective and politically astute public servant, Casey is very much an alumnus of the wartime “loose lips sink ships” school of intelligence. As such, he must find it baffling that the current brouhaha has reached political crisis proportions.

Other thoughtful men of both parties in four administrations have closed their eyes to the underlying reality: That the democratic foundations for the CIA’s “secret war”--a once-unanimous national respect for a cult of secrecy during the Cold War--were knocked away by Watergate and never rebuilt. There is no longer any national consensus about those non-intelligence-gathering CIA operations lumped together under the euphemism, covert action.

All that followed Watergate and the congressional inquisition into CIA “horrors” was some patchwork lawmaking and the creation of a Capitol Hill bureaucracy for the caging of “rogue elephants.” But principles of subtle covert action cannot be legislated like a compromise tax bill. Consider these ironies: Congress outlawed peacetime assassination, but U.S. bombers may scourge a foreign capital in the hope that the body of a deranged dictator will be in the debris. Congress frowns on promoting coups d’etat-- and CIA political projects seem at the mercy of the most junior congressional staffer with moral qualms and a friend at the Washington Post--but from our movie-conscious capital, we may launch a massive Clint Eastwood assault on a Caribbean mouse that roared, reminiscent of the worst days of Yankee gunboat diplomacy. And while the practice of “plausibly denying” official involvement in foreign hanky-panky has become a no-no, U.S. leaders hold press conferences to announce intentions to lend secret support to anti-communist insurgents on three continents. After the Contragate dust has settled and the blame-laying, breast-beating and ad hoc legislating is over, there ought to be a complete rewriting of the covert-action rule book. Unless the United States is resigned to take no further hand in Kipling’s great game of world power, we must end four decades of confusion by clarifying the complex issues of CIA political intervention abroad.

Setting aside emotions and legalities to look analytically at just those events now making headlines, CIA involvement falls into four categories, each with a distinct operational means and ends.

There was the vital business of maintaining secret contact with political “outs” and potential “ins,” with dissidents who could hardly be seen in the company of State Department attaches.

There was an anti-terrorist counterintelligence operation, requiring heavy expenditure of men and treasure in search of elusive facts about a small political underworld--the kind of laborious investigation more suited to police detectives than espionage agents.

There was the clandestine shipment of conventional weapons to a government in power, kept under wraps for diplomatic reasons. Since 1949, when the agency handled the first U.S. arms shipments to Yugoslavia, after Josip Broz Tito broke with Moscow, the CIA has been saddled with such tasks simply because it was there, with dummy corporations and money-laundering facilities, to do whatever dirty jobs the king’s men wanted kept out of the papers.

Finally, there was, for at least the 40th time in as many years, agency support for an “underground resistance movement,” a paramilitary insurgency against some unpalatable foreign government.

This operational hodgepodge was present from the creation. When the National Security Council first authorized covert action in President Harry S. Truman’s day, it enumerated an all-inclusive “laundry list” of operational contingencies spanning hot and cold wars--from simple propaganda and political intrigues to sabotage and guerrilla warfare. No distinction was made between the age-old crypto-diplomacy of stratagem and maneuver and those paramilitary operations that have enthralled policy-makers of every postwar Administration. Yet there is a real difference between slipping cash to some friendly foreign politician and smuggling guns to “freedom fighters” in the cellars of Budapest or the Nicaraguan jungles. One is “diplomacy, by other means”; the other is inciting to revolution.

Intelligence officers are very conscious of the distinction. The CIA, since birth, has certainly housed civilians and soldiers driven by the paramilitary impulse, but a growing body of espionage professionals has been skeptical, over the years, of big-talking ex-OSS paratroopers left over from World War II, the “Park Avenue cowboys” who brought disaster at the Bay of Pigs. After that tragedy another ex-CIA director, crusty Gen. Walter Bidell Smith, remarked, “It’s time we take this bucket of slop” out of the CIA “and put another cover over it.” But the paramilitary slop remained and grew into a towering pile, with then-popular “special operations” assigned to a corps of contract mercenaries who like to talk about the fine points of blowing up buses.

Gung-ho adventurers thrive under the CIA’s huge covert umbrella, but the skepticism of agency professionals about “noisy, smelly” operations has coalesced into an institutional ethos. Intelligence officers are as reticent about unrealistic and pointless covert operations as professional soldiers are reserved about rushing into hopeless combat. Casey, as a good conservative and friend of the President, has often been caught in the middle, between Reaganite revolutionaries who yearn to keep “fighting fire with fire,” and his own cherished “pros,” with strong ideas about what can realistically be accomplished by covert means.

The hearts of CIA realists do not bleed for suffering humanity; nor are they kept awake by moralistic pangs, not in a profession that reeks of moral ambiguities. Casey’s professionals have no illusions about the violent world they deal with. People laboring in secret service know that the saintly rarely rise to power, that moral suasion does not deter murderers, and that, as Henry A. Kissinger coldly pointed out, “covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”

But the man on the street is confused, and sweeping the whole business under the rug once again after the current flap will not restore the crumbled political foundations for CIA covert action. It is fitting and proper that we learn who knew what and when, and discover which private pockets were lined with U.S. millions. Thereafter, in a spirit of calm deliberation, we ought to consider more basic questions: What should the CIA be doing, how and why? And following those answers, it will require a Great Communicator to tell some hard truths to the American public: That sometimes great secrecy is necessary in foreign-policy- making and not destructive of democratic principles. That sometimes formal diplomacy must be supplemented by “other means,” by some lesser evil than a military action that could trigger nuclear holocaust. Ronald Reagan would be doing a service to the country by allowing covert action to come out of a closet in the White House basement.