LITMIR.BIZ

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of spies and the stealing of secrets. For me, the challenge revolved around providing intelligence to policymakers. It meant telling the administrations of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon that the Vietnam War was essentially unwinnable. It meant telling the Pentagon that its views on Soviet weapons systems were wrong, which opened the door to arms control agreements in the 1970s. It meant telling the Carter administration that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had nothing to do with the “urge to the sea,” and telling the Reagan administration that Gorbachev was a different Soviet leader.

      This challenge was enhanced by having access to the intelligence community’s vast collection of information: communications intercepts from the National Security Agency (NSA); satellite photography from the National Reconnaissance Office; sensitive cables from the Department of State; field reports from military attachés as well as clandestine reports from CIA operatives. There is a great deal of information in the public arena, but it cannot compare to the collection of the intelligence agencies.

      Intelligence work is exhilarating and exhausting, particularly when intelligence analysts accept the importance of informing policymakers of the historical and social factors that should be considered in decision-making regarding U.S. actions in foreign lands. Decisions regarding Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s ignored these factors, and U.S. policy suffered as a result. U.S. decisions on Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria also ignored these factors, and too often U.S. intelligence failed to provide relevant information.

       SPOT-ON ABOUT THE SIX-DAY WAR

      My baptism as a CIA intelligence analyst took place less than one year after I came onboard. As a member of the task force preparing situation reports for the White House on the increased tensions in the Middle East, I helped to draft the report that described Israel’s preemptive attack against Egypt on the morning of June 5, 1967. We had sensitive NSA intercepts that documented Israeli preparations for an attack and no evidence of an Egyptian battle plan.

      The Israelis had been clamoring to Washington that they had indications of Egyptian preparations for an invasion, but the U.S. intelligence community saw no Egyptian readiness in terms of its air or armored power. We assumed that the Israelis were engaging in disinformation in order to gain U.S. support. My own view was that Egypt would be unlikely to start a war with Israel while half of its army was tied down fighting in a civil war in Yemen. My Egyptian colleagues believed that Egyptian president Gamel Abdel Nasser was bluffing, and all of us emphasized the low quality of Cairo’s military equipment.

      We were therefore shocked when President Lyndon Johnson’s national security advisor, Walt Rostow, wouldn’t accept our intelligence assessment of the Israeli preemptive attack. Rostow cited “assurances” from the Israeli ambassador in Washington that under no circumstances would the Israelis attack first. Over the protests of Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan, the Israeli government lied to the White House about how the war started. President Johnson was told that the Egyptians had initiated firing on Israeli settlements and that an Egyptian squadron had been observed heading toward Israel. Neither statement was true.

      Rostow had convinced the president that Israel would never consider a preemptive attack, and as a result, three days before the war President Johnson’s letter to Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol noted that Israel would be alone if it preempted, but he couldn’t “imagine that [Israel] would make this decision.”¹ As a result, our report the morning of June 5, 1967, that described a series of surprise attacks on Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian airfields, met with a hostile response from the National Security Council. Rostow returned the report with some angry remarks, but CIA director Richard Helms supported our decision to return the report with modest and meaningless editorial changes. When the National Military Command Center corroborated our assessment, Rostow summoned Clark Clifford, chairman of the President’s Foreign Advisory Board, to examine the intelligence along with Harold (Hal) Saunders, the leading Arabist on the National Security Council staff. Clifford and Saunders corroborated our assessments.

      President Johnson admitted in his memoirs that he strongly disagreed with the CIA estimates regarding a quick Israeli victory and asked Helms to recalculate the intelligence because it seemed so unbelievable. Rostow never conceded his errors of judgment, although he did order the U.S. ambassador, Walworth Barbour, to see Israeli Prime Minister Eshkol and to demand a military briefing on the war. When the ambassador asked if the Egyptians had attacked, the Israelis responded with vague references to movements of Egyptian troops and tanks. The CIA, with the benefit of satellite intelligence, could inform the White House that Egyptian planes were parked on their airfields wingtip-to-wingtip, which pointed to no plan to attack.

      Twenty years later, I learned that Harry McPherson, a confidant of the president, was in Israel at the start of the war and accompanied the ambassador to the prime minister’s office. During this meeting, Israeli air raid sirens began to wail, but when the ambassador suggested moving the meeting to the Foreign Ministry’s underground bunker, Israeli intelligence chief General Aharon Yariv assured him it wasn’t necessary. As a result, McPherson concluded that the “Egyptian air force had been destroyed . . . on the ground,” which he immediately cabled to Washington.² It would have been useful to have this information on a timely basis, but our intelligence indicated that the Israelis had destroyed more than 200 Egyptian planes on the ground.

      In any event, Helms stood by our analysis, even when we predicted an Israeli victory in a matter of days. Once again, our analysis differed from that of Rostow’s National Security Council, which believed that Soviet arms shipments to Egypt, Syria, and Iraq would bring a different result than the Israeli success in the Suez crisis of 1956. Some staffers from the National Security Council argued that Israel might even be “driven into the sea.” We predicted an Israeli victory in seven to ten days, which was close enough.

      In addition to lying about the start of the war, the Israelis were deceitful in attributing the attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 to a random accident. If so, it was a well-planned accident. The ship was a U.S. intelligence vessel in international waters, both slow-moving and lightly armed. It brandished a five-foot-by-eight-foot Stars and Stripes in the midday sun, and certainly didn’t resemble a ship in any other navy, let alone a ship in the arsenal of one of Israel’s enemies. The Israeli attack took place after six hours of intense, low-level reconnaissance. The attack was conducted over a two-hour period by unmarked Mirage jets using cannons and rockets. Then more jets with napalm and more rockets. Israeli boats fired machine guns at close range at those helping the wounded, then machine-gunned the life rafts that survivors dropped in hope of abandoning ship. The NSA investigation of the disaster remains classified.

      As a result of the CIA’s spot-on intelligence, President Johnson invited Helms to attend the White House’s important Tuesday Lunch Group, which until then had only included the president, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and the national security advisor. Helms was generous with his praise for our analytic efforts, but within several years the CIA’s pessimistic and accurate assessments on Vietnam made him an unwelcome member of the group.

       CIA SUPPORT FOR ARMS CONTROL AND DISARMAMENT

      My headiest experience as an intelligence analyst was an assignment to Vienna in 1971 as intelligence advisor to the U.S. delegation at the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). In my 42 years of government service, it was the only time that I was involved in intense diplomatic negotiations, the implementation of strategic policy, and the bureaucratic infighting that complicates formation and implementation of policy. Negotiations between the U.S. agencies were no less difficult and protracted than negotiations between the U.S. and Soviet delegations.

      The CIA’s assessments on strategic arms were the best within the U.S. intelligence community, so the SALT experience played an important role in my career as an analyst. The CIA’s ability to verify and monitor all aspects of a disarmament treaty, particularly the development and deployment of Soviet strategic forces, enabled the U.S. Senate to ratify the SALT and Anti-Ballistic Missile treaties with confidence.

      The CIA plays an important role in allaying the concerns of U.S. congress members, both liberal and conservative, regarding the verification and monitoring of international treaties. This was particularly true in 1972, when there

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