STUDIES IN INTELLIGENCE [Vol. 22 No. 2, Summer 1978]

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January 1, 1978
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Approved For Release 2005/01,SEDP80-00630A000100030001-6 c "'s aT,UDI't IN INTELLl CE- GEN CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY VOL. 22 No. 2 SUMMER 1978 TR-SINT 78-002 SECRET Approved For Release 2005 1/06: CIA-R 0751 P80-00630A000100030001-6 25X1 25X1 Approved For Release 2005/01/SE-CIA-RDP80-00630A000100030001-6 Materials in the Studies are in general to be reserved to US personnel holding appropriate clearances. The existence of this journal is to be treated as information privy to the US official community. All copies of each issue beginning Summer 1964 are numbered serially and subject to recall. All opinions expressed in the Studies are those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the official views of the Central Intelligence Agency or any other component of the intelligence community. Warning Notice Sensitive Intelligence Sources and Methods Involved NATIONAL SECURITY INFORMATION Unauthorized Disclosure Subject to Criminal Sanctions Approved For Release 2005/ 1! 1/06 : CIA-R P80-00630A000100030001-6 25X1 25X1 25X1 25X1 25X1 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Next 3 Page(s) In Document Exempt Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A000190Q01-6 NOFORN The tumult and the shouting dies? THE MYTH OF THE ROGUE ELEPHANT INTERRED John Waller As the first session of the 95th Congress came to a close, Senator Daniel K. Inouye of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reported to the Senate on the work of the Committee which he had chaired for a year and a half. His remarks were a good tonic to a long-beleaguered CIA. While he commented that "There is no question that a number of abuses of power, mistakes in judgment, and failures by the intelligence agencies have harmed the United States," he made the significant point: "In almost every instance, the abuses that have been revealed were a result of direction from above, including Presidents and Secretaries of State." "Further," he added, "in almost every instance, some members of both Houses of Congress assigned the duty of oversight were knowledgeable about these activities." These remarks should have finally laid to rest the myth of the "Rogue Elephant." What seems to have been lost to the press and public in the welter of sensational sounding disclosures was essentially the same conclusion reached by the Church Committee in its final report following the intensive investigation of CIA. It may be interesting and currently useful to revisit some of the key conclusions of the 1976 Congressional investigations of CIA. This may serve as a reminder that the employees of CIA never deserved the image of amoral practitioners, much less uncontrolled delinquents, and the excesses committed by the Agency were not the prods ct of inadequate control. If anything, the Agency's problems could be traced to the tradition of strong discipline and responsiveness to direction from above. The Senate Select Committee chaired by Senator Church, in pursuing its mandate, focused on three broad questions, one of which bore on command and control: "whether the processes through which the intelligence agencies have- been directed and controlled have been adequate to assure conformity with policy and the law."' The processes referred to are of two kinds: (1) the process of external control, and (2) the process of internal control. A general conclusion which appeared in the Senate Select Committee's final report is: "The Central Intelligence Agency in broad terms is not `out of control,' although the Committee found that "there were significant limits to this control" 2 from above 8 the CIA. Pursuing farther the thesis that the problem lay in external, not internal, control are the following additional quotes from the "General Findings" of the SSC Report: The Committee finds that United States foreign and military intelligence agencies have made important contributions to the nation's security, and generally have performed their missions with dedication and 'Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities-United States Senate, Book I, "Foreign and Military Intelligence;" 26 April 1976, (Report No. 94-755) (hereafter cited by short title, SSC Final Report), V. 4. 2 Ibid., p. 427. 3 All emphasis in this article has been added by author. SVYp~fr5ved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA00010003000116 MORI/HRP PAGES 1-7 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 SECRET Rogue Elephant distinction.' The Committee finds that Congress has failed to provide the necessary statutory guidelines to ensure that intelligence agencies carry out their missions in accord with constitutional processes.' In addition to blaming Congress for inadequate external control, the Senate Select Committee, in its final report, blames the Office of the President: The degree of control and accountability exercised regarding covert action and sensitive collection has been a function of each particular ('resident's willingness to use these techniques .... 0 1residents have not established specific instruments of oversight to prevent abuses by the Intelligence Community. In essence, Presidents have not exercised effective oversight.' In general terms, the Senate Select Committee's History of the Central Intelligence Agency (Section IV) states at the outset a conclusion which suggests that CIA activities have not always been viewed in relationship with foreign policy: The current political climate and the mystique of secrecy surrounding the intelligence profession have made it difficult to view the CIA in the context of foreign policy.' Book I of the Senate Report admits to misconceptions about CIA and states: The CIA has come to be viewed as an unfettered monolith, defining and determining its activities independent of other elements of government and of the direction of American foreign policy. This is a distortion. During its twenty-nine year history, the Agency has been shaped by the course of international events, by pressures from other government agencies, and by its own internal norms. An exhaustive history of the CIA would demand an equally exhaustive history of American foreign policy, the role of Congress and the Executive, the other components of the intelligence community, and an examination of the interaction among all these forces.' The House Committee on Intelligence (Pike Committee), although failing to gain Congressional approval for release of its final report, arrived at the following even more categoric conclusions concerning the control of CIA (if we are to believe drafts of its report shown the CIA and the version of the report appearing in The Village Voice): All evidence in hand suggests that the CIA, far from being out of control, has been utterly responsive to the instructions of the President and the Assistant to the President for Security Affairs.10 Congressman Pike, in effect, accused CIA of being a supine elephant, not a rogue elephant. In his eyes, CIA was too responsive to higher authority-its abuses were committed as a result of too demanding command control, not too passive or permissive control. ' Ibid., p. 424. Ibid., p. 425. , Ibid., p. 427. ' Ibid., p. 429. ' SSC Final Report, Book IV, "Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Foreign and Military Intelligence," P. (1). '[bid;, Book 1, p. 97. "The Village Voice, 16 February 1976. This passage refers mainly to covert action. Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A000100030Qj ET R6 PJ ro~vpphport Release 2005/01/06 :CIA-RDP80-00630A00010091Q 1T 6 What neither Congressional committee stressed adequately was the significant fact that all abuses or illegal activities, except two specific cases in the drug experimentation field, were identified, decried, and corrected by CIA itself before the investigations began, and before the press published its sensational charges. The role of the committees, essentially, was not one of original discovery but one of airing past abuses, already discovered and rectified. While this may have been useful to serve as a basis for new legislation, it would have been helpful to the Agency's image if more credit could have been given in the Senate's report to CIA's own efforts to get its house in order. Described below are some Congressional conclusions of a more specific nature. First, the subject of control over covert actions' is summarized. The Senate Select Committee found: The CIA has not been free ... to carry out covert action as it sees fit. The Committee's investigation revealed that, on the whole, the Agency has been responsive to internal and external review and authorization requirements. 12 In the case of Chile, singled out for a separate, in-depth report, the Senate blamed the President for by-passing the 40 Committee machinery in the case of the so-called "Track II" part of the operation, but did not consider this to be an example of CIA out of control. It was noted that other aspects of the Chile operation were carefully cleared by the 40 Committee. And the SSC's question: "Did the threat to vital U.S. national security interests posed by the Presidency of Salvador Allende justify the several major covert attempts to prevent his accession to power?" was answered in its report by the statement: "Three American Presidents and their senior advisors evidently thought SO." I' The SSC report on Covert Action (Volume 7) states categorically: "Executive command and control of major covert action was tight and well-directed. " 14 The SSC did criticize the procedures in which CIA itself determined which covert action projects were submitted to the 40 Committee, and it felt that certain intelligence operations not submitted to the 40 Committee had political action implications requiring 40 Committee approval. But the Senate did not charge that covert action operations had been carried out without the knowledge and approval of at least the Director.15 The House Committee disagreed with some of the covert action operations performed by CIA but concluded, as mentioned above, that the Agency was "utterly responsive to the instructions of the President and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs" and was not "out of control." The draft report added: "It is further clear that CIA has been ordered to engaged in covert action over the Agency's strong prior objections." 16 The draft Pike Committee report allegedly made the following comment which makes clear that in those instances in which the 40 Committee did not specifically pass on CIA's recruitment of individual stand-by covert action assets (sometimes called "Covert action was not considered by the Senate in the abuse category except in the case of assassination plots. 12 SSC Final Report, Book I, p. 447. 13 Senate Select Committee Report, "Intelligence Activities," Senate Resolution 21, Volume 7, "Covert Action," p. 198. 11 Ibid., p. 199. "Ibid., p. 199. " The Village Voice, loc. cit., p. 84, "Covert Action." SFN$ffaved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA00010003000136 Aw d For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Rogue Elephant "infrastructure") or other minor action operations, at least the Director-not subordinate officials-provided approval: . . . the CIA Director determines which CIA-initiated covert action projects are sufficiently `politically sensitive' to require Presidential attention." Assassination planning was an especially reprehensible case of abuse in the covert action field. These cases were completely aired by the SSC. There were split opinions on whether or how much successive Presidents knew and approved such operations. While the SSC quite correctly believed that the doctrine of plausible denial, the use of euphemisms to describe "assassination," and the theory that authorities granted to one Director could be assumed to cover subsequent Directors all created "the risk of confusion, rashness and irresponsibility in the very areas where clarity and sober judgments were most necessary," 'R it did not suggest that such actions ever took place without at least approval at the top of the Agency.'9 Intelligence activities affecting the rights of American citizens understandably loomed large in the abuse category of the Senate Select Committee. This included infiltrating and surveilling groups of American dissidents, dissemination of material collected on these groups, and covert action designed to disrupt or discredit such groups. The following general statement by the SSC seems to be a fair one and one which places the blame where it belongs: We must acknowledge that the assignment which the Government has given to the intelligence community has, in many ways, been impossible to fulfill. It has been expected to predict or prevent every crisis, respond immediately with information on any question, act to meet all threats, and anticipate the special needs of Presidents. And then it is chastised for its zeal. Certainly, a fair assessment must place a major part of the blame upon the failures of senior executive officials and Congress. 10 The SSC blamed the excessive power of the Executive built up over the years and the failure of Congress to exercise the Congressional check and balance role which is essential. But whatever the problem, the picture here is not one of a Central Intelligence Agency out of control. The CIA did not restrict itself to servicing FBI requests for information on Americans, but "under White House pressure" 21 the CIA developed its own domestic counterintelligence program-Operation CHAOS. According to the Senate Select Committee final report (Book II), "Former CIA Director Richard Helms testified that he established the program in response to President Johnson's persistent interest in the extent of foreign influence on domestic dissidents." 22 In 1969, President Nixon's Ibid. Senate Select Committee Report, "Alleged Assassination Report Involving Foreign Leaders," 20 November 1975, Report No. 94-465, p. 277. CIA took exception to the SSC definition and application of "plausible deniability." CIA felt it was legitimately intended to make it possible for the government, including the President, to disclaim something, while the SSC tended to say it permitted internal CIA records to cloud the facts. 19 In the case of the assassination plot against Lumumba, the Senate found that when Mr. McCone became Director, he may not have been informed by the Deputy Director of CIA of this plan. SSC Final Report, Book 11, "Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans," p. 290. Ibid., p. 99. '.2 Ibid., p. 100. The MHCHAOS domestic counterintelligence was concerned with making file entries on certain dissident Americans. The operational aspect of MHCHAOS was overseas, i.e., investigation of dissident Americans overseas who might have foreign intelligence ties. Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA00010003 ST Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Rogue Elephant SECRET White House required the CIA to study foreign Communist support to American protest groups. "In 1972, the CIA Inspector General found `general concern' among the overseas stations `over what appeared to constitute a monitoring of the political views and activities of Americans....... 23 This led to a reduction in the program, but it was not terminated until March 1974. However questionable this program may have been, even considering the context of the times, it is clear that it was undertaken and sustained by two successive Presidents, and the Inspector General machinery did at least what it could to mitigate the program despite Presidential pressure. Inadequate control was not the problem. The opening of mail in the U.S. Postal Service was understandably criticized by the Senate Select Committee. This program, however, was condoned by the FBI and Justice Department for many years. The FBI not only was aware of this program, but relied on the CIA for the product from it. The FBI, in fact, tasked the CIA.24 The Attorney General's findings on this program 25 are interesting. The report dated 14 January 1977 (White Paper) concluded that it was highly unlikely that prosecutions based on CIA mail openings would end in criminal convictions and recommended, therefore, that no indictments be sought:26 ... prosecution of the potential defendants . . . would be unlikely to succeed ... because of the state of the law that prevailed during the course of the mail openings.... It would be mistaken to suppose that it was always clearly perceived that the particular mail opening programs of the CIA were obviously illegal.27 The report continues: ... this case involves a general failure of the government, including the Department of Justice itself, over the period of the mail opening programs, ever clearly to address and to resolve for its own internal regulation the constitutional and legal restrictions on the relevant aspects of the exercise of Presidential power. The actions of Presidents, their advisors in such affairs, and the Department (of Justice),itself might have been thought to support the notion that the governmental power, in scope and manner of exercise, was not subject to restrictions that, through a very recent evolution of the law and the Department's own thinking, are now considered essential. In such circumstances, prosecution takes on an air of hypocrisy and may appear to be the sacrifice of a scapegoat.28 The report chronicles the authority implicit in successive high officials' actions. In 1958, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover approved the program. In 1961, Postmaster General Day was informed in some degree.20 Director Helms, "a cabinet officer," and a person then serving on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) have all stated that Presidents Kennedy and Johnson were aware of the East Coast mail opening program.30 In July 1969, the CIA Inspector General recommended that 22 Ibid., p. 102. 24 Ibid., p. 107. 21 Report of the Department of Justice Concerning its Investigation and Prosecutorial Decisions with Respect to Central Intelligence Agency Mail Opening Activities in the United States, 14 January 1977. 26 Ibid., p. 2. 2' Ibid., p. 3. 25 Ibid., p. 5. 29 ibid., p. 13. "Ibid., p. 15. SE8Rpfoved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A000100030001-6 SECRET Rogue Elephant senior officials of the Nixon Administration should be informed, and in June 1971, Director Helms briefed both Attorney General John Mitchell and Postmaster General Blount.31 Former President Nixon has stated he was aware of CIA's monitoring of mail between the U.S. and the USSR and PRC, but there is no direct evidence that he was specifically informed of mail openings. The product available at the White House, however, made it quite clear that such had to be the case.32 In sum, CIA was acting with both implicit and explicit higher authority in the mail opening programs. The program for testing chemical and biological agents was the only area where clearly inadequate control was found by the Senate Select Committee. It concluded that this program raised . . . serious questions about the adequacy of command and control procedures within the Central Intelligence Agency and military intelligence. . . . The CIA's normal administrative controls were waived for programs involving chemical and biological agents to protect their security.... They prevented the CIA's internal review mechanism . . . from adequately supervising the programs.33 Excessive compartmentation of the program was also criticized by the Senate Select Committee. An observation made by the CIA Inspector General that "the knowledge that the Agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles . . ." 34 went unheeded. Early drug-testing programs such as Project BLUEBIRD in 1950 and Project ARTICHOKE in 1951 were approved by the Director and enjoyed good intra-Agency coordination and control. MKNAOMI, begun in 1967 and ended in 1970, had Director approval and was conducted with the cooperation of the Army's Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick. MKULTRA, the principal CIA program involving the research and development of chemical and biological agents capable of being used in clandestine operations to control human behavior, was approved by the Director on 13 April 1953. Various aspects of the program were carried out in cooperation with universities, pharmaceutical houses, hospitals, state and federal institutions, and private research organizations, although some of the activities were conducted without their CIA sponsorship being known. The National Institute of Mental Health and the Bureau of Narcotics also played important roles. In 1963, the Inspector General learned that under the MKULTRA program surreptitious administration of LSD to unwitting, non-voluntary human subjects was being carried out. This program was then known to and approved by the then- Director. As a result of the Inspector General's protest, the testing was halted and tighter administrative controls imposed. The program was completely terminated in the late 1960s. The tragic case of Dr. Frank Olson in 1953 does reveal a problem of command and control. Despite explicit warnings by the Deputy Director for Plans (DDP) that his approval had to be given before LSD human experiments were conducted, the head of the Technical Services Division (TSD) of the DDP without such authorization Jl Ibid., o. 17. Ibid., p. 18. as SSC Final Report, Book I, p. 386. Ibid., pp. 385-386. Approved For Release 2005/01/06: CIA-RDP80-00630A000100030RP1RET Approved For Release 2005/01/06: CIA-RDP80-00630A0001002j3n~-6 Rogue Elephant went ahead with an experiment in which Dr. Olson unwittingly ingested LSD without being told in advance. Olson had a severe emotional breakdown shortly afterward and either jumped or fell to his death from a hotel room in New York. The atmosphere of the times probably led the approving officer to believe that he had implicit license to conduct such experiments. He has testified that he does not remember a DDP memorandum requiring DDP authorization.35 The General Counsel concluded, however, that there seemed "to be a very casual attitude on the part of TSD representatives to the way this experiment was concluded.. . . ." 36 The shellfish toxin case was cited by the Senate Select Committee as the other specific failure of command and control in the drug experiment area. That an Agency scientist failed to do away with 11 grams of shellfish toxin and instead kept it in CIA classified storage despite a Presidential order that all such material had to be destroyed is indeed a lapse of control. Yet this seems to be an individual human failing, not an organizational failing.37 It should also be noted that it was the CIA itself which discovered the store of toxin and brought it to the Senate Select Committee's attention. Abuses committed by CIA over the years which were subjected to close scrutiny by the Church committee investigation should not be minimized, much less condoned. Nor should misjudgments of any kind, which took place through the years, be allowed to recur. There were certainly instances of reprehensible conduct on the part of individual officers and examples of the Agency taking advantage of lax oversight or loosely defined authority to commit excesses. It is not the purpose of this paper to chronicle past faults, however, but rather to put into perspective the issue of past control and accountability as seen objectively by Congress. The problems facing the Agency today are enough without adding to them an unwarranted burden of guilt, or stifling CIA with the incubus of additional restrictions. The findings of the 1976 Congressional investigations, confirmed by the statement of Senator Inouye at the conclusion of a year and a half of Senatorial oversight, should be persuasive confirmation of CIA's own views of past abuses and their causes. As charter legislation is being formulated, it may be hoped that the lessons of the past will not be misread, and that oversight machinery and law will not go beyond that which is constructive and necessary. as Ibid., p. 395, footnote 34. -ibid., p. 398 (Memorandum to the Inspector General from the General Counsel dated 1/4/54). 37 With the perspective of time, the knowledge that this rare multi-million dollar item now is being used for the good of humanity by a U.S. Government public health laboratory perhaps mitigates to some extent the scientist's failure to carry out orders. S aved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A000100030001t6 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 SECRET No Foreign Dissem The economic analyst as middleman between collector and consumer in narcotics intelligence ANALYST IN A HELICOPTER I was used to the jungle and the mountains. My nerves were steady, and my heart no longer jumped to see the rocky clearing-surely too small for our assault helicopter-rushing up at us. Still, thought and breath stopped as the pilot sideslipped between the mountains and out us down on a barren knoll among the trees. While my companion collected her purse, I pushed open the door, partially blocked by the thick vegetation, and helped her to the ground. Heavily armed Thais emerged from the silence of the jungle. "It's okay," I said, more to myself than to Mathea. "They're our escort." The clandestine morphine refinery was only a few hundred yards away, but it was a good 20-minute sludge down the rain-slippery mountain path. The elephant grass closed over our heads as we slithered through the mud. It would be hard going for Mathea's dress and high heels, I found myself thinking. Suddenly, I was sliding, gaining momentum, headlong toward the precipice where the path turned sharply to the right. I clawed at the grass and the rocks, but could get no grip. This time you've done it, Eddie, I said to myself. Film clips of past missions passed before my eyes-the party circuit in Geneva, facing the machine guns of nervous soldiers on the Singapore waterfront, listening to the beep of a secret transmitter hidden in an opium-carrying wooden saddle, chasing pigs and cows off a precipitous mountain runway. Then I felt Mathea's fingernails gripping my arm. My slide slowed and stopped only feet from the edge of the cliff. Mathea's spike heels, dug inches into the mud, had saved me. Thank God for elegant women, I thought. Sound like something out of James Bond? Or a war story spun by a DDO veteran at the end of a cocktail party? Well, it's nothing of the sort; it's just a day in the life of an analyst in NFAC's Office of Economic Research. Let me tell you how it all started. Hooked by the Drug Trade For eight years I have had a rare-for an NFAC officer-and interesting assignment in the field of narcotics intelligence. My responsibility has been research and reporting on the narcotics situation in the Golden Triangle. Over the years, the assignment has widened and now covers the spectrum of the intelligence production process from personal involvement in intelligence collection activites with case officers in the field to presentation of finished analysis to policy makers in the White House and in the Department of State. My involvement in the narcotics intelligence effort grew out of a decision made by the White House in the late 1960s to try to stem the flow of illicit narcotics into the S rpved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A00010003000176 MORI/HRP PAGES Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 SECRET Narcotics Intelligence United States by attacking the foreign sources of these products. The role played by the Golden Triangle in supplying the U.S. military market in South Vietnam was of particular concern to the President. I was initially selected to work on the program because of my experience, as a China agriculture analyst in OER, with projects utilizing overhead photography for crop detection and measurement and because I had also written one of the earliest CIA reports on narcotics production in Communist China. My job was to start from scratch in developing an intelligence resource base for the U.S. Government's new initiative in this area. The Golden Triangle is the term used to describe the conjunction of the borders of Burma, Thailand, and Laos, one of the largest illicit narcotics producing areas in the world. (See Map.) Since World War II this vast acreage of opium poppy cultivation has been controlled or contested by Communist, Nationalist Chinese, and various insurgent organizations, by independent traffickers, and various tribal groups. The area has been a cockpit of anti-Burmese government insurgency for years, much of it financed by earnings from narcotics trafficking. The situation is further complicated by political and military relationships between local governments and the insurgents and tribal groups in the area, relationships shot through with official corruption at all levels. The type of information required for analyzing the narcotics situation could be obtained only through penetration of the narcotics syndicates and smuggling markets involved in the traffic, and at first we were forced to rely almost exclusively on human source reporting. Fortunately the DDO had a number of fairly reliable assets in Southeast Asia who could be assigned to narcotics targets in addition to their other responsibilities. Soon thereafter, many of these assets were assigned exclusively to narcotics targets. One of the first priority intelligence requirements placed on the field when I was assigned to this task was the collection of wholesale narcotics prices at various locations within the Golden Triangle and adjacent areas. It was our contention that to measure the impact of narcotics control programs effectively, it was necessary to develop some understanding of the factors affecting prices of illicit narcotics. In time, a standardized monthly price report developed by the DDO and subsequent "fine-tuning" of requirements would provide a steady source of basic raw data for analysis. Requirements have since been tailored to meet the needs of current intelligence analysts for rapid responses to policy makers' requests. The overall result has been a collection program uniquely satisfactory to collectors, analysts, and consumers. The success of the Southeast Asia effort derived in no small measure from the fact that the middleman-in this case, myself-was allowed to make direct personal contacts in the field and at the policy levels in Washington. DDO case officers and reports officers facilitated TDY tours in the field, where I was able to provide direct feedback to field representatives from my contacts with State and NSC officers involved in day-to-day direction of the administration's international narcotics policy. Instead of brushing me off as a Headquarters junketeer, field oficers welcomed the chance to discuss the relevance of their collection efforts and were willing to let me see many of their problems at first hand. Out of this experience has grown a collection of personal "war stories" which, though hardly rivaling those of the experienced operations officer, show some of the personal and professional benefits from an analyst's happy menage a trois with the collector and the policy maker. Most of the anecdotes that follow are from TDY trips requested by the Department of State, generally as part of a mission to give substantive briefings at annual meetings of State and Drug Enforcement Agency representatives in the field. Approved For Release 2005/01/06: CIA-RDP80-0063OA0001000300K T Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A000100030001-6 Narcotics Intelligence SECRET Chin Special Division I n d i a 13 ay Of Beit ,gal China Kachin State Kayah State r^' RANGOON e to p +Hsipaw B u r- a Tangyan- Shan State ".Ban Hin Taek Ban Doi Long Mae Sa LFri~ ? ?, - International boundary - Province or state boundary (Burma and northwest Thailand only) Chiang Chia Mai + Mae Lampang Hong Son fil ULLaradit 4ittaradit , "Golden Triangle" Muang Sing Bung Ka Stf ptqved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A00010003000116 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Geneva, Switzerland, October 1971 In 1971, I traveled to Geneva on my first narcotics TDY assignment Narcotics Intelligence to attend the 24th session of the United Nations Commission on Narcotics Drugs (UNCND) in support of the U.S. delegation. It was my first opportunity to observe this UN body in action and to gather information on the narcotics situation from contacts with UN officials and foreign nationals. The daily meetings were dull; most of the sessions bogged down over procedural questions, and it was immediately apparent that nothing of intelligence interest was to be gained from them. So I cajoled our representative to include me on the guest lists for the nightly social functions among the various delegations. Despite some initial concern over my cover because of my overt status in the CIA, invitations were soon forthcoming and I had the entree I needed to circulate and listen. These social occasions produced valuable contacts with representatives from Iran, Thailand, the International Police Organization (INTERPOL), and the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) of the UN. There was an immediate intelligence payoff on narcotics production in Iran and the extent of the illicit traffic through that country, including a very detailed briefing map used by the Iranian delegation in a closed meeting of the INCB. Again, while exchanging toasts with the Thai delegation I was given some rather startling information concerning the closeness of political relationships then existing between high-level Thai government officials and the former Chinese Nationalist generals who were in command of the two major narcotics trafficking organizations operating in the Burma/Thailand border area. Here, too, the information filled some very important intelligence gaps. During the three-year interlude before my next overseas TDY, I was busy expanding our narcotics research data base in order to determine the magnitude and trends of the narcotics market. My assignment as an Agency representative to the East Asia Interagency Working Group on Narcotics Control added to my responsibilities a direct policy support role. The Working Group met weekly at the Department of State and was responsible for determining the feasibility of various narcotics control programs in Southeast Asia. The role also brought me into closer contact with policy makers at the Department of State and the White House, for whom I was frequently called upon to provide substantive briefings. My responsibility for narcotics intelligence also brought me into official contact with foreign nationals in the Washington area for various political and substantive reasons. In 1973, for example, I was asked to sit in on a meeting with members of the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) arranged by former OSS operatives who had been in Burma during World War II. The Kachins, who played a major role in OSS actions against the Japanese, have been fighting the Burmese government ever since for an autonomous Kachin State. All I knew about this meeting was that the Kachins wanted to talk to someone from the U.S. Government and that the subject of narcotics would be brought up during the conversation. After some exploratory questions about U.S. policy toward Burma and the Kachin insurgency, and repeated references to the U.S.-Kachin friendship during the war, the Kachins raised their main question: Would the U.S. Government provide financial and military aid to the KIO? The Kachin people could not succeed against the Ne Win 25X1 J~proved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA00010003RPRIT lYdPTro Yn emi Reelecase 2005/01/06: CIA-RDP80-00630A000100 S p`&6 regime without outside assistance, and without U.S. help the Kachins might be forced into the Communist camp. This kind of thing may have been old hat to my DDO associates, but it was clear to me that I, at least, had no business discussing such issues with these people. We told them that only the State Department could give them an official answer, but we added our private advice that the United States was unlikely to provide even covert support for any insurgency in Burma. We reminded them that threats of alliance with the Communists would most likely have a negative effect on both U.S. and Burmese official attitudes. They appeared to accept this advice, but glumly reiterated that if the Kachins were allowed to run their own region as an autonomous state the cultivation of opium poppies could be eliminated. The Burmese, on the other hand, do not have the resources to gain complete control of the remote countryside and could never hope to stop poppy cultivation. This was their most persuasive and effective argument, for it is clear that some sort of rapprochement between the Government of Burma and its ethnic minorities would be the best long-run solution to the narcotics problem in Burma. Singapore, January 1974 As I prepared for my first trip to Southeast Asia on a narcotics assignment, I was asked to provide some collateral support to the National Photographic Interpretation Center, which was in the process of updating its ground coverage of the Singapore Straits region. I was to be in Singapore for the 1974 narcotics conference, and I was asked, as a semiofficial tourist, to try to photograph oil refineries and containerization facilities in the port. A private launch was provided by the naval attache for a tour of the port and straits area. Unbeknownst to us, a Japanese Red Army terrorist group chose to attack one of the oil refineries just as we approached the harbor. While we cruised among the islands and installations, the terrorists were hijacking a ferry boat with some 100 passengers as hostages. We gradually became aware of an abrupt drop- off in harbor activity, and by the time we headed for shore the area was crawling with heavily-armed troops. Upon docking, we were challenged by a large band of nervous soldiers, each of whom seemed to be pointing his submachinegun at my head. Their commander finally accepted, with some astonishment, our plea that we had been oblivious of the terrorist action despite the explosions and the assault on the ferry. The excellent photographs we got have since been used in an update of the CIA Gazeteer for the region. Chiang Mai and the North, January 1974 After the excitement of my Singapore diversion, it was a relief to be on my way to Thailand and back on the track of narcotics intelligence. The impact of a visit to the Golden Triangle on a normally chairbound analyst was profound. Chiang Mai is a major center of narcotics trafficking and a front-line intelligence collection post; within a few miles of the city one can see opium poppies swaying in the breeze. At I had a very candid exchange of information with and first-hand observations of many facets of the narcotics situation. I was allowed to observe the field-testing of some improved aerial electronics equipment specially designed for locating opium caravans. The object was to have an agent in the caravan plant a radio beacon in a saddle compartment used for carrying narcotics. Aircraft would then home in on the radio signal and break up the caravan with gunfire. During our test flight we played a cat-and-mouse game with a jeep carrying the beacon and readily located its hiding place along a heavily tree-canopied jungle road. When used in anti-narcotics operations the beacons were instrumental in 25X1 SE'roved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A000100030001-6 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A000100030 01-6 SECRET Narcotics Intelligence dispersing or destroying several large caravans. Beacons were also used to pinpoint narcotics refineries during Burmese army operations in the border area. During my stay in Chiang Mai, I was invited by the Thai Border Patrol Police (BPP) to observe the planning phase of an interdiction operation against an opium convoy reported to have crossed into Thailand from Burma. The East Asia Interagency Working Group on Narcotics Control, of which I was a member, had before it a request from the BPP for additional aircraft, and we had had several discussions before I left Washington. The BPP operation was intended to airlift a company of heavily-armed troops into a blocking position along the Thai-Burma border; speed was of the essence. But with only two helicopters and one Porter aircraft, it took an entire day to move the troops into position. By the time the troops were in place, the caravan had been alerted to the movement, and was able to disperse into the jungle and escape back across the border into Burma. My most exciting adventure during the 1974 visit, however, occurred during a flight by our Porter aircraft to a Lisu tribal village close to the Burmese border. This was one of the opium-growing villages chosen by the United Nations to test the feasibility of crop substitution programs. The village was a model of inaccessibility. It was nestled on a ridge between two peaks, and as we approached the pilot pointed out that our landing strip would be a very narrow, somewhat vertical path leading up the side of a hill. He had already told me at a party the night before that it was the most hazardous landing strip in North Thailand. With his passenger thus prepared to be appreciative, he slipped the old reliable Porter onto the ridge to an uneventful uphill landing. We toured the village poppy fields observing long rows of women, many with infants slung on their back, harvesting the opium. The only men we saw were in the village socializing. As we got ready to leave, the pilot confided that the wind was blowing in the wrong direction and the plane was probably overloaded for the wind conditions. He pointed out that the takeoff had to be made downhill with a very sharp right turn to avoid two menacing peaks. Stray cows, pigs, chickens, and other assorted beasts were now observed foraging along the strip, and the antics of these animals as our pilot taxied the aircraft up and down the runway trying to scare them was amusing but not reassuring. Thus prepared, I was then given the unwelcome job of handling the wing flap controls during the critical first stage of the lift-off, after which I was to turn the control over to the pilot for a quick adjustment during the turn between the peaks. It was the scariest takeoff I have ever experienced, and that includes three years with U.S. Army Air Force bombers during World War II. (1 doubt my trip report had anything to do with it, but Porters now are barred from flying to this village because of the dangerous conditions and because the United States eventually agreed to provide the helicopters the Thais had requested.) Visit to a Frontier Town, February 1974 I jumped at the opportunity to visit Mae Sai, T 'hailand, a notorious border town in the Golden Triangle. Mae Sai was the headquarters for many narcotics traffickers in the Golden Triangle, and our intelligence indicated that commercial stores in the town were fronts for all types of illegal activities. The town has historically been a major entry point for narcotics produced in Burma for distribution to international markets. Its reputation was evident in the heavy police guard assigned us for the trip. We flew to Chiang Rai and then transferred to police vehicles for the final run into Mae Sai. Mae Sai had an air about it reminiscent of the frontier towns of the old American west. There was a hustle and bustle of people coming and going without any apparent destination, all seemingly swallowed up in the many commercial establishments of the Ap9Tved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A0001000300RET A p o c M V e9Cg nleease 2005/01/06 CIA-RDP80-00630A000100 30001-6 town. Most of this traffic at one time or another could be observed crosssing the narrow foot bridge between the town and Tachilek in Burma. There were customs posts at both ends of the bridge, but the traffic flowed unchecked and barely acknowledged by the numerous officials lounging around the posts. Had checks been made, smugglers could easily circumvent the checkpoint by crossing the river at numerous fords up and down stream. Before I left Mae Sai, I was invited by my police escort to visit a jade store where one could get "a real bargain." The best jade is produced in Burma and Mae Sai is the principal entry point for smuggling these stones into Thailand, so there was no question that these were smuggled gems. Everyone got a good laugh when, after making a small purchase, I asked for a receipt to show U.S. customs. During the years between visits to the field, I continued to improvise by using our computer program to enlarge the data format and make possible more sophisticated analysis of the narcotics situation in the Golden Triangle. Our missions in Thailand and Burma were especially eager to get the statistical results, which we published every three months. Inasmuch as the various missions differed over the value of each other's intelligence collection effort and their estimates of production and trade, the more objective Washington data were in great demand. This was particularly apparent during my 1976 and 1977 trips to'Asia when the chiefs of mission in Bangkok and Rangoon asked for briefings on Washington's evaluation of narcotics control programs in their countries of responsibility. The continuing debate over the effectiveness of narcotics control programs in Burma and Thailand made me more determined than ever to take a closer look at the target areas to obtain a better understanding of the problems involved. The 1977 and 1978 trips were the highlights of this effort. Assault on a Refinery, April 1977 During my 1977 visit to the Golden Triangle Mathea Falco, senior advisor to the Secretary of State and Coordinator for International Narcotics Matters, invited me to accompany her on an inspection trip of north Thailand arranged by the Thai government. Inasmuch as our purpose was to observe the numerous insurgent bases located along the Thai-Burma border, our escort for the trip was the local commander of the Border Patrol Police, a major general who placed his helicopter at our disposal. In the course of our day-long flight, as we flew over the major base camps of the Chinese Irregular Forces (CIF), Shan United Revolutionary Army (SURA), the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), and the Shan United Army (SUA), the general maintained radio contact with an assault force which was combing the jungles of Chiang Rai Province for a reported narcotics refinery. After we left Mae Sai, a lunch stop, the general received a message confirming the location of the narcotics refinery; the assault team was being airdropped into the area. We accepted his invitation to follow the attack force into the landing zone and proceeded southwesterly with the assault helicopter, circling the area repeatedly before we found an area flat enough to land. Our pilot sideslipped us into a mountain clearing and put us down on a knoll barely large enough to allow egress from the aircraft. It was during the hike from this landing zone to the refinery that Ms. Falco's spike heels kept me from sliding over the precipice, as described at the outset of this article. The refinery was completely hidden from the air by a jungle canopy; it was not unlike an Appalachian whiskey still. There were large vats, copper cooling and mixing bowls, and associated implements and chemicals. I was able to determine that this refinery had been producing morphine base, and intermediate product in the heroin production process. Confirmation was provided when we found brass plates etched with the numerals SEC$?Jiroved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A000100030091-6 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 SECRET Narcotics Intelligence 999," used to form morphine base into bricks. The "999" imprint on morphine bricks had been the trademark of refineries which produced a very high quality product. In recent years, however, this trademark has been copied by most refiners in the area regardless of the quality of the product. Despite the police efforts at surprise, the operators of the refinery had escaped into the bush when they heard the helicopters roaring into the zone. Nevertheless, the troops maintained an armed guard around us as we made the arduous climb back to the landing zone. At Chiang Mai we boarded a waiting defense attache plane for our flight back to Bangkok. Muddied and shoeless, Ms. Falco and I spent the flight exchanging observations from our tours of north Thailand. On the Road to Mandalay, April 1977 My next stop in 1977 was in Rangoon, where Ambassador Osborn was most interested in Washington's assessment of Burma's narcotics control program. After a day of consultations and briefings at the mission, I was given a plane ticket to Mandalay and told to make contact with I the U.S. Consulate. The consulate in Mandalay is the northernmost extension of the U.S. Mission in Burma, and it was and remains the source of considerable intelligence on narcotics activities in the northern and central Shan States. Despite the shortness of my stay in Mandalay, I got a very detailed briefing oil the narcotics intelligence support, provided by the consulate, and then I debriefed a knowledgeable Burmese government official on the 1977 opium poppy harvest. The information I obtained was decisive in adjudicating a heated disagreement between Rangoon and Washington over the size of the harvest. This source also provided me with useful background information on the load capacities of narcotics caravans, which has continued to serve as the basis for estimating the quantity of narcotics moving between the Shan State of Burma and the Thai border. Mission Across the Border, January 1978 Returning to Chiang Mai, Thailand in January 1978 1 had expected a rather routine visit to discuss intelligence gaps and Washington priorities. I was pleasantly surprised when I invited inc to accompany him on two aerial photographic intelligence collection missions along the Burma-Thailand border. These missions were in response to a request from Rangoon for an update on the location of heroin refineries in the area. Our first mission departed Chiang Mai by Porter aircraft early Sunday morning. Our flight path took us due north over the military bases of the Third and Fifth Chinese Irregular Forces, the Shan United Revolutionary Army, the Shan United Army, and the Shan States Revolutionary Army. (SSRA). Our primary targets were on the Burmese side of the border around Lao Lo Chai and Doi Long, where centers for the refining of illegal heroin had long been concentrated. To get good vertical and oblique photography we had to make a broad sweep across the border, climbing to 5,000 feet over the target area to avoid hostile fire. Around Doi Long we spotted a refinery run by the SSRA and photographed it from every angle. Flying on a northeast heading we covered the Fifth CIF headquarters at Mae Salong and the SUA headquarters at Bari Hill Taek, where we observed a considerable number of fortified positions and communications structures. We then approached our primary target in the Lao Lo Chai area, photographing what appeared to be several narcotics-related facilities. Some of these buildings were no more than 10 to 30 kilometers west of the Mae Sai highway, a major road linking north and south Thailand. After two sweeps across the area with color and infrared cameras we returned to Chiang Mai. 25X1 A~groved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A000100030QQ~t-RET N.ARRF$syeAie~rgrepi[%ase 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A000100g#QW6 Three days later I accompanied I n a mission to the Huai Pa Dam area on the border. This area had been the target of a military operation by the Burmese army only the year before. :Heading northwest to the border, we found numerous defensive positions and narcotics-related facilities indicating the resumption of a high level of activity, probably by the SUA. New buildings appeared to confirm this judgment, and I observed a considerable concentration of opium poppy fields adjacent to the SUA military camps. We crossed the border into Burma and began our sweep over Mong Mah. We immediately observed a new defensive position with six huts ringed by 14 foxholes at the peak of Man Thong Mountain. All indications were that the refineries put out of operation by previous Burmese attacks had again reopened. The photographic intelligence gathered on these missions has since been used by the Burmese army in an attack on the Doi Long area during which they destroyed three of the refineries targeted. Additional Burmese operations against the photographed targets in the Lao Lo Chai and Mong Mah areas will probably have taken place by the time this article is published. In a conversation with relating to the opium poppy crop estimate for 1978, we decided to test the validity of human source reporting against an aerial survey of the poppy fields in northern Thailand. I volunteered for a flight over the test area so that we could compare our photographic coverage with the area reported in the ground survey. We flew out of Chiang Mai and made a northwest sweep across northern Thailand. The condition of the fields indicated to me that the crop had been severely damaged by late rains, and although extensive acreage appeared to have been planted, the sowing patterns were very irregular due to the damage. Since the plants had not yet flowered, it was obvious that the crop would be harvested late in 1978, and perhaps no earlier than the end of February 1979. A bonus earned on this flight was the discovery of a new and extensive area of poppy cultivation in which a considerable amount of acreage appeared to have been planted. The targets identified on this mission were subsequently checked out and substantiated by collateral intelligence. This eyeball-and-camera survey of the poppy areas produced a long-needed statistical base for estimating 1978 opium production in Thailand. Such surveys are also valuable for accumulating additional background data to test the feasibility of overhead photography for monitoring the narcotics control effort. Visit to the Thai-Lao Border, January 1978 At I was given the opportunity to review intelligence files containing new information received from northeast Thailand. Information in these files indicated a significant increase in narcotics traffic out of Laos. There had been considerable debate within the Washington intelligence community over the role the Communist government of Laos might be playing in narcotics production and trade. The issue was particularly sensitive because the UN Commission on Narcotics Drugs (CND) was considering a request from Laos for narcotics control funds. It was suggested that I fly to Udorn, Thailand to review and evaluate this intelligence. At Udorn, I was met by with a car and driver to take us to Nong Khai, a major ferry crossing on the Mekong River between Vientiane and Thailand. Nong Khai is often mentioned in intelligence reports as a principal entry point for narcotics from Laos. The Lao border actually lies along the high water mark on the Thai side of the river. 25X1 SAaved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A0001000300011- wd For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A000100030001-6 Narcotics Intelligence After observing the activity at the ferry crossing, we made a 150-mile round trip by car along the Laos-Thailand border to the town of Ring Kan, Thailand, another major narcotics entry point. The highway between Nong Khai and Bung Kan is a fairly good one-too good, because it enabled our driver to weave between oncoming trucks and around water buffaloes at speeds approaching 90 miles per hour, ignoring the constant shouts of my escort. I kept my panic in check by focusing on the side of the road, observing that we were traversing what had to be the poorest and most desolate countryside in all of Thailand. There were only a few pockets of villages along the way and only two check points, where the police simply raised the barriers at the approach of a vehicle; no one was stopped for interrogation or vehicle checks. It was easy to see that narcotics could be packed from Laos into Thailand at any point along the border to be picked up by a vehicle along the highway for shipment into Bangkok. Part of our trip took us through an area controlled by Communist terrorists, where we moved even faster except for a detour around a dynamited bridge. At Rung Karr we visited the local police post to meet the new area commander. The police post had a clear view of the Mekong which, this being the dry season, had receded to a narrow ribbon of water which could most likely be crossed by wading. I was informed that the local jail contained no narcotics offenders but rather was packed with Lao refugees who had recently fled across the river at these narrow points. Before leaving northeast Thailand, I accompanied o Khon Kaen, the provincial capital, to meet the commandant of Zone Six, which included the Thailand-Laos border area. In exchange for our briefing on the narcotics situation in the border area, we asked him to provide a communication channel for regular exchanges with Washington on narcotics trafficking. He said he would be happy to cooperate but that his forces were spread quite thin and lacked adequate equipment. What he wanted from Bangkok and particularly from Washington was more emphasis on northeast Thailand's anti-narcotics control programs, including funds to provide incentive awards to his personnel for apprehending narcotics traffickers. He feared that Laos could supplant the traditional areas of the Golden Triangle in magnitude if Washington failed to support a greater anti-narcotics effort in the area. So again I found myself a not unwilling message bearer from the field to officials in Washington. With the Victims in Hong Kong, January 1978 A fitting climax to my 1978 tour of Southeast Asia came in Hong Kong, where I was briefed on the local drug situation by the Commissioner for Narcotics and then given a four-hour tour of a drug addict treatment center on one of the outlying islands. I had ample cause to reflect on the drug problem and my involvement in the battle as I sat among the pitiful crowd of heroin addicts being ferried to this facility. Reflections Most of the events described here were not outlined or even foreseen in the formal travel prospectus prepared for each of my trips. In every instance, these experiences added to our knowledge of the international drug trade arid related subjects. On many occasions chance lent a hand in helping fill an intelligence gap or clarify issues. In assessing my role as a link between Washington and the field it became apparent that the opportunities provided me were not always motivated by intelligence needs. It was not unusual to find myself a conduit to Washington for narcotics aid assistance requests from foreign countries, and often I had to provide a filter as well. There were occasions when I was asked by various U.S. missions to help 25X1 AAproved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A000100030MRr T Nc rSv9#tA%5 ase 2005/01 /06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100 P@I -6 grind their particular axes or increase their share of the narcotics control budget. Even within our own organization, I sensed that at times motives unrelated to orientation purposes were behind my involvement in some of the operational situations. Whatever the motivation, the opportunities afforded me resulted in a comprehensive exposure to an intelligence problem that is rare for an NFAC analyst and which benefited the entire narcotics intelligence program. SECjq~roved For Release 2005/01/06: CIA-RDP80-00630A0001000300t -6 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Our past intelligence judgments were neither as good as we think they were, nor as bad as others believe. COGNITIVE BIASES: PROBLEMS IN HINDSIGHT ANALYSIS Psychologists observe that limitations in man's mental machinery (memory, attention span, reasoning capability, etc.,) affect his ability to process information to arrive at judgemental decisions. In order to cope with the complexity of our environment, these limitations force us to employ various simplifying strategies for perception, comprehension, inference, and decision. Many psychological experiments demonstrate that our mental processes often lead to erroneous judgments. When such mental errors are not random, but are consistently and predictably in the same direction, they are known as cognitive biases. This article discusses three cognitive biases affecting how we evaluate ourselves and how others evaluate us as intelligence analysts. ? The analyst who thinks back about how good his past judgments have been will normally overestimate their accuracy. ? The intelligence consumer who thinks about how much he learned from our reports will normally underestimate their true value to him. ? The overseer of intelligence production who conducts a postmortem of an intelligence failure to evaluate what we should have concluded from the information that was available will normally judge that events were more readily foreseeable than was in fact the case. Evidence supporting the existence of these biases is presented in detail in the second part of this article. None of the biases is surprising. We have all observed these tendencies in others-although probably not in ourselves. What may be unexpected is that these biases are not solely the product of self-interest and lack of objectivity. They are specific examples of a broader phenomenon that seems to be built into our mental processes and that cannot be overcome by the simple admonition to be more objective. In the experimental situations described below, conscious efforts to overcome these biases were ineffective. Experimental subjects with no vested interest in the results were briefed on the biases and encouraged to avoid them or compensate for them, but there was little or no improvement in their estimates. While self-interest and lack of objectivity will doubtless aggravate the situation, bias is also cause by mental processes unrelated to these baser instincts. The analyst, consumer, and overseer evaluating estimative performance all have one thing in common: they are exercising hindsight. They take their current state of knowledge and compare it with what they or others did or could or should have known before the current knowledge was received. Intelligence estimation, on the other hand, is an exercise in foresight, and it is the difference between these two kinds of thought-hindsight and foresight-that seems to be the source of the bias. The amount of good information that is available obviously is greater in hindsight than in foresight. There are several possible explanations of how this affects mental processes. One is that the additional information available for hindsight apparently Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA0001000300R1-6 MORI/HRI PAGES 21-28 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A000100030001-6 Cognitive Biases changes our perceptions of a situation so naturally and so immediately that we are largely unaware of the change. When new information is received, it is immediately and unconsciously assimilated into our prior knowledge. If this new information adds significantly to our knowledge-if it tells us the outcome of a situation or the answer to a question about which we were previously uncertain-our mental images are restructured to take the new information into account. With the benefit of hindsight, for example, factors previously considered relevant may become irrelevant, and factors previously thought to have little relevance may be seen as determinative. Once our view has been restructured to assimilate the new information, there is virtually no way we can accurately reconstruct our prior mental set. We may recall our previous estimates if not much time has elapsed and they were precisely articulated, but we apparently cannot reconstruct them accurately. The effort to reconstruct what we previously thought about a given situation, or what we would have thought about it, is inevitably influenced by our current thought patterns. Knowing the outcome of a situation makes it harder to imagine other outcomes that we might have considered. Simply understanding that our mind works in this fashion, however, does little to help us overcome the limitation. The overall message we should learn from an understanding of these biases is that our intelligence judgments are not as good as we think they are, or as bad as others seem to believe. Since the biases generally cannot be overcome, they would appear to be facts of life that need to be taken into account in evaluating our own performance and in determining what evaluations to expect from others. This suggests the need for a more systematic effort to: ? Define what should be expected from intelligence analysis. ? Develop an institutionalized procedure for comparing intelligence judgments and estimates with actual outcomes. ? Measure how well we live up to the defined expectations. Discussion of Experiments The experiments that demonstrated the existence of these biases and their resistance to corrective action were conducted as part of a research program in decision analysis funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Before examining these experiments, it is appropriate to consider the nature of experimental evidence per se, and the extent to which one can generalize from these experiments to conclude that the same biases are prevalent in the intelligence community. When we say that psychological experiments demonstrate the existence of a bias, we do not mean the bias will be found in every judgment by every individual. We mean that in any group of people, the bias will exist to a greater or lesser degree in most of the judgments made by a large percentage of the group. On the basis of the kind of experimental evidence discussed here, we can only generalize about the tendencies of groups of people, not make statements about individual analysts, consumers, or overseers. All the experiments described below used students, not members of the intelligence community, as test subjects. There is, nonetheless, ample reason to believe the results can be generalized to apply to the intelligence community. The experiments deal with basic mental processes common to everyone, and the results do seem consistent with our personal experience. In similar psychological test using various experts (including intelligence analysts) as test subjects, the experts showed the same pattern of responses as students. Apoved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A000100030001-6 Approve For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Cognitive lases Our own imperfect efforts to repeat one of these experiments using CIA analysts support the validity of the findings. In order to test the assertion that intelligence analysts normally overestimate the accuracy of their past judgments, there are two necessary preconditions. First, analysts must make a series of estimates in quantitative terms-they must say not just that a given occurrence is probable, but that there is, for example, a 75-percent chance of its occurrence. Second, it must be possible to make an unambiguous determination whether the estimated event did or did not occur. When these two preconditions are present, one can then go back and test the analyst's recollection of his or her earlier estimate. Because CIA estimates are rarely stated in terms of quantitative probability, and because the occurrence of an estimated event within a specified time period often cannot be determined unambiguously, these preconditions are rarely met. We did, however, identify several analysts in CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis who on two widely differing subjects had made quantitative estimates of the likelihood of events that we now know either did or did riot occur. We went to these analysts and asked them to recall their earlier estimates. The conditions for this miniexperiment were far from ideal, and the results were not clear-cut, but they did tend to support the conclusions drawn from the more extensive and systematic experiments described below. These reasons lead us to conclude that the three biases are found in intelligence community personnel as well as in the specific test subjects. In fact, one would expect the biases to be even greater in foreign affairs professionals whose careers and self- esteem depend upon the presumed accuracy of their judgments. We can now turn to more detailed discussion of the experimental evidence demonstrating these biases from the perspective of the analyst, consumer, and overseer. The Analyst's Perspective ' Analysts interested in improving their own performance need to evaluate their past estimates in the light of subsequent developments. To do this, an analyst must either recall (or be able to refer to) his past estimates, or he must reconstruct his past estimates on the basis of what he remembers having known about the situation at the time the estimates were made. The effectiveness of the evaluation process, and of the learning process to which it gives impetus, depends in part upon the accuracy of these recalled or reconstructed estimates. Experimental evidence suggests, however, a systematic tendency toward faulty memory of our past estimates. That is, when events occur, we tend to overestimate the extent to which we had previously expected them to occur. And conversely, when events do not occur, we tend to underestimate the probability we had previously assigned to their occurrence. In short, events generally seem less surprising than they should on the basis of past estimates. This experimental evidence accords with our intuitive experience; analysts, in fact, rarely seem very surprised by the course of events they are following. In experiments to test the bias in memory of past estimates, 119 subjects were asked to estimate the probability that a number of events would or would not occur during President Nixon's trips to Peking and Moscow in 1972. Fifteen possible outcomes were identified for each trip, and each subject assigned a probability to each of these outcomes. The outcomes were selected to cover the range of possible developments and to elicit a wide range of probability values. This section is based on research reported by Baruch Fischhoff and Ruth Beyth in "'I Knew It Would Happen'; Remembered Probabilities of Once-Future Things," Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 13 (1975), pp. 1-16. Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A0001000300(J3-6 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Cognitive Biases At varying time periods after the trips, the same subjects were asked to recall or reconstruct their predictions as accurately as possible. (No mention was made of the memory task at the time of the original prediction.) Then the subjects were asked to indicate whether they thought each event had or had not occurred during these trips. When three to six months were allowed to elapse between the subjects' estimates and their recollection of these estimates, 84 percent of the subjects exhibited the bias when dealing with events they believed actually happened. That is, the probabilities they remembered having estimated were higher than their actual estimates of events they believed actually occurred. Similarly, for events they believed did not occur, the probabilities they remembered having estimated were lower than their actual estimates, although here the bias was not as great. For both kinds of events, the bias was more pronounced after three to six months had elapsed than when subjects were asked to recall estimates they had given only two weeks earlier. In sum, knowledge of the outcomes somehow affected most test subjects' memory of their previous estimates of these outcomes, and the more time was allowed for memories to fade, the greater was the effect of the bias. The developments during the President's trips were perceived as less surprising than they would have been if actual estimates were compared with actual outcomes. For the 84 percent of the subjects who showed the anticipated bias, their retrospective evaluation of their estimative performance was clearly more favorable than was warranted by the facts. The Consumer's Perspective 2 When the consumer of intelligence reports evaluates the quality of the intelligence product, he asks himself the question, "How much did I learn from these reports that I did not already know?" In answering this question, there is a consistent tendency for most people to underestimate the contribution made by new information. This kind of "I knew it all along" bias causes consumers to undervalue the intelligence product. That people do in fact commonly react to new information in this manner was confirmed in a series of experiments involving some 320 people, each of whom answered the same set of 75 factual questions taken from almanacs and encyclopedias. They were then asked to indicate how confident they were in the correctness of each answer by assigning to it a probability percentage ranging from 50 (no confidence) to 100 (absolute certainty). As a second step in the experiment, subjects were divided into three groups. The first group was given 25 of the previously asked questions and instructed to respond to them exactly as they had previously. This simply tested the subjects' ability to remember their previous answers. The second group was given the same set of 25 questions but with the correct answers circled "for your [the subjects'] general information." They, too, were asked to respond by reproducing their previous answers. This tested the extent to which learning the correct answers distorted the subjects' memory of their previous answers, thus measuring the same bias in recollection of previous estimates that was discussed above from the analyst's perspective. The third group was given a different set of 25 questions that they had not previously seen, but of similar difficulty so that results would be comparable with the 2 The experiments described in this section are reported in Baruch Fischhoff, The Perceived Informativeness of Factual Information, Technical Report DDI-1 (Oregon Research Institute, Eugene, Ore., 1976). Ap roved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Cognitive Biases other two groups. The correct answers were indicated, and the subjects were asked to respond to the questions as they would have had they not been told the answer. This tested the subjects' ability to remember accurately how much they had known before they learned the correct answer. The situation is comparable to that of the intelligence consumer who is asked to evaluate how much he learned from a report and who can do this only by trying to reconstruct the extent of his knowledge before he read the report. The most significant results came from this third group of subjects. The group clearly overestimated what they had known originally and underestimated how much they learned from having been told the answer. For 19 of 25 items in one test and 20 of 25 items in another, this group assigned higher probabilities to the correct alternatives than it is reasonable to expect they would have assigned had they not already known the correct answers. The bias was stronger for deceptive questions than for easier questions. For example, one of the deceptive questions was: (a) Persian (b) Chinese The correct answer, which is surprising to most people, is Chinese. The average probabilities assigned to each answer by the three groups varied as follows: ? When subjects recalled their previous response without having been told the correct answer, the average of the probabilities they assigned to the two possible responses was: (a) .838 (b) .134 As these subjects did not know the correct answer, they had no opportunity to exhibit the bias. Therefore, the above figures are the base against which to compare the answers of the other two groups that were aware of the correct answer. ? When subjects tried to recall their previous response after having been told the correct answer, their average responses were: (a) .793 (b) .247 ? When subjects not previously exposed to the question were given the correct answer but asked to respond as they would have responded before being told the answer, their average responses were: (a) .542 (b) .321 In sum, the experiment confirms the results of the previous experiment showing that people exposed to an answer tend to remember having known more than they actually did, and it demonstrates that people tend even more to exaggerate the likelihood that they would have known the correct answer if they had not been informed of it. In other words, people tend to underestimate how much they learn from new information. To the extent that this bias affects the judgments of intelligence consumers-and there is every reason to expect that it does-these consumers will tend to underrate the value of intelligence estimates. Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A000100030002& Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Cognitive Biases An overseer, as the term is used here, is one who investigates intelligence performance by conducting a postmortem examination, for example, of why we failed to foresee the 1.973 Yom Kippur War. Such investigations are carried out by Congress and by our own management, and independent judgments are also made by the press and others. For those outside the executive branch who do not regularly read the intelligence product, this sort of retrospective evaluation in cases of known intelligence failure is a principal basis for judgments about the quality of our intelligence analysis. A fundamental question posed in any postmortem investigation of intelligence failure is: Given the information that was available at the time, should we have been able to foresee what was going to happen? Unbiased evaluation of intelligence performance depends upon the ability to provide an unbiased answer to this question. Once an event has occurred, it is impossible to erase from our mind the knowledge of that event and reconstruct what our thought processes would have been at an earlier point in time. In reconstructing the past, there is a tendency toward determinism, toward thinking that what occurred was inevitable under the circumstances and therefore predictable. In short, there is a tendency to believe we should have foreseen events that were in fact unforeseeable on the basis of the available information. The experiments reported here tested the hypotheses that knowledge of an outcome increases the perceived probability of that outcome, and that people who are informed of the outcome are largely unaware that this information has changed their perceptions in this manner. A series of sub-experiments used brief (150-word) summaries of several events for which four possible outcomes were identified. One of these events was the struggle between the British and the Gurkhas in India in 1814. The four possible outcomes for this event were (1) British victory, (2) Gurkha victory, (3) military stalemate with no peace settlement, and (4) military stalemate with a peace settlement. Five groups of 20 subjects each participated in each sub-experiment. One group received the 150-word description of the struggle between the British and the Gurkhas with no indication of the outcome. The other four groups received the identical description but with one sentence added to indicate the outcome of the struggle-a different outcome for each group. The subjects in all five groups were asked to estimate the likelihood of each of the four possible outcomes and to evaluate the relevance to their judgment of each fact in the description of the event. Those subjects who were informed of an outcome were placed in the same position as our overseer who, although knowing what happened, seeks to estimate the probability of that outcome without the benefit of hindsight. The results are shown in the table below. Experimental Groups Average Probabilities Assigned to Outcomes I 2 3 4 Not Told Outcome 33.8 21.3 32.3 12.3 't'old Outcome 1 57.2 14.3 15.3 13.4 Told Outcome 2 30.3 38.4 20.4 10.5 Told Outcome 3 25.7 17.0 48.0 0.9 Told Outcome 4 33.0 15.8 24.3 27.0 The experiments described in this section are reported in Baruch Fischhoff, "Hindsight # Foresight: The Effect of Outcome Knowledge on Judgment Under Uncertainty," Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1, 3 (1975), pp. 288-299. %proved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A000100030001-6 Cognitive Biases The group not informed of any outcome judged the probability of Outcome 1 as 33.8 percent, while the group told that Outcome 1 was the actual outcome perceived the probability of this outcome as 57.2 percent. The estimated probability was clearly influenced by knowledge of the actual outcome. Similarly, those informed that Outcome 2 was the actual outcome perceived this outcome as having a 38.4 percent probability, as compared with a judgment of only 21.3 percent for the control group with no outcome knowledge. An average of all estimated outcomes in six sub- experiments (a total of 2,188 estimates by 547 subjects) indicates that the knowledge or belief that an outcome has occurred approximately doubles the perceived probability that that outcome will occur. The relevance that subjects attributed to any fact was also strongly influenced by which outcome, if any, they had been told was true. As Wohlstetter has indicated, "It is much easier after the fact to sort the relevant from the irrelevant signals. After the event, of course, a signal is always crystal clear. We can now see what disaster it was signaling since the disaster has occurred, but before the event it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings."' The fact that knowledge of the outcome automatically restructures our judgments on the relevance of available data is probably one reason it is so difficult to reconstruct what our thought processes were or would have been without this outcome knowledge. In several variations of this experiment, subjects were asked to respond as though they (lid not know the outcome, or as others would respond if they did not know the outcome. The results were little different, indicating that subjects were largely unaware of how knowledge of the outcome affected their own perceptions. The experiment showed that subjects were unable to empathize with how others would judge these situations. Estimates of how others would interpret the data were virtually the same as the subjects' own retrospective interpretations. These results indicate that overseers conducting postmortem evaluations of what CIA should have been able to foresee in any given situation will tend to perceive the outcome of that situation as having been more predictable than it in fact was. Because they are unable to reconstruct a state of mind that views the situation only with foresight, not hindsight, overseers will tend to be more critical of intelligence performance than is warranted. Can We Overcome These Biases? We tend to blame biased evaluations of intelligence performance at best on ignorance, at worst on self-interest and lack of objectivity. These factors may also be at work, but the experiments described above suggest that the nature of our mental processes is a principal culprit. This is a more intractable cause than either ignorance or lack of objectivity. The self-interest of the experimental subjects was not at stake; yet they showed the same kinds of bias with which we are familiar. Moreover, in these experimental situations the biases were highly resistant to efforts to overcome them. Subjects were instructed to make estimates as if they did not already know the answer, but they were unable to do so. In the experiments using 75 almanac and encyclopedia questions, one set of subjects was specifically briefed on the bias, citing the results of previous experiments; this group was instructed to try to compensate for the bias, but it too was unable to do so. Despite maximum information and the best intentions, the bias persisted. ' Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford University Press, Stanford Calif., 1962), p. 387. Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A000100030001- Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A000100030001-6 Cognitive Biases This intractability suggests that the bias does indeed have its roots in the nature of our mental processes. The analyst who tries to recall his previous estimate after learning the actual outcome of events, the consumer who thinks how much a report has added t,) his prior knowledge, and the overseer who judges whether our analysts should have been able to avoid an intelligence failure, all have one thing in common. They are engaged in a mental process involving hindsight. They are trying to erase the impact of knowledge, so as to recall, reconstruct, or imagine the uncertainties they had or would have had about a subject prior to receiving more or less definitive information on that subject. It appears, however, that the receipt of what is accepted as definitive or authoritative information causes an immediate but unconscious restructuring of our mental images to make them consistent with the new information. Once our past perceptions have been restructured, it seems very difficult, at best, to reconstruct accurately what our thought processes were or would have been before this restructuring. There is one procedure that may help to overcome these biases. It is to pose such questions as the following. The analyst should ask himself, "If the opposite outcome had occurred, would I have been surprised?" The consumer should ask, "If this report had told me the opposite, would I have believed it?" And the overseer should ask, "If the opposite outcome had occurred, would it have been predictable given the information that was available?" These questions may help us to recall the degree of uncertainty we had prior to learning the content of a report or the outcome of a situation. They may help us remember the reasons we had for supporting the opposite answer, which we now know to be wrong. This method of overcoming the bias can be tested by readers of this article, especially those who believe it failed to tell them much they had not already known. If this article had reported that psychological experiments show no consistent pattern of analysts overestimating the accuracy of their estimates, and of consumers underestimating the value of our product, would you have believed it? (Answer: Probably not.) If it had reported that psychological experiments show these biases to be caused only by self-interest and lack of objectivity, would you have believed this? (Answer: Probably yes.) And would you have believed it if the article had reported that these biases can be overcome by a conscientious effort at objective evaluation? (Answer: Probably yes.) These questions may lead the reader to recall the state of his knowledge or beliefs before reading this article, and thus to highlight what he has learned from it-namely, that significant biases in the evaluation of intelligence estimates are attributable to the nature of human mental processes, not just to self-interest and lack of objectivity, and that they are, therefore, exceedingly difficult to overcome. improved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A000100030001-6 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 COMMUNICATIONS INTELLIGENCE AND TSARIST RUSSIA Western publications in recent years have been providing frequent revelations about the use of communications intelligence (COMINT) by major nations of the world.' The one notable exception, at least in English-language publications, has been Russia. At the logical source, the natural secrecy attached to COMINT information in general, combined with the traditional Russian obsession with secrecy throughout its society, has held discussion of the subject to a minimum. Outside the USSR, such Imperial Russian failures in communications security as Tannenberg in World War I have contributed to the impresssion that the Russians must have known little about COMINT. Despite these constraints, however, since the early 1960s several rather specific articles concerning COMINT organizations and operations under the Tsars 2 and even on the early development of a radio intelligence service in the Soviet Army 8 have appeared in Soviet journals. When supplemented with information available from non-Soviet sources, a general picture emerges of an early Tsarist COMINT effort approaching, if not on a par with, similar efforts in the West. This article is an initial attempt to shed some historical light on this little-known area of Tsarist intelligence. It should be noted that the absence of any discussion in this present article concerning Russian military COMINT activities before World War I or Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Internal Affairs COMINT operations during WW I itself does not necessarily mean such activities did not exist, but merely that insufficient documentation was available from which to draw any conclusions. It should also be noted that the early Russian COMINT efforts apply to communications in their broadest sense, including secret or coded written messages. Early Development of Russian COMINT Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID) Traditionally, communications intelligence involving foreign governments and their representatives fell within the purview of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID). This tradition has been traced back to at least the reign of Peter the Great.' The methods used, of course, involved gaining access to the diplomatic correspondence, opening it (perlustration), and if found to be encrypted, either purchasing the necessary cryptographic materials from a willing employee or actually engaging in operational cryptanalysis to exploit the document. Even so wily a statesman as the "Iron Chancellor," Otto von Bismarck, while serving as Prussian Ambassador to St. ' David Kahn, The Codebreakers (Macmillan, New York, 1967); F. W. Winterbotham, The Ultra Secret (Harper & Row, New York, 1974); Patrick Beesly, Very Special Intelligence (Hamish Hamilton, London, 1977); and Ewen Montagu, Beyond Top Secret Ultra (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, New York, 1978) to list just a few. 2 "On the Origins of Radio Intelligence in the Russian Navy" by V. Yankovich, Voenno-Istoricheskij Zhurnal (Journal of Military History), February 1961; Marshal I. T. Peresypkin, Voennaya Radiosvyaz' (Military Radio Communications), Moscow, Voenizdat, 1962; "The Communications Service in the Russian Navy during World War I" by M. Zernov and N. Trukhnin, Voenno-Istoricheskij Zhurnal, March 1966. s "The Organization and Combat Use of Radio intelligence during the Civil War" by Yu. Ural'skij, Voenno-?Istoricheskij Zhurnal, November 1972. 'For instance, see Kahn, op. cit., V. 614. Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A00010003000 $ MORI/HRI PAGES 29-38 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Tsarist COMINT Petersburg (1859-63), fell victim to MID's COMINT operations in reading Prussian ciphers.' MID was aided in its COMINT efforts by the so-called "Black Cabinets" of the Imperial Russian Postal Service. Black Cabinets were set up at post offices in major cities of the Russian Empire. One of their important functions appears to have been opening suspect correspon- dence, photographing the contents, and disseminating the information to the appropriate ministry, i.e., information of "general State interest" (usually comments about the Imperial Family made by segments of the Tsarist nobility) to the Minister of Internal Affairs; "political" correspondence to the Department of Police; "diplomatic" correspondence to the Minister of Foreign Affairs; and "espionage" correspondence, presumably during wartime, to the Army and Navy General Staffs. According to one former Black Cabinet employee, there was never much of a problem gaining access to, or photographing the contents of, foreign diplomatic pouches. When the diplomatic correspondence was found to be encrypted, it was not worked on at the Black Cabinet itself but sent to a "... similar establishment attached to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs." Copies of all encrypted telegrams sent and received by embassies in St. Petersburg were delivered to this MID organization. In important cases, even copies of reports carried in locked leather briefcases by special diplomatic couriers were forwarded to this same unit.' As most couriers and embassy employees were underpaid by their governments, they could be prevailed upon for a small bribe to allow the contents of their briefcases to be photographed by Black Cabinet specialists. The fact that diplomatic documents were encrypted only served to intensify MID's efforts to discover their contents. One Black Cabinet official described the ease with which foreign cryptographic materials could be obtained, even on the open market, in the following manner: Codebooks were acquired not only with the assistance of embassy employees but also in the cities of Brussels and Paris, where well-known persons engaged directly in open trade of foreign codebooks for a fixed price. The situation was completely identical in both cities. Codebooks which were of less interest to us, e.g., Greek, Bulgarian, and Spanish, and could be obtained rather easily cost 1,500 to 2,000 (rubles). Such codebooks as those of the Germans, Japanese, or U.S.A. cost several tens of thousands. The prices for the remaining countries fluctuated between 5,000 and 15,000. It was possible with this trading in codebooks to place an order for this or that new codebook, and these orders were filled within a short period of tirne.7 The "similar establishment" of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to which the encrypted diplomatic correspondence was sent by the Black Cabinets was, of course, the main COMINT organization within MID responsible for diplomatic cryptanalysis. Little information is available on the specific structure and operations of this organization. Purportedly it could read the encrypted correspondence of many countries, including France, England, Turkey, Austro-Hungary and Sweden. Shortly before World War I, according to one source, this cryptanalytic organization was reorganized by Aleksandr A. Savinskij, chief of the MID Cabinet (1901-10), and brought directly under control of the foreign affairs minister himself.8 Cited in Richard VJ Rowan, Secret Service (Literary Guild, New York, 1937), p. 699. "Black Cabinet: Recollections of a Former Tsarist Censor" by S. Maiskii, Byloe (The Past), July 1918, p. 191. Ibid., p. 192. 'Swedish Cryptanalyst Yves Gylden, cited in Kahn, op. cit., p. 621. P319proved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Tsd#,@pr IRr Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) Like the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), through the cryptanalytic organization of its Department of Police, was an important component of the Tsarist Russian COMINT "community." The internal security and surveillance functions of the MVD, including the monitoring of communications of both anti-Tsarist revolutionary groups and the general populace of the Empire as a whole, have been rather well-documented elsewhere.' What is not generally well- known is that for at least a short period of time, the MVD expanded its jurisdiction to include monitoring the communications (as well as the movements) of foreign ambassadors, ministers, and military attaches based in Russia. This extension of the MVD into an area normally under sole control of the MID occurred between 1904 and 1906. Included among those whose communications were being monitored by the MVD was the U.S. Ambassador. The monitoring of U.S. diplomatic communications, according to the former chief of this "Top Secret" MVD bureau, Colonel M. S. Komissarov, had "enormous significance" for Tsarist diplomatic initiatives. On 4 May 1917, in testimony before the Extraordinary Investigating Commission of the Provisional Government," Komissarov stated: During the Portsmouth Treaty (conference), we knew all the American conditions (positions) earlier than the American Ambassador in Petrograd." This statement may have been only post-revolutionary bluster on the part of Komissarov, but it might be added that the principal Russian delegate to the Portsmouth conference, Sergej Witte, received the title of "Count" from the Tsar upon Witte's return to Russia specifically for his work at Portsmouth. Army Radio Intelligence The integration of radio communications into the military forces of the major world powers at the beginning of the twentieth century greatly expanded the horizons of COMINT in obtaining information on one's adversaries. It is unknown precisely when a radio intelligence service was first established in the Russian Army, but it undoubtedly was connected with the successful radio intelligence services set up by the Baltic and Black Sea Fleets in the autumn of 1914.12 Although there does not appear to have been any centralized control of intelligence, COMINT or otherwise, within the military command structure overseeing both Army and Navy operations, according to a former Soviet Communications Service chief close cooperation did in fact exist between the army radio intelligence services of Russia, Great Britain and France. This cooperation included frequent exchange of information on the operating characteristics of enemy radio stations, callsign constructions, and signal codes.13 'For example, Kahn, op. cit., pp. 618-621. " ? The Extraordinary Investigating Commission was set up by the Provisional Russian Government after March 1917 to take testimony from former Tsarist officials on the functioning of the old regime. Its operations were ended with the Bolshevik Revolution. " Cited in "The Revolution of 1905-06 in the Reports of Foreign Diplomats" by M. G. Fleer, Krasnyj Arkhiv (Red Archive), Vol. 3 (16), 1926, p. 220. The Portsmouth Peace Conference (August--September 1905), which took place at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, ended the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. President Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for his mediation efforts at the conference. 12 See "Navy Radio Intelligence," below. " Peresypkin, op. cit., p. 57. The existence of Russian Army COMINT liaison with the COMINT services of Great Britain and France has not heretofore been acknowledged in any western publication concerning Allied COMINT activities in WW I. Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A000100030A11-6 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A0001000300Q1-f~ Tsarist C Ml T In the Russian Army, at each Army Headquarters, radio intelligence operations were controlled by the chief of army communications through his assistant for technical matters. Each army's radio battalion had a radio intelligence squad, or section, which operated two radio stations: one station monitored the radio waves for enemy communications and, once detected, the other station then recorded them. Presumably, the radio direction finding (RDF) stations also located at each Army Headquarters were controlled via the assistant for technical matters too. (See Chart I.) Although information on Russian Army radio intelligence operations is almost nil, one example can be cited. In April 1915, on the eve of the German breakthrough in Galicia, Russian Army COMINT-provided information revealed the appearance of several new German Corps at the front, including a Guards Corps which had just been transferred from other areas in Galicia. The radio intelligence service had discerned this information on the basis of certain peculiar operating characteristics of these Corps radio stations and by the distinctive "fists" of their radio operators. Russian radio direction finding stations were also being used extensively at this time. By the end of 1915, encrypted German Army radiograms were being intercepted on at least the Northern Front and sent to a "special bureau (SPETsIAL'NOE BYuRO) of the Chief Directorate of the General Staff in St. Petersburg" for cryptanalysis. According to one former high-ranking Tsarist Army intelligence officer, however, tangible results of the work of this bureau were not passed on, and the radio intelligence work itself was poorly organized in the Army when compared to similar work in the Russian Navy." Navy Radio Intelligence If communications intelligence was organized and operated poorly in the Army, the exact opposite was the case in the Russian Navy. In fact, the organizational structure of the radio intelligence service was so thoroughly developed in the Baltic Sea Fleet that operations undertaken by the fleet were almost always successful. Like the Baltic Sea Fleet, the Black Sea Fleet also had an effective, if somewhat less well- developed, radio intelligence effort. From available evidence, it appears that each fleet's radio intelligence service was independent and responsible ultimately only to its respective fleet headquarters. The decision to set up radio intelligence services in the Navy (and probably in the Army as well) stemmed from the Russian recovery of German naval radiotelegraphic codebooks from the cruiser Magdeburg, which had been sunk by Russian ships on 26 August 1914 in the Baltic. Shortly thereafter Captain 1st Rank M. A. Kedrov and Captain 2nd Rank M. I. Smirnov were sent to England with copies of the German codebooks, 15 which they handed over personally to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. '6 Probably following consultations with the English, the Commander-in-Chief of the Baltic Fleet, Admiral N. O. von Ehssen, jointly with the Baltic Fleet's chief of Communications Service, Captain 1st Rank (later Vice-Admiral) A. I. Nepenin, decided on the immediate establishment of the first "special purpose (OSNAZ) radio intercept station" in the western part of the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland, between Baltijskii Port (now Paldiski) and Revel (now Tallin). The chosen site was " General-Major N. Batyushin, Tajnaya Voennaya Razvedka i Bor ba s Nej (Secret Military intelligence and the Struggle with it), Sofia, Nov'Zhivot' Press, 1939, p. 73. 15 According to Yankovich, op. cit., p. 116, the French also received a photocopy of the German naval , odebooks from the Russians. '1 "Mine Warfare in the Black Sea" by Senior Lieutenant 1. I. Steblin-Kamenskij, La Revue Maritime (Naval Revue), November 1932, p. 620. Apjjoved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Tsa ssPr A - Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 BASIC COMINT STRUCTURE IN RUSSIAN ARMY(ca. 1915) ARMY Has RADIO BATTALION -(ASSISTANT FOR TECHNICAL MATTERS) RADIO INTELLIGENCE SQUAD/ SECTION RDF STATIONS RADIO STATION (2 SEARCH RECEIVERS) RADIO STATION (2 SEARCH RECEIVERS) -------- Postulated Control -- -- Actual Control (From Peresypkin, off. cit.,p.56) Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030003i36 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Tsarist COMINT located in the woods, far away from populated areas, in order to achieve better monitoring of the radio waves. The secluded location was also selected in order to protect the station from German espionage activities and to create an ideally quiet place for carrying out the work of radio intercept and cryptanalysis. The buildings were hidden from outside view, and the station's personnel were allowed no contact with the outside world. A reinforced guard was set up around the station for added protection. The necessary supplies were delivered to the station at specified times by car from Revel. Captain 2nd Rank Przhilenskii was placed in charge of this OSNAZ station, with his closest collaborator a Ministry of Foreign Affairs cryptanalyst named Fetterlein.' Several naval officers who knew the German language well and had some experience in cipher work were detailed to assist Fetterlein in attacking the encrypted German communications. All information obtained by the intercept station was then sent by underground cable to Captain Nepenin at the southern region administration of the Communications Service in Revel. During World War I, the chief of the fleet's Communications Service wore two hats: communications and naval intelligence." A similar radio intercept station was set up about the same time at Sevastopol in support of the Black Sea Fleet.'s Before going into specific examples of the use of COMINT information by the Russian Navy, let's look at the radio intelligence structure as it was set up in the Baltic and Black Sea Fleets. At the beginning of the war, the Baltic Fleet Communications Service was divided into three regions: northern, stretching from Helsingfors to the Abo-Aland Islands; southern, from the Kunda Inlet in the west to the German border; and eastern, covering the Gulf of Finland east of Helgoland Island. Each of these regions had a Central Radio Station (CRS) attached to it which not only provided communications support to the fleet but also received intelligence information from aerial reconnaissance and shore-based observation posts in addition to radio intelligence from intercept and RDF stations. Except for the southern region, which served as the headquarters for the chief of the Baltic Fleet's Communications Service, it is unknown when the other regions first set up their COMINT stations. By the autumn of 1916, however, the northern region had five RDF and five radio intercept stations in operation, while the southern region had expanded its operation to five RDF and four radio intercept stations. It is possible that the eastern region did not have a COMINT effort at all, or the effort was only of limited duration. In March 1915, a so-called "Radio Intelligence Center" was set up at Revel, subordinate to the CRS of the southern region. This "Center" was probably connected with all radio intercept and RDF stations within the southern region by underground cable. It is possible similar "(,enters" were established within the other regions to deal strictly with COMINT- related data before forwarding the information on to their respective CRSs. Once the (:OMINT information reached the CRS, if it was extremely urgent and time-sensitive it would be transmitted immediately to commanders of Russian ships operating in the Baltic. (See Chart II.) " After the Revolution in 1917, Fetterlein apparently was employed by the British Government Code and Cipher School as a cryptanalyst, a position he was still occupying in World War H. See Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville, Philby: The Long Road to Moscow (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1972), pp. 152, 158. One former employee of the Tsarist Ministry of Foreign Affairs has characterized Fetterlein as a most gifted cryptanalyst. See Vladimir Korostovetz, Lenin Im House Der Vater (Lenin in the House of the Fathers) (Verlag fur Kulturpolitik, Berlin, 1928), pp. 50-51. 18 Rear Admiral S. N. Timirev, Vospominaniya Morskogo Ofitsera (Recollections of a Naval Officer), New York, American Society for Russian Naval History, 1961, pp. 46-47; Yankovich, op. cit., p. 116. 's Steblin-Kamenskii, op. cit., p. 620. i roved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Ts r pr 1 - Release 2005/01/06: CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Although the Black Sea Fleet's radio intelligence organization was similar to the Baltic Sea Fleet's, there are fewer details available. The Communications Service of the Black Sea Fleet was divided into a northern region, stretching from the mouth of the Danube to Fedosiya, and an eastern region, extending from Fedosiya to Batumi. Except for the initial radio intercept station set up at Sevastopol early in the war, it is unknown if or when other similar stations were established. (See Chart III. ) It might be added that while some of the equipment for the radio intelligence services was provided to the Russians by foreign firms, some of the equipment was constructed by specialists of the Russian Navy Department itself,20 possibly associated with the Naval Ministry's own radiotelegraphic equipment factory (now called "COMINTERN" factory).21 The use of COMINT information by the Russian Navy during the war, especially in the Baltic Sea Fleet, proved to be very effective. Part of the reason for this effectiveness, according to a former high-ranking Tsarist Baltic Fleet officer, lay in the analytical judgments of Captain Nepenin as chief of the Baltic Fleet Communications Service. Nepenin had developed to the highest degree the gift of establishing a complete picture of the movements of enemy ships and from this determining the plans and intentions of the enemy. Nepenin was able to accomplish this task by logically comparing facts and conjectures, which had been provided to him by Communications Service posts, both on the basis of decrypted German radiograms and bearings obtained by radio direction finding. His predictions of enemy movements, sometimes very bold and apparently with little basis, almost always were vindicated.... Not one operation was undertaken (by the fleet) without first receiving a detailed and almost always correct interpretation (of information) on the requested area from Nepenin.22 The information provided by the radio intelligence service, under Nepenin's direction, was looked upon with such favor by the Russian Naval Command that it was one of the reasons Nepenin was designated as the new Commander-in-Chief of the Baltic Fleet in 1916. Nepenin was probably succeeded at that time as chief of the fleet's Communications Service by Captain 1st Rank Novopashennyj,23 who was noted as chief of the Baltic Fleet Communications Service in 1917.24 In the Baltic Fleet, the first operation known to have been undertaken on the basis of COMINT information took place on 14 February 1915, when the Russians learned in advance the scheduled times for the arrival and departure of a German cruiser at the port of Libau (now Liepaya). A Russian submarine was immediately dispatched and sank the cruiser as it left Libau. COMINT information also played a major role in mine-laying operations against German ships entering and leaving the, Gulf of Riga. One example of the utilization of time-sensitive COMINT by Russian ships afloat occurred on 1 July 1915. A detachment of Russian cruisers, while in transit to bombard German targets in Memel (now Klaipeda), received a report on the location of a projected rendezvous between the cruiser Augsburg and a group of other Ural'skij, op. cit., p. 84. Zernov and Trukhnin, op. cit., p. 107. L2 Timirev, op. cit., pp. 14-15. 23 Possibly the same Novopashennyj who " ... had rendered good service during WW I in the Imperial Russian Navy ..." and, from 1922 on, served as a senior assistant to the chief of a German cryptanalytic organization. See Wilhelm F. Flicke, War Secrets in the Ether: Volume II (Aegean Park Press, Laguna Hills, 1977), pp. 292-293. 14 Timirev, op. cit., p. 165. Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A00010003000P56 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Tsarist COMINT z 0 H H ") oW 0 ow 1-4 4-1 w z on? Y t., Y 0 0 a oar ~. Hv Y ~ro roz C) v) 0 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Tsarist COMINT z 0 H d i H O cn a. 0 O H ~ cn O Q; d ro H z H aN wd acn w0 H v z Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A00010003000j7,6 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Tsarist COMINT German ships. The Russian detachment then broke up the rendezvous by forcing the German ships to retreat.25 The high point in the operations of the Baltic Fleet's radio intelligence service was reached on 31 July 1915, when the Russians obtained foreknowledge of the German Navy's proposed forcing of the Gulf of Riga in conjunction with the German Army's seizure of the city of Riga. Information obtained by cryptanalysis as well as from aerial reconnaissance and shore-based observation posts provided the proposed time and date of the offensive, including deployment of enemy forces. When the German Navy attempted to carry out the operation on 8 August 1915, ships of the Baltic Fleet were already in place and broke up the attack.- The earliest known example of an operation undertaken by the Black Sea Fleet based on COMINT occurred in September 1916, although undoubtedly there must have been earlier operations. The Russians were aided in their Black Sea Fleet radio intelligence effort by the Turkish Navy's reliance on the Germans for cryptographic material, which the Russians already had in their possession. On 15 September 1916, Black Sea Fleet radio intelligence units (subdivisions) intercepted information from a shore-based Turkish radio station regarding the sweeping up of Russian mines obstructing the approaches to the Bosporus. A large Turkish transport ship was to pass through the swept area with a cargo of coal from Zonguldak. Russian ships were quickly sent to re-lay mines, and the Turkish ship was sunk. In December 1916, the Russians decrypted an order for a German submarine to return to Constantinople (now Istanbul), along with the coordinates of the mine-swept channel through which the submarine was to pass. Torpedo boats were immediately dispatched from Sevastopol to re-mine the area. It was learned by the Russians within 48 hours, through another decrypted radiogram, that the submarine had been sunk by the mines. This was the last German submarine to embark for the Black Sea during the war.27 It is clear from the above that communications intelligence was an integral part of information-gathering under the Tsars. The invention of radio and its integration into the military forces of the major powers at the turn of the century also opened up a new horizon for Tsarist COMINT activities, although the Russian Military Command appears to have been somewhat slow in recognizing the possibilities inherent in using the radio for intelligence purposes. Nevertheless, Tsarist Russia for all of its faults was not totally inept in intelligence-gathering, as implied by some historians, and despite its slowness, it did achieve some success, at least in the Navy, with its use of COMINT. zs Zernov and Trukhnin, op. cit., p. 107; Yankovich, op. cit., p. 117. zfi Vladimir Korostovetz, Seed and Harvest (Faber and Faber Limited, London, 1931), pp. 220-221; Yankovich, op. cit., p. 117; Zernov and Trukhnin, op. cit., p. 108. 1' Steblin-Kamenskii, op. cit., pp. 621-622; Zernov and Trukhnin, op. cit., p. 110. Appproved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 At a time when there is considerable opinion that CIA's tribulations of recent years have eroded our security consciousness, a Chinese report on security regulations below may be of interest-and even useful. CHINESE SECURITY REGULATIONS Report by NCNA Peking, 20 May-The Military Commission of the CCP Central Committee recently published the "Regulation on PLA Safeguarding of State and Military Secrets"; it also issued a circular calling on all PLA units to take class struggle as the key link, carry out in-depth education on military security according to the regulation and in light of each unit's actual conditions, increase awareness of keeping military secrets, and resolutely prevent secret information or documents from being leaked or lost. The regulation points out that the PLA shoulders the great responsibility of defending the Motherland and safeguarding socialist revolution and construction. Military building, national defense construction, and army operations and movements are top secret. Safeguarding state and military secrets concerns the best interests of the entire party, army, and people of the nation. It plays an important role in the struggle against all class enemies-domestic and foreign-and is a guarantee for consolidating the dictatorship of the proletariat and winning future wars against aggression. All PLA personnel must unreservedly and wholeheartedly safeguard secrets. The regulation requires all PLA personnel to follow these rules: Never discuss military secrets you shouldn't discuss. Never ask questions about secrets you shouldn't know. Never read secret documents you shouldn't read. Never mention a secret in personal correspondence. 5. Never record secret information in anything other than secret information files. 6. Never discuss military secrets in places where such secrets should not be discussed. 7. Never take secret documents to public places or to the homes of relatives or friends. 8. Never discuss party, state, or military secrets in front of family members, including your own children. 9. Never use public telephones, clear-language telegrams, or regular post offices for handling secret information. The regulation calls on personnel working in departments of top secret, security, secret file, and key leading offices to follow strictly regulations that forbid removal of secret documents from the working area, reading of secret documents by people who have no need to know, use of one's position to peruse secret documents privately, clandestine listening to secret information, copying of secret documents, duplication of documents or telegrams without authorization, making friends indiscriminately or Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030( 1-6 MORI/HRI PAGES -lq-An Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Chinese Security establishing dubious connections, practice of bourgeois factionalism, and use of secret documents to engage in illegal activities. The regulation outlines the requirements for education in military security and sets forth the security inspection system. It points out that to safeguard secret information, it is necessary to begin with ideological education in security. Party committees and political departments at all levels must regard this education as an important part of a unit's political and ideological education; educate units in order to enhance their revolutionary vigilance; oppose anarchism and liberalism; consciously struggle against all bad practices and habits that endanger the safeguarding of secrets; and guard against the use of secret information for illegal and conspiratorial activities and against enemy attempts to steal secrets. The regulation also calls on leaders at all levels to set examples by following the rules and systems for safeguarding secrets and to insist that their subordinate units strictly implement these rules and systems. Each unit must conduct annual or semiannual general security inspections and hold security inspections regularly prior to major festivals and national holidays. Any cases of leaked or lost secret information or documents must be promptly reported, seriously investigated, and strictly handled. The regulation stresses that in carrying out security work it is necessary to reward and punish impartially. Commendations or awards should be given to those who have made marked achievements in consistently and strictly implementing security systems, regulations, and rules, and safeguarding state and military secrets; those who have invented new security techniques or equipment or have contributed to the study arid improvement of security work; those who have resolutely safeguarded state and military secrets by adhering to principles, no matter what the situation and irrespective of threats or inducement; and those who have performed meritorious deeds by daring to struggle, or by giving timely information on, or discovering acts of stealing, looting, sabotaging, and selling state and military secrets. Disciplinary action should be taken or criminal punishment meted out, according to the merits of the case, against those who violated security discipline, neglected duties, and lost or divulged important state and military secrets; those who failed to prohibit, struggle against, or report instances of stolen secrets and lost or divulged secrets in more serious cases; those who caused damage by leaking secrets because they thought only of their own safety; and those who engaged in illegal activities by taking advantage of state and military secrets in their possession. Those counterrevolutionaries and other bad elements who have stolen, looted, sabotaged, and sold state and military secrets must be punished in accordance with the law and sternly suppressed. The regulation also provides that party committees throughout the army, at and above the regimental level, should all establish their own security commissions which, led by party committees and leading officers, should study the implementation of principles, policies, instructions, and rules of the CCP Central Committee's Military Commission and superior leading organs concerning security work; study security work conditions in subordinate units and recommend necessary measures for strengthening and improving this work; conduct and supervise security education and inspection; study security conditions and report on security work to party committees, leading officers, and superior security commissions; and organize and supervise activities to investigate cases of stolen secrets and serious divulgence of secrets. ARgroved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 INTELLIGENCE IN RECENT PUBLIC LITERATURE PRACTISE TO DECEIVE. By David Mure. (William Kimber, London, 1977). This is an intriguing and provocative book. If the author is to be believed-and, despite any formal supporting evidence or endorsement, there is a ring of truth about much of what he says-then he has provided us with a priceless view of the origins of Allied deception operations in World War II. From his first-hand account as manager of a middle-level field deception center, we have a seat at ringside on the critical Middle East operations designed to convince the German High Command that a major offensive was to be mounted against the Balkans through Greece. It is an accepted historical fact that this supposed threat, which continued during 1943 and 1944, succeeded first in diverting German attention from Sicily as the initial point of Allied entry into southern Europe, and then in tying down large numbers of German troops in southeastern Europe until the Normandy invasion was well-launched on the road to success. Truly, this well-written set of personal reminiscences has the appearance of being a valuable complement to Anthony Cave Brown's Bodyguard of Lies,' that epic of investigative journalistic enterprise, with the added advantage that we are dealing here with on-the-scene descriptions of what actually happened in major deception operations, as told by one of the key participants. Alas, where Cave Brown had his failings in the form of excessive errors of detail, questionable interpretation of interviews taken decades after the fact, and the assumption that official plans represented actual accomplishments, David Mure is open to even more fundamental attack as to credibility, albeit based mainly on circumstantial evidence. Thus, Mure tells us that since 1944 he has had no access to any records other than those available to the general public. Indeed, he cites some fifteen conventional secondary references without keying them to the text. He relies on a self- acknowledged "photographic memory" to reproduce the details of messages and incidents from more than three decades in the past. Moreover, his own description of himself, if intended to be disarming, is scarcely reassuring: I was-and am-by nature a congenital liar and romancer-a veritable Bulpington of Blup-so much so that, in writing these recollections, I have the greatest difficulty in distinguishing between what we actually did and what we would have liked to have done. This made me an eminently suitable figurehead for a deception unit. Since the notional (i.e., imaginary) world was just as real to me as the factual one, there was really very little difficulty for me to put it over on our clients, since I half believed in it myself ... We are faced, then, with the necessity of taking on faith the statements of a devious (by definition) individual of obvious intelligence, whose background is unknown to us, beyond his assertion that, although not college-educated and lacking in any language skills, he was the product of a "good school" and was seconded to intelligence duties as a captain from a "good regiment." That he soon graduated from the somewhat humdrum administrative and support duties of a junior intelligence officer in a field army headquarters to the inner sanctum of deception operations must indicate a recognition by someone in authority that he possessed special qualifications for the task. Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA00010003000 16 MORI/HRI PAGES 41-47 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Books Certainly David Mure's easy-going, self-deprecating air of good humor, his understanding of people, willingness to work hard when necessary, sense of purpose in his job, and, above all, clear ability to calculate an enterprise's chances of success or failure, all seem to have stood him in good stead during his two years of participation in a program of deception that appears to have been singularly successful. As he wandered into the deception game at the beginning of 1943, so he seems to have wandered out of it at the end of 1.944, an unsung, anonymous major with no (apparent at least) subsequent ties to the intelligence establishment. Mr. Mure exhibits strong patriotic sentiments and a sense of discretion with respect to both security and the privacy of his former associates. He has waited the prescribed period of time before unburdening himself of his story and, save for his personal idols in the enterprise, of whom more later, has used pseudonyms for most of the participants. (A less charitable view of the author's reticence toward earlier publication might suggest that he waited until there were enough versions of related history available to permit him to flesh out his own rather limited portion of the story into a publishable account. But this is mere speculation.) It is remarkable that there have been so few reviews of this book, particularly by the former British intelligence types who so ferociously attacked Cave Brown when he issued Bodyguard of Lies. Their purported aim was to excoriate Brown for having written an inaccurate book, but, in fact, one suspects they were more concerned with punishing him verbally for "jumping the gun" in the revelation of since-declassified state secrets. If the latter is true, Mure should be safe from their wrath. More likely, the silence from the intelligence community derives from an unwillingness of former members of the deception "establishment" in London to give recognition to any such paean of praise for "A" Force in Cairo, which they regarded with tolerance as something of an upstart organization lacking in high-grade agents but demonstrating some competence in the technical aspects of deception.' In fact, one can probably attribute some of David Mure's unrelenting public relations approach where "A" Force is concerned to an attempt on his part, at long last, to "set the record straight." All else aside, however, the book is entertaining and easy reading, somewhat reminiscent of the writings of Compton Mackenzie concerning his secret service experiences in the same part of the world during World War I. While quite unlikely to impress a professional historian, the book tells a cracking good story that is interspersed with many useful intelligence insights. With due allowance for the author's judgments on certain controversial matters, this reviewer, at least, tends to give it considerable credence, particularly as it concerns itself with those operational activities and events in which the author himself participated. Mr. Mure introduces us to British deception operations in the Middle East by bringing us up to date on events which had transpired prior to his arrival on the scene in mid-1942. He retells the story of the victory of General Wavell's "Desert Rats" over the Italian army at Sidi Barrani, Egypt, at the end of 1940. In that encounter, a largely untrained ragtag British force of initially less than 50,000 men stood off, and after the arrival of modest reinforcements, managed to put to flight and capture large portions of a well-equipped army of more than 200,000. The difference was provided by deception: the use of great quantities of dummy equipment to represent non-existent British forces, and the use of false intelligence reports from controlled German agents to convince the Italian commander that British reinforcements were close at hand long before they actually arrived on the scene. Approved For Release 2005/01/06: CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 o s The hero of this engagement, which many regard as critical for the later success of the Allies, was one Brigadier Dudley Wrangel Clarke, General Wavell's deception specialist and, in civilian life, a wealthy London solicitor. It is the author's contention that this individual was the guiding genius of all deception operations against Western Europe and in the Mediterranean area, despite his continued association throughout the war with "A" Force, nominally the deception element for eastern Mediterranean operations. Thus, the author is convinced that Wavell, and not Churchill, was the originator of strategic deception in World War II, and that the former's handpicked assistant, Brigadier Clarke, operating under the cover name of Major Galveston, was its most skilled practitioner. In support of this view, Mure points out that Galveston was the highest ranking member of the deception community and that when General Eisenhower required a chief of deception for his SHAEF Headquarters, he was given Colonel Noel Wyld, Brigadier Clarke's deputy at "A" Force, and the individual largely responsible for the planning of Montgomery's successful deception of Rommel at El Alamein. We are led to believe that Middle East deception was built on the foundation of a walk-in agent, the chief German spy sent to Cairo in July of 1940 with instructions to set up a spy network. On this base, the British built up and operated until late in 1944 a large deception operation throughout the Middle East involving some 50 captive or notional agents reporting back through a few trusted operatives controlled by British intelligence to the Abwehr stations in Athens, Sofia and Istanbul. A sub-element of the Ultra code-breaking operation, known as Triangle, provided access to local Abwehr radio communications traffic, as did Ultra itself to German strategic communications in Western Europe. This permitted deception teams operating out of several centers in the Middle East to monitor the effects of their spurious messages and to guide their future plans and actions accordingly. As in Western Europe, where the Twenty (or Double Cross) Committee supervised the employment of controlled enemy agents, so in the Middle East, the Thirty Committee, located in Cairo, with its sub-elements, Thirty-one Committee in Beirut, Thirty-two Committee in Bagdhad, Thirty-three Committee in Cyprus, and Thirty-four Committee in Teheran, performed a like function. Eventually, Mure ran Thirty-two Committee and supervised the relatively inactive Thirty-four Committee. A factor of great importance to the ultimate success of deception operations in the Middle East was the overrunning of Rommel's communications intelligence center in July of 1942. From this, it was learned that much of Rommel's previous success had been due to effective communications intercept and to lax British communications discipline. It also led to the uncovering of another major German field agent in Cairo, known as Kondor. This knowledge was employed to plant false information on the Germans as to the timing of the British attack at El Alamein. Rommel was so thoroughly deceived that he was actually visiting Germany when the attack began. Thus, the British were aware of the German distribution of forces through Ultra intercepts and the Germans were fooled as to both the time of attack and the strength and dispositions of British forces through the use of communications deception and dummy equipment. The latter were provided by the second of Mure's heroes, Major Jasper Maskelyne, the British magician, whose inflatable tanks, guns, trucks, and boats had been an integral part of "A" Force's deception operations since the time of Sidi Barrani. It would appear, then, that General Montgomery's reputation as a field commander owes a considerable debt to the men of "A" Force. Actually, the author did not officially enter the deception game until near the end of 1942, after many of the important North African operations had already taken Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A00010003004j-6 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Books place. Moreover, the strategic importance of his area had declined after the German defeat at Stalingrad in November of 1942. It became his task to be concerned with deceptions which were related to the invasion of Sicily and, later, the invasion of Western Europe. He had the job of trying to put across such concepts as the idea that Turkey was preparing to abandon its neutrality and enter the war on the side of the Allies, and trying to make very nominal Allied forces stationed in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East look like part of a buildup in support of a large-scale attack on the Balkans. The ultimate objective of all this, of course, was to pin down a couple of dozen German divisions in southeastern Europe and thereby deny their availability to the defense of Sicily, Italy or Western Europe. In this, his efforts were apparently a complete success until well after the landings in Normandy. The core of the deception in his part of the Middle East was a largely mythical 10th Indian Army which was perennially being "requested" by Southeast Asian Theater, where Peter Fleming was the cooperating chief of deception operations, and being "reassigned" to the group of forces threatening Greece and the Balkans. Much of the book deals with the ebb and flow of deception messages related to this subject. While the author says he only met "Galveston" three times during the two years that he served under his tutelage, he describes that gentleman as "certainly the most unusual Intelligence officer of his time, very likely of all time. His mind worked quite differently from anyone else's and far quicker; he looked out on the world through the eyes of his opponents." Mure sums up Galveston's record, as follows: Sidi Barrani: An army of 50,000 men and 60 tanks exagger- ated to two armies of 250,000 and 400 tanks won a virtually bloodless victory over an army of just this size. Alain Halfa: The enemy was hypnotized into attacking our strongest point-our first victory in the desert since 1940. El Alamein: Rommel was so misled as to date of battle that he was away in Europe; 1,000 tanks, 1,200 guns and 2,000 vehicles were concealed on a flat surface, and the Germans were completely misled as to the place of attack. Sicily: Total and really absurd success. Rommel arrived in Athens to take command of anti-invasion armies on the day we landed in Sicily. Anzio: We attained complete surprise and no Germans showed up on the beaches for 49 hours. (It is a pity that the American General Lucas was so taken by surprise himself that he sat down and waited for a counter-attack for 48 hours.)' l)-Day: We did it again in the Balkans. The total of 19 first-line two L.O.C. (presumably Line of Communication) German divisions identified there in September 1943, were increased by D- Day to 25 first-line divisions, three of them armored and two motorized, opposed by a ' Anthony Cave Brown, op. cit., p. 420, notes that Lucas was merely acting in accordance with orders given to him by General Mark Clark. Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Bd proved For Release 2005/01/06: CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 factual five brigades scattered between Teheran and Benghazi. Galveston's Deputy took over deception in London, and the German 15th Army remained with 17 divisions in the Pas de Calais area until after the breakout. Surely, no one could ask for a more faithful and devoted press agent. Moreover, Mure goes on to point out the lack of success in the battles at which Galveston was not invited or able to assist: Wavell's August offensive in 1941; Auchinleck's Crusader operation; Auchinleck's Gazala battle; Salerno; the Aegean Islands in 1943; the "slogging matches" in Italy; and the post-August 1944 operations in France. He makes a good case. "Without," he says, "wanting in any way to belittle the work of the LCS,' who, from all accounts, performed a most difficult and essential task of coordinating worldwide deception operations with enormous skill and tact, credit for the successful implementation of the plans decided upon, especially in the Mediterranean area, must belong principally to Galveston ... He was incomparably the most effective as well as the most senior executant in strategic deception." Mure points out that Galveston insisted on strict adherence to his rules (see below) for the use of double agents in support of "A" Force operations, and is of the opinion that whenever elsewhere any of these rules was departed from the results were regrettable. In general, Mure feels that Galveston's plans succeeded because they were what both the Nazis and the Schwarze Kapelle5 for their different reasons expected and hoped for-this was in accordance with his last and most vital rule of the following set: 1. The contacts of an agent used for passing deception information should be entirely notional, as should be his own espionage activities. 2. Following from the above, a deception agent must not be allowed access to the outer world, no matter what his own allegiances. 3. No deception link should ever be used for any intelligence purpose other than deception. Should it become so involved for reasons beyond our control, then it should cease to be used for deception. 4. No deception material should on any account be passed through a double agent to anyone known to be in the service of any neutral or Allied country other than the Americans. 5. All cover plans should follow, not dictate, the real plan. Any attempt to fit reality to the deception is doomed to failure. 6. All cover plans should be based on what the enemy himself not only believes but hopes for. Galveston, we are told, had another cardinal principle. Whereas Winston Churchill is quoted as having said at Teheran that in wartime "truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies," Galveston's principle was the opposite. His thesis was that the lie-the cover plan-was so precious that it should be flanked with an escort of truths. Truths should make up at least 90% of the information fed to the enemy, even if these "truths" stemmed from Galveston's 'London Controlling Section. ' Literally, Black Choir, the designation given by Reinhard Heydrich, chief of German security services, to the "Generals' Plot" against Hitler. Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-00630A0001000300.89-6 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Books dummy fleets and tanks, or his false divisional signs painted conspicuously in places where Allied troops were practically non-existent. The point was that 90% or so of the material in agents' reports was confirmable by the Germans from other sources of information. By changing the emphasis with "masterly skill," however, what were mostly confirmable truths added up to a picture so "lethally false" as to make possible the enemy's defeat, "irrespective of the merits or otherwise of the operational plan to be covered." Aside from ascribing the lion's share of the credit for Allied deception policy to his idol Galveston of "A" Force in Cairo, Mure makes the following major controversial judgments and assertions: 1. Although not directly involved with the Cicero operation in Istanbul, as a result of oblique remarks made by Galveston and other circumstantial evidence, Mure was led to believe that if Cicero was not under British control from the outset, he became so immediately thereafter through the medium of the Triangle intercepts of Abwehr messages from Istanbul. He believes that Galveston used Cicero to feed the Germans important deception material concerning the invasion of Western Europe. Mure's reasoning involves the "common-sense" judgment that Cicero as a German agent was simply "too good to be true," given British security regulations and procedures. This is consistent with Cave Brown's quotation of Sir Stewart Menzies, head of MI-6, to the effect that Cicero was indeed under British control.' However, other Cave Brown material and David Kahn's recent book' point strongly to the possibility that the identity of Cicero was not discovered until near the end of his six-month period of activity. While communications intercept is thought to have played a role, the reason for its failure to uncover Cicero earlier could well have been the fact that the stolen documents were forwarded in the form of film in the diplomatic pouch or as telegraphed excerpts. 2. Mure's main point of controversy concerns his belief that Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, must have been consciously aiding the British by turning a blind eye to evidences of deception and the activities of double agents. Thus, in Mure's estimation, far too many minor errors occurred in the deception operations which were simply ignored by the other side. He cites the fact that not a single double agent was blown in the Mediterranean or in Western Europe as simply inconceivable to him. The fact that this situation continued even after the Sicherheitsdienst took over from the Abwehr late in 1943 would seem to argue against his view of Canaris. He explains this away, however, by noting that by then no agent handler, or even Schellenberg himself, would have been willing to risk embarrassment and a possible one-way trip to the Russian front by pointing out that one or more of his agents had been doubled, let alone whole networks. Neither Cave Brown nor Kahn 8 shares Mure's view of Canaris, nor does this reviewer. 3. Mure's treatment of the Bonner Fellers case is consistent with Cave Brown's version. That is, Col. Fellers, as the U.S. Military Attache in Cairo, had his almost daily coded transmissions to the United States on the progress ' Anthony Gave Brown, op. cit., p. 404. ' David Kahn, Hitler's Spies (Macmillan, New York, 1978). ' David Kahn, op. cit. In his encyclopedic treatment of German military intelligence in World War II, Kahn comments frequently on the surprising tendency of German military and political leaders to gross self- deception in matters relating to intelligence. roved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 A 0 Bo sproved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 of the war, between September of 1941 and August of 1942, read by Rommel's wireless intercept service. Thereafter, a portion of his transmis- sions were continued in the old code in support of the British deception operation for El Alamein, which did not take place until November of 1942. Kahn verifies the first part of the Fellers story, but makes no mention of a subsequent deception effort. In the last analysis, we are entitled to ask again, just who is David Mure? He comes to us with self-generated credentials and without apparent sponsor. (He even misspells the first name of the wartime head of MI-6.) We know nothing of his background prior to his short stint in intelligence in World War II, nor do we know anything of him since. For all we know, he may be the figment of someone's imagination, invented to put across a good story. Taken together with Bodyguard of Lies, Practise to Deceive can only serve further to whet our appetites for the official history of World War II deception, which is reportedly in preparation by one of the main practitioners of that art. Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 25X1 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6 Approved For Release 2005/01/06 : CIA-RDP80-0063OA000100030001-6