Uneasy Alliance: CIA Operators vs. CIA Analysts : Intelligence: No one from the research side has ever headed the agency. But is nominee Robert Gates really a covert activist?

They have been an odd couple all along, the analyst and the operator. The analyst stayed home, pored over his reports and documents, looked out for patterns and prospects, concocted the “intelligence product.” The operator stayed out there, in the “real world”--running agents, bribing potentates, fomenting tribal wars.

From the beginning, they’ve represented two distinct and frequently incompatible “cultures,” the alternate “sides” of the intelligence Establishment.

If Robert M. Gates does become the Director of Central Intelligence, he will be the first man to head the agency from the research discipline. This represents an historical breakthrough. Since Wild Bill Donovan tossed together the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, the analytic types have always been regarded as less than fully certified, necessary but unexciting. A collection of professors, basically, in a world of warriors and spymasters. They have been excluded, bypassed when necessary, discredited whenever politics required. Often to the detriment of coherent national policy. The question with Gates has become: Was he an analyst to the end, or did he nurture, as he advanced, an operator mentality?

Always, these two distinct sides of the house have danced along at arms length. During the OSS days, what was then called the research-and-analytic section, R&A;, was run by William L. Langer, a shrewd and acerbic Harvard historian who fought for the integrity of his results. The “active measures” enthusiasts--ultimately the Clandestine Services--began as the Secret Intelligence branch. Donovan’s hell-for-leather converts ultimately added military capacities and evolved their own counterintelligence function--the dreaded X-2.

At war’s end, when Harry S. Truman folded up the OSS, it was the humdrum research-and-analysis section that was the prize, and it was relocated, virtually intact, into the State Department. The senior operational people went back to business and law, and what was left turned up in a ragbag of Department of Army detachments, affiliated with the War Department.

After 1947, when the National Security Act created the Central Intelligence Agency, this newsreel played backward. In the early ‘50s, the established functions of the CIA were divided between the DDI, the Directorate of Intelligence, a descendant of the R&A; academics, and what was then called the Directorate of Plans, which subsumed virtually everything of an “active” character. These were the Clandestine Services, which had the clout.

Whenever there was a disagreement, in almost every case the conclusions of the operators moved up to the White House and influenced policy. The DDI chief during most of the ‘50s, Robert Amory Jr., laughed hollowly to me when recalling the intra-CIA maneuvering of that period. Arguing, in the fall of 1956, that the Israelis were poised for an attack on Egypt because even Amory’s usual driver in the Middle East, a man with one eye and one arm, had recently been called to the colors, Amory found himself outvoted by a consensus on the operational side, led by senior officers beholden to the Israelis and the British.

Excluded from the loop before the Bay of Pigs, Amory was well aware that Fidel Castro had immobilized whatever workable opposition was supposed to rise up on the island prior to the intended invasion. Enthusiastic operators even misread the overflight photos, and dismissed as seaweed the coral reefs that subsequently ripped the bottoms out of the agency’s landing boats.

The most famous cases in which operational intent and analysis reached loggerheads occurred during the Vietnam War. It was the CIA, after all, that oversaw the introductory years of the war in Southeast Asia, especially in Laos.

By the late ‘60s, after Lyndon B. Johnson “militarized” the war, increasing discrepancies began to appear between the judgments of the CIA’s in-house analysts and specialists on the ground--especially Gen. William C. Westmoreland’s interpreters. This led to the face-off between Sam Adams, an earnest--Lord, ingenuous--analytic professional at Langley and all his bosses up the chain of command to the President himself. Adams had concluded that there were at least twice as many Viet Cong as earlier estimates assumed. Politically, with the war becoming less popular month by month, this simple, well-substantiated judgment contained the guarantee of a presidential disaster.

It could only mean that U.S. forces--at that point approaching 500,000--must now be stepped up to perhaps a million in order to counter the swelling ranks of the guerrilla opposition. Politically, this was out of the question. Caught in the middle, CIA Director Richard Helms did what he could. But his survival in his job depended on the agency’s ability to circumvent the unmistakeable. In the end, the old figures prevailed, the war ground on for years to its humiliating conclusion, Adams was forced out of the CIA and the careers of successive Presidents were ultimately eroded and destroyed.

Another situation in which the agency analysts butted heads with policy, and lost, came out of the late ‘70s in Iran. Near East specialists on the analytic side were already beginning to fear that, outside Tehran, the shah was losing influence and control fast. These low-grade warnings were ignored by the regular operators. The Carter Administration’s policies throughout the region depended on the shah’s cooperation. Indeed, out of fear of offending Savak, the shah’s secret police, CIA personnel stationed in the country were discouraged from mixing in the bazaars or attempting to assess the quality of the opposition.

Seasoned agency professionals such as John M. Maury were telling me by the early ‘80s that the agency had, in effect, incapacitated itself in Iran to please the increasingly megalomaniacal shah. Again, it was the analysts whose ears were most effectively to the ground.

Ultimately, it would benefit CIA leadership to impart to each American President not what he prefers to hear but what he had better know. For this to happen, the head of the agency cannot be a political appointee. The CIA, embarked on a wide range of questionable projects around the world, cannot have institutional priorities and preferences of its own that encourage it to reshape--if not to skew--the information it collects and the intelligence it polishes. In the end, true and independent judgment can only come out of a CIA that is itself disinterested and objective in the highest sense.

Burton Hersh’s new book “The Old Boys,” about the origins of the CIA, will be published by Scribners next year.