SHAKING UP THE C.I.A.

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CIA-RDP99-00498R000300030003-6
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February 28, 2007
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3
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July 29, 1979
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Approved For Release 2007/03/01 : CIA-RDP99-00498R000300030003-6 Approved For Release 2007/03/01 : CIA-RDP99-00498R0003000 ARTICLE APPEAR.' D ON PACE THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE 29 July 1979 SHAKING UP THE C.I.A. By Tad Szulc immy Carter was furious. He sat in . the Oval Office on this chill Novem- ber day, staring at the note paper be- fore him. Riots, were sweeping 1, Iran. The Shah had just been forced to impose a military gov- ernment on his nation. And the .President of the United States hadn't even known a revolution was coming - had, in fact, been assured all along by the American intelli- gence community that there was no such danger. Mr. Carter lifted his pen and wrote: "I am not satisfied with the quality of political intelligence." The notes were addressed to "Cy," "Stan" and "Zbig" - Secre- tary of State Cyrus R. Vance, Director of Central In- telligence Stansfield Turner and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. PTAT r Those handwritten messages of last Nov. 11 were not the President's first expression of concern over the state of American intelligence, but they were by all odds his strongest. They removed any doubts of White House determination to force change upon the intelli- gence apparatus. It had failed him in a most astonish- ing manner. A nation Jimmy Carter considered America's linch- pin of stability in the Middle East, a nation in which the United States had essential strategic and economic stakes, was in the midst of a profound crisis. By Febru- ary, Mr. Carter would see Shah -Mohammed Riza Pahlevi's government replaced by a radical Islamic re- Tad Szulc is a Washington writer who specializes in international affairs. AnnrnvPrl Fir RPIPacP 9nn7/nY/n1 ? rIA-RnPAa-nn4ARRnnnRnnnRnnn3_F Approved For Release 2007/03/01 : CIA-RDP99-00498R000300030003-6 gime with which the United States { had established no contact. The I loss of America's secret tracking stations that monitored Soviet missile testing would damage prospects for Congressional ap- of the latest strategic arms proval limitations talks (SALT II.) The cutoff of Iranian oil production would spark shortages that plague American motorists to this day. Yet the President, until the end was almost at hand, had not known the depth or extent of the Shah's problems. That kind of failure over the last few "I years has led to the most comprehensive shake-up in the history of the nation's intelligence community. A major reorganization, begun early in 1978, continues. Special groups have been created to critique the com- munity's efforts, including a new top-level unit, the Political Intelligence Working Group, that ? is forcing traditionally turf-conscious agencies to work together. Hundreds of Central Intelligence Agency operatives have been fired, sending the organization's morale already low following the traumatic investigations of the mid-70's -plummeting to new depths. Congress is putting together legislation that would, for the first time, legally define the powers of, and limitations on, the intelligence community. Only a few years ago, the C.I.A. and its partner agen- cies. were being attacked as too aggressive and too powerful. Now, irony of ironies, some of the same liberals in Congress and the Administration who had led the charge have begun to worry over the failures in political intelligence. And they are calling upon the C.I.A. to assert itself, to take a greater role in policy formulation. The watchdog Senate Select Committee. on Intelligence is actually approving clandestine missions that would have been taboo as recently as 1976. Meanwhile, the uproar over the na- tion's intelligence record has come full circle. The brickbats are no longer re- served for the "producers" of intelli- gence, such as the C.I.A. Critics charge that preconceptions and misconcep- tions on the part of the "consumers," the top policy makers, have prevented good decisions, regardless of the qual- ity of the intelligence material pre- sented them. The "consumers," of course, are primarily the National Se- curity Council - and an angry letter- writer named Jimmy Carter. THE GATHERING STORM I "We will continue to anticipate tomorrow's crises as often as we can," says Adm. Stansfield Turner. "But our record here will never be as good as we would like it to be." Admiral. Turner rules an empire with an estimated an- nual budget of $15 billion and an army of tens of thousands, at home and abroad, overt and covert. But uneasy lies the head that wears that crown; the record of Admiral Turner's troops is not as good as his peers and masters would like it to be. Since Harry Truman carved the C.I.A. out of the wartime Office of Spe- cial Services in 1947, the chief of that or- ganization has also been responsible in theory for the larger intelligence com- munity. Hence Admiral Turner's offi- cial title: Director of Central Intelli- gence/Director of the Central Intelli- gence Agency. But keeping rein on the dozen or so elements of the intelligence community can try a Director's soul. The C.I.A., the mainspring of the community, is a single, clearly defined entity. The other members of the community are a dis- parate lot, ranging from the Penta- gon's National Reconnaissance Office, with its spy-in-the-sky satellites, to a Treasury Department unit that collects foreign financial data. Thus the Direc- tor of the community faces a built-in division of loyalty: The offices of the Department of Defense that collect for- eign intelligence, for example, operate within a military hierarchy as well as within the intelligence community hier- archy. yoMT14V u ,j Approved For Release 2007/03/01 : CIA-RDP99-00498R000300030003-6 Over the years, that arrangement has helped make the Directorship one of the more notorious revolving-door jobs in Washington. Between 1973 and 1977, for example, four men - James R. Schlesinger, William E. Colby and George Bush - held the post. Probably the only Director who actually suc- ceeded in exercising full control over the intelligence community as a whole was the imperious Allen W. Dulles, who was forced to resign seven months after the C.I.A.-sponsored Bay of Pigs disas- ter of 1961. Admiral Turner was given a decisive leg up in the struggle. Eighteen months ago President Carter issued an execu- tive order that, for the first time, gave the Director budgetary control over all elements of the intelligence communi- ty. Just how long Admiral Turner - a controversial figure in his own right - would be around to enjoy the benefits of that change, however, has been a mat- ter of conjecture. The Admiral is trim and earnest, a 55- year-old intellectual who was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University after graduation from Annapolis. He was sworn in as Director by Jimmy Carter in 1977; Senate opposition had led Mr. Carter to drop his first candidate for the job, former Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorensen. Those who have worked with the Ad- miral say he's "tough" and "mean." Presumably they were necessary qual- ities for a man who commanded fleets for the United States and for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and who was in charge of Allied Forces Southern Europe. Presumably they came in handy on his C.I.A. assignment. But the Admiral has drawn different kinds of comments of late, the kindest of them being "inept." The White House staff complained that he had failed to breathe new life into the C.I.A. There was a pronounced coolness to- ward him at the top of the Defense De- partment's intelligence establishment. Many of the Congressmen involved in C.I.A. oversight were dissatisfied. And he was not liked within the agency it- self. For close to a year, there has been insistent speculation that Admiral Turner was on his way out of the job. However, there is some doubt that the President would wish to give the re- volving door another turn so soon. Mr. Carter's executive order of Jan. 24, 1978, calling for reorganization, was not greeted with great enthusiasm throughout the intelligence communi- ty. It was, after all, the first public sign of the deep discontent the community's top consumers were feeling about prod- uct quality. Moreover, it arrived on the heels of two of the worst years in the community's history. Attacks on the C.I.A. and its sister agencies traditionally focus on interfer- ence with the rights of other nations, or with the rights of American citizens. And it was the illegal surveillance at home and abroad of American citizens suspected of antiwar activism that brought down on the C.I.A.'s head the Congressional investigations of 1975 and 1976. The agency's dirty linen was piled sky high: secret assassination plots against Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and Fidel Castro in Cuba ... sub- version of the Marxist regime in Chile ... mind-control experiments with dan- gerous drugs .. unlawful ties with American journalists and academics. The necessity for the gathering of for- eign intelligence was never seriously in question. For a President to make in- formed decisions about arms-limita- tion talks or oil imports, he requires some kind of intelligence-gathering and analysis apparatus. But the Congres- sional revelations led to demands that the intelligence community cease in- fringing upon individual liberties, and forsake its aggressive role in the mak- ing of foreign policy. Congress named a total of eight committees in both houses to oversee C.I.A. operations. The intelligence community was shaken, but its problems were just beginning. Having been tried and con- victed in the public eye on charges of being unethical, it was up on charges of being inefficient. The issue was apparently first raised by National Security Adviser Brzezin- ski at a dinner given by Admiral Turner at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., on Oct. 27, 1977. Brzezinski complained to the senior officials present that the intelligence community had allowed its human-intelligence (known in the trade as "HUMINT") skills in gathering political data to decay because of the increased emphasis on technical intelli. gence - essentially the use of elec- tronic and photographic devices. The data and information he was receiving at the White House, he said, fell far short of the mark in terms of policy- making requirements. (He noted along the way that he had stopped reading telegrams from most American ambas- sadors abroad because they provided no coherent assessment of political situations.) . Meanwhile, the staff of the National Security Council, the President's chief policy-making body for international affairs, was undertaking a full review of American security and intelligence, and that led ultimately to President Carter's executive order. Ten days be- fore that order was issued, Brzezinski wrote forceful secret memorandums to 3 Admiral Turner and Secretary Vance expressing his unhappiness over the quality of American political intelli- gence. Among his complaints: a lack of basic source material and, as one of his associates put it, a lack of emphasis on "making sense." There were other critics. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, in a report issued last spring, took the com- munity's "political-social analysis" record to task. In some instances, the committee found, "the performance of specialized public sources," such as trade publications, "equated or ex- ceeded that of the intelligence com- munity." The community was said to emphasize current developments at the expense of analysis, and to have a lim- ited ability to integrate political and economic factors in those analyses it produced. Ray Cline, former C.I.A. Deputy Di- rector for Intelligence, says that the agency's political intelligence skills "fell into disuse" in the late 1960's as a result of high-level decisions to econo- mize by cutting down on detailed re- porting from the field - "in favor of summary analytical reporting." But, he insists, "if you don't have patient ac- cumulation on political and economic events and trends, you're at a loss for relevant estimates when new data come in." The critics have no dearth of specific instances of community failure: ? A still-classified Senate committee study claims that the C.I.A. led the Ad- ministration to believe that Cuba was actively behind the 1978 invasion of Zaire's Shaba province by exiles at- tacking from Angola, an assessment that has never been adequately docu- mented. It led President Carter to pub- licly denounce the Cubans for mounting the invasion, to his subsequent extreme embarrassment. ? When the President announced in 1977 his plans to reduce the United States military presence in South Korea, he was not aware of the extent to which the North Koreans had been building up their armed forces since 1970. Army intelligence campaigned for a full review, but was ignored for { nearly a year; only last spring did the community finally conclude that there were 550,000 to 600,000 troops arrayed in North Korea rather than the 450,000 it had previously reported. And nine days ago the White House officially an- nounced the indefinite suspension of troop withdrawals, citing "security considerations." = CONTi1V ~1FD Approved For Release 2007/03/01 : CIA-RDP99-00498R000300030003-6 years the Director of Central Intelli- break out in 1978, but the top-secret gence, was named Ambassador to Iran document did discuss in long-range b terms the viability of the Iranian by President Nixon in 1973. armed forces, the political attitudes of There was, however, some question Iranian students at home and abroad, about Savak's effectiveness. A senior ! and the growing disaffection in the American official well acquainted with its operations commented, "Savak cities. Some agency officials say that wasn't all that good.... Though it did the authors of the 1975 estimate had ac- all right on Soviet clandestine opera- tually tried to "talk up" a better overt trated by the Russians.... Savak also overreacted when it came to any politi- cal opponents. One time, in 1977, its agents badly beat up some innocuous kids in Teheran. So it was the sort of thing that just added to the pressures for the Shah's overthrow." had been ignored by their bosses. On March 18, 1978, the Shah an- nounced what would be the first of a series of concessions - the release of 385 prisoners. But day after day, through May and into June, the demon- strations and riots continued, as did the 5 The C.I.A.'s confidence in the Shah knew no bounds. In mid-September, as part of a routine rotation of personnel and as though no crisis existed, a new, station chief, Horace Fleischman, was installed in Teheran. He had been serv- ing in Tokyo. I There is general agreement today that the worst period of the "intelli- gence gap" ended in. September. The C.I.A. station acquired a Farsi-speak- mg officer who could pick up the gossip in the bazaars. Ambassador Sullivan's reports home were taking on a more worried tone, as were those of the C.I.A. station. Strikes were erupting all over Iran -. in the oil fields, the refin- eries, the banks. Yet even as the intelligence gap was being closed by the "producers" in the field, another gap was yawning among the intelligence "consumers" back in Washington. Pessimistic views were being consistently rejected by the White House in general, and by Na- tional Security Adviser Brzezinski in particular. He remained convinced that the Shah should and would survive, and he was receiving assurances to this effect from Ardeshir Zahedi, the Ira- nian nian Ambassador in Washington, whom he had selected as one of his principal sources of information. He had other, outside sources as well, including some There was a third leg to the basic in-' flow of assurances from the Iranian telligence relationship in Iran - Mos- Government that all was, in fact, under sad, the Israeli secret service. Mossad control. Ambassador Sullivan was tell- did not labor under the same kind of ing Washington that things were "stir- self-imposed limits as did the Ameri- ring," but not enough to prevent him cans. Moreover, they enjoyed the ad- from flying home for a summer vaca- vantage of a major source of informa- tion at the end of June. The British Am- tion in the influential Jewish com- bassador, Sir Anthony Parsons, with munity of 80,000 in Iran. Thus, Israeli whom Sullivan was in close contact, left Ambassador Uri Lubrani was able to on vacation at the same time. correctly inform a visiting United Ambassador Sullivan returned to Te- States senator in 1976 that the greatest heran late in August. On Sept. 7, mar- danger to the Shah came from the con- tial law was declared, and the following servative Islamic clergy. And early in day, in Teheran, Government troops 1978, the Israeli Embassy in Washing- fired into protesting crowds; the oppo- ton sought to alert the State Depart- sition claimed that thousands of civil- ment to danger signals in Iran. (It was fans were killed. repeatedly assured that all was well From Baghdad, the Ayatollah Kho- with the Shah.) meini called upon the Iranian armed William H. Sullivan arrived in Tehe- forces to rise against the Shah. In Qum, ran in June 1977 to replace Helms as the Ayatollah Shanat-Madari asked for American Ambassador. (Sullivan's background included a stint as Ambas- sador to Laos, during which he in effect ran the "secret war" of the C.I.A. and the Air Force against the North Vietna- mese.) He quickly sized up the inade- quacies in the collection of internal political intelligence. Even contacts with the middle-of-the-road opposition, the men who would soon form the Na- tional Front movement, were limited because many of the leaders were in exile and some of the others feared Savak reprisals if they talked to Ameri- cans. There were only three officers in the embassy who could speak the Per- sian. language, Farsi; that was not enough to keep tabs on "the bazaars" - shorthand for the thousands of small shopowners who are the commercial and social heart of the big cities. One source of information the C.I.A. ignored was in its own files, the Na- tional Intelligence Estimate of 1975. It identified the Islamic religious com- munity, including Khomeini, as a basic cause of future unrest. It did not, of course, predict that a revolution would Iranians who had been among his graduate students at Columbia Univer- sity. "revenge from God against those who During November, Brzezinski appar- so bestially treated our children." And ently persuaded Zahedi to fly to Tehe- in Camp David, Jimmy Carter took time out from his meetings with Egypt's President Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Begin to telephone the Shah and assure him of continued United States support. - What could have led President Carter to go out on such a limb? One factor was a report produced by the C.I.A. on Aug. 16, following three days of riots in Isfahan and presented to Mr. Carter personally by Admiral Turner in the course of a regular Wednesday White House briefing. This top-secret, 23-page document was far less exhaustive a product than the National Intelligence Estimate of three years before, and it took a different tack. Its conclusion: "Iran is not in a revolutionary or even prerevolutionary situation." The re- port stated that "those who are in oppo- sition, both violent and nonviolent, do not have the capability to be more than troublesome. ran to keep him advised of develop- ments. Zahedi's communications were invariably optimistic, and they became the- central influence on American policy decisions. Brzezinski was the principal officer in charge of American policy in Iran. Secretary of State Vance spent most of his time on the Israeli-Egyptian peace negotiations, and was for all practical purposes cut off from Iranian decision making. So were his top deputies. Nor did Admiral Turner play a major policy role - his agency's stock at the White House was that low. A small but telling example of how that had hap- pened was making the rounds of Wash- ington: The C.I.A. had just discovered that Khomeini had written and pub- lished years before a book about his philosophy. The book was said to state precisely what he would do should he come to power. It was the kind of infor- mation an intelligence apparatus might have been expected to turn u automat- CONTINV14 Approved For Release 2007/03/01 : CIA-RDP99-00498R000300030003-6 ically; in fact, it was not found until late in the game, and even then it was a private citizen who happened upon it and informed the agency. Brzezinski was putting ever more trust in the Iranian armed forces to keep the lid on. But there were high- level doubters. In November, Lieut. Gen. Eugene F. Tighe, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, visited Teheran. He came away with the im- pression that the army was trained and equipped to defend the country from ex- ternal attack, but that it had not been taught how to deal with an internal threat. Another November visitor to Teheran was then-Treasury Secretary W. Mi- chael Blumenthal, who upon his return recommended that Mr. Carter get an independent evaluation of the mounting Iranian crisis. On Nov. 28, the Presi- dent asked George W. Ball, a New York investment banker and Under Secre- tary of State in the Kennedy and John- son Administrations, to prepare a spe- cial report. Two weeks later, as Iranian troops were killing at least 40 demon- strators in Isfahan, and Ambassador Sullivan was preparing the evacuation of dependents of American diplomatic and military personnel, George Ball submitted his report to the President, a document the Administration chose not to make public. Ball had come to Wash- ington with his mind pretty much made up that the Shah was finished; his study of the situation had reinforced that view. Ball presented his pessimistic report at a meeting in the Oval Office on Dec. 12, but later in the day, Mr. Carter told a news conference: "I fully expect the Shah to maintain power in Iran and for the present problems in Iran to be re- solved. ... I think the predictions of doom and disaster that came from some sources have certainly not been .realized at all." White House officials said that the "doom and disaster" reference reflected Mr. Carter's unhap- piness with the reporting by the em- bassy in Teheran and the C.I.A. station there. Another Presidential mission was in the works. According to White House sources, National Security Adviser Brzezinski had proposed that he him- self secretly travel to Teheran to get the facts, hiding his presence there as Henry Kissinger had done in Peking in 1971. The President had agreed, but just before the scheduled Dec. 13 depar- ture, Mr. Carter canceled the expedi- tion, convinced that it simply could not remain secret: - Meanwhile, voices were being.raised, particularly in the State Department, about the need for the United States to establish some form of contact with Khomeini, who had moved from Bagh- dad to a suburb of Paris, from where he was running the revolution. Men like Ambassador Sullivan thought that it would be impossible for the Adminis- tration to plan future policies without understanding the Ayatollah, and a sound judgment required a face-to-face meeting. In December, there were ac- tually some secret meetings between a political officer at the American Em- bassy in Paris and Ibrahim Yazdi, an adviser to Khomeini. Yazdi told the American diplomat that the Ayatollah was interested in conferring with a sen- ior United States official, and Ambas- sador Sullivan called Secretary Vance to recommend that the United States send an envoy to meet with Khomeini. Vance agreed, and called Theodore L. Eliot Jr., who had retired three months earlier as Inspector General of the Foreign Service. But the mission was aborted. On Jan. 6, Vance received a telegram from Guadeloupe, site of a summit meeting of Western leaders. It was signed by Brzezinski, who was with the President at the meeting and was speaking in the President's name. The mission to Khomeini was canceled. Later, White House officials would ex- plain that if word of Eliot's trip were to leak out, the mission might be con- strued as undermining the Shah. By the first week of January, Iran was virtually paralyzed by strikes in every sector of the economy. The Shah named Shahpur Bakhtiar, a political moderate, as Prime Minister with a general understanding that he would be asked to organize a transitional govern- ment. Ambassador Sullivan was sure that it signaled the Shah's decision to leave Iran, at least temporarily. Now American policy makers fo? cused once again on the army. Would it stand by Bakhtiar in the immediate post-Shah period and prevent Khomeini from grabbing power? Ambassador Sullivan asked Washington to rush a senior United States military officer to Iran to establish liaison with the com- manders. Air Force Gen. Robert E. Huyser, deputy commander of United States forces in Europe, was tapped for the job. On Jan. 16, the Shah left Iran for Egypt, his first stop in exile. The mili- tary question was no longer academic, but General Huyser and Sullivan had a problem: They were receiving from Washington "tactical instructions" - how to deal with Bakhtiar on a day-to- day basis - when what they wanted was policy guidance. Foil the two men had developed very different assess- ments of the situation. The Ambassa- dor felt the armed forces had been "shellshocked" by the Shah's flight and thought they would split under a severe challenge. He worried that General Huyser was concentrating only on the top brass. The general, on the other hand, felt that the army had adjusted to the loss of the Shah and that morale was so high that they would hold fast if challenged by Khomeini. C.I.A. Station Chief Fleischman agreed with Sullivan. The three men openly discussed their differences, and when Huyser was called to Washington early in Febru- ary, he presented both sets of views. Brzezinski and his aides gratefully ac- cepted General Huyser's estimates. The Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Teheran in triumph on Feb. 1. In Wash- ington, the Administration still ex- pected the Iranian military to hold the fort for Bahktiar. Even at this 11th hour, no alternative policies had been devised. On Feb. 11, following a pro- Khomeini demonstration at an air- force base outside Teheran, the army withdrew to its barracks. The end had come - an historic defeat for one of Washington's most important allies, for the entire American intelligence community and for the Carter Adminis- tration itself. PUTTING BACK THE PIECES The office is quiet, spare: a wooden conference table, a large desk, no ash. trays, some big briefing charts with their transparent overlays. Adm. Stansfield Turner takes his private elevator to the top floor, the seventh, and moves toward his desk: It is Febru- ary 1977, and he has just been con- firmed in his new post. The C.I.A. is emerging from a public battering over its illegal misadventures in the United States and abroad. Morale is in need of a boost. But there is nothing to suggest to the Admiral that, before the year is out, he and the intelligence community will be under concerted bureaucratic. attack and subjected to a sweeping reorganization. Admiral Turner's tenure has seen a dramatic change in the relationship among the members of the intelligence community. The intelligence units of agencies outside the C.I.A., once pretty much autonomous, have been incorpo- _rated into a new chain of ' command Anorov _d For Release 2nn7/n3m1 C;IA- _ fnPgq-nn4ARRnnn3nnn3n_nn3-F_. Approved For Release 2007/03/01 : CIA-RDP99-00498R000300030003-6 under the Director. The Director has Lion Tasking, responsible for I economic and political materi- also been given the power of the purse assigning intelligence units in als spew out of banks of com- over them. Thus, the Pentagon's Na- other directorates to do the ac- puters. Experts in a dozen dis- tional Security Agency, for example, which specializes in such arcane tasks as breaking Soviet codes, has become more responsive to overall intelligence community needs. Moreover, new com- mittees have been created with ex- traordinary powers to poke into the nooks and crannies of the community and to cut across traditional tables of organization. Such moves, plus whole- tual collection of data. (In the jargon of the community, "as- signing" is translated as "tasking.") Within the direc- torate, the assignment job is farmed out among specialists -in PHOTINT (Photographic Intelligence) and HUMINT (Human Intelligence), for ex- ample - who will figure out what community resources to ciplines analyze the results, and finally a report emerges to make its way back up the chain of command through the Director's office to the Na- tional Security Council and, eventually, to the top con. sumer of the intelligence com- munity's product, the Presi- dent. sale firings, plus continuing bureau- cratic hassles, have exacerbated thej morale problem. And there is concern within the community that the legisla- tion now being drawn up in Congress to define the parameters of intelligence! operations will cut further into C.I.A. prerogatives. The central goal of virtually all of these changes is to improve efficiency, to prevent the kind of failure of intelli- gence gathering and analysis that took place in Iran. And the cutting edge of change has been bureaucratic - the reorganization of the community, from a relatively loose assemblage of ele- ments into a tightly structured table of organization (see chart, Page 15). At the top sit Director Turner and Deputy Director Frank C. Carlucci. Re- I porting to them are six deputies, each tap. ' Along with the administrate In addition to Collection tive changes has come a star- Tasking, the Director and tling turnover in the top eche- Deputy Director supervise lons over the past 18 months. three other operational direc- Frank C. Carlucci, for exam- torates: National Intelligence, ple, has taken over as Deputy Science and Technology, Director, second only to Admi- Operations. All are to be in- ral Turner in the community. volved in the Soviet troop. A short, slim bureaucratic in- movement inquiry. The Direc- fighter, the 49-year-old Car- tor also has the authority to lucci is a career Foreign Serv- task member agencies of the ice officer who won high intelligence community. For marks as ambassador in Lis- this inquiry, he calls upon the bon during the Portuguese National Reconnaissance Of- revolution of 1975, but he also fice and the National Security served as director of the Office Agency, both Pentagon-con- of Economic Opportunity and trolled operations, in other domestic posts tinder At the supersecret National the Nixon Administration. of whom supervises a number of spe- Center, part of the Science and cialized offices. And within each office, Technology directorate, spe- the personnel may be all C.I.A. or a mix cialists are instructed to of C.I.A. and other agency staffers. The search high-resolution photo- theory is that the integration improves graphs from satellites and U-2 reaucratic, to a degree not en- coordination among the elements, mak- spy planes for details of the joyed by Admiral Turner. community on any given assignment. Moreover, the six directorates make it more easily possible for those seeking to apportion blame to pin the tail on the right donkey. How does the intelligence complex actually operate when confronted with a problem? The following scenario re- flects the community's workings as of the summer of '79. Assumption: The United States Gov- ernment becomes aware of a sudden, unexplained movement of Soviet troops in Eastern Europe. In the National Security Council, it is the Special Coordination Committee that considers what is officially de- scribed as "sensitive foreign-intelli- gence collection operations." The Na- tional Security Adviser takes the chair; the Director of Central Intelligence, the Secretaries of State and Defense, the Attorney General and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are in attend- ance. The Director of Central Intelligence tional Reconnaissance Office, sponsibilities is his role on the which spends the largest share Political Intelligence Working of the intelligence communi- Group, created this year with ty's budget, may be asked to no public notice to find ways of send new satellites aloft. The improving the product. Under National Security Agency or- Secretary of State for Political ders a major new campaign of Affairs David D. Newsom and electronic eavesdropping on Deputy National Security Ad- coded Soviet communications. viser David L. Aaron are the Meanwhile, the Deputy Di- rector for Operations, the cloak-and-dagger chief, has alerted his network of agents around-the world to be on the lookout for information bear- ing on the Soviet troop move- ments. More specifically, he has set his operatives in East- ern Europe and the Soviet Union itself to ferreting out the reasons for the moves. All the data stream in to the directorate for National Intel- ligence. Here the thousands of bits and pieces are shaken down and pored over; related other members of the group, which has no chairman but op- erates with a small staff. It conducts regular studies on what it calls "vulnerable coun- tries," recommending priori- ties in political and sociologi- cal intelligence reporting in the field by embassies and C.I.A. stations. The principal objective of the organization is to improve the coordination of overt and covert reporting by the State Department and the C.I.A.; they are now under orders to work together, pooling their is instructed to find the information necessary to understand the scope and intent of the Soviet troop movement. Upon his return to his Langley, Va., base, he calls in his Deputy for Collec- I President Carter named him to his current post in 1978. He has the respect of virtually all the power centers of Washing- ton, legislative as well as bu- 7 Approved For Release 2007/03/01 : CIA-RDP99-00498R000300030003-6 assets; rather than pursusing the kind of separate operations typical of the past. In the course of its coordinating ef- forts, the group takes up such matters as "nominal" versus "integrated" covers for C.I.A. personnel in the embassies. A "nominal" cover is usually known to the host govern- ! ment; an "integrated" cover is deeply concealed. Another new community leader charged with increas- ing coordination among agen- cies is Lieut. Gen. Frank A. Camm, who runs Collection Tasking, a new C.I.A. post. A lanky, 6-foot 4-inch native of Kentucky, he holds graduate degrees from Harvard (engi- neering) and George Washing- ton (international relations) and has helped to run the Corps of Engineers and the Atomic Energy Commission. He's been given the job of set- ting priorities within the com- munity as to who will do what jobs and how the available re- sources in terms of people and money will be expended. Under General Camm's wing, for example, is the newly created National Intelli- i gence Tasking Office, staffed by representatives of the civil- ian and military agencies that make up the intelligence com- munity along with the C.I.A. The center is intended to "coordinate" the intelligence units of these agencies, units that had been relatively au- tonomous before President Carter's Executive Order forced cooperation upon them. The Energy Department, for example, is charged with overt collection of all informa- tion on energy matters abroad, and it cooperates with the C.I.A. in preparing against the day terrorists might try nuclear thefts. The Treasury Department collects foreign financial and monetary data. The Drug Enforcement Ad- ministration is supported by the C.I.A. (abroad) and the F.B.I. (at home) in rooting out international networks of nar- cotics smugglers. The State Department's Intelligence and Research Bureau specializes in analyzing information flow- ing from American embassies and consulates abroad. The Pentagon's Office of Net As- sessments is concerned with the balance of strategic and conventional forces between the United States and the Soviet Union. The net-assessments func- tion is a bone of contention be- tween the Pentagon and the C.I.A., the kind of issue that suggests why there's a need for coordination. The Defense Department insists that with- out access to the most classi- fied aspects of the United States defense posture - ac- cess that the Defense Depart- ment denies to the C.I.A. - net assessment should not be made. Let the C.I.A. stick to its collection of information on the war-making potential of foreign nations, says the Pen- tagon, and leave the weighing of the balance of forces, histor- ically a military-command function, to the military. Admiral Turner protests that his agency "is not in the business of making net assess- ments nor does it intend to get into it." However, he does add that through the National In- telligence directorate the C.I.A. is "trying to find ways to make our assessments more meaningful [and] this inevita- bly involves some compari- sons...." The single most criticized area of intelligence activity is now centralized in the direc- torate of National Intelli- gence, which is responsible for maintaining the flow of data and analysis, short-and long- term, to policy makers. This army of 1,500 analysts is com- manded by Deputy Director Robert R. Bowie, a dapper, 69- year-old lawyer, educator and foreign-policy specialist whom Admiral Turner hired in 1977. He had once been chairman of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, but this is his first job in the intelligence community. Specific intelligence assess- ments are produced for Bowie by the corps of National Intel- ligence Officers. Years ago, the Office of Estimates drew on information and views from the entire intelligence com- munity and reached conclu- sions by consensus (with dis- sents footnoted). Today, a Na- tional Intelligence Officer, a specialist in a given area, may seek cooperation from others in the community, but he drafts his own assessment. It is The N.I.O.'s who produce the lengthy National Intelligence Estimates (N.I.- E.'s), sometimes projecting a nation 10 years into the future; these papers, which include dissenting views in the actual text, must be approved by the National Foreign Intelligence Board, made up of the chief in- telligence officers of the com- munity. The trouble with such studies, as members of the community reluctantly admit, is that policy makers have no time to read them. Only the annual N.I.E. on the Soviet Union's strategic posture and intentions has a wide reader- ship. As a rule, policy makers prefer daily current intelli- gence ("the quick fix," as a C.I.A. official calls it) al- though they complain about a lack of in-depth material after something - like Iran - has. gone wrong. All of which poses what Bowie calls "tensions" between long-term and short- term intelligence require- ments. He is constantly urged to provide current intelli- gence, making it increasingly hard to spring analysts loose for the N.I.E.'s and other in- depth studies. Last fall Bowie established the post of National Intelli- gence Officer for Warning, and gave it to Richard Leh- man, a C.I.A. veteran of 30 years. The Pentagon's Strate- gic Warning Staff, which had been primarily designed to provide advance notice of an of major developments through "alert memoranda." It was Lehman's staff, for ex- ample, that warned the Ad- ministration that China would invade Vietnam last February and provided a correct assess- ment of how the situation would develop. Basically, the warning system is geared to situations with a potential for a Soviet-American confronta. tion. A coup d'etat in, say, the Chad, does not trigger alp memorandums. Yet another newly create.- unit is the super-secret "Mos. cow Committee," set up by the C.I.A. this year. It seeks to deal with Soviet efforts to de- stroy American intelligence networks abroad. Meanwhile, Bowie has created a little-known but much-experienced group to oversee the whole collection and analysis effort. The Senior Review Panel is headed by the former Ambassador to Tanza. nia and Yugoslavia, William Leonhart. Its other members are retired Army Gen. Bruce Palmer, a former Vice Chief o Staff, and Princeton Univer. sity Prof. Klaus Knorr, a scholar in the field of intelli. gence. The full-time pane! serves as an in-house critic o1 the quality of intelligence; it i involved at the inception of every estimating process anc in all of the post-mortems. 0 The most demoralized of the departments under Admiral Turner's wing is the director ate for Operations, home of thE cloak and dagger. John N, McMahon, a graying, 50-year cades with the C-1-A., brings quiet demeanor to his post an is said to have considerabl popularity with his subord nates - but he has had an ul hill struggle coping with th body blows his organizatia has absorbed. The Operations responsibi ities are officially defined a _ the collection of "foreign inte ligeace, largely through seen impending nuclear conflict, was absorbed and its role ex- panded by Lehman. It now keeps the Government abreast CONTINUED Approved For R l .asp 2nn7m3/n1 - ('1A-RnP99-nn49RRnnn nnn2nnnl-A Approved For Release 2007/03/01 : CIA-RDP99-00498R000300030003-6 means," counterintelligence missions abroad and "other secret foreign intelligence tasks." But for all the roman- tic and/or grisly tales of its operatives, covert spying today is devoted more to so- phisticated espionage - re- cruiting foreign officials to serve as American spies, for example - than to the subver- sion, political action and guer- rilla warfare of the past. In part, that reflects the in- vestigations of a few years ago; Congressional oversight committees are still sensitive about approving major covert operations, and the National Security Council's Special Coordination Committee (chaired by Brzezinski) is re- luctant to propose "special ac- tivities." Moreover, this change has dramatically af- fected personnel. The agen- cy's paramilitary capability, for instance, has virtually van- ished. Some 27 percent of the C I A 's clandestine services der whether the SALT II treaty was even verifiable. Government experts claimed that because of complex satel- lite and radar surveillance networks around the world, the United States would not be- come blind altogether, even if it takes three or four years to replace fully the stations in Iran. What's more, though no one in Government will dis- cuss the matter in detail, there are other sources of informa- The major outside check on the community, however, is the Senate and House over- sight committees. And it is in the Congress that the most sig- nificant limits ever imposed on the country's intelligence apparatus are now being de- signed, in the form of draft legislation. The so-called "charters," drawn up by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, will cover the C.I.A., the Defense Intelli- THE NEW AGE OF INTELLIGENCE tion concerning new missile gence Agency and the Federal designs, even before they have i Bureau of Investigation. The been test flown. The indica- goal: to define with reasonable tions are that these sources precision the parameters for are human agents who have in spying operations in all fields, some fashion penetrated the including the setting of certain Soviet defense establishment. constraints on what the agen- Thus the human element -! cies are permitted to do. The HUMINT - can still have a central dilemma: how to . major role in strategic intelli- reconcile national-security gence; presumably it will con- needs with the constitutional tinue to do so. "We have to rights of Americans. play all the systems together," Reasonable men may differ a senior C.I.A. official said the on such an issue. The White other day. "Spies tell you that House, for example, opposes there's something unusual on as too cumbersome the com- staff is now 50 years of age or' the ground, say, in the Soviet older; and replacements don't Union, so you order photogra- grow on trees. As Admiral phy and signal intercepts, and Turner recently remarked, then you have to go back to the "You can't just recruit from spy. On the other hand, you the street for the spy shop:" don't want to send a spy to get Recruiting, of course, has what can be obtained from not been a major activity photographs. So it's a syner- within the community of late. getic affair; the problem is During the last two years, the how to get the synergism Admiral has fired more than going." 400 officers in the clandestine El services. The C.I.A. had be- come top-heavy, he says. The public concern over the The personnel cutback has ethics of the C.I.A. was re- damaged the agency's morale flected in the creation of the more than the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Board, investigations and all the other a private citizens' panel ap- criticism put together. pointed by the President and operating from the Executive All of which is not to suggest Office Building next to the that spy satellites and elec. White House. Its members are tropic gadgets have totally Thomas L. Farmer, a Wash- taken over from flesh-and- ington lawyer, chairman; for- blood spies. Covert operations mer Senator Albert Gore of continue, and in at least one Tennessee and former Gov. important instance, they may William S. Scranton of Penn- be taking the place of scien- sylvania. tific hardware. The board reviews all activi- The loss of the missile-track- ties of the intelligence agen- ing stations in Iran was a low cies that might raise questions blow to American surveillance of propriety and legality. It of Soviet strategic testing, and has a mandate to report di- it made some in Congress won- rectly to the President any such flaws. mittee's desire to require the President's personal approval of all major covert operations. The C.I.A. is holding out against Senators who would deny the agency the right to secretly use electronic surveil- lance on officials of foreign countries who hold American citizenship. The committee staff hopes to have a draft completed by Labor Day, in an atmosphere viewed as remarkably favora- ble toward the intelligence community, given past histo- ry. "The environment has changed," says Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, committee chairman. He says that the proposed charter will not in- terfere with the agency's "ability to penetrate the deci- sion-making process of foreign nations." But some members of the intelligence community, given the shaking up they've received of late, feel they're entitled to a few doubts. There has been no obvious change in the status of Ameri- ca's intelligence community. Each morning, the President of the United States still re- ceives the top-secret docu- ment called the President's Daily Intelligence Brief. (Only five copies are produced.) Once a week, the President continues to welcome Admiral Turner or Deputy Director Carlucci to the Oval Office for a half-hour intelligence up- date. The very reorganization that Jimmy Carter has de- manded of the intelligence community indicates his con- tinuing interest - not to men- tion disappointment. Yet the glory days of the C.I.A. seem to have passed. When the Cold War was per- ceived by the nation and its President as representing a clear and present danger, the intelligence community had a special aura. There was little public discussion then of its "efficiency" (which in all like- lihood was no greater than it is today) and Congress tended to look the other way when ques- tions of means and ends arose. There is no lack of major problem areas for the modern intelligence community to ex- plore, from the growing turbu- lence in Latin America and the Caribbean to the strategic issues of SALT II and the eco- nomic threat posed by the Or- ganization of Petroleum Ex- porting Countries. And the C.I.A. is expected by its mas- ters in the White House to come up with the data and analyses needed to deal with those issues. But it is apt to be a more careful, deliberate ef- fort, relying more on elec- tronic tools and patient collec- tion than on the cloak and dag- ger. Approved For Release 2007/03/01 : CIA-RDP99-00498R000300030003-6 On the top levels of the intel- ligence community, there is some uncertainty about that prospect, and considerable re- sentment of the criticism the agencies have attracted. A Senator recently commented, for example, on the failure of today's C.I.A. to play a role on the policy-making level: "They must have some opin- ions." To which a top C.I.A. of- ficial responds: "What is it that they want us to do? It's damned if we get involved in policy and damned if we don't. I guess, on balance, we prefer to stay out of it." The complaints about the agency's efficiency, according' to Admiral Turner, reflect some confusion as to the na- ture of intelligence work. Ac- curate political analysis, he says, "depends upon anticipat- ing and correctly interpreting human action and reaction, some of which is inconsistent,, or irrational, or driven by per- sonal rather than national con- siderations. The best the ana- lyst can do is to alert the deci- sion maker to trends, possibil- ities, likelihoods." As Admiral Turner sees it, the whole process of intelli- gence gathering and analysis is undergoing evolution from what he has called the old- fashioned "military-intelli- gence mentality" to a modern political, economic and socio- logical approach. "We are re- tooling," he says, "trying to understand the world." There is, however, pressure to speed up the process. The Congress and the President are impa- tient. ^ i CONTINUED Approved For Release 2007/03/01 : CIA-RDP99-00498R000300030003-6 President Jimmy Carter PHOTINT Photo Intelligence HUMINT Human Intelligence Collection Evaluation directora Adm. Stanfield Turner Director of Central Intel- ligence and Director of Frank C. Carlucci the Central Intelligence Deputy Director of Cen- lAgency (DCI/DCIA) trol Intelligence (DDCI) Economic Research Political Analysis National Intelligence Officers Zbigniew Brzezinski Assistant to the President for El Intelligence community ONSIDE INTELLIGENCE Lieut. Gen. Frank A. Comm Deputy for Collection Tasking Robert R. Bowie I Deputy for National ntelligence National Intelligence Scientific Tasking Office Intelligence Current Operations PRODUCERS In an effort to improve the quality of its "product," the intelligence community - the C.I.A. and other agencies - has been reorganized. Four of the key new tes are shown at left.