Safe for democracy, p.80
Safe for Democracy, page 80
But the handling of the cutback was abysmal. Turner allowed himself to be convinced that CIA would avoid legal liability by simply serving up pink slips rather than graciously commending officers’ service, which might furnish grounds to question the personnel actions. Retirements were dictated by edict. Personnel officers went through their files and culled the oldest and the bottom 5 percent of performers, the latter by taking the lowest-ranked officers within their grade levels. The old hands were the most numerous (92 percent of those let go were over age forty), with the most experience and usually at least one language. Some young officers were victimized. At least one, dismissed from a European station, hired Mitchell Rogovin (back in private practice), showed that his rankings had been based on differences with a station chief who wrote his efficiency reports, and was eventually rehired to avoid the lawsuit he threatened.
Inexperienced at Langley, the admiral did not know he had been set up. Turner’s strategy gained the DCI no friends and alienated the clandestine service. President Carter could not miss the torrent of complaints reflected in media reporting. He asked Pennsylvania governor William Scranton to look into the CIA personnel mess. Scranton gave Admiral Turner a pass. That did not stop officers from blaming him. Many would agree with the DO’s Floyd Paseman who writes, “Our collection capability was decimated.” Turner would argue it had been improved. Some sided with him. Tom Gilligan, who had served both in stations and undercover, believes that “Turner’s decision to make the cuts evenly from top to bottom made more sense than the plan proposed by [DO] management.” Turner himself, in retrospect, believes he should have done the same as George Bush—nothing—and passed the problem on.
The cutback issue played out over years. So did an unsavory scandal over former DO officer Edwin P. Wilson that began a few weeks after Turner became DCI. The Wilson scandal added to criticisms of the admiral, who felt obliged in the course of it to replace DDCI Hank Knocke and discipline Ted Shackley, a Wilson associate, as well as fire a couple of other officers. That did not add to his luster.
Then there is the denouement of the Helms affair. Admiral Turner found Helms very defensive when they met. Little wonder. The forces that had stalled the Justice Department in this matter were eroding. Prosecutors had impaneled a grand jury late in 1976. As Carter took office, Helms was told he was a target of the inquiry. The secret document issue persisted into the fall of 1977—the CIA had turned over sixty documents to Justice, but they could not be given to the grand jury until declassified, and Bush had stalled that. There is no evidence whether Turner had a direct role, but the Helms indictment went forward in September. That November Helms pleaded no contest to two counts of perjury. Declared guilty, he received a suspended sentence and a fine, collected from former comrades in cash donations one afternoon at a country club lunch. No matter Turner’s role, he could not but suffer as CIA veterans bristled at the treatment meted out to Helms.
It is to Director Turner’s credit that he persisted and did what he could to make the community responsive and responsible. In the DO, Turner brought forward John N. McMahon, whose background lay in technical intelligence. On a temporary assignment in charge of the intelligence community staff, he impressed the DCI so much that in 1978 Turner had McMahon replace Bill Wells. Everywhere Turner sought to manage the colossus. Clandestine service gadfly Duane Clarridge, never slow to criticize weakness, credits Turner with trying to transform the DDO into the lead manager of a directorate, leaving behind his traditional role as “nominal ‘chief spy.’ ” McMahon as DDO played his own part, among other things reinvigorating field training for operations officers at Camp Peary and personally selecting graduates’ assignments. Admiral Turner conceded in later interviews that he had not paid as much attention to the DO as the service wanted, but he certainly had not ignored it. Still, the former DCI recalls, “Being confident that the organization was not out of control was not the same as feeling that it was adequately under control.”
As for congressional oversight, Stansfield Turner felt it a positive benefit to the CIA—a view decidedly unconventional at that time. He strongly resisted prior notification of covert operations to Congress. He also advocated restricting reporting to the intelligence committees and adopted harsh strictures against leaks. Most of this Congress yielded with the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, passed as an amendment to the fiscal 1981 budget, repealing Hughes-Ryan. Congress did insist on being “fully and currently informed,” and got some definition of elements that belonged in a proper finding. Senators who wanted a comprehensive intelligence charter gave up.
As one of his policy review initiatives, President Carter ordered a study of intelligence, completed in February 1977. Although it centered on resource allocation and the responsiveness to the president and other consumers, the review gave some attention to covert operations. The chief consequence was an expression of interest in developing a new standard doctrine, but the paper saw procedures for controlling action as adequate. The Carter review also observed that the procedures, not only maintained, might “perhaps [be] put into statute.” The administration’s willingness to concede on this issue remained untested.
Meanwhile the DO stayed in business. Leery of covert operations as Carter may have been, his national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski demanded action. Robert M. Gates served during this period successively as CIA analyst, special assistant to Turner, and NSC staff director for intelligence. Gates dealt with both Brzezinski and his deputy, David Aaron. He recalls, “The most frequent criticism of CIA that I heard . . . was its lack of enthusiasm for covert action and its lack of imagination and boldness in implementing the President’s ‘findings.’ ” Preoccupied with his duties as manager of the intelligence community as a whole, Admiral Turner left the covert action role to his deputy Frank Carlucci.
Within two months of his arrival at the White House Brzezinski, who had a major interest in nationality questions as an avenue to the breakup of the Soviet Union, had already begun insisting on new propaganda efforts to reach into Russia. These White House demands were slow to gather momentum, in part because Brzezinski first tried to work through CIA’s Soviet/East European Division, whose expertise lay in running spies. Richard F. Stolz headed the division at the time, and he not only numbered among the anointed spy chiefs but had several successful espionage penetrations against the Russians active at that time.
Once Brzezinski connected with the Covert Action Staff, propaganda projects began to move. Paul Henze, seconded from CIA to the NSC staff to help Brzezinski on intelligence, had an extensive background in propaganda and political action and helped refine these programs. Underground literature that Soviet dissidents knew as samizdat received a boost from CIA xerox machines. Russian exiles in Western Europe and elsewhere got help from the agency for more formal publishing efforts. Toward the end of 1977 the agency established that the Russians were running their own propaganda operation to stoke up anti-nuclear opposition in Western Europe. Langley worked to expose Moscow’s activity through British journalists and others.
Findings were also approved for operations against a pro-Cuban government in Grenada, a political action in Jamaica, and actions in Nicaragua and El Salvador as those governments faced Marxist guerrilla movements. Some of these findings occasioned strong objections when they were described to the oversight committees in Congress, but there is no recorded instance in which a covert action was called off due to such complaints. In late 1979 President Carter signed a finding authorizing the CIA to block Cuban activities throughout Latin America.
Turner wanted capability in reserve and wished to avoid squandering it on insignificant moves. He preferred highly directed operations, such as one mounted in an East African country to recover certain equipment from a downed aircraft. Carlucci has been especially identified with a paramilitary venture in concert with the British and, for the first time, Saudi Arabia, that began in South Yemen in February 1979 when that country attacked North Yemen. Turner is reported to have thought this project ridiculous, but others forged ahead. Vice President Walter Mondale, formerly a senator and a member of the Church Committee, supported the effort. The CIA recruited several dozen Yemenis and formed two strike teams, one of which ended up in Yemeni prisons, the other withdrawn. Secret warriors terminated the operation at that point. The United States also sent $390 million in military aid to North Yemen and eventually helped broker an uneasy unification of the two states in 1990.
By 1980 the pendulum had swung from restraining the “rogue elephant” to “unleashing” the CIA. International events as well as public opinion account for much of the impetus for the shift. Four developments especially affected the debate over the role of covert operations and controls over them: the advent of human rights as a foreign policy focus, the rising incidence of terrorism, the fall of the Shah of Iran, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Human rights, the enshrinement of which proved to be Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy legacy, at first appears antithetical to covert action, indeed not a policy issue at all. Certainly many at the time resisted thinking of human rights abroad as a policy goal or issue. But in fact the goal could easily be manipulated to cloak cynical aims, as Zbigniew Brzezinski did with his effort to destabilize Russia through its nationalities. The succeeding Reagan administration would be especially adept at this exercise, used to justify covert action.
The rise of terrorism, on which the Carter administration took a hard line, led to renewed attention to military special warfare forces. This ended the post-Vietnam doldrums of Special Forces. These had fallen to only 3,600 in three groups, all deployed in the United States, with detachments in Europe and the Far East plus a battalion in Panama. Reserve and National Guard units assumed the bulk of the special warfare mission, with a force level of 5,800. Anti-terrorism provided a new rationale, much as counterinsurgency had under Kennedy. With the support of chief of staff Gen. Edward C. “Shy” Meyer, the army formed two elite commando units, Blue Light and Delta. These initiatives received personal attention from Brzezinski.
The third development was the fall of the Shah of Iran—what followed in its wake. Policymakers and intelligence analysts either refused to recognize the shah’s growing vulnerability or could not agree on what to do. Carter at one point complained to Turner, Brzezinski, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance about the poor quality of political intelligence he received. Similarly, more detailed criticism emerged from a House intelligence committee study, repeated extensively in the press and by opinion leaders.
The Iranian crisis of 1978–1980 ended by calling into question U.S. special warfare capability. Diplomats were unable to preserve friendly relations with the Islamic Republic under the Ayatollah Khomeini. As already recounted, Iranian militants took over the U.S. embassy on November 4, 1979. National security adviser Brzezinski ordered preparation of a rescue mission. Secretary of State Vance strongly resisted a resort to force. In Teheran the militants released thirteen black and women hostages, and later they freed one man, Richard Queen, who had contracted multiple sclerosis during captivity. Otherwise diplomatic efforts were of no avail. On January 29, 1980, when the Canadians smuggled six Americans out of their embassy in Teheran, Director Turner gave no prior notice to the intelligence committees, who were briefed hours after the Americans were out of the country. That pushing at the envelope of newly established congressional oversight, allowed to pass at the time, became characteristic of the system.
The losses at Desert One, the failed helicopter rescue mission, obliged Carter, through Secretary of Defense Harold Brown and the Joint Chiefs, to reveal the existence of Operation Eagle Claw. The Carter administration faced ridicule from many quarters. Cyrus Vance, who perhaps had earned the right to criticize, remained charitably silent. Nevertheless Carter continued to maintain a military option as part of his search for a way out of the hostage crisis.
Gen. James Vaught continued leading the joint task force, which prepared a larger-scale plan, Honey Badger. Vaught had some of the best covert operations people around. His air commander, Brig. Gen. Richard V. Secord, had worked on supplies to the Kurds, been a sparkplug in Laos, and had special operations experience going back to “Jungle Jim.” Secord had also been air advisory group boss in Iran from 1975 to 1978. Vaught’s chief operations planner, Col. Robert C. Dutton, held three Distinguished Flying Crosses for his exploits flying out of Thailand in the Vietnam War. Dutton had served under Secord in Iran. The joint task force staff worked in unison. Individual will and a desire to get the hostages out overcame Pentagon politics, in this case the services’ demands that each be part of the task force.
Some criticisms of Eagle Claw centered on inadequate planning. There had not been enough helicopters; the requirement to use a “unit” precluded a Pentagon-wide search for the best pilots; the many exercises had never included a complete rehearsal of all phases of the operation. Honey Badger was to correct these deficiencies. Even worse than before, however, the problem was intelligence. The Iranians dispersed the hostages and redoubled their vigilance. In desperation and in hope, the United States turned to expatriate Iranians, who flocked to volunteer their contacts. One who did this was Albert Hakim, to the extent of putting his Multitech Corporation, which still functioned in Teheran, at the disposal of the Americans. The degree to which Iranian exiles considered this patriotic may be gauged from the fact that Hakim went to General Secord after having been turned down by him for lucrative business contracts. Now Secord put Hakim in touch with air force intelligence.
A flood of reports came from Hakim and the other sources. General Secord remembers hundreds. But no one ever pinned down the hostage locations because there was no way to check the reports (and because the Iranians began moving the hostages around Teheran, keeping them in small groups). Uncertainty continued, with the joint task force in constant consultation with the CIA. In October 1980 Langley suddenly announced it had new information, presenting an elaborate briefing. Secord called this the “Eureka” briefing because of the abrupt claim that CIA had all the answers—this might just be someone’s wild idea. Joint task force intelligence had no information to corroborate Langley’s view. General Secord actually escalated this dispute up the chain of command to the White House, where Carter policymakers were reminded of the insoluble intelligence problems of the rescue option.
By comparison, the military side was in much better shape. The Honey Badger force stood ready from August 1980. Whenever there was fair consensus on the intelligence picture, Dutton and the operations staff put together a new plan. General Vaught’s forces conducted at least six major exercises rehearsing successive versions of Honey Badger. The secret warriors also made a start toward filling the void of in-place assets with the army’s formation of a Foreign Operations Group (FOG), a unit to facilitate deep-cover missions, soon renamed the Intelligence Support Activity. Air force HH-53 helicopters, with better avionics to navigate through sandstorms, were substituted for the navy craft used in Eagle Claw.
As preparations continued, costs mounted. Honey Badger was of such importance, however, that General Vaught spent the money and only then went to the services to tell each how much it owed. They intended to go to Congress later to seek a supplemental appropriation. But Honey Badger never went down. Instead diplomatic prospects improved, an accommodation was arranged, and after 444 days of captivity the Americans were released on January 20, 1981. Subsequent debriefing of the hostages by joint task force intelligence showed that the “Eureka” data had indeed been mistaken.
Fiasco in the Iran hostage crisis crystallized opinion on the need to strengthen special warfare capabilities. As Stansfield Turner put it, “The talent necessary for covert action is available in the CIA and it must be preserved.” The military wanted capability at the Pentagon.
At this juncture, as Washington began to resurrect covert action, another international development intervened, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Langley, already involved in a minor key, immediately prepared plans for operations and gave prior notice to the congressional committees. The first known Hill briefings on this subject took place on January 9, 1980. Langley’s representatives were Frank Carlucci and John N. McMahon, the director of operations. The secret warriors were back in the saddle.
* In fact, Kissinger’s difficulties on nuclear arms control derived from a set of problems that had little to do with Angola: differences over the coverage of specific weapons systems, fears of compliance, a decline in political support related to Kissinger’s own overselling of his achievements, Soviet intransigence over Jewish emigration, Kissinger’s struggles with the Pentagon over what U.S. weapons systems should be constrained, and general suspicions of the Soviet Union. Angola had a role in distrust of the Soviets, but a small one compared to other issues. The counterfactual here—that Moscow would have agreed to nuclear weapons limits if only it had looked like the CIA was winning in Angola—is so absurd it clearly demonstrates the emptiness of this argument.
19
The Mountains of Allah
EVERYTHING IS TRIBAL. Tribes and clans exist not just as ethnic or national groupings, like the tribes of Afghanistan or Iraq, but by self-selection. The Central Intelligence Agency itself is a collection of clans. Alan D. Fiers, Jr., an agency Middle East specialist, put the thought well in a 1991 appearance before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “The CIA is a family,” Fiers declared, and went on: “The DO particularly is a family . . . the DO is like—is broken down into clans: the Middle East clan, the Latin American clan, the Far East clan, the European-Soviet clan. . . . The bonds of mutual experience aren’t there outside the clan.” Fiers ran into trouble during the Reagan years, and there are differing opinions on him among the tribes at Langley and outside them, but his description of the social texture rings true.
