A NEEDED CAPABILITY JEOPARDIZED: COVERT ACTION IN THE WAKE OF THE IRAN-CONTRA HEARINGS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90M01264R000100050003-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 18
• Document Creation Date: December 27, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 7, 2012
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: August 10, 1987
• Content Type: REPORT

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A Needed Capability Jeopardized:
Covert Action in the Wake of the Iran-Contra Hearings
by George A. Carver, Jri,A.
The Iran-contra hearings, now mercifully ended, make one think
of Shakespeare. To paraphrase Mark Antony (in Julius Caesar), the
evil men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their
.reports. Even more pertinent, particularly in the hearings'
aftermath, is Lady Macduff's plaint (in Macbeth) at being,
"... in this earthly world, where to do harm
Is often laudable; to do good, sometime
Accounted dangerous folly ..."
These Shakespearean aphorisms apply with pa'ticular force to
something much-debated but little understood, inside or outside the
hearing room or even, alas, in the Reagan White House: covert action.
An intelligence officer for twenty-six years -- Special Assistant
to three Directors of Centeral Intelligence, Deputy for National
Intelligence to two DCIs and for three years, Chairman of the U.S.
Intelligence Co-ordinating Committee in Germany -- George Carver is
now the John M. Olin Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies in Washington, D. C.
This essay was published, in its entirety, in the Opinion section of the Sunday,
16 August 1987 edition of The San Die So Union, in the Commentary section of the
Monday, 17 August 1987 edition of The Washington Times, and was nationally
syndicated by the Copley News Service.
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Successful foreign policy, as de Toqueville observed, requires
secrecy and patience. Washington abounds in neither, at either end
of Pennsylvania Avenue, which is far from the least reason why many
of our foreign policy ventures are notably unsuccessful. Covert
action is a special, often useful and sometimes essential form of
secret diplomacy, practiced from time immemorial by all manner of
tribes, kingdoms and nations to further their interests and those of
their friends or allies, or thwart the designs of their adversaries,
in situations where it is deemed desirable or necessary to mask the
hand of the action in question's true instigator or sponsor. Before
we condemn this as invariably sinister, we should remember that we
would never have won our War of Independence and become a free nation
without French and Spanish covert action support, initially handled
with great secrecy to keep the donors from becoming openly embroiled,
themselves, in a direct conflict with George III's Britain. We
should also remember that for similar reasons, private individuals
often act in a similar fashion. A benign mother or aunt who tries
"to bring two young people together" without being an obvious
matchmaker is engaging in covert action, as is anyone who tries to
break up an alliance which that person considers ill-advised, without
getting counter-productively caught in the process.
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There are many similarities between covert action and a
scalpel. Neither can be successfully wielded by a committee. Like
covert action, a scalpel is useful, even essential in certain
situations, though disaster can quickly result if it is not
skillfully.employed, with a deft and sure hand, by someone who knows
what he or she is doing. Surgeons do not forgo scalpels because if
inappropriately or clumsily used they can inflict great injury, even
cause death. Similarly, covert action -- despite the risks its
employment . engenders -- is a tool of statecraft no nation should
forgo, and very few do. In dealing with the United States, for
example, virtually every nation in the world supplements its open
diplomacy with various forms of covert action -- or unadvertised,
unacknowledged lobbying -- attempting, with varying degrees of
success, to influence our opinions and actions in ways congenial to
the nation in question's perception of its interests. Our
adversaries are by no means the only ones to essay this game; indeed,
no one plays it more indefatigably, or successfully, than one of our
closest allies -- Israel.
To stand any reasonable chance of being successful, a proposed
or contemplated covert action must meet several tests. Conceptually,
it should reflect a sense of proportion and perspective. Immediate
desires and objectives, such as freeing hostages, should never be
allowed to obscure or put at risk larger, long-term national
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interests, such as punishing and curbing terrorism. It should also
be sensible, running with -- never against -- the grain of local
reality in the area in which the operation in question is to be
attempted.
Like surgery, covert action should be conducted by trained,
experienced professionals, not entrusted to zealous, well-meaning
amateurs with more energy than judgment, whose warheads are better
than their guidance systems. By definition, no covert action should
be undertaken unless there is a reasonable. chance of keeping it
secret, and no such action should be conducted in a way that
increases its risk of exposure. Secrecy being hard to maintain under
the best of circumstances, however, the political and other costs of
exposure should be carefully assessed before a final decision is made
to launch any given covert action operation.
Though covert action operations -- again, by definition --
inevitably involve at least some dissimulation and deception, no such
operation should be basically inconsistent or incompatible. with any
important, publicly proclaimed governmental policy. Covert action
functions at the margins of policy -- ideally, in a quietly
supportive way. It can contribute, sometimes significantly, to a
policy's success, but it can never be an effective substitute for
.policy -- or for thought. Furthermore, the most brilliantly
conceived and skillfully executed covert action operation cannot
salvage or redeem a policy that is fundamentally unsound or flawed.
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Providing U.S. arms to Iran, by the planeload, in a bootless
effort to negotiate the release of American hostages for these
already-provided arms failed every test and violated every precept
just outlined. From an American perspective (though not necessarily
from an Israeli one), the Iranian exercise was a disasterous fiasco
-- particularly as a covert action operation. At its end, Iran's
stock of weapons and resultant military capabilities were markedly
increased (which may well have been Israel's primary objective), the
Reagan administration and the United States were gravely embarrassed,
the sound American policy of not negotiating with terrorists was
badly undercut, and-the net number of American hostages held in or
near Lebanon by Shiite militant factions presumably responsive to
Iranian influence, such as Hezbollah, had not diminished but,
instead, had increased by half (from six in the summer of 1985 to
nine in the summer of 1987).
In the process, matters were worsened by grafting the Iran
exercise onto the contra support and re-supply endeavor (another
Israeli suggestion) -- thus violating every professional canon of
compartmentation and sound security in running covert action
operations, with the inevitable result any professional could have
predicted. This was doubly unfortunate since the contra endeavor was
far more sensible and defensible, on its merits, than the Iran
quadrille and should never have been tarred with the latter's brush.
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As a candidate for election, then re-election, and as
President, Ronald Reagan has never made any secret of the fact that
he considers the establishment of a Cuban and Soviet supported
Communist dictatorship in Central America, in Nicaragua, a potential
threat to America's vital interests. Whatever its defects in
detailed conception and in execution, the contra-aid endeavor
directly supported -- and unlike the Iran exercise, did not undercut
or contravene -- well-known, often-ennunciated Reagan administration
policy. In retrospect, it was nonetheless clearly not wise, or
politically astute, to handle contra aid as a covert action
operation. Indeed, 20/20 hindsight strongly suggests that the
country and the Congress, as well as the administration, would have
been far better served if Lt. Col. North -- in open session, with
appropriate publicity -- had given Congress his forceful presentation
of the case for contra aid in 1982, before the passage of the first
of the five "Boland amendments", not at a post-Iran-contra disaster
hearing in 1987.
We can not go back, however, only forward. We should do so,
furthermore, in the realization that ample mistakes have already been
made, at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Mining these errors for
partisan political advantage should not be anyone's primary
objective. Instead, the American people and their elected
representatives in Washington should focus on protecting our nation's
interests, and the capabilities -- including covert action
capabilities -- that any administration, of any party, will need to
safeguard those interests in years ahead.
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Unfortunately, no such focus is currently evident on Capitol
Hill, or in the White House. Instead, there is.only sharp
skirmishing in the unending legislative-executive branch struggle for
foreign policy primacy, a struggle as old as our republic and
ingrained in our Constitution -- which, by design, divides this power
as well as others. Perceiving Presidential weakness, a partisan
Congress is pressing to extend its prerogatives, while an
embarrassed, beleaguered White House seems willing, even eager, to
placate Congress by voluntarily accepting self-imposed restrictions
that Ronald Reagan and his Oval Office successors may one-day
bitterly regret. In this situation, both Congress and the White
House -- as well as America's media and public -- would profit from
recalling some pertinent history.
With little Congressional knowledge and even less
Congressional input, President Thomas Jefferson's representatives --
Robert Livingston and James Monroe -- negotiated the purchase of
"Louisiana" from Napoleon, who shrewdly sold them land he could not
defend. The treaty consumating this purchase was signed, in Paris,
on 30 April 1803 and ratified by a somewhat surprised Senate the
following November. Thus, for an eventual total price of
$27,267,622, Thomas Jefferson -- without any explicit constitutional
warrant to do so -- acquired a block of territory five times the size
of France, in area, and extended America's frontier westward to the
Rockies. With equally minimal Congressional knowledge or input,
Jefferson's successor James Madison directed the covert action
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operations that brought "West Florida" into the Union -- i.e. the
land extending to the east bank of the Mississippi, encompassing what
is now Alabama and Mississipi, plus part of Louisiana, as well as
Florida proper. If Jefferson, the drafter of our Declaration of
Independence, or Madison, the principal architect of our Constitution
had shown -- as President -- the diffident deference to Congress it
is now fashionable to claim that a President is constitutionally
obligated to show, in conducting foreign affairs, our republic would
not now have its present' territorial extent and probably would not
have survived its-perilous initial decades.
Precedents even older than our republic are germane to current
concerns and debates about covert action, and about secrecy. Our
first foreign intelligence and covert action directorate -- the
Committee of Secret Correspondence -- was established by the
Continental Congress in November 1775. That Committee negotiated and
handled the covert French support without which we could never have
won our struggle for independence. Speaking of that support, two of
the. Committee's members -- Benjamin Franklin and Robert Morris --
commented: "We agree in opinion that it is our indespensable duty to
keep it a secret, even from Congress ... We find, by fatal
experience, the Congress consists of too many members to keep
secrets." In this regard, little has changed in over two centuries.
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During the past two decades, the endemic, perpetual
legislative-executive branch struggle over foreign policy has
perceptibly sharpened -- especially as Democratic-controlled
Congresses, partly out of pique and frustration, have tried to hobble
Republican presidents, elected by landslides, and curtail their
discretionary latitude. In the process, Congress has attempted to
insert itself into the managment, even micro-management, of foreign
affairs, asserting authority without accepting responsibility and
essaying a role for which Congress not only has little constitutional
warrant but is also ill-suited -- by organization and temperament --
to perform.
One example of this phenomenon is the 1973 War Powers
Resolution, which President Nixon should have immediately challenged,
on constitutional grounds, and probably would have so challenged had
he not been mired in Watergate. It.still needs to be challenged and,
if possible, rescinded or struck down before a situation arises in
which this act's potential for damage-causing mischief is fully
realized. Indeed, the Capitol Hill Democrats now filing suit to
force-the administration to place its Persian Gulf operations under
the War Powers Act may be doing the republic a 'great, if unintended,
service by subjecting that act to judicial scrutiny and review.
Other obvious examples are the five "Boland amendments" (one
each in 1982, 1983, and 19814, then two in 1985), each of which was
attached to an omnibus, veto-proof "continuing resolution" or
spending bill made necessary by Congress' inability to complete its
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work on time. Not one of these five amendments is clearly or
precisely drafted, no two are consistent with each other, and the
Reagan administration should have forcefully challenged every one,
particularly the first, when it was initially proposed -- not tried
to finesse or evade it after it was passed.
The Boland amendments symptomize and highlight a decidedly
disquieting turn that legislative-executive branch struggles over
foreign policy have recently taken: the attempt by Democratic
Congressional leaders and their media supporters to criminalize
foreign policy differences. This effort set a tone that permeated
the Iran-contra hearings, as evidenced by The Washington Post's
headline over its wrap-up story: "Three Months of Hearings Fail to
Crack the Case". Nothing but bitter divisiveness, damaging to a
whole range of national interests, is likely to result from any
continued effort to make differences of opinion over foreign policy
criminal matters to be resolved by the courts, rather than the
subject of political debates to be settled at the ballot box.
The phenomenon of Congressional assertiveness, with an
attendant penchant for detailed, legalistic documentation, has been
particularly pronounced in the sphere of covert action. In 1974, the
Hughes-Ryan amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961
stipulated that the CIA could spend no funds "for operations in
foreign countries, other than activities intended solely for
obtaining necessary intelligence, unless and until the President
finds that each such operation is important to the national security
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of the United States". This requirement for reporting to the
Congressional intelligence oversight committees was broadened and
tightened in the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1981,
though that act did leave the President the discretionary option of
reporting sensitive covert action activities "in a timely fashion" --
an option the Reagan administration clearly abused in its handling of
the Iran-contra matter, quite understandably irritating Congress in
the process.
Not surpisingly, given Congress' current mood and temper,
several bills to tighten these restrictions even further. are already
in the hopper, including H.R. 1013 -- sponsored by House Intelligence
Committee Chairman Stokes and former Chairman Boland, among others --
which would require the circulation of additional copies of written
Presidential findings, eliminate the "in a timely fashion" provision,
and require advance notice, to Congress, of all contemplated covert
action operations with but one, 48 hour, exception to be used "only
in extraordinary circumstances affecting the vital interests of the
United States, and only where time is of the essence". Similar ideas
were reflected in "suggestions".given the White House by the Senate's
oversight committee, to which President Reagan responded in a
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disquieting 7 August letter that the White House took pains to
publicize. In the present situation, the White House's timorous
defensiveness may be as understandable as Congressional
assertiveness, but both need to be curbed if the national interest is
Those who wrote, passed or issued the restrictions on covert
action now in force forgot or ignored a unique, very important
feature of our Constitution, which all those considering new
restrictions should remember. Our Constitution combines in one
individual, our President, two distinct offices and functions that
virtually all other nations divide: the government's chief executive
and administrative officer -- a partisan political figure chosen (in
America) by election -- and the nation's Chief of State -- a symbolic
focus of national unity supposedly, in that capacity, above the-fray
of political partisanship. As chief executive officer, a President
should certainly be accountable for his and his administration's
actions. Nonetheless, it is by no means necessarily in our national
interest for our Chief of State to sign "findings" or any other
documents directing agencies or officers of the U.S. Government to
infringe upon or violate the laws of other nations with which we are
not in a state of declared war. NSC staff members, national security
advisors, cabinet officers and directors of central intelligence are
all expendable; but in our government, presidents are not. As Chief
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of State, an American President should be able to distance himself or
herself from, even disavow, a covert action that he or she approved,
even ordered, as chief executive. This may sound complicated, but so
is the real world and, hence, effective diplomacy that runs with the
grain of its complex reality.
With respect to covert action, in all its forms and
ramifications, many mis: r,,. 1.~: e clearly been made over the past
several years -- at, again, both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. With
the White House taking the lead, the air.inistration obviously needs
to reform and improve its relevant structures and mechanisms, and
then use them -- not ignore them or supplant them with hip pocket, ad
hoc arrangements. The administration's relations and manner of
dealing with Congress also manifestly need to be improved; for no
matter who may or may not like this arrangement, our Constitution
yokes the legislative and executive branches in a single harness and
unless they can pull together, in tandem, the nation suffers.
To be effective, however, this kind of tandem-harness
partnership requires reciprocal confidence and trust which both
partners must work to build and maintain -- even when the White House
is controlled by one party and the Congress by another. Here, though
the White House clearly needs to clean up and improve its act, so too
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does Congress. For example, Congress should curb its itch to exploit
its power over the purse to exercise negative, blocking authority
over the administration's conduct of foreign affairs unless, at a
minimum, Congress is also willing to aecept.responsibility for its
actions, and their consequences.
Additionally, there is much that Congress needs to do in the
field of secrecy protection. The current Senate. and House
intelligence oversight committees, to cite another example, have a
total of thirty two members, plus four honorary members (the majority
and minority leaders in each house), plus about sixty more people on
the two committee staffs (combined). That makes a total of around a
hundred people on Capitol Hill who, under existing arrangements, are
formally, officially apprised of covert action operations -- and no
matter how these Committees' majorities may rule, any of these
100-odd people, members or staffers, can kill by a pre-emptive leak
any covert action operation of which he or she personally
disapproves. That is not a workable situation if a true covert
action capability is to be preserved. At a minimum, Congress should
give serious consideration to combining these two separate oversight
committees into one joint committee -- with an appreciably smaller
membership and a much smaller combined staff.
In the wake of the Iran-contra hearings, the concerns and
emotions that prompted them, and the additional emotions they
engendered, there is a great danger that the covert action
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.capabilities our nation urgently needs -- for its security and
perhaps even its survival -- will be crimped, emasculated or erased
by a new spate of restrictive laws and regulations hastily written in
a fit of moralistic pique. This might suffuse the drafters and
enacters of such laws and regulations with a transient glow of
self-righteous virtue; but for the country, it would be disasterous.
If this were to happen, harking back to Mark Antony, the Iran-contra
committee -- whatever its intent may have been -- would have done
evil that would live long after that committee was disbanded and its
various reports interred in files.
Particularly for an open, democratic society such as ours, the
issues here involved are thorny and complex. They need to be
carefully, coolly and dispassionately weighed, not hastily decided
under emotional or political pressure. Effective covert action not.
only needs to be covert, by definition, it also needs to be
imaginative, flexible, and quickly responsive to concrete challenges,
problems or situations that can not be predicted, let alone codified,
in advance. The kinds of additional restrictions now being
discussed, in the White House as well as on Capitol Hill, would not
only make effective covert action much more difficult, they could
easily make it impossible.
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-- White House-Capitol Hill consultation on covert action
clearly needs improvement, but an automatic advance notice
requirement, with only rare exceptions, would put Congress
directly into the approval loop, on individual operations, in
ways that would inevitably increase Congress' already
pronounced penchant for micro-management and would have
profound constitutional implications.
-- "Timely" should mean just that, and any month-measured
interval clearly stretches "timely's" meaning beyond
reasonable bounds, but a rigid 248 hour or "two working day"
stipulation would be a strait-jacket too confining for the
real world's exigencies.
-- Key Congressional leaders and all the cabinet-level members
of the National Security Council itself (not the NSC staff),
including the Vice-President, should be apprised of all covert
action operations, but in ways that minimize -- not maximize
-- security risks. Oral briefings to principals (only) can
not be xeroxed. Spreading additional copies of highly
sensitive "findings" around Capitol Hill and the Executive
Branch would increase security risks exponentially, along with
the attendant risk that anyone, anywhere who personally
disapproved of a given covert action -- even one that had
successfully surmounted all formal approval hurdles -- could
kill it by a.leak.
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-- If present restrictions were broadened and tightened,
cautious bureaucrats could easily become skittish about even
attempting to obtain approval for covert action operations
that badly needed to be undertaken.
-- Simultaneously, conscientious intelligence professionals
could easily become very reluctant to embark on an approval
process that could clearly imperil the security and safety of
their indispensable foreign contacts and assets.
-- Additional Congressional involvement in a more formalized
approval process, furthermore, could understandably make
foreign organizations and individuals, whose co-operative
assistance we need, very loathe to put themselves, their
futures and even their lives hostage to our willingness and
ability to protect their secrets when we are demonstrably
incapable of protecting our own.
In our nation's conduct of covert action, the patently
necessary improvements and reforms can not be produced by additional
verbiage, written in legalese. Instead, the leaders of Congress, on
both sides of both aisles, should meet quietly and privately with
senior officials in the administration, including the President, to
ascertain the best way, under our Constitution, to give any President
-- of either (or any) party -- the covert action capabilities, and
the discretionary flexibility, he or she will need in this dangerous,
strife-ridden and now thermonuclear world to "provide for the common
defence", as that Constitution's Preamble puts it, and "secure the
blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."
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In the current climate of political and public opinion,
writing new legislative or executive branch restrictions on covert
action would doubtless be considered laudable, but -- harking back to
Lady Macduff -- would actually do great harm. Quiet, executive-
legislative branch leadership discussions that produce only sensible
compromises and agreements on future procedures -- some of which
could well be secret and not published, even if written -- might be
"accounted dangerous folly", particularly by the media; but for the
nation, that is the approach that would truly do good.
10 August 1987
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