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THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE

SEVEN: Espionage and Counterespionage

The soul of the spy is somehow
the model of us all.
-- JACQUES BARZUN

INTELLlGENCE agencies, in the popular view, are organizations
of glamorous master spies who, in the best tradition of James
Bond, daringly uncover the evil intentions of a nation's enemies.
In reality, however, the CIA has had comparatively little success in
acquiring intelligence through secret agents. This classical form
of espionage has for many years ranked considerably below space
satellites, code-breaking, and other forms of technical collection
as a source of important foreign information to the U.S. government.
Even open sources (the press and other communications
media) and official channels (diplomats, military attaches, and the
like) provide more valuable information than the Clandestine
Services of the CIA. Against its two principal targets, the Soviet
Union and Communist China, the effectiveness of CIA spies is
virtually nil. With their closed societies and powerful internalsecurity
organizations, the communist countries have proved practically
impenetrable to the CIA.
To be sure, the agency has pulled off an occasional espionage
coup, but these have generally involved "walk-ins"--defectors
who take the initiative in offering their services to the agency.
Remember that in 1955, when Oleg Penkovsky first approached
CIA operators in Ankara, Turkey, to discuss the possibility of
becoming an agent, he was turned away, because it was feared that
he might be a double agent. Several years later, he was recruited by
bolder British intelligence officers. Nearly all of the other Soviets
and Chinese who either spied for the CIA or defected to the West
did so without being actively recruited by America's leading espionage
agency.
Technically speaking, anyone who turns against his government
is a defector. A successfully recruited agent or a walk-in who offers
his services as a spy is known as a defector-in-place. He has not
yet physically deserted his country, but has in fact defected politiEspionage
and Counterespionage 185
cally in secret. Refugees and emigres are also defectors, and the
CIA often uses them as spies when they can be persuaded to risk
return to their native lands. In general, a defector is a person who
has recently bolted his country and is simply willing to trade his
knowledge of his former government's activities for political asylum
in another nation; that some defections are accompanied by a
great deal of publicity is generally due to the CIA's desire to obtain
public approbation of its work.
Escapees from the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe are handled by
the CIA's defector reception center at Camp King near Frankfurt,
West Germany. There they are subjected to extensive debriefing
and interrogation by agency officers who are experts at draining
from them their full informational potential. Some defectors are
subjected to questioning that lasts for months; a few are interrogated
for a year or more.
A former CIA chief of station in Germany remembers with great
amusement his role in supervising the lengthy debriefing of a
Soviet lieutenant, a tank-platoon commander, who fell in love with
a Czech girl and fled with her to the West after the Soviet invasion
of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The ex-agency senior officer relates
how he had to play marriage counselor when the couple's relationship
started to sour, causing the lieutenant to lose his willingness
to talk. By saving the romance, the chief of station succeeded in
keeping the information flowing from the Soviet lieutenant. Although
a comparatively low-level Soviet defector of this sort would
seem to have small potential for providing useful intelligence, the
CIA has had so little success in penetrating the Soviet military that
the lieutenant underwent months of questioning. Through him,
agency analysts were able to learn much about how Soviet armor
units, and the ground forces in general, are organized, their training
and tactical procedures, and the mechanics of their participation
in the build-up that preceded the invasion of Czechoslovakia. This
was hardly intelligence of strategic importance, but the CIA's
Clandestine Services have no choice but to pump each low-level
Soviet defector for all he is worth.
The same former chief of station also recalls with pride the
defection of Yevgeny Runge, a KGB illegal (or "deep cover"
186 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
agent) in late 1967. Runge, like the more infamous Colonel
Rudolf Abel from Brooklyn and Gordon Lonsdale of London,
was a Soviet operator who lived for years under an assumed identity
in West Germany. Unlike his colleagues, however, he was not
exposed and arrested. Instead, Runge defected to the CIA when
he lost interest in his clandestine work. According to the ex-agency
official, Runge was of greater intelligence value to the U.S. government
than Penkovsky. This assessment, however, is highly debatable
because Runge provided no information which the CIA's
intelligence analysts found to be useful in determining Soviet
strategic capabilities or intentions. On the other hand, the KGB
defector did reveal much concerning the methods and techniques
of Soviet clandestine intelligence operations in Germany. To CIA
operators who have been unsuccessful in penetrating the Soviet
government and who have consequently become obsessed with the
actions of the opposition, the defection of an undercover operator
like Runge represents a tremendous emotional windfall, and they
are inclined to publicize it as an intelligence coup.
Once the CIA is satisfied that a defector has told all that he
knows, the resettlement team takes over. The team's objective is to
find a place for the defector to live where he will be free from the
fear of reprisal and happy enough neither to disclose his connections
with the CIA nor, more important, to be tempted to return to his
native country. Normally, the team works out a cover story for the
defector, invents a new identity for him, and gives him enough
money (often a lifetime pension) to make the transition to a new
way of life. The most important defectors are brought to the
United States (either before or after their debriefing), but the large
majority are permanently settled in Western Europe, Canada, or
Latin America. *
The defector's adjustment to his new country is often quite difficult.
For security reasons, he is usually cut off from any contact
with his native land and, therefore, from his former friends and
those members of his family who did not accompany him into
• On occasion, a defector will be hired as a contract employee to do
specialized work as a translator, interrogator, counterintelligence analyst,
or the like, for the Clandestine Services.
Espionage and Counterespionage • 187
exile. He may not even know the language of the country where
he is living. Thus, a large percentage of defectors become psychologically
depressed with their new lives once the initial excitement
of resettlement wears off. A few have committed suicide. To try
to keep the defector content, the CIA assigns a case officer to each
one for as long as is thought necessary. The case officer stays in
regular contact with the defector and helps solve any problems that
may arise. With a particularly volatile defector, the agency maintains
even closer surveillance, including telephone taps and mail
intercepts, to guard against unwanted developments.
In some instances, case officers will watch over the defector for
the rest of his life. More than anything else, the agency wants no
defector to become so dissatisfied that he will be tempted to return
to his native country. Of course, redefection usually results in a
propaganda victory for the opposition; of greater consequence,
however, is the fact that the redefector probably will reveal everything
he knows about the CIA in order to ease his penalty for
having defected in the first place. Moreover, when a defector does
return home, the agency has to contend with the nagging fear that
all along it has been dealing with a double agent and that all the
intelligence he revealed was part of a plot to mislead the CIA. The
possibilities for deception in the defector game are endless, and
the communist intelligence services have not failed to take advantage
of them.
Bugs and Other Devices
Strictly speaking, classical espionage uses human beings to gather
information; technical espionage employs machines, such as photographic
satellites, long-range electronic sensors, and communications-
intercept stations. Technical collection systems were virtually
unknown before World War II, but the same technological explosion
which has affected nearly every other aspect of modern life over
the last twenty-five years has also drastically changed the intelligence
trade. Since the war, the United States has poured tens of
billions of dollars into developing ever more advanced machines
to keep track of what other countries--especially communist
188 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
countries-are doing. Where once the agent sought secret information
with little support beyond his own wits, he now is provided
with a dazzling assortment of audio devices, miniaturized cameras,
and other exotic tools.
Within the CIA's Clandestine Services, the Technical Services
Division (TSD) is responsible for developing most of the equipment
used in the modern spying game. Some of the paraphernalia
is unusual: a signal transmitter disguised as a false tooth, a pencil
which looks and writes like an ordinary pencil but can also write
invisibly on special paper, a bizarre automobile rear-view mirror
that allows the driver to observe not the traffic behind but the
occupants of the back seat instead. Except for audio devices,
special photographic equipment, and secret communications systems,
there is in fact little applicability for even the most imaginative
tools in real clandestine operations.
Secret intelligence services in past times were interested only in
recruiting agents who had direct access to vital foreign information.
Today the CIA and other services also search for the guard or
janitor who is in a position to install a bug or a phone tap in a
sensitive location. Even the telephone and telegraph companies of
other countries have become targets for the agency. In addition to
the foreign and defense ministries, the CIA operators usually try to
penetrate the target nation's communications systems-a task
which is on occasion aided by American companies, particularly
the International Telephone and Telegraph Company. Postal services
also are subverted for espionage purposes.
Most agency operators receive training in the installation and
servicing of bugs and taps, but the actual planting of audio surveillance
devices is usually carried out by TSD specialists brought
in from headquarters or a regional operational support center, like
( DELETED ). The more complex the task, the more
likely it is that headquarters specialists will be utilized to do the
job. On some operations, however, agents will be specially trained
by TSD experts, or even the responsible case officer, in the skills
of installing such equipment.
Audio operations vary, of course, in complexity and sensitivity
-that is, in risk potential. A classic, highly dangerous operation
Espionage and Counterespionage • 189
calls for a great deal of planning, during which the site is surveyed
in extensive detail. Building and floor plans must be acquired or
developed from visual surveillance. The texture of the walls, the
colors of interior paints, and the like must be determined. Activity
in the building and in the room or office where the device is to be
installed must be observed and recorded to ascertain when the
area is accessible. The movements of the occupants and any
security patrols must be also known. When all this has been accomplished,
the decision is made as to where and when to plant the
bug. Usually, the site will be entered at night or on a weekend and,
in accordance with carefully pre-planned and tightly timed actions,
the audio device will be installed. High-speed, silent drills may be
used to cut into the wall, and after installation of the bug, the
damage will be repaired with quick-drying plaster and covered by a
paint exactly matching the original. The installation may also be
accomplished from an adjoining room, or one above or below (if
a ceiling or floor placement is called for).
The agency's successes with bugs and taps have usually been
limited to the non-communist countries, where relatively lax
internal-security systems do not deny the CIA operations the freedom
of movement necessary to install eavesdropping devices.
A report on clandestine activities in Latin America during the
1960s by the CIA Inspector General, for example, revealed that a
good part of the intelligence collected by the agency in that region
came from audio devices. In quite a few of the Latin nations, the report
noted, the CIA was regularly intercepting the telephone conversations
of important officials and had managed to place bugs in
the homes and offices of many key personnel, up to and including
cabinet ministers. In some allied countries the agency shares in the
information acquired from audio surveillance conducted by the
host intelligence service, which often receives technical assistance
from the CIA for this very purpose-and may be penetrated by
the CIA in the process.
Audio devices are fickle. As often as not, they fail to work
after they have been installed, or they function well for a few
days, then suddenly fall silent. Sometimes they are quickly discovered
by the local security services, or, suspecting that a room
190 THE CIA AND THE CU L T 0 FIN TEL L 1GENe E
may be bugged, the opposition employs effective countermeasures.
The Soviet KGB has the habit of renting homes and offices in
foreign countries and then building new interior walls, floors, and
ceilings covering the original ones in key rooms-thus completely
baffling the effectiveness of any bugs that may have been installed.
The simplest way to negate audio surveillance-and it is a method
universally employed-is to raise the noise level in the room by
constantly playing a radio or a hi-fi set. The music and other extraneous
noises tend to mask the sounds of the voices that the bug
is intended to capture; unlike the human ear, audio devices cannot
distinguish among sounds.
CIA technicians are constantly working on new listening devices
in the hope of improving the agency's ability to eavesdrop. Ordinary
audio equipment, along with other clandestine devices, are
developed by the Technical Services Division. In addition to espionage
tools, the TSD devises gadgets for use in other covert
activities, such as paramilitary operations. Plastic explosives, incapacitating
and lethal drugs, and silent weapons-high-powered
crossbows, for example-are designed and fabricated for special
operations. The more complex or sophisticated instruments used by
the CIA's secret operators are, however, produced by the agency's
Directorate of Science and Technology. This component also
assists other groups within the CIA engaging in clandestine research
and development. (
DELETED
) The D/S & T, furthermore, assists
the Office of Communications in devising new and improved
methods of communications intercept and security countermeasures.
Although the experts in the Science and Technology Directorate
have done much outstanding work in some areas-for example,
overhead reconnaissance-their performance in the audio field for
clandestine application is often less than satisfactory. One such
device long under development was a laser beam which could be
Espionage and Counterespionage 191
aimed at a closed window from outside and used to pick up the
vibrations of the sound waves caused by a conversation inside the
room. This system was successfully tested in the field-in West
Africa-but it never seemed to function properly elsewhere, except
in the United States. Another (
DELETED
)
When CIA operators are successful in planting a bug or making
a tap, they send the information thus acquired back to the Clandestine
Services at headquarters in Langley with the source clearly
identified. However, when the Clandestine Services, in turn, pass
the information on to the intelligence analysts in the agency and
elsewhere in the federal government, the source is disguised or the
information is buried in a report from a real agent. For example,
the Clandestine Services might credit the information to "a source
in the foreign ministry who has reported reliably in the past" or
"a Western businessman with wide contacts in the local government."
In the minds of the covert operators, it is more important to
protect the source than to present the information straightforwardly.
This may guarantee "safe" sources, but it also handicaps the
analysts in making a confident judgment of the accuracy of the
report's content.·
• This withholding of information within the government for security
reasons is not a new phenomenon in the intelligence business. The joint
congressional committee investigating the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
found that "the fact the Japanese codes had been broken was regarded as of
192 THE C I A AND THE CU L T 0 FIN TEL L I GENe E
(
DELETED
more importance than the information obtained from decoded traffic. The
result of this rather specious premise was to leave large numbers of policymaking
and enforcement officials in Washington completely oblivious of the
most pertinent information concerning Japan."
Espionage and Counterespionage 193
DELETED
I 94 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
DELETED
)
The fertile imaginations of the S&T Directorate experts during
the following years produced many more unique collection schemes
aimed at solving the mysteries of China's strategic missile program.
Most eventually proved to be unworkable, and at least one entailed
a frighteningly high-risk potential. The silliest of all, however, called
for the creation of a small one-man airplane that could theoretically
be packaged in two large suitcases. In concept, an agent along with
the suitcases would somehow be infiltrated into the denied area,
where, after performing his espionage mission, he would assemble
the aircraft and fly to safety over the nearest friendly border. Even
the chief of the Clandestine Services refused to have anything to do
with this scheme, and the project died on the drawing boards.
(
DELETED
Espionage and Counterespionage • 195
DELETED
)
The technical difficulties involved in the (DELETED) system
and the (DELETED) device were too great and too time-consuming
for either to be fully developed by their inventors before improvements
in intelligence-satellite surveillance programs were
achieved. Other clandestine collection devices-a few more sensibly
contrived, but most of dubious value-were also developed by the
agency's technicians and may now be in operation. The CIA's
technical experts often feel compelled to build exotic systems only
because of the mechanical challenge they pose. Such efforts might
be justified by an intelligence requirement; unfortunately, too many
intelligence requirements are not honestly based on the needs of
the policy-makers but are instead generated by and for the CIA
and the other intelligence-community members alone.
196 THE CIA AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
The Technical Collection Explosion
While technology has increasingly tended to mechanize classical
espionage, its most important impact on the intelligence trade has
been in large-scale collection-satellites, long-range sensors, and
the interception of communications. These technical espionage systems
have become far and away the most important sources of
information on America's principal adversaries. Overhead-reconnaissance
programs have provided much dletailed information on
Soviet and Chinese missile programs, troop movements, and other
military developments. They have also produced valuable information
regarding North Vietnamese infiltration of South Vietnam
and North Korean military preparations against South Korea. And
such collection has frequently contributed to the U.S. government's
knowledge of events in the Middle East.
As technical collection becomes more refined, classical spies
have, of course, become nearly obsolete in clandestine operations
against the more important target countries. So, too, has the shift
to technical espionage caused America's intelligence costs to skyrocket
to more than $6 billion yearly. Not only are classical spies
relatively cheap, but technical collection systems, producing incredible
amounts of information, require huge numbers of people
to process and analyze this mass of raw datai.
In terms of money spent and personnel involved, the CIA is very
much a junior partner to the Pentagon in llhe technical-espionage
field. The Defense Department has an overalll intelligence budget of
about $5 billion a year, some 75 to 80 perctmt of which is spent on
technical collection and processing. The CIA's technical programs,
however, anIount to no more than $150 million yearly. (This is
exclusive of several hundred million in fun~ls annually supplied by
the Pentagon for certain community-wide programs, such as satellite
development, in which the agency share:s.) Similarly, there are
tens of thousands of people-both military and civilian-working
for the Defense Department in the technical ;fields,whereas the CIA
only has about 1,500 such personnel.
Still, the agency has made a substantial contribution to research
Espionage and Counterespionage 197
and development in technical espionage. Over the years, CIA
scientists have scored major successes by developing the U-2 and
SR-7! spy planes, in perfecting the first workable photographicreconnaissance
satellites, and in producing outstanding advances
in stand-off, or long-range, electronic sensors, such as over-thehorizon
radars and stationary satellites. A good part of these research
and operating costs have been funded by the Pentagon, and
in several instances the programs were ultimately converted into
joint CIA-Pentagon operations or "captured" by the military
services.
America's first experience in technical espionage came in the form
of radio intercepts and code-breaking, an art known as communications
intelligence (CO MINT). Although Secretary of State Henry
Stimson closed down the cryptanalytical section of the State Department
in 1939 with the explanation that "gentlemen do not read
each other's mail," COMINT was revived, and played an important
part in U.S. intelligence activities during World War II. In the immediate
postwar period this activity was initially reduced, then
expanded once again as the Cold War intensified. In 1952 the
President, by secret executive order, established the National Security
Agency (NSA) to intercept and decipher the communications
of both the nation's enemies and friends and to ensure that
U.S. codes were secure from similar eavesdropping. The NSA,
though placed under the control of the Defense Department, soon
established an independent bureaucratic identity of its own-and
at present has a huge budget of w'ell over a billion dollars per
annum and a workforce of some 25,000 personnel.
Before the NSA can break into and read foreign codes and
ciphers, it must first intercept the encoded and encrypted messages
of the target country. To make these intercepts, it must have
listening posts in locations where the signal waves of the transmitters
that send the messages can be acquired. Radio traffic between
foreign capitals and embassies in Washington can be easily
picked off by listening equipment located in suburban Maryland
and Virginia, but communications elsewhere in the world are not
so easily intercepted. Thus, the NSA supports hundreds of listening
198 • THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
posts around the globe, such posts usually being operated by other
U.S. government agencies. Most commonly used to run the NSA's
overseas facilities are the armed services' cryptological agencies:
the Army Security Agency, the Navy Security Service, and the Air
Force Security Agency. These three military organizations come
under the NSA's policy coordination; the messages they intercept
are sent back to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, near
Washington.
Perhaps the most controversial NSA base (operated by the
Army) is at (DELETED) in (DELETED). A Senate subcommittee
investigating American commitments abroad, chaired by
Stuart Symington, revealed in 1970 that this heretofore secret
facility had been secured from the Haile Selassie regime in return
for hundreds of millions of dollars in military and economic assistance-
without most members of Congress ever being aware of
its existence. The Symington subcommittee also discovered a similar
NSA facility (operated by the Navy) at (DELETED) in (DELETED)
which also had been kept secret from Congress. Both
these bases have been used to intercept communications from the
Middle East and Africa, and both required the U.S. government
to offer an implicit-but secret~ommitment to the host government.
(
DELETED
)
Espionage and Counterespionage 199
Although the NSA engineered some successes against the Eastern
European countries and Communist China in its early days, for at
least the last fifteen years it has been completely unable to break
into the high-grade cipher systems and codes of these nations.
Against such major targets, the NSA has been reduced to reading
comparatively unimportant communications between low-level military
components and the equally inconsequential routine exchanges
between low-grade bureaucrats and economic planners. This is far
short of learning the Soviet Union's or China's most vital secrets.
(
DELETED
) .* One such benefit is derived from traffic
analysis, the technique by which the NSA gleans some useful information
through the study of communication patterns. A principal
assistant of the NSA Director observed at the same meeting that
another justification for the agency's continuing programs against
the Soviets and Chinese is the hope that "maybe we'll get a break
sometime, like the Pueblo." He was, of course, referring to the capture
in 1968 of the NSA spy ship by North Korea. Much of the
Pueblo's cryptological machinery was seized intact by the North
Koreans and probably turned over to the Soviets. While these
* David Kahn, author of the definitive work on modern cryptology, The
Code Breakers, explained in the June 22, 1973, New York Times why NSA
has had and will continue to have so little luck with reading advanced communications
systems like the Soviets': "Cryptology has advanced, in the last
decade or so, to systems that, though not unbreakable in the absolute, are
unbreakable in practice. They consist essentially of mathematical programs
for computer-like cipher machines. They engender so many possibilities that,
even given torrents of intercepts, and scores of computers to batter them
with, cryptanalysts could not reach a solution for thousands of years. Moreover,
the formulas are so constructed that even if the cryptanalyst has the
ideal situation-the original plain text of one of the foreign cryptogramshe
cannot recreate the formula by comparing the two and then use it to
crack the next message that comes along."
200 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
machines were not associated with the highest-grade U.S. military
or diplomatic systems, the Soviets would have been able to use them
to read messages previously sent through certain American military
channels and intercepted and stored by the Soviets. The NSA has
for many years been recording and storing not-yet-"broken" Soviet
and Chinese messages, and can presume the same has been done
with American communications; for our part, there are literally
boxcars and warehouses full of incomprehensible tapes of this sort
at NSA's Fort Meade headquarters.
As with so many other parts of the American intelligence apparatus,
the NSA has had considerably more success operating
against the Third World countries and even against some of our
allies. With what is reportedly the largest bank of computers in the
world and thousands of cryptanalysts, the NSA has had little
trouble with the codes and ciphers of these nations. Two of the
highly secret agency's young officers, William Martin and Bemon
Mitchell, who defected to the Soviet Union in 1960, mentioned
thirty to forty nations whose systems the NSA could read. In
addition, Martin and Mitchell told of a practice under which the
NSA provided encoding and cryptographic machines to other
nations, then used its knowledge of the machinery to read the
intercepted messages of these countries. This practice still flourishes.
One of the countries that Martin and Mitchell specifically named
as being read by the NSA at that time was Egypt-the United
Arab Republic. After making their revelation at a Moscow press
conference, (
DELETED
Espionage and Counterespionage 201
DELETED
) The Soviets probably
were, too. (
DELETED
)
A "break," in the terminology of the cryptanalyst, is a success
scored not through deciphering skill, but because of an error on the
part of another country's communications clerks or, on rare occasions,
a failure in the cipher equipment. A few years ago, a new
code clerk arrived at a foreign embassy in Washington and promptly
sent a message "in the clear" (i.e., unenciphered), to his Foreign
Ministry. Realizing that he should have encrypted the transmission,
he sent the same message again, but this time in cipher. With the
"before and after" messages in hand, the NSA had little difficulty
thereafter, of course, reading that country's secret communications.
Malfunctioning or worn-out cryptographic equipment results in
triumphs for the NSA by unintentionally establishing repetitious
patterns which detract from the random selections that are vital to
202 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
sophisticated ciphers. A rough analogy would be a roulette wheel
which, because of poor construction or excessive wear, develops
certain predictable characteristics discernible to a keen observer
who is then able to take advantage because of his special knowledge.
Another type of break comes as a result of a physical (rather
than cerebral) attack on another country's communications system.
The attack may be a clandestine operation to steal a code
book or cipher system, the suborning of a communications clerk,
or the planting of an audio device in an embassy radio room. Within
the CIA's Clandestine Services, a special unit of the Foreign Intelligence
(i.e., espionage) Staff specializes in these attacks. * When
it is successful, the information it acquires is sent to the NSA to
help that agency with its COMINT efforts.
In 1970, NSA Director Admiral Noel Gayler and his top deputies
admitted privately that a good part of the NSA's successes came
from breaks, and they emphasized that the agency was extremely
adept at exploiting these non-cryptanalytical windfalls. Nevertheless,
breaks are never mentioned in the authorized U.S. government
"leaks" concerning the NSA's activities that from time to time
appear in the press. In its controlled revelations to the public, the
NSA deliberately tries to create the impression that it is incredibly
good at the art of deciphering secret foreign communications and
that its triumphs are based purely on its technical skills. (
DELETED
* This approach apparently appealed to President Nixon when he approved
the 1970 Huston plan for domestic espionage which surfaced during
the Watergate scandal. The plan called for breaking into foreign embassies
in Washington because it would be "possible by this technique to secure the
material with which the NSA can crack foreign cryptographic codes. We
spend millions of dollars attempting to break these codes by machines. One
surreptitious entry can do the job successfully at no dollar cost." While the
Huston plan might have been effective against Third World countries with
unsophisticated cryptological systems, it was unlikely to score any significant
gains against major powers--even if there had been any successful break-ins.
David Kahn explains why: "Codebooks could be photographed, [because]
today's cipher secrets reside in electronic circuits, some of them integrated
on a pinhead, some of them embodied in printed-circuit boards with up to
fifteen layers."
Espionage and Counterespionage • 203
DELETED
)
A side effect of the NSA's programs to intercept diplomatic and
commercial messages is that rather f'requently certain information
is acquired about American citizens, including members of Congress
and other federal officials, which can be highly embarrassing
to those individuals. This type of intercepted message is handled
with even greater care than the NSA's normal product, which itself
is so highly classified that a special security clearance is needed to
see it. Such information may, for example, derive from a Senator's
conversation with a foreign ambassador in Washington who then
cables a report of the talk to his Foreign Ministry.
A more serious embarrassment happened in 1970 during the
course of delicate peace talks on the Middle East. A State Department
official had a conversation about the negotiations with an
Arab diplomat who promptly reported what he had been told to
his government. His cable disclosed that the State Department man
had either grossly misstated the American bargaining position or
204 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
the diplomat had badly misunderstood what had been told him. In
any case, high State Department officers were quite disturbed about
the misrepresented position and the incident did not reflect well on
the competence of the American official in the eyes of his superiors.
Not even the CIA is immune to such prying by the NSA. On one
occasion the Director of Central Intelligence was supplied with an
intercepted message concerning his deputy. According to this message,
a transmission from a Western European ambassador to his
Foreign Office, the CIA's number-two man had a few evenings
earlier at a dinner party hosted by the ambassador indiscreetly
opined on several sensitive U.S. policy positions. The ambassador's
interpretation of the conversation was contradicted by the Deputy
Director-to the apparent satisfaction of the DCI-and the matter
was quietly dropped.
Some NSA-intercepted communications can cause surprising problems
within the U.S. government if they are inadvertently distributed
to the wrong parties. When particularly sensitive foreign-policy
negotiations are under way which may be compromised internally
by too much bureaucratic awareness, the White House's usual
policy has been to issue special instructions to the NSA to distribute
messages mentioning these negotiations only to Henry
Kissinger and his immediate staff.
The FBI operates a wiretap program against numerous foreign
embassies in Washington which, like some of the NSA intercept
operations, also provides information about Americans. In cooperation
with the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company (a
Bell subsidiary), FBI agents regularly monitor the phones in the
offices of all communist governments represented here; on occasion,
the embassies of various non-communist countries have their phones
tapped, especially when their nations are engaged in negotiations
with the U.S. government or when important developments are
taking place in these countries. (
DELETED
Espionage and Counterespionage • 205
DELETED
)
Wiretaps on foreign embassies, justified on the grounds of preserving
national security, must be approved by the State Department
before they are installed by the FBI. As it is often State which
requests the FBI to activate the listening devices, approval is almost
always given. The transcripts of such conversations are never
marked as having come from wiretaps, but instead carry the description
"from a source who has reported reliably in the past."
Such reliable "sources" include State Department officials themselves-
the CIA has, on occasion, intercepted communications
between American ambassadorial officials and their colleagues in
Washington.
In the way of background, it should be understood that CIA
communications clerks handle nearly all classified cables between
American embassies and Washington-for both the CIA and the
State Department. To have a separate code room for each agency
in every embassy would be a wasteful procedure, so a senior CIA
communications expert is regularly assigned to the administrative
part of the State Department in order to oversee CIA's communicators
who work under State cover. In theory, CIA clerks are not
supposed to read the messages they process for State, but any code
clerk who wants to have a successful career quickly realizes that his
promotions depend on the CIA and that he is well advised to show
the CIA station chief copies of all important State messages. The
State Department long ago implicitly recognized that its most secret
206 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
cables are not secure from CIA inspection by setting up special
communications channels which supposedly cannot be deciphered
by the CIA.
When in 1968 Ambassador to Iran Armin Meyer ran into troubles
with the CIA station chief in Teheran, Meyer switched his
communications with State in Washington to one of these "secure"
channels, called "Roger." But the CIA had nonetheless figured out
a way to intercept his cables and the replies he received from
Washington; the CIA Director thus received a copy of each intercepted
cable. Written on top of each cable was a warning that the
contents of the cable should be kept especially confidential because
State was unaware that the CIA had a copy.
Satellites and Other Systems
The most important source of technical intelligence gathered by
the U.S. is that collected by photographic and electronic reconnaissance
satellites. Most are launched into north-south orbits designed
to carry them over such targets as the U.S.S.R. and China
with maximum frequency as they circle around the earth. Others
are put into orbits synchronized with the rotation of the globe,
giving the illusion that they are stationary. All satellite programs
come under the operational authority of the National Reconnaissance
Office (NRO), a component of the Secretary of the Air
Force's office. The NRO spends well over a billion dollars every
year for satellites and other reconnaissance systems. While the
Defense Department provides all the money, policy decisions on
how the funds will be allocated are made by the Executive Committee
for Reconnaissance, consisting of the Assistant Secretary of
Defense for Intelligence, the Director of Central Intelligence, and
the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. Requirements
for satellite collection are developed by the U.S. Intelligence
Board (USIB), which is chaired by the Director of Central
Intelligence and whose members are the heads of all other intelligence
agencies. A special committee of the USIB designates the
specific targets each satellite will cover.
Employing high-resolution and wide-angle cameras, the photoEspionage
and Counterespionage • 207
graphic satellites have for years provided voluminous and detailed
information on Soviet and Chinese military developments and other
matters of strategic importance; conversely, except for special cases
such as the Arab-Israeli situation, there has been little reason to
apply satellite reconnaissance against other, less powerful countries.
Some photographic satellites are equipped with color cameras
for special missions, and some even carry infrared sensing devices
which measure heat emissions from ground targets, to determine,
for example, if a site is occupied or what the level of activity is at
certain locations. There are satellites that have television cameras
to speed up the delivery of their product to the photo interpreters
who analyze, or read out, the film packages of the spies in the sky.
But, good as they are, photographic satellites have inherent
limitations. They cannot see through clouds, nor can they see into
buildings or inside objects.
In addition to photographic satellites, U.S. intelligence possesses
a wide array of other reconnaissance satellites which perform
numerous electronic sensing tasks. These satellites collect data on
missile testing, on radars and the emissions of other high-power
electronic equipment, and on communications traffic. Electronic
satellites are in some cases supported by elaborate ground stations,
both in friendly foreign countries and in the United States, that feed
targeting directions to the sensors, receive the collected data from
the satellites, and transmit the processed data to the intelligence
agencies in Washington. (
DELETED
)
Until satellites became operational in the early 1960s, spy planes
and ships were valuable sources of information, serving as supplements
to the product of the NSA, then the best material available
to U.S. intelligence. Air Force and CIA aircraft frequently flew
along the perimeters of the communist countries and even over
their territory in search of badly needed electronic and photographic
information. Spy ships operated by the Navy-like the Pueblosailed
along the coasts listening in on communications and other
208 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
electronic signals. Although these programs were considered to be
great successes by the intelligence community, occasional blunders
such as the 1959 U-2 affair and the Tonkin Gulf incident in 1964
(the two U.S. destroyers "torpedoed" by North Vietnamese boats
were on a clandestine spy mission) had a serious and detrimental
effect on world politics. Aggressive technical intelligence-collection
efforts have also led to the capture of the Pueblo, the Israeli attack
on the Liberty in 1967, and shoot-downs of RB-47s by the Soviets,
and of EC-12l s and several U-2s by the Chinese.
Despite the risks incurred by such provocative collection actions
in the name of intelligence, the Pentagon continues to sponsor
these now obsolete programs. Satellites and long-range stand-off
(i.e., non-penetrating) systems have deeply reduced, if not eliminated,
the need for spy flights and cruises. But the armed services
have spent billions of dollars to develop the spy planes and ships
(just as the CTA and the NSA have invested in outmoded listening
posts ringing the U.S.S.R. and China); consequently, there has
been a stubborn bureaucratic reluctance to take these collectors
out of service. The "drone"-pilotless aircraft-flights over China,
for example, were continued even after the Chinese started shooting
them down on a regular and embarrassing basis, and after they
had proven nearly useless. State Department reconnaissance intelligence
experts insisted that the Air Force maintained the drone
activity, even though the information thus gathered was of marginal
value, because it had nowhere else to use such spy equipment.
Similarly, Air Force SR-71s have continued to fly over North
Korea despite that country's lack of meaningful intelligence targets.
With the Soviet Union declared off bounds for secret overflights
since 1960, and China since 1971, the Air Force can devise no
other way of justifying the operational need for these aircraft.
(
DELETED
Espionage and Counterespionage • 209
DELETED
)
Clearly, the prevailing theology in the U.S. intelligence community
calls for the collection of as much information as possible.
Little careful consideration is given to the utility of the huge
amounts of material so acquired. The attitude of "collection for
collection's sake" has resulted in mountains of information which
can only overwhelm intelligence analysts charged with interpreting
it. Further, such material contributes little to the national requirements,
though it may prove interesting to certain highly specialized
analysts, particularly in the Pentagon. There has been little coordination
between the managers of the various technical espionage
programs, and even less between the collectors and the policymakers.
Each of the many agencies which carry out such programs
has a vested bureaucratic interest in keeping its particular system
in being, and the extreme compartmentalization of the operations
has .made it almost impossible for the programs to be evaluated
as a whole. Former CIA Director Helms failed almost completely
in his assigned mission of bringing a more rational and coordinated
approach to the myriad technical espionage systems. It is not
likely that his successors will do much better. No CIA Director
has ever been able to manage the intelligence community.
Despite the roughly $5 billion already being spent each year on
technical systems and on processing the great amounts of data
collected, there remains significant pressure within the intelligence
community to collect still more information. (
210 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
DELETED
) This secrecy is unquestionably
needed to protect the actual workings of the system, but then the
operation of the ABM was no less classified, and the national
security did not seem to be injured by the ABM debate in Congress.
However, the very word "intelligence" seems to make our legislators
bow and genuflect. They have in the past bestowed virtual blank
checks on the various intelligence agencies, allowing these organizations
to do practically anything they desired. The Soviets have
a fairly clear idea of the functions performed by American satellites
and other collection systems; there would seem to be little practical
reason why the Congress and the American people must be kept
completely in the dark.
Furthermore, technical espionage of any kind has a limited
value. It can identify and measure missile development and troop
movements, but it cannot tell what foreign leaders are planning
to do with those missiles and troops. In 1968 the U.S. intelligence
community had a relatively clear picture of the Soviet preparations
for military action against Czechoslovakia; it had no means whatever
of knowing whether or not an actual attack would be made.
That kind of information could have been provided only by a
human spy inside the Kremlin, and the CIA had none of those, and
small prospect for recruiting any. The United States knew what
could happen, but intelligence consumers have an insatiable appetite
for knowledge of what will happen. Their clamoring makes for more
and bigger collection systems to attempt to satisfy their demands.
Espionage and Counterespionage • 211
Counterespionage
Counterespionage, the clandestine warfare waged between rival
intelligence agencies, is usually referred to more delicately in the
spy business as counterintelligence. Essentially, it consists of preventing
the opposition from penetrating your own secret service
while at the same time working to penetrate the opposition's-to
learn what he is planning against you. As practiced by the CIA
and the Soviet KGB, counterespionage is a highly complex and
devious activity. It depends on cunning entrapments, agents provocateurs,
spies and counterspies, double and triple crosses. It is
the stuff that spy novels are made of, with limitless possibilities for
deception and turns of plot.
While foreign intelligence organizations with longer histories
have traditionally emphasized counterespionage, U.S. intelligence
was slow to develop such a capability. To Americans during World
War II and immediately thereafter, counterespionage meant little
more than defensive security measures such as electrified fences,
watchdogs, and codes. The obscure subtleties and intricate conspiracies
of counterespionage seemed alien to the American character
and more suited to European back alleys and the Orient
Express. But the demands of the Cold War and the successes scored
by the KGB in infiltrating Western intelligence services gradually
drew the CIA deeply into the counterespionage game.
Primary responsibility for U.S. internal security rests with the
FBI, but inevitably there has been friction between the agency and
the bureau in their often overlapping attempts to protect the nation
against foreign spies. In theory, the CIA cooperates with the FBI
in counterespionage cases by handling the overseas aspects and
letting the bureau take care of all the action within the United
States. In actual fact, the agency tends to keep within its own
control, even domestically, those operations which are designed
to penetrate opposition intelligence services; the basically defensive
task of preventing the Soviets from recruiting American agents in
the United States is left to the FBI. While the FBI also on occasion
goes on the offensive by trying to recruit foreign intelligence agents,
212 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
the bureau's first inclination seems to be to arrest or deport foreign
spies rather than to turn them, as the CIA tries to do, into double
agents. This fundamental difference in approach limits the degree
of FBI-CIA cooperation in counterespionage and confirms the
general view within the agency that FBI agents are rather unimaginative
police-officer types, and thus incapable of mastering
the intricacies of counterespionage work. (The FBI, on the other
hand, tends to see CIA counterintelligence operators as dilettantes
who are too clever for their own good.) Although the CIA has had
almost no success in penetrating the Soviet and other opposition
services, it nonetheless continues to press for additional operational
opportunities in the United States, claiming that the FBI is not
sophisticated enough to cope with the KGB.
Within the CIA, the routine functions of security-physical
protection of buildings, background investigations of personnel,
lie-detector tests-are assigned to the Office of Security, a component
of the housekeeping part of the agency, the M&S Directorate.
Counterespionage policy and some actual operations emanate
from the Counterintelligence (CI) Staff of the Clandestine
Services. As with the bulk of espionage activities, however, most
operations are carried out by the area divisions (Far East, Western
Hemisphere, etc.), which are also responsible. The area divisions
tend to see espionage value or information-gathering value in counterespionage
operations, which are referred to in CIA files as
joint FlfCI projects-PI (Foreign Intelligence) being the Clandestine
Services' euphemism for espionage.
Almost every CIA station or base overseas has one or more
officers assigned to it for counterespion~ge purposes. The first
priority for these counterspy specialists is to monitor agency espionage
and covert-action operations to make sure that the opposition
has not penetrated or in some other way compromised the activity.
All reports submitted by CIA case officers and their foreign agents
are carefully studied for any indication of enemy involvement. The
counterintelligence men know all too well that agents, wittingly
or unwittingly, can be used by the KGB as deceptions to feed false
information to the CIA, or employed as provocations to disrupt
carefully laid operational plans. Foreign agents can also be peneEspionage
and Counterespionage 213
trations, or double agents, whose task it is to spy on the CIA's
secret activities. When a double agent is discovered in an operation,
consideration is given to "turning" him-that is, making him a
triple agent. Or perhaps he can be unwittingly used to deceive or
provoke the opposition.
If a KGB officer tries to recruit a CIA staff employee, the counterespionage
experts may work out a plan to entrap the enemy
operator, then publicly expose him or attempt to "turn" him. Or
they may encourage the agency employee to pretend to cooperate
with the Soviets in order to learn more about what kind of information
the KGB wants to collect, to discover more about KGB
methods and equipment, or merely to occupy the time and money
of the KGB on a fruitless project. CIA counterespionage specialists
do not necessarily wait for the KGB to make a recruitment effort,
but instead may set up an elaborate trap, dangling one of their
own as bait for the opposition.
Further, beyond safeguarding the CIA's own covert operations,
counterespionage officers actively try to penetrate the opposition
services. Seeking to recruit agents in communist and other intelligence
services, they hope both to find out what secret actions the
opposition is planning to take against the CIA, and to thwart or
deflect those initiatives.
Counterespionage, like covert action, has become a career specialty
in the CIA; some clandestine operators do no other type of
work during. their years with the agency. These specialists have
developed their own clannish subculture within the Clandestine
Services, and even other CIA operators often find them excessively
secretive and deceptive. The function of the counterespionage officers
is to question and verify every aspect of CIA operations;
taking nothing at face value, they tend to see deceit everywhere.
In an agency full of extremely mistrustful people, they are the
professional paranoids. *
* It is commonly thought within the CIA that the Counterintelligence
Staff operates on the assumption that the agency-as well as other elements
of the U.S. government-is penetrated by the KGB. The chief of the CI
Staff is said to keep a list of the fifty or so key positions in the CIA which
are most likely to have been infiltrated by the opposition, and he reportedly
keeps the persons in those positions under constant surveillance. Some CIA
214 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
Many experienced CIA operators believe that counterespionage
operations directed against opposition services receive a disproportionate
amount of attention and resources within the Clandestine
Services, for even if a spy were recruited in the KGB (which almost
never happens), he would likely be of less intelligence value than
a penetration at a similar level elsewhere in the Soviet government
or Communist Party. To be sure, the spy could probably provide
the CIA with some information on foreign agents working for the
KGB, perhaps the type of intelligence received from them and
other foreign sources, and maybe a few insights into KGB operations
against the United States and other countries. But he would
know little about the intentions of the Soviet leadership or Moscow's
military and nuclear secrets-the most crucial information of
all to those officials responsible for looking after the national security
of the United States. The KGB officer, like most clandestine
operators, is usually better versed on developments in foreign
countries than those in his own nation. Although it is interesting to
know what the KGB operators know and how they acquired their
knowledge, that in itself is of little significance in achieving U.S. intelligence
goals. The justification for the counterintelligence effort,
although usually couched in intricate, sophisticated argument,
amounts to little more than "operations for operations' sake."
Admittedly, there can occasionally be a positive intelligence windfall
from a counterespionage operation; an agent recruited in a
foreign service may have access to information on his own government's
secret policies and plans. Penkovsky, who was in Soviet
military intelligence (GRU), provided his British and American
case officers with reams of documents concerning the Soviet armed
forces and their advanced weapons-development programs, in
addition to clandestine operational information and doctrine.
Agents working for other foreign services have from time to time
made similar, although less valuable, contributions. But the CIA's
preoccupation with this type of clandestine operation, often to the
officers speculate-and a few firmly believe-that the only way to explain
the poor performance in recruiting Soviet agents-and conducting classical
intelligence operations in general against the U.S.S.R.-is that KGB penetrations
inside the agency have been for years sending back advance warnings.
Espionage and Counterespionage 2 15
exclusion of a search for more important secrets, is at least questionable.
Within the Clandestine Services, the Soviet Bloc (SB) Division,
quite obviously, is the most counterespionage-oriented of all the
area divisions. The rationale generally given for this emphasis is
that it is nearly impossible to recruit even the lowest-level spy in
the U.S.S.R. because of the extremely tight internal-security controls
in force there. Among the few Soviets who can, however,
move about freely despite these restrictions are KGB and other
intelligence officers. They are, furthermore, part of that small
group of Soviet officials who regularly come in contact with
Westerners (often searching for their own recruits). And they are
among those officials most likely to travel outside the Soviet Union,
where recruitment approaches by CIA operators (or induced
defections) can more easily be arranged. Being the most accessible
and least supervised of all Soviet citizens, KGB officers are, therefore,
potentially the most recruitable.
Outside the Soviet Union, according to the SB Division's rationale,
recruitment of non-KGB agents is almost as difficult as
in the U.S.S.R. Most other Soviets, including the highest officials,
are usually under KGB surveillance; they travel or live in groups,
or are otherwise unreachable by the agency's clandestine operators.
Once again, it is only the opposition intelligence officer who has
the freedom of movement which allows for secret contact with
foreigners. The division's efforts are therefore concentrated on
seeking out potential agents among the KGB.
There is much truth in the Soviet Bloc Division's view of this
operational problem, but the fact that the agency's operators have
recruited no high-level Soviet spies and induced almost no significant
defections from the U.S.S.R. in well over a decade raises serious
questions concerning the CIA's competence as a clandestine
intelligence organization. In fact, since the early 1960s there have
been practically no CIA attempts to recruit a Soviet agent, and
only a handful of defection inducements; Oleg Penkovsky, it must
be remembered, was turned away when he first tried to defect.
To be sure, there is reason for extreme care. Most Soviet de216
THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
fectors who bolt to the West are greeted by the agency with great
caution because they may be KGB deceptions or provocations. The
clandestine operators are so unsure of their ability to evaluate the
intentions and establish the legitimacy of most defectors that the
CIA has set up an inter-agency committee within the U.S. intelligence
community to review all defector cases. This bureaucratic
layering not only works to reduce the number of defectors accepted
by the U.S. government (perhaps wisely), but also serves to spread
the blame if mistakes are made.
Despite the CIA's extreme caution, however, a few defectors,
some of them KGB undercover officers, have managed to accomplish
their goal of escaping and establishing, as it is known in the
clandestine trade, their bona fides, in spite of the agency's doubts.
Svetlana Stalin succeeded simply because the CIA officers on the
scene in India, with the encouragement of Ambassador Chester
Bowles, refused to be held back by the SB Division's bureaucratic
precautions.
It has been well established that the CIA cannot spy, in the classical
sense, against its major target, the Soviet Union. Nor does the
CIA seem to be able to conduct effective counterespionage (in
the offensive aspect) against the Soviets. It even has difficulty
dealing with the gratuitous opportunities presented by walk-ins
and defectors. Much of this obviously can be attributed to the
inherent difficulties involved in operating in a closed society like
the U.S.S.R.'s, and against a powerful, unrelenting opposition
organization like the KGB; and some of the lack of success can,
too, be explained by the CIA's incompetence. But there is more to
the failure against the Soviet target than insurmountable security
problems or ineptitude. The CIA's Clandestine Services are, to a
large extent, fearful of and even intimidated by the Soviet KGB
because they have so frequently been outmaneuvered by it.
Most Soviet spying successes against the major Western powers
have involved penetrations of their intelligence services. The KGB,
with its origins in the highly conspiratorial czarist secret police, has
often appeared to professional observers to be more adept at
Espionage and Counterespionage 217
penetrating foreign intelligence organizations than in recruiting
ordinary spies.
Most notorious among the KGB's infiltrations of Western intelligence
(at least those that have been discovered) was Harold
"Kim" Philby, who spied for Moscow for over twenty years while
a very high-ranking official of Britain's MI-6. * There have been
several other highly damaging KGB penetrations of British intelligence,
French and German intelligence, and the services of most of
the smaller N.A.T.O. countries. And KGB agents have been uncovered
on several occasions in U.S. intelligence agencies, including
the National Security Agency, several of the military security agencies,
and the intelligence section of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
But as far as is publicly known, no career officer of the CIA
has ever been proved to be an enemy spy. There have been some
odd dismissals of clandestine officers from time to time for reasons
that have smacked of more than mere incompetence or corruption,
but none of these has ever officially been designated as a penetration.
On the other hand, foreign agents recruited by the agency
have sometimes been found to be working for an opposition service.
Whenever such a penetration is discovered in a CIA operation,
the agency's counterespionage specialists compile a damage report
assessing how much information has been revealed to the subject
and the possible repercussions of such disclosures on other
CIA activities. Similarly, agency counterespionage officers participate
in the preparation of damage reports when a penetration
is exposed elsewhere in the U.S. intelligence community.
One such report was prepared in cooperation with the Defense
Department in 1966 when Lieutenant Colonel W. H. Whalen, a
U.S. Army intelligence officer working for the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, was arrested as a KGB spy. The investigation disclosed that
Whalen had had access to almost all the U.S. national intelligence
* In his memoirs (unquestionably full of KGB disinformation) Philby
expressed little professional respect for the CIA's talents in counterespionage.
But he did admit that it was an agency officer (ironically, an ex-FBI
agent) who ultimately saw through his masquerade and was responsible for
exposing him to British authorities.
218 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
estimates of Soviet strategic military capabilities during the "missile
gap" controversy several years earlier. Evidently, he had delivered
copies of these top-secret documents to his KGB employers.
However, the results of Whalen's actions were, upon examination,
as surprising as they were discouraging to U.S. intelligence.
A principal reason why CIA and Pentagon analysts believed there
was a missile gap during the late 1950s and early 1960s was the
numerous references in speeches made at the time by Khrushchev
and other Soviet leaders alluding to the development and deployment
of Soviet long-range nuclear missiles. These announcements,
carefully timed to correspond to the progressive phases of intercontinental
ballistic missile research, testing, production, and
operational introduction to the armed forces, were studied in great
detail by the Kremlin-watchers of the U.S. intelligence community.
Learning from American scientists working on U.S. missile programs
what was technically feasible in the field of ICBM development,
and having already witnessed the startling demonstration of
Soviet space technology demonstrated in the launching of Sputnik,
the intelligence analysts assumed the worst-that the Soviets were
well ahead of the United States in the missile race. The analysts
noted in their estimates that the statements of the Soviet leaders
were a significant factor in making this judgment.
Neither the U-2 reconnaissance flights nor the first missions of
American photographic satellites confirmed the fears of the
analysts, but the U.S. government took no chances, and pressed
fervently ahead with its own strategic strike programs, especially
the Minuteman ICBM and the Polaris submarine. By 1963 it was
abundantly evident that the only "missile gap" which existed was
in America's favor, created by the rapid deployment of U.S.
systems. Khrushchev and his colleagues had deliberately attempted
to mislead by cleverly implying a nuclear attack capability which
the Soviet Union did not possess; apparently, they were somewhat
encouraged by those U.S. intelligence estimates secretly
provided by Colonel Whalen which showed how worried U.S.
officials were by the Soviet bluff. But even though deception was
Espionage and Counterespionage 219
at first successful, in that U.S. officials believed the Soviet
claims, it ultimately backfired as the United States chose to accelerate
its own missile-development programs, thereby placing the
Soviet Union in a position of still greater strategic disadvantage
than before.
Perhaps an even greater service which Colonel Whalen unintentionally
performed for his country while spying for the KGB
came during the Berlin crisis of 1961. At that time, in addition to
building the wall to separate the east and west portions of the city,
the East Germans attempted, with obvious Soviet support, to
reduce access to Berlin from West Germany. The U.S. intelligence
estimate was that the communists were toughening and unlikely
to back down. This gloomy but influential estimate was passed to
the KGB by Colonel Whalen, probably along with other information
that the United States would stand absolutely firm. When the
Soviets suddenly and unexpectedly eased their position, both the
White House and the intelligence community, although pleased,
were confused by Moscow's turnabout. Only years later, during the
preparation of the Whalen damage report, did the analysts get a
better idea why their original estimates of Soviet behavior had
proved to be wrong in 1961. With the benefit of hindsight, the
analysts reasoned: The Soviet leaders had decided to ease their
stand when they realized the U.S. government would not back
down, despite the estimate of Soviet intransigence. Apparently
afraid they might be on the verge of provoking a major military
conflict, the Soviets abruptly softened their demands.
The unexpected benefits to the U.S. government stemming from
the Whalen penetration, while clearly fortuitous, are not unique in
clandestine operations. In 1964 it was learned that the American
embassy in Moscow had been thoroughly bugged by the KGB.
Scores of Soviet audio devices were found throughout the building.
Counterespionage and security specialists determined that the
equipment had been installed in 1952 when the embassy had been
renovated, and that the bugs had been operational for roughly
twelve years. The damage report asserted that during this entire
period-at the height of the Cold War-Soviet intelligence had
220 • THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
probably intercepted every diplomatic cable between Washington
and the embassy. (
DELETED
)
U.S. suspicions about the Soviet eavesdropping were apparently
aroused early in 1964 when Nikita Khrushchev made a remark
to Ambassador Foy Kohler about Kohler's role in blocking the
shipment to the Soviet Union of steel for an important pipeline.
Taken in context, Khrushchev's remark indicated to Kohler that
there was a leak somewhere in American security. Kohler started
a massive investigation and, within a month or two, found fortyodd
bugs embedded in walls throughout the embassy. Although
Kohler would later claim there was no connection between the
discovery of the bugs and the investigation he ordered after his
conversation with Khrushchev, the timing would seem to indicate
otherwise.
(
DELETED
)
Today the likelihood of the KGB eavesdropping on the activities
in an embassy code room is extremely remote. Most State Department
communications overseas are handled by the CIA.
The machines and other equipment are cushioned and covered to
mute the sounds emanating from them. The rooms themselves are
Espionage and Counterespionage • 221
encased in lead and rest on huge springs that further reduce the
internal noises. Resembling large camping trailers, the code rooms
now are normally located deep in the concrete basements of embassy
buildings. Access to them by sound-sensitive devices is, for
all practical purposes, impossible.
The CIA's counterespionage operators not only try to recruit
secret agents in opposition services like the KGB; they also work
against the so-called friendly or allied services. Off bounds for the
most part-in principle, at least-are the intelligence agencies of
the English-speaking countries, among which there is a kind of
unwritten agreement not to spy on each other. (
DELETED
222 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
DELETED
)
Attempts are made by the Intelligence Directorate to restrict
the dissemination of highly classified analysis to foreign intelligence
services, but for the most part these are limited to relatively minor
deletions of references to collection sources. In some instances, the
practice involves simply cutting out with a razor a few words here
and there from the text of, say, a National Intelligence Estimate
on Soviet missile capabilities. Usually this is done on only a few
documents being given to the British or other English-speaking
services. (
DELETED
Espionage and Counterespionage 223
DELETED
224 • THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
DELETED
)
Domestic Operations
On December 17, 1972, the New York Times revealed that the
CIA had secretly provided training to fourteen New York City
policemen. At the time, agency spokesman Angus Thuermer
acknowledged that other American police departments had received
"similar courtesies," but he would not specify how many.
Thuermer said to the Times, "I doubt very much that [CIA
officials] keep that kind of information." But New York Congressman
Edward Koch persisted in seeking precisely "that kind
of information" from the agency. On January 29, 1973, the CIA's
Legislative Counsel, John Maury (himself a longtime clandestine
operator and former station chief in Greece), admitted to Koch
that "less than fifty police officers all told, from a total of about a
Espionage and Counterespionage 225
dozen city and county police forces, have received some sort of
Agency briefing within the past two years." But again the CIA
was being less than forthcoming, for its police training (which
consisted of much more than a "briefing") had been going on
for considerably more than the two years cited by the CIA-at
least since 1967, when Chicago police received instruction at both
the agency's headquarters and at "The Farm" in southeastern
Virginia. When queried by newspaper reporters in 1973, police
authorities in Chicago denied that any of their men had received
any such agency training. But Richard Helms, then recently departed
as Director, specifically told a secret session of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee at the beginning of February that
Chicago police had been included in the agency training effort, and
his disclosure subsequently leaked out to the press.
It was significant that when the CIA publicly owned up to
training sessions in Maury's letter to Koch, the only time period
mentioned was "the past two years"; it was likely true that in "the
past two years" fewer than fifty officers from a dozen localities had
been trained. But if the CIA had confessed to the full extent of its
pre-1971 police-training activities, the figures would have been
much larger. More important, the agency could not have justified
its domestic police-training program, as it did, on the grounds that
a provision of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act
of 1968 encouraged federal law-enforcement agencies to assist
local forces. That law was not passed until June 1968, well after
the CIA training had started. Of course, once the agency had been
shown to have carried out this domestic activity, it needed such a
justification or excuse: the National Security Act of 1947 had
forbidden it to exercise any "police, subpoena, law-enforcement
powers, or internal security functions."
The tactics used by the CIA to cover its tracks in this instance
were typical of the kind of deception that the agency has generally
used to conceal its numerous activities inside the United States.
The subject of domestic operations is a particularly sensitive one
in the CIA, and probably no other program is handled with greater
secrecy.
CIA training of local police departments may seem like a rela226
• THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
tively harmless activity, but it does raise several questions. Why did
the agency at first try to cover up and then mislead Congress,
the press, and the public about its activity? Why could the same
training not have been given by the FBI, which maintains facilities
and has legal authorization for that purpose? (Helms told the
Foreign Relations Committee that the police requested CIA assistance
because the agency's techniques in keeping intelligence
files and in performing certain kinds of surveillance were more
advanced than the FBI's.) And why have subsequent CIA Directors
James Schlesinger and William Colby not specifically ruled out
any future police training, even after the press and the Congress
have raised the questions of illegality and impropriety?
None of these questions has an obvious answer. In general,
however, the CIA does not like to admit that it has been doing
something it shouldn't have, and deceptive public statements by
the agency are as much a standard reflex action as an indication
that something particularly unsavory has occurred. Another
explanation might be that during those days in December
1972 and January 1973 when the police-training incident was
being exposed, the Watergate cover-up bad not yet come unglued
and the CIA might have been trying to keep investigators away
from its domestic activities. A few months later, of course, the
press would discover, and various public officials would reveal,
that Richard Helms had been "most cooperative and helpful" in
helping to organize the top-secret White House plan for domestic
surveillance and intelligence collection; that the CIA had provided
"technical" assistance to the White House plumbers in their 1971
burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist; that the
agency maintained "safe houses" in the heart of Washington where
E. Howard Hunt was clandestinely provided with CIA-manufactured
false documents, a disguise, a speech-altering device, and
a camera fitted into a tobacco pouch; that five of the seven Watergate
burglars were ex-CIA employees, and one was still on the
payroll and regularly reporting to an agency case officer; that in
the week after the break-in at the Democratic Party's headquarters,
high White House officials tried to involve the agency directly in
the Watergate cover-up; and, perhaps most significantly, that top
Espionage and Counterespionage 227
CIA officials remained silent, even in secret testimony before congressional
committees, about the illegal activities they knew had
taken place. In fact, Helms' answers to the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee's questions on Watergate in February and March
1973 proved to be so evasive and misleading, particularly as subsequent
disclosures were made, that the Washington Post's
Laurence Stern wrote on July 10 of the same year "that the word
perjury was being uttered in Senate offices by those who were
privy to the secret testimony given by Helms .... "
At a February 7 hearing, for example, New Jersey's Senator
Clifford Case told Helms it had come to his attention that in 1969
or 1970 the White House had asked the various government intelligence
agencies to pool resources to learn more about the anti-war
movement. "Do you know anything," Case asked Helms, "about
any activity on the part of the CIA in that connection? Was it
asked to be involved?" Helms replied, "I don't recall whether we
were asked, but we were not involved because to me that was a
clear violation of what our charter was." Case persisted, "What
do you do in a case like that? Suppose you were?" Helms answered,
"I would simply go to explain to the President this didn't
seem advisable." Case: "That would end it?" Helms: "Well, I think
so, normally."·
But the facts and suspicions to emerge from the Senate Watergate
hearings during the following months suggested that this is
not at all the way such matters are worked out behind the scenes
in the executive branch of the government, raising still more questions
as to the reliability of the CIA's clandestine leadership--and
the agency's role in U.S. domestic intelligence operations.
* Four months later a memorandum written by former White House aide
Tom Charles Huston leaked to the New York Times. It outlined a program
for domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens that had been approved by President
Nixon on July 15, 1970, and then rescinded by him five days later.
Huston noted a series of meetings with top officials of the FBI, the CIA,
the DIA, the NSA, and the service intelligence agencies, and said, "I went
into this exercise fearful that CIA would refuse to cooperate. In fact, Dick
Helms was most cooperative and helpful." According to the Huston memorandum,
the authenticity of which has been confirmed by the White House.
the CIA was slated to be a full participating member.
228 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
The CIA and the FBI
The CIA has always conducted clandestine operations within the
United States, although for the most part these have been related
to its overseas activities or their support. It was for this purpose
that the agency originally established, a number of years ago, a
special component of the Clandestine Services, the Domestic Operations
Division. But the separation between foreign-oriented
covert operations and those considered essentially domestic is often
vague and confusing in the intelligence business. Thus, over the
years there has been constant bureaucratic friction between the
CIA and the FBI, which has primary responsibility for internal
security. Compromises and other working arrangements have had
to be evolved, allowing the CIA a certain operational latitude
within the U.S.A. and giving the bureau in return special privileges
abroad in the agency's sphere of responsibility.
The Domestic Operations Division (DaD), with a staff of a few
hundred people and an annual budget of up to $10 million, is a
well-established part of the Clandestine Services. Divisional headquarters
for Domestic Operations is not at the main CIA installation
at Langley, but in an office building on downtown Washington's
Pennsylvania Avenue, within two blocks of the White House. This
is also the Washington "station," and its subordinate "bases" are
situated in major American cities. These offices are separate from
the agency's other facilities for routine personnel-recruiting and
overt contact with American overseas travelers. The "secret" DaD
offices serve as springboards for the Clandestine Services' covert
operations in American cities.
The DaD is surrounded by extreme secrecy, even by CIA
standards, and its actual functions are shrouded in mystery. The
extent of the agency's unwillingness to discuss the Domestic
Division could be seen when the CIA officer preparing the agency's
annual budget request to Congress in 1968 was pointedly told by
the Executive Director not to include anything about the DaD
in the secret briefing to be given to the Senate and House appropriations
committees. In at least one other instance, Director Helms was
Espionage and Counterespionage 229
specifically asked in a secret congressional session about the "Domestic
Operations Division." In his answer to the unsuspecting
legislators, he described the functions of the "Domestic Contact
Service"-the overt agency office that recruits American travelers
to be unofficial CIA eyes and ears abroad-which at the time was
a completely separate entity housed outside the Clandestine Services.
The Domestic Division's task, like all agency clandestine area
divisions, is the collection of covert intelligence and the conduct
of other secret operations-but in this instance inside the United
States. It operates some of the espionage programs aimed against
foreign students and other visitors to the United States, but by no
means all of them. Recruitment of a Soviet diplomat at the United
Nations or in Washington would fall under the Clandestine Services'
Soviet Bloc Division. Programs with Cuban-Americans in Florida
would be handled by the Western Hemisphere Division, the Covert
Action Staff, or the Special Operations (paramilitary) Divisiondepending
on the agent's intended role.
There is a relatively widespread feeling among observers of the
CIA's Clandestine Services that the DOD would like to do more
on the American scene than it apparently has up to now. It is also
believed that if the Nixon administration's domestic-security plan
of 1970 and the related surveillance of American dissidents had
ever been put into operation-which the White House has denied
but various press accounts have suggested-the DOD probably
would have become deeply involved. The rationale used by the CIA
would most likely have been the same one mentioned by Director
Colby at his confirmation hearing: that the agency can rightfully
spy on Americans "involved with foreign institutions." To the mistrustful
minds of the Clandestine Services, the problems caused in
the United States by dissidents, civil-rights activists, and anti-war
protesters certainly conjured up the specter of foreign influences.
After all, the covert officers reasoned, the dissident political groups
in the United States were obviously receiving financial support from
somewhere, and the sources could be foreign. The clandestine operators
familiar with the CIA's secret efforts to aid and strengthen
anti-government groups in Eastern Europe and elsewhere easily
calculated that somehow the communist countries were now get230
THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
ting even by using American groups to stir up trouble in the United
States. CIA support for dissident movements in Eastern Europe
never made any less real the source of their grievances, but that
did not prevent the agency from using them to put pressure on the
Soviet government and perhaps even to divert Moscow's attention
from its struggle with the West. And in the late 1960s and early
1970s American dissidents were certainly causing difficulties for
the U.S. government. Since the Clandestine Services knew it had
exploited similar circumstances in Eastern Europe, its operators
naturally looked for KGB involvement in the United States. *
The Johnson White House, however, had chosen not to involve
the CIA deeply in domestic clandestine operations at the time when
it first asked, back in the beginnings of the anti-war movement. The
Domestic Operations Division was given only a small piece of the
action-namely, to increase its surveillance of the movement, and
its activities against direct foreign involvement in the movement.
The FBI, too, was instructed to expand its domestic politicalintelligence
capabilities. But the lion's share of the responsibility in
the matter was given to the Pentagon-in particular, the Armyapparently
under a newly discovered, but outdated, emergency law
granting the President special power to utilize the military and
take whatever measures he deemed necessary to put down domestic
unrest and conspiracies. Literal legal justification probably was
not the sole reason why Army intelligence was assigned as the
main instrument with which to attack the domestic targets; size
was another consideration. Neither the CIA nor the FBI had the
manpower for an all-out clandestine offensive against the radicals.
Nor did either have available large numbers of young intelligence
personnel who could actually penetrate the movement. But Army
Intelligence soon blundered, and it, domestic surveillance programs
were exposed in January 1970 by ex-agent Christopher Pyle,
writing in the Washington Monthly. During the following year the
military services were forced to withdraw from their massive
* Clandestine Services had sympathizers everywhere. H. R. Haldeman,
in a secret memo made public during the Senate Watergate hearings: "We
need our people to put out the story on the foreign or Communist money
that was used in support of demonstrations against the President in 1972."
Espionage and Counterespionage • 231
attack against domestic dissidents; the field was once again left to
the "professionals"-the FBI and the CIA.
This situation, however, soon resulted in an open break between
the agency and the bureau. The New York Times attributed the
split, in late 1971, to a minor event involving jurisdictional control
over the handling of an informant/agent in Denver, Colorado. But
shortly afterward Sam Papich, the FBI's officer in charge of liaison
with the CIA, and a member of J. Edgar Hoover's immediate staff,
was dismissed by the bureau chief. And only weeks later William
Sullivan, head of the FBI's Division of Internal Security, the
bureau's representative on the U.S. Intelligence Board, and a good
friend of the CIA, was locked out of his office and fired by Hoover.
In the aftermath of the troubles at the FBI, the press carried a
series of reports of Hoover's and the bureau's incompetence. Some
comments, attributed to "authoritative sources" in the intelligence
community, accused the FBI of having done a poor job of protecting
the nation's internal security in recent years. These same
sources also noted that the bureau had uncovered only a handful of
foreign spies in the United States during the past several years, and
described the FBI as lacking in the "sophisticated" approach to
modern counterespionage. Such statements, in substance and in
phraseology, clearly originated with, or were inspired by, the CIA.
What the public was unaware of at the time, however, was that
since 1970-1ong before the open CIA-FBI split-the White
House had been planning to expand domestic intelligence operations.
And while the CIA had gone along with and encouraged the
secret policy, the FBI had resisted it. It was, in fact, Hoover's
personal refusal to support the new policy that resulted in the collapse
of the White House plan. And it was in these circumstances
that a paranoid President then established the infamous "plumbers"
squad, with which the CIA was evidently quite willing to cooperate
-and with which the FBI seems to have been reluctant to become
involved.
When CIA Director William Colby was asked at his Senate confirmation
hearings, in the fall of 1973, what he believed to be the
nroner scope of CIA activities within the United States, his first
232 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
response was "We obviously have to run a headquarters here; we
have to recruit people for our staffs, and so forth, and we have to
conduct investigations on those people .... " No one disputes the
need for the agency to conduct certain routine administrative business
within the United States, but few people realize that what the
"headquarters" needs to be "run" includes dozens of buildings
in the Washington area alone, large training facilities at several
locations in Virginia, a paramilitary base in North Carolina, secret
air bases in Nevada and Arizona, communications and radio intercept
bases around the country, scores of "dummy" commercial
organizations and airlines, operational offices in more than twenty
major cities, a huge arms warehouse in the Midwest, and "safe
houses" for secret rendezvous in Washington and other cities. While
most of these are oriented toward foreign operations, some are used
full- or part-time for purely domestic activities.
Colby continued: "We have to contract with a large number of
American firms for the various kinds of equipment that we might
have need for abroad." Again, this is on the surface a legitimate
function. The CIA every year purchases tens of millions of dollars'
worth of goods from domestic companies--everything from office
supplies to esoteric espionage equipment. But Colby carefully left
out any mention of those other "purchases"-the services provided
for by the CIA's contractual relationships with universities, "think
tanks," and individual professors.
Many of these came to light in the winter of 1967 after Ramparts
first revealed the CIA subsidization of the National Student Association
and as exposure followed exposure Richard Helms asked
his Executive Director to report back to him exactly what the CIA
was doing on American campuses. The Executive Director quickly
found that he had no easy task before him, since nearly every agency
component had its own set of programs with one or more American
universities and there was no central office in the CIA which
coordinated or even kept track of these programs. A special committee
was formed to compile a report, and its staff officers spent
weeks going from office to separate office to put together the study.
The committee compiled data on the hundreds of college professors
who had been given special clearances by the agency's Office
Espionage and Counterespionage • 233
of Security to perform a wide variety of tasks for different CIA
components. The Intelligence Directorate, for example, had a corps
of consultants on campus who did historical and political research,
much like normal scholars, with the difference that they were almost
never permitted to publish their findings; in a few instances,
that rule was suspended on condition that the source of their funding
was not identified, and if the work neatly coincided with a
prevailing CIA propaganda line.
Similarly, the Directorate of Science and Technology employed
individual professors, and at times entire university departments or
reseach institutes, for its research and development projects. (This
apart from the millions of dollars of work the S&T Directorate
contracted out every year to private companies and "think tanks.")
Research of this type included the development (
DELETED
) commonly used).
In many cases, the CIA's research involvement on the campuses
went much deeper than simply serving as the patron of scholarly
work. In 1951, CIA money was used to set up the Center for
International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A key figure at the MIT Center was Walt Rostow, a political
scientist with intelligence ties dating back to OSS service during
World War II who later became President Johnson's Assistant for
National Security Affairs. In 1952, Max Millikan, who had been
Director of the CIA's Office of National Estimates, became head
of the center. This linkage between the CIA and research institutions
on campus and in the private sector became standard practice
in later years, just as it did for the Pentagon. But whereas the
Pentagon's procedures could to some extent be monitored by the
Congress and the public, the CIA set up and subsidized its own
"think tanks" under a complete veil of secrecy. When in 1953 the
MIT Center published The Dynamics ot Soviet Society, a book
by Rostow and his colleagues, there was no indication to the
234 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
reader that the work had been financed by CIA funds and that it
reflected the prevailing agency view of the Soviet Union. MIT cut
off its link with the center in 1966, but the link between the center
and the CIA remained, and the agency has continued to subsidize
a number of similar, if smaller, research facilities around the country.
The compilers of the 1967 study on CIA ties to the academic
community also found that the Clandestine Services had their own
research links with universities, for the purpose of developing
better espionage tools (listening devices, advanced weapons, invisible
inks, etc.). But for the covert operators, research was not
the primary campus interest. To the Clandestine Services the universities
represented fertile territory for recruiting espionage agents.
Most large American colleges enrolled substantial numbers of foreign
students, and many of these, especially those from the Third
World, were (and are) destined to hold high positions in their
home countries in a relatively few years. They were much easier
to recruit at American schools-when they might have a need for
money, where they could be easily compromised, and where foreign
security services could not interfere-than they would be
when they returned home. To spot and evaluate these students, the
Clandestine Services maintained a contractual relationship with
key professors on numerous campuses. When a professor had
picked out a likely candidate, he notified his contact at the CIA
and, on occasion, participated in the actual recruitment attempt.
Some professors performed these services without being on a
formal retainer. Others actively participated in agency covert operations
by serving as "cut-outs," or intermediaries, and even by carrying
out secret missions during foreign journeys.
The Clandestine Services at times have used a university to
provide cover or even assist in a covert operation overseas. The
best-known case of this sort was exposed in 1966 when Ramparts
revealed that Michigan State University had been used by the CIA
from 1955 to 1959 to run a covert police-training program in
South Vietnam. The agency had paid $25 million to the university
for its service, and five CIA operators were concealed in the program's
staff.
Espionage and Counterespionage • 235
The 1967 study on the CIA's ties with American universities
covered all the activities described above, but the staff officer
responsible for preparing it was told that no research program concerning
the use of drugs was to be mentioned in the report. *
The final study that the Executive Director presented to Director
Helms was several inches thick, but the man who wrote it was still
not sure that it was complete, less because he feared having overlooked
some particular CIA component or proprietary organization
which had its own university program than because he suspected
that information had been withheld from him, particularly by the
covert operators.
Because of its sensitivity, only one copy of the study was made,
and it was turned over to the Director. Helms reviewed it and
agreed with its conclusion: that all the CIA's campus activities
were valuable to the agency and should be continued, except for
a few individual contracts that had become outdated or too exposed.
In the end, there was selective pruning of these programs,
but essentially the CIA's activities with and at the universities continued
as they had before the NSA scandal broke. They do so today.
The lone copy of the study was placed in the CIA Executive
Director's safe for future reference. Within a few weeks after
Helms' review, the report had to be pulled out; a controversy had
erupted at a Midwestern university over alleged contracts between
a certain professor and the CIA. When the study was consulted
to find out if the allegations were correct, neither the professor nor
the program he was associated with was listed anywhere in the
bulky document. There was a collective sigh of relief in the agency's
executive suite and some mumbling about irresponsible students
making ridiculous charges. Shortly thereafter, however, the Director's
staff found out that the exposed professor was genuine and
had telephoned his CIA contact to discuss how he should react
to the charges. He was told to get a teaching job elsewhere-and
he did.
* The agency's interest in drugs was more than a passing one; one officer
was assigned to travel all over Latin America, buying up all sorts of hallucinatory
drugs which might have some application to intelligence activities
and operations.
236 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
Soon after, another incident occurred. (
DELETED
)
Returning to Director Colby's explanation of the CIA's domestic
activities:
We also, I believe quite properly, can collect foreign intelligence
in the United States, including the requesting [sic]
American citizens to share with their Government certain information
they may know about foreign situations, and we
have a service that does this, and I am happy to say a very
large number of American citizens have given us some information.
We do not pay for that information. We can
protect their proprietary interest and even protect their names
if necessary, if they would rather not be exposed as the source
of that information.
What Colby was referring to was the Domestic Contact Service
(DCS). The DCS's primary function has traditionally been to collect
intelligence from Americans without resorting to covert
methods. Until early 1973 the DCS was part of the CIA's Intelligence
Directorate, the overt analytical part of the agency. The
DCS's normal operating technique is to establish relationships with
businessmen, scholars, tourists, and other travelers who have made
trips abroad, usually to Eastern Europe or China. These people are
asked to provide information voluntarily about what they have seen
or heard on their journeys. Most often they are contacted by the
agency after they have returned home, but occasionally, if the CIA
hears that a particular person plans to visit, say, a remote part of
the Soviet Union, the DCS will get in touch in advance and ask
Espionage and Counterespionage • 237
the traveler to seek out information on certain targets. In the past
the DCS has, however, shied away from assigning specific missions,
since the travelers are not professional spies and may easily be
arrested if they take their espionage roles too seriously.
On several occasions over the years, the Clandestine Services
have expressed an interest in assuming control of the DCS-with
the argument that in the interest of efficiency all CIA intelligence
collection by human sources should be run out of the same directorate.
During the late 1960s the Clandestine Services were specifically
rebuffed after a crude takeover attempt, but as a compromise
measure Director Helms allowed clandestine operators to be
assigned to the DCS in order to better coordinate intelligence collection.
The DCS itself remained under the Intelligence Directorate.
But in early 1973 Director James Schlesinger approved the transfer
of the DCS to the Clandestine Services. Although there was no
public notice of this change and travelers were not informed they
were now dealing with the CIA's clandestine operators, Senator
William Proxmire somehow got the word and told the Senate on
August 1, 1973, that he was "particularly disturbed" by the shift.
"Mr. Colby says," Proxmire explained, "that this is to improve the
coordination of its collection activities with those of the Agency
abroad. I find this disturbing because of the possibility that the
DCS, which has a good reputation, may now become 'tainted' by
the covert side of the Agency."
Again, Colby at the Senate hearing:
We also, I believe, have certain support activities that we must
conduct in the United States in order to conduct foreign intelligence
operations abroad; certain structures are necessary in
this country to give our people abroad perhaps a reason for
operating abroad in some respects so that they can appear not
as CIA employees but as representatives of some other entity.
Here Colby was undoubtedly talking about the CIA's training
facilities, weapons warehouses, secret arrangements with U.S.
companies to employ "deep cover" CIA operators, covert dealings
238 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
with arms dealers, and other back-up activities necessary to support
paramilitary operations and other clandestine doings overseas. He
may also have been referring to the CIA's use of American foundations,
labor unions, and other groups as fronts to fund covert-action
programs overseas, or to the proprietary corporations which operate
for the CIA around the world. In this last category are the complex
web of agency-owned airlines-Air America, Air Asia, Civil
Air Transport, Southern Air Transport, Intermountain Aviation, (
DELETED )-all of which have headquarters
in the United States, and some of which maintain extensive
facilities here. These airlines are run in direct competition with
private companies, receive charter contracts from the U.S. government,
and often operate domestically, in addition to taking on
secret missions for the CIA abroad. (
DELETED
) All these companies-and others not yet revealed-do
much more than provide cover for CIA employees, as Colby implied.
They represent businesses worth hundreds of millions of
dollars that can be used in all manner of operations by the CIA
both at home and overseas.
Colby concluded:
Lastly, I think that there are a number of actIvItIes in the
United States where foreign intelligence can be collected from
foreigners, and as long as there is foreign intelligence, I think
it is quite proper that we do this.
In this instance Colby was referring in part to the CIA's efforts
to recruit foreign students on American campuses, and a similar
program, operated with the cooperation of military intelligence, to
suborn foreign military officers who come to the United States for
training. But the CIA also targets other foreign visitors to the U.S.
-businessmen, newsmen, scholars, diplomats, U.N. delegates and
employees, even simple tourists. It is specifically for the recruitEspionage
and Counterespionage • 239
ment and handling of foreign agents that the CIA maintains safe
houses in Washington, New York, and other cities.
Another group of Americans who are very much targets of the
CIA are recent immigrants. Almost from the moment Fidel Castro
took power in 1959, CIA operators have worked closely with
Cuban exiles, particularly in Florida. Most of the recruiting and
some of the training for the agency's abortive invasion of the
island in 1961 took place in the Miami area. Even after that fiasco
the CIA has continued to use Cuban-Americans (few as celebrated
as "retained" agent-and Watergate burglar-Eugenio Martinez)
to carry out guerrilla operations against the Castro government. It
has also been quite active among Eastern European emigres in the
United States. In November 1964, Eerik Heine, an Estonian refugee
living in Canada, sued for slander another Estonian named Juri
Raus, a resident of Hyattsville, Maryland. Raus, who was American
national commander of the Legion of Estonian Liberation, was
alleged to have denounced Heine as an agent of the KGB. Raus'
defense in court was based not on the specifics of the case but on
an affidavit submitted by then CIA Deputy Director Richard Helms
stating that Raus was a CIA agent and had spoken out against
Heine among Estonian-Americans under direct agency orders.
Helms submitted two more affidavits to the court stating that the
CIA had further ordered Raus not to testify in court, but explaining
he had said what he had "to protect the integrity of the Agency's
foreign intelligence sources." The federal judge, Roszel C. Thomsen,
ruled in the CIA's favor and did not accept the plaintiff's contention
that even if the agency had ordered that the alleged slander be
committed, it had no power to do so under the National Security
Act of 1947, which forbade the CIA to exercise any "internal
security functions."
In his decision, Judge Thomsen wrote:
It is reasonable that emigre groups from behind the Iron
Curtain would be a valuable source of information as to what
goes on in their homeland. The fact that the intelligence source
is located in the United States does not make it an "internal
security function" over which the CIA has no authority. The
240 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
court concludes that activities by the CIA to protect its foreign
intelligence sources located in the United States are within the
power granted by Congress to the CIA.
By extension, it might also be argued that any "foreign intelligence
source" located in the United States, emigre or not, is fair game
for the CIA. Clearly, American citizens traveling abroad are
eligible; clearly, researchers in universities are eligible; and if the
agency can come up with a reason-such as the threat of "foreign
influence" in American politics-then everyone's eligible. And
that eligibility extends not only to the honor of being consulted,
cajoled, and financed, but to the privilege of being investigated,
suborned, or whatever else the covert operators might wish to do.

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