LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

out of control,” but a secret agency that simply carried out the orders of the White House. CIA director Gates ordered the destruction of nearly all of the operational documents on the overthrow of Iran’s government (Operation Ajax) in 1953, presumably because one of the coup’s planners prepared a secret history that described the Eisenhower administration’s direct involvement. The coup may have been a tactical success, but it was a strategic nightmare that still burdens U.S.-Iranian ties. The same could be said for most covert actions.

      The bureaucratic wall between the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence and Directorate of Operations contributed to my belief that I was doing legitimate work as an intelligence analyst and had nothing to do with the covert activities of the CIA’s “case officers.” The CIA headquarters building contributed to this feeling, because it was divided physically and ideologically between the two major directorates, or the “two sides of the house.” Analysts resided in the northern half of the building, and operations officers in the southern half. We ate in different cafeterias to make sure that visitors to the CIA would never stumble into covert operatives who worked under cover. The physical layout was cumbersome, and it inhibited contact and communication between analysts and collectors. The latter wanted this system because analysts were viewed as progressive eggheads who didn’t understand the harsh international environment. Few analysts objected, because we viewed many of the operatives as knuckle-draggers with little substantive expertise.

      There was a double standard in the training of new hires. The CIA’s Directorate of Operations—in charge of clandestine activities in foreign countries—recruited operations types who were given rigorous training for nearly a year at a training facility in Virginia. They received training in paramilitary activities as well as operational tradecraft. The career trainee program was devoted to preparing incoming officers for a career in clandestine activities. There was no comparable training for new analysts. A few analysts received mentors when they got to their regional offices, but most were on their own.

      A useful preparation for life as an intelligence analyst was reading studies from the senior research staff. I learned that the research in the academic community was not as up-to-date as the work being done by the senior research staff. The work of this small, elite group suggested that the best way to get good assessments is to recruit good students and give them enough time and independence in their areas of expertise to pursue their work. Since papers by the senior research staff were considered “working papers” and not final intelligence, they did not require formal coordination within the CIA or the intelligence community, which is the best way to encourage out-of-the-box thinking. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger knew that the best intelligence in Washington came from informal papers and not the formal estimates and assessments that carried the endorsement logos of myriad intelligence organizations. Coordinated intelligence is typically intelligence that forswears the most radical or experimental thinking.

      Before facing the cultural challenges of the Intelligence and Operations Directorates, however, I encountered a personal challenge. Returning to my graduate studies at Indiana University’s Russian and East European Research Institute, I encountered strong hostility to the CIA among faculty members and fellow students. They were aghast at my career choice. One member of my dissertation committee, Professor Bernard Morris of the Department of Government, immediately resigned from my committee without any explanation either to me or to the Department of History. He refused to speak to me for years, let alone help with my research.

      Morris had had a bad experience while serving in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which was the intelligence arm of the State Department. He told a mutual friend that the “Goodman thing” really bothered him because he did not want to be perceived as a former government official from the intelligence community whose students were seeking job counseling and, in my case, a job with the dreaded CIA. The episode with Morris left me angry and frustrated.

      I learned later that Morris had faced a rigorous and unfair security investigation at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research and wanted nothing to do with anyone considering a career in intelligence, let alone at the CIA. Professor Morris, an engaging and exciting professor, was victimized by the wave of McCarthyism that swept over the State Department in the 1950s.

      Morris was extremely important to me because he had arrived at Indiana University in 1963, a year after my enrollment, as a vigorous and articulate critic of the U.S war in Vietnam. I was opposed to the war too, but Morris had a deeper understanding of the relevant history and politics, and their implications for international stability. He soon developed a close circle of followers within the graduate student community, and a few of us became active in the teach-in movement against the war, which was later investigated during my polygraph examination for the CIA.

      I was also sympathetic toward Owen Lattimore, another professor who was victimized by McCarthyism in the 1950s and, as a result, was treated shabbily by our university, Johns Hopkins, where he was a professor. Neither Morris nor Lattimore received the protection they should have had from their institutions, and their experience should have made me more critical about bureaucratic politics in Washington, craven bureaucrats who occupy important positions, and the cowardice of academic and governmental institutions.

      The reaction from some of my closest friends at the university was equally passionate and outraged. There were several individuals who cut off all contact with me, although this group did not include such fellow students as James Collins, who became ambassador to the Soviet Union in the late 1980s; Richard Miles, who became ambassador to Azerbaijan in 1992; and another close friend—who must remain unnamed—who headed the CIA’s operational desk on the Soviet bloc. There were ugly letters from some graduate students, but they didn’t cause me to rethink my career choice.

      Losing friends at Indiana University was good preparation for my experiences with another former student there, Robert M. Gates, a close friend before he became an adversary at the CIA. When Gates was nominated to be CIA director and I became his leading opponent at his confirmation hearings in 1991, more friendships were lost. I had great respect for my Indiana University friends who were expressing strong opposition to the CIA. I had little respect for my CIA critics, who seemed to be careerists or opportunists. At the same time, I had my supporters at the agency—including some in management positions—who took risks in providing examples of politicized intelligence to support my congressional testimony. And there were analysts who also took great risks in submitting sworn testimony against the confirmation of Gates. One of them, Carolyn McGiffert Ekedahl, became my wife two years after the hearings.

      I entered the CIA with great enthusiasm in the summer of 1966. The agency’s headquarters are in McLean, Virginia, less than 10 miles from the White House. The 258-acre compound has a campus setting, which helped me ignore the heavily guarded main gate and the various barricades, which were fortified in 1993 after a young Pakistani national, Aimal Khan Kansi, killed two CIA employees and wounded several others, firing an AK-47 into cars headed into the CIA grounds. Shortly after the shootings, I got a call from the Virginia police, telling me that they had found an old copy of Newsweek in Kansi’s apartment from the time of the 1991 hearings. The police wanted me to know that the pictures of Gates and me were circled. I asked if Gates had also been called, and they assured me that he was getting 24-hour police protection. I asked what I was “getting,” and they replied that I was getting “this call.”

      The CIA’s headquarters was designed in the 1950s by the same New York architects who designed the United Nations complex in Manhattan. The facade was impressive; the entrance offered an airy and open feeling. The compound itself was known as “Langley,” the name of the McLean neighborhood where the CIA is located. There is a statue of Nathan Hale, who was captured and executed by the British for spying for the United States, to the right of the entrance, and an egg-shaped auditorium nearby, where the jazz legend Lionel Hampton gave a concert for his neighbor from Connecticut, the CIA director George H.W. Bush.

      The two major cultures of the CIA, the analytical and the operational, were quite distinct. The operatives believed the primary mission of the CIA was the collection of foreign intelligence. The recruitment of case officers involved a search for extroverts who would be trained at a facility in Virginia, to recruit foreign sources of secret information for policymakers, and not necessarily for

Скачать книгу