CIA’s New Celebrity Exposes Its Failings

After a decade of relative anonymity, the CIA has suddenly been thrust back into the spotlight. But can it stand the glare?

When CIA agent Johnny “Mike” Spann was killed during the Mazar-i-Sharif prison uprising last November, CIA Director George J. Tenet seized upon his death to trumpet the CIA’s key role in the war effort. Already the agency has played a prominent role in Afghanistan, where its agents have been helping the military to identify targets. And in the end, nothing can be more central to the war on terrorism than reliable intelligence that can detect and destroy terrorist cells before they strike against the U.S. or its allies.

But even as the CIA touts its deeds, veteran CIA-watchers are skeptical. Intelligence experts, along with a growing number of former CIA operatives, point out that the agency was caught flat footed by Sept. 11 and is using the war on terrorism as an excuse to evade scrutiny. Ultimately, though, unless the CIA examines what went wrong in its past, it will not be able to avoid disasters in the future. The successful terrorist attacks revealed the agency’s weaknesses: Now it’s time for reinvention.

A common perception is that the CIA had a golden age during the Cold War and now simply needs to return to its roots. But a look at the history of the CIA suggests that it was never particularly effective. The CIA grew out of the World War II Office of Strategic Services, which was run by Gen. William “Wild Bill” Donovan. A Wall Street lawyer, Donovan hand picked Ivy League graduates and Wall Street figures to form an East Coast intelligence elite. Donovan infused the group--which included future CIA directors Allen Dulles, Richard Helms and William J. Casey--with a daredevil spirit of action behind enemy lines.

During the first half of the Cold War, the CIA continued in that tradition, focusing on covert action abroad. Heeding George F. Kennan’s call to “fight fire with fire,” the CIA recruited numerous former Nazis, Ukrainian collaborators and other freebooters to carry out paramilitary actions in Eastern Europe. Most of the agency’s planned actions failed, and many, including President Harry S. Truman, expressed concern that the CIA had failed to get advance information about even such large-scale actions as the 1948 Soviet-backed communist coup in Prague or the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950.

The CIA was undeterred. Under Allen Dulles’ direction, the organization focused on increasingly suspect actions, like installing the Shah of Iran in power in 1953 and toppling the Guatemalan government in 1954 to protect the United Fruit Co. Not until the Bay of Pigs operation to oust Fidel Castro in Cuba was Dulles sacked for his shenanigans, and then only because he had failed. During the 1960s, the CIA tried repeatedly to assassinate Castro. It plotted to kill Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1960. And in Vietnam, the agency’s Phoenix program was responsible for brutal actions against suspected Viet Cong in South Vietnamese hamlets.

During the 1975-76 hearings held by Idaho Democrat Sen. Frank Church’s Select Committee on Intelligence, the CIA’s darkest secrets were disclosed to an incredulous nation. Reforms grew out of the hearings, including a ban on the CIA’s involvement in assassinations and domestic spying. Jimmy Carter’s CIA chief, Adm. Stansfield Turner, went further. He sacked many covert action analysts and turned to an emphasis on using what is known as national-technical means of verification. In other words, the CIA shifted to greater reliance on high-tech gadgets and analysis, devoting fewer resources to cultivating sources and on-the-ground observations. But while the reforms may have eliminated some of the agency’s most flagrant abuses, they did little to improve its performance.

On the eve of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the CIA was producing documents stating that East German industrial production exceeded West Germany’s. Nor did the CIA have any inkling that the Soviet Union was about to collapse. The West was about to achieve the ultimate victory, but the CIA--created to help achieve that victory--was AWOL. Matters did not improve in the 1990s. Under the Clinton administration’s CIA Director John M. Deutch, an MIT academic, the emphasis on satellites and listening devices only increased. Almost nothing was done to cultivate human intelligence sources.

No one would argue that the CIA should stop relying on technology. But it desperately needs to refocus its energies on understanding foreign cultures and languages. The red thread that runs through the CIA’s failures is an American arrogance of power that assumes military power and technological wizardry alone can reshape the world in our image. The truth is that the CIA has never paid much attention to the environment in which it was operating. According to Thomas Powers, who has written extensively about the CIA, it had no agent inside the government in Hanoi, nor did it ever have a spy in the North Korean government. It has never had a high-level spy in the Saudi Arabian government. But, even more than penetrating governments, the CIA needs to do painstaking, on-the-ground intelligence work. Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA operative, wrote last year in the Atlantic magazine that the CIA has done next to nothing to penetrate the Arab world on the ground. Instead, officers remain cooped up in embassies and are ignorant of local languages. The Bush administration will be hard pressed to make the necessary changes, given that the current president’s father helped shape the agency that exists today.

But the danger is that the CIA will continue to use the war on terrorism to head off calls for any real reform. The worst possible lesson that the CIA could take from Afghanistan is that it needs to focus again on covert military action. If the CIA is to combat terrorism, it needs to break with its past.