LITMIR.BIZ

      ONE

       JOINING THE CIA

      “In order to know what is going to happen, one must know what has happened.”

      —Niccolò Machiavelli

      I never planned to join the Central Intelligence Agency. In looking back, there were signposts on my path to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in the summer of 1966. My three-year tour in the U.S. Army as a cryptographer exposed me to the intelligence world, and my two years in Athens, at the Joint United States Military Mission to Greece led to a love of travel and global politics. The training for my assignment at Fort Gordon in Augusta, Georgia, was secretive. My first tour of duty at the Pentagon involved encoding and decoding sensitive messages involving U.S. national security. My duties in Athens introduced me to behind-the-scenes developments during the Suez War in 1956, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, the launching of Sputnik in 1957, and the U.S. invasion of Lebanon in 1958. The latter invasion posed such a threat that my commanding general considered extending my tour as an “essential soldier” due to the possibility of warfare in the region. For the first and perhaps only time, at the age of 20, I was termed essential.

      The assignment in Athens was important in another way. It gave me the opportunity to take college courses at a University of Maryland classroom on a U.S. air base. My professor, the late Dr. Amin Banani, a brilliant scholar from Iran, sparked my interest in Russian history and opened many academic and cultural doors. As a result of Dr. Banani’s encouragement, I applied to Johns Hopkins University, which I did to please him but without any expectation of being admitted. Following Hopkins, I went to Indiana University for graduate school where another professor, Dr. Robert Ferrell, took an interest in me and my work. He directed my Ph.D. dissertation on Soviet-American relations, which I completed largely because I didn’t want to disappoint this generous man. Without Professors Banani and Ferrell, my life would have been far different and much less interesting.

      My initial interviews with the CIA and the State Department were in 1964 and 1965, when both agencies conducted interviews on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University. I was also approached by the National Security Agency (NSA) because of my background in cryptography and Russian studies. I pursued all three agencies because I was unhappy with the academic openings for Indiana University graduates at that time; I had no interest in going to Stevens Point, Wisconsin, or to Denton, Texas, to teach. I decided to look elsewhere as long as I could make use of my background in Russian studies.

      The selection process was easy. The security environment at the NSA was oppressive, which is ironic in view of the extensive leaks regarding NSA surveillance of American citizens. There were security mobiles hanging from the ceilings at Fort Meade, Maryland, and political posters (“Loose lips sink ships!”) facing visitors in every corridor. There were badge checks within the building even after you got through security at the entrance. The foreign-service examination of the State Department was rigorous, but the personnel board of senior United States Foreign Service officers was off-putting. These officers had no interest in the work I was doing in graduate school and didn’t indicate that I could specialize in the Soviet and East European areas. The personnel board was unwilling to give me an entry waiver of 12 months so I could complete my dissertation research. I didn’t get the impression that the Foreign Service was interested in Russian area specialists with a serious academic background.

      The introduction to the CIA didn’t have the pervasive security atmosphere of the NSA and, unlike the State Department, it was willing to accommodate my academic pursuits. I had no interest in working in clandestine operations, so I met no one from the Directorate of Operations, which coordinates covert actions worldwide. I emphasized my interest in the Soviet area and was directed to the CIA’s Office of Current Intelligence, where I met with the chiefs of the Soviet and East European regions. We discussed my dissertation topic on Soviet-American relations and held a lively exchange on national security and the role of intelligence in policymaking. Most importantly, they offered a one-year waiver to enable me to complete my research at the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York.

      I was interviewed by the crème de la crème of the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence—the analytical division of the CIA that produces reports and briefings for the White House and policymakers. Senior managers in those days had joined the CIA in the late 1940s and early 1950s when the Cold War was heating up, and the Soviet Union had become the “evil empire.” This was probably the golden age for the CIA as an intelligence organization because of its sense of mission. Large numbers of liberal Ivy League graduates had been attracted to the CIA along with veterans of the military and the Office of Strategic Services, who were proud to serve a national security team’s international mission. This was a political generation that had been willing to take risks on behalf of U.S. interests, and had encountered no serious political criticism of the CIA or U.S. foreign interventions when they were recruited. When I arrived in the 1960s, however, there was widespread criticism because of Vietnam.

      I arrived at the CIA in 1966 as the war was becoming costly and unpopular. Several supervisors were curious as to why someone who opposed the Vietnam War would join a CIA that was becoming infamous due to the war’s horrors, particularly the violent Phoenix program, which was responsible for the deaths of innocent Vietnamese people. I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t give much thought to the role of the CIA in Vietnam or in places such as Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, or Cuba, where the CIA had conducted some of its most destructive operations. The CIA’s involvement in the overthrow of the government in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954 as well as the targeting of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1959 and Fidel Castro in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs were far from my mind.

      I was naïve, leaving the first round of CIA interviews believing that it was a large research institution specializing in international relations. I gave little thought to the security investigation that would take up most of that year, which included an oppressive lie detection test. The CIA had an excellent library in my fields of interest, a helpful and professional staff to assist in research, opportunities for additional language training, and access to the most sensitive secrets of the U.S. government on the Soviet Union and East Europe. I was impressed with the people I met in the interviews, and I was excited by the possibility of overseas travel.

      There is no excuse for not focusing on the clandestine operations of the CIA, and not weighing the pros and cons of the agency’s violent role in undermining the governments of other nations, many of which were democracies. While the CIA had a legitimate role to play in the collection and analysis of intelligence, its role in the field of clandestine operations and covert action was questionable at best. CIA training courses were quite boastful of the covert actions behind the overthrow of governments in Iran and Guatemala, but I eventually concluded these events were strategic failures. We are still dealing with strategic setbacks caused by the pursuit of regime changes in nations lacking political stability outside the authoritarian strongman model. It took me too long to realize that CIA covert actions, as well as military intervention, had registered no strategic successes, but had been responsible for a series of strategic failures for the United States, and catastrophe for families and communities in foreign lands. It was particularly shocking to learn that the father of containment, George F. Kennan, whose books I had devoured as a graduate student, was a leading proponent of a covert action role for the CIA in the late 1940s—over the objections of the first CIA directors and their general counsels.

      I

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