SECRET INTELLIGENCE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01350R000200440001-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 21, 2004
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: September 1, 1977
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

a urrrr ' ~~xa n rn Approved For ReleasW l i 3 : CIA-RDP88-01
Q7 P.C.
SEPTEMBER 1977
Secret Intelligence in, the Twentieth Century
by Constantine FitzGbbon
(Stein and Day; 350 pp.; $10.00)
The CIA's Secret Operations
by Harry Rositzke
(Readers Digest Press; 273 pp.; $12.95)
Paul Blackstock
These two volumes are recent additions
to a series of books that seeks to re-
habilitate the tarnished image of "intel-
ligence" following the disastrous reve-
lations of Watergate and the extended
congressional investigations of 1976,
which Rositzke refers to as "the Year of
Intelligence." Other than this implicit
underlying purpose, the two books have
little in common. Both authors were
engaged in intelligence operations, but
Rositzke's work takes on the format of a
personal memoir, whereas FitzGibbon
has written a popular and often grossly
oversimplified account of the role that
strategic intelligence played in World
War I, in the interwar period, and in
World War 11.
Starting with the premise that intelli-
gence is a "pitting of wits.. .which can
vary from the competition between
friendly gamblers or sportsmen to lethal
hostility between states, religions or
ideologies," FitzGibbon attempts to
evaluate the effect that strategic intelli-
gence (or the lack of it) had on high-
level political and military decision-
making during two world wars. He
served as an intelligence officer at-
tached to General Omar Bradley's staff
during World War 11 and was privy to
Ultra-Secret, the code word for intelli-
gence that the British came by as a result
of having broken the top-secret German
communications'' enciphered by their
Enigma machine-communications the
German high command mistakenly re-
garded as unbreakable throughout the
war. FitzGibbon properly notes that
"the breaking of German ciphers was,
for the British and almost equally for the
Americans, the war-winning intelli-
gence weapon." For this reason his
account is a useful supplement to the
authoritative study by Major General
Sir Kenneth Strong, Men of Intelli-
gence: A Study of the Roles and Deci-
sions of Chiefs of Intelligence From
World War 1 to the Present Day (1971),
which was written while the contrib-
ution to the Allied victory of Ultra-
Secret was still guarded under the high-
est security wraps.
FitzGibbon touches superficially on
strategic deception. the cover plans. and
massive Allied operations that deceived
the German high command during the
spring and summer of 1944 and were
thus a major factor behind the success-
ful invasion of Normandy and sub-
sequent German defeat in the West. His
deprecating, highly subjective evalua-
tion of the operations contrasts sharply
with the glowing, heavily doi umented
account of them by the Britis jjournalist
-Anthony Cave Brown in his best-selling
Bodyguard of Lies (1976). FitzGibbon
ends his survey with a section entitled
"The Third World War" (a phrase bor-
rowed from Solzhenitsyn) that is. an
ill-disguised cold war propaganda tract.
It includes a chapter on Soviet espio-
nage and propaganda, "The Early
KGB," and another entitled "Some
Comments on the CIA."
The author's harsh anti-Russian and
anti-Soviet antipathies run like a red
thread throughout Secret Intelligence in
the Twentieth Century. In an early chap-
ter on "The Okhrana" FitzGibbon be-
trays gross ignorance of the historic Rus-
sian scene when he writes: "The Rus-
sian masses, illiterate in the last cen-
tury, live the life of illiterates in
this....Even an avowed foreign Com-
munist, such as Pablo Picasso; may not
be allowed to show his works to the
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Russian people. lest they be caused to
think or at least to question." Fifteen
chapters later. in what is apparently
meant to be "a chilling expose of KGB
machinations." he writes: When the
Russians realized, in Korea in 1951.
that sheer brute strength was not
enough. they turned increasingly to
subversion. The outcome remains un-
decided. and the Soviet leaders may yet
revert to naked aggression. In which
case it may be assumed that they will
have learned their Chinese lesson, that
their objective will not be a Communist
United States remotely controlled from
,Moscow but rather the physical destruc-
tion not only of the American educated
is a classic of institutional advertising
fur the so-called "cold war mission" of
the agency.
In his preface Rositzke writes that the
book -'naturally focuses on what has
been my major professional interest
from 1946 on, operations against the
Soviet Union. the Soviet intelligence
services, and key Communist parties,"
and that he is mainly concerned to re-
place ignorance and distortion with
fact " Presumably the work is meant to
serve as antidote to such critical
memoirs as Philip Agee's Inside the
Company: CIA Diary (1975) and the
analytical study by victor %larchetti
and John D. Marks. The CIA arid the
Cult of Intelligence (1974). This im-
pression is reinforced by Rositzke's can-
did account of the "severe restrictions"
he imposed on himself "in writing this
open account' '-restrictions so severe
that they unwittingly refute his claim
that "for the historian it will supply
some footnotes to the Cold War. [andj
for the student of America's foreign
policy a record of the interplay between
open and covert diplomacy."
classes (as in Poland) but of America as
a whole." Since in the same chapter the
author writes with disarming candor. "I
have no direct knowledge of secret intel-
ligence, in any form since 1946." he
might better have left well enough
alone, ending his account with World
War II instead of marring an otherwise
pleasantly informative historical survey
with the crudest kind of cold war pro-
paganda that reads as if it were written
in the 1950's. The same observation
applies to FitzGibbon's sparse, depre-
cating, and ill-informed chapter on the
CIA. Here one is reminded of Pope's
evaluation of the verses of Dryden: too
mean for comment.
In sharp contrast to FitzGibbon's
chronicle. Harry Rositzke's The CIA's
Secret Operations: Espionage. Coun-
terespionage and Covert Action, with
an introduction by Arthur M.
Schlesinger. Jr., is very well informed
on CIA operations, since it is based on
twenty-five years of agency experience
in a wide variety of assignments, mainly
in clandestine collection (espionage).
counterespionage, and covert action.
Rositzke discusses the latter under three
categories in chapters nine to eleven.
dealing with propaganda. paramilitary
and political operations respectively.
These mixed autobiographical and de-
scriptive sections are followed by "The
CIA at Home" (a survey of domestic
operations). and "The CIA at Bay." a
spirited defense of the agency against
"attacks" from the press. especially the
New York Tunes. and from various con-
gressional investigations. A controver-
sial final chapter. "The Future of Secret
Operations." reads as if it were written-
by the ghost of the late Allen Dulles.
former director of Central lntelligcncr~
whose The Craft of Inc pr~t4\q?~6kpr
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The clandestine services about which
Rositzkc writes include espionage,
counterespionage, and covert political
action. In seeking to put the best possi-
ble face on the CIA's clandestine opera-
tions, Rositzke both minimizes their
scope and, throughout the entire book,
takes the line that the CIA acted merely
as it faithful servant of the Pentagon in
the clandestine collection of "vital"
military secrets, or as a loyal tool of the
president in its covert operations. In his
thoughtful introduction to the work
even Arthur Schlesinger, a vintage cold
warrior in his own right, takes exception
to this kind of special pleading as fol-
lows: "While there is some truth in this,
I think that [Rositzkel pushes the idea of
an innocent and obedient CIA, acting
only on 'express' presidential instruction
and authorization, a good deal too far.
The record, as I read it, indicates that
the'Agency acted on its own in a diver-
sity of ways, some of very considerable
importance."
Soviet alter ego, the KGB. into covert
political action around the globe during
the cold war. But this is precisely the
kind of "forward strategy" that
Rositzke recommends in his final chap-
ter on "The Future of Secret Opera-
tions." Viewed in the light of what the
Soviets call "stupid bourgeois objectiv-
ity," Rositzke's memoir is unwitting
testimony that the CIA's covert political
actions have been oversold, overused
and, at best, in his own words. "can be a
useful, if minor, standby for American
diplomacy."
Rositzke's special pleading leads him
into numerous underestimates on the
one hand and to gross exaggerations on
the other. For example, in his preface he
writes that the public record is "unbal-
anced for the simple reason that CIA's
espionage and counterespionage opera-
tions...have formed at least eighty per-
cent of the work of all CIA's operations
officers from the mid-fifties on. Covert
actions have occupied only a small por-
tion of our man-hours...." This pa-
tently absurd estimate must certainly
come as a surprise to such former
operators as Philip Agee, Miles Cope-
land (The Game of Nations, 1963), and
John Burkholder Smith, author of a
candid autobiographical memoir, Por-
trait of a Cold Warrior (1977). The
latter catches the early enthusiasm and
later disenchantment with CIA's cold
war mission better than any single book
of its kind.
The CIA clandestine activities train-
ing manual used at the time of the Day of
Pigs fiasco has a wonderfully descrip-
tive phrase warning about "corruption
by the tools of the trade." There is also
inherent in all clandestine collection
services*a confusion of means with ends
(a point that Schlesinger emphasizes in
his preface). Moreover, there is a built-
in, inescapable urge to move from col-
lection to covert action, the manipula-
tive syndrome, which has been a major
factor impelling both the CIA and its
Approved Fo
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