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      INTRODUCTION

       THE PATH TO DISSENT: A WHISTLEBLOWER AT THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

      “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

      —George Bernard Shaw

      This is the story of an unreasonable man at the Central Intelligence Agency. There will be insights about the CIA and the forces of top-down corruption within the intelligence process, some settling of old scores within the Agency, and introspection about a 42-year career spent serving my country in the military and intelligence communities during the height of the Cold War. I joined the agency in the 1960s, a decade of radical change and upheaval in American culture. My closest friends questioned the decision of a self-confessed progressive to join one of the most secretive agencies in the government when the U.S. war against Vietnam was becoming increasingly ugly and divisive. Ironically, I found a more spirited and intelligent debate over the war in CIA corridors than I experienced in graduate school at Indiana University where I participated in the teach-in movement against the war.

      There has been a great decline in the stature and influence of the CIA over the past two decades. The CIA’s failure to anticipate the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in 1990, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, which ended the Cold War that fostered the CIA, deeply damaged the credibility of the entire intelligence community. The manipulation of intelligence for political ends—politicization—was responsible for these failures, and two decades later this process of corruption helped the Bush administration make the catastrophic decision to invade and occupy Iraq without any evidence of a threat or provocation. The insistence of Vice President Dick Cheney to conjure phony intelligence in order to go to war against Iraq in 2003 was particularly criminal. With the end of the CIA’s anti-communism mission, the Agency had to come up with other missions; the ethical and operational failures in these missions further damaged its reputation. The CIA’s role in the Terror Wars has included extrajudicial killings, assassinations, secret prisons, torture and abuse, and extraordinary renditions that have violated the U.S. Constitution and international law.

      The CIA’s decline over several decades was marked by mediocre leadership, particularly by directors such as William Casey, Robert Gates, Porter Goss, and George Tenet, who tailored intelligence to satisfy the neoconservative biases of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Tenet and Goss as well as Michael Hayden and John Brennan endorsed barbaric interrogation methods, and Brennan tried to block the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of torture in secret prisons. CIA directors who tried to prevent manipulation of the intelligence process, such as Richard Helms and William Colby, were either exiled to Iran as ambassador or simply fired, respectively. Meanwhile, the CIA refuses to recognize the harm of politicization and hasn’t introduced bureaucratic barriers that protect intelligence analysts from coercion.

      There have been too few people of conscience willing to risk their careers in order to call attention to the turpitude that occurs in the CIA headquarters building in the tranquil suburbs of Virginia. I am proud of the fact that I was one of the dissidents, having testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 1991 in an unsuccessful effort to stop the confirmation of Robert Gates as director of central intelligence and having written profusely on the dangers of politicization—the systematic manipulation, distortion, and falsification of intelligence to serve ulterior motives outside the Agency’s mission.¹

      Why would someone who spent more than four decades in the United States of America’s national security system become a dissident or a contrarian? I entered the United States Army as a teenager with the reluctant permission of my parents, and served as a cryptographer at the Joint United States Military Mission in Greece in the 1950s. If any single experience kindled my passion for a career in international relations and led me to the CIA, it was serving in the U.S. Army in Athens. It was an eventful two-year period from 1956 to 1958, marked by the Hungarian Revolution and the Soviet invasion; the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt; the launching of Sputnik; and the U.S. invasion of Lebanon, which threatened an unwanted extension of my tour of duty. I was enthralled by my work coding and decoding sensitive messages about these historic flash points while they were situations in progress; my father, a telegrapher with the Pennsylvania Railroad for 50 years, was proud and bemused.

      I was fortunate to hold intelligence positions that provided unusual access to the U.S. foreign policy process. The CIA and the National War College provided an excellent vantage point for observing the national security system in the nation’s capital. I witnessed one of the great turning points for U.S. national security with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and observed events that members of my generation never expected to witness. I was an intelligence advisor to the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in Vienna, where intense negotiations led to the conclusion of SALT I and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972. I was in the audience at the National War College in 2001 when President George W. Bush announced that the United States would abrogate the ABM Treaty, destroying the keystone of strategic deterrence.

      For 24 years, I served as an intelligence analyst at the CIA and the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. When I left the intelligence community in 1990, I crossed the river to join the Department of Defense as a professor of international security at the National War College. For several decades, I held sensitive security clearances that gave me access to clandestine reports from the CIA; cables from foreign service officers; military attaché reports from the Department of Defense; satellite photography from the National Reconnaissance Office; and signals and communications intelligence from the National Security Agency (NSA). I was privy to the most sensitive political and intelligence issues of the Cold War, and served on task forces on virtually every crisis with the Soviet Union for nearly a quarter of a century. It was incredibly challenging and exciting.

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