LITMIR.BIZ

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The National Security Act of 1947 that created the CIA did not refer to covert actions, but it did assign to the CIA “duties related to intelligence affecting the national security.” There is no evidence that President Truman wanted to use the CIA in such covert deeds, but his immediate successors, Eisenhower and Kennedy, gave the CIA a major clandestine role in foreign policy. Their successors endorsed covert actions that violated international law, and were not in accordance with U.S. law.

      President Truman wanted a firewall between the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of Intelligence because he didn’t want the policy role of clandestine operations to compromise the analytic role of the Directorate of Intelligence. In 2015 Brennan destroyed the bureaucratic wall between intelligence and operations to create regional and functional “fusion centers,” which now situate analysts and operatives side by side. This creates greater centralized control and more opportunities for manipulating intelligence, and harms the production of strategic intelligence and authoritative National Intelligence Estimates.

      The intelligence from CIA’s fusion centers concentrates on tactical warning, but does a poor job of explaining the “why” and “wherefore” of geopolitical events. The CIA was wrong, for example, in failing to anticipate the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and never warned the White House in 2002–2003 about the domestic consequence of using force in Iraq. The CIA clearly underestimated the military capabilities of the Islamic State, and the intelligence failure led to a policy failure in responding to a new challenge in both Iraq and Syria.

      There were immediate rewards in joining the CIA’s Office of Current Intelligence, which provided timely intelligence to the president and key policymakers, particularly the friendship of a group of Soviet foreign policy analysts, about a half dozen or so, in their late twenties, most newly married, and one or two with young children. All had advanced degrees from good universities; all were progressive; all were committed to becoming good intelligence analysts. We held potluck parties at a time when Washington had few decent restaurants and salaries in the range of $6,000–$8,000 didn’t allow for dining out. When we moved from apartments to houses, we banded together with rented trucks and got the job done.

      There was great esprit de corps in the first years. I pitched for the CIA’s Office of Current Intelligence softball team and played point guard for its basketball team. When CIA director Helms was asked by LIFE magazine to do a photo essay on the softball league, he agreed, if a healthy honorarium was paid. Helms was interested in padding the CIA’s budget; LIFE wasn’t that interested in our softball league. My contribution to the esprit was organizing small groups of analysts to go to Baltimore for baseball games, since Washington was deprived of the sport. On one occasion, I got management of the Orioles to welcome the CIA contingent on the electronic scoreboard, which was a great delight for all of us. In 1984, I chartered a bus to conduct a one-day tour of Charm City for 45 colleagues, another great source of merriment. I have a wonderful picture of a half dozen of us standing in front of the CIA’s Family Inn, a down-to-earth Italian restaurant in Fells Point.

      

      We were an interesting mix, and became rather formidable within the Office of Current Intelligence. We gave no thought to the fact that there were no female analysts in our group. We worked long hours without any provision for overtime. We were feisty for the most part, and some of us manifested a contrarian streak. I developed a reputation for being particularly prickly, but there were few shrinking violets in the group. Some of us were simply quicker than others to go to the mat. I wrestled in junior high school, so I loved to go to the mat. We had no mentors inside the office so we nudged and badgered each other; some dealt with that better than others.

      The group included, at one extreme, Bob Gates, who went on to become CIA director under President George H. W. Bush and secretary of defense under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. I took Gates to the cafeteria for his first lunch in the building in 1968, and told my colleagues that we would be working for this guy one of these days. It simply happened much sooner than I expected. Bob started out as a very good, hard-working analyst, but his ambition and ego eventually prevailed over his ethics and professionalism.

      At the other extreme was Raymond McGovern, who currently heads a small group of former intelligence analysts who lobby the White House on sensitive issues and contribute regularly to various websites. Like Gates, McGovern came to the CIA as part of his tour as an Air Force officer; they locked horns immediately and they haven’t disengaged 50 years later. When the young McGovern became our branch chief, it was the even younger Gates who went to our bosses and succeeded in getting McGovern replaced.

      I’m not a member of Ray’s group of activists because I prefer to pick my own causes and make my own cases. Ray’s civic activity has led to a great deal of notoriety, including an arrest in 2014 in New York City simply for trying to attend a talk by General David Petraeus at the 92nd Street Y. So much for the 92nd Street Y’s commitment to free speech, tolerance, and openness. Federal agents have also escorted Ray from public meetings where he merely tried to question former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld or former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

      If anyone doubts the massive nature of surveillance of the American population, then just ponder the fact that McGovern had a ticket to the Petraeus event that was purchased online, and that the 92nd Street Y and New York City’s finest were waiting for McGovern at the door to bar his legitimate and lawful entry. The head of counterintelligence for the New York City police department may have had something to do with this. The counterintelligence chief is the former head of operations at the CIA, David Cohen.

      My best friend in the CIA was the late Barry L. Stevenson. Barry and I traveled together in China; taught a course in Soviet politics and policy at the National War College; attended anti-war rallies in the Vietnam era; and forged a close personal relationship that lasted until shortly after the confirmation hearings for Gates in 1991. Barry, Bob, and I had been close in the 1960s and 1970s, and Barry did his best to bridge the gap when Bob and I became antagonists. Barry was one of the analysts who provided me with important documents that revealed how Gates was tampering with intelligence to satisfy those above him, but eventually Barry felt he had to choose between the two of us. He chose Gates, so I felt an ironic satisfaction when Barry was named the CIA’s ombudsman to prevent corruption in the mid-1990s. The position didn’t exist until several of us made the issue of politicization the thrust of our opposition to Gates’s confirmation as CIA director.

      Another close friend was Eugene Wicklund, whose wedding reception was held at my apartment in Washington because it was within walking distance of the ceremony at the National Cathedral, and the cost was right. A favorite delicatessen in McLean, Virginia, for CIA analysts and operatives did the catering. Wicklund was a new and inexperienced analyst in 1968 when he accurately forecast the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, but he was silenced and even ridiculed by senior managers at the CIA and the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, who argued the Kremlin didn’t do that kind of thing anymore.² Fast forward to Russian aggression in Ukraine and Crimea in 2014–2015 for a similar CIA failure.

      Many, if not most, of my colleagues in the Soviet Division of the CIA’s Office of Current Intelligence were opposed to the war in Vietnam and took part in anti-war rallies in Washington. More importantly, the CIA’s political intelligence on the war was implicitly critical of the U.S. effort and extremely pessimistic on the chances of U.S. success. The most memorable march occurred in 1967 and was memorialized in Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night. Stevenson and I proudly marched behind veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that had fought in Spain 30 years earlier. We went as far as the Pentagon, but when it turned ugly we took the advice of Kenny Rogers: “You gotta know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.” We imagined the absurd political imagery of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI agents taking pictures of the two of us as CIA anti-war protesters.

      The environment and work in the Office of Current Intelligence suited my temperament and disposition. Our task was to provide timely political intelligence to U.S. decision makers. Pride of place was given to the President’s Daily Brief, which went to the president, the national security advisor, the secretaries of state and defense, and very few others. President Richard

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