IMPLICATIONS OF DECISION-MAKING FOR COVERT OPERATIONS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01315R000200030008-5
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 33
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 19, 2004
• Sequence Number: 8
• Publication Date: September 13, 1974
• Content Type: REPORT

~//3/7y /z
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IMPLICATIONS OF
DECISION-MAKING FOR COVERT OPERATIONS
By Morton H. Halperin
This essay first seeks to describe, using case illustra-
tions, the system by which the United States government plans,
approves, and carries out covert operations which are aimed
at influencing political events in other countries or gather-
ing intelligence by using human agents or technological means.
It then seeks to show how the structure and manner in which
these decisions have been made has determined not only the
final decisions on the covert operations themselves, but has
also had unplanned implications for the more general pro-
cesses of decision-making on matters of foreign policy and
national defense by both the Executive Branch and the Con-
gress. Finally, after assessing the implications of the
tightly closed decision-making procedures and structures,
the essay concludes with recommendations for change.
We begin with a brief description of three aspects of
American foreign policy in the post World War II period which
illustrate different facets of the problem of the closed
system with which decisions are made about covert intelli-
gence operations. We examine first the story of the Bay of
Pigs invasion of Cuba by the Kennedy Administration in 1961,
then we consider the decision to continue reconnaissance
flights over North Vietnam after the March 1968 halt of much
of the bombing of that country, and, finally, we consider
various aspects of American covert policy toward the People's
Republic of China during both the early post-World War II
period and the cultural Revolution in the mid-1960's.
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The Bay of Pigs
The story of the disastrous, abortive American-supported
invasion of Cuba in 1961 has been frequently told, but it is
worth repeating some of the highlights here, particularly as
they reveal some of the procedures and problems of covert
decision-making.*
The planning for a landing of opponents of the Castro
regime apparently began within the Directorate of Programs
(then called the Director of Plans) in the Central Intelli-
gence Agency. Within that organization, there was a planning
and coordinating group at headquarters for the western hemi-
sphere and field groups ih Miami and elsewhere in Latin
America that were concerned with programs directed at the
Castro government. These groups developed a plan to support
a landing of a large scale guerrilla group which would at-
tempt to seize power in Cuba. This planning took place
during 1960 and developed into a formal plan during the 1960
election campaign between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy.
While both candidates were briefed on the existence of the
plan during the campaign, it appears actually not to have
been approved by the 40 Committee until shortly after the
election. This committee,, chaired by a senior white House
foreign policy adviser and which included representatives
from the State Department, the Department of Defense, and
the CIA, gave tentative approval to the covert operation
against Cuba in the period between the election of John F.
Kennedy and the inauguration. In these closing days, offi-
cials were apparently not willing to take responsibility for
* On the Bay of Pigs episode, see in particular Theodore C.
Sorensen, Kennedy, New York: Harper & Row, 1965; Roger Hils-
man, To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in
the Administration of John F. Kennedy, New York: Doubleday,
1967; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F.
Kennedy in the White House, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965;
Chester Bowles,. Promises to Keep: My Years in Public Life,
1941-1969, New York: Harper & Row, 1971; and Haynes Johnson,
The Bay of Pte: The Leaders' Story of Brigade 2506, New
York: W. W. Norton, 1964.
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either approving the final go-ahead or for turning off. the
operation. Thus, Kennedy was confronted when he came to office
with an ongoing plan for a large scale invasion.
Rather than consider the matter in the structure of the
40 Committee, the President began to hold meetings on the issue
with his principal advisers, including the Secretary of State
and the Secretary of Defense. In addition, he brought in some
personal advisers, including Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and, for
at least one meeting, Senator William Fulbright, the Chairman
of the Foreign Relations Committee, as well as his brother,
Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The meetings with the Presi-
dent also included the Assistant Secretary of State for Ameri-
can Public Affairs, an official who normally would not be
included in meetings of the 40 Committee.
Nevertheless, the circle of officials who were aware of
the proposed invasion plan, and who could provide an assess-
ment to the President of its likely consequences and the
likelihood that there would be the necessary support for the
operation in Cuba, were exceedingly limited. Even those who
were present at the meetings in the white House did not have
the opportunity to study the plan since the information pre-
sented was either given to them orally or contained in papers
which were collected after the White House meetings. The
mystique of covert operations was apparently so great that
White House officials permitted themselves to be told by the
CIA that no copies of their plan could be left behind for
consideration after Agency briefings on the proposal.
Even more striking, most of the officials in the Ameri-
can government, who from either a policy or intelligence point
of view were concerned with and knowledgeable about the situa-
tion in Cuba and Latin America, were not informed about the
planned invasion and were not asked for an assessment of the
likely consequences. Thus, for example, the officials in the
Bureau of American Republic Affairs, in the State Department,
below the Assistant Secretary, were not informed of the
planned operation. Thus, the Cuban desk office, concerned
with day-to-day relations with Cuba, did not know of the
operation and could not give an evaluation of its conse-
quences. Nor were other officials in State informed--for
example, nobody in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research,
the State Department's research and evaluation arm, was
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officially informed of the pending operation.* Roger Hilsman,
who was then the Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and
Research, learned of the impending invasion through a chance
comment by the Director of the CIA, Allen Dulles. However,
when Hilsman proposed to Dean Rusk that he have his analysts
do a study of the likely consequences of such an invasion,
he was told by Rusk that this was impossible, since the ana-
lysts were not to know of the plan.
Nor were intelligence analysts in the CIA itself informed.
There appears to be a firm dividing line between the operating
side of the CIA, the Directorate for Programs, and the intelli-
gence evaluation side, the Directorate for Intelligence. None
of the intelligence analysts in the office of the Directorate
for Intelligence of the CIA, including the Deputy Director of
the CIA for Intelligence, Mr. Robert Amory, were informed of
the planned Bay of Pigs invasion. Hence, all of the analytic
talents of the CIA were absent from the consideration of
whether the operation might succeed. When Mr. Allen Dulles,
the Director of Central Intelligence, informed the President
that the chances of success were very high, this opinion was
based entirely on the views of the covert operators planning
the Bay of Pigs invasion and on his own hunches--without any
support from either the Board of National Estimates or the
intelligence analysts in the Directorate for Intelligence.
In the Pentagon, knowledge of the operation appears to
have been restricted to the Secretary and perhaps his Deputy,
Roswell Gilpatrick, and to military officers on the Joint
Staff of the military services. No civilian officials in the
Pentagon, including the Assistant Secretary of Defense for In-
ternational Security Affairs, Paul Nitze, seems to have been
informed or given an opportunity to comment on the planned
operation.
Thus, although the key judgment in the Bay of Pigs opera-
tion was whether a sufficient number of Cubans would rise up
to support the invaders when they landed on the beach, no one
who had a good capability on the question was consulted and
permitted to express an opinion, with the exception of theCIA
operatives themselves, who, being heavily committed to the
plan, could not have been expected to have an impartial view.
* At this time the small staff which worked with the Deputy
Undersecretary for Political' Affairs on covert operations was
not in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research; it reported
dire c~t??l to the Deput Undersecretar Some time later, this
unit'?' o Fnc j 4/Mf1I .L9AM 8-( 1?RQQQQ aOQQ" Research.
See Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation.
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The Bay of Pigs episode illustrates quite clearly one of
the consequences of the tight secrecy with which covert opera-
tions are planned, approved, and implemented. It shows why
such operations are approved when they should not be, and why
they often go badly. Cutting off many officials from the Bay
of Pigs operation meant not only that officials knowledgeable
about the Cuban scene were not able to comment and warn the
President that the kind of uprising on which the plan depended
was unlikely, but also the narrow circle meant that the Presi-
dent was not confronted with advice from those who had opera-
tional responsibility for other programs and other means, and
who could have pointed out the limitations of the different
ways by which the presumed threat from the Castro regime could
be contained.
This episode illustrates how the procedures for framing
covert operations can affect the likelihood of their approval
and the likelihood of success of the operations themselves.
The next step is to illustrate how the closed system of
decision-making on covert operations can spill over and affect
more general policy in the same area.
Reconnaissance of North Vietnam
On March 31, 1968, after the mounting controversy over
the Vietnam war that followed the Tet Offensive, President
Johnson announced a dramatic curtailment of the American
bombing of North Vietnam in the same speech in which he an-
nounced that he would not be a candidate for reelection to
the Presidency. Most of the public attention following the
speech was given to Johnson's withdrawal from political life,
the reduction of the bombing, and the possibility that these
would lead to negotiations of a peaceful settlement. Hardly
any public attention was given to a key component of the set
of decisions which the President made in the days leading up
to the speech, namely: the decision to continue reconnais-
sance operations over all of North Vietnam. While the bomb-
ing was to be limited to the area below the 20th parallel, the
military was authorized to continue reconnaissance operations,
including the penetration of North Vietnamese air space by
American high and low flying airplanes, throughout all of
North Vietnam.
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Similarly, in October of 1968, on the eve of the presi-
dential election between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon,
President Johnson announced a complete halt of the bombing
and the beginning of substantive peace talks in Paris on a
political settlement of the conflict. Again, attention fo-
cussed on the negotiating consequences of the bombing halt
and on the political consequences for the upcoming presiden-
tial election--little attention was given to the fact that
the United States would continue reconnaissance operations
over all of North Vietnam. While the decision was little
noted, it was to have substantial consequences in the Nixon
Administration, leading to what were called "protective re-
action strikes" designed to suppress anti-aircraft fire
directed at the reconnaissance operations. Allegedly at the
initiative of General Lavelle, the commander of the 7th Air
Force, such strikes were ultimately used as a cover for a
limited resumption of the bombing of North Vietnam.
The reconnaissance operations and the "protective re-
action strike" bombings of North Vietnam which followed ap-
pear to have contributed to, delaying a settlement of the
Vietnam conflict. Yet, in the events leading up to both
the March and October bombing halts, the President excluded
from the discussions all but a very small number of his
civilian advisers. Because of the structure of the Joint
Chiefs system and because of the President's need to consult
the military on such an issue, a substantial number of mili-
tary officers on the Joint Staff and the Service Staffs con-
tinued to be informed and consulted, but only a very small num-
ber of people, perhaps a dozen or two dozen, in various other
agencies were consulted. Thus, these critical policy decisions
were made within very tight, small circles--even in this situa-
tion where the intention to conduct the reconnaissance flights
had been announced to the North Vietnamese government. And
once again, the fact that the policy was not subjected to the
critical scrutiny of officials with differing expertise and
organizational interests led to considering only one of many
possible options--manned reconnaissance flights, over North
Vietnam. This one-sided approach illustrated the consequences
that are possible with such closed decision-making procedures.
For the President, the basic problem had been to secure
the military's concurrence iFn a decision first to curtail and
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then to halt the bombing of North Vietnam, and he offered the
military whatever assurances about future behavior on the part
of the united States that he could. Some of these assurances
involved the conditions under which the United States would
resume the bombing, and others inevitably involved the ques-
tion of what operations the United States would continue dur-
ing this period, including reconnaissance operations. The
military, of course, was always interested in getting. informa-
tion about potential targets, particularly in areas in which
they have been bombing and might again be ordered to resume
bombing. Thus, one of the conditions proposed by the military
for the two bombing halts was that they be permitted, at their
discretion, to continue any and all reconnaissance operations
against North Vietnam.
President Johnson's inclination, no doubt, would have
been to accept this condition, regardless of the lurking ad-
verse consequences and regardless of any assessment of the
importance of this reconnaissance information, precisely be-
cause it seemed a small price to pay to get military concur-
rence in the bombing halt. Nevertheless, it is important to
note that the decision was made without any careful evaluation
of the likely impact on the North Vietnamese, or the need for
the kind of reconnaissance which involved an intrusion into
North Vietnamese air space. Intelligence analysts in the in-
telligence branches of the CIA, the Department of State, and
even the Department of Defense, as well as those involved in
Vietnam policy making on the civilian side of the Pentagon
and in the Department of State, were excluded from the
decision-making process, both because it involved a tightly
held political decision and because it involved operational,
covert programs.
Considerable confusion on the question of the North
Vietnamese reaction resulted from the belief that the North
Vietnamese had committed themselves in October not to shoot
at the American reconnaissance planes. At the Paris negotia-
tions, the North Vietnamese had been clearly informed by
Averell Harriman that the United States intended to continue
such reconnaissance operations, and they, in turn, had ex-
pressed their willingness to begin substantive negotiations
despite the persistence of the United States in these opera-
tions. In other words, the North Vietnamese retreated from
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their position that they would not begin peace talks until
the United States ended all acts of war against North Viet-
nam--a description clearly meant to include reconnaissance
operations--and shifted, instead, to being willing to talk
if the United States simply terminated all acts of force
against North Vietnam--a formulation clearly designed to
exclude unarmed reconnaissance operations. But the North
Vietnamese neither stated nor suggested that they would re-
frain from seeking to interfere with these operations by,
for instance, shooting at the reconnaissance planes. Until
after the decision was made, analysts familiar with the
North Vietnamese positions and statements did not have an
opportunity to examine this question, and, since they had
not been in on the details of the negotiations with the North
Vietnamese, their views were not taken seriously afterwards.
There also remained the question of the value and im-
portance of reconnaissance operations which involved an in-
trusion over North Vietnamese territory, particularly by
manned aircraft. This was a highly technical problem, in-
volving questions such as what the United States needed to
know or wanted to know about what was going on in North
Vietnam, evaluating what other means the United States could
use to discover this information, and how much degradation of
intelligence would in fact result if--except for the manned
intrusions of North Vietnamese air space--all such alterna-
tive means were used and perhaps maximized.
Even to begin to discuss the question of whether other
intelligence gathering means could serve as usefully as
manned aircraft, officials needed an array of clearances.
One set involved the tactical intelligence operations of the
United States over North Vietnam by both high and low flying
aircraft. Others included what the activities of the National
Security Agency could and did learn from monitoring both elec-
tronic signals and other forms of communications between North
Vietnam and South Vietnam. Some clearances involved different
aspects of this monitoring, including whether the United States
had successfully broken any North Vietnamese codes and there-
fore could read any of their coded, classified communications.
One also needed clearances which involved various satellite
programs of the United States, including, in particular, the
satellite photography program. Not only was access to the
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information learned from this program necessary, but also the
operational clearances which would enable an official to
assess whether, and at what cost, more intensive use of
satellites over North Vietnam could provide additional infor-
mation and to what degree a satellite program could compensate
for a curtailment or elimination of the manned reconnaissance
programs.
Other than officials on the Joint Staff, which viewed
the situation from a military perspective, there was almost
no one who had access to these necessary intelligence clear-
ances. Thus, officials who might otherwise have added the
perspective of broader Vietnam issues, such as the problems
of negotiation, to the military's interest in having the in-
formation for its tactical operations, were not in a position
to offer an assessment of the relative importance and value
of continuing armed reconnaissance flights.
The people who did have such clearances had gotten them
painfully, one at a time, on the sufferance of the various
groups who controlled the clearances. The decision as to
whether to award clearances to a particular individual is,
in general, made by the managers and operators of a particular
program who, being responsible for the security of that pro-
gram, are given the responsibility to determine who has access
to the material involved. Naturally, they are not anxious to
give material to people who might become critics of their
particular program. Moreover, even those who had the clear-
ances did not have all the information which was necessary
to make a study of the consequences of halting reconnaissance
which involved intrusion into North Vietnamese air space.
A variety of technical problems and alternatives were
involved which called for extensive knowledge of the various
programs. For example, how much could be gotten from aircraft
flying around the perimeter of North Vietnam? To what extent
were drones (unmanned aircraft) available which could perform
some of the missions involved? What was the likely destruc-
tion rate of drones? To what degree could additional satel-
lites or additional satellite time be programmed over North
Vietnam? Information on each of these questions was tightly
held and controlled by the people managing each one of these
programs. while in some circumstances they each had an in-
centive to show how good their programs were, none of them
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had any incentive to cooperate with an effort to determine
whether the program of reconnaissance over North Vietnam should
be curtailed.
Obviously, if the President or the Secretary of Defense
had personally been strongly interested in such a study, the
information could have, with considerable difficulty, been
gotten out of the various bureaucracies involved. But with
the President and the Secretary committed to the continuation
of the program, it was unlikely that all the necessary data
could be assembled. This system of secrecy stands in con-
trast with other areas of policy, where there are no special
subcategories of clearances, and where papers can be done
assessing the implications of alternative policies by even
relatively junior officials with the support of senior offi-
cials in the government.
Added to all these other problems were the simple cleri-
cal problems of dealing with the material involving special
clearances. Even fewer secretaries than substantive staff
people are cleared for such operations. Junior officials
interested in such activities are unlikely to have members of
their own staff cleared to assist them on the programs. Out-
side consultants are rarely cleared for all, or even most, of
these activities. The safes in most government offices, even
in the Pentagon, are not authorized for storage of material
involving these clearances. When several of these clearances
are lumped together, the problems of storage, typing, and
analysis become even greater.
These are reasons why there does not appear to have been
any serious study, either before or after the decisions to
continue reconnaissance while curtailing the bombing, on the
utility of the manned reconnaissance operations involving
intrusion into North Vietnamese air space and the degree to
which that same information, or virtually all the same infor-
mation, could have been obtained by alternate intelligence
means. Instead, the reconnaissance went on, the North Viet-
namese began to shoot at the airplanes, the United States
responded first by firing back and then by a program described
as "protective reaction" in which strikes would be made after
North Vietnamese air defense units were believed to be on the
verge of attacking American reconnaissance planes. The
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"protective reaction strikes" were ultimately used as a cover
for preplanned strikes on a variety of targets in North Viet-
nam. All this proceeded without any real assessment of the
need for the reconnaissance program itself, and it illus-
trates how the decision-making procedures for covert opera-
tions--including technical operations--can have wider
repercussions in a major policy area.
We turn now to the case of China to see how covert
operations can have even more profound effects on the rela-
tions between two major countries.
The People's Republic of China
On a number of occasions in the post-World War II period,
the CIA has directed covert operations within the territory of
the People's Republic of China--three such operations have
come to light. Although little is known about the internal
decision-making procedures which led to these particular opera-
tions, there is no reason to think that they were different from
those routinely followed in.approving covert operations in
general.
In 1949, with the Communist conquest of the Chinese main-
land, Secretary of State Dean Acheson announced on behalf of
the Truman Administration that the United States would permit
the dust to settle in China before deciding what to do. The
debate which raged within the American government, outside of
the covert intelligence community, was on whether or not the
United States would defend Taiwan. At the same time, and
without the knowledge of at least junior officials involved
in China policy in general, the CIA began planning for a pro-
gram of covert operations on the Chinese mainland. By 1950,
with the Korean war underway, the CIA began the operations,
relying mainly on Chinese Nationalist agents from Taiwan.
These operations, which were geared in part to aid American
airmen who might be shot down in China as a result of bombing
raids over North Korea, were also designed to infiltrate Chi-
nese Nationalist agents onto the mainland for information
gathering and covert operations. The CIA agents were trained
in Japan on the establishment of secret bases and communica-
tions lines, organized into teams, and dropped into China,
with one such drop taking place in the fall of 1952.
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The existence of these operations came to light only be-
cause in November of 1952 two American CIA agents involved in
directing the operation, John Downey and Richard Fecteau, were
shot down when they attempted to pick up one of the agents
previously parachuted into China and to drop supplies for
other agents. The United States made no public announcement
of the disappearance of these two agents, evidently assuming
that they had both been killed when their plane went down.
However, two years later the Chinese disclosed that Downey
and Fecteau had been captured. The Chinese asserted that
both Downey and Fecteau had confessed to their clandestine
operations and CIA connections and were tried and sentenced
for interfering in Chinese affairs. It was reported that
Downey had been sentenced to life imprisonment and Fecteau
to twenty years in prison. It was not until 1971 that Fecteau
was finally freed and until 1973 that Downey's release was
arranged.
The Chinese public announcement that Downey and Fecteau
were CIA agents and had been taken alive must have caused a
great shock within the covert operations establishment, since
it made public the fact of these operations. It is not known
how widely within the Executive Branch at this point that the
CIA admitted that Downey and Fecteau were in fact CIA agents.
The American public was lied to--according to the State De-
partment spokesman at the time of the trials:
These men, John Thomas Downey and Richard
George Fecteau, were civilian personnel employed
by the Department of the Army in Japan. They
were believed to have been lost on a flight from
Korea to Japan in November, 1952.*
While even a cursory look at a map would indicate the
implausibility of somebody being lost over China on a flight
from Seoul to Tokyo, much of the American public seems to
have accepted the administration's story, and it was accepted
as one more proof of the lawless behavior and callous dis-
regard for human life of the "outlaw" regime then in control
* The New York Times, November 24, 1954.
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of the Chinese mainland. It was not until 1973, and then
apparently as part of the arrangements for Downey's release,
that President Nixon finally admitted that Downey and Fecteau
were CIA agents on a covert operation. One suspects that
many parts of the Executive Branch, while they had long sus-
pected the truth, were only at that moment formally and offi-
cially informed of the existence of the operation in China.
In the mid-1950's, the CIA appears to have begun an
operation in support of rebel groups in Tibet. Thus, in
1958 the CIA brought a group of Tibetans to a training base
in Colorado and gave them training for covert operations
within Tibet. These CIA-trained Tibetan agents were dropped
into Tibet by the Civil Air Transport (CAT), a CIA proprietary
air force.
Analysts of Chinese-American relations in the State De-
partment, the CIA, and the academic community were not aware
until the charges against Downey and Fecteau that secret
operations of any kind were being conducted on the Chinese
mainland, and they were not.aware of the Tibetan operation
until recent revelations. Thus, in assessing Chinese and
American relations and the reasons for Chinese hostility to
the United States, they were unable to take account of Chi-
nese fears stemming from the Chinese knowledge of extensive
American interference on the Chinese mainland through the
covert operations of the CIA and the support of internal op-
ponents of the regime, including the Chinese nationalists
and Tibetan guerrilla groups. The decisions to conduct these
operations were undoubtedly made by a small group, including,
certainly, the President and the Secretary of State, but not
including most government experts on China and Tibet, who
could have provided an assessment of the likely effects of
these operations on the local conditions in the area in which
they were operating, on the Chinese perception of the United
States, and on the likelihood of improved relations between
the two countries.
While some CIA support for Chinese Nationalist operations
in and over the mainland of China appear to have continued
steadily, at least until the last few years, the only other
publicly known major CIA operations in China occurred in the
mid-1960's at the time of the Cultural Revolution. When the
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Cultural Revolution broke out, discussion among officials not
involved in covert operations in the State Department, the
Defense Department, the White House, and even the CIA,
quickly reached the conclusion that the United States should
not intervene in any way in the Cultural Revolution. The
United States could in fact indicate to the Chinese leaders
that, whatever past American policy, the United States now
accepted the Chinese regime and, by remaining aloof from the
turnoil of the Cultural Revolution, was making no effort to
undercut it. By not interfering when China appeared to be
weak and divided, the United States could lay the basis for
a degree of improved relations once the tumult of the cul-
tural Revolution had died down. Though this reason for
non-interference was never publicly admitted, the consensus
emerging from these working-level meetings appears to have
been ratified at the highest levels of the government and it
was the official American policy, both internal and stated
by senior American officials, that the United States was not
intervening in the cultural Revolution and would not attempt
to exploit it for any purpose.
At the same time, and unbeknownst to these officials,
the CIA was mounting covert operations designed to influence
the Cultural Revolution and to increase the turmoil and dif-
ficulty within China.
In 1967, detecting signs that the Cultural Revolution
was dying down and that forces for law and order were reassert-
ing themselves, the CIA stepped up its operations in a design
to rekindle the extreme violence of the earlier Cultural Revo-
lution period. Balloons were used to drop leaflets and other
propaganda materials over China. These documents had been
carefully prepared by CIA agents to appear as similar as pos-
sible to genuine publications being distributed in China by
the conservative elements. The leaflets criticized the Red
Guard and their radical supporters in the Peking leadership.
The pamphlets appear to have been successful in that they were
taken as genuine by many Chinese and, by the radicals, as evi-
dence of greater resistance to Red Guard propaganda, particu-
larly in the southern provinces. Refugees from China arrived
in Hong Kong carrying some of this CIA material. At the same
time, a CIA-operated clandestine radio on Taiwan broadcasted
some of the same kinds of propaganda as was in the leaflets.
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These covert operations, which were almost certainly de-
tected by Chinese communist leaders, had the effect of under-
cutting what most American officials believed was the agreed
policy of the United States--to remain out of the cultural
Revolution and to attempt to use the good will generated by
that inaction to lay the basis for improved relations after
the extreme violence died down. Senior, long-experienced
China officials in the State Department, the overt side of
the CIA, and within the Pentagon were given no opportunity
to argue against these CIA operations. They had simply not
been informed of them, and were allowed to believe that the
United States was remaining aloof from the Cultural Revolu-
tion.
The CIA operations had even more bizarre consequences.
American intelligence analysts from the Department of State
in Hong Kong began to get copies of these leaflets from re-
fugees from the Chinese mainland; at the same time, a dif-
ferent branch of the CIA, the Foreign Broadcast Information
Service, began to monitor the clandestine radio broadcasts
from Taiwan and treat them as though they were coming from
a clandestine, dissident radio on the Chinese mainland. The
pamphlets and the radio broadcasts were then fed into the
analyses of the Cultural Revolution situation being done by
the State Department and the CIA analysts in Hong Kong and
Washington.
Thus, over an extended period of time, analysts of de-
velopments in China and of Chinese-American relations within
the American government have had their perceptions distorted
by a lack of knowledge of American covert interference in the
affairs of the People's Republic of China. Perhaps more im-
portantly, American policy toward China was for many years
affected by these covert operations without most of the of-
ficials in the American government who were concerned with
China policy being informed about them and given an oppor-
tunity to argue that such activities were not in the national
interest.
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Secrecy and Decision-Making Procedures
Our review of the decision-making structure involving
the planning and implementation of covert operations will be
necessarily brief since this subject was discussed at greater
length by Marks and Marchetti. Our focus will be on the
patterns of decision-making, with particular reference to
the narrowing of the circle of those involved.
The proposals for covert operations generally come
largely,, if not entirely, from the organizations which will
then be responsible for carrying them out once they are ap-
proved. This structure is highly decentralized, with its
different units not having access to either the programs or
the results of the programs of other operating units. In
general, there is a different organizational structure for
the planning and the implementing of each of the different
programs.
One of these, that involving covert operations and the
use of agents to gather information, is centered almost en-
tirely in the program division of the,CIA. This organization
is broken down into a regional structure--under the Deputy
Director for Programs there is an Assistant Director for each
region and, under him, staff dealing with particular countries.
There is also an organization in the field with CIA
agents in relatively overt status, although somewhat dis-
guised, on the staffs of American embassies in almost every
country of the world. In addition, there are people under
more intensive cover, being ostensibly employees of private
business organizations, for example. The individuals manning
these slots in the division of programs of the agency and in
the field are also drawn from a career service of covert
operators within the CIA. Finally, the Defense Intelligence
Agency has a program of military attaches stationed abroad,
who engage in the more or less overt collection of intelli-
gence information about the military capabilities of the
countries to which they are assigned.
A separate structure deals with the gathering of commu-
nications intelligence information by monitoring various
electronic signals put in the air by various governments.
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This structure, about which considerably less is known,
involves the National Security Agency as the central coor-
dinating mechanism and has a staff which evaluates this
information and attempts to break the codes in which the
messages are sent. It also includes the various service
intelligence organizations and their overseas components,
which apparently carry on the overseas collection opera-
tions. Thus, NSA bases overseas appear to be manned and
controlled by service intelligence units, and certainly
ships such as the Pueblo and the Liberty and airplanes such
as the EC-121, shot down off the coast of Korea in 1959,
fall into the operational responsibility of the military
intelligence organizations.
Still a separate group runs the overhead reconnaissance
programs. These, it is now known, are conducted by the over-
head Reconnaissance Office, which is a part of the office of
the Secretary of the Air Force. This operation continues to
be classified totally, in the sense that the United States
does not even admit that it carries on an overhead reconnais-
sance program and the structures by which the program is
conducted are all classified, even as to their existence.
The decisions on the budgets of these organizations ap-
pear to be made by a variety of separate channels involving
the office of Budget and Management and senior officials of
the CIA and the Department of Defense. However, the deci-
sions about particular operations and their approval are
centered in a single institution now known as the 40 Commit-
tee, previously known by other numbers, such as the 303 Com-
mittee.
The 40 Committee, chaired by the President's Assistant
for National Security Affairs, includes as representatives
the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Undersecretary of State
for Political Affairs, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and
the Director of Central Intelligence. Each member has a spe-
cial staff which is involvedtin the evaluation and monitoring
of the programs brought forward by the various separate
organizations discussed above. In the case of the representa-
tives of the Department of State, the unit involved is an
office in the department of the Director of Intelligence and
Research that is specially assigned to this purpose. In the
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Defense Department the staffing is done by a special Assistant
to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs for Covert Operations. At
least until recently, this office basically staffed both the
Chairman and the Deputy Secretary. The President's Assistant
for National Security Affairs is traditionally staffed by a
single individual assigned to his office by the CIA.
We can illustrate how this program works by considering
a typical instance of a covert operation. In general, a simi-
lar pattern has been followed for a technical program coming
out of the NSA, the service intelligence operations, or an
overhead reconnaissance program from the Air Force.
In general, an idea for a covert operation will develop
either in the field in the country involved or in the depart-
ment of the CIA headquarters staff that is responsible for
that particular country. The idea would then be discussed
between these two groups and, if approved by them, passed to
the Assistant Director for the region concerned, and then from
him to the Director of Central Intelligence. If the plan at
least has his tentative approval, it will then be passed in-
formally to the various staffs of the members of the 40 Com-
mittee. An attempt is then made at that level to develop a
consensus on the desirability of going forward with the opera-
tion. In general, there would be no consultation with other
officials who might be concerned with other aspects of the
policy toward the country in which it was planned to conduct
the covert operations. Thus, within the State Department,
there would not be continual consultation with the regional
branch of the Bureau of intelligence and Research concerned
with that country, or with the director for the country con-
cerned. The Assistant Secretary of the region might be con-
sulted depending on past indications of his interest in being
consulted or in being informed about covert operations.* Other
* There are, of course, exceptions. In some instances there
may be informal consultations with others in the Bureau of
Intelligence and Research or with a country director, although
this does not appear to be the norm.
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parts of the state Department, including the planning staff
and the Bureau of Political and Military Affairs, will almost
certainly not be consulted.
In the Department of Defense, the consultation would be
limited to the staff of the Assistant to the Joint Chiefs for
Covert Operations and to the service counterparts. The con-
sultation would not extend, apparently, to the J-5 planning
staff of the Joint Staffs or to the similar service staffs
which deal more generally with political-military questions,
and would not extend to civilians in the Pentagon, including
those in the office of international Security Affairs.
On the National Security Council staff, the consultation
would be limited to a few people specifically assigned to pro-
vide staff support on covert operations to the Assistant to
the President and would not normally extend to those concerned
with regional affairs for the country involved.or to those
involved in the planning. In the CIA, the Deputy Director
for Intelligence and all of his staffs would be excluded from
the consultation.
Once a consensus is reached within this small group, the
matter would move onto the agenda of the 40 Committee, where
it will almost certainly be approved, and then there will be
informal consultation with the President, usually not in
writing so that it will be possible to deny involvement if
that were to become necessary. The approval of the President
having been obtained, the Assistant to the President for Na-
tional Security Affairs would notify the relevant operating
agencies that the program had been approved, and they would
then put it into effect. Once it was ongoing, there would be
little, if any opportunity for any other group to monitor the
program.
This then is the bare outline of the decision-making
structures. We are ready to turn to an assessment of the
implications of this structure for Executive Branch decision-
making, keeping in mind the vignettes with which we began
the essay.
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Implications for Executive Branch Decision-Making*
The system under which decisions about covert operations
are made distorts the decision-making process in a number of
undesirable ways. It (1) increases the chances that such
operations will be chosen over more desirable alternatives,
(2) reduces the effectiveness with which such operations are
designed and carried out, (3) distorts the decision-making
within the Executive Branch in general, and (4) reduces the
effectiveness of the intelligence evaluation which is sup-
posed to be the primary responsibility of the CIA. Each of
these is discussed in turn, drawing in particular on the
brief cases presented above.
Choosing covert Operations
The super secrecy of covert operations increases the
chances the President will choose covert actions rather than
other options which would be more desirable and which, given
a free and open debate within the Executive Branch or if the
Congress and the public were also involved in the decision-
making process, would otherwise have been adopted.
A major problem that faces an American President taking
any action is the multiple audience problem. Whatever the
President does will be seen by the foreign country against
which he may be directing his action, by leaders and active
groups in other countries, and by a number of domestic groups
in the Congress and the attentive public. The fact that the
operation itself cannot be kept from these other audiences is
one of the costs frequently associated with any operation.
One of the major attractions of covert operations is the
ability to avoid the problem of multiple audiences. If some-
thing is to be conducted in secret, then one can avoid the
fight over the means and the ends which erupts when other
audiences discover an ongoing operation. For example, when
asked in the summer of 1970 why the United States had been
* This section is adopted from Morton H. Halperin and Jeremy
Stone, "Secrecy and Covert Intelligence Collection and Opera-
tions," in None of Your Business: Government Secrecy in
Amen ic#ppoi3ied1 pr la 2D /*M1 a 4 ~ 3 100(3 T$ g
Press: New York, 1974). I am grateful to Mr. Stone for his
willingness to permit me to use our joint product for this
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willing to send military forces to Vietnam to prevent a Com-
munist takeover but had not been willing to send American.
military forces to Chile to prevent a Marxist government
from coming into power, President Nixon replied the United
States could not send military forces to Chile without pro-
voking such an adverse political reaction in the rest of
Latin America that it would outweigh the possible value of
American military intervention.*
Though he did not make it clear at the time, it is now
evident that the 40 Committee authorized covert intervention
in Chile both before and after Allende came to power.** These
operations were ultimately successful but avoided the politi-
cal outcry which would have come with an overt step such as
the use of American military forces.
Compared to alternatives, it is easier to obtain the
necessary approval for covert operations. The President
himself can usually authorize such operations without having
to go to Congress for funds or to go before the American pub-
lic to make a public justification.
In addition, covert operations often also come to seem
cheap and easy because, virtually by definition, a covert
operation can generally be disavowed if discovered. As in
many other aspects of the planning and execution of covert
operations, an extreme optimism seems to accompany such
evaluations. Thus both in the case of the U-2 and of the
Bay of Pigs, an explicit element of the calculation leading
to authorizing the plan was the belief that the operations
could be disavowed with a cover story if they were discovered.
As mentioned above, prior to the U-2 episode, the credibility
of the American Executive Branch was so high that even very
implausible stories, such as the Downey-Fecteau story, were
believed by most of the American public and many others
throughout the world.
* Presidential Press Conference, August, 1970.
** See the heavily censored discussion in Marchetti and
Marks, pp.
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22
The mechanism of decision-making also tends to bias the
system toward the choosing of covert options. When the United
States is faced with a problem, such as how to respond to the
Cultural Revolution in China, the various parts of the govern-
ment with responsibility for different parts of the problem
will consider alternative options leading, depending on the
system in operation at the time, toward White House consulta-
tions and decisions. In a typical case there will be meetings
to discuss the whole range of overt possibilities weighted
against each other in an advisory procedure that will permit
critics of one proposal to be heard while the proponents of
that proposal are present. Covert operations will not be
discussed,at such meetings, but rather will be considered
separately at meetings from which both advocates of other
proposals and critics of covert operations'are excluded.
Indeed, in meetings considering other options, many partici-
pants are often not aware of the fact that there are other
meetings in which covert alternatives are being considered.
Those advocating covert operations can bring them up through
the mechanism of the 40 Committee and thus do not have to
compete for the time and attention of top-level decision-
makers. For example, one suspects that it is now considerably
easier to get an issue onto the agenda of the 40 Committee
than on the schedule of the Senior Review Group which meets
to consider all non-covert matters within the National Security
Council System.
These same factors serve to reduce the efficiency of the
design and execution of covert operations. Thus, the extreme
secrecy of covert operations increases the probability that
such operations will be poorly designed and implemented with
little regard for the realities of the external world (e.g.,
the Bay of Pigs) or for appropriate principles of American
behavior (e.g., Chile). Many of the problems in the design
and execution of covert operations come precisely from the
fact that the circle of people involved in such operations is
kept very small and, indeed, is limited to people who tend to
be sympathetic to such operations.
As in all areas of policy, those involved have an interest
in keeping the number of participants to the lowest possible
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level and to keep out those who are likely to be critics.*
However, in the area of covert intelligence operations, there
is a special tool of great importance for excluding potential
critics, namely, the special clearances. As noted, a top
secret clearance is not sufficient to involve an official in
the planning or execution of covert operations. To have ac-
cess to such information, one must get special clearances,
the existence of which may not even be known to officials who
do not have them. Daniel Ellsberg has described his own
introduction to this system:
If you had worked all your life with top secret
material in the Pentagon for Assistant Secretaries,
unless you were one of the elect, you would not be
aware that there are entire rooms in the Pentagon
with safe doors outside, with a guardian, with a com-
puter list up to date hourly and daily as to who is
admitted in that room, and unless you know the code-
word and are on the list, you cannot enter that room
or know of its existence.
It will have a very nondescript door in the hall
that will not suggest what is inside. You can go in
that room and discover yourself in something like the
reading room of the New York Public Library, not a
closet, not a safe, but a room with charts, with
library shelves of material, no word of which you
were previously aware existed.
You did not know how it was gotten. You did not
know the President had this kind of information at all.
Of course, the effect of that is very euphoric at first.
You go around and take things off the shelves and begin
reading it and imagine you are about to learn all the
answers, that Godlike knowledge is now available to you.
Now, you can be introduced into one of those rooms
and still have no idea that there exist still other
* See Morton H. Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign
Policy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1974), pp. 119-27.
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rooms with other sources of information, other access
lists just as large and just as secret.
I would say it is not until you have four or five
such clearances that the next level of mystery is re-
vealed to you. Then you become aware that there is no
limit to this; that these clearances can be generated
very quickly in a day or two.; and such types of infor-
mation can be segregated--I am not saying only from
the public or Congress, but even from other people who
have two or three other clearances--very effectively.
`Once you have a dozen, from then on, you live in
the knowledge there must be others you don't have.
I still keep finding out about new ones.
Could there be clearances the President doesn't
know about? Of course, certainly, without any doubt,
because the physical nature of generating these things
is such that they can multiply and proliferate in a
way that no individual has any way of knowing about.*
Since the authority to grant such clearances is in the
hands of the officials who manage the programs, they can use
this tool--the need for super secrecy--to prevent the access
of those they fear might be skeptical or critical of their
operations.
The structure of special clearances prevents a bureau-
crat who is skeptical of such operations from fighting his
way into the process as he might do in other areas. Normally,
an official observing an ongoing policy which he sees as a
threat to his organization's interests, or to national inter-
ests as he sees them, would attempt to fight his way into the
* Executive Privilege, Secrecy in Government, Freedom of In-
formation, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Intergovern-
mental Relations of the Committee on Government Operations
and the Subcommittees on Separation of Powers and Administra-
tive Practice and Procedure of the Committee on the Judiciary,
United States Senate, 93rd Congress,-First Session (1973),
Volume I, p. 430.
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process. He would argue that he has a special expertise to
contribute or that the interests of his organization are in-
volved. In the area of covert operations, the extreme
secrecy, protected by special clearances, makes it extremely
difficult for this to be done.
In many cases, an official simply does not know that the
activities are under consideration or being implemented.
Moreover, the existence. of the special clearances makes it
difficult to assert a right-to-be-involved since one is
asserting the need for a clearance whose existence one is
not supposed to know, and which is supposedly kept to a small
number of people. Thus, someone attempting to fight his way
into the evaluation of a particular covert operation faces
not only the normal difficulties of getting into a new policy
arena, but special problems: one appears to be jeopardizing
security requirements by seeking unwarranted access.
As a result, an individual who finally does get cleared
for a particular covert operation is likely to feel he has
been admitted by the sufferance of those planning the opera-
tions. He knows he will continue to be involved only if he
accepts the basic principles involved and presents his criti-
cism on the edges of particular details of the operation. One
who is skeptical about covert operations in general, or about
covert operations in a particular area, is not likely to get
the necessary clearances to involve himself in the process.
If he does, he may feel that he must mute his views or find
himself isolated and, ultimately, have his clearance with-
drawn. This range of problems affected the evaluation of
reconnaissance operations over North Vietnam described above.
With the circle of those "in the know" kept very small,
those involved will tend to discount the views of other govern-
ment officials who are not aware of the details of covert
operations. Thus, for example, the analyses of experts on
Cuba--that a successful anti-Castro operation in Cuba in 1961
was unlikely--were discounted by those "in the know" about the
Bay of Pigs operation. These officials saw themselves as the
only ones receiving all the reports from the covert operations
in Cuba. The views of intelligence analysts in the CIA and in
the Department of State on Cuba were discounted because of the
fact that they did not receive some of the reports from agents
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26
operating within Cuba. Since they were seen as not having
the whole picture, their otherwise expert views of the Cuban
situation were entirely discounted.
The process by which proposals for covert operations
move up through the narrow group of those with necessary
clearances increases the likelihood that senior officials who
sit on the 40 Committee will usually be unanimous. Because
of the close working relationships of the members of this
committee, they tend to get rubber stamped by the committee.
Presumably, they are also rubber stamped by the President
when such proposals are brought to his attention. The lack
of vigorous dissent, so common with other proposals of a
controversial nature, tends to lead to routine approval.
This is also true because top officials tend to lose track
of what is being done and accept the designation that this
is a committee that deals with "dirty tricks" without any
clear scrutiny of what in particular is involved in any single
instance.
When such operations are very large, the fact that top
officials are unable to control the operations is particu-
larly acute. In such a situation, if they call off an
operation after it is well on the way, they are confronted
with the danger that that fact will leak out with adverse
political consequences. In the case of the Bay of Pigs,
President Kennedy was confronted with statements from Allen
Dulles that, if the operation were cancelled, Cuban refugees
who had been recruited for it would begin talking about it.
The cancellation would have become widely known, and, because
of the intense anti-Castro feeling then rampant in the
United States, the Kennedy Administration would have had to
contend with adverse political consequences.
The extreme secrecy surrounding covert operations also
inhibits the monitoring of such operations, making sensible
choices more difficult. In the case of overt operations,
the press provides one critical aspect of the monitoring
system by providing the President and other top officials
with an evaluation of what is going on. With covert opera-
tions, this form of feedback is often entirely absent unless
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the operation reaches such proportions that the press in the
field begins to learn of it.*
The secrecy of covert operations also reduces the possi-
bility of effective monitoring within the American government.
The acknowledged need for flexibility in such operations often
makes it easy to justify extreme authority for officials in
the field to carry out a plan in the manner which they deem
desirable. Ambassadors can sometimes provide an effective
monitoring or control over some operations, but often they do
not know, or do not want to know, about CIA operations. More-
over, the"CIA controls its own assets of money, people, and
communications channels to Washington, often enabling it to
move without the normal internal monitoring and control pro-
cedures within the Executive Branch. Skeptics within the
government are often not informed about covert operations
and cannot play the role that they normally perform for other
areas of policy--that of constantly monitoring an approved
policy or operation in an effort to convince the President
that it was an error and should be abandoned.
The secrecy surrounding the decision-making and execu-
tion of covert operations not only undermines the effective-
ness of the decisions themselves, but also casts a shadow
over Executive Branch decision-making on national security
matters in general. By creating a special class of those
with a "need to know" for covert operations, it tends to
give such people a sense that on all matters they are better
informed than those who are not involved in the covert opera-
tions. Those who have additional clearances come to think of
themselves as "in the know" and to discount across the board
the views of others not informed.
Moreover, lying within the government becomes an accepted
routine. In order to protect the existence of additional
* In many cases, it is the press that alerts other parts of
the U.S. government to what is going on. This appears to have
been the case with covert operations in Laos through the
1960's, where covert activities came to the attention of many
government officials through press reports from Laos.
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clearances and of covert operations, officials in the govern-
ment who have access to this kind of information must, as a
matter of routine, deceive other officials in order to pro-
tect the clearances and operations. This lying breeds a
habit of cynicism and contempt for those who are lied to which
cannot help but spill into the general pattern of Executive
Branch decision-making. Daniel Ellsberg, in testimony before
Senate subcommittees, describes his efforts to warn Henry
Kissinger about this problem prior to inauguration day in
1969:
Moreover, in signing agreements to have this
information, you will come to understand that the
only way of keeping secrets this well is to lie.
A contract to observe those clearances, and
these are essentially contractual arrangements in
the executive branch, conditions of employment, is
a contract to lie; in a good cause, it would appear
to protect intelligence secrets.
When i say lie, on the first hand, if you are
asked if you have this clearance, you are not allowed
to-say, no comment. That would confirm it. Your
duty is to lie and say you do not have it.
If you are asked about the contents, you are to
lie and say you know nothing about the contents.
if you are asked whether you have a particular
piece of information, you must lie and say you do not.
These go back to the practices of World War II,
when thousands of civilians were introduced to the
need to lie to their fellow scientists despite the
supposed sharing of scientific information. Lying
is legitimatized with an enemy like Hitler or Stalin.
Thus, some people learn these practices in a context
that seems thoroughly legitimate to them and inevitable-.
But I went on to say to Kissinger:
The effect of that is that you will have to lie
and you will succeed in lying and you will fool your
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former academic colleagues. You will discover, in
collaboration with thousands of other executive of-
ficials all telling the same cover story, that it's.
easy to fool people.
And that is what the President learns.
I suspect that those of you at this table in
your life have fooled this person or that, but you
also know you are subject to reelection, whether
it is every two years or six years, and that there
is a-limit to how many people you can fool and how
much.*
The most explicit and concrete way in which the super
secrecy system of covert operations distorts Executive Branch
decision-making is in its impact on the CIA itself. President
Truman, in calling for its creation, and Congress, in authoriz-
ing it, had envisioned the CIA as primarily, if not exclusively,
an intelligence evaluation organization. President Truman had
written that, prior to the creation of the CIA, he received
intelligence reports from each of the services and from the
State Department. He felt the need for a single agency which
would collate and evaluate each of these reports and which
would do so without the bias that an operating agency has.
The Air Force, for example, tended to bias reports in ways
that would prove the argument for Air Force programs. Truman
wanted an agency with a professional intelligence. analytic
capability and without any programs of its own.
Because of the covert intelligence operations, this con-
ception of the CIA's role differs markedly from reality.
Throughout the postwar period, the CIA has been dominated by
officials whose primary concern and interest was covert opera-
tions rather than intelligence evaluation. The only career
* Executive Privilege, Secrecy in Government, Freedom of In-
formation, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Intergovernmental
Relations of the Committee on Government Operations and the
Subcommittees on Separation of Powers and Administrative Prac-
tice and Procedure of the Committee on the Judiciary, United
States Senate, 93rd Congress, First Session (1973), Volume I,
pp. 427-8.
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officials to be named heads of the CIA, Allen Dulles, Richard
Helms, and William Colby, came up through the covert side of
the agency and ran the covert operations of the agency before
becoming Directors of Central Intelligence. Officials on the
agency's intelligence side recognize that the main focus of
the CIA as an institution is with its covert operations
rather than with its intelligence evaluations, that they are
not operating in a totally hospitable environment, and that
they are unlikely to rise to the top. This dominance by
covert operations within the CIA has tended to diminish the
quality of the personnel on the agency's intelligence evalua-
tion side.
In addition, the CIA, because of its involvement in
operations, is not the neutral intelligence evaluation organ
that President Truman and others envisioned. With its
policy concerns related to its covert operations, the CIA
has a policy axe to grind just as much as any other agency.
The Director of Central Intelligence will often feel pressured
to fight for covert operations programs that the CIA desires
rather than to fight to have its intelligence reports, which
might contradict these programs, taken seriously.
The secrecy of covert operations also reduces the quality
of CIA intelligence in that the intelligence evaluators are
often not informed of covert operations within the CIA--the
situation of the CIA operations during the Cultural Revolu-
tion, mentioned above, is one such example. Much of the con-
tact between the CIA and other agencies is by officials from
the Directorate of Programs rather than the Directorate of
Intelligence, which reduces the latter's knowledge of what is
going on in the government and their ability to make sensible
intelligence inputs.
Thus, because of the existence of a covert operations
staff which dominates the agency, the CIA has been in a much
weaker position to fulfill its primary function of providing
objective intelligence evaluation. The Vietnam War illus-
trates this well. The intelligence analysis in the CIA, as
the Pentagon Papers reveal, frequently produced much more
sensible estimates of the situation in Vietnam than were com-
ing from other parts of the intelligence community. What the
Pentagon Papers did not indicate, because they did not draw
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31
on the files of the covert operations of the American govern-
ment, is that the Directorate of Programs was as wrong on
Vietnam as any other part of the government. The CIA was
heavily involved in covert operations in Vietnam, including
the training and arming of ethnic minorities, and its opera-
tors were as optimistic as anyone about the success of their'
programs. Thus the great weight of the CIA effort within the
government was to defend these programs rather than to push
the consequences of the pessimistic intelligence evaluations.
Conclusions and Recommendations
The recommendations drawn from this analysis are limited
to the implications for altering the way in which decisions
dealing with covert intelligence operations are made--in secret
and separate channels from those decisions dealing with ques-
tions of political operations.*
The simplest and single most important step to be taken
to reduce the secrecy surrounding covert technical intelli-
gence gathering is to end the fiction that such operations are
secret. The United States continues to insist that the fact
that it has developed satellite reconnaissance operations.and.
the fact that it has a National Security Agency which routinely
intercepts all communications by other governments are highly
secret facts. Much of the extreme secrecy of the decision-
making flows from-such unrealistic assumptions. As discussed
above, special clearances are required,.as a result of this
fiction, simply to read any of the products of.these technical'
means of intelligence gathering. Any information which indi-.
cates that it comes from these'. sources is. handled through
separate classification channels and is stored in; separate
safes. As a result, th' information cannot be routinely re-
ferred to in policy papers or at meetings in which people are.
present who do not have the clearances involved. If the
simple fact that such operations were going on were
* For more sweeping recommendations, see Morton H. Halperin
and Jeremy Stone, "Secrecy and Covert Intelligence Collection
and Operations," in None of Your Business: Government,Secrecy
in America, ed. by Norman Dorsen and Stephen Gillers (New York:
Viking Press, 1974).
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32
acknowledged, then it would be possible to abolish the special
clearances which exist for all products of these operations.*
The abolition of the special procedures would make it
possible to open up substantially the decision-making on these
programs, leading to more realistic evaluations as to their
size, scope, and relation to more general policy issues, such
as those raised by the reconnaissance over North Vietnam or by
the EC-121 flying off the coast of North Korea.
in addition, a willingness on the part of the United
States to acknowledge that we engage in such operations, some-
thing well known to everyone, would make it possible to make
public the budgets and the structures of the organizations
which conduct these operations; the National Security Agency
and the Overhead Reconnaissance office could become public
organizations with publicly acknowledged budgets.
Although covert political operations are by their nature
a more difficult problem, the United States could conceivably
.make a general acknowledgment that it has in the past and
might in the future engage in such operations when it felt
necessary--although in some respects a proposal to make them
public is, in effect, a proposal to abolish them. If they
are to continue, steps could be taken to minimize the adverse
consequences of the decision-making process leading to such
operations.
To deal with the problems inherent in its structure, the
CIA should be broken up into two separate organizations: one
an intelligence evaluation organization and the other a small
unit engaging in covert operations. A revised CIA--that is,
the intelligence evaluation unit--should be given a role in
decision-making about ail-covert operations, including evalua-
tions of the likelihood of the success of the programs, of the
implications for other countries of the operations, and,
finally, of the importance of whatever information it is al-
leged will be learned from these operations that will-be of
* When necessary, special clearances or special` restrictions
could still be imposed to'protect the operational characteris-
tics of some of these systems and, perhaps, some part of the
products which involved particularly sensitive means of
detection. % i
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use to American intelligence. The covert operations organiza-
tion should be both publicly known and publicly voted by the
Congress. Its operations should be subject to evaluation not
only by the new CIA but also by those responsible for policy
issues in the State Department, the Department of De-ffen.se, and 11
the White House.
without any axe to grind, without an
d CIA
,
This revise
l stake in competing programs, would provide a much more
i
a
spec
effective evaluation than that which now comes from the opera-
tional side of the CIA. Such a structure could better deal
with some of the problems identified above and begin to evalu-
ate the more basic question of whether the United States
should, in fact, have such programs.
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