Part 4: The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence...Propaganda and Disinformation..Espionage and Counterespionage

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

SIX: 

Propaganda and Disinformation 

In psychological warfare ... the intelligence agencies of the democratic countries suffer from the grave disadvantage that in attempting to damage the adversary they must also deceive their own public. 

—VICTOR ZORZA 

Washington Post November 15, 1965 By the mid-1960s most of the professionals in the CIA's Clandestine Services thought that the day of the balloon as an effective delivery vehicle in propaganda operations had long since passed. Years before, in the early rough-and-tumble era of the Cold War, agency operators in West Germany had often used balloons to carry anti-communist literature into the denied areas behind the Iron Curtain. These operations, although lacking in plausible deniability, normally a prerequisite in covert propaganda efforts, had scored high—judging from the numerous angry protests issued by the Soviet Union and its East European satellites. 

Since then the propaganda game had evolved into a subtle contest of wits, and the agency's Covert Action Staff had developed far more sophisticated methods for spreading ideological messages. Thus, there was a sense of "deja vu" among the covert-action staffers when officers of the Far East Division suggested in 1967 that a new balloon operation be undertaken. The target this time was to be mainland China. 

The People's Republic was at that time in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. Youthful Red Guards were rampaging throughout the country, shattering customs and laws alike; confusion, near chaos, engulfed the nation. But the CIA's China watchers in Hong Kong and elsewhere on the periphery of the mainland had detected that a reaction was setting in, especially in southern China around Canton and Foochow in the provinces of Kwangtung and Fukien. They believed that a kind of backlash to the excesses of the Red Guards was building, for increasingly groups within the military and among the workers were beginning to resist the Red Guards and to call for a return to traditional law and order. 

To the agency's operators, these were conditions worth exploiting. No one really believed that communism could be eliminated from the mainland, but the short-term political objectives which might be achieved through covert propaganda were too tempting to pass up. 

China was an avowed enemy of the United States, and the CIA felt that each bit of additional domestic turmoil that could be stirred up made the world's most populous country—already experimenting with long-range ballistic missiles—that much less of a threat to American national security. 

Furthermore, if Peking could be kept preoccupied with internal problems, then the likelihood of Chinese military intervention in the Vietnamese war, in a manner similar to that so effectively employed years earlier in Korea, could be diminished. 

Perhaps, too, China could be forced to reduce its material support to North Vietnam and to cut back on its export of revolution to other areas of the developing world. The operation was accordingly approved by the 303 Committee (now the 40 Committee) and the agency took its balloons out of storage, shipping them to a secret base on Taiwan. There they were loaded with a variety of carefully prepared propaganda materials— leaflets, pamphlets, newspapers—and, when the winds were right, launched to float over the mainland provinces due west of the island. 

The literature dropped by the balloons had been designed by the agency's propagandists to appear as similar as possible in substance and style to the few publications then being furtively distributed on a small scale by conservative groups inside China. 

Names of no genuine anti-revolutionary organizations were used; fictitious associations, some identified with the army, others with agricultural communes or urban industrial unions, were invented. The main thrust of all the propaganda was essentially the same, criticizing the activities (both real and imaginary) of the Red Guards and, by implication, those leaders who inspired or permitted such excesses. 

It was hoped that the propaganda and its attendant disinformation would create further reactions to the Cultural Revolution, on one hand adding to the growing domestic confusion and on the other disrupting the internal balance of power among the leadership in Peking. 

The CIA calculated that when the Chinese realized they were being propagandized, the U.S. government could confidently disclaim any responsibility. The assumed culprit would most likely be Chiang Kai-shek's Taiwan regime, the agency's witting and cooperative host for the operation. 

Almost immediately after it began, the balloon project was a success. The CIA's China watchers soon saw evidence of increased resistance to the Red Guards in the southern provinces. 

Peking, apparently believing the reaction to the Cultural Revolution to be greater than it actually was, displayed strong concern over developments in the south. And within weeks, refugees and travelers from the mainland began arriving in Hong Kong with copies of the leaflets and pamphlets that the agency's propagandists had manufactured—a clear indication of the credence being given the false literature by the Chinese masses. It was not long, therefore, before the Clandestine Services were searching for other ways to expand their propaganda effort against the new target. 

A decision was therefore made to install on Taiwan a pair of clandestine radio transmitters which would broadcast propaganda—and disinformation—of the same nature as that disseminated by the balloon drops. If the Chinese people accepted the radio broadcasts as genuine, the CIA reasoned, then they might be convinced that the countermovement to the Cultural Revolution was gaining strength and perhaps think that the time had come to resist the Red Guards and their supporters still more openly. 

Again the Covert Action Staff relied on imitation .... 

The Agency's radios were modeled after a handful of authentic stations.... One of the CIA's radios, therefore, ... the other ... Setting up the radios involved a difficult task for the Agency's technical experts.... The technicians proved capable of meeting the challenge, but it was obvious to all associated with the operation that the Chinese government, which had by now discovered that much of the counter-revolutionary literature circulating in the southern provinces was the product of foreign balloon drops, would after a while determine that the radio broadcasts, ... Nevertheless, the operators pressed ahead with the project. 

Against a closed-society target, simply providing information and news that the government wishes to keep from its people can have a significant effect. If, in addition, some clever disinformation can be inserted, then so much the better. The listeners, realizing that much of what they are hearing is true, tend to believe that all they are told is accurate. 

One source of news used by agency propagandists was the CIA's own Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), which daily monitors open radio broadcasting around the world from more than a dozen listening posts located in such varied places as Hong Kong, Panama, Nigeria, Cyprus, even San Francisco. The product of the FBIS was also utilized to determine whether the broadcasts of the clandestine transmitters were reaching their target in China and creating the anticipated effect. 

There was a third (and deleterious) way, however, in which the monitoring service played a role in the operation, and the Clandestine Services were slow to correct it. Unlike most of the intelligence collected by the agency, the programs monitored by the FBIS are widely disseminated within the U.S. government and to certain subscribers among the press corps and the academic community. 

These daily reports, verbatim transcripts translated into English, are packaged and color-coded according to major geographical area— Far East (yellow), Middle East! Africa (blue), Latin America (pink), and so on. But even though the FBIS editors are members of the CIA's Intelligence Directorate, the operators in the Clandestine Services are reluctant to reveal their propaganda operations to them. 

As a result, for its Far East daily report the FBIS frequently monitored and distributed the texts of programs actually originating from the agency's secret stations on Taiwan along with the transcripts of broadcasts from real counter-revolutionary organizations on the mainland. 

CIA operators seemed untroubled by this development and the accompanying fact that the agency's own China analysts back at headquarters in Washington (along with their colleagues in the State and Defense departments) were being somewhat misled. 

Nor did they appear to mind that unwitting scholars and newsmen were publishing articles based to some extent on the phony information being reported by the FBIS. 

Eventually the CIA analysts at home were informed of the existence of the clandestine radios, but no steps were taken to rectify the false data passed on to the other U.S. government agencies or to the press and academia; operational security precluded such revelations. 

Besides, Communist China was an enemy, and the writings of recognized journalists and professors publicizing its state of near chaos and potential rebellion helped to discredit Peking in the eyes of the world—which was, after all, in keeping with the CIA's interpretation of American foreign policy at the time. The CIA's secret radios thus proved to be highly successful, even after the Chinese government discovered their origin and announced to its people that the broadcasts were false. 

Meanwhile, the agency's operatives turned to outright disinformation in their effort to exploit China's internal difficulties. 

For example, ( DELETED ) began to show results. The Red Guards turned their fury on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, demanding that Chinese diplomats, too, be cleansed of Western ways and rededicated to Mao's principles of communism. ( DELETED ) 

To be sure, propaganda and disinformation are not new phenomena. Nations and factions within nations have long employed such techniques to enhance their own images while at the same time attempting to discredit their enemies and rivals. Yet the great advances in communications during the twentieth century have vastly changed the potential of propagandistic effort, making possible rapid, widespread distribution of propaganda material. 

Nazi Germany refined and made enormous use of the "big lie." The Soviet Union and other communist countries have used many of the methods invented by the Germans and have added new twists of their own. Although the United States did not actively enter the field until World War II, when the ass and the Office of War Information (OWI) started their psychological warfare programs, its propaganda effort has grown— under the eyes of the Covert Action (CA) Staff of the CIA's Clandestine Services—to be thoroughly expert. 

Working on the CA Staff are sociologists, psychologists, historians, and media specialists—all skilled at selecting "reachable" targets, such as the youth or intellectuals of a particular country, and at getting a message through to them. In planning and carrying out its activities, the branch often works closely with other agency officers in the area divisions. The idea for an operation may be initiated by a field component—say, a station in Africa or Latin America —that sees a special need or a target of opportunity within its area of responsibility; it may originate at headquarters in Langley, either in the propaganda branch or in one of the area divisions; or it may come from the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, or any member of the U.S. intelligence community in the form of a requirement for the CIA to take action. 

If it is considered to be a program of major political significance or entailing an inherent high-risk factor—that is, if its exposure would cause substantial embarrassment for the U.S. government—a project proposal developed in the Clandestine Services is submitted to the Director's office for review. Subsequently, the plan will be sent to the 40 Committee for final approval. Thenceforth, control of any propaganda operation and responsibility for its coordination within the Clandestine Services and the government may rest with either the Covert Action Staff or an area division. 

Certain long-standing operations, such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, were traditionally under the control of the CA Staff. But responsibility for the newer and smaller operations usually is determined on an ad hoc basis, with the CA Staff serving in either an advisory or controlling capacity, depending on the circumstances of the particular undertaking. A propaganda operation might not be anything more sinister than broadcasting straight news reports or rock music to the countries of Eastern Europe. Others are far more devious. 

For example, the CIA used secret agents to plant extremely negative and often distorted articles about communism in the Chilean press in the period before the 1970 presidential election in that country. The purpose was to discredit the candidacy of Marxist Salvador Allende. 

The CIA also makes considerable use of forged documents.[1] During the mid-1960s, for instance, the agency learned that a certain West African country was about to recognize the People's Republic of China and that the local government intended to force the withdrawal of the diplomatic representatives of Nationalist China. This was considered to be contrary to American foreign-policy aims, so the CIA went into action. ( DELETED ) 

The Pentagon Papers have revealed some other examples of CIA propaganda and disinformation activities. One top-secret document written in 1954 by Colonel Edward Lansdale, then an agency operator, describes an effort involving North Vietnamese astrologers hired to write predictions about the coming disasters which would befall certain Vietminh leaders and their undertakings, and the success and unity which awaited the South. 

Lansdale also mentioned that personnel under his control had engineered a black psywar strike in Hanoi: leaflets signed by the Vietminh instructing Tonkinese on how to behave for the Vietminh takeover of the Hanoi region in early October, including items about property, money reform, and a three-day holiday of workers upon takeover. The day following the distribution of these leaflets, refugee registration tripled. Two days later Vietminh took to the radio to denounce the leaflets; the leaflets were so authentic in appearance that even most of the rank-and-file Vietminh were sure that the radio denunciations were a French trick. 

Lansdale's black propaganda also had an effect on the American press. One of his bogus leaflets came to the attention of syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop, who was then touring South Vietnam. The leaflet, indicating that many South Vietnamese were to be sent to China to work on the railroads, seemed to have been written by the communists. Alsop naively accepted the leaflet at face value and, according to Lansdale, this "led to his sensational, gloomy articles later. ... Alsop was never told this story." Nor, of course, was the false impression left with Alsop's readers ever corrected. 

CIA propaganda activities also entail the publication of books and periodicals. Over the years, the agency has provided direct subsidies to a number of magazines and publishing houses, ranging from Eastern European emigre organs to such reputable firms as Frederick A. Praeger, of New York—which admitted in 1967 that it had published "fifteen or sixteen books" at the CIA's request. ( DELETED ) 

Many other anti-communist publishing concerns in Germany, Italy, and France were also supported and encouraged by the agency during the post-World War II years. ( DELETED ) 

According to a former high ranking agency official, ( DELETED ) and the Parisian newspaper, "Le Combat." This same ex-official also recalls with an ironic smile that for several years the agency subsidized the New York communist paper, The Daily Worker. In fairness to the Worker's staff, it must be noted that they were unaware of the CIA's assistance, which came in the form of several thousand secretly purchased prepaid subscriptions. 

The CIA apparently hoped to demonstrate by this means to the American public that the threat of communism in this country was indeed real. Although the CIA inherited from the oss responsibility for covert propaganda operations, the agency has no specific authority in the open law to engage in such operations—other than the vague charge to carry out "such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct." 

Yet since its founding in 1947 the CIA has spent over one billion dollars for propaganda activities (mainly foreign but also domestic) to further what it perceived to be the national interests of the United States. Sometimes this means simply telling the truth to an audience (called "white" propaganda); other times a mixture of truths, half-truths, and slight distortions is used to slant the views of the audience ("gray" propaganda); and, on occasion, outright lies ("black" propaganda) are used, although usually accompanied for credibility's sake by some truths and half-truths. 

"Black" propaganda on the one hand and "disinformation" on the other are virtually indistinguishable. Both refer to the spreading of false information in order to influence people's opinions or actions. Disinformation actually is a special type of "black" propaganda which hinges on absolute secrecy and which is usually supported by false documents; originally, it was something of a Soviet specialty, and the Russian word for it, dezinformatsiya, is virtually a direct analogue of our own. Within the KGB there is even a Department of Disinformation. 

On June 2, 1961 (less than two months after the CIA's humiliating failure at the Bay of Pigs), Richard Helms, then Deputy Director of the Clandestine Services, briefed the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee on communist forgeries. Helms discussed thirty-two fraudulent documents "packaged to look like communications to or from American officials." Twenty-two were meant to demonstrate imperialist American plans and ambitions; seventeen of these asserted U.S. interference in the affairs of several free-world countries. Of the seventeen, eleven charged U.S. intervention in private business of Asian nations. One was a fake secret agreement between the Secretary of State and Japanese Premier Kishi permitting use of Japanese troops anywhere in Asia. Another alleged that American policy in Southeast Asia called for U.S. control of the armed forces of all S.E.A.T.O. nations. Two forgeries offered proof that the Americans were plotting the overthrow of Indonesia's Sukarno; the remaining two were merely meant to demonstrate that the U.S. government, despite official disclaimers, was secretly supplying the anti-Sukarno rebels with military aid. 

These last examples concerning Indonesia are especially interesting. A cursory examination of the documents, as submitted by Helms, indicates that they were indeed rather crude forgeries, but their message was accurate. Not only did the CIA in 1958 support efforts to overthrow the Sukarno government, but Helms himself, as second-ranking official in Clandestine Services, knew it well. And he knew that the "official disclaimers" to which be referred were deceptions and outright lies issued by U.S. government spokesmen. 

Helms' testimony was released to the public with the approval of the CIA, which was, in effect, targeting a propaganda operation against the American people. Not only did he lie about the communists' lying (which is not to say that they are not indeed culpable), but Helms in the process quite ably managed to avoid discussion of the pervasive lying the CIA commits in the name of the United States. 

The Radios 

Until 1971, the CIA's largest propaganda operations by far were Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty (RL). RFE broadcast to Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria, while RL was aimed at the Soviet Union. These ostensibly private stations had been started by the agency in the early 1950s at the height of the Cold War. They operated under the cover provided by their New York-based boards of directors, which were made up principally of distinguished statesmen, retired military leaders, and corporate executives. With studios in Munich and transmitters in West Germany, Spain, Portugal, and Taiwan, the two stations broadcast thousands of hours of programs a year into the communist countries. Their combined annual budgets ranged from $30 to $35 million, and the CIA financed over 95 percent of the costs.[2] 

In their early years, both RFE and RL quite stridently promoted the "rolling back" of the Iron Curtain. (Radio Liberty was originally named Radio Liberation.) The tone of their broadcasts softened considerably in the aftermath of the 1957 Hungarian revolt, when RFE was subjected to severe criticism for its role in seeming to incite continued, but inevitably futile, resistance by implying that American assistance would be forthcoming. 

During and after the Hungarian events, it became quite clear that the United States would not actively participate in freeing the captive nations, and the emphasis at both RFE and RL was changed to promote liberalization within the communist system through peaceful change. The CIA continued, however, to finance both stations, to provide them with key personnel, and to control program content. 

The ostensible mission of RFE and RL was to provide accurate information to the people of Eastern Europe. In this aim they were largely successful, and their programs reached millions of listeners. While RFE and RL broadcasts contained a certain amount of distortion, they were, especially in the early years, considerably more accurate than the Eastern European media. 

But to many in the CIA the primary value of the radios was to sow discontent in Eastern Europe and, in the process, to weaken the communist governments. Hard-liners in the agency pointed to the social agitation in Poland which brought Wladyslaw Gomulka to power in 1956, the Hungarian uprising in 1957, and the fall of Czech Stalinist Antonin Novotny in 1967 as events which RFE helped to bring about. Others in the CIA did not specifically connect RFE or RL to such dramatic occurrences, but instead stressed the role of the two stations in the more gradual deStalinization and liberalization of Eastern Europe. 

Like most propaganda operations, RFE's and RL's principal effect has been to contribute to existing trends in their target areas and sometimes to accentuate those trends. Even when events in Eastern Europe have worked out to the agency's satisfaction, any direct contribution by the radios would be nearly impossible to prove. In any case, whatever the success of the two stations, the CIA intended from the beginning that they play an activist role in the affairs of Eastern Europe—well beyond being simply sources of accurate news. For, in addition to transmitting information to Eastern Europe and harassing the communist governments, RFE and RL have also provided the Clandestine Services with covert assets which could be used against the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. 

The two radio stations, with their large staffs of Eastern European refugees, are a ready-made source of agents, contacts, information, and cover for operations. Among further radio-derived sources of intelligence was the comparatively large number of letters RFE and RL received from their listeners in Eastern Europe. Delivered by mail and by travelers coming to the West, these letters were considered by the agency's clandestine operators to be an intelligence collection resource. RFE and RL emigre personnel used the letters and other information available to the stations to prepare written analyses of what was happening in the East. Much of this analysis, however, was thought to be of doubtful value back at CIA headquarters, and was held in low esteem throughout the U.S. intelligence community. 

However debatable the direct effect of RFE and RL on events in Eastern Europe, the governments of the communist countries obviously were quite disturbed by the stations. Extensive efforts were made to jam their signals, and by the late 1950s the communist intelligence services were actively trying to discredit the stations and to infiltrate the radios' staffs. In many cases, they succeeded, and by the mid-1960s the general view at CIA headquarters was that the two facilities were widely penetrated by communist agents and that much of the analysis coming out of Munich was based on false information planted by opposition agents. 

During this same time the spirit of East-West detente was growing, and many officers in the CIA thought that RFE and RL had outlived their usefulness. Supporters of the stations were finding it increasingly difficult at budget time to justify their yearly costs. Even the Eastern European governments were showing a declining interest in the stations, and the jamming efforts fell off considerably. 

The agency carried out several internal studies on the utility of RFE and RL, and the results in each case favored phasing out CIA funding. But after each study a few old-timers in the CIA, whose connections with the stations went back to their beginnings, would come up with new and dubious reasons why the radios should be continued. The emotional attachment of these veteran operators to RFE and RL was extremely strong. Also defending the stations were those influential personalities, like former N.A.T.O. chief Lucius Clay, CBS president Frank Stanton, and General Motors chairman James Roche, who made up the radios' boards of directors. 

All of these efforts ran counter to attempts of the CIA's own Planning, Programming and Budgeting Staff to end agency support. Additionally, the CIA's top management appeared reluctant to part with the stations because of a fear that if the $30 to $35 million in annual payments were ended, that money would be irrevocably lost to the CIA. Each internal agency study which called for the end of the CIA's involvement invariably led to nothing more than yet another study being made. Thus, bureaucratic inertia, the unwillingness of the USIA to take over the radios' functions, and well-placed lobbying efforts by RFE and RL boards of directors combined to keep CIA funds flowing into both stations through the 1960s. 

Even when agency financing of the stations became widely known during the 1967 scandal surrounding the CIA's penetration and manipulation of the National Student Association, the agency did not reduce its support. In the aftermath of that scandal, President Johnson's special review group, the Katzenbach committee, recommended that the CIA not be allowed to finance "any of the nation's educational or private voluntary organizations." Still, with the approval of the White House, the agency did not let go of RFE or RL. No change occurred until January 1971, when Senator Clifford Case of New Jersey spoke out against the CIA subsidies to the radios and proposed legislation for open funding. 

Case's move attracted quite a bit of attention in the media and it became obvious that the Senator was not going to back down in the face of administration pressure. When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee scheduled hearings on Case's bill and the Senator threatened to call former RFE employees as witnesses, the CIA decided that the time had come to divest itself of the two stations. 

Open congressional funding became a reality, and by the end of 1971 CIA financial involvement in RFE and RL was officially ended. Whether the agency has also dropped all its covert assets connected with them is not known, but, given past experience, that is not likely. For the time being, the largest threat to the future of RFE and RL would seem to be not Congress, which will probably vote money indefinitely, but the West German government of Willy Brandt. Now that the stations are in the open, Bonn faces pressure from the Eastern European countries to forbid them to broadcast on German soil. ( DELETED ) but he still might at some point accept the argument, as part of an effort to further the East-West detente, that RFE and RL represent unnecessary obstacles to improved relations. 

Other Propaganda Operations 

The CIA has always been interested in reaching and encouraging dissidents in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In the early days of the Cold War, the agency sent its own agents and substantial amounts of money behind the Iron Curtain to keep things stirred up, mostly with disastrous results. In more recent times, operations against Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R. have become less frequent and less crude. The agency, however, has continued to maintain its contacts with emigre groups in Western Europe and the United States. These groups are sometimes well informed on what is happening in their home countries, and they often provide a conduit for the CIA in its dealings with dissidents in those countries. 

One such group is ... The main value ... to the CIA has been its role ... the CIA's ... is obviously a relic of the early Cold War ... no American interest would be at all harmed by a cut-off of ... and, in fact, a cut-off would have a beneficial effect. Nevertheless, as was the case with ... the CIA has been extremely reluctant to abandon ... a covert asset, even after the agency's own Planning and Programming Staff has found the emigre group to be of only marginal usefulness. 

Another organization heavily subsidized by the CIA was the Asia Foundation. Established by the agency in 1956, with a carefully chosen board of directors, the foundation was designed to promote academic and public interest in the East. It sponsored scholarly research, supported conferences and symposia, and ran academic exchange programs, with a CIA subsidy that reached $8 million dollars a year. While most of the foundation's activities were legitimate, the CIA also used it, through penetrations among the officers and members, to fund anti-communist academicians in various Asian countries, to disseminate throughout Asia a negative vision of mainland China, North Vietnam, and North Korea, and to recruit foreign agents and new case officers. Although the foundation often served as a cover for clandestine operations, its main purpose was to promote the spread of ideas which were anticommunist and pro-American— sometimes subtly and sometimes stridently. 

The focus of the Asia Foundation's activities was overseas, but the organization's impact tended to be greater in the American academic community than in the Far East. Large numbers of American intellectuals participated in foundation programs, and they—usually unwittingly—contributed to the popularizing of CIA ideas about the Far East. Designed—and justified at budget time—as an overseas propaganda operation, the Asia Foundation also was regularly guilty of propagandizing the American people with agency views on Asia. 

The agency's connection with the Asia Foundation came to light just after the 1967 exposure of CIA subsidies to the National Student Association. The foundation clearly was one of the organizations which the CIA was banned from financing and, under the recommendations of the Katzenbach committee, the decision was made to end CIA funding. A complete cut-off after 1967, however, would have forced the foundation to shut down, so the agency made it the beneficiary of a large "severance payment" in order to give it a couple of years to develop alternative sources of funding. Assuming the CIA has not resumed covert financing, the Asia Foundation has apparently made itself self-sufficient by now. During the 1960s the CIA developed proprietary companies of a new type for use in propaganda operations. 

These proprietaries are more compact and more covert than relatively unwieldy and now exposed fronts like the Asia Foundation and Radio Free Europe. ( DELETED ) More and more, as the United States cuts back its overt aid programs and withdraws from direct involvement in foreign countries, the agency will probably be called upon to carry out similar missions in other nations. The CIA has also used defectors from communist governments for propaganda purposes—a practice which has had more impact in this country than overseas. 

These defectors, without any prodding by the CIA, would have interesting stories to tell of politics and events in their homelands, but almost all are immediately taken under the CIA's control and subjected to extensive secret debriefings at a special defector reception center near Frankfurt, West Germany, or, in the cases of particularly knowledgeable ones, at agency "safe houses" in the United States. In return for the intelligence supplied about the defector's former life and work, the CIA usually takes care of his resettlement in the West, even providing a new identity if necessary. 

Sometimes, after the lengthy debriefing has been finished, the agency will encourage—and will help—the defector to write articles or books about his past life. As he may still be living at a CIA facility or be dependent on the agency for his livelihood, the defector would be extremely reluctant to jeopardize his future by not cooperating. The CIA does not try to alter the defector's writings drastically; it simply influences him to leave out certain information because of security considerations, or because the thrust of the information runs counter to existing American policy. 

The inclusion of information justifying U.S. or CIA practices is, of course, encouraged, and the CIA will provide whatever literary assistance is needed by the defector. While such books tend to show the communist intelligence services as diabolical and unprincipled organs (which they are), almost never do these books describe triumphs by the opposition services over the CIA. Although the other side does indeed win on occasion, the agency would prefer that the world did not know that. And the defector dependent on the CIA will hardly act counter to its interests. 

In helping the defector with his writing, the agency often steers him toward a publisher. Even some of the public-relations aspects of promoting his book may be aided by the CIA, as in the case of Major Ladislav Bittman, a Czech intelligence officer who defected in 1968. Prior to the 1972 publication of his book, The Deception Game, Bittman was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, which quoted him on U.S. intelligence's use of the disinformation techniques. "It was our opinion," the former Czech operative said, "that the Americans had more effective means than this sort of trickery—things such as economic-aid programs—that were more influential than any black propaganda operation." 

While Bittman may well have been reflecting attitudes held by his former colleagues in Czech intelligence, his words must be considered suspect. The Czechs almost certainly know something about the CIA's propaganda and disinformation programs, just as the CIA knows of theirs. But Bittman's statement, taken along with his extensive descriptions of Czech and Russian disinformation programs, reflects exactly the image the CIA wants to promote to the American public—that the communists are always out to defraud the West, while the CIA, skillfully uncovering these deceits, eschews such unprincipled tactics. 

To the CIA, propaganda through book publishing has long been a successful technique. In 1953 the agency backed the publication of a book called The Dynamics of Soviet Society, which was written by Walt Rostow, later President Johnson's Assistant for National Security Affairs, and other members of the staff of the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The center had been set up with CIA money in 1950, and this book was published in two versions, one classified (for the CIA and government policy-makers) and the other unclassified (for the public). Both versions, except in some minor details, promoted the thesis that the Soviet Union is an imperialistic power bent on world conquest, and that it is the responsibility of the United States to blunt the communist menace. 

Most CIA book operations, however, are more subtle and clandestine. A former CIA official who specialized in Soviet affairs recalls how one day in 1967 a CIA operator on the Covert Action Staff showed him a book called The Foreign Aid Programs of the Soviet Bloc and Communist China by a German named Kurt Muller. The book looked interesting to the Soviet expert, and he asked to borrow it. The Covert Action man replied, "Keep it. We've got hundreds more downstairs." Muller's book was something less than an unbiased treatment of the subject; it was highly critical of communist foreign assistance to the Third World. The Soviet specialist is convinced that the agency had found out Muller was interested in communist foreign-aid programs, encouraged him to write a book which would have a strong anti-communist slant, provided him with information, and then helped to get the book published and distributed. 

Financing books is a standard technique used by all intelligence services. Many writers are glad to write on subjects which will further their own careers, and with a slant that will contribute to the propaganda objectives of a friendly agency. Books of this sort, however, add only a false aura of respectability and authority to the information the intelligence agency would like to see spread—even when that information is perfectly accurate—because they are by definition restricted from presenting an objective analysis of the subject under consideration. And once exposed, both the writer and his data become suspect. The CIA's most famous venture in book publishing was The Penkovsky Papers. This chronicle of spying for the West inside the Kremlin appeared in 1965, and it was allegedly taken from the journal of the actual spy, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky. 

Spies, however, do not keep journals. They simply do not take that kind of risk, nor do they have the time to do so while they are leading double lives. ... The Soviet Government obviously knew that he had spied for the West, but it could not be sure of what specific information he had turned over... Allen Dulles seemed to be rubbing salt in their wounds when he wrote in The Craft of Intelligence that the Penkovsky defection had shaken the Soviet intelligence services with the knowledge that the West had located Russian officials willing to work "in place for long periods of time," and others who "have never been 'surfaced' and [who] for their own protection must remain unknown to the public." 

And, of course, the publication of The Penkovsky Papers opened the Soviets up to the embarrassment of having the world learn that the top level of their government had been penetrated by a Western spy. Furthermore, Penkovsky's success as an agent made the CIA look good, both to the American people and to the rest of the world. Failures such as the Bay of Pigs might be forgiven and forgotten if the agency could recruit agents like Penkovsky to accomplish the one task the CIA is weakest at—gathering intelligence from inside the Soviet Union or China. 

The facts were otherwise, however. In the beginning, Penkovsky was not a CIA spy. He worked for British intelligence. He had tried to join the CIA in Turkey, but he had been turned down, in large part because the Soviet Bloc Division of the Clandestine Services was overly careful not to be taken in by KGB provocateurs and double agents. To the skittish CIA operators, Penkovsky seemed too good to be true, especially in the period following the Burgess-McLean catastrophe. The CIA had also suffered several recent defeats at the hands of the KGB in Europe, and it was understandably reluctant to be duped again. 

Penkovsky, however, was determined to spy for the West, and in 1960 he made contact with British intelligence, which eventually recruited him. The British informed the CIA of Penkovsky's availability and offered to conduct the operation as a joint project. CIA operators in Moscow and elsewhere participated in the elaborated clandestine techniques used to receive information from Penkovsky and to debrief the Soviet spy on his visits to Western Europe. ( DELETED ) The Penkovsky Papers was a best-seller around the world, and especially in the United States. Its publication certainly caused discomfort in the Soviet Union. ( DELETED )

 Richard Helms years later again referred to Penkovsky in this vein, although not by name, when he claimed in a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors that "a number of well-placed and courageous Russians ... helped us" in uncovering the Soviet move. One person taken in by this deception was Senator Milton Young of North Dakota, who serves on the CIA oversight subcommittee. In a 1971 Senate debate on cutting the intelligence budget, the Senator said, "And if you want to read something very interesting and authoritative where intelligence is concerned, read the Penkovsky papers ... this is a very interesting story, on why the intelligence we had in Cuba was so important to us, and on what the Russians were thinking and just how far they would go." Yet the CIA intelligence analysts who were working on the Cuban problem at the time of the missile crisis and preparing the agency's intelligence reports for the President up to and after the discovery of the Soviet missiles saw no such information from Penkovsky or any other Soviet spy. The key intelligence that led to the discovery of the missiles came from the analysis of satellite photography of the U.S.S.R., Soviet ship movements, U-2 photographs of Cuba, and information supplied by Cuban refugees.

Penkovsky's technical background information, provided well before the crisis, was of some use—but not of major or critical importance. Several scholars of the Soviet Union have independently characterized The Penkovsky Papers as being partly bogus and as not having come from Penkovsky's "journal." The respected Soviet expert and columnist for the Manchester Guardian and the Washington Post, Victor Zorza, wrote that "the book could have been compiled only by the Central Intelligence Agency." Zorza pointed out that Penkovsky had neither the time nor the opportunity to have produced such a manuscript; that the book's publisher (Doubleday and Company) and translator (Peter Deriabin, himself a KGB defector to the CIA) both refused to produce the original Russian manuscript for inspection; and that The Penkovsky Papers contained errors of style, technique, and fact that Penkovsky would not have made.

British intelligence also was not above scoring a propaganda victory of its own in the Penkovsky affair. Penkovsky's contact officer had been MI-6's Greville Wynne, who, working under the cover of being a businessman, had been arrested at the same time as Penkovsky and later exchanged for the Soviet spy Gordon Lonsdale. When Wynne returned to Britain, MI-6 helped him write a book about his experiences, called Contact on Gorky Street. British intelligence wanted the book published in part to make some money for Wynne, who had gone through the ordeal of a year and a half in Soviet prisons, but the MI-6's main motive was to counteract the extremely unfavorable publicity that had been generated by the defection of its own senior officer, Harold "Kim" Philby, in 1963, and the subsequent publication of his memoirs prepared under the auspices of the KGB. 

Interestingly, nowhere in Contact on Gorky Street does Wynne cite the help he received from the CIA. The reason for this omission could have been professional jealousy on the part of British intelligence, good British manners (i.e., not mentioning the clandestine activities of a friendly intelligence service), or most likely, an indication of the small role played by the CIA in the operation. 

Another book-publishing effort in which the CIA may or may not have been involved—to some degree—was Khrushchev Remembers, and the second volume of Khrushchev memoirs scheduled for publication this year. While these autobiographical and somewhat self serving works unquestionably originated with the former Soviet premier himself, there are a number of curious circumstances connected with their transmission from Moscow to Time Inc. in New York, and to its book-publishing division, Little, Brown and Company. 

Time Inc. has been less than forthcoming about how it gained access to the 180 hours of taped reminiscences upon which the books are based, and how the tapes were taken out of the U.S.S.R. without the knowledge of the Soviet government or the ubiquitous and proficient KGB. The whole operation— especially its political implication—was simply too important to have been permitted without at least tacit approval by Soviet authorities. Unlike Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Khrushchev was subsequently neither denounced nor exiled by Moscow's all-powerful party chiefs 

Most of the explanations offered by Time Inc. to clarify the various mysteries involved in this episode have a slightly disingenuous air. They may be true, but a number of highly regarded American and British scholars and intelligence officers dealing with Soviet affairs find them difficult to accept in toto. 

Why, for example, did Time Inc. find it necessary to take the risky step of sending a copy of the bound galleys of the book to its Moscow bureau—secretly via Helsinki— before it was published? The complete story of the Khrushchev memoirs, in short, may never be publicly known. And if it is, it may turn out to be another example of secret U.S.-Soviet cooperation, of two hostile powers giving wide circulation to information that each wants to see published, while collaborating to keep their operations away from the eyes of the general public on both sides. After all the publication of the first volume in 1971 had a relatively happy effect, it supported Moscow's anti Stalinists and in turned increased the prospects for detente.

7: 

Espionage and Counterespionage 

The soul of the spy is somehow the model of us all. 

—JACQUES BARZUN 

INTELLIGENCE agencies, in the popular view, are organizations of glamorous master spies who, in the best tradition of James Bond, daringly uncover the evil intentions of a nation's enemies. In reality, however, the CIA has had comparatively little success in acquiring intelligence through secret agents. This classical form of espionage has for many years ranked considerably below space satellites, code-breaking, and other forms of technical collection as a source of important foreign information to the U.S. government. Even open sources (the press and other communications media) and official channels (diplomats, military attaches, and the like) provide more valuable information than the Clandestine Services of the CIA. Against its two principal targets, the Soviet Union and Communist China, the effectiveness of CIA spies is virtually nil. With their closed societies and powerful internal-security organizations, the communist countries have proved practically impenetrable to the CIA.

To be sure, the agency has pulled off an occasional espionage coup, but these have generally involved "walk-ins"—defectors who take the initiative in offering their services to the agency. Remember that in 1955, when Oleg Penkovsky first approached CIA operators in Ankara, Turkey, to discuss the possibility of becoming an agent, he was turned away, because it was feared that he might be a double agent. Several years later, he was recruited by bolder British intelligence officers. Nearly all of the other Soviets and Chinese who either spied for the CIA or defected to the West did so without being actively recruited by America's leading espionage agency. 

Technically speaking, anyone who turns against his government is a defector. A successfully recruited agent or a walk-in who offers his services as a spy is known as a defector-in-place. He has not yet physically deserted his country, but has in fact defected politically in secret. Refugees and emigres are also defectors, and the CIA often uses them as spies when they can be persuaded to risk return to their native lands. In general, a defector is a person who has recently bolted his country and is simply willing to trade his knowledge of his former government's activities for political asylum in another nation; that some defections are accompanied by a great deal of publicity is generally due to the CIA's desire to obtain public approbation of its work.

Escapees from the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe are handled by the CIA's defector reception center at Camp King near Frankfurt, West Germany. There they are subjected to extensive debriefing and interrogation by agency officers who are experts at draining from them their full informational potential. Some defectors are subjected to questioning that lasts for months; a few are interrogated for a year or more.

A former CIA chief of station in Germany remembers with great amusement his role in supervising the lengthy debriefing of a Soviet lieutenant, a tank platoon commander, who fell in love with a Czech girl and fled with her to the West after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The exagency senior officer relates how he had to play marriage counselor when the couple's relationship started to sour, causing the lieutenant to lose his willingness to talk. By saving the romance, the chief of station succeeded in keeping the information flowing from the Soviet lieutenant. 

Although a comparatively low-level Soviet defector of this sort would seem to have small potential for providing useful intelligence, the CIA has had so little success in penetrating the Soviet military that the lieutenant underwent months of questioning. Through him, agency analysts were able to learn much about how Soviet armor units, and the ground forces in general, are organized, their training and tactical procedures, and the mechanics of their participation in the build-up that preceded the invasion of Czechoslovakia. This was hardly intelligence of strategic importance, but the CIA's Clandestine Services have no choice but to pump each low-level Soviet defector for all he is worth. 

The same former chief of station also recalls with pride the defection of Yevgeny Runge, a KGB illegal (or "deep cover" agent) in late 1967. Runge, like the more infamous Colonel Rudolf Abel from Brooklyn and Gordon Lonsdale of London, was a Soviet operator who lived for years under an assumed identity in West Germany. Unlike his colleagues, however, he was not exposed and arrested. Instead, Runge defected to the CIA when he lost interest in his clandestine work. According to the ex-agency official, Runge was of greater intelligence value to the U.S. government than Penkovsky. 

This assessment, however, is highly debatable because Runge provided no information which the CIA's intelligence analysts found to be useful in determining Soviet strategic capabilities or intentions. On the other hand, the KGB defector did reveal much concerning the methods and techniques of Soviet clandestine intelligence operations in Germany. To CIA operators who have been unsuccessful in penetrating the Soviet government and who have consequently become obsessed with the actions of the opposition, the defection of an undercover operator like Runge represents a tremendous emotional windfall, and they are inclined to publicize it as an intelligence coup.

Once the CIA is satisfied that a defector has told all that he knows, the resettlement team takes over. The team's objective is to find a place for the defector to live where he will be free from the fear of reprisal and happy enough neither to disclose his connections with the CIA nor, more important, to be tempted to return to his native country. Normally, the team works out a cover story for the defector, invents a new identity for him, and gives him enough money (often a lifetime pension) to make the transition to a new way of life. The most important defectors are brought to the United States (either before or after their debriefing), but the large majority are permanently settled in Western Europe, Canada, or Latin America.

The defector's adjustment to his new country is often quite difficult. For security reasons, he is usually cut off from any contact with his native land and, therefore, from his former friends and those members of his family who did not accompany him into exile. He may not even know the language of the country where he is living. Thus, a large percentage of defectors become psychologically depressed with their new lives once the initial excitement of resettlement wears off. A few have committed suicide. To try to keep the defector content, the CIA assigns a case officer to each one for as long as is thought necessary. The case officer stays in regular contact with the defector and helps solve any problems that may arise. With a particularly volatile defector, the agency maintains even closer surveillance, including telephone taps and mail intercepts, to guard against unwanted developments.

In some instances, case officers will watch over the defector for the rest of his life. More than anything else, the agency wants no defector to become so dissatisfied that he will be tempted to return to his native country. Of course, redefection usually results in a propaganda victory for the opposition; of greater consequence, however, is the fact that the defector probably will reveal everything he knows about the CIA in order to ease his penalty for having defected in the first place. Moreover, when a defector does return home, the agency has to contend with the nagging fear that all along it has been dealing with a double agent and that all the intelligence he revealed was part of a plot to mislead the CIA. The possibilities for deception in the defector game are endless, and the communist intelligence services have not failed to take advantage of them.

Bugs and Other Devices 
Strictly speaking, classical espionage uses human beings to gather information; technical espionage employs machines, such as photographic satellites, long-range electronic sensors, and communications intercept stations. Technical collection systems were virtually unknown before World War II, but the same technological explosion which has affected nearly every other aspect of modern life over the last twenty five years has also drastically changed the intelligence trade. Since the war, the United States has poured tens of billions of dollars into developing ever more advanced machines to keep track of what other countries—especially communist countries—are doing. Where once the agent sought secret information with little support beyond his own wits, he now is provided with a dazzling assortment of audio devices, miniaturized cameras, and other exotic tools. 

Within the CIA's Clandestine Services, the Technical Services Division (TSD) is responsible for developing most of the equipment used in the modern spying game. Some of the paraphernalia is unusual: a signal transmitter disguised as a false tooth, a pencil which looks and writes like an ordinary pencil but can also write invisibly on special paper, a bizarre automobile rear-view mirror that allows the driver to observe not the traffic behind but the occupants of the back seat instead. Except for audio devices, special photographic equipment, and secret communications systems, there is in fact little applicability for even the most imaginative tools in real clandestine operations.

Secret intelligence services in past times were interested only in recruiting agents who had direct access to vital foreign information. Today the CIA and other services also search for the guard or janitor who is in a position to install a bug or a phone tap in a sensitive location. Even the telephone and telegraph companies of other countries have become targets for the agency. In addition to the foreign and defense ministries, the CIA operators usually try to penetrate the target nation's communications systems-a task which is on occasion aided by American companies, particularly the International Telephone and Telegraph Company. Postal services also are subverted for espionage purposes.

Secret intelligence services in past times were interested only in recruiting agents who had direct access to vital foreign information. Today the CIA and other services also search for the guard or janitor who is in a position to install a bug or a phone tap in a sensitive location. Even the telephone and telegraph companies of other countries have become targets for the agency. In addition to the foreign and defense ministries, the CIA operators usually try to penetrate the target nation's communications systems-a task which is on occasion aided by American companies, particularly the International Telephone and Telegraph Company. Postal services also are subverted for espionage purposes.

Most agency operators receive training in the installation and servicing of bugs and taps, but the actual planting of audio surveillance devices is usually carried out by TSD specialists brought in from headquarters or a regional operational support center, like ( DELETED ). The more complex the task, the more likely it is that headquarters specialists will be utilized to do the job. On some operations, however, agents will be specially trained by TSD experts, or even the responsible case officer, in the skills of installing such equipment.

Audio operations vary, of course, in complexity and sensitivity—that is, in risk potential. A classic, highly dangerous operation calls for a great deal of planning, during which the site is surveyed in extensive detail. Building and floor plans must be acquired or developed from visual surveillance. The texture of the walls, the colors of interior paints, and the like must be determined. Activity in the building and in the room or office where the device is to be installed must be observed and recorded to ascertain when the area is accessible. The movements of the occupants and any security patrols must be also known. When all this has been accomplished, the decision is made as to where and when to plant the bug. 

Usually, the site will be entered at night or on a weekend and, in accordance with carefully pre-planned and tightly timed actions, the audio device will be installed. High-speed, silent drills may be used to cut into the wall, and after installation of the bug, the damage will be repaired with quick drying plaster and covered by a paint exactly matching the original. The installation may also be accomplished from an adjoining room, or one above or below (if a ceiling or floor placement is called for).

The agency's successes with bugs and taps have usually been limited to the non-communist countries, where relatively lax internal-security systems do not deny the CIA operations the freedom of movement necessary to install eavesdropping devices. A report on clandestine activities in Latin America during the 1960's by the CIA Inspector General, for example, revealed that a good part of the intelligence collected by the agency in that region came from audio devices. In quite a few of the Latin nations, the report noted, the CIA was regularly intercepting the telephone conversations of important officials and had managed to place bugs in the homes and offices of many key personnel, up to and including cabinet ministers. In some allied countries the agency shares in the information acquired from audio surveillance conducted by the host intelligence service, which often receives technical assistance from the CIA for this very purpose—and may be penetrated by the CIA in the process.

Audio devices are fickle. As often as not, they fail to work after they have been installed, or they function well for a few days, then suddenly fall silent. Sometimes they are quickly discovered by the local security services, or, suspecting that a room may be bugged, the opposition employs effective countermeasures. The Soviet KGB has the habit of renting homes and offices in foreign countries and then building new interior walls, floors, and ceilings covering the original ones in key rooms—thus completely baffling the effectiveness of any bugs that may have been installed. The simplest way to negate audio surveillance—and it is a method universally employed —is to raise the noise level in the room by constantly playing a radio or a Hi-Fi set. The music and other extraneous noises tend to mask the sounds of the voices that the bug is intended to capture; unlike the human ear, audio devices cannot distinguish among sounds.

CIA technicians are constantly working on new listening devices in the hope of improving the agency's ability to eavesdrop. Ordinary audio equipment, along with other clandestine devices, is developed by the Technical Services Division. In addition to espionage tools, the TSD devises gadgets for use in other covert activities, such as paramilitary operations. Plastic explosives, incapacitating and lethal drugs, and silent weapons—high-powered crossbows, for example— are designed and fabricated for special operations. The more complex or sophisticated instruments used by the CIA's secret operators are, however, produced by the agency's Directorate of Science and Technology. 

This component also assists other groups within the CIA engaging in clandestine research and development. It aids the Office of Security in the latter's effort to improve on the polygraph (lie detector) machine through research on eye movement and changes in voice quality under stress, and by the use of drugs. Experiments with drugs for this purpose have been secretly conducted by outside scientists under contract to the CIA, some apparently connected with universities, on volunteers from a few federal penitentiaries. The D/S&T, furthermore, assists the Office of Communications in devising new and improved methods of communications intercept and security countermeasures.

Although the experts in the Science and Technology Directorate have done much outstanding work in some areas—for example, overhead reconnaissance—their performance in the audio field for clandestine application is often less than satisfactory. One such device long under development was a laser beam which could be aimed at a closed window from outside and used to pick up the vibrations of the sound waves caused by a conversation inside the room. This system was successfully tested in the field—in West Africa—but it never seemed to function properly elsewhere, except in the United States. Another device was ... Under laboratory conditions and controlled field experiments, the system performed adequately, but the many imponderables of real operational situations ... prevented ... from ever being used by the Agency's clandestine operators.

When CIA operators are successful in planting a bug or making a tap, they send the information thus acquired back to the Clandestine Services at headquarters in Langley with the source clearly identified. However, when the Clandestine Services, in turn, pass the information on to the intelligence analysts in the agency and elsewhere in the federal government, the source is disguised or the information is buried in a report from a real agent. For example, the Clandestine Services might credit the information to "a source in the foreign ministry who has reported reliably in the past" or "a Western businessman with wide contacts in the local government." In the minds of the covert operators, it is more important to protect the source than to present the information straightforwardly. This may guarantee "safe" sources, but it also handicaps the analysts in making a confident judgment of the accuracy of the report's content.

( DELETED ) The fertile imaginations of the S&T Directorate experts during the following years produced many more unique collection schemes aimed at solving the mysteries of China's strategic missile program. Most eventually proved to be unworkable, and at least one entailed a frighteningly high-risk potential. The silliest of all, however, called for the creation of a small one-man airplane that could theoretically be packaged in two large suitcases. In concept, an agent along with the suitcases would somehow be infiltrated into the denied area, where, after performing his espionage mission, he would assemble the aircraft and fly to safety over the nearest friendly border. Even the chief of the Clandestine Services refused to have anything to do with this scheme, and the project died on the drawing boards. ( DELETED ) 

The technical difficulties involved in the (DELETED) system and the (DELETED) device were too great and too time-consuming for either to be fully developed by their inventors before improvements in intelligence satellite surveillance programs were achieved. Other clandestine collection devices—a few more sensibly contrived, but most of dubious value— were also developed by the agency's technicians and may now be in operation. The CIA's technical experts often feel compelled to build exotic systems only because of the mechanical challenge they pose. Such efforts might be justified by an intelligence requirement; unfortunately, too many intelligence requirements are not honestly based on the needs of the policy-makers but are instead generated by and for the CIA and the other intelligence community members alone.

The Technical Collection Explosion 
While technology has increasingly tended to mechanize classical espionage, its most important impact on the intelligence trade has been in large-scale collection satellites, long-range sensors, and the interception of communications. These technical espionage systems have become far and away the most important sources of information on America's principal adversaries. Overhead reconnaissance programs have provided much detailed information on Soviet and Chinese missile programs, troop movements, and other military developments. They have also produced valuable information regarding North Vietnamese infiltration of South Vietnam and North Korean military preparations against South Korea. And such collection has frequently contributed to the U.S. government's knowledge of events in the Middle East.

As technical collection becomes more refined, classical spies have, of course, become nearly obsolete in clandestine operations against the more important target countries. So, too, has the shift to technical espionage caused America's intelligence costs to skyrocket to more than $6 billion yearly. Not only are classical spies relatively cheap, but technical collection systems, producing incredible amounts of information, require huge numbers of people to process and analyze this mass of raw data.

In terms of money spent and personnel involved, the CIA is very much a junior partner to the Pentagon in the technical-espionage field. The Defense Department has an overall intelligence budget of about $5 billion a year, some 75 to 80 percent of which is spent on technical collection and processing. The CIA's technical programs, however, amount to no more than $150 million yearly. (This is exclusive of several hundred million in funds annually supplied by the Pentagon for certain community-wide programs, such as satellite development, in which the agency shares.) Similarly, there are tens of thousands of people—both military and civilian—working for the Defense Department in the technical fields, whereas the CIA only has about 1,500 such personnel. 

Still, the agency has made a substantial contribution to research and development in technical espionage. Over the years, CIA scientists have scored major successes by developing the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes, in perfecting the first workable photographic reconnaissance satellites, and in producing outstanding advances in stand-off, or long-range, electronic sensors, such as over-the-horizon radars and stationary satellites. A good part of these research and operating costs have been funded by the Pentagon, and in several instances the programs were ultimately converted into joint CIA-Pentagon operations or "captured" by the military services.

America's first experience in technical espionage came in the form of radio intercepts and code breaking, an art known as communications intelligence (COMINT). Although Secretary of State Henry Stimson closed down the cryptanalytical section of the State Department in 1939 with the explanation that "gentlemen do not read each other's mail," COMINT was revived, and played an important part in U.S. intelligence activities during World War II. In the immediate postwar period this activity was initially reduced, then expanded once again as the Cold War intensified. In 1952 the President, by secret executive order, established the National Security Agency (NSA) to intercept and decipher the communications of both the nation's enemies and friends and to ensure that U.S. codes were secure from similar eavesdropping. The NSA, though placed under the control of the Defense Department, soon established an independent bureaucratic identity of its own—and at present has a huge budget of well over a billion dollars per annum and a workforce of some 25,000 personnel. 

Before the NSA can break into and read foreign codes and ciphers, it must first intercept the encoded and encrypted messages of the target country. To make these intercepts, it must have listening posts in locations where the signal waves of the transmitters that send the messages can be acquired. Radio traffic between foreign capitals and embassies in Washington can be easily picked off by listening equipment located in suburban Maryland and Virginia, but communications elsewhere in the world are not so easily intercepted. Thus, the NSA supports hundreds of listening posts around the globe, such posts usually being operated by other U.S. government agencies. Most commonly used to run the NSA's overseas facilities are the armed services' cryptological agencies: the Army Security Agency, the Navy Security Service, and the Air Force Security Agency. These three military organizations come under the NSA's policy coordination; the messages they intercept are sent back to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, near Washington.

Perhaps the most controversial NSA base (operated by the Army) is at Kagnew in Ethiopia. A Senate subcommittee investigating American commitments abroad, chaired by Stuart Symington, revealed in 1970 that this heretofore secret facility had been secured from the Haile Selassie regime in return for hundreds of millions of dollars in military and economic assistance—without most members of Congress ever being aware of its existence. The Symington subcommittee also discovered a similar NSA facility (operated by the Navy) at (DELETED) in (DELETED) which also had been kept secret from Congress. 

Both these bases have been used to intercept communications from the Middle East and Africa, and both required the U.S. government to offer an implicit—but secret commitment to the host government. ( DELETED ) Although the NSA engineered some successes against the Eastern European countries and Communist China in its early days, for at least the last fifteen years it has been completely unable to break into the high-grade cipher systems and codes of these nations. Against such major targets, the NSA has been reduced to reading comparatively unimportant communications between low-level military components and the equally inconsequential routine exchanges between low-grade bureaucrats and economic planners. This is far short of learning the Soviet Union's or China's most vital secrets. ( DELETED ). 

One such benefit is derived from traffic analysis, the technique by which the NSA gleans some useful information through the study of communication patterns. A principal assistant of the NSA Director observed at the same meeting that another justification for the agency's continuing programs against the Soviets and Chinese is the hope that "maybe we'll get a break sometime, like the Pueblo." He was, of course, referring to the capture in 1968 of the NSA spy ship by North Korea. Much of the Pueblo's cryptological machinery was seized intact by the North Koreans and probably turned over to the Soviets. While these machines were not associated with the highest-grade U.S. military or diplomatic systems, the Soviets would have been able to use them to read messages previously sent through certain American military channels and intercepted and stored by the Soviets. The NSA has for many years been recording and storing not-yet-"broken" Soviet and Chinese messages, and can presume the same has been done with American communications; for our part, there are literally boxcars and warehouses full of incomprehensible tapes of this sort at NSA's Fort Meade headquarters.

As with so many other parts of the American intelligence apparatus, the NSA has had considerably more success operating against the Third World countries and even against some of our allies. With what is reportedly the largest bank of computers in the world and thousands of cryptanalysts, the NSA has had little trouble with the codes and ciphers of these nations. 

Two of the highly secret agency's young officers, William Martin and Bemon Mitchell, who defected to the Soviet Union in 1960, mentioned thirty to forty nations whose systems the NSA could read. In addition, Martin and Mitchell told of a practice under which the NSA provided encoding and cryptographic machines to other nations, then used its knowledge of the machinery to read the intercepted messages of these countries. This practice still flourishes. 

One of the countries that Martin and Mitchell specifically named as being read by the NSA at that time was Egypt—the United Arab Republic. After making their revelation at a Moscow press conference, ( DELETED ) The Soviets probably were, too. ( DELETED ) A "break," in the terminology of the cryptanalyst, is a success scored not through deciphering skill, but because of an error on the part of another country's communications clerks or, on rare occasions, a failure in the cipher equipment. A few years ago, a new code clerk arrived at a foreign embassy in Washington and promptly sent a message "in the clear" (i.e., un-enciphered), to his Foreign Ministry. Realizing that he should have encrypted the transmission, he sent the same message again, but this time in cipher. With the "before and after" messages in hand, the NSA had little difficulty thereafter, of course, reading that country's secret communications. 

Malfunctioning or worn-out cryptographic equipment results in triumphs for the NSA by unintentionally establishing repetitious patterns which detract from the random selections that are vital to sophisticated ciphers. A rough analogy would be a roulette wheel which, because of poor construction or excessive wear, develops certain predictable characteristics discernible to a keen observer who is then able to take advantage because of his special knowledge. Another type of break comes as a result of a physical (rather than cerebral) attack on another country's communications system. The attack may be a clandestine operation to steal a code book or cipher system, the suborning of a communications clerk, or the planting of an audio device in an embassy radio room. Within the CIA's Clandestine Services, a special unit of the Foreign Intelligence (i.e., espionage) Staff specializes in these attacks. When it is successful, the information it acquires is sent to the NSA to help that agency with its COMINT efforts.

In 1970, NSA Director Admiral Noel Gayler and his top deputies admitted privately that a good part of the NSA's successes came from breaks, and they emphasized that the agency was extremely adept at exploiting these non-cryptanalytical windfalls. Nevertheless, breaks are never mentioned in the authorized U.S. government "leaks" concerning the NSA's activities that from time to time appear in the press. In its controlled revelations to the public, the NSA deliberately tries to create the impression that it is incredibly good at the art of deciphering secret foreign communications and that its triumphs are based purely on its technical skills. ( DELETED)

( DELETED ) A side effect of the NSA's programs to intercept diplomatic and commercial messages is that rather frequently certain information is acquired about American citizens, including members of Congress and other federal officials, which can be highly embarrassing to those individuals. This type of intercepted message is handled with even greater care than the NSA's normal product, which itself is so highly classified that a special security clearance is needed to see it. Such information may, for example, derive from a Senator's conversation with a foreign ambassador in Washington who then cables a report of the talk to his Foreign Ministry.

A more serious embarrassment happened in 1970 during the course of delicate peace talks on the Middle East. A State Department official had a conversation about the negotiations with an Arab diplomat who promptly reported what he had been told to his government. His cable disclosed that the State Department man had either grossly misstated the American bargaining position or the diplomat had badly misunderstood what had been told him. In any case, high State Department officers were quite disturbed about the misrepresented position and the incident did not reflect well on the competence of the American official in the eyes of his superiors. Not even the CIA is immune to such prying by the NSA. On one occasion the Director of Central Intelligence was supplied with an intercepted message concerning his deputy. According to this message, a transmission from a Western European ambassador to his Foreign Office, the CIA's number-two man had a few evenings earlier at a dinner party hosted by the ambassador indiscreetly opined on several sensitive U.S. policy positions. The ambassador's interpretation of the conversation was contradicted by the Deputy Director—to the apparent satisfaction of the DCI—and the matter was quietly dropped.

Some NSA-intercepted communications can cause surprising problems within the U.S. government if they are inadvertently distributed to the wrong parties. When particularly sensitive foreign-policy negotiations are under way which may be compromised internally by too much bureaucratic awareness, the White House's usual policy has been to issue special instructions to the NSA to distribute messages mentioning these negotiations only to Henry Kissinger and his immediate staff.

The FBI operates a wiretap program against numerous foreign embassies in Washington which, like some of the NSA intercept operations, also provides information about Americans. In cooperation with the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company (a Bell subsidiary), FBI agents regularly monitor the phones in the offices of all communist governments represented here; on occasion, the embassies of various non-communist countries have their phones tapped, especially when their nations are engaged in negotiations with the U.S. government or when important developments are taking place in these countries. ( DELETED ) Wiretaps on foreign embassies, justified on the grounds of preserving national security, must be approved by the State Department before they are installed by the FBI. As it is often State which requests the FBI to activate the listening devices, approval is almost always given. The transcripts of such conversations are never marked as having come from wiretaps, but instead carry the description "from a source who has reported reliably in the past." Such reliable "sources" include State Department officials themselves—the CIA has, on occasion, intercepted communications between American ambassadorial officials and their colleagues in Washington.

In the way of background, it should be understood that CIA communications clerks handle nearly all classified cables between American embassies and Washington—for both the CIA and the State Department. To have a separate code room for each agency in every embassy would be a wasteful procedure, so a senior CIA communications expert is regularly assigned to the administrative part of the State Department in order to oversee CIA's communicators who work under State cover. In theory, CIA clerks are not supposed to read the messages they process for State, but any code clerk who wants to have a successful career quickly realizes that his promotions depend on the CIA and that he is well advised to show the CIA station chief copies of all important State messages. The State Department long ago implicitly recognized that its most secret cables are not secure from CIA inspection by setting up special communications channels which supposedly cannot be deciphered by the CIA.

When in 1968 Ambassador to Iran Armin Meyer ran into troubles with the CIA station chief in Tehran, Meyer switched his communications with State in Washington to one of these "secure" channels, called "Roger." But the CIA had nonetheless figured out a way to intercept his cables and the replies he received from Washington; the CIA Director thus received a copy of each intercepted cable. Written on top of each cable was a warning that the contents of the cable should be kept especially confidential because State was unaware that the CIA had a copy.

Satellites and Other Systems 
The most important source of technical intelligence gathered by the U.S. is that collected by photographic and electronic reconnaissance satellites. Most are launched into north-south orbits designed to carry them over such targets as the U.S.S.R. and China with maximum frequency as they circle around the earth. Others are put into orbits synchronized with the rotation of the globe, giving the illusion that they are stationary. All satellite programs come under the operational authority of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), a component of the Secretary of the Air Force's office. The N.R.O spends well over a billion dollars every year for satellites and other reconnaissance systems. While the Defense Department provides all the money, policy decisions on how the funds will be allocated are made by the Executive Committee for Reconnaissance, consisting of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, the Director of Central Intelligence, and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. Requirements for satellite collection are developed by the U.S. Intelligence Board (U.S.I.B), which is chaired by the Director of Central Intelligence and whose members are the heads of all other intelligence agencies. A special committee of the U.S.I.B designates the specific targets each satellite will cover.

Employing high-resolution and wide-angle cameras, the photographic satellites have for years provided voluminous and detailed information on Soviet and Chinese military developments and other matters of strategic importance; conversely, except for special cases such as the Arab-Israeli situation, there has been little reason to apply satellite reconnaissance against other, less powerful countries. Some photographic satellites are equipped with color cameras for special missions, and some even carry infrared sensing devices which measure heat emissions from ground targets, to determine, for example, if a site is occupied or what the level of activity is at certain locations. There are satellites that have television cameras to speed up the delivery of their product to the photo interpreters who analyze, or read out, the film packages of the spies in the sky. But, good as they are, photographic satellites have inherent limitations. They cannot see through clouds, nor can they see into buildings or inside objects.

In addition to photographic satellites, U.S. intelligence possesses a wide array of other reconnaissance satellites which perform numerous electronic sensing tasks. These satellites collect data on missile testing, on radars and the emissions of other high-power electronic equipment, and on communications traffic. Electronic satellites are in some cases supported by elaborate ground stations, both in friendly foreign countries and in the United States, that feed targeting directions to the sensors, receive the collected data from the satellites, and transmit the processed data to the intelligence agencies in Washington. (The electronic satellite systems to a large extent carry out the same collection functions performed by the many listening posts of the CIA and NSA which ring the U.S.S.R. and China. And they collect much of the same data as that gathered by the NSA's spy ships and the Air Force's flying listening posts. The J.R.C, Joint Reconnaissance Committee, an inter-agency group controlled largely by the military through the Joint Chiefs of Staff, maintains overall responsibility for the technical collection projects carried out by planes and ships.

Until satellites became operational in the early 1960s, spy planes and ships were valuable sources of information, serving as supplements to the product of the NSA, then the best material available to U.S. intelligence. Air Force and CIA aircraft frequently flew along the perimeters of the communist countries and even over their territory in search of badly needed electronic and photographic information. Spy ships operated by the Navy-like the Pueblo sailed along the coasts listening in on communications and other electronic signals. Although these programs were considered to be great successes by the intelligence community, occasional blunders such as the 1959 U-2 affair and the Tonkin Gulf incident in 1964 (the two U.S. destroyers "torpedoed" by North Vietnamese boats were on a clandestine spy mission) had a serious and detrimental effect on world politics. Aggressive technical intelligence collection efforts have also led to the capture of the Pueblo, the Israeli attack on the Liberty in 1967, and shoot downs of RB-47's by the Soviets, and of EC-121's and several U-2's by the Chinese.

Despite the risks incurred by such provocative collection actions in the name of intelligence, the Pentagon continues to sponsor these now obsolete programs. Satellites and long-range stand-off (i.e., non-penetrating) systems have deeply reduced, if not eliminated, the need for spy flights and cruises. But the armed services have spent billions of dollars to develop the spy planes and ships (just as the C.T.A and the NSA have invested in outmoded listening posts ringing the U.S.S.R. and China); consequently, there has been a stubborn bureaucratic reluctance to take these collectors out of service. The "drone"—pilot less aircraft—flights over China, for example, were continued even after the Chinese started shooting them down on a regular and embarrassing basis, and after they had proven nearly useless. State Department reconnaissance intelligence experts insisted that the Air Force maintained the drone activity, even though the information thus gathered was of marginal value, because it had nowhere else to use such spy equipment. 

Similarly, Air Force SR-71's have continued to fly over North Korea despite that country's lack of meaningful intelligence targets. With the Soviet Union declared off bounds for secret overflights since 1960, and China since 1971, the Air Force can devise no other way of justifying the operational need for these aircraft. ( DELETED ) Clearly, the prevailing theology in the U.S. intelligence community calls for the collection of as much information as possible. Little careful consideration is given to the utility of the huge amounts of material so acquired. The attitude of "collection for collection's sake" has resulted in mountains of information which can only overwhelm intelligence analysts charged with interpreting it. Further, such material contributes little to the national requirements, though it may prove interesting to certain highly specialized analysts, particularly in the Pentagon. There has been little coordination between the managers of the various technical espionage programs, and even less between the collectors and the policymakers. Each of the many agencies which carry out such programs has a vested bureaucratic interest in keeping its particular system in being, and the extreme compartmentalization of the operations has .made it almost impossible for the programs to be evaluated as a whole. Former CIA Director Helms failed almost completely in his assigned mission of bringing a more rational and coordinated approach to the myriad technical espionage systems. It is not likely that his successors will do much better. No CIA Director has ever been able to manage the intelligence community. Despite the roughly $5 billion already being spent each year on technical systems and on processing the great amounts of data collected, there remains significant pressure within the intelligence community to collect still more information. The Pentagon has for several years been pushing for ... This system is technologically feasible if the United States is willing to invest ... for the equipment ... While the Congress is permitted to pass on weapons systems of this magnitude, ... will probably never be voted on by our nation's legislators because of the secrecy insisted upon by the intelligence community. This secrecy is unquestionably needed to protect the actual workings of the system, but then the operation of the ABM was no less classified, and the national security did not seem to be injured by the ABM debate in Congress. However, the very word "intelligence" seems to make our legislators bow and genuflect. They have in the past bestowed virtual blank checks on the various intelligence agencies, allowing these organizations to do practically anything they desired. The Soviets have a fairly clear idea of the functions performed by American satellites and other collection systems; there would seem to be little practical reason why the Congress and the American people must be kept completely in the dark.

Furthermore, technical espionage of any kind has a limited value. It can identify and measure missile development and troop movements, but it cannot tell what foreign leaders are planning to do with those missiles and troops. In 1968 the U.S. intelligence community had a relatively clear picture of the Soviet preparations for military action against Czechoslovakia; it had no means whatever of knowing whether or not an actual attack would be made. That kind of information could have been provided only by a human spy inside the Kremlin, and the CIA had none of those, and small prospect for recruiting any. The United States knew what could happen, but intelligence consumers have an insatiable appetite for knowledge of what will happen. Their clamoring makes for more and bigger collection systems to attempt to satisfy their demands.

Counterespionage 
Counterespionage, the clandestine warfare waged between rival intelligence agencies, is usually referred to more delicately in the spy business as counterintelligence. Essentially, it consists of preventing the opposition from penetrating your own secret service while at the same time working to penetrate the opposition's—to learn what he is planning against you. As practiced by the CIA and the Soviet KGB, counterespionage is a highly complex and devious activity. It depends on cunning entrapment's, agents provocateurs, spies and counterspies, double and triple crosses. It is the stuff that spy novels are made of, with limitless possibilities for deception and turns of plot.

While foreign intelligence organizations with longer histories have traditionally emphasized counterespionage, U.S. intelligence was slow to develop such a capability. To Americans during World War II and immediately thereafter, counterespionage meant little more than defensive security measures such as electrified fences, watchdogs, and codes. The obscure subtleties and intricate conspiracies of counterespionage seemed alien to the American character and more suited to European back alleys and the Orient Express. But the demands of the Cold War and the successes scored by the KGB in infiltrating Western intelligence services gradually drew the CIA deeply into the counterespionage game.

Primary responsibility for U.S. internal security rests with the FBI, but inevitably there has been friction between the agency and the bureau in their often overlapping attempts to protect the nation against foreign spies. In theory, the CIA cooperates with the FBI in counterespionage cases by handling the overseas aspects and letting the bureau take care of all the action within the United States. In actual fact, the agency tends to keep within its own control, even domestically, those operations which are designed to penetrate opposition intelligence services; the basically defensive task of preventing the Soviets from recruiting American agents in the United States is left to the FBI. While the FBI also on occasion goes on the offensive by trying to recruit foreign intelligence agents, the bureau's first inclination seems to be to arrest or deport foreign spies rather than to turn them, as the CIA tries to do, into double agents. This fundamental difference in approach limits the degree of FBI-CIA cooperation in counterespionage and confirms the general view within the agency that FBI agents are rather unimaginative police officer types, and thus incapable of mastering the intricacies of counterespionage work. (The FBI, on the other hand, tends to see CIA counterintelligence operators as dilettantes who are too clever for their own good.) Although the CIA has had almost no success in penetrating the Soviet and other opposition services, it nonetheless continues to press for additional operational opportunities in the United States, claiming that the FBI is not sophisticated enough to cope with the KGB.

Within the CIA, the routine functions of security— physical protection of buildings, background investigations of personnel, lie-detector tests—are assigned to the Office of Security, a component of the housekeeping part of the agency, the M&S Directorate. Counterespionage policy and some actual operations emanate from the Counterintelligence (CI) Staff of the Clandestine Services. As with the bulk of espionage activities, however, most operations are carried out by the area divisions (Far East, Western Hemisphere, etc.), which are also responsible. The area divisions tend to see espionage value or information-gathering value in counterespionage operations, which are referred to in CIA files as joint FI/CI projects—FI (Foreign Intelligence) being the Clandestine Services' euphemism for espionage.

Almost every CIA station or base overseas has one or more officers assigned to it for counterespionage purposes. The first priority for these counterspy specialists is to monitor agency espionage and covert-action operations to make sure that the opposition has not penetrated or in some other way compromised the activity. All reports submitted by CIA case officers and their foreign agents are carefully studied for any indication of enemy involvement. The counterintelligence men know all too well that agents, wittingly or unwittingly, can be used by the KGB as deceptions to feed false information to the CIA, or employed as provocations to disrupt carefully laid operational plans. Foreign agents can also be penetrations, or double agents, whose task it is to spy on the CIA's secret activities. When a double agent is discovered in an operation, consideration is given to "turning" him—that is, making him a triple agent. Or perhaps he can be unwittingly used to deceive or provoke the opposition.

If a KGB officer tries to recruit a CIA staff employee, the counterespionage experts may work out a plan to entrap the enemy operator, then publicly expose him or attempt to "turn" him. Or they may encourage the agency employee to pretend to cooperate with the Soviets in order to learn more about what kind of information the KGB wants to collect, to discover more about KGB methods and equipment, or merely to occupy the time and money of the KGB on a fruitless project. CIA counterespionage specialists do not necessarily wait for the KGB to make a recruitment effort, but instead may set up an elaborate trap, dangling one of their own as bait for the opposition. 

Further, beyond safeguarding the CIA's own covert operations, counterespionage officers actively try to penetrate the opposition services. Seeking to recruit agents in communist and other intelligence services, they hope both to find out what secret actions the opposition is planning to take against the CIA, and to thwart or deflect those initiatives.

Counterespionage, like covert action, has become a career specialty in the CIA; some clandestine operators do no other type of work during their years with the agency. These specialists have developed their own clannish subculture within the Clandestine Services, and even other CIA operators often find them excessively secretive and deceptive. The function of the counterespionage officers is to question and verify every aspect of CIA operations; taking nothing at face value, they tend to see deceit everywhere. In an agency full of extremely mistrustful people, they are the professional paranoids.

Some CIA Many experienced CIA operators believe that counterespionage operations directed against opposition services receive a disproportionate amount of attention and resources within the Clandestine Services, for even if a spy were recruited in the KGB (which almost never happens), he would likely be of less intelligence value than a penetration at a similar level elsewhere in the Soviet government or Communist Party. To be sure, the spy could probably provide the CIA with some information on foreign agents working for the KGB, perhaps the type of intelligence received from them and other foreign sources, and maybe a few insights into KGB operations against the United States and other countries. But he would know little about the intentions of the Soviet leadership or Moscow's military and nuclear secrets—the most crucial information of all to those officials responsible for looking after the national security of the United States. 

The KGB officer, like most clandestine operators, is usually better versed on developments in foreign countries than those in his own nation. Although it is interesting to know what the KGB operators know and how they acquired their knowledge, that in itself is of little significance in achieving U.S. intelligence goals. The justification for the counterintelligence effort, although usually couched in intricate, sophisticated argument, amounts to little more than "operations for operations' sake." Admittedly, there can occasionally be a positive intelligence windfall from a counterespionage operation; an agent recruited in a foreign service may have access to information on his own government's secret policies and plans. 

Penkovsky, who was in Soviet military intelligence (G.R.U), provided his British and American case officers with reams of documents concerning the Soviet armed forces and their advanced weapons development programs, in addition to clandestine operational information and doctrine. Agents working for other foreign services have from time to time made similar, although less valuable, contributions. But the CIA's preoccupation with this type of clandestine operation, often to the exclusion of a search for more important secrets, is at least questionable. Within the Clandestine Services, the Soviet Bloc (SB) Division, quite obviously, is the most counterespionage-oriented of all the area divisions. 

The rationale generally given for this emphasis is that it is nearly impossible to recruit even the lowest-level spy in the U.S.S.R. because of the extremely tight internal security controls in force there. Among the few Soviets who can, however, move about freely despite these restrictions are KGB and other intelligence officers. They are, furthermore, part of that small group of Soviet officials who regularly come in contact with Westerners (often searching for their own recruits). And they are among those officials most likely to travel outside the Soviet Union, where recruitment approaches by CIA operators (or induced defections) can more easily be arranged. Being the most accessible and least supervised of all Soviet citizens, KGB officers are, therefore, potentially the most recruit-able.

Outside the Soviet Union, according to the SB Division's rationale, recruitment of non-KGB agents is almost as difficult as in the U.S.S.R. Most other Soviets, including the highest officials, are usually under KGB surveillance; they travel or live in groups, or are otherwise unreachable by the agency's clandestine operators. Once again, it is only the opposition intelligence officer who has the freedom of movement which allows for secret contact with foreigners. The division's efforts are therefore concentrated on seeking out potential agents among the KGB.

There is much truth in the Soviet Bloc Division's view of this operational problem, but the fact that the agency's operators have recruited no high-level Soviet spies and induced almost no significant defections from the U.S.S.R. in well over a decade raises serious questions concerning the CIA's competence as a clandestine intelligence organization. In fact, since the early 1960s there have been practically no CIA attempts to recruit a Soviet agent, and only a handful of defection inducements; Oleg Penkovsky, it must be remembered, was turned away when he first tried to defect. To be sure, there is reason for extreme care. Most Soviet defectors who bolt to the West are greeted by the agency with great caution because they may be KGB deceptions or provocations. The clandestine operators are so unsure of their ability to evaluate the intentions and establish the legitimacy of most defectors that the CIA has set up an inter-agency committee within the U.S. intelligence community to review all defector cases. This bureaucratic layering not only works to reduce the number of defectors accepted by the U.S. government (perhaps wisely), but also serves to spread the blame if mistakes are made.

Despite the CIA's extreme caution, however, a few defectors, some of them KGB undercover officers, have managed to accomplish their goal of escaping and establishing, as it is known in the clandestine trade, their bonafides, in spite of the agency's doubts. Svetlana Stalin succeeded simply because the CIA officers on the scene in India, with the encouragement of Ambassador Chester Bowles, refused to be held back by the SB Division's bureaucratic precautions.

It has been well established that the CIA cannot spy, in the classical sense, against its major target, the Soviet Union. Nor does the CIA seem to be able to conduct effective counterespionage (in the offensive aspect) against the Soviets. It even has difficulty dealing with the gratuitous opportunities presented by walk-ins and defectors. Much of this obviously can be attributed to the inherent difficulties involved in operating in a closed society like the U.S.S.R.'s, and against a powerful, unrelenting opposition organization like the KGB; and some of the lack of success can, too, be explained by the CIA's incompetence. But there is more to the failure against the Soviet target than insurmountable security problems or ineptitude. The CIA's Clandestine Services are, to a large extent, fearful of and even intimidated by the Soviet KGB because they have so frequently been outmaneuvered by it. Most Soviet spying successes against the major Western powers have involved penetrations of their intelligence services. The KGB, with its origins in the highly conspiratorial czarist secret police, has often appeared to professional observers to be more adept at penetrating foreign intelligence organizations than in recruiting ordinary spies.

Most notorious among the KGB's infiltration's of Western intelligence (at least those that have been discovered) was Harold "Kim" Philby, who spied for Moscow for over twenty years while a very high ranking official of Britain's MI-6.There have been several other highly damaging KGB penetrations of British intelligence, French and German intelligence, and the services of most of the smaller N.A.T.O. countries. And KGB agents have been uncovered on several occasions in U.S. intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, several of the military security agencies, and the intelligence section of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

But as far as is publicly known, no career officer of the CIA has ever been proved to be an enemy spy. There have been some odd dismissals of clandestine officers from time to time for reasons that have smacked of more than mere incompetence or corruption, but none of these has ever officially been designated as a penetration. On the other hand, foreign agents recruited by the agency have sometimes been found to be working for an opposition service. Whenever such a penetration is discovered in a CIA operation, the agency's counterespionage specialists compile a damage report assessing how much information has been revealed to the subject and the possible repercussions of such disclosures on other CIA activities. 

Similarly, agency counterespionage officers participate in the preparation of damage reports when a penetration is exposed elsewhere in the U.S. intelligence community. One such report was prepared in cooperation with the Defense Department in 1966 when Lieutenant Colonel W. H. Whalen, a U.S. Army intelligence officer working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was arrested as a KGB spy. The investigation disclosed that Whalen had had access to almost all the U.S. national intelligence estimates of Soviet strategic military capabilities during the "missile gap" controversy several years earlier. Evidently, he had delivered copies of these top-secret documents to his KGB employers. However, the results of Whalen's actions were, upon examination, as surprising as they were discouraging to U.S. intelligence. 

A principal reason why CIA and Pentagon analysts believed there was a missile gap during the late 1950's and early 1960's was the numerous references in speeches made at the time by Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders alluding to the development and deployment of Soviet long-range nuclear missiles. These announcements, carefully timed to correspond to the progressive phases of intercontinental ballistic missile research, testing, production, and operational introduction to the armed forces, were studied in great detail by the Kremlin watchers of the U.S. intelligence community. Learning from American scientists working on U.S. missile programs what was technically feasible in the field of ICBM development, and having already witnessed the startling demonstration of Soviet space technology demonstrated in the launching of Sputnik, the intelligence analysts assumed the worst—that the Soviets were well ahead of the United States in the missile race. The analysts noted in their estimates that the statements of the Soviet leaders were a significant factor in making this judgment.

Neither the U-2 reconnaissance flights nor the first missions of American photographic satellites confirmed the fears of the analysts, but the U.S. government took no chances, and pressed fervently ahead with its own strategic strike programs, especially the Minuteman ICBM and the Polaris submarine. By 1963 it was abundantly evident that the only "missile gap" which existed was in America's favor, created by the rapid deployment of U.S. systems. Khrushchev and his colleagues had deliberately attempted to mislead by cleverly implying a nuclear attack capability which the Soviet Union did not possess; apparently, they were somewhat encouraged by those U.S. intelligence estimates secretly provided by Colonel Whalen which showed how worried U.S. officials were by the Soviet bluff. But even though deception was at first successful, in that U.S. officials believed the Soviet claims, it ultimately backfired as the United States chose to accelerate its own missile development programs, thereby placing the Soviet Union in a position of still greater strategic disadvantage than before.

Perhaps an even greater service which Colonel Whalen unintentionally performed for his country while spying for the KGB came during the Berlin crisis of 1961. At that time, in addition to building the wall to separate the east and west portions of the city, the East Germans attempted, with obvious Soviet support, to reduce access to Berlin from West Germany. The U.S. intelligence estimate was that the communists were toughening and unlikely to back down. This gloomy but influential estimate was passed to the KGB by Colonel Whalen, probably along with other information that the United States would stand absolutely firm. When the Soviets suddenly and unexpectedly eased their position, both the White House and the intelligence community, although pleased, were confused by Moscow's turnabout. Only years later, during the preparation of the Whalen damage report, did the analysts get a better idea why their original estimates of Soviet behavior had proved to be wrong in 1961. With the benefit of hindsight, the analysts reasoned: The Soviet leaders had decided to ease their stand when they realized the U.S. government would not back down, despite the estimate of Soviet intransigence. Apparently afraid they might be on the verge of provoking a major military conflict, the Soviets abruptly softened their demands.

The unexpected benefits to the U.S. government stemming from the Whalen penetration, while clearly fortuitous, are not unique in clandestine operations. In 1964 it was learned that the American embassy in Moscow had been thoroughly bugged by the KGB. Scores of Soviet audio devices were found throughout the building. Counterespionage and security specialists determined that the equipment had been installed in 1952 when the embassy had been renovated, and that the bugs had been operational for roughly twelve years. The damage report asserted that during this entire period—at the height of the Cold War—Soviet intelligence had probably intercepted every diplomatic cable between Washington and the embassy. 

This assessment was based on the discovery of electronic listening devices in the code room which allowed the Soviets to hear distinctly the sounds being made by the typewriters and cryptographic equipment. It was a reasonably easy technological feat, well within Soviet capabilities-to translate such sounds into their true alphabetical meaning. U.S. suspicions about the Soviet eavesdropping were apparently aroused early in 1964 when Nikita Khrushchev made a remark to Ambassador Foy Kohler about Kohler's role in blocking the shipment to the Soviet Union of steel for an important pipeline. 

Taken in context, Khrushchev's remark indicated to Kohler that there was a leak somewhere in American security. Kohler started a massive investigation and, within a month or two, found forty-odd bugs embedded in walls throughout the embassy. Although Kohler would later claim there was no connection between the discovery of the bugs and the investigation he ordered after his conversation with Khrushchev, the timing would seem to indicate otherwise.... In any case, the official damage report concluded that for those twelve crucial years at the height of the Cold War, ... The damage report noted, however, that this Soviet knowledge may well have worked to the advantage of the United States ... Today the likelihood of the KGB eavesdropping on the activities in an embassy code room is extremely remote. Most State Department communications overseas are handled by the CIA.

The machines and other equipment are cushioned and covered to mute the sounds emanating from them. The rooms themselves are encased in lead and rest on huge springs that further reduce the internal noises. Resembling large camping trailers, the code rooms now are normally located deep in the concrete basements of embassy buildings. Access to them by sound-sensitive devices is, for all practical purposes, impossible.

The CIA's counterespionage operators not only try to recruit secret agents in opposition services like the KGB; they also work against the so-called friendly or allied services. Off bounds for the most part—in principle, at least—are the intelligence agencies of the English-speaking countries, among which there is a kind of unwritten agreement not to spy on each other.... The Agency's closest ally is British intelligence.... (... The CIA exchanges such a large volume of information with British intelligence that the analytical part of the Agency, the Directorate for Intelligence, always has several officers stationed in England for the sole purpose of facilitating the liaison .... ) 

Attempts are made by the Intelligence Directorate to restrict the dissemination of highly classified analysis to foreign intelligence services, but for the most part these are limited to relatively minor deletions of references to collection sources. In some instances, the practice involves simply cutting out with a razor a few words here and there from the text of, say, a National Intelligence Estimate on Soviet missile capabilities. Usually this is done on only a few documents being given to the British or other English speaking services.... Although there are a good number of American Jews in the Clandestine Services, many veterans of the O.S.S and the early CIA German and East European operations, ... Elsewhere in the Agency, Jews serve in many capacities, some at the very top of the organization, but in accordance with tradition, none is engaged in analytical work on the Mideast ....)

Domestic Operations 
On December 17, 1972, the New York Times revealed that the CIA had secretly provided training to fourteen New York City policemen. At the time, agency spokesman Angus Thuermer acknowledged that other American police departments had received "similar courtesies," but he would not specify how many. Thuermer said to the Times, "I doubt very much that [CIA officials] keep that kind of information." But New York Congressman Edward Koch persisted in seeking precisely "that kind of information" from the agency. 

On January 29, 1973, the CIA's Legislative Counsel, John Maury (himself a longtime clandestine operator and former station chief in Greece), admitted to Koch that "less than fifty police officers all told, from a total of about a dozen city and county police forces, have received some sort of Agency briefing within the past two years." But again the CIA was being less than forthcoming, for its police training (which consisted of much more than a "briefing") had been going on for considerably more than the two years cited by the CIA—at least since 1967, when Chicago police received instruction at both the agency's headquarters and at "The Farm" in southeastern Virginia. 

When queried by newspaper reporters in 1973, police authorities in Chicago denied that any of their men had received any such agency training. But Richard Helms, then recently departed as Director, specifically told a secret session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the beginning of February that Chicago police had been included in the agency training effort, and his disclosure subsequently leaked out to the press.

It was significant that when the CIA publicly owned up to training sessions in Maury's letter to Koch, the only time period mentioned was "the past two years"; it was likely true that in "the past two years" fewer than fifty officers from a dozen localities had been trained. But if the CIA had confessed to the full extent of its pre-1971 police-training activities, the figures would have been much larger. More important, the agency could not have justified its domestic police training program, as it did, on the grounds that a provision of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 encouraged federal law enforcement agencies to assist local forces. That law was not passed until June 1968, well after the CIA training had started. Of course, once the agency had been shown to have carried out this domestic activity, it needed such a justification or excuse: the National Security Act of 1947 had forbidden it to exercise any "police, subpoena, law enforcement powers, or internal security functions."

The tactics used by the CIA to cover its tracks in this instance were typical of the kind of deception that the agency has generally used to conceal its numerous activities inside the United States. The subject of domestic operations is a particularly sensitive one in the CIA, and probably no other program is handled with greater secrecy.

CIA training of local police departments may seem like a relatively harmless activity, but it does raise several questions. Why did the agency at first try to cover up and then mislead Congress, the press, and the public about its activity? Why could the same training not have been given by the FBI, which maintains facilities and has legal authorization for that purpose? (Helms told the Foreign Relations Committee that the police requested CIA assistance because the agency's techniques in keeping intelligence files and in performing certain kinds of surveillance were more advanced than the FBI's.) And why have subsequent CIA Directors James Schlesinger and William Colby not specifically ruled out any future police training, even after the press and the Congress have raised the questions of illegality and impropriety? None of these questions has an obvious answer. In general, however, the CIA does not like to admit that it has been doing something it shouldn't have, and deceptive public statements by the agency are as much a standard reflex action as an indication that something particularly unsavory has occurred. Another explanation might be that during those days in December 1972 and January 1973 when the policetraining incident was being exposed, the Watergate cover-up bad not yet come unglued and the CIA might have been trying to keep investigators away from its domestic activities. A few months later, of course, the press would discover, and various public officials would reveal, that Richard Helms had been "most cooperative and helpful" in helping to organize the top-secret White House plan for domestic surveillance and intelligence collection; that the CIA had provided "technical" assistance to the White House plumbers in their 1971 burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist; that the agency maintained "safe houses" in the heart of Washington where E. Howard Hunt was clandestinely provided with CIA-manufactured false documents, a disguise, a speech-altering device, and a camera fitted into a tobacco pouch; that five of the seven Watergate burglars were ex-CIA employees, and one was still on the payroll and regularly reporting to an agency case officer; that in the week after the break-in at the Democratic Party's headquarters, high White House officials tried to involve the agency directly in the Watergate cover-up; and, perhaps most significantly, that top CIA officials remained silent, even in secret testimony before congressional committees, about the illegal activities they knew had taken place. In fact, Helms' answers to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's questions on Watergate in February and March 1973 proved to be so evasive and misleading, particularly as subsequent disclosures were made, that the Washington Post's Laurence Stern wrote on July 10 of the same year "that the word perjury was being uttered in Senate offices by those who were privy to the secret testimony given by Helms...."

At a February 7 hearing, for example, New Jersey's Senator Clifford Case told Helms it had come to his attention that in 1969 or 1970 the White House had asked the various government intelligence agencies to pool resources to learn more about the anti-war movement. "Do you know anything," Case asked Helms, "about any activity on the part of the CIA in that connection? Was it asked to be involved?" Helms replied, "I don't recall whether we were asked, but we were not involved because to me that was a clear violation of what our charter was." Case persisted, "What do you do in a case like that? Suppose you were?" Helms answered, "I would simply go to explain to the President this didn't seem advisable." Case: "That would end it?" Helms: "Well, I think so, normally."

But the facts and suspicions to emerge from the Senate Watergate hearings during the following months suggested that this is not at all the way such matters are worked out behind the scenes in the executive branch of the government, raising still more questions as to the reliability of the CIA's clandestine leadership —and the agency's role in U.S. domestic intelligence operations.

The CIA and the FBI 
The CIA has always conducted clandestine operations within the United States, although for the most part these have been related to its overseas activities or their support. It was for this purpose that the agency originally established, a number of years ago, a special component of the Clandestine Services, the Domestic Operations Division. But the separation between foreign-oriented covert operations and those considered essentially domestic is often vague and confusing in the intelligence business. Thus, over the years there has been constant bureaucratic friction between the CIA and the FBI, which has primary responsibility for internal security. Compromises and other working arrangements have had to be evolved, allowing the CIA a certain operational latitude within the U.S.A. and giving the bureau in return special privileges abroad in the agency's sphere of responsibility.

The Domestic Operations Division (DOD), with a staff of a few hundred people and an annual budget of up to $10 million, is a well-established part of the Clandestine Services. Divisional headquarters for Domestic Operations is not at the main CIA installation at Langley, but in an office building on downtown Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue, within two blocks of the White House. This is also the Washington "station," and its subordinate "bases" are situated in major American cities. These offices are separate from the agency's other facilities for routine personnel recruiting and overt contact with American overseas travelers. The "secret" DOD offices serve as springboards for the Clandestine Services' covert operations in American cities.

The DOD is surrounded by extreme secrecy, even by CIA standards, and its actual functions are shrouded in mystery. The extent of the agency's unwillingness to discuss the Domestic Division could be seen when the CIA officer preparing the agency's annual budget request to Congress in 1968 was pointedly told by the Executive Director not to include anything about the DOD in the secret briefing to be given to the Senate and House appropriations committees. In at least one other instance, Director Helms was specifically asked in a secret congressional session about the "Domestic Operations Division." In his answer to the unsuspecting legislators, he described the functions of the "Domestic Contact Service"—the overt agency office that recruits American travelers to be unofficial CIA eyes and ears abroad—which at the time was a completely separate entity housed outside the Clandestine Services. 

The Domestic Division's task, like all agency clandestine area divisions, is the collection of covert intelligence and the conduct of other secret operations—but in this instance inside the United States. It operates some of the espionage programs aimed against foreign students and other visitors to the United States, but by no means all of them. Recruitment of a Soviet diplomat at the United Nations or in Washington would fall under the Clandestine Services' Soviet Bloc Division. Programs with Cuban-Americans in Florida would be handled by the Western Hemisphere Division, the Covert Action Staff, or the Special Operations (paramilitary) Division, depending on the agent's intended role.

There is a relatively widespread feeling among observers of the CIA's Clandestine Services that the DOD would like to do more on the American scene than it apparently has up to now. It is also believed that if the Nixon administration's domestic-security plan of 1970 and the related surveillance of American dissidents had ever been put into operation—which the White House has denied but various press accounts have suggested—the DOD probably would have become deeply involved. The rationale used by the CIA would most likely have been the same one mentioned by Director Colby at his confirmation hearing: that the agency can rightfully spy on Americans "involved with foreign institutions." To the mistrustful minds of the Clandestine Services, the problems caused in the United States by dissidents, civil-rights activists, and anti-war protesters certainly conjured up the specter of foreign influences. After all, the covert officers reasoned, the dissident political groups in the United States were obviously receiving financial support from somewhere, and the sources could be foreign. 

The clandestine operators familiar with the CIA's secret efforts to aid and strengthen anti-government groups in Eastern Europe and elsewhere easily calculated that somehow the communist countries were now getting even by using American groups to stir up trouble in the United States. CIA support for dissident movements in Eastern Europe never made any less real the source of their grievances, but that did not prevent the agency from using them to put pressure on the Soviet government and perhaps even to divert Moscow's attention from its struggle with the West. And in the late 1960's and early 1970's American dissidents were certainly causing difficulties for the U.S. government. Since the Clandestine Services knew it had exploited similar circumstances in Eastern Europe, its operators naturally looked for KGB involvement in the United States. 

The Johnson White House, however, had chosen not to involve the CIA deeply in domestic clandestine operations at the time when it first asked, back in the beginnings of the anti-war movement. The Domestic Operations Division was given only a small piece of the action—namely, to increase its surveillance of the movement, and its activities against direct foreign involvement in the movement. The FBI, too, was instructed to expand its domestic political intelligence capabilities. But the lion's share of the responsibility in the matter was given to the Pentagon —in particular, the Army apparently under a newly discovered, but outdated, emergency law granting the President special power to utilize the military and take whatever measures he deemed necessary to put down domestic unrest and conspiracies. Literal legal justification probably was not the sole reason why Army intelligence was assigned as the main instrument with which to attack the domestic targets; size was another consideration. 

Neither the CIA nor the FBI had the manpower for an all-out clandestine offensive against the radicals. Nor did either have available large numbers of young intelligence personnel who could actually penetrate the movement. But Army Intelligence soon blundered, and it, domestic surveillance programs were exposed in January 1970 by ex-agent Christopher Pyle, writing in the Washington Monthly. During the following year the military services were forced to withdraw from their massive attack against domestic dissidents; the field was once again left to the "professionals"—the FBI and the CIA.

This situation, however, soon resulted in an open break between the agency and the bureau. The New York Times attributed the split, in late 1971, to a minor event involving jurisdictional control over the handling of an informant/agent in Denver, Colorado. But shortly afterward Sam Papich, the FBI's officer in charge of liaison with the CIA, and a member of J. Edgar Hoover's immediate staff, was dismissed by the bureau chief. And only weeks later William Sullivan, head of the FBI's Division of Internal Security, the bureau's representative on the U.S. Intelligence Board, and a good friend of the CIA, was locked out of his office and fired by Hoover. In the aftermath of the troubles at the FBI, the press carried a series of reports of Hoover's and the bureau's incompetence. Some comments, attributed to "authoritative sources" in the intelligence community, accused the FBI of having done a poor job of protecting the nation's internal security in recent years. These same sources also noted that the bureau had uncovered only a handful of foreign spies in the United States during the past several years, and described the FBI as lacking in the "sophisticated" approach to modern counterespionage. Such statements, in substance and in phraseology, clearly originated with, or were inspired by, the CIA. What the public was unaware of at the time, however, was that since 1970—long before the open CIA-FBI split—the White House had been planning to expand domestic intelligence operations. And while the CIA had gone along with and encouraged the secret policy, the FBI had resisted it. It was, in fact, Hoover's personal refusal to support the new policy that resulted in the collapse of the White House plan. And it was in these circumstances that a paranoid President then established the infamous "plumbers" squad, with which the CIA was evidently quite willing to cooperate—and with which the FBI seems to have been reluctant to become involved.

When CIA Director William Colby was asked at his Senate confirmation hearings, in the fall of 1973, what he believed to be the proper scope of CIA activities within the United States, his first response was "We obviously have to run a headquarters here; we have to recruit people for our staffs, and so forth, and we have to conduct investigations on those people...." No one disputes the need for the agency to conduct certain routine administrative business within the United States, but few people realize that what the "headquarters" needs to be "run" includes dozens of buildings in the Washington area alone, large training facilities at several locations in Virginia, a paramilitary base in North Carolina, secret air bases in Nevada and Arizona, communications and radio intercept bases around the country, scores of "dummy" commercial organizations and airlines, operational offices in more than twenty major cities, a huge arms warehouse in the Midwest, and "safe houses" for secret rendezvous in Washington and other cities. While most of these are oriented toward foreign operations, some are used full or part-time for purely domestic activities.

Colby continued: "We have to contract with a large number of American firms for the various kinds of equipment that we might have need for abroad." Again, this is on the surface a legitimate function. The CIA every year purchases tens of millions of dollars' worth of goods from domestic companies—everything from office supplies to esoteric espionage equipment. But Colby carefully left out any mention of those other "purchases"—the services provided for by the CIA's contractual relationships with universities, "think tanks," and individual professors.

Many of these came to light in the winter of 1967 after Ramparts first revealed the CIA subsidization of the National Student Association and as exposure followed exposure Richard Helms asked his Executive Director to report back to him exactly what the CIA was doing on American campuses. The Executive Director quickly found that he had no easy task before him, since nearly every agency component had its own set of programs with one or more American universities and there was no central office in the CIA which coordinated or even kept track of these programs. A special committee was formed to compile a report, and its staff officers spent weeks going from office to separate office to put together the study. The committee compiled data on the hundreds of college professors who had been given special clearances by the agency's Office of Security to perform a wide variety of tasks for different CIA components. The Intelligence Directorate, for example, had a corps of consultants on campus who did historical and political research, much like normal scholars, with the difference that they were almost never permitted to publish their findings; in a few instances, that rule was suspended on condition that the source of their funding was not identified, and if the work neatly coincided with a prevailing CIA propaganda line.

Similarly, the Directorate of Science and Technology employed individual professors, and at times entire university departments or research institutes, for its research and development projects. (This apart from the millions of dollars of work the S&T Directorate contracted out every year to private companies and "think tanks.") Research of this type included the development ( DELETED ) These technical contracts were almost always drawn up under the cover of being between the scholar (or the university) and some government agency other than the CIA (the Defense Department or some component thereof were the most commonly used. In many cases, the CIA's research involvement on the campuses went much deeper than simply serving as the patron of scholarly work. 

In 1951, CIA money was used to set up the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A key figure at the MIT Center was Walt Rostow, a political scientist with intelligence ties dating back to O.S.S service during World War II who later became President Johnson's Assistant for National Security Affairs. In 1952, Max Millikan, who had been Director of the CIA's Office of National Estimates, became head of the center. This linkage between the CIA and research institutions on campus and in the private sector became standard practice in later years, just as it did for the Pentagon. But whereas the Pentagon's procedures could to some extent be monitored by the Congress and the public, the CIA set up and subsidized its own "think tanks" under a complete veil of secrecy. 

When in 1953 the MIT Center published The Dynamics of Soviet Society, a book by Rostow and his colleagues, there was no indication to the reader that the work had been financed by CIA funds and that it reflected the prevailing agency view of the Soviet Union. MIT cut off its link with the center in 1966, but the link between the center and the CIA remained, and the agency has continued to subsidize a number of similar, if smaller, research facilities around the country. The compilers of the 1967 study on CIA ties to the academic community also found that the Clandestine Services had their own research links with universities, for the purpose of developing better espionage tools (listening devices, advanced weapons, invisible inks, etc.). 

But for the covert operators, research was not the primary campus interest. To the Clandestine Services the universities represented fertile territory for recruiting espionage agents. Most large American colleges enrolled substantial numbers of foreign students, and many of these, especially those from the Third World, were (and are) destined to hold high positions in their home countries in a relatively few years. They were much easier to recruit at American schools—when they might have a need for money, where they could be easily compromised, and where foreign security services could not interfere—than they would be when they returned home. To spot and evaluate these students, the Clandestine Services maintained a contractual relationship with key professors on numerous campuses. 

When a professor had picked out a likely candidate, he notified his contact at the CIA and, on occasion, participated in the actual recruitment attempt. Some professors performed these services without being on a formal retainer. Others actively participated in agency covert operations by serving as "cut-outs," or intermediaries, and even by carrying out secret missions during foreign journeys.

The Clandestine Services at times have used a university to provide cover or even assist in a covert operation overseas. The best-known case of this sort was exposed in 1966 when Ramparts revealed that Michigan State University had been used by the CIA from 1955 to 1959 to run a covert police-training program in South Vietnam. The agency had paid $25 million to the university for its service, and five CIA operators were concealed in the program's staff. The 1967 study on the CIA's ties with American universities covered all the activities described above, but the staff officer responsible for preparing it was told that no research program concerning the use of drugs was to be mentioned in the report. The final study that the Executive Director presented to Director Helms was several inches thick, but the man who wrote it was still not sure that it was complete, less because he feared having overlooked some particular CIA component or proprietary organization which had its own university program than because he suspected that information had been withheld from him, particularly by the covert operators.

Because of its sensitivity, only one copy of the study was made, and it was turned over to the Director. Helms reviewed it and agreed with its conclusion: that all the CIA's campus activities were valuable to the agency and should be continued, except for a few individual contracts that had become outdated or too exposed. In the end, there was selective pruning of these programs, but essentially the CIA's activities with and at the universities continued as they had before the NSA scandal broke. They do so today. The lone copy of the study was placed in the CIA Executive Director's safe for future reference. Within a few weeks after Helms' review, the report had to be pulled out; a controversy had erupted at a Midwestern university over alleged contracts between a certain professor and the CIA. When the study was consulted to find out if the allegations were correct, neither the professor nor the program he was associated with was listed anywhere in the bulky document. There was a collective sigh of relief in the agency's executive suite and some mumbling about irresponsible students making ridiculous charges. Shortly thereafter, however, the Director's staff found out that the exposed professor was genuine and had telephoned his CIA contact to discuss how he should react to the charges. He was told to get a teaching job elsewhere—and he did.

Soon after, another incident occurred. ( DELETED ) Returning to Director Colby's explanation of the CIA's domestic activities: 

We also, I believe quite properly, can collect foreign intelligence in the United States, including the requesting [sic] American citizens to share with their Government certain information they may know about foreign situations, and we have a service that does this, and I am happy to say a very large number of American citizens have given us some information. We do not pay for that information. We can protect their proprietary interest and even protect their names if necessary, if they would rather not be exposed as the source of that information.

What Colby was referring to was the Domestic Contact Service (D.C.S). The D.C.S's primary function has traditionally been to collect intelligence from Americans without resorting to covert methods. Until early 1973 the D.C.S was part of the CIA's Intelligence Directorate, the overt analytical part of the agency. The D.C.S's normal operating technique is to establish relationships with businessmen, scholars, tourists, and other travelers who have made trips abroad, usually to Eastern Europe or China. These people are asked to provide information voluntarily about what they have seen or heard on their journeys. Most often they are contacted by the agency after they have returned home, but occasionally, if the CIA hears that a particular person plans to visit, say, a remote part of the Soviet Union, the D.C.S will get in touch in advance and ask the traveler to seek out information on certain targets. In the past the D.C.S has, however, shied away from assigning specific missions, since the travelers are not professional spies and may easily be arrested if they take their espionage roles too seriously. On several occasions over the years, the Clandestine Services have expressed an interest in assuming control of the D.C.S—with the argument that in the interest of efficiency all CIA intelligence collection by human sources should be run out of the same directorate. During the late 1960's the Clandestine Services were specifically rebuffed after a crude takeover attempt, but as a compromise measure Director Helms allowed clandestine operators to be assigned to the D.C.S in order to better coordinate intelligence collection. The D.C.S itself remained under the Intelligence Directorate. But in early 1973 Director James Schlesinger approved the transfer of the D.C.S to the Clandestine Services. Although there was no public notice of this change and travelers were not informed they were now dealing with the CIA's clandestine operators, Senator William Proxmire somehow got the word and told the Senate on August 1, 1973, that he was "particularly disturbed" by the shift. "Mr. Colby says," Proxmire explained, "that this is to improve the coordination of its collection activities with those of the Agency abroad. I find this disturbing because of the possibility that the D.C.S, which has a good reputation, may now become 'tainted' by the covert side of the Agency." 

Again, Colby at the Senate hearing:
We also, I believe, have certain support activities that we must conduct in the United States in order to conduct foreign intelligence operations abroad; certain structures are necessary in this country to give our people abroad perhaps a reason for operating abroad in some respects so that they can appear not as CIA employees but as representatives of some other entity.

Here Colby was undoubtedly talking about the CIA's training facilities, weapons warehouses, secret arrangements with U.S. companies to employ "deep cover" CIA operators, covert dealings with arms dealers, and other back-up activities necessary to support paramilitary operations and other clandestine doings overseas. He may also have been referring to the CIA's use of American foundations, labor unions, and other groups as fronts to fund covert-action programs overseas, or to the proprietary corporations which operate for the CIA around the world. In this last category is the complex web of agency-owned airlines—Air America, Air Asia, Civil Air Transport, Southern Air Transport, Intermountain Aviation, ( DELETED )—all of which have headquarters in the United States, and some of which maintain extensive facilities here. These airlines are run in direct competition with private companies, receive charter contracts from the U.S. government, and often operate domestically, in addition to taking on secret missions for the CIA abroad. ( DELETED ) All these companies— and others not yet revealed—do much more than provide cover for CIA employees, as Colby implied. They represent businesses worth hundreds of millions of dollars that can be used in all manner of operations by the CIA both at home and overseas. 

Colby concluded:

Lastly, I think that there are a number of activities in the United States where foreign intelligence can be collected from foreigners, and as long as there is foreign intelligence, I think it is quite proper that we do this. 

In this instance Colby was referring in part to the CIA's efforts to recruit foreign students on American campuses, and a similar program, operated with the cooperation of military intelligence, to suborn foreign military officers who come to the United States for training. But the CIA also targets other foreign visitors to the U.S.—businessmen, newsmen, scholars, diplomats, U.N. delegates and employees, even simple tourists. It is specifically for the recruitment and handling of foreign agents that the CIA maintains safe houses in Washington, New York, and other cities.

Another group of Americans who are very much targets of the CIA are recent immigrants. Almost from the moment Fidel Castro took power in 1959, CIA operators have worked closely with Cuban exiles, particularly in Florida. Most of the recruiting and some of the training for the agency's abortive invasion of the island in 1961 took place in the Miami area. Even after that fiasco the CIA has continued to use Cuban-Americans (few as celebrated as "retained" agent— and Watergate burglar—Eugenio Martinez) to carry out guerrilla operations against the Castro government. It has also been quite active among Eastern European emigres in the United States. In November 1964, Eerik Heine, an Estonian refugee living in Canada, sued for slander another Estonian named Juri Raus, a resident of Hyattsville, Maryland. Raus, who was American national commander of the Legion of Estonian Liberation, was alleged to have denounced Heine as an agent of the KGB. Raus' defense in court was based not on the specifics of the case but on an affidavit submitted by then CIA Deputy Director Richard Helms stating that Raus was a CIA agent and had spoken out against Heine among Estonian-Americans under direct agency orders. Helms submitted two more affidavits to the court stating that the CIA had further ordered Raus not to testify in court, but explaining he had said what he had "to protect the integrity of the Agency's foreign intelligence sources." The federal judge, Roszel C. Thomsen, ruled in the CIA's favor and did not accept the plaintiff's contention that even if the agency had ordered that the alleged slander be committed, it had no power to do so under the National Security Act of 1947, which forbade the CIA to exercise any "internal security functions." 

In his decision, Judge Thomsen wrote:

It is reasonable that emigre groups from behind the Iron Curtain would be a valuable source of information as to what goes on in their homeland. The fact that the intelligence source is located in the United States does not make it an "internal security function" over which the CIA has no authority. The court concludes that activities by the CIA to protect it's foreign intelligence sources located in the United States are within the power granted by Congress to the CIA.

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The Clandestine Mentality

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