SECRECY & DEMOCRACY THE CIA IN TRANSITION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91-00587R000201050002-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 30, 2011
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: August 11, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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ARTICLE APPEARED
ON PAGE
Rtvm%) LOS ANGELES TIMES
11 August 1985
Secrecy&Democracy
The CIA in Transition
by Stanfield Turner (Houghton Mifflin: $16.95, hardcover, 28S pp.)
Nobody could ever accuse me of being
soft on Stanfield Turner. It was he
who in 1978 prompted the govern-
ment to take me to court for publishing my
own CIA memoir without the Agency's
approval. On page. two of this chronicle of
his own years in the CIA, as President
Carter's Director of Central Intelligence, he
attempts to justify that decision by suggest-
ing that I broke a personal promise to him
guaranteeing him a look at my manuscript.
Turner knows this isn't so, and testified that
it wasn't at my trial. But never mind this
small glitch in his memory. Suffice it to say
there is no love loot between us.
With that understood, - I can honestly
report that there is much about his memoir
that I would recommend to both liberal and
conservative friends. Liberals will take
heart from his staunch opposition to "covert
action"-those CIA dirty tricks aimed at
Reviewed by Frank Snepp
destablizing other governments. Conserva-
tives will delight in the way he snipes at
other Carterites, particularly former Na-
tional Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezin-
ski, whom he blames for the step-up in
covert action that actually punctuated the
last year of the Carter presidency.
When Turner took over as director in
1977, the CIA was hunkering down. Con-
gress had just completed a wrenching probe
of its past excesses. The U.S. withdrawal
from Indochina had brought an end to some
of its most ambitious operations. And public
outrage over CIA involvement in Chile and
the Angola
first shreds of restraining resaiming "o "oversight"
legislation.
Prudence should have counseled the new
director to go slow. He didn't. He came on
like Mr. Clean, determined to shake up the
place, even though by all signs what was
needed was a little soothing tranquility. He
fired or forced into retirement a number of
old-timers, brought in outsiders to head up
the CIA's mayor branches, and sought to
have himself appointed intelligence czar
with the power to hire and fire employees of
all the nation's spy agencies. This was too
much. The resulting controversy very near-
ly completed the demolition work Congress
had started, and by the beginning of his
second year in office, Turner, reportedly,
was on the verge of being fired himself.
From the. self-portrait that emerges in
this. memoir it is readily apparent why he
always seemed the odd man out. Though
he'd acquitted himself famously as a Rhodes
Scholar, NATO commander and as the
innovative president of the Naval War
College, he knew nothing of intelligence
work and was even a little contemptuous of
it. ("Bush leagues" was how he referred to
the intelligence community when he first
learned he was to be director).
Even worse, he brought to his new
assignment an obstinacy and fixation with
protocol that was surely better suited to the
military than to the congregation of bruised
egos and eccentric personalities that made
up the intelligence community in the late
1970x. Worse still, once the old timers began
repaying his intolerance with a bit of the
same, he seemed incapable of keeping things
in perspective. At one point in his book he
tells of firing a CIA operations officer who'd
lied to him about having an affair with a
female agent. Granted, the liaison was
improper and the man's duplicity more so.
He should have been punished for it. But to
suggest, as Turner does, that his control of
the CIA was at stake and that discipline
might have unraveled everywhere if he
hadn't acted decisively seems to tell us more
about his own insecurity than about the
foibles of the CIA's rank and file.
Since Turner came to CIA headquarters
with a preconceived commitment to reform,
he almost had to find something there worth
reforming. And to judge from his book, he
did. He says the entire organization was
cowering in fear of public criticism and that
the covert action cupboard was almost bare.
He claims that the analysts were pedantic,
that they were contemptuous of unclassified
research and of anyone outside the flow of
official secrets, and that the operatives had
no qualms about rewriting the director's
orders to suit themselves. Of the intelli-
gence community as a whole, which nom-
inally he headed as Director of Central
Intelligence, he says that there was more
rivalry than cooperation, with the eaves-
dropping National Agency leading
the pack in
In short, the picture he gives us of the
intelligence community is disturbing indeed.
If you take it at face value, then the CIA's
critics were right in the mid-'70s when they
denounced the agency as a rogue elephant
and a pretty useless one at that.
The question it How much of it do you
take at face value?
As a former CIA officer who labored in
the traces up through 1976, I can say that
Turner's complaints about the analytical
branch have the ring of truth, though I
suspect that some of the deficiencies he
found there were a function of the Carter
Administration's own foreign policy prob-
lems. When a President is reduced merely to
reacting to events abroad, it's difficult for
the CIA's crystal-ball gazers to do the kind
of politically relevant, long-range forecast-
ing that the admiral rightly believes is their
proper function.
As for his complaints about the intelli-
gence community at large, once again he
seems fairly well on the mark: The dozen or
so agencies that make it up are less a tightly
knit fraternity than a confederacy of con-
flicting fiefdoms. But the issue Turner does
not adequately address in his book is
whether this is a bad thing. Fleetingly he
recognizes that the pooling of the awesome
powers of espionage in the hands of a single
intelligence czar could be dangerous, both
for the intelligence business and for the
country. And yet, in the same breath he
argues that efficiency demands it.
In explaining why he couldn't sell this
idea to Jimmy Carter, he says simply that
the President had become too fond of
reading uncoordinated "raw intelligence"
reports from the separate spy agencies. But
it seems just as likely that somebody in the
White House realized that the only intelli-
gence czar this country can safely tolerate is
its principal elected official.
Far and away the moat doubtful of
Turner's judgments are those that have to
do with what he delicately describes as the
"dark science" of espionage. While he's
absolutely correct in saying that "technos-
pies"-high-flying aircraft and other sur-
veillance gadgetry-are steadily upstaging
human spies as important intelligence
sources, he seems to me to carry his
argument too far. In one flourish he tells us
that classic espionage seldom produces any
more than "background" information-a
debatable proposition at best considering
that during part of his own CIA tour the
agency had a productive agent inside the
Soviet foreign ministry and another operat-
ing alongside, the KGB contingent at the
United Nations. What's more, it's obvious
from recent espionage cases involving Sovi-
et agents operating here in the United States
that a well-placed spy network can gather
Continued
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intelligence that's worth its weight
in gold.
Even more troubling is the way
Turner tries to put down the CIA's
spymasters themselves. There's no
question that when he became
director the agency's clandestine
operatives were champing at the
unaccustomed bit of congressional
oversight and were overly sensi-
tive to any hint that they might be
subjected to more of the same. But
what Turner doesn't tell us is that
he went out of his way to deepen
their worries by immediately sig-
naling his intent to pare their ranks
and by bringing in novices from the
Navy, the RAND Corp. and else-
where to see how it ought to be
done. Having just been through an
orgy of investigations, they found
themselves facing move of the
same-only this time from their
own commander in chief. What
remained of that morale buckled.
To make matters worse, Turner's
attitude towards them was at best
condescending, and at times with-
eringly moralistic. Even in his book
he betrays the facile judgments
that made him so inflammatory a
director. At one point he describes
the recruiting of spies-the prima-
ry job of the CIA's espionage
shop-as little more than sales-
manship that any well-trained
salesman could perform. This so
misrepresents the complexities of
espionage that it's difficult to be- -
lieve he really subscribed to it.
Elsewhere he waxes mournful
about the psychological pressures
of spycraft, pictures some of the
CIA's key practitioners as emotion-
ally deformed paranoids, and adds
for good measure that few of them
ever face real danger except per-
haps the always risky temptation
to flout CIA rules and regulations.
Leaving aside whether any of this
is true-and I tend to believe the
picture is overdrawn-can you
wonder that the CIA's spy-han-
dlers had trouble reconciling them-
selves to a director who jneld such
views?
Pr 8, 9KAssaull ot2: q w,
CIA's espionage branch came over
Halloween weekend 1977 when he
launched a spate of firings and
forced retirements to clear out the
deadwood. He claims in his book
that the "Halloween Massacre"
was fully justified by the fact that
nearly 30% of the clandestine
operatives were approaching the
agency's early retirement age. He
also accuses the press of grossly
exaggerating its impact and the
number of operatives affected (no
more than 164 were actually forced
out, he says).
What he doesn't mention is that
because of resulting resentments
and morale problems, as well as
normal attrition, more than 1,000
experienced CIA officials quit the
agency in the next two years and
that he was forced to rehire some of
them on contract simply to meet
daily need
Nor does he really own up to his
own mishandling of the affair.
Though he tells us that embittered
CIA retirees and the press whipped
up a crisis where there didn't have
to be one, the fact is he helped fan
the flames himself by callously
insulting those he'd booted out,
decrying them in the press as
"crybabies" for not taking their
pink slips lying down.
In the end, of course, all of
Turner's missteps might have been
forgiven if he'd excelled at his own
primary job as the nation's princi-
pal "watch officer- and forecaster
of dire events. But unfortunately
he didn't. While technical intelli-
gence sources enabled him to keep
the President one step ahead of the
Chinese invasion of Vietnam in
1979, the Soviet push into Afghani-
stan, and the build-up of Soviet
forces on Poland's borders, he
stumbled badly when asked to
provide political intelligence on the
gravest crisis of the Carter Admin-
istration, the upheaval in Iran. The
main problem, he says, was the
failure of CIA analysts to key on
warning signals that were availa-
ble for all to see. But even this.
explanation deserves to be re-ex-
amined in fight of U.S. intelligence
documents seized during the em-
bassy takeover in Teheran and
recently published by the Iranian
government.
According to these files, CIA
analysts were not so myopic as
Turner claims. As early as 1976
they recognized the shah's insta-
bility, the weakness of his army,
the lethal potential of the religious
mullahs, and, most important, the
blind spots in U.S. intelligence.
Turner had two years to catch up
on all this, and to patch up the
problems. He didn't. His memoir
doesn't explain why.
What it does give us is the
portrait of an enlightened advocate
of intelligence reform-Turner as
he would like to be remembered.
Accordingly, he presents himself as
being fully in favor of Congression-
al oversight, and is sharply critical
of his successor, William Casey, for
not keeping Congress fully in-
formed of key espionage opera-
tions, such as the Contra effort in
Nicaragua. He also professes to
believe that the CIA ought not to
G,
opt for secrecy-for secrecy's sake,
and should attempt to declassify as
much of its research as it can.
All this will be music to the ears
of civil libertarians and liberal
lawmakers-unless of course
somebody thinks to check Turner's
record. In fact, as CIA director, he
did not always distinguish himself
in his dealings with Congress. He
refused to assure the oversight
committee advance notice of im-
portant espionage operations, even
though the law required it, and he
actively fought to water down a
proposed comprehensive "charter"
for the intelligence community,
even though he now claims to favor
one.
Even worse, though you
wouldn't know it from his book, he
sided with those in the Carter
Administration who decided to let
former CIA director Richard Helms
plea-bargain his way out of a
perjury charge after he failed to
testify honestly to Congress. At
stake was whether an intelligence
chief could be punished for flouting
the principles of accountability.
Turner backed those who favored a
soft touch, thus sending the worst
possible signal to those in the
intelligence community who felt
they could cut legal corners with
impunity.
As for his professed commitment
to "openness" in government,
there's a smattering of hypocrisy in
that too. Though he excoriates the
Reagan CIA for trying to manipu.
late press leaks for political pur-
poses, he did it too, through a large
PR staff that he created at CIA
headquarters to flog his own ver-
sion of the truth.
More seriously, during his reign
as director, he fought to exempt
even unclassified CIA files from the
reach of the Freedom of Informa-
tion Act, and through the lawsuit
against me, nailed down a system
of censorship that encompasses
even the unclassified writings of
past and present CIA employees
(hence, this entire review was
handed over to the CIA's censors).
Belatedly, Turner now realizes
the error of his ways. In the preface
of his book, he complains that the
CIA's current board of censors
abused their power in vetoing his
manuscript, arbitrarily snipping
out more than 100 items that
presumably ought to have been left
in. Nobody who believes in the
sanctity of the First Amendment
could do any more than sympathize
with him.
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3,
Still, it's not as if he had not had
fair warning. When another former
CIA director, William Colby, sub-
mitted his memoir to Turner's
censors in 1977, he too encountered
arbitrariness and abuse and com-
plained about both. Turner could
have made adjustments then. But
he didn't. Instead, stung by criti-
cism of his overall performance, he
continued to endorse censorship as
a way of disciplining the CIA's rank
and file. It's only faint consolation
to see him now hoist by his own
petard.
Sapp is the author of "Decent
Internal' An Insider's Account of
Saigon's Indecent End Told by the
CIA's Chief Strategy Analyst in
Vietnam" (Random House).
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