Fighting the Cold War, CIA Avoided a Hot One

The history of the Central Intelligence Agency is not complicated. Among the dozen or so perfectly sound reasons for its establishment by Congress 50 years ago this week, only one mattered: the belief, supported by an overwhelming preponderance of the evidence, that if somebody had been minding the intelligence store in the first week of December 1941, the U.S. Navy would have been ready and waiting when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

In recent years, a series of embarrassing failures by the CIA--penetration of the agency by Russian spies, gross exaggeration of the economic power of the Soviet Union, failure to foresee its collapse--have created a revolving door for directors and prompted critics in the Senate to propose pruning the agency back severely or perhaps even breaking it in two, following, at long last, the British example. The Brits, as they are universally called by the CIA’s working intelligence officers, warned that nothing but trouble would come from housing the collection

and analysis of intelligence with a covert-action arm under a single roof.

The CIA tried to keep the two jobs separate, but quarreling in the field soon prompted an early director, Walter Bedell Smith, to put everybody within a single chain of command. Blunders and screw-ups, painful as they may be, are all part of the great game; and a just verdict on the CIA’s way of doing business, after 50 years and 10 American presidents, is something better than a passing grade.

Among the many missions assigned to the CIA at the outset, along with others added over the years, again one was paramount--to ensure that U.S. military forces were never again caught napping for want of a central repository of intelligence and a staff competent to analyze the take. With such an agency, it was hoped, the U.S. government might secure its position as leader of the free world, hold the line in Europe, block communist takeovers in Third World countries emerging from colonialism, fight a propaganda war for the allegiance of world opinion, keep track of Russian arms programs, ensure the U.S. was always one jump ahead in the development of new weapons and prevent the outbreak of a third world war. The amazing thing is that all worked out pretty much as planned.

But along with these bold hopes for what a secret intelligence organization could contribute to U.S. security, there was one that proved preposterous--that with the exception of the director, who was confirmed by the Senate, the rest of the staff, the marching orders and the operations of the CIA could remain secret.

The first major crack in the wall of silence came in 1965, with publication of a book much feared by the agency--”The Invisible Government” by Thomas B. Ross and David Wise. Till then, the CIA’s first line of defense had been the implication that the republic would fall if anyone whispered the agency’s name without a top-secret clearance.

“The Invisible Government” changed all that. Everyone who paid attention to Cold War geopolitics now knew that the CIA had been behind the overthrow of left-leaning governments in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala the following year, and it was an open secret in Washington in the spring of 1961 that the new President John F. Kennedy was so angry about the CIA’s bungled invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, he was almost ready to scatter the agency to the winds. But the book went a giant step farther, dropping the obsession with “red subversion” of the ‘50s to focus critically, for the first time, on the role of intelligence in the U.S. government.

The first reaction of the American public to the realities of the secret world was one of pure horror--our government? meddling in foreign countries? training secret armies? In the great game, according to American rules, playing fair meant playing in the open, declaring your aims, abiding by the rules of the United Nations. For years, almost every story about the CIA was a “revelation”--something hidden for good reason, a cause for alarm and censure. Assassination plots, domestic spying, secret drug experiments. When all the awful secrets were gathered in one folder during the Watergate investigation by then-Director of Central Intelligence William E. Colby, they were referred to as “the family jewels” and kept under lock and key until, one by one, each made its headline and faded away.

But times change. Thirty years ago, even seasoned political journalists were learning something new when they read that the clandestine side of the CIA was formally called the deputy directorate of plans. No more. The inner workings of the agency are now standard fare for journalists and historians in such books as the five (count ‘em, five!) that cite chapter and verse from the CIA career of the Russian agent Aldrich H. Ames, who sold the KGB what amounted to the agency’s address book for U.S. spies in Moscow. The level of CIA institutional detail now routine in books about the Cuban missile crisis or the early Cold War intelligence battles in Berlin would have horrified the intelligence hands of yesteryear, but no longer incites panic at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.

Secrets remain, of course, but it is now accepted by the general public, and even the CIA’s historians, that the agency is an important tool of U.S. foreign policy; and that an informed account of the U.S. side of the Cold War requires the sort of frank factual treatment of the CIA that has long been taken for granted in telling the story of conventional military campaigns.

But even though Americans have learned to accept the darker side of intelligence work much as they do other unpleasant realities, there is one stark truth about the CIA that still meets resistance: the fact that the agency, like the Pentagon, works for the president. This sounds obvious but it bears repetition. The CIA doesn’t work for the executive branch of government, or the White House or the National Security Council. It works for the man who is president, and when the president personally wants something done by the CIA, it is very, very difficult for the agency to say no.

Americans have always been ready to believe that things go wrong because someone is pulling strings behind the scenes. From anonymity during its first decade, the CIA quickly won a reputation as the real power in foreign policy-making in Washington, a cabal of hard-liners pushing their own views and doctoring intelligence to force the hand of presidents. By the mid-1960s, after the Bay of Pigs disaster and before the die was fully cast for war in Vietnam, there were many in Washington who argued it was the CIA that was banging the drum about Soviet arms, insisted on supporting right-wing regimes, pushed for secret wars against communists wherever they might be found. It’s an old fear when intelligence services are concerned, but the historians have settled the matter long since--it was Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Kennedy who wanted, authorized, supported and pushed for a program to get rid of Fidel Castro, just as it was Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson who marched the United States into war in Vietnam.

The rule that the CIA works for the president and not the other way around is not simply academically interesting--it provides an important tool for understanding what is going on. What intelligence services do--whether it be the U.S. Russian, Israeli or British intelligence service makes no matter--is what their government’s policy is. They would be slapped down in a hurry if they tried anything else. Blaming intelligence services for doing bad, mean things belongs only in a child’s history of the world. The CIA has often been expected to take the fall when a president’s wishes have led to disaster, but that doesn’t change the way things really are.

Not everybody is willing to accept this truth but a simple test will establish whether you are among them. Did Kennedy know about the CIA’s plots to assassinate Castro? Did Richard M. Nixon know about the CIA’s aid to the Watergate burglars? Did Ronald Reagan know about the CIA’s support for the Iran-Contra deal? A child’s history of the world would say: heavens no!

There is plenty of painful reading in any true history of the CIA, just as there is ample cause for caution whenever Congress senses the agency is holding back. But a fair verdict at the end of the CIA’s first 50 years ought to give pride of place to what worked. What presidents wanted was some way of knowing all those things that the Soviet Union wanted to keep secret--what sort of weapons it had, how the books balanced, who was really running things in the Kremlin, how far it would go in backing an ally, how it planned to fight a big war, how the KGB kept similar track on us.

On some questions, and at some times, the CIA did better than others. But the big question was always whether the peace could be preserved, and that the CIA helped do. The lesson for lawmakers: Tinker with the CIA all you like, but keep it.