Part 2: The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence....The Clandestine Theory ...The CIA and the Intelligence Community

The CIA and the 
Cult of Intelligence
By Victor Marchetti 
and John D. Marks
TWO: 

The Clandestine Theory 

For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational arm and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. 

—PRESIDENT HARRY S. TRUMAN 

December 1963 

"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people." Henry Kissinger made that statement not in public, but at a secret White House meeting on June 27, 1970. The country he was referring to was Chile. 

In his capacity as Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, Kissinger was chairman of a meeting of the so-called 40 Committee, an interdepartmental panel responsible for overseeing the CIA's high-risk covert-action operations. The 40 Committee's members are the Director of Central Intelligence, the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (At the time of the Chilean meeting, Attorney General John Mitchell was also a member.) It is this small group of bureaucrats and politicians—in close consultation with the President and the governmental departments the men represent—that directs America's secret foreign policy. 

On that Saturday in June 1970, the main topic before the 40 Committee was: What, if any, secret actions should be taken to prevent the election of Salvador Allende? The Chilean election was scheduled for the following September, and Allende, a declared Marxist, was one of the principal candidates. Although Allende had pledged to maintain the democratic system if he was elected, the U.S. ambassador to Chile Edward Korry, predicted dire consequences in the event of an Allende victory. Korry feared Allende would lead his country into the Communist bloc, and thus he strongly favored CIA intervention to make sure that Chile did not become another Cuba. 

Most of the American companies with large investments in Chile were also fearful of a possible Allende triumph, and at least two of those companies, the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT) and Anaconda Copper, were spending substantial sums of money to prevent his election. 

Ambassador Korry's superiors at the State Department in Washington opposed the idea of CIA intervention. They believed that the interests of the United States would best be served if events in Chile were allowed to follow their natural course. They hoped that Allende would not win, but they opposed active—even if secret—American intervention against him. To try to manipulate the Chilean electoral processes, believed the State group led by Assistant Secretary for Latin America Charles Meyer, would likely succeed only in making matters worse and further tarnishing America's image in Latin America. 

Richard Helms, then director of the CIA, represented a somewhat divided Agency. On the one hand, the 40 Committee was that day considering plans for covert intervention which had been drawn up by the Agency's Clandestine Services;[1] and like the American ambassador, the CIA's principal representative in Chile strongly supported covert action to keep Allende out of office. But, on the other hand, there was a lack of confidence among senior CIA officials that secret agency funding and propaganda would have the desired effect. They were concerned that a large influx of CIA money might lead to discovery of the agency's role by the Chilean press— perhaps with help from the Soviet KGB—or by American reporters, and that such disclosures would only help Allende. 

Helms' position at the 40 Committee meeting was influenced by memories of the Chilean presidential election of 1964. At that time he had been chief of the Clandestine Services and had been actively involved in planning the CIA's secret efforts to defeat Allende, who was then running against Eduardo Frei.[2] Frei had won the Presidency, but now, six years later, he was constitutionally forbidden to succeed himself, and Allende's candidacy therefore seemed stronger than before. 

Anti-American feeling had grown in Chile since 1964, and one reason was widespread resentment of U.S. interference in Chile's internal affairs. The Chilean leftist press had been full of charges of CIA involvement in the 1964 elections, and these reports had not been without effect on the electorate. Additionally, in 1965 the exposure of the Pentagon's ill advised Project Camelot had further damaged the reputation of the U.S. government. Ironically, Chile was not one of the principal target countries of the Camelot project, a multimillion-dollar social-science research study of possible counterinsurgency techniques in Latin America. But the existence of Camelot had first been made public in Chile, and newspapers there—of all political stripes—condemned the study as "intervention" and "imperialism." One paper said, in prose typical of the general reaction, that Project Camelot was "intended to investigate the military and political situation prevailing in Chile and to determine the possibility of an anti-democratic coup." Politicians of both President Frei's Christian Democratic Party and Allende's leftist coalition protested publicly. The final result was to cause Washington to cancel first Camelot's limited activities in Chile, and then the project as a whole. While the CIA had not been a sponsor of Camelot, the project added to the fears among Chileans of covert American intelligence activities. 

In 1968 the CIA's own Board of National Estimates, after carefully studying the socio-political problems of Latin America, had produced a National Intelligence Estimate on that region for the U.S. government's planners and policy-makers. The central conclusion had been that forces for change in the developing Latin nations were so powerful as to be beyond outside manipulation. This estimate had been endorsed by the Intelligence Board, whose members include the heads of the government's various intelligence agencies, and had then been sent to the White House and to those departments that were represented on the 40 Committee. 

The 1968 estimate had in effect urged against the kind of intervention that the 40 Committee was in 1970 considering with regard to Chile. But as is so often the case within the government, the most careful advance analysis based on all the intelligence available was either ignored or simply rejected when the time came to make a decision on a specific issue. ( DELETED ) Henry Kissinger, the single most powerful man at the 40 Committee meeting on Chile, clearly wanted to intervene. Kissinger was also concerned about the need for absolute secrecy and the near impossibility of hiding massive American involvement. He, too, knew that discovery would work to Allende's advantage. So at Kissinger's urging, the 40 Committee agreed that the CIA would carry out a relatively modest $400,000 program of secret propaganda and support for Allende's opponents. While CIA men and money would be brought into play to prevent an Allende victory, there would be no repeat of the agency's massive effort to fix the election in 1964. Within the next few days, President Nixon endorsed the 40 Committee's decision, and the American ambassador and the CIA chief of station in Chile were notified to start the covert propaganda programs. 

Ambassador Korry reacted to the go-ahead from Washington by sending a cable back to Assistant Secretary Meyer through "Roger," a communication channel, which, at least in theory, only the State Department could decipher. Korry knew that Meyer had actively opposed his recommendation for intervention, and Korry stated in the cable that he would not begin the anti-Allende campaign without the direct approval of Meyer, his nominal superior. Since the decision to intervene had been approved by the President of the United States... Meyer was forced to send a message back to Korry stating that his own views were irrelevant since "higher authority" had given its blessing to the project. 

In keeping with the guidelines set down by the 40 Committee and approved by the President, four hundred thousand dollars were made available from the CIA director's secret contingency fund and earmarked for the Chilean election operation. The agency's chief of station in Santiago, working with the close cooperation of Ambassador Korry, put the money and his undercover agents to work in a last-minute propaganda effort to thwart the rise of Allende to the Presidency. But despite the CIA's covert action program, Salvador Allende received a plurality in the September 1970 popular vote.

During the next two months, before Allende was officially endorsed as President by the Chilean congress, the CIA and Ambassador Korry, with White House approval, tried desperately to prevent the Marxist from taking office. Attempts were made to undercut Allende through continued propaganda, by encouraging a military coup d'etat, and by trying to enlist the support of private U.S. firms, namely ITT, in a scheme to sabotage Chile's economy. None of the secret actions, however, proved successful. 

Some months afterward President Nixon disingenuously explained at a White House press conference: "As far as what happened in Chile is concerned, we can only say that for the United States to have intervened in a free election and to have turned it around, I think, would have had repercussions all around Latin America that would have been far worse than what happened in Chile." 

The following year, in the fall of 1972, CIA Director Helms, while giving a rare public lecture at the Johns Hopkins University, was asked by a student if the CIA had mucked about in the 1970 Chilean election. His response: "Why should you care? Your side won." 

Helms was understandably perturbed. Columnist Jack Anderson had only recently reported "the ITT story," which among other things revealed that the CIA had indeed been involved in an effort to undo Allende's victory—even after he had won the popular vote. Much to the agency's chagrin, Anderson had shown that during September and October 1970, William Broe, chief of the Western Hemisphere Division of the CIA's Clandestine Services, had met several times with high officials of ITT to discuss ways to prevent Allende from taking office. (The ITT board member who later admitted to a Senate investigative committee that he had played the key role in bringing together CIA and ITT officials was John McCone, director of the CIA during the Kennedy administration and, in 1970, a CIA consultant.) Broe had proposed to ITT and a few other American corporations with substantial financial interests in Chile a four-part plan of economic sabotage which was calculated to weaken the local economy to the point where the Chilean military authorities would move to take over the government and thus frustrate the Marxist's rise to power. 

ITT and the other firms later claimed they had found the CIA's scheme "not workable." But almost three years to the day after Allende's election, at a time when severe inflation, truckers' strikes, food shortages, and international credit problems were plaguing Chile, he was overthrown and killed in a bloody coup d'etat carried out by the combined action of the Chilean armed services and national police. His Marxist government was replaced by a military junta. What role American businesses or the CIA may have played in the coup is not publicly known, and may never be. 

ITT and the other giant corporations with investments in Chile have all denied any involvement in the military revolt. So has the U.S. government, although CIA Director William Colby admitted in secret testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee (revealed by Tad Szulc in the October 21, 1973, Washington Post) that the agency "had some intelligence coverage about the various moves being made," that it had "penetrated" all of Chile's major political parties, and that it had secretly furnished "some assistance" to certain Chilean groups. 

Colby, himself the former director of the bloody Phoenix counterintelligence program in Vietnam, also told the Congressmen that the executions carried out by the junta after the coup had done "some good" because they reduced the chances that civil war would break out in Chile—an excellent example of the sophistry with which the CIA defends its strategy of promoting "stability" in the Third World. 

Even if the CIA did not intervene directly in the final putsch, the U.S. government as a whole did take a series of actions designed to undercut the Allende regime. Henry Kissinger set the tone of the official U.S. position at a background press conference in September 1970, when he said that Allende's Marxist regime would contaminate Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru —a stretch of the geopolitical imagination reminiscent of the Southeast Asian domino theory. Another measure of the White House attitude—and an indication of the methods it was willing to use—was the burglarizing of the Chilean embassy in Washington in May 1972 by some of the same men who the next month staged the break-in at the Watergate. And the U.S. admittedly worked to undercut the Allende government by cutting off most economic assistance, discouraging private lines of credit, and blocking loans by international organizations. 

State Department officials testifying before Congress after the coup explained it was the Nixon administration's wish that the Allende regime collapse economically, thereby discrediting socialism. Henry Kissinger has dismissed speculation among journalists and members of Congress that the CIA helped along this economic collapse and then engineered Allende's downfall; privately he has said that the secret agency wasn't competent to manage an operation as difficult as the Chilean coup. Kissinger had already been supervising the CIA's most secret operations for more than four years when he made this disparaging remark. Whether he was telling the truth about the CIA's noninvolvement in Chile or was simply indulging in a bit of official lying (called "plausible denial"), he along with the President would have made the crucial decisions on the Chilean situation. 

For the CIA is not an independent agency in the broad sense of the term, nor is it a governmental agency out of control. Despite occasional dreams of grandeur on the part of some of its clandestine operators, the CIA does not on its own choose to overthrow distasteful governments or determine which dictatorial regimes to support. Just as the State Department might seek, at the President's request, to discourage international aid institutions from offering loans to "unfriendly" governments, so does the CIA act primarily when called upon by the Executive. The agency's methods and assets are a resource that comes with the office of the Presidency. 

Thus, harnessing the agency's clandestine operators is not the full, or even basic, solution to the CIA problem. The key to the solution is controlling and requiring accountability of those in the White House and elsewhere in the government who direct or approve, then hide behind, the CIA and its covert operations. This elusiveness, more than anything else, is the problem posed by the CIA. 

Intelligence versus Covert Action 

The primary and proper purpose of any national intelligence organization is to produce "finished intelligence" for the government's policy-makers. Such intelligence, as opposed to the raw information acquired through espionage and other clandestine means, is data collected from all sources—secret, official, and open—which has been carefully collated and analyzed by substantive experts specifically to meet the needs of the national leadership. 

The process is difficult, time-consuming, and by no means without error. But it is the only prudent alternative to naked reliance on the unreliable reporting of spies. Most intelligence agencies, however, are nothing more than secret services, more fascinated by the clandestine operations—of which espionage is but one aspect— than they are concerned with the production of "finished intelligence." The CIA, unfortunately, is no exception to this rule. Tactics that require the employment of well-placed agents, the use of money, the mustering of mercenary armies, and a variety of other covert methods designed to influence directly the policies (or determine the life-spans) of foreign governments—such are the tactics that have come to dominate the CIA. This aspect of the modern intelligence business—intervention in the affairs of other countries—is known at the agency as covert action. 

The United States began engaging in covert-action operations in a major way during World War II. Taking lessons from the more experienced British secret services, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) learned to use covert action as an offensive weapon against Germany and Japan. When the war ended, President Truman disbanded the oss on the grounds that such wartime tactics as paramilitary operations, psychological warfare, and political manipulation were not acceptable when the country was at peace. At the same time, however, Truman recognized the need for a permanent organization to coordinate and analyze all the intelligence available to the various governmental departments. He believed that if there had been such an agency within the U.S. government in 1941, it would have been "difficult, if not impossible" for the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor successfully. 

It was, therefore, with "coordination of information" in mind that Truman proposed the creation of the CIA in 1947. Leading the opposition to Truman's "limited" view of intelligence, Allen Dulles stated, in a memorandum prepared for the Senate Armed Services Committee, that "Intelligence work in time of peace will require other techniques, other personnel, and will have rather different objectives .... We must deal with the problem of conflicting ideologies as democracy faces communism, not only in the relations between Soviet Russia and the countries of the west but in the internal political conflicts with the countries of Europe, Asia, and South America." It was Dulles—to become CIA director six years later—who contributed to the eventual law the clause enabling the agency to carry out "such other functions and duties related to intelligence as the National Security Council may from time to time direct." It was to be the fulcrum of the CIA's power. 

Although fifteen years later Truman would claim that he had not intended the CIA to become the covert-action arm of the U.S. government, it was he who, in 1948, authorized the first postwar covert-action programs, although he did not at first assign the responsibility to the CIA. Instead he created a largely separate organization called the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), and named a former OSS man, Frank G. Wisner, Jr., to be its chief. Truman did not go to Congress for authority to form OPC. He did it with a stroke of the presidential pen, by issuing a secret National Security Council Intelligence directive, NSC 10/2. (The CIA provided OPC with cover and support, but Wisner reported directly to the secretaries of State and Defense.) Two years later, when General Walter Bedell Smith became CIA director, he moved to consolidate all major elements of national intelligence under his direct control. As part of this effort, he sought to bring Wisner's operations into the CIA. Truman eventually concurred, and on January 4, 1951, OPC and the Office of Special Operations (a similar semi-independent organization established in 1948 for covert intelligence collection) were merged into the CIA, forming the Directorate of Plans or, as it became known in the agency, the Clandestine Services. Allen Dulles was appointed first chief of the Clandestine Services; Frank Wisner was his deputy. 

With its newly formed Clandestine Services and its involvement in the Korean War, the agency expanded rapidly. From less than 5,000 employees in 1950, the CIA grew to about 15,000 by 1955—and recruited thousands more as contract employees and foreign agents. During these years the agency spent well over a billion dollars to strengthen non-communist governments in Western Europe, to subsidize political parties around the world, to found Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty for propaganda broadcasts to Eastern Europe, to make guerrilla raids into mainland China, to create the Asia Foundation, to overthrow leftist governments in Guatemala and Iran, and to carry out a host of other covert-action programs. 

While the agency considered most of its programs to have been successful, there were more than a few failures. Two notable examples were attempts in the late 1940s to establish guerrilla movements in Albania and in the Ukraine, in keeping with the then current national obsession of "rolling back the Iron Curtain." Almost none of the agents, funds, and equipment infiltrated by the agency into those two countries was ever seen or heard from again. 

In the early 1950s another blunder occurred when the CIA tried to set up a vast underground apparatus in Poland for espionage and, ultimately, revolutionary purposes. The operation was supported by millions of dollars in agency gold shipped into Poland in installments. Agents inside Poland, using radio broadcasts and secret writing techniques, maintained regular contact with their CIA case officers in West Germany. In fact, the agents continually asked that additional agents and gold be sent to aid the movement. Occasionally an agent would even slip out of Poland to report on the operation's progress—and ask for still more agents and gold. It took the agency several years to learn that the Polish secret service had almost from the first day co-opted the whole network, and that no real CIA underground operation existed in Poland. The Polish service kept the operation going only to lure anti-communist Polish emigres back home—and into prison. And in the process the Poles were able to bilk the CIA of millions of dollars in gold. 

One reason, perhaps the most important, that the agency tended from its very beginnings to concentrate largely on covert-action operations was the fact that in the area of traditional espionage (the collection of intelligence through spies) the CIA was able to accomplish little against the principal enemy, the Soviet Union. With its closed society, the U.S.S.R. proved virtually impenetrable. The few American intelligence officers entering the country were severely limited in their movements and closely followed. The Soviet Union's all-pervasive internal security system made the recruitment of agents and the running of clandestine operations next to impossible. Similar difficulties were experienced by the CIA in Eastern Europe, but to a lesser degree. The agency's operators could recruit agents somewhat more easily there, but strict security measures and efficient secret-police establishments still greatly limited successes. 

Nevertheless, there were occasional espionage coups, such as the time CIA operators found an Eastern European communist official able to provide them with a copy of Khrushchev's 1956 deStalinization speech, which the agency then arranged to have published in the New York Times. Or, from time to time, a highly knowledgeable defector would bolt to the West and give the agency valuable information. Such defectors, of course, usually crossed over of their own volition, and not because of any ingenious methods used by CIA. A former chief of the agency's Clandestine Services, Richard Bissell, admitted years later in a secret discussion with selected members of the Council on Foreign Relations: "In practice however espionage has been disappointing.... The general conclusion is that against the Soviet bloc or other sophisticated societies, espionage is not a primary source of intelligence, although it has had occasional brilliant successes."[3] 

It had been Bissell and his boss Allen Dulles who by the mid-1950s had come to realize that if secret agents could not do the job, new ways would have to be found to collect intelligence on the U.S.S.R. and the other communist countries. Increasingly, the CIA turned to machines to perform its espionage mission. By the end of the decade, the agency had developed the U-2 spy plane. This high-altitude aircraft, loaded with cameras and electronic listening devices, brought back a wealth of information about Soviet defenses and weapons. Even more important was communications intelligence (COMINT), electronic transmissions monitored at a cost of billions of dollars by the Defense Department's National Security Agency (NSA). 

Both Bissell and Dulles, however, believed that the successful use of human assets was at the heart of the intelligence craft. Thus, it was clear to them that if the Clandestine Services were to survive in the age of modern technical espionage, the agency's operators would have to expand their covert-action operations— particularly in the internal affairs of countries where the agency could operate clandestinely.

In the immediate postwar years, CIA covert-action programs had been concentrated in Europe, as communist expansion into Western Europe seemed a real threat. The Red Army had already occupied Eastern Europe, and the war-ravaged countries of the West, then trying to rebuild shattered economies, were particularly vulnerable. Consequently, the CIA subsidized political parties, individual leaders, labor unions, and other groups, especially in West Germany, France, and Italy. It also supported Eastern European emigre groups in the West as part of a program to organize resistance in the communist countries. "There were so many CIA projects at the height of the Cold War," wrote columnist Tom Braden in January 1973, "that it was almost impossible for a man to keep them in balance." Braden spoke from the vantage point of having himself been the CIA division chief in charge of many of these programs. By the end of the 1950s, however, pro-American governments had become firmly established in Western Europe, and the U.S. government, in effect, had given up the idea of "rolling back the Iron Curtain." 

Thus, the emphasis within the Clandestine Services shifted toward the Third World. This change reflected to a certain extent the CIA's bureaucratic need as a secret agency to find areas where it could be successful. More important, the shift came as a result of a hardened determination that the United States should protect the rest of the world from communism. A cornerstone of that policy was secret intervention in the internal affairs of countries particularly susceptible to socialist movements, either democratic or revolutionary. Years later, in a letter to Washington Post correspondent Chalmers Roberts, Allen Dulles summed up the prevailing attitude of the times. Referring to the CIA's coups in Iran and Guatemala, he wrote: "Where there begins to be evidence that a country is slipping and Communist takeover is threatened ... we can't wait for an engraved invitation to come and give aid." 

The agency's orientation toward covert action was quite obvious to young officers taking operational training during the mid-1950s at "The Farm," the CIA's West Point, located near Williamsburg, Virginia, and operated under the cover of a military base called Camp Peary. Most of the methods and techniques taught there at that time applied to covert action rather than traditional espionage, and to a great extent training was oriented toward such paramilitary activities as infiltration/exfiltration, demolitions, and nighttime parachute jumps. Agency officers, at the end of their formal clandestine education, found that most of the job openings were on the Covert Action Staff and in the Special Operations Division (the CIA's paramilitary component). Assignments to Europe became less coveted, and even veterans with European experience were transferring to posts in the emerging nations, especially in the Far East. 

The countries making up the Third World offered far more tempting targets for covert action than those in Europe. These nations, underdeveloped and often corrupt, seemed made to order for the clandestine operators of the CIA, Richard Bissell told the Council on Foreign Relations: "Simply because [their] governments are much less highly organized there is less security consciousness; and there is apt to be more actual or potential diffusion of power among parties, localities, organizations, and individuals outside the central government." And in the frequent power struggles within such governments, all factions are grateful for outside assistance. Relatively small sums of money, whether delivered directly to local forces or deposited (for their leaders) in Swiss bank accounts, can have an almost magical effect in changing volatile political loyalties. In such an atmosphere, the CIA's Clandestine Services have over the years enjoyed considerable success. 

Swashbucklers and Secret Wars 
During the 1950s most of the CIA's covert-action operations were not nearly so sophisticated or subtle as those Bissell would advocate in 1968. Nor were they aimed exclusively at the rapidly increasing and "less highly organized" governments of the Third World. Covert operations against the communist countries of Europe and Asia continued, but the emphasis was on clandestine propaganda, infiltration and manipulation of youth, labor, and cultural organizations, and the like. The more heavy-handed activities—paramilitary operations, coups, and counter coups—were now reserved for the operationally ripe nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Perhaps the prototype for CIA covert operations during the 1950s was the work of Air Force Colonel Edward Lansdale. His exploits under agency auspices, first in the Philippines and then in Vietnam, became so well known that he served as the model for characters in two best-selling novels, The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, and The Quiet American by Graham Greene. In the former, he was a heroic figure; in the latter, a bumbling fool. 

Lansdale was sent to the Philippines in the early 1950s as advisor to Philippine Defense Minister (later President) Ramon Magsaysay in the struggle against the Huks, the local communist guerrillas. Following Lansdale's counsel, Magsaysay prompted social development and land reform to win support of the peasantry away from the Huks. But Lansdale, backed up by millions of dollars in secret U.S. government funds, took the precaution of launching other, less conventional schemes. One such venture was the establishment of the Filipino Civil Affairs Office, which was made responsible for psychological warfare. 

After a 1972 interview with Lansdale, now living in quiet retirement, journalist Stanley Karnow reported: One [Lansdale-initiated] psywar operation played on the superstitious dread in the Philippine countryside of the asuang, a mythical vampire. A psywar squad entered an area, and planted rumors that an asuang lived on where the Communists were based. Two nights later, after giving the rumors time to circulate among Huk sympathizers, the psywar squad laid an ambush for the rebels. When a Huk patrol passed, the ambushers snatched the last man, punctured his neck vampire-fashion with two holes, hung his body until the blood drained out, and put the corpse back on the trail. As superstitious as any other Filipinos, the insurgents fled from the region. 

With Magsaysay's election to the Philippine Presidency in 1953, Lansdale returned to Washington. In the eyes of the U.S. government, his mission had been an unquestioned success: the threat of a communist takeover in the Philippines had been eliminated. A year later, after Vietnam had been provisionally split in two by the Geneva Accords, Lansdale was assigned to South Vietnam to bolster the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. He quickly became involved in organizing sabotage and guerrilla operations against North Vietnam, but his most effective work was done in the South. There he initiated various psychological-warfare programs and helped Diem in eliminating his political rivals. His activities, extensively described in the Pentagon Papers, extended to pacification programs, military training, even political consultation: Lansdale helped design the ballots when Diem formally ran for President of South Vietnam in 1955. He used red, the Asian good-luck color, for Diem and green—signifying a cuckold—for Diem's opponent. Diem won with an embarrassingly high 98 percent of the vote, and Lansdale was widely credited within American government circles for having carried out another successful operation. He left Vietnam soon afterward. 

Meanwhile, other agency operators, perhaps less celebrated than Lansdale, were carrying out covert action programs in other countries. Kermit Roosevelt, of the Oyster Bay Roosevelts, masterminded the 1953 putsch that overthrew Iran's Premier Mohammed Mossadegh. The Guatemala coup of 1954 was directed by the CIA. Less successful was the attempt to overthrow Indonesian President Sukarno in the late 1950s. Contrary to denials by President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles, the CIA gave direct assistance to rebel groups located on the island of Sumatra. Agency B-26s even carried out bombing missions in support of the insurgents. On May 18, 1958, the Indonesians shot down one of these B-26s and captured the pilot, an American named Allen Pope. Although U.S. government officials claimed that Pope was a "soldier of fortune," he was in fact an employee of a CIA-owned proprietary company, Civil Air Transport. Within a few months after being released from prison four years later, Pope was again flying for the CIA—this time with Southern Air Transport, an agency proprietary airline based in Miami. 

As the Eisenhower years came to an end, there still was a national consensus that the CIA was justified in taking almost any action in that "back alley" struggle against communism—this despite Eisenhower's clumsy effort to lie his way out of the U2 shootdown, which lying led to the cancellation of the 1960 summit conference. Most Americans placed the CIA on the same above-politics level as the FBI, and it was no accident that President-elect Kennedy chose to announce on the same day that both J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles would be staying on in his administration. It took the national shock resulting from the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 to bring about serious debate over CIA operations—among high government officials and the public as a whole. Not only had the CIA failed to overthrow the Castro regime, it had blundered publicly, and the U.S. government had again been caught lying. 

For the first time, widespread popular criticism was directed at the agency. And President Kennedy, who had approved the risky operation, came to realize that the CIA could be a definite liability—to both his foreign policy and his personal political fortunes—as well as a secret and private asset of the Presidency. Determined that there would be no repetition of the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy moved quickly to tighten White House control of the agency. He reportedly vowed "to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." But the President's anger was evidently more the result of the agency's failure to overthrow Castro than a reaction to its methods or techniques. While neither agency funding nor operations were cut back in the aftermath, the Bay of Pigs marked the end of what was probably the CIA's Golden Age. Never again would the secret agency have so totally free a hand in its role as the clandestine defender of American democracy. 

Kennedy never carried through on his threat to destroy the CIA, but he did purge three of the agency's top officials, and thus made clear the lines of accountability. If Allen Dulles had seemed in Kennedy's eyes only a few months earlier to be in the same unassailable category as J. Edgar Hoover, the Bay of Pigs had made him expendable. In the fall of 1961 John McCone, a defense contractor who had formerly headed the Atomic Energy Commission, replaced Dulles as CIA Director; within months Major General Marshall "Pat" Carter took over from Major General Charles Cabell as Deputy Director, and Richard Helms became chief of the Clandestine Services in place of Richard Bissell. 

Kennedy also ordered General Maxwell Taylor, then special military advisor to the President and soon to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to make a thorough study of U.S. intelligence. Taylor was joined by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Dulles, and Naval Chief Admiral Arleigh Burke. The Taylor committee's report was to a large extent a critique of the tactics used in—not the goals of—the Bay of Pigs operation. It did not call for any fundamental restructuring of the CIA, although many outside critics were urging that the agency's intelligence collection and analysis functions be completely separated from its covert-action arm. The committee's principal recommendation was that the CIA should not undertake future operations where weapons larger than hand guns would be used. 

Taylor's report was accepted, at least in principle, by the Kennedy administration, but its primary recommendation was disregarded almost immediately. CIA never shut down its two anti-Castro operations bases located in southern Florida, and into the mid1960s, albeit on a far smaller scale than the Bay of Pigs. The agency also became deeply involved in the chaotic struggle which broke out in the Congo in the early 1960s. Clandestine Service operators regularly bought and sold Congolese politicians, and the agency supplied money and arms to the supporters of Cyril Adoula and Joseph Mobutu. By 1964, the CIA had imported its own mercenaries into the Congo, and the agency's B-26 bombers, flown by Cuban exile pilots— many of whom were Bay of Pigs veterans—were carrying out regular missions against insurgent groups. 

During these same years American involvement in Vietnam expanded rapidly, and the CIA, along with the rest of the U.S. government, greatly increased the number of its personnel and programs in that country. Among other activities, the agency organized guerrilla and small-boat attacks on North Vietnam, armed and controlled tens of thousands of Vietnamese soldiers in irregular units, and set up a giant intelligence and interrogation system which reached into every South Vietnamese village. In neighboring Laos, the CIA actually led the rest of the U.S. government—at the White House's order—into a massive American commitment. 

Although the agency had been carrying out large-scale programs of political manipulation and other covert action up to 1962, that year's Geneva agreement prohibiting the presence of foreign troops in Laos paradoxically opened up the country to the CIA. For almost from the moment the agreement was signed, the Kennedy administration decided not to pull back but to expand American programs in Laos. This was justified partly because the North Vietnamese were also violating the Geneva Accords; partly because Kennedy, still smarting from his Cuban setback, did not want to lose another confrontation with the communists; and partly because of the strategic importance placed on Laos in the then fashionable "domino theory." 

Since the United States did not want to admit that it was not living up to the Geneva agreement, the CIA—whose members were not technically "foreign troops"—got the job of conducting a "secret" war. The other Lao mountain tribesmen were recruited into the CIA's private army, L'Armee Clandestine; CIA-hired pilots flew bombing and supply missions in the agency's own planes; and, finally, when L'Armee Clandestine became less effective after long years of war, the agency recruited and financed over 17,000 Thai mercenaries for its war of attrition against the communists.

By the late 1960s, however, many CIA career officers were expressing opposition to the agency's Laotian and Vietnamese programs—not because they objected to the Indochina wars (few did), but because the programs consisted for the most part of huge, unwieldy, semi-overt paramilitary operations lacking the sophistication and secrecy that most of the agency's operators preferred. Furthermore, the wars had dragged on too long, and many officers viewed them as unwinnable messes. The agency, therefore, found itself in the awkward position of being unable to attract sufficient volunteers to man the field assignments in Vietnam. Consequently, it was forced to draft personnel from other areas of its clandestine activity for service in Southeast Asia.

Covert-Action Theory 
It was in such an atmosphere of restiveness and doubt, on a January evening in 1968, that a small group of former intelligence professionals and several other members of the cult of intelligence met to discuss the role of the CIA in U.S. foreign policy, not at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, but at the Harold Pratt House on Park Avenue—the home of the Council on Foreign Relations. The discussion leader was investment banker C. Douglas Dillon, previously Under Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasury; the main speaker was Richard Bissell, the former chief of the agency's Clandestine Services, still a consultant to the CIA, and now a high-ranking executive with the United Aircraft Corporation. Like most other former agency officials, Bissell was reluctant to make his views on intelligence known to the public, and the meeting was private.  

In 1971, however, as part of an anti-war protest, radical students occupied the building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that houses Harvard University's Center for International Affairs. Once inside, the protesters proceeded to barricade the entrances and ransack the files of faculty members who worked there. Discovered among the papers belonging to Center associate William Harris were the confidential minutes of the January 8, 1968, meeting at the Pratt House. Harris admitted privately a year later that the document in his files had been partially edited to eliminate particularly sensitive material. Even so, the purloined version was still the most complete description of the CIA's covert-action strategy and tactics ever made available to the outside world. Aside from a few newspaper articles which appeared in 1971, however, when it was reprinted by the African Research Group, the Bissell paper attracted almost no interest from the American news media.

Among the CIA's senior Clandestine Services officers, Richard Bissell was one of a very few who had not spent World War II in the ass; in all other respects, he was the ideal agency professional. A product of Groton and Yale, he had impeccable Eastern Establishment credentials. Such a background was not absolutely essential to success in CIA, but it certainly helped, especially during the Allen Dulles years. And Bissell also had the advantage of scholarly training, having earned a doctorate in economics and then having taught the subject at Yale and MIT. He joined the CIA in 1954 and immediately showed a great talent for clandestine work. By 1958 Dulles had named Bissell head of the Clandestine Services.

At the beginning of the Kennedy administration, Bissell was mentioned in White House circles as the logical candidate to succeed Dulles, who was then near seventy. Brilliant and urbane, Bissell seemed to fit perfectly, in David Halberstam's phrase, the "best and the brightest" image of the New Frontier. But Bissell's popularity with the Kennedy administration was short lived, for it was Bissell's Clandestine Services which planned and carried out the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961. Bissell's operatives had not only failed, they were not even successful in inventing and maintaining a good cover story, or "plausible denial," which every covert operation is supposed to have and which might have allowed the Kennedy administration to escape the blame. Fidel Castro had told the truth to the world about American intervention in Cuba while the U.S. Secretary of State and other administration officials had been publicly caught in outright lies when their agency-supplied cover stories fell apart. So Kennedy fired the CIA officials who had got him into the Bay of Pigs, which he himself had approved; Bissell was forced out along with Dulles and Deputy Director Charles Cabell.

Bissell's replacement, Richard Helms, despite having been second in command in the Clandestine Services, had managed to stay remarkably untouched by the Bay of Pigs operation. Years later a very senior CIA official would still speak in amazement of the fact that not a single piece of paper existed in the agency which linked Helms to either the planning or the actual execution of the Bay of Pigs. This senior official was not at all critical of Helms, who had been very much involved in the overall supervision of the operation. The official simply was impressed by Helms' bureaucratic skill and good judgment in keeping his signature off the documents concerning the invasion, even in the planning stage.

Helms took over from Bissell as Clandestine Services chief on February 17, 1962, and Bissell was awarded a secret intelligence medal honoring him for his years of service to the agency. But Bissell remained in close touch with clandestine programs as a consultant; the CIA did not want to lose the services of the man who had guided the agency into some of its most advanced techniques. He had been among the first during the 1950s to understand the hopelessness of spying against the Soviets and the Chinese with classic espionage methods, and hence had pushed the use of modern technology as an intelligence tool. He had been instrumental in the development of the U-2 plane, which had been among CIA's greatest successes until the Powers incident. Bissell had also promoted, with the technical help of Kelly Johnson and the so-called Skunk Works development facilities of Lockheed Aircraft Corp., the A-II, later known as SR71, a spy plane could fly nearly three times the speed of sound at altitudes even higher than U-2's.

Moreover, Bissell had been a driving force behind the development of space satellites for intelligence purposes—at times to the embarrassment of the Air Force. He had quickly grasped the espionage potential of placing high-resolution cameras in orbit around the globe to photograph secret installations in the Soviet Union and China. And due in great part to the technical advances made by scientists and engineers working under Bissell, the CIA largely dominated the U.S. government's satellite reconnaissance programs in the late 1950s and well into the 1960s. Even today, when the Air Force has taken over most of the operational aspects of the satellite programs, the CIA is responsible for many of the research and development breakthroughs. At the same time that Bissell was sparking many of the innovations in overhead reconnaissance, he was guiding the Clandestine Services into increased emphasis on covert-action programs in the Third World. It was Bissell who developed and put into practice much of the theory and technique which became standard operating procedure in the CIA's many interventions abroad. 

Bissell spoke mainly about covert action that January night in 1968 at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and the minutes provide a virtual textbook outline of covert operations. Among his listeners were former CIA officials Allen Dulles and Robert Amory, Jr., former State Department intelligence chief Thomas Hughes, former Kennedy aide Theodore Sorensen, columnist Joseph Kraft, and fourteen others.[4] All those present were men who had spent most of their lives either in or on the fringes of the government. They could be trusted to remain discreet about what they heard. 

Speaking freely to a friendly audience, the former Clandestine Services chief said:

Covert action is attempting to influence the internal affairs of other nations—sometimes called "intervention"—by covert means. 

... the technique is essentially that of "penetration," including "penetrations" of the sort which horrify classicists of covert operations, with a disregard for the "standards" and "agent recruitment rules." Many of the "penetrations" don't take the form of "hiring" but of establishing a close or friendly relationship (which may or may not be furthered by the provision of money from time to time). 

Bissell was explaining that the CIA needs to have its own agents on the inside—i.e., "penetrations"—if it wants to finance a political party, guide the editorial policy of a newspaper, or carry off a military coup. CIA clandestine operators assigned overseas are called case officers, and they recruit and supervise the "penetrations." Their tours of duty are normally two to three years, and most serve with false titles in American embassies. Some live under what is called "deep cover" in foreign countries posing as businessmen, students, newsmen, missionaries, or other seemingly innocent American visitors.

The problem of Agency operations overseas [Bissell continued] is frequently a problem for the State Department. It tends to be true that local allies find themselves dealing always with an American and an official American—since the cover is almost invariably as a U.S. government employee. There are powerful reasons for this practice, and it will always be desirable to have some CIA personnel housed in the Embassy compound, if only for local "command post" and communications requirements.

Nonetheless, it is possible and desirable, although difficult and time-consuming, to build overseas an apparatus of unofficial cover. This would require the use or creation of private organizations, many of the personnel of which would be non-U.S. nationals, with freer entry into the local society and less implication for the official U.S. posture. 

Whatever cover the case officer has, his role is to find agents willing to work with or for the CIA. His aim is to penetrate the host government, to learn its inner workings, to manipulate it for the agency's purposes. 

But for the larger and more sensitive interventions [Bissell went on], the allies must have their own motivation. On the whole the Agency has been remarkably successful in finding individuals and instrumentalities with which and through which it could work in this fashion. Implied in the requirement for a preexisting motivation is the corollary that an attempt to induce the local ally to follow a course he does not believe in will at least reduce his effectiveness and may destroy the whole operation.

Covert action is thus an exercise in seeking out "allies" willing to cooperate with the CIA, preferably individuals who believe in the same goals as the agency; at the very least, people who can be manipulated into belief in these goals. CIA case officers must be adept at convincing people that working for the agency is in their interest, and a good case officer normally will use whatever techniques are required to recruit a prospect: appeals to patriotism and anti-communism can be reinforced with flattery, or sweetened with money and power. Cruder methods involving blackmail and coercion may also be used, but are clearly less desirable. For covert action to be most effective, the recruitment and penetration should be made long before an actual operation is scheduled. 

When the U.S. government secretly decides to provoke a coup in a particular country, it is then too late for CIA case officers to be looking for local allies. Instead, if the case officers have been performing their jobs well, they will have already built up a network of agents in that country's government, military forces, press, labor unions, and other important groups; thus there is, in effect, a standing force in scores of countries ready to serve the CIA when the need arises. In the interim, many of these agents also serve the agency by turning over intelligence obtained through their official positions. This intelligence can often be of tactical value to the CIA in determining local political power structures and calculating where covert action would be most effective. Again, Bissell: 

There is a need for continuing efforts to develop covert-action capabilities even where there is no immediate need to employ them. The central task is that of identifying potential indigenous allies—both individuals and organizations—making contact with them, and establishing the fact of a community of interest.

This process is called, in intelligence parlance, "building assets" or developing the operational apparatus. It is a standard function of all CIA clandestine stations and bases overseas. And when a case officer is transferred to a new assignment after several years in a post, he passes on his network of agents and contacts to his replacement, who will stay in touch with them as well as search out new "assets" himself. 

Depending on the size and importance of a particular country, from one to scores of CIA case officers may operate there; together, their collective "assets" may number in the hundreds. The planners of any operation will try to orchestrate the use of the available assets so as to have the maximum possible effect. Bissell:

Covert intervention is probably most effective in situations where a comprehensive effort is undertaken with a number of separate operations designed to support and complement one another and to have a cumulatively significant effect. 

In fact, once the CIA's case officers have built up their assets, whether or not the United States will intervene at all will be based in large part on a judgment of the potential effectiveness, importance, and trustworthiness of the CIA's agents or, in Bissell's word, "allies." Yet only case officers on the scene and, to a lesser extent, their immediate superiors in the United States are in a position to make this judgment, since only the CIA knows the identity of its agents. This information is not shared with outsiders by code names even in top-secret documents. Thus, while the political decision to intervene must be made in the White House, it is the CIA itself (through its Clandestine Services) which supplies the President and his advisors with much of the crucial information upon which their decision to intervene is based. 

Even if the CIA's reputation for honesty and accurate assessment were unassailable (which it is not), there would still be a built-in conflict of interest in the system: the CIA draws up the intervention plans; the CIA is the only agency with the specific knowledge to evaluate the merits and the feasibility of those plans; and the CIA is the action arm which carries out the plans once they are approved. When the CIA has its assets in place, the inclination within the agency is to recommend their use; the form of intervention recommended will reflect the type of assets which have been earlier recruited. Further, simply because the assets are available, the top officials of the U.S. government may well rely too heavily on the CIA in a real or imagined crisis situation. To these officials, including the President, covert intervention may seem to be an easier solution to a particular problem than to allow events to follow their natural course or to seek a tortuous diplomatic settlement. The temptation to interfere in another country's internal affairs can be almost irresistible, when the means are at hand. 

It is one of the contradictions of the intelligence profession, as practiced by the CIA, that the views of its substantive experts—its analysts—do not carry much weight with the clandestine operators engaging in covert action. 

The operators usually decide which operations to undertake without consulting the analysts. Even when pertinent intelligence studies and estimates are readily available, they are as often as not ignored, unless they tend to support the particular covert-action cause espoused by the operators. 

Since the days of the ass, clandestine operators—especially in the field— have distrusted the detached viewpoint of analysts not directly involved in covert action. To ensure against contact with the analysts (and to reduce interference by high-level staff members, even those in the Office of the Director) the operators usually—and to bureaucratic deceptions when developing or seeking approval of a covert-action operation. 

Thus, it is quite possible in the CIA for the intelligence analysts to say one thing, and for the covert-action officers to get the authorization to do another. Although the analysts saw little chance for a successful rebellion against President Sukarno in 1958, the Clandestine Services supported the abortive coup d'etat. 

Despite the analysts' view that Castro's government had the support of the Cuban people, the agency's operators attempted—and failed—at the Bay of Pigs to overthrow him. In spite of large doubts on the part of the analysts for years as to the efficacy of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, the CIA continued to fund these propaganda efforts until 1971, when forced by Congress to withdraw its support. 

Although the analysts clearly indicated that the wars in Laos and Vietnam were not winnable, the operational leadership of the CIA never ceased to devise and launch new programs in support of the local regimes and in the hope of somehow bringing about victory over the enemy. The analysts had warned against involvement in Latin American politics, but covert action was attempted anyway to manipulate the 1964 and 1970 Chilean presidential elections. 

In theory, the dichotomy that exists between the analytical and clandestine components of the CIA is resolved at the top of the agency. It is at the Director's level that the CIA's analytical input is supposed to be balanced against the goals and risks of the covert action operation. But it does not always, or even often, work that way. Directors like Allen Dulles and Richard Helms, both longtime clandestine operators, tended to allow their affinity for secret operations to influence their judgment. Even a remote chance of success was enough to win their approval of a covert-action proposal. The views of the analysts, if requested at all, and if they survived the bureaucratic subterfuge of the clandestine operators, were usually dismissed by the agency's leadership on the grounds that they were too vague or indecisive for the purposes of operational planning. 

Still, regardless of the preference of the Director of Central Intelligence, it is the President or his National Security Advisor who any significant covert action program undertaken by the CIA. Often in proposing such a program the agency's operators are responding solely to a presidential directive or to orders of the National Security Council. And always when a CIA covert-action proposal is submitted for approval, the plans are reviewed by the 40 Committee, the special interdepartmental group chaired by the President's National Security Advisor. Thus, the desire of the President or his advisor to move secretly to influence the internal events of another country is frequently the stimulus that either sparks the CIA into action or permits its operators to launch a dubious operation. Only then does the apparatus get into motion; only then do the analysts become meaningless. But "only then" means "almost always." 

Tactics 
In his talk at the Council on Foreign Relations, Bissell listed eight types of covert action, eight different ways that the CIA intervenes in the domestic affairs of other nations: 
(1) political advice and counsel; 
(2) subsidies to an individual; 
(3) financial support and "technical assistance" to political parties; 
(4) support of private organizations, including labor unions, business firms, cooperatives, etc.; 
(5) covert propaganda; 
(6) "private" training of individuals and exchange of persons; 
(7) economic operations; and 
(8) paramilitary [or] political action operations designed to overthrow or to support a regime (like the Bay of Pigs and the program in Laos). 

These operations can be classified in various ways: by the degree and type of secrecy required by their legality, and, perhaps, by their benign or hostile character. 

Bissell's fifth and eighth categories—covert propaganda and paramilitary operations—are so large, so important, that they The first three categories— political advice and counsel, subsidies to an individual, and financial support and technical assistance to political parties—are usually so closely related that they are nearly impossible to separate. ( DELETED ) 

The reporters who covered that affair on April 10, 1971, apparently failed to notice anything unusual about the guests. Seated in the State Dining Room at long white tables forming a large E was the usual assortment of foreign dignitaries, high U.S. government officials, and corporate executives who have become fixtures at such occasions during the Nixon years. 

The guest list supplied by the White House press office gave the titles and positions for almost all the diners. 
( DELETED ) 
years later, he was elected mayor of West Berlin. Throughout this period, 
( DELETED ) 
He was a hard-working politician in Allied-occupied Berlin, and his goal of making the Social Democratic party a viable alternative to communism 
( DELETED ) 

And that evening after dinner, singer Pearl Bailey entertained the White House crowd in the East Room. The Washington Post reported the next day that she had "rocked" the White House. 

During the same Cold War years ... the CIA ... was also secretly funding and providing technical assistance ... to the Christian Democratic party ... in Italy. Most of these payments were terminated in the 1950s, ... 

In certain countries where the CIA has been particularly active, the agency's chief of station (COS) maintains closer ties with the head of state than does the U.S. ambassador. Usually, the ambassador is kept informed of the business transacted between the COS (who is officially subordinate to the ambassador) and the head of state (to whom the ambassador is officially accredited as the personal representative of the President of the United States). But Bissell mentioned cases in which the CIA's relationship with the local head of state was so special that the American ambassador was not informed of any of the details, because either the Secretary of State or the head of the host government preferred that the ambassador be kept ignorant of the relationships. A notable example of such a "special relationship" is Iran, where a CIA organized coup d'etat restored the Shah to power in 1953.... 

Still another example of a country where the CIA enjoys a special relationship is Nationalist China. In Taiwan, however, the CIA's link is not with President Chiang Kai-shek, but with his son and heir apparent, Premier Chiang Ching-kuo. One former CIA chief of station, Ray Cline, until late 1973 the State Department's Director of Intelligence and Research, became something of a legend within the Clandestine Services because of his frequent all-night drinking bouts with the younger Chiang. Over the years, the CIA closely collaborated with the Nationalists ... to use Taiwan as a base for U-2 flights (flown over China by Nationalist pilots trained in the United States), electronic surveillance ... and such covert action programs as propaganda and disinformation aimed at China during the Cultural Revolution. 

In South Vietnam, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker insisted on personally conducting all important meetings with President Thieu; sometimes Bunker was accompanied by the CIA chief when there was agency business to be discussed. But there has been another CIA officer in Saigon who has known Thieu for many years and who has retained access to the Vietnamese President. According to a former assistant to Ambassador Bunker, this CIA officer has served as conduit between Thieu and the American government when a formal meeting is not desired or when Thieu wishes to float an idea. ( DELETED ) Each man has been thought by the agency to represent a strong anticommunist force that would maintain stability in a potentially volatile country. 

Generally speaking, the CIA's ties with foreign political leaders who receive advice and money from the agency are extremely delicate. The CIA is interested in moving the leader and, through him, his party and country into policies to the advantage of the United States. In most countries of the Third World, the United States policy is usually to maintain the status quo, so most subsidies are designed to strengthen the political base of those in power.[This is wrong on so many levels it disgusts me to live in a country that lives to keep its neighbors down in it's own hemisphere.DC] 

The foreign leader who receives money from the CIA is typically furthering both his own career and, presumably, what he believes are the legitimate aims of his country. But even that presumption is shaky; any politician's ability to rationalize his actions probably increases once he has made the decision to accept such funds. Extensive CIA involvement with private institutions at home and overseas (Bissell's fourth category of covert-action tactics) is one of the few aspects of the agency's covert-action effort to have received a good deal of public attention. 

The 1967 expose by Ramparts magazine of the CIA's clandestine connections with the National Student Association was quickly followed by a flurry of articles in the press concerning agency subsidies to scores of other organizations. Some of these institutions, particularly those used as conduits for covert funds, were under direct CIA control. Others simply were financed by the agency and steered toward policies that it favored through the manipulation of only a few of the organization's key personnel. Sam Brown, a former head of the National Student Association's National Supervisory Policy Board and later a leader in the 1968 McCarthy campaign and in the anti-war movement, told David Wise and Thomas B. Ross that in the case of the NSA, the CIA would select one or two association officers as its contacts. 

These officers were told that they should be aware of certain secrets and were asked to sign an oath pledging silence. "Then," Brown said, they were told, 

"You are employed by the CIA." At that point they were trapped, having signed a statement not to divulge anything .... This is the part of the thing that I found to be most disgusting and horrible. People were duped into this relationship with the CIA, a relationship from which there was no out. 

Not all the student leaders recruited over the years by the CIA, however, were displeased with the arrangement. Some later joined the agency formally as clandestine operatives, and one rose to become executive assistant to Director Richard Helms. It was this same man who sometimes posed as an official of the Agency for International Development to entrap unsuspecting NSA officers, revealing his "cover" only after extracting pledges of secrecy and even NSA commitments to cooperate with specific CIA programs. Tom Braden, who headed the CIA's International Organizations Division from 1950 to 1954 when that component of the Clandestine Services was responsible for subsidizing private organizations, described his own experiences in a 1967 Saturday Evening Post article entitled "I'm Glad the CIA Is 'Immoral'": 

It was my idea to give the $15,000 to Irving Brown [of the American Federation of Labor). He needed it to pay off his strong-arm squads in Mediterranean ports, so that American supplies could be unloaded against the opposition of Communist dock workers .... At [Victor Reuther's] request, I went to Detroit one morning and gave Walter [Reuther] $50,000 in $50 bills. Victor spent the money, mostly in West Germany, to bolster labor unions there ....

I remember the enormous joy I got when the Boston Symphony Orchestra won more acclaim for the U.S. in Paris than John Foster Dulles or Dwight D. Eisenhower could have bought with a hundred speeches. And then there was Encounter, the magazine published in England and dedicated to the proposition that cultural achievement and political freedom were interdependent. Money for both the orchestra's tour and the magazine's publication came from the CIA, and few outside of the CIA knew about it. We had placed one agent in a Europe-based organization of intellectuals called the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Another agent became an editor of Encounter. The agents could not only propose antiCommunist programs to the official leaders of the organizations but they could also suggest ways and means to solve the inevitable budgetary problems. Why not see if the needed money could be obtained from "American foundations"? As the agents knew, the CIA financed foundations were quite generous when it came to the national interest. 

The CIA's culture-loving, optimistic, freewheeling operators, however, made serious tactical errors in funding these "private" institutions. Over the years, the agency became involved with so many groups that direct supervision and accounting were not always possible. Moreover, the agency violated a fundamental rule of intelligence in not carefully separating the operations of each organization from all the others. Thus, when the first disclosures of CIA involvement were published early in 1967, enterprising journalists found that the financing arrangements and the conduit foundations were so intertwined and overused that still other groups which had been receiving CIA funds could be tracked down. Bissell acknowledged this sloppiness of technique when he said, " ... it is very clear that we should have had greater compartmenting of operations." 

In the aftermath of the disclosures, President Johnson appointed a special committee consisting of Under Secretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach as chairman, CIA Director Richard Helms, and HEW Secretary John Gardner to study the CIA's relationship with private organizations. On March 29, 1967, the committee unanimously recommended—and the President accepted as the national policy—that "No federal agency shall provide any covert financial assistance or support, direct or indirect, to any of the nation's educational or private voluntary organizations." The report said that exceptions to this policy might be granted in case of "overriding national security interests," but that no organizations then being subsidized fitted this category. 

The Katzenbach committee noted that it expected the CIA largely, if not entirely, to terminate its ties with private organizations by the end of 1967. Yet, a year later Richard Bissell told the Council on Foreign Relations: 

If the Agency is to be effective, it will have to make use of private institutions on an expanding scale, though those relations which have "blown" cannot be resurrected. We need to operate under deeper cover, with increased attention to the use of "cut-outs" (i.e., intermediaries). CIA's interface with the rest of the world needs to be better protected. If various groups hadn't been aware of the source of their funding, the damage subsequent to disclosure might have been far less than occurred. The CIA interface with various private groups, including business and student groups, must be remedied. 

Bissell's comments seemed to be in direct contradiction to the official U.S. government policy established by the President. But Bissell, no longer a CIA officer, wasn't challenging presidential authority, and his audience understood that, just as it understood what, indeed, the Katzenbach committee had recommended. Bissell was merely reflecting the general view within the CIA and the cult of intelligence that President Johnson had been pressured by liberals and the press into taking some action to reduce the agency's involvement with private groups; that by naming Katzenbach (then considered by the CIA to be a "friend") as chairman of the committee and by making CIA Director Helms the second of its three members, the President was stacking the deck in the CIA's favor; that the agency certainly could be criticized for its lack of professional skill in so sloppily funding the private groups; but that, essentially, the President did not wish to change appreciably the CIA's covert-action programs. 

Once the Katzenbach report appeared, the CIA arranged secret exceptions to the much-heralded new policy. Two CIA broadcasting stations, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which together received more than $30 million annually in CIA funds, were immediately placed outside the restrictions of the presidential order. And the CIA delayed withdrawing its support for other organizations whose agency ties had been exposed until new forms of financing them could be developed. Thus, as late as 1970 the CIA was still subsidizing a major international youth organization through a penetration who was one of the organization's officers. In some cases, "severance payments" were made that could keep an organization afloat for years. 

Although the CIA had been widely funding foreign labor unions for more than fifteen years and some of the agency's labor activities were revealed in Tom Braden's Saturday Evening Post article, the Katzenbach committee did not specify unions as the type of organizations the CIA was barred from financing. At the 1968 Council on Foreign Relations meeting at which Bissell spoke, Meyer Bernstein, the Steelworkers Union's Director of International Labor Affairs, commented: 

the turn of events has been unexpected. First, there hasn't been any real problem with international labor programs. Indeed, there has been an increase in demand for U.S. labor programs and the strain on our capacity has been embarrassing. Formerly, these foreign labor unions knew we were short of funds, but now they all assume we have secret CIA money, and they ask for more help. 

Worse yet, Vic Reuther, who had been alleging that others were receiving CIA money, and whose brother's receipt of $50,000 from CIA in old bills was subsequently disclosed by Tom Braden, still goes on with his charges that the AFL-CIO has taken CIA money. Here again, no one seems to listen. "The net result has been as close to zero as possible. We've come to accept CIA, like sin." So, for example, British Guiana's [Guyana] labor unions were supported through CIA conduits, but now they ask for more assistance than before. So, our expectations to the contrary, there has been almost no damage. 

In Vietnam, enthusiastic officials of the U.S. embassy in Saigon were fond of saying during the late 1960s that Tran Ngoc Buu was the Samuel Gompers of the Vietnamese labor movement. They did not say —and most probably did not know—( DELETED ) Bissell also identified" 'private' training of individuals and exchange of persons" as a form of covert action: 

Often activities have been initiated through CIA channels because they could be started more quickly and informally but do not inherently need to be secret. An example might be certain exchange-of-persons programs designed to identify potential political leaders and give them some exposure to the United States. It should be noted, however, that many such innocent programs are more effective if carried out by private auspices than if supported officially by the United States Government. They do not need to be covert but if legitimate private entities such as the foundations do not initiate them, there may be no way to get them done except by covert support to "front" organizations. 

He was referring to the so-called people-to-people exchange programs, most of which are funded openly by the State Department, the Agency for International Development, the U.S. Information Agency, and various private organizations and foundations. But the CIA has also been involved to a lesser extent, and has brought foreigners to the United States with funds secretly supplied to conduit organizations. On occasion, the agency will sponsor the training of foreign officials at the facilities of another government agency. 

A favorite site is AID's International Police Academy in Washington. The academy is operated by AID's Public Safety (police) Division, which regularly supplies cover to CIA operators all over the world. And the CIA takes advantage of exchange programs to recruit agents. While a systematic approach is not followed, the agency considers foreigners visiting the United States to be legitimate targets for recruitment. 

The CIA has undertaken comparatively few economic covert-action programs (Bissell's seventh category) over the years, preferring the more direct approach of paramilitary operations or propaganda. And those economic programs attempted by the agency have not been notably successful. During the mid-1960s Japanese investors were used in an effort to build up the South Vietnamese economy, because American companies tended to shy away from making substantial investments in Vietnam. The U.S. government hoped that the Japanese would fill the void at least partially, and eventually lighten U.S. aid requirements. Thus, CIA representatives promised certain Japanese businessmen that the agency would supply the investment capital if the Japanese would front for the operation and supply the technical expertise for large commercial farms. After long and detailed negotiations, the deal faltered and then failed. 

A few years earlier the CIA had tried to disrupt Cuba's sugar trade as part of its program to undercut Fidel Castro's regime. At one point the Clandestine Services operatives proposed that the CIA purchase large amounts of sugar and then dump it in a certain foreign country so as to destroy the market for Cuban sugar. This plan also fell through, but a more serious attack on Cuban sugar occurred in August 1962 when a British freighter under lease to the Soviets docked in Puerto Rico for repairs. The freighter, carrying Cuban sugar destined for the Soviet Union, was placed in a bonded warehouse while the ship was in dry dock. CIA agents broke into the warehouse and contaminated the sugar with a nonpoisonous but unpalatable substance. 

As pointed out earlier, one of the advantages a secret agency like the CIA provides to a President is the unique pretext of being able to disclaim responsibility for its actions. Thus, a President can direct or approve high-risk clandestine operations such as a manned overflight of the Soviet Union on the eve of a summit conference, a Bay of Pigs invasion, penetration and manipulation of private youth, labor, or cultural organizations, paramilitary adventures in Southeast Asia, or intervention in the domestic politics of Chile without openly accepting the consequences of these decisions. If the clandestine operations are successful—good. If they fail or backfire, then usually all the President and his staff need do to avoid culpability is to blame the CIA. 

In no instance has a President of the United States ever made a serious attempt to review or revamp the covert practices of the CIA. Minor alterations in operational methods and techniques have been carried out, but no basic changes in policy or practice have ever been demanded by the White House. And this is not surprising: Presidents like the CIA. It does their dirty work—work that might not otherwise be "doable." When the agency fails or blunders, all the President need do is to deny, scold, or threaten. For the CIA's part, being the focus of presidential blame is an occupational hazard, but one hardly worth worrying about. It is merely an aspect of the cover behind which the agency operates. Like the other aspects of cover, it is part of a deception. 

The CIA fully realizes that it is too important to the government and the American political aristocracy for any President to do more than tinker with it. The CIA shrugs off its blunders and  The CIA shrugs off its blunders and proceeds to devise new operations, secure in the knowledge that the White House usually cannot resist it's offerings, particularly covert actions, covert action, that dominates, that determines, that defines the shape and purpose of the CIA. America's leaders have not yet reached the point where they are willing to forsake intervention in the internal affairs of other countries and let events naturally run their course. There is still a widely held belief in this country that America has the right and the responsibility to become involved in the internal political processes of foreign nations, and while faith in this belief and that of doctrinaire anti-communism may have been somewhat shaken in the last decade it was Henry Kissinger, who in 1970 when confronted with the prospect of a democratically elected Marxist president in Chile, still reacted by seeking covert ways to prevent such a development. In doing so he expressed the view of the cult of intelligence by announcing, " I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of it's own people.

THREE: 

The CIA and the 

Intelligence Community 

It is the task of the Director of Central Intelligence, utilizing his influence in the various interdepartmental mechanisms, to create out of these diverse components a truly national estimate, useful to the national interest and not just to a particular bureaucratic preference. This is not an easy task. 

—HARRY HOWE RANSOM 

The Intelligence Establishment 

THE CIA is big, very big. Officially, it has authorized manpower of 16,500, and an authorized budget of $750 million—and even those figures are jealously guarded, generally made available only to Congress. Yet, regardless of its official size and cost, the agency is far larger and more affluent than these figures indicate. The CIA itself does not even know how many people work for it. The 16,500 figure does not reflect the tens of thousands who serve under contract (mercenaries, agents, consultants, etc.) or who work for the agency's proprietary companies.[1] 

Past efforts to total up the number of foreign agents have never resulted in precise figures because of the inordinate secrecy and compartmentalization practiced by the Clandestine Services. Sloppy record-keeping often deliberate on the part of the operators "for security purposes"—is also a factor. There are onetime agents hired for specific missions, contract agents who serve for extended periods of time, and career agents who spend their entire working lives secretly employed by the CIA. 

In some instances, contract agents are retained long after their usefulness has passed, but usually are known only to the case officers with whom they deal. One of the Watergate burglars, Eugenio Martinez, was in this category. When he was caught inside the Watergate on that day in June 1972, he still was receiving a $100-a-month stipend from the agency for work apparently unrelated to his covert assignment for the Committee to Re-Elect the President. The CIA claims to have since dropped him from the payroll. A good chunk of the agency's annual operational funds, called "project money," is wasted in this fashion. Payments to no-longer-productive agents are justified on several grounds: the need to maintain secrecy about their operations even though these occurred years ago; the vague hope that such agents will again prove to be useful (operators are always reluctant to give up an asset, even a useless one), and the claim that the agency has a commitment to its old allies—a phenomenon known in the CIA as "emotional attachment." 

It is the last justification that carries the most weight within the agency. Thus, hundreds— perhaps thousands—of former Cuban, East European, and other minor clandestine agents are still on the CIA payroll, at an annual cost to the taxpayers of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars a year. 

All mercenaries and many field operations officers used in CIA paramilitary activities are also contractees and, therefore, are not reflected in the agency's authorized manpower level. The records kept on these soldiers of fortune are at best only gross approximations. In Laos and Vietnam, for example, the Clandestine Services had a fairly clear idea of how many local tribesmen were in its pay, but the operators were never quite certain of the total number of mercenaries they were financing through the agency's numerous support programs, some of which were fronted for by the Department of Defense, the Agency for International Development, and, of course, the CIA proprietary, Air America. 

Private individuals under contract to—or in confidential contact with—the agency for a wide variety of tasks other than soldiering or spying are also left out of the personnel totals, and complete records of their employment are not kept in any single place.[2] 

In 1967, however, when the CIA's role on American campuses was under close scrutiny because of the embarrassing National Student Association revelations, Helms asked his staff to find out just how many university personnel were under secret contract to the CIA. After a few days of investigation, senior CIA officers reported back that they could not find the answer. Helms immediately ordered a full study of the situation, and after more than a month of searching records all over the agency, a report was handed in to Helms listing hundreds of professors and administrators on over a hundred campuses. But the staff officers who compiled the report knew that their work was incomplete. Within weeks, another campus connection was exposed in the press. The contact was not on the list that had been compiled for the director. 

Just as difficult as adding up the number of agency contractees is the task of figuring out how many people work for its proprietaries. CIA headquarters, for instance, has never been able to compute exactly the number of planes flown by the airlines it owns, and personnel figures for the proprietaries are similarly imprecise. An agency holding company, the Pacific Corporation, including Air America and Air Asia, alone accounts for almost 20,000 people, more than the entire workforce of the parent CIA. For years this vast activity was dominated and controlled by one contract agent, George Doole, who later was elevated to the rank of a career officer. Even then his operation was supervised, part time, by only a single senior officer who lamented that he did not know "what the hell was going on." 

Well aware that the agency is two or three times as large as it appears to be, the CIA's leadership has consistently sought to downplay its size. During the directorship of Richard Helms, when the agency had a career personnel ceiling of 18,000, CIA administrative officers were careful to hold the employee totals to 200 or 300 people below the authorized complement. Even at the height of the Vietnam War, while most national-security agencies were increasing their number of employees, the CIA handled its increased needs through secret contracts, thus giving a deceptive impression of personnel leanness. Other bureaucratic gambits were used in a similar way to keep the agency below the 18,000 ceiling. Senior officers were often rehired on contract immediately after they retired and started to draw government pensions. Overseas, agency wives were often put on contract to perform secretarial duties.

Size and cost of the CIA

[Approximate]

                                       Personal      $Millions 
Office of the Director                 400               10

Clandestine Services               6000             400
(Directorate of Operations)

Espionage/CounterEsp.)         4200             180
Covert Action                           1800             220

Directorate of Management
and Services                            5300              110

Communications                     2000               70
Other Support                          3300               40

Directorate of Intelligence      3500               70

Analysis                                   1200                50
Information Processing          2300                20

Directorate of Science
and Technology                      1300              120

Technical Collection               1000                50
Research & Dev.                        300                70      

Total                                       16,500*           7500**
*Nearly 5,000 CIA personnel serve overseas, the majority (60-70 percent) being members of the Clandestine Services. Of the remainder, most are communications officers and other operational support personnel. 
**Does not include the Director's Special Contingency Fund. 

Just as the personnel figure is deceptive, so does the budget figure not account for a great part of the CIA's campaign chest. The agency's proprietaries are often money-making enterprises, and thus provide "free" services to the parent organization. The prime examples of this phenomenon are the airlines (Air America, Air Asia, and others) organized under the CIA holding company, the Pacific Corporation, which have grown bigger than the CIA itself by conducting as much private business as possible and continually reinvesting the profits. These companies generate revenues in the tens of millions of dollars each year, but the figures are imprecise because detailed accounting of their activities is not normally required by agency bookkeepers. For all practical purposes, the proprietaries conduct their own financial affairs with a minimum of oversight from CIA headquarters. 

Only when a proprietary is in need of funds for, say, expansion of its fleet of planes does it request agency money. Otherwise, it is free to use its profits in any way it sees fit. In this atmosphere, the proprietaries tend to take on lives of their own, and several have grown too big and too independent to be either controlled from or dissolved by headquarters. 

Similarly, the CIA's annual budget does not show the Pentagon's annual contribution to the agency, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, to fund certain major technical espionage programs and some particularly expensive clandestine activities. For example, the CIA's Science and Technology Directorate has an annual budget of only a little more than $100 million, but it actually spends well over $500 million a year. 

The difference is funded largely by the Air Force, which underwrites the national overhead reconnaissance effort for the entire U.S. intelligence community. Moreover, the Clandestine Services waged a "secret" war in Laos for more than a decade at an annual cost to the government of approximately $500 million. Yet, the CIA itself financed less than 10 percent of this amount each year. The bulk of the expense was paid for by other federal agencies, mostly the Defense Department but also the Agency for International Development. 

Fully aware of these additional sources of revenue, the CIA's chief of planning and programming reverently observed a few years ago that the director does not operate a mere multimillion-dollar agency but actually runs a multibillion-dollar conglomerate—with virtually no outside oversight. 

In terms of financial assets, the CIA is not only more affluent than its official annual budget reflects, it is one of the few federal agencies that have no shortage of funds. In fact, the CIA has more money to spend than it needs. 

Since its creation in 1947, the agency has ended almost every fiscal year with a surplus—which it takes great pains to hide from possible discovery by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) or by the congressional oversight subcommittees. The risk of discovery is not high, however, since both the OMB and the subcommittees are usually friendly and indulgent when dealing with the CIA. Yet, each year the agency's bookkeepers, at the direction of the organization's top leadership, transfer the excess funds to the accounts of the CIA's major components with the understanding that the money will be kept available if requested by the director's office. 

This practice of squirreling away these extra dollars would seem particularly unnecessary because the agency always has some $50 to $100 million on call for unanticipated costs in a special account called the Director's Contingency Fund. 

The Director's Contingency Fund was authorized by a piece of legislation which is unique in the American system. Under the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949, the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) was granted the privilege of expending funds "without regard to the provisions of law and regulations relating to the expenditure of Government funds; and for objects of confidential, extraordinary, or emergency nature, such expenditures to be accounted for solely on the certificate of the Director...." 

In the past, the Fund ( DELETED ) But there have been times when the fund has been used for the highly questionable purpose of paying expenses incurred by other agencies of the government. In 1967 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara promised Norwegian officials that the U.S. government would provide them with some new air defense equipment costing several million dollars. 

McNamara subsequently learned the equipment was not available in the Pentagon's inventories and would have to be specially purchased for delivery to Norway. He was also informed that, because of the high cost of the Vietnam War (for which the Defense Department was then seeking a supplemental appropriation from Congress), funds to procure the air defense equipment were not immediately at hand. 

Further complications arose from the fact that the Secretary was then engaged in a disagreement with some members of Congress over the issue of foreign military aid. It was therefore decided not to openly request the funds for the small but potentially sticky commitment to the Norwegians. Instead, the Pentagon asked the CIA (with White House approval) to supply the money needed for the purchase of air defense equipment. The funds were secretly transferred to the Defense ( DELETED ) 

That same year President Johnson traveled to Punta del Este, a posh resort in Uruguay, for a meeting of the Organization of American States. He entertained the attending foreign leaders in a lavish manner which he apparently thought befitted the President of the United States, and he freely dispensed expensive gifts and souvenirs. In the process, LBJ greatly exceeded the representational allowance that the State Department had set aside for the conference. When the department found itself in the embarrassing position of being unable to cover the President's bills because of its tight budget (due in part to the economies LBJ had been demanding of the federal bureaucracy to help pay for the war in Vietnam), it was reluctant to seek additional funds from Congress. 

Representative John Rooney of Brooklyn, who almost single-handedly controlled State's appropriations, had for years been a strong critic of representational funds (called the "booze allowance") for America's diplomats. Rather than face Rooney's wrath, State turned to the CIA, and the Director's Contingency Fund was used to pay for the President's fling at Punta del Este. 

For some reason—perhaps because of the general view in the CIA that its operations are above the law —the agency has tended to play fiscal games that other government departments would not dare engage in. 

One example concerns the agency's use of its employee retirement fund, certain agent and contract personnel escrow accounts, and the CIA credit union's capital, to play the stock market. With the approval of the top CIA leadership, a small group of senior agency officers has for years secretly supervised the management of these funds and invested them in stocks, hoping to turn a greater profit than normally would be earned through the Treasury Department's traditional low-interest but safe bank deposits and bond issues. 

Originally, the investment group, consisting of CIA economists, accountants, and lawyers, dealt with an established Boston brokerage house, which made the final investment decisions. But several years ago the Boston brokers proved too conservative to suit the agency investors, some of whom were making fatter profits with their personal portfolios. The CIA group decided it could do much better by picking its own stocks, so the brokerage house was reduced to doing only the actual stock trading (still with a handsome commission, of course). Within a matter of months the agency investors were earning bigger profits than ever before. Presumably, the gains were plowed back into the retirement, escrow, and credit union funds.[3] 

In 1968, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, then the chairman of the Senate joint subcommittee for overseeing the CIA's activities, privately informed Director Helms that because of increasing skepticism among certain Senators about the agency operations, it probably would be a good idea for the CIA to arrange to have its financial procedures reviewed by an independent authority. Thus, in Russell's view, potential Senate critics who might be considering making an issue of the agency's special fiscal privileges would be undercut in advance. Senator Russell suggested the names of a few private individuals who might be willing to undertake such a task on behalf of the CIA. 

After conferring with his senior officers, Helms chose to ask Wilfred McNeil, at that time the president of Grace Shipping Lines ( DELETED ) to serve as the confidential reviewer of the agency's budgetary practices. McNeil, a former admiral and once comptroller for the Defense Department, was thought by Helms to be ideally suited, politically and otherwise, for the assignment. McNeil accepted the task and soon came to CIA headquarters for a full briefing on the agency's most sensitive financial procedures— including an account of the methods used for purchasing and laundering currency on the international black market. He was told of the CIA's new planning, programming, and budgeting system, modeled after the innovations Robert McNamara had introduced at the Defense Department. 

Agency experts explained to McNeil how funds for new operations were authorized within the agency. He learned that the agency maintained a sliding-scale system for the approval of new projects or the periodic renewal of ongoing ones; that espionage operations costing up to $10,000 could be okayed by operators in the field; and that progressively more expensive operations necessitated branch, division, and Clandestine Services chief approval until, finally, operations costing over $100,000 were authorized personally by the Director. McNeil also was briefed on the agency's internal auditing system to prevent field operatives from misusing secret funds. 

McNeil's reaction to his long and detailed briefing was to express surprise at the scope of the CIA's financial system and to praise the accounting practices used. When asked where and when he would like to begin his work in depth, he politely demurred and departed—never to return. A month or so later a CIA officer working in the Director's office learned that McNeil had had certain misgivings about the project and had sought the advice of former agency Director William Raborn, who had his own doubts about the reliability of the CIA's top career officers. 

Raborn had apparently discouraged McNeil from becoming involved in such a review. But as far as the CIA was concerned, Senator Russell's request for an independent audit had been carried out, since the agency's fiscal practices had been looked over by a qualified outsider and found to be in no need of improvement. The whole matter was then dropped. 

Organization 
The CIA is neatly organized into five distinct parts, a relatively small office of the Director and four functional directorates, the largest of which is the Directorate of Operations (known inside the agency as the Clandestine Services). The executive suite houses the CIA's only two political appointees, the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) and the Deputy Director (DDCI), and their immediate staffs. Included organizationally, but not physically, in the Office of the Director are two components that assist the DCI in his role as head of the U.S. intelligence community. One is a small group of senior analysts, drawn from the CIA and the other agencies of the community, which prepares the "blue books," or National Intelligence Estimates, on such subjects as Soviet strategic defense capabilities, Chinese long-range missile developments, and the political outlook for Chile.[4] 

The other is the Intelligence Resources Advisory Committee, a group created in 1971, which provides staff assistance to the Director in his efforts to manage and streamline the $6-billion intelligence community. The Intelligence Resources Advisory Committee, long a dream of those officers who believe the U.S. intelligence community to be too big and inefficient, has thus far proven to be something of a nightmare. Instead of eliminating wasteful and redundant activities within US intelligence, it has been turned into a vehicle for the military intelligence agencies to justify and expand overly ambitious collection programs. Likewise, the recent revamping of the Board of National Estimates, under present Director William Colby, has been characterized by some experienced hands as a " sellout" to Pentagon power, caused in part  by the political pressures of Henry Kissinger's National Security Staff.

Under Colby  the board has been greatly reduced in both prestige and independence, and has been brought under the stifling influence of military men whose first allegiance is to their parent services rather than to the production of objective, balanced intelligence assessments for the policy-makers. The other components of the Office of the Director include those traditionally found in governmental bureaucracies: press officers, congressional liaison, legal counsel, and so on. Only two merit special note: the Cable Secretariat and the Historical Staff. 

The former was established in 1950 at the insistence of the Director, General Walter Bedell Smith. When Smith, an experienced military staff officer, learned that agency communications, especially those between headquarters and the covert field stations and bases, were controlled by the Clandestine Services, he immediately demanded a change in the system. "The operators are not going to decide what secret information I will see or not see," he is reported to have said. Thus, the Cable Secretariat, or message center, was put under the Director's immediate authority. Since then, however, the operators have found other ways, when it is thought necessary, of keeping their most sensitive communications from going outside the Clandestine Services. 

The Historical Staff represents one of the CIA's more clever attempts to maintain the secrecy on which the organization thrives. Several years ago the agency began to invite retiring officers to spend an additional year or two with the agency—on contract, at regular pay—writing their official memoirs. The product of their effort is, of course, highly classified and tightly restricted. In the agency's eyes, this is far better than having former officers openly publish what really happened during their careers with the CIA. 

The largest of the agency's four directorates is the Directorate of Operations, or the Clandestine Services, which has about 6,000 professionals and clericals. 

The ratio between professionals, mostly operations officers, and clericals, largely secretaries, is roughly two to one. 

Approximately 45 percent of the Clandestine Services personnel is stationed overseas, the vast majority using official cover, i.e., posing as representatives of the State or Defense Department. 

About two out of three of the people in the Clandestine Services are engaged in general intelligence activities—liaison, espionage, and counterespionage—the remainder concentrating on various forms of covert action. 

Yet despite the smaller number of personnel working on covert action, these interventions in the internal affairs of other countries cost about half again as much as spying and counterspying ($260 million v. $180 million annually). 

The greater expense for covert action is explained by the high costs of paying for paramilitary operations and subsidizing political parties, labor unions, and other international groups. 

The Clandestine Services is broken down into fifteen separate components, but its actual operating patterns do not follow the neat lines of an organizational chart. 

Exceptions are the rule. 

Certain clandestine activities which would seem to an outsider to be logically the responsibility of one component are often carried out by another—

because of political sensitivity, 

because of an assumed need for even greater secrecy than usual, 

because of bureaucratic compartmentalization, or simply because things have always been done that way. 

The bulk of the Clandestine Services' personnel, about 4,800 people, work in the so-called area divisions, both at headquarters and overseas. 

These divisions correspond roughly to the State Department's geographic bureaus, a logical breakdown, since most CIA operators in foreign countries work under State cover. 

The largest area division is the Far East (with about 1,500 people), followed in order of descending size by 
Europe (Western Europe only), 
Western Hemisphere (Latin America plus Canada), 
Near East, Soviet Bloc (Eastern Europe), and 
Africa (with only 300 staff). 

The chain of command goes from the head of the Clandestine Services to the chiefs of the area divisions, then overseas to the chiefs of stations (COS) and their chiefs of bases (COB). 

The CIA's stations and bases around the world serve as the principal headquarters of covert activity in the country in which each is located. 

The station is usually housed in the U.S. embassy in the capital city, while bases are in other major cities or sometimes on American or foreign military bases. 

For example, in West Germany, the CIA's largest site for operations, the station is located in Bonn; the chief of station is on the staff of the American ambassador. There are subordinate bases in ( DELETED ) and a few other cities, along with several bases under American military cover scattered throughout the German countryside. 

The Domestic Operations Division of Clandestine Services is, in essence, an area division, but it conducts its mysterious clandestine activities in the United States, not overseas. 

Its chief—like the other area—division chiefs, the civilian equivalent of a two- or three-star general—works out of an office in downtown Washington, within two blocks of the White House. 

Under the Washington station are bases located in other major American cities. 

Also in the Clandestine Services are three staffs, Foreign Intelligence (espionage), 
Counterintelligence (counterespionage), 
and Covert Action, which oversee operational policy in their respective specialties and provide assistance to the area divisions and the field elements. 

For instance, in an operation to plant a slanted news story in a Chilean newspaper, propaganda experts on the Covert Action Staff might devise an article in cooperation with the Chilean desk of the Western Hemisphere Division. 

A CIA proprietary, like ( DELETED ) might be used to write and transmit the story to Chile so it would not be directly attributable to the agency, and then a clandestine operator working out of the American embassy in Santiago might work through one of his penetration agents in the local press to ensure that the article is reprinted. 

While most CIA operations abroad are carried out through the area divisions, the operational staffs, particularly the Covert Action Staff, also conduct independent activities. 

The Special Operations Division is something of a hybrid between the area divisions and the operational staffs. 

Its main function is to provide the assets for paramilitary operations, largely the contracted manpower (mercenaries or military men on loan), the materiel, and the expertise to get the job done. 

Its operations, however, are organizationally under the station chief in the country where they are located. 

The remaining three components of the Clandestine Services provide technical assistance to the operational components. These three are: 

The Missions and Programs Staff, which does much of the bureaucratic planning and budgeting for the Clandestine Services and which writes up the justification for covert operations submitted for approval to the 40 Committee. 

The Operational Services Division, which among other things sets up cover arrangements for clandestine officers.

The Technical Services Division, which produces in its own laboratories the gimmicks of the spy trade—the disguises, miniature cameras, tape recorders, secret writing kits, and the like. 

The Directorate of Management and Services (formerly the Directorate of Support) is the CIA's administrative and housekeeping part. 

However, most of its budget and personnel is devoted to assisting the Clandestine Services in carrying out covert operations. (This directorate is sometimes referred to within the agency as the Clandestine Services' "slave" directorate.) 

Various forms of support are also provided to the Directorate of Intelligence and the Directorate of Science and Technology, but the needs of these two components for anything beyond routine administrative tasks are generally minimal. 

Covert operations, however, require a large support effort, and the M&S Directorate, in addition to providing normal administrative assistance, contributes in such areas as communications, logistics, and training. 

The M&S Directorate's Office of Finance, for example, maintains field units in Hong Kong, Beirut, Buenos Aires, and Geneva with easy access to the international money markets. 

The Office of Finance tries to keep a ready inventory of the world's currencies on hand for future clandestine operations. 

Many of the purchases are made in illegal black markets where certain currencies are available at bargain rates. In some instances, most notably in the case of the South Vietnamese piaster, black-market purchases of a single currency amount to millions of dollars 'a year. 

The Office of Security provides physical protection for clandestine installations at home and abroad and conducts polygraph (lie detector) tests for all CIA employees and contract personnel and most foreign agents. 

The Office of Medical Services heals the sicknesses and illnesses (both mental and physical) of CIA personnel by providing "cleared" psychiatrists and physicians to treat agency officers. 

Analyzes prospective and already recruited agents; and prepares "psychological profiles" of foreign leaders (and once, in 1971, at the request of the Watergate "plumbers," did a "profile" of Daniel Ellsberg). 

The Office of Logistics operates the agency's weapons and other warehouses in the United States and overseas, supplies normal office equipment and household furniture, as well as the more esoteric clandestine materiel to foreign stations and bases, and performs other housekeeping chores. 

The Office of Communications, employing over 40 percent of the Directorate of Management and Services' more than 5,000 career employees, maintains facilities for secret communications between CIA headquarters and the hundreds of stations and bases overseas. 

It also provides the same services, on a reimbursable basis, for the State Department and most of its embassies and consulates. 

The Office of Training operates the agency's training facilities at many locations around the United States, and a few overseas. (The Office of Communications, however, runs ( DELETED ) 

The Office of Personnel handles the recruitment and record-keeping for the CIA's career personnel. 

Support functions are often vital for successful conduct of covert operations, and a good support officer, like a good supply sergeant in an army, is indispensable to a CIA station or base. 

Once a station chief has found the right support officer, one who can provide everything from housekeeping to operational support, the two will often form a professional alliance and stay together as they move from post to post during their careers. 

In some instances the senior support officer may even serve as the de facto second-in-command because of his close relationship with the chief. 

Together, the Clandestine Services and the Directorate for Management and Services constitute an agency within an agency. 

These two components, like the largest and most dangerous part of an iceberg, float along virtually unseen. Their missions, methods, and personnel are quite different from those of the CIA's other two directorates, which account for only less than a third of the agency's budget and manpower. 

Yet the CIA—and particularly former Director Richard Helms—has tried to convince the American public that the analysts and technicians of the Directorates for Intelligence and Science and Technology, the clean white tip of the CIA iceberg, are the agency's key personnel.

The Directorate of Intelligence, with some 3,500 employees, engages in two basic activities. 

First, the production of finished intelligence reports from the analysis of information. (both classified and unclassified)

Second, the performance of certain services of common concern for the benefit of the whole intelligence community. 

Included in the latter category are the agency's various reference services (e.g., a huge computerized biographical library of foreign personalities, another on foreign factories, and so on). 

The Foreign Broadcasting Information Service. (a worldwide radio and television monitoring system) 

The National Photographic Interpretation Center (an organization, run in close cooperation with the Pentagon, which analyzes photographs taken from satellites and spy planes). 

About two thirds of the Intelligence Directorate's $70 million annual budget is devoted to carrying out these services of common concern for the government's entire national-security bureaucracy. 

Thus, the State and Defense departments are spared the expense of maintaining duplicate facilities, receiving from the CIA finished intelligence in areas of interest to them. 

For example, when there is a shift in the Soviet leadership, or a new Chinese diplomat is posted to Washington, the Intelligence Directorate routinely sends biographical information (usually classified "secret") on the personalities involved to the other government agencies. 

Similarly, the various State Department bureaus (along with selected American academicians and newspapers) regularly receive the agency's unclassified transcripts of foreign radio and television broadcasts. 

Most of the rest of the Intelligence Directorate's assets are focused on political, economic, and strategic military research. 

The agency's specialists produce both current intelligence—reports and explanations on a daily basis of the world's breaking events—and long range analysis of trends, potential crisis areas, and other matters of interest to the government's policymakers. 

Turning out current intelligence reports is akin to publishing a newspaper, and, in fact, the Intelligence Directorate puts out daily and weekly publications which, except for their high security classifications, are similar to work done by the American press. 

These regular intelligence reports, along with special ones on topics like corruption in South Vietnam or the prospects for the Soviet wheat crop, are sent to hundreds of "consumers" in the federal government. 

The primary consumer, however, is the President, and he receives every morning a special publication called the President's Daily Brief. 

In the Johnson administration these reports frequently contained, in addition to the normal intelligence fare, rather scandalous descriptions of the private lives of certain world leaders, always avidly read by the President.[5][Lol a pig DC] 

The agency found, however, that in the Nixon administration such items were not appreciated, and the tone of the daily report was changed. 

Even so, President Nixon and Henry Kissinger soon lost interest in reading the publication; the task was relegated to lower-ranking officials on the National Security Council staff. 

The fourth and newest of the CIA's directorates. Science and Technology, also employs the smallest number of personnel, about 1,300 people. 

It carries out functions such as basic research and development, the operation of spy satellites, and intelligence analysis in highly technical fields. 

In addition to these activities, it also handles the bulk of the agency's electronic data processing (computer) work. 

While the S&T Directorate keeps abreast of and does research work in a wide variety of scientific fields, its most important successes have come in developing technical espionage systems. 

The precursor of this directorate was instrumental in the development of the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes. 

The S&T experts have also made several brilliant breakthroughs in the intelligence satellite field. 

In the late 1950s, when Clandestine Services chief Richard Bissell encouraged the technicians in their development of America's first photo-reconnaissance satellite, they produced a model which was still in use as late as 1971. 

And agency technicians have continued to make remarkable advances in the "state of the art." 

Today spy satellites, capable of producing photographs from space with less than ( DELETED ) resolution, lead all other collection means as a source of intelligence. 

The S&T Directorate has also been a leader in developing other technical espionage techniques, such as over the horizon radars, "stationary" satellites, and various other electronic information-gathering devices. 

The normal procedure has been for the S&T Directorate, using both CIA and Pentagon funds, to work on a collection system through the research-and development stage. 

Then, once the system is perfected, it is turned over to the Defense Department. 

In the case of a few particularly esoteric systems, the CIA has kept operational control, but the agency's S&T budget of about $120 million per year is simply not large enough to support many independent technical collection systems. 

CIA technicians, for example, worked with Lockheed Aircraft at a secret site in Nevada to develop the A-II, probably the most potent airborne collection system ever to fly. 

In February 1964, before the plane became operational, President Johnson revealed its existence to the news media, describing it as a long-range Air Force interceptor. 

Five months later, at another news conference, the President disclosed that there was a second version of the aircraft, which he described as "an advanced strategic reconnaissance plane for military use, capable of worldwide reconnaissance." 

Three years after that, when the A-11, now the SR-71, was flying regularly, the program was turned over to the Air Force. 

Just before the actual transfer, ... The White House gave its approval for trial flights ... and three of the sleek black planes left a secret base ... and landed in ... From there, the planes carried out reconnaissance flights over ... 

Any reasonable reviewer of the CIA, after surveying the deployment of agency funds and personnel and weighing these against the intelligence gains produced by the various directorates, would probably come to the same conclusion as did Richard Helms' temporary replacement as Director, James Schlesinger. 

On April 5, 1973, Schlesinger admitted to the Senate Armed Forces Committee that "We have a problem ... we just have too many people. It turns out to be too many people in the operational areas. These are the people who in the past served overseas .... Increasing emphasis is being placed on science and technology, and on intelligence judgments."

Schlesinger's words—and the fact that he was not a "house man" from the Clandestine Services—were auguries of hope to those many critics of the CIA who believe that it is overly preoccupied with the covert side of intelligence. 

But Schlesinger lasted only four months at the agency before he was named Secretary of Defense, and the changes he effected were generally confined to a 6-percent staff cut and an early-retirement program for certain superannuated employees. 

Schlesinger has been succeeded by William Colby—a man who had a highly successful career as a clandestine operator specializing in "dirty tricks," and who can only be expected to maintain the Dulles-Helms policy of concentration on covert action. 

At present the agency uses about two thirds of its funds and its manpower for covert operations and their support—proportions that have been held relatively constant for more than ten years. 

Thus, out of the agency's career workforce of roughly 16,500 people and yearly budget of about $750 million, 11,000 personnel and roughly $550 million are earmarked for the Clandestine Services. 

Those activities of the Directorate of Management and Services (formerly the Directorate of Support), such as communications, logistics, and training, which contribute to covert activities. 

Only about 20 percent of the CIA's career employees (spending less than 10 percent of the budget) work on intelligence analysis and information processing. 

There is little reason, at present, to expect that things will change. 

The Intelligence Community 
Taken as a whole, U.S. intelligence is no longer made up of a small glamorous fraternity of adventurous blue bloods, men motivated by a sense of noblesse oblige who carry out daring undercover missions. 

That is the romantic myth without which there would be few spy novels, but it is not the substance of the modern intelligence profession. 

Today the vast majority of those in the spy business are faceless, desk-bound bureaucrats, far removed from the world of the secret agent. 

To be sure, the CIA still strives to keep alive such techniques as classical espionage and covert action, but its efforts have been dwarfed by the huge technical collection programs of other government intelligence organizations, chiefly military agencies. 

In all, there are ten different components of the federal government which concern themselves with the collection and/or analysis of foreign intelligence. 

These ten agencies, complete with their hundreds of subordinate commands, offices, and staffs, and are commonly referred to as the "intelligence community." 

Operating silently in the shadows of the federal government, carefully obscured from public view and virtually immune to congressional oversight, the intelligence community every year spends over $6 billion and has a full-time workforce of more than 150,000 people. 

The bulk of this money and manpower is devoted to the collection of information through technical means and the processing and analysis of that information. 

The intelligence community amasses data on all the world's countries, but the primary targets are the communist nations, especially the Soviet Union and China, and the most sought-after information concerns their military capabilities and intentions.

Size and Cost of

U.S. Intelligence Community

(Approximates)

Organization           Personal           Annual Budget
CIA                            16,500                 750,000,000
NSA*                         24,000              1,200,000,000
DIA*                              5000                 200,000,000
AI*                             35,000                 700,000,000
NI*                             15,000                 600,000,000
AFI*                           56,000            2 ,700,000,000
State                               350                    8,000,000
FBI                                  800                  40,000,000
AEC                                300                  20,000,000
Treasury                         300                  10,000,000
Total                         153250             6,228,000,000
*Department of Defense agency

As can be seen, the intelligence community's best known member, the CIA, accounts for less than 15 percent of its total funds and personnel. 

Despite the agency's comparatively small size, however, the head of the CIA is not only the number-one man in his own agency but, as a result of the National Security Act of 1947, is also the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), the titular chief of the entire intelligence community. 

However, the community which the DCI supposedly oversees is made up of fiercely independent bureaucratic entities with little desire for outside supervision. 

All the members except the CIA are parts of much larger governmental departments, and they look to their parent agencies for guidance, not to the DCI. 

While all participants share the same profession and general aim of protecting the national security, the intelligence community has developed into an interlocking, overlapping maze of organizations, each with its own goals. In the words of Admiral Rufus Taylor, former head of Naval Intelligence and former Deputy Director of the CIA, it most closely resembles a "tribal federation." 

The Director of Central Intelligence heads up several interagency groups which were created to aid him in the management and operation of the intelligence community. 

The DCI's two principal tools for managing intelligence are the Intelligence Resources Advisory Committee (IRAC) and the United States Intelligence Board (USIB). 

The IRAC's members include representatives from the State Department, Defense, the Office of Management and Budget, and the CIA itself. (Since the agency's Director chairs the group in his role as DCI, or head of the intelligence community, the CIA is also given a seat.) 

IRAC was formed in November 1971, and it is supposed to prepare a consolidated budget for the whole community and generally assure that intelligence resources are used as efficiently as possible. 

However, it has not been in existence long enough for its performance to be judged, especially since three different DCl's have already headed it. The USIB main tasks are the issuance of National Intelligence Estimates and the setting of collection requirements and priorities. 

Under it are fifteen permanent inter-agency committees and a variety of ad hoc groups for specials problems. Working through these committees and groups the USIB among other things, lists the targets for American intelligence and the priority attached to each one. [6] Coordinates within the intelligence community, the estimates of future events and enemy strengths, controls the classification and security systems for most of the U.S. government.

Directs research in the various fields of Technical intelligence and decides what classified information  will be passed on to foreign friends and allies.[7]

The USIB meets every Thursday morning in a conference room on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters. 

At a typical meeting there are three or four subjects on the agenda, itself a classified document which the USIB secretariat circulates to each member a few days before the meeting. 

The first item of business is always the approval of the minutes of the last session; in the interest of security, the minutes are purposely made incomplete. 

Then the USIB turns to the Watch Report, which has been prepared earlier in the week by an inter-agency USIB committee responsible for keeping an eye out for any indication that armed conflict, particularly one which might threaten the United States or any of its allies, may break out anywhere in the world. 

A typical Watch Report might, in effect, say something like: War between the United States and the Soviet Union does not seem imminent this week, but the Soviets are going ahead with the development of their latest missile and have moved two new divisions into position along the Chinese border. 

North Vietnamese infiltration along the Ho Chi Minh trail (as monitored by sensors and radio intercepts) indicates that the level of violence will probably rise in the northern half of South Vietnam. 

Satellite photos of the Suez Canal ( DELETED ) point to a higher level of tension between Israel and Egypt. 

Once the USIB gives its routine assent, the Watch Report is forwarded to the nation's top policymakers, who normally do not even glance at it, since they know that everything in it of any consequence has already been distributed to them in other intelligence reports. 

If some apocalyptic sign that war might break out were ever picked up by any agency of the community, the President and his top aides would be notified immediately, and the USIB would not be consulted; but as long as nothing of particular note is occurring, every Thursday morning the USIB spends an average of about thirty seconds discussing the Watch Report (which actually takes several man weeks to prepare) before it is forwarded to the White House. 

Next on the USIB agenda is the consideration and, almost always, the approval of the one or two National Intelligence Estimates which have been completed that week. 

These estimates of enemy capabilities and future events are drafted in advance by the CIA's National Intelligence Officers and then coordinated at the staff level with the various USIB member agencies. 

By the time the estimates come before the USIB itself, all differences have normally been compromised in the inter-agency coordination meetings, or, failing in that accommodation, a dissenting member has already prepared a footnote stating his agency's disagreement with the conclusions or text of the NIE. 

Once the USIB has approved the estimates before it (now certified as the best judgments of the intelligence community on the particular subject), the board turns to any special items which all the members have the prerogative of placing on the agenda. 

One Thursday in 1969 the chief of Naval Intelligence asked the USIB to reconsider a proposal, which had earlier been turned down at the USIB subcommittee level, to furnish the Brazilian navy with relatively advanced American cryptologic equipment. 

Because of the sensitivity of U.S. codes and encrypting devices, exports, even to friendly countries, need the USIB's approval; the board turned down this particular request. 

At another meeting in 1970 the special discussion was on whether or not a very sophisticated satellite should be targeted against the (DELETED) 
part of the 
( DELETED) 
instead of 
( DELETED ). 
The Air Force's request to 
(DELETED) 
its satellite came to the USIB under its responsibility for setting intelligence collection priorities. 

Citing the great cost of the satellite and the possibility that the 
(DELETED) 
might lead to a malfunction, the USIB said no to the (DELETED). 

In another 1970 meeting the USIB considered a Pentagon proposal to lower the U.S. government's research goals for the detection of underground nuclear explosions. Again the USIB said no.[8] 

On occasion, when extremely sensitive matters are to be discussed, the USIB goes into executive session, the practical effect of which is that all staff members leave the room and no minutes at all are kept. 

The USIB operated in this atmosphere of total privacy for a 1969 discussion of the Green Beret murder case and again in 1970 for a briefing of the Fitzhugh panel's recommendations on the reorganization of Pentagon intelligence (see p. 100). 

Under DCI Helms, most USIB meetings were finished within forty-five minutes. 

Since almost all of the substantive work had been taken care of in preparatory sessions at the staff level. 

The USIB rarely did anything more than ratify already determined decisions, and thus the board, the highest-level substantive committee of the U.S. intelligence community, had very little work to do on its own. 

The USIB and its fifteen committees deal exclusively with what is called national intelligence, intelligence needed, in theory, by the country's policymakers. 

But there is a second kind of intelligence "departmental" which is, again in theory, solely for the use of a particular agency or military service. 

The Army, Navy, and Air Force collect great amounts of departmental intelligence to support their tactical missions. 

For example, an American commander in Germany may desire data on the enemy forces that would oppose his troops if hostilities broke out, but the day-to-day movements of Soviet troops along the East German border are of little interest to high officials back in Washington (unless, of course, the Soviets are massing for an invasion, in which case the information would be upgraded to national intelligence). 

The dividing line between national and departmental intelligence, however, is often quite faint, and the military have frequently branded as departmental a number of wasteful collection programs that they know would not be approved on the national level. 

Although the CIA has had since its creation exclusive responsibility for carrying out overseas espionage operations for the collection of national intelligence, the various military intelligence agencies and the intelligence units of American forces stationed abroad have retained the right to seek out tactical information for their own departmental requirements. 

During the Korean and Vietnamese wars, field commanders understandably needed data of enemy troop movements, and one way of obtaining it was through the hiring of foreign agents. 

But even in peacetime, with U.S. forces permanently stationed in countries like England, Germany, Italy, Morocco, Turkey, Panama, Japan, and Australia, the military intelligence services have consistently sought to acquire information through their own secret agents. 

The justification, of course, always being the need for departmental or tactical intelligence. 

To avoid duplication and proliferation of agents, all of these espionage missions are supposed to be coordinated with the CIA. 

But the military often fail to do this because they know the CIA would not give its approval, or because an arrangement has been previously worked out to the effect that as long as the military stay out of CIA's areas of interest, they can operate on their own. 

Every military unit has an intelligence section, and few commanders wish to see their personnel remain idle. Therefore, if for no other reasons than to keep their soldiers occupied, American military intelligence units overseas are usually involved in the espionage game. 

For example, a military intelligence unit assigned to Bangkok, Thailand, as late as 1971 was trying to entrap Soviet KGB officers, recruit local spies, and even was attempting to run its own agents into China through Hong Kong. 

Little or none of this activity was being cleared with the CIA. Similarly, in Army intelligence officers stationed in the ... at virtually every level, and others operating in Germany were revealed in 1973 to be carrying out extensive covert surveillance—including phone taps—of American antiwar and leftist civilians. 

The tribalism that plagues the intelligence community is at its worst in the military intelligence agencies, and most of the personnel working for these organizations feel their first loyalty is to their parent service. 

The men who run military intelligence are almost all career officers who look to the Army, Navy, and Air Force for promotion and other advancement. They serve only a tour or two in intelligence before they return to conventional military life. 

Very few are willing to do anything in their intelligence assignments which will damage their careers, and they know all too well that analysis on their part which contradicts the views or the policies of the leadership of their parent service will not be well received. 

Thus, their intelligence judgments tend to be clouded by the prejudices and budgetary needs of the military service whose uniform they wear. 

The Army, the Navy, and the Air Force traditionally maintained their own independent intelligence agencies—ostensibly to support their tactical responsibilities and to maintain an enemy "order of battle." 

Each service collected its own information and quite often was less than forthcoming to the others. The result was a large amount of duplication and an extremely parochial approach in each service's analysis of enemy capabilities. 

This self serving approach of the military services toward intelligence led to the formation in 1961 of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which was supposed to coordinate and consolidate the views and, to some extent, the functions of the three service agencies. 

It was planned that the DIA would replace the Army, Navy, and Air Force at the USIB meetings, but Allen Dulles and successive DCIs have balked at leaving total responsibility for representing the Pentagon to the DIA, which has subsequently developed its own brand of parochialism as the intelligence arm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

Thus, while only the DIA is an official USIB member, the heads of the three service agencies remain at the table for the weekly sessions, push their pet theories, and demand that footnotes be included in intelligence estimates that run contrary to their views of their service. 

Aside from operating the overt system of military attaches working out of American embassies overseas, the DIA does little information collection on its own. It is largely dependent on the service intelligence agencies for its raw data, and its 5,000 employees process and analyze this material and turn it into finished intelligence reports which are circulated within the Pentagon and to the rest of the intelligence community. 

The DIA also prepares daily and weekly intelligence digests that are similar in form and content to the CIA publications, and makes up its own estimates of enemy capabilities. This latter function did not take on much significance in the DIA until November 1970, when the agency was reorganized and Major General Daniel Graham was given a mandate by DIA chief Lieutenant General Donald Bennett to improve the agency's estimating capability. Graham had served two earlier tours of duty in CIA's Office of National Estimates, and he quickly established the DIA office as a serious rival to the agency's estimative function.[9] 

Although the DIA was originally intended to take over many of their functions, the service intelligence agencies have continued to grow and flourish since its founding. Indeed, each of the three is larger than the DIA, and Air Force intelligence is the biggest spy organization in the whole intelligence community, with 56,000 employees and an annual budget of about $2.7 billion. 

Most of this latter figure goes to pay for the extremely costly reconnaissance satellites and the rockets necessary to put them in orbit. A separate part of Air Force intelligence, the National Reconnaissance Office, operates these satellite programs for the entire community, and the NRO's budget alone is more than $1.5 billion a year. 

The NRO works in such intense secrecy that its very existence is classified. Its director for many years was a mysterious Air Force colonel (and later brigadier general) named Ralph Steakley, who retired in the early 1970s to take employment with Westinghouse, a defense contractor which sells considerable equipment to the NRO. 

The Office of Naval Intelligence, with about 15,000 employees and a $600 million annual budget, is perhaps the fastest-growing member of the intelligence community. At the same time submarine missile (Polaris and Poseidon) programs have in recent years received larger and larger budgets 
( DELETED ) 
have similarly captured the imagination of the military planners. Naval Intelligence operates 
( DELETED ) 
crammed with the most modern sensors, radars, cameras, and other listening devices which 
( DELETED ) 
The Navy formerly sent surface ships, like the Liberty and the Pueblo, on similar missions, but since the attack on the former and the capture of the latter, these missions have largely been discontinued. 

Army Intelligence is the least mechanized of the three service agencies. Its mission is largely to acquire tactical intelligence in support of its field forces. Yet, due to the great size of the Army and the proliferation of G2-type units, the Army still manages to spend about $700 million annually and employ 35,000 people in intelligence. 

The remaining large component of military intelligence is the National Security Agency. The NSA, the most secretive member of the intelligence community, breaks foreign codes and ciphers and develops secure communications for the U.S. government at a cost to the taxpayer of about $1.2 billion every year. 

Founded in 1952 by a classified presidential order, the NSA employs about 24,000 people. Its headquarters is at Fort Meade, Maryland, and its hundreds of listening posts around the world eavesdrop on the communications of most of the world's countries—enemy and friend alike. Most of the NSA's intercept stations are operated by special cryptological units from the armed forces, which are subordinate to the head of the NSA.

Under the Fitzhugh recommendations, which were put into effect in 1972, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence has overall responsibility for military intelligence. 

Independent of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military services, he is supposed to coordinate and generally supervise the activities of the DIA, the service intelligence agencies, the NSA, the Defense Mapping Agency, and the Defense Investigative Service. 

These latter two organizations were formed in early 1972 (also as a result of the Fitzhugh recommendations) out of the three separate mapping and investigative agencies which had previously existed in the Army, Navy, and Air Force. 

The mappers, aided by satellite photography, chart nearly every inch of the earth's surface. The investigators perform counterintelligence work and look into the backgrounds of Defense Department personnel. In the late 1960s, however, the three units which would later become the Defense Investigative Service devoted much of their time and effort to reporting on domestic dissident and anti-war groups. The Secretary of Defense ordered that this military surveillance of civilians be stopped in early 1971, but there are indications that it is still going on. 

The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research has the smallest budget in the intelligence community—only $8 million—and it is the only member with no collection capability of its own. It is completely dependent on State Department diplomatic cables and the sources of other community members for the data which its 350 employees turn into finished intelligence reports. 

INR represents State on all the USIB and other inter-agency panels dealing with intelligence. It coordinates within State the departmental position for 40 Committee meetings, and does the Under Secretary's staff work for these meetings. 

The Director of INR until the end of 1973, Ray S. Cline, spent twenty-two years with the CIA before he joined the State Department in 1969. He had risen to be the agency's Deputy Director for Intelligence before losing out in an internal CIA struggle in 1966, when he was sent off to head agency operations in West Germany. 

Although the German station was (and is) the CIA's largest in the world, Cline was far from the center of power in Washington. However, his absence apparently did not diminish either his bureaucratic skills or his capabilities as an intelligence analyst, and he bolstered INR's position within the community, although the bureau, without any resources of its own, still remains a comparatively minor participant.[10] 

The FBI, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Treasury Department—the lesser members of the USIB—are all active participants in the intelligence community although the primary functions of these organizations are unrelated to the collection of foreign intelligence. Nevertheless, the FBI's internal-security duties include protecting the country against foreign espionage attempts, a responsibility considered to be associated with that of the intelligence community. 

The Atomic Energy Commission has an intelligence division which concerns itself with information about nuclear developments in foreign countries and maintains technical listening posts around the world (sometimes manned by CIA personnel) to monitor foreign atomic blasts. 

The Treasury Department's connection with the intelligence community is based primarily in its campaign to halt drugs entering the United States. 

Contrary to the National Security Act of 1947, the CIA today does not in fact perform the function of "coordinating the intelligence activities of the several governmental departments and agencies." 

For a time during the early 1950s the DCI did manage some degree of control over the other agencies, but in the years that followed came the technological explosion in intelligence and with it the tremendous expansion of the community. The spying trade was transformed—everywhere but at the CIA— from a fairly small, agent-oriented profession to a machine-dominated information-gathering enterprise of almost boundless proportions. 

Technical collection, once a relatively minor activity in which gentlemen did read other gentlemen's mail, blossomed into a wide range of activities including COMINT (communications intelligence), SIGINT (signal intelligence), PHOTINT (photographic intelligence), ELINT (electronic intelligence), and RADINT (radar intelligence). 

Data was obtained by highly sophisticated equipment on planes, ships, submarines, orbiting and stationary space satellites, radio and electronic intercept stations, and radars—some the size of three football fields strung together. The sensors, or devices, used for collection consisted of high-resolution and wide-angle cameras, infrared cameras, receivers for intercepting microwave transmissions and telemetry signals, side-looking and over-the-horizon radars, and other even more exotic contrivances. 

The proliferation of technical collection has also had a significant influence on the personnel makeup of the intelligence community. The mountains of information received gave rise to a variety of highly specialized data processors: cryptanalysts, traffic analysts, photographic interpreters, and telemetry, radar, and signal analysts, who convert the incomprehensible bleeps and squawks intercepted by their machines into forms usable by the substantive intelligence analysts. 

And it has created a new class of technocrats and managers who conceive, develop, and supervise the operation of systems so secret that only a few thousand (sometimes only a couple of hundred) people have high enough security clearances to see the finished intelligence product. 

The information collected by the technical systems constitutes the most valuable data available to U.S. intelligence. Without it, there would be no continuing reliable way for government to determine with confidence the status of foreign— especially Soviet and Chinese—strategic military capabilities. Without it, also, there would have been no agreement with the Soviet Union in 1972 for the limitations of strategic armaments, since that pact was absolutely dependent on each side being confident that it could monitor new military developments—even possible cheating—on the other side through its own satellites and other surveillance equipment. 

The first advanced overhead-reconnaissance systems—the U-2 spy planes and the early satellites in the late 1950s and early 1960s—provided valuable information about the Soviet Union, but their successes only whetted the appetites of U.S. military planners, who had so long been starved for good intelligence on America's main adversary. 

Once they got a taste of the fruits of technical collection, they demanded more specific and more frequent reporting on the status of the Soviet armed forces. And the technicians, with nearly unlimited funds at their disposal, obliged them, partly because the technicians themselves had a natural desire to expand the state of their art. 

A complementary circle of military intelligence requirements and technical collection methods evolved. Collection responded to requirements and, in turn, generated still further demands for information, which resulted in the development of yet bigger and better collection systems. If some particular type of data could somehow be collected, invariably one or another part of the Pentagon would certify that it was needed, and a new technical system for gathering it would be developed. The prevailing ethic became collection for collection's sake. 

In the infant years of the technological explosion, Allen Dulles paid scant attention to technical collection's potential as an intelligence tool. He was far more interested in clandestine operations and the overthrowing of foreign governments. After the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961 cut short Dulles' career as DCI, his successor, John McCone, soon grasped the importance of the new information gathering systems. He tried to reassert the CIA's leadership position in this area, and as part of his effort he created the Directorate for Science and Technology and recruited a brilliant young scientist, Albert "Bud" Wheelon, to head the component. 

But try as he might, the tenacious, hard-driving McCone could not cope with the Pentagon juggernaut, then under the direction of Robert McNamara, who energetically supported the military services in their efforts to gain maximum control of all technical collection. McCone was forced to conclude that the battle with the Defense Department was lost and the trend toward Pentagon domination was irreversible. This was one of the reasons that McCone resigned in 1965 (another being, in McCone's view, President Johnson's lack of appreciation for strategic intelligence such as the National Intelligence Estimates).[As I am reading I am beginning to realize, I do not know as much about the United States intelligence gathering process as I think I do, not only have I gave the CIA too much credit for their part in it, I also have failed to understand just how fractured the CIA has become, through so called oversight by Congress! Damn CIA has been running a Psyop called Cover our ass in Congress forever! Not really liking that thought right now,Oh S*$t.DC]

McCone was followed by Admiral William Raborn, whose ineffective tour as DCI was mercifully ended after only fourteen months, to the relief of all members of the intelligence community. 

Richard Helms took over the CIA in the spring of 1966. Like Dulles, he was much more interested in the cloak-and-dagger field, where he had spent his entire career, than in the machines that had revolutionized the intelligence trade. Although he was Director of Central Intelligence, not just the head of CIA, Helms rarely challenged the Pentagon on matters regarding technical collection— or, for that matter, intelligence analysis—until, belatedly, his last years as DCI. As a result, during his directorship the CIA was completely overshadowed by the other agencies in all intelligence activities other than covert operations, and even here the military made deep inroads. [Focus should be on the underlined aspects of the Agency,whatever they are hiding from the people and Congress involves these aspects. Something yet unknown to us all outside of it.DC]

Richard Helms clearly understood the bureaucratic facts of life. He knew all too well that he did not have Cabinet status and thus was not the equal of the Secretary of Defense, the man ultimately responsible for the military intelligence budget. 

Helms simply did not have the power to tell the Pentagon that the overall needs of U.S. intelligence (which were, of course, his responsibility as DCI) demanded that the military cut back on a particular spying program and spend the money elsewhere. 

Since managing the intelligence community did not interest him very much anyway, only on a few occasions did he make the effort to exercise some measure of influence over the other agencies outside the CIA. 

In 1967 Helms was urged by his staff to authorize an official review of intelligence collection by community members, with special emphasis on the many technical collection systems. However, Helms was reluctant to venture very far into this highly complex, military-controlled field, and decided only to authorize a study of the CIA's "in-house" needs. 

He named an experienced senior agency officer, Hugh Cunningham, to head the small group picked to make the study. Cunningham, a former Rhodes scholar, had previously served in top positions with the Clandestine Services and on the Board of National Estimates. 

With his broad experience, he seemed to agency insiders to be an ideal choice to carry out the review. After several months of intense investigation, he and his small group concluded—this was the first sentence of their report —"The United States intelligence community collects too much information." They found that there was a large amount of duplication in the collection effort, with two or more agencies often spending great amounts of money to amass essentially the same data, and that much of the information collected was useless for anything other than low-level intelligence analysis. 

The study noted that the glut of raw data was clogging the intelligence system and making it difficult for the analysts to separate out what was really important and to produce thoughtful material for the policymakers. The study also observed that the overabundance of collection resulted in an excess of finished intelligence reports, many of which were of little use in the formulation of national policy; there simply were too many reports on too many subjects for the high-level policy-makers to cope with. 

The Cunningham study caused such consternation in the CIA that Helms refused to disseminate it to the other intelligence agencies. Several of his deputies complained bitterly about the study's critical view of their own directorates and the way it seemed to diminish the importance of their work. Since the study was even harsher in dealing with the military's intelligence programs, Helms was further unwilling to risk the Pentagon's wrath by circulating it within the intelligence community. He decided to keep the controversial report within the CIA. 

Always the master bureaucrat, Helms resorted to the time-honored technique of forming another special study group to review the work of the first group. He organized a new committee, the Senior Executive Group, to consider in general terms the CIA's managerial problems. 

The SEG's first job was to look over the Cunningham study, but its members were hardly fitted to the task. They were the chiefs of the agency's four directorates, each of which had been heavily criticized in the original study; the Executive Director (the CIA's number-three man), a plodding, unimaginative former support officer; and—as chairman—the Deputy DCI, Admiral Rufus Taylor, a career naval officer. 

After several prolonged meetings, the SEG decided, not surprisingly, that the study on collection was of only marginal value and therefore not to be acted on in any significant way. A short time later Cunningham was transferred to the Office of Training, one of the CIA's administrative Siberias. The SEG never met again. Although Richard Helms showed little talent for management—and even less interest in it—during his years as DCI he did make some efforts to restrict the expansion of the intelligence community. [Never bring real truth to the CIA, it can land you in the Gulag's of Intelligence gathering, for your reward DC]

One such try was successful. It occurred in the late 1960s when Helms refused to give his approval for further development work on the Air Force's extremely expensive manned orbiting laboratory (MOL), which was then being promoted as being, among other things, an intelligence collection system. Without Helms' endorsement, the Air Force was unable to convince the White House of the need for the project, and it was subsequently dropped by the Johnson administration. (Some Air Force officials viewed Helms' lack of support as retaliation for the Air Force's "capture" in 1967 of the SR-71 reconnaissance plane, which the CIA had originally developed and would have preferred to keep under its control, but this criticism was probably unfair. 

Helms simply seemed to be going along with the strong pressure in the Johnson administration to cut costs because of the Vietnam War, and saw the MOL as a particularly vulnerable— and technically dubious—program in a period of tight budgets.) Helms was always a realist about power within the government, and he recognized that, except in a rare case like that of the MOL, he simply did not have the clout to prevent the introduction of most new technical collection systems. 

He also understood that the full force of the Pentagon was behind these projects—as redundant or superfluous as they often were—and that if he concentrated his efforts on trying to eliminate or even reduce unproductive and outdated systems, he was making enemies who could undercut his own pet clandestine projects overseas. 

But even the few efforts he did bring against these obviously wasteful systems failed (save that against the MOL), demonstrating vividly that the true power over budgets in the intelligence community lies with the Pentagon, not the Director of Central Intelligence. 

In 1967, for example, Helms asked Frederick Eaton, a prominent and conservative New York lawyer, to conduct a review of the National Security Agency. For some time the NSA's cost-effectiveness as a contributor to the national intelligence effort had been highly suspect within the community, especially in view of the code-breaking agency's constantly growing budget, which had then risen over the billion-dollar mark. 

Eaton was provided with a staff composed of officials from several intelligence offices, including the CIA, the State Department, and the Pentagon, and this staff accumulated substantial evidence that much of the NSA's intelligence collection was of little or marginal use to the various intelligence consumers in the community. But Eaton, after extensive consultation with Pentagon officials, surprised his own staff by recommending no reductions and concluding that all of the NSA's programs were worthwhile. 

The staff of intelligence professionals rebelled, and Eaton had to write the conclusions of the review himself. The lesson of the Eaton study was clear within the intelligence community. The NSA was widely recognized as the community member most in need of reform, and the professionals who had studied the matter recommended substantial change in its programs. 

Yet Helms' effort to improve the supersecret agency's performance through the Eaton study accomplished nothing, and if the Director of Central Intelligence could not, as the professionals said, "get a handle on" the NSA, then it was highly unlikely that he could ever influence the expanding programs of the other Pentagon intelligence agencies. 

In 1968 Helms created another select inter-agency group at the insistence of his staff: the National Intelligence Resources Board (the forerunner of the Intelligence Resources Advisory Committee). Intended to bring about economies in the community by cutting certain marginal programs, the NIRB had more bureaucratic power than any of its predecessors because it was chaired by the Deputy Director of the CIA and had as members the directors of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.[Remember...The staff of intelligence professionals rebelled DC] 

It immediately decided to take a new look at the NSA's programs, and it singled out a particular communications intercept program, costing millions of dollars a year, as particularly wasteful. The NIRB had found that nearly all intelligence analysts within the community who had access to the results of the NSA program believed the data to be of little or no use. 

These findings were related to Paul Nitze, then Deputy Secretary of Defense, with the recommendation that the program be phased out. (The final decision on continuing the NSA program, of course, had to be made in the Pentagon, since the NSA is a military intelligence agency.) Nitze did nothing with the recommendation for several months. 

Then, as he was leaving office in January 1969, he sent a letter to Helms thanking the DCI for his advice but informing him that approval had been given by Pentagon decision-makers to continue the dubious project. And despite the NIRB's overwhelming arguments against the project, Nitze did not even bother to list any reasons why the Pentagon chose not to concur with the decision of the Director of Central Intelligence. 

In the wake of such defeats, Helms gave up on making attempts at managing the intelligence community. At one point, months later, he observed to his staff that while he, as DCI, was theoretically responsible for 100 percent of the nation's intelligence activities, he in fact controlled less than 15 percent of the community's assets—and most of the other 85 percent belonged to the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

Under such circumstances, Helms concluded, it was unrealistic for any DCI to think that he could have a significant influence on U.S. intelligence resource decisions or the shaping of the intelligence community. 

But when the Nixon administration took over in 1969, some very powerful people, including Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and the President himself, became concerned about the seemingly uncontrolled expansion of the Pentagon's intelligence programs. 

Laird said in his 1970 Defense budget statement: Intelligence is both critical and costly. Yet we have found intelligence activities, with management overlapping or nonexistent. 

Deficiencies have provoked criticism that became known even outside the intelligence community. These criticisms can be summarized in five principal points: 

1. Our intelligence product was being evaluated poorly.[11] 

2. Various intelligence-gathering activities overlapped and there was no mechanism to eliminate the overlap. 

3. There was no coordinated long-range program for resource management and programming. 

4. Significant gaps in intelligence-gathering went unnoticed. 

5. The intelligence community failed to maintain frank and unrestricted channels of internal communication. 

That same year President Nixon appointed a "blue ribbon" panel chaired by Gilbert W. Fitzhugh, chairman of the board of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, to conduct a review of the Defense Department's entire operations and organization. Fitzhugh declared at a July 1970 press conference that his investigation showed that the Pentagon was "an impossible organization to administer in its present form, just an amorphous lump." [ Did anyone on Earth, who was in position to act against this 'lump', do so is the question 40 years later.DC]

Then turning to military spying, he stated, "I believe that the Pentagon suffers from too much intelligence. They can't use what they get because there is too much collected. It would almost be better that they didn't have it because it's difficult to find out what's important." 

The Fitzhugh panel recommended a series of economies in Pentagon espionage and also urged that a new post of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence be created. 

Under this proposal, the various military intelligence agencies, which previously had been scattered all over the Defense Department's organizational chart, were to be put under the authority of the new Assistant Secretary, who in turn would report to Secretary Laird. 

By 1971, before the Fitzhugh recommendations were put into effect, the House Committee on Appropriations had become aware that military intelligence was in need of a shake-up. 

The committee released a little-noticed but blistering report which stated that "the intelligence operations of the Department of Defense have grown beyond the actual needs of the Department and are now receiving an inordinate share of the fiscal resources of the Department." 

The congressional report continued, "Redundancy is the watch word of many intelligence operations.... Coordination is less effective than it should be. Far more material is collected than is essential. Material is collected which cannot be evaluated ... and is therefore wasted. New intelligence means have become available ... without offsetting reductions in old procedures." 

With these faults so obvious even to the highly conservative and military oriented congressional committee, strong reform measures would have seemed to be in order. But little was done by the Congress to bring the intelligence community under control. The fear on Capitol Hill of violating the sacred mystique of "national security" prevented any effective corrective action prevented any effective corrective action. 

Finally, in November 1971, after a secret review of the intelligence community carried out by the Office of Management and Budget's James Schlesinger, who would a year later be named Director of the CIA, the Nixon administration announced "a number of management steps to improve the efficiency and effectiveness" of U.S. intelligence.[We know how this played out and who won and who lost. DC] 

The President reportedly had been grumbling for some time about the poor information furnished him by the intelligence community. Most recently he had been disturbed by the community's blunder in assuring that American prisoners were being held at the Son Tay camp in North Vietnam, which during a dramatic rescue mission by U.S. commandos in 1970 was found to be empty. 

Nixon was also angered by the failure of intelligence to warn about the ferocity of the North Vietnamese response to the South Vietnamese invasion of Laos in early 1971. (In both these instances the faulty intelligence seems to have come from the Pentagon,[12] although there are good reasons to believe that in the Son Tay case the President's political desire to make a show of support for the prisoners outweighed the strong possibility that no prisoners would be found there.) 

The President, as the nation's primary consumer of intelligence, felt that he had a right to expect better information. Whether a President takes great personal interest in intelligence, as Lyndon Johnson did, or, as in Nixon's case, delegates most of the responsibility to an aide (Henry Kissinger), the intelligence field remains very much a private presidential preserve. [A questionable aide as far as allegiance is concerned, and is some 'deal' with Israel made back in the beginnings of both, what the CIA is hiding from the people and Congress? DC]

Congress has almost completely abdicated any control it might exercise. Thus, when President Nixon chose to revamp the intelligence structure in 1971, he did not even bother to consult in advance those few Congressmen who supposedly oversee the intelligence community. 

The ostensible objective of the 1971 reorganization was to improve management of the intelligence community by giving the DCI "an enhanced leadership role ... in planning, reviewing, coordinating, and evaluating all intelligence programs and activities, and in the production of national intelligence." 

Under the Nixon plan, the DCI's powers over the rest of the community for the first time included the right to review the budgets of the other members—an unprecedented step in the tribal federation of intelligence and one absolutely necessary to the exercise of any meaningful degree of control. 

But with this very same plan to enhance the DCI's "leadership role," the President was also placing control over all U.S. intelligence squarely in the National Security Council staff, still headed today by Henry Kissinger, even after he also has become Secretary of State. [Easy to see who's pocket Nixon was in at this point, not a smart move to try and take down the CIA. Maybe the deal is with the whole US Government and not just the Agency  Tricky Dick.Wrong people to throw under the bus,if that is the case.  D.C]

Kissinger was put in charge of a new NSC Intelligence Committee which included as members the DCI, the Attorney General, the Under Secretary of State, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

This Intelligence Committee was to "give direction and guidance on national intelligence needs and provide for a continuing evaluation of intelligence products from the viewpoint of the intelligence user." 

At the same time the President established another new body, called the Net Assessment Group, under Kissinger's control, to analyze U.S. military capabilities in comparison with those of the Soviets and Chinese as estimated by intelligence studies. 

Already chairman of the 40 Committee, which passes on all high-risk CIA covert operations, and the Verification Panel, which is responsible for monitoring the intelligence related to the S.A.L.T. negotiations and agreements, Kissinger, with his control now asserted over virtually all the NSC's key committees, had clearly emerged as the most powerful man in U.S. intelligence—as well as in American foreign policy. [Do they yet understand how fu*#ing bad they got played by Mossad DC}

Yet with Kissinger almost totally occupied with other matters, the President clearly intended under his November 1971 reorganization that CIA Director Helms take over and improve the actual management of the intelligence community—under Kissinger's general supervision, to be sure. [Occupied indeed! DC]

Partly because of the nearly impervious tribalism of the community and partly because of Helms' pronounced lack of interest in management and technical matters, the shake-up had little effect on the well-entrenched ways of the community. 

Much to the amazement of his staff, Helms did virtually nothing to carry out the wishes of the President as contained in the restructuring order. 

Shortly after the 1972 election, Helms was fired by the President as Director of Central Intelligence. According to his own testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he wanted to stay on the job, but that was not the wish of the White House. 

The President's dissatisfaction with Helms' management of the intelligence community was certainly a factor in his ouster, as perhaps were Helms' social connections with liberal Congressmen and journalists (some of whom were on the White House "enemies" list). 

From his earlier work at the Office of Management and Budget and the Rand Corporation, James Schlesinger appeared knowledgeable about the problems facing the community and moved quickly, once he arrived at the CIA to replace Helms, to set up the bureaucratic structures necessary to exercise control over the other intelligence agencies. 

He created a new Deputy Director for Community Relations and strengthened the Intelligence Resources Advisory Committee, but his four-month tenure was too short to bring about any large-scale reform. 

And nothing in the record of his successor, William Colby— a clandestine operator for thirty years—indicates that he has either the management skills or the inclination to bring the spiraling growth of the intelligence community under control. 

Clearly the CIA is not the hub, nor is its Director the head of the vast U.S. intelligence community. The sometimes glamorous, incorrigibly clandestine agency is merely a part  of a much larger interdepartmental federation dominated by the Pentagon.

And  although the Director of Central Intelligence is nominally designated by each President in turn as the governments chief intelligence advisor, he is in fact overshadowed in the  realities of Washington's politic's by both the Secretary of Defense, and the President's own Assistant for National Security Affairs as well as by several lesser figures, such as the Chairman for the Joint Chiefs of Stall.

Nevertheless, agency director's and the CIA itself have survived, and at times flourish in the secret bureaucratic jungle because of their one highly specialized contribution to the national intelligence effort. The CIA's primary task is not to coordinate the efforts of US intelligence or even to produce finished national intelligence for the policy makers. It's job for better or worse, to conduct the governments covert policy[think about that for a few DC] 

next part 2
Special Operations 217s

notes
Chapter 2
[1] The official name for this part of the CIA is the Directorate of Operations (until early 1973 the Directorate of Plans), but it is more appropriately referred to within the agency as the Clandestine Services. Some members of Congress and certain journalists call it the "Department of Dirty Tricks," a title never used by CIA personnel. 
[2] Nine years later Laurence Stern of the Washington Post finally exposed the CIA's massive clandestine effort in the 1964 Chilean election. He quoted a strategically placed U.S. intelligence official as saying, "United States intervention in Chile was blatant and almost obscene." Stern reported that both the State Department and the Agency for International Development cooperated with the CIA in funneling up to $20 million into the country, and that one conduit for the funds was an ostensibly private organization called the International Development Foundation. 
[3] This and all subsequent quotes from the Bissell speech come from the official minutes of the meeting. The minutes do not quote Bissell directly but, rather, paraphrase his remarks. 
[4] A complete listing of the participants, as well as the available minutes of the meeting are contained in the Appendix, "The Bissell Philosophy."

Chapter 3
[1] Nor does the figure include the guard force which protects the CIA's buildings and installations, the maintenance and char force, or the people who run the agency's cafeterias. The General Services Administration employs most of these personnel. 
[2] Attempts to computerize the complete CIA employment list were frustrated and eventually scuttled by Director Helms, who viewed the effort as a potential breach of operational security. 
[3] The investment practices of the CIA group in companies with overseas holdings open up some interesting questions about "insider" information. Would the CIA group have sold Anaconda Copper short in 1970 when the agency realized that its covert efforts to prevent Salvador Allende from assuming the Presidency of Chile had failed? Or in 1973, when Director James Schlesinger decided to allow William Broe, the former chief of the Clandestine Services' Western Hemisphere Division, to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and describe ITT's role in trying to provoke CIA action against Allende, might the investment group not have been tempted to dump its ITT stock (if it had any). 
[4] These senior analysts are called National Intelligence Officers (and sometimes "the Wise Men" by their colleagues within the community). The group has replaced the Board of National Estimates, which was a larger and more formalized body of senior officers who oversaw the preparation of national estimates. 
[5] President Johnson's taste in intelligence was far from conventional. A former high State Department official tells of attending a meeting at the White House and then staying on for a talk with the President afterward. LBJ proceeded to play for him a tape recording (one of those presumably made by the FBI) of Martin Luther King in a rather compromising situation. 
[6] Although in a crisis situation, like the implementation of the Arab-Israeli cease-fire in 1970, Henry Kissinger or occasionally the President himself may set the standards. In the 1970 case ( DELETED ). 
[7] Intelligence reports are routinely provided to certain foreign countries, especially the English speaking ones, on the basis of so-called intelligence agreements entered into by the DCI and his foreign equivalents. Although these agreements commit the United States government to a specified course of action enforceable under international law, they are never submitted as treaties to the U.S. Senate. In fact, they are negotiated and put into force in complete secrecy, and no member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has ever seen one, even for informational purposes. 
[8] The Pentagon claimed that there was not enough money available in its budget to attain the level of detection on the Richter scale set forth in the USIB guidelines, and that relaxing the standard reflected this financial reality. The State Department argued that a changed goal might open the intelligence community up to criticism on grounds that it had not done everything possible to achieve a comprehensive nuclear test ban —which would ultimately be dependent on both sides, being confident that cheating by the other party could be detected. DCI Helms sided with State. But the civilian victory was a hollow one, since there was no way the DCI could ensure that the Pentagon would indeed spend more money on seismic research in order to be able to meet the level of detection fixed by the USIB. 
[9] As a colonel in the late 1960s, Graham nearly resigned from the Army to accept an offer of permanent employment with the CIA. In early 1973 DCI James Schlesinger brought him back to the agency, still in uniform, to work on military estimates. Graham was widely known in the corridors of the CIA as the funny little military officer who hung a drawing of a bayonet over his desk with a caption describing it as "The weapon of the future." 
[10] INR's position within the intelligence community has been upgraded recently because of Henry Kissinger's assumption of the role of Secretary of State and by his appointment of long-time NSC aide and former CIA officer William Hyland to the post of director. 
[11] Some intelligence was not being evaluated at all, and, as a result, a new concept, "the linear drawer foot," entered the English language. Translated from Pentagonese, this refers to the amount of paper needed to fill a file drawer one foot in length. A 1969 House Armed Services Committee report noted that the Southeast Asia office of the DIA alone had 517 linear drawer feet of unanalyzed raw intelligence locked in its vaults. 
[12] Reporter Tad Szulc, formerly of the New York Times, recalls that after the Son Tay raid a CIA official approached him to emphasize that the agency had played no part in the operation and that the faulty information had originated with military intelligence.

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