LITMIR.BIZ

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to the close relationship between Nixon and John Mitchell. The fact that a very junior analyst could contribute to an intelligence document for the president of the United States was a major part of the excitement of our work.

      The President’s Daily Brief was an all-source document that incorporated sensitive materials from the CIA’s Directorate of Operations; intercepts from the National Security Agency; cables from U.S. embassies; defense attaché reporting; and the excellent and under-appreciated media coverage from the CIA’s Foreign Bureau of Information. The National Security Agency is defined as a collection agency rather than an analytic one, but in the 1960s and 1970s they boasted some of the best analysts in Washington, and I soon learned to use the scrambler telephone to call my counterpart at the National Security Agency, Eugene Rowe, an outstanding intelligence analyst.

      One of the peculiarities of the CIA during my tenure from 1966 to 1990 was the fact that so few people were delegated and so little attention was paid to the President’s Daily Brief, which was read at the highest levels of government, compared to the time and attention given to National Intelligence Estimates, which were rarely read by senior policymakers. The CIA tailored the Brief to the interests of the president, some of whom were readers (Kennedy, Clinton, and Obama) and some of whom were not (Johnson and Reagan). With the changes in the intelligence community, the Brief is now directed by the Director of National Intelligence—a retired military officer—and not the director of CIA—an intelligence professional.

      In order to prepare items for the President’s Daily Brief or to contribute to National Intelligence Estimates, I had an in-box with the best of U.S. intelligence from an outstanding collection system is unmatched. We had the most challenging intelligence requirement in the community, judging the capabilities and intentions of the major adversary facing the United States—the Soviet Union. We were not fully appreciative of the great responsibility we had at the time, particularly in view of our inexperience and modest professional backgrounds. We had academic degrees, typically master’s degrees, but none of us had ever worked in foreign policy or intelligence communities. We had successes and failures. Our failures had nothing to do with collection; they were due primarily to the lack of rigor and imagination among analysts and, in the 1980s, to chronic political interference from Casey and Gates.

      In addition to writing short intelligence items for the President’s Daily Brief and the National Daily Bulletin that went worldwide, we conducted briefings before congressional committees, traveled overseas for orientation and briefings of foreign liaisons, participated in the preparation of National Intelligence Estimates, and coordinated intelligence throughout the multi-agency intelligence community. I served on task forces at all hours of the day and night during crises such as the Six-Day War in the Middle East, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the October War of 1973, and even the Iranian hostage crisis and the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in the late 1970s, because there was always a Soviet angle to be investigated.

      No one has ever studied the intelligence products of these task forces, although they produced the best assessments of fast-breaking situations around the world. These products were superior to the work of other intelligence agencies, and far more valuable than what appeared in the mainstream media. When I served on the task force on Vietnam in 1979, I fielded a call from former CIA director George H.W. Bush, who was traveling in Texas and wanted to be brought up to speed on the Chinese invasion.

      I soon learned that the CIA’s intelligence support is invaluable in any negotiating arena, whether arms control negotiations such as SALT or negotiations on the Middle East. Harold Saunders, one of the leading Arabists in the State Department, who accompanied Kissinger in negotiations between Israel, Egypt, and Syria, affirmed to me the importance of CIA support. “When you are a mediator . . . you quickly realize you’re particularly naked because the Syrians had lived on, and the Israelis were sitting on, the Golan Heights, and the Egyptians had pumped oil from the Gulf of Suez and the Israelis were sitting on that territory,” Saunders said.³ “We weren’t, so our ability to keep people in the mediation honest and not trying to pull wool over each other’s eyes was entirely dependent on our having knowledge from independent sources.” He considered CIA support “superb.” If I sound overly enthusiastic, then it is because I was. I found all of this exhilarating.

      It was impossible to hold a conversation in Washington in the mid-1960s without debating Vietnam. It didn’t take many social occasions for me to realize that the CIA wasn’t a popular institution, but a good way to disarm critics was to protest the war with chapter and verse evidence of U.S. perfidy and poor judgment in deploying a huge force to Southeast Asia. Twenty years later, the various annexes to the Pentagon Papers carried several National Intelligence Estimates that recorded CIA assessments from the early 1960s indicating that U.S. bombing of Vietnam would not hinder Hanoi’s ability to carry on the war against the South, and that the North Vietnamese would match every U.S. act of escalation, no matter how great the physical suffering.⁴ U.S. bombers dropped more ordnance on Vietnam than on Germany in World War II, with no impact on the outcome of the war in Southeast Asia. CIA director Richard McGarrah Helms soon wore out his welcome at both the Johnson and Nixon White House because of the pessimistic messages he carried to policy meetings.

      The CIA prepared a series of studies for President Lyndon B. Johnson, National Security Advisor Walt Rostow, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that concluded that bombing operations such as Rolling Thunder, designed to complicate the enemy’s war effort, had not reduced enemy operations in the South or the amount of enemy supplies moving into the area. A good friend of mine at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Louis Sarris, was reaching identical conclusions, but McNamara ordered that Sarris be taken off the Vietnam account. Secretary of State Dean Rusk meekly carried out McNamara’s outrageous order, which may have been the first personnel reprisal of the war. Sarris was treated as a pariah by most of his colleagues because of his opposition to the war. Some of my colleagues, including my wife, encountered similar experiences in the wake of their testimony to the Congress to counter the confirmation of Robert Gates as CIA director.

      Secretary of Defense McNamara responded to Sarris’s trenchant analysis with an angry and chilling warning to Secretary of State Rusk, saying, “If you were to tell me that it is not the policy of the State Department to issue military appraisals without seeking the views of the Defense Department, the matter will die.”⁵ Rusk assured McNamara that future memoranda that contained “military appraisals (would) be coordinated with your Department.”⁶ At a pivotal time in October 1963, only several weeks before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, when the groundwork was being laid for the tragic escalation of the war, key decision makers were denied ground truth about the situation in Vietnam from the CIA and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

      Policymakers looked at CIA operatives and intelligence analysts with the same suspicion that operatives and analysts had toward each other. It is the rare memoir from a policymaker that extols the virtues of the CIA; for the most part the CIA became a whipping post for failed policy. Secretary of Defense McNamara lied about the intelligence he received on Vietnam and denied having access to good intelligence that provided sufficient warning of the fool’s errand that he supported. He used his memoir and a documentary film to argue that a lack of reliable information about Vietnam led to incorrect decisions in the early 1960s.⁷ “Our government lacked experts for us to consult,” he wrote. This was not true. Four decades later, the key members of the Bush administration used their memoirs to blame the invasion of Iraq on bad and inadequate intelligence.

      A CIA colleague, Samuel Adams, fourth cousin seven times removed of the second president of the United States, became another outcast. He wore out his welcome with the CIA establishment by fighting the deliberate undercount of Viet Cong by military intelligence, particularly the Defense Intelligence Agency. Adams was taken off the Vietnam account, but was not moved far enough away, because after his lateral arabesque to the Cambodian desk, he found that the Khmer Rouge in Southeast Asia were also being deliberately undercounted. Policymakers had a difficult time dealing with the larger estimates of enemy fighting forces because such estimates exposed the exaggerated body counts of the military and begged serious questions about the need for a greater U.S. troop presence. Presently, military intelligence is being investigated for politicizing

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