The CQ Researcher : Reforming the CIA
From the February 2, 1996 issue of The CQ Researcher, Volume 6, No. 5, p. 99-106.
Overview : After the Aldrich Ames Spy Scandal
By Mary H. Cooper
When Aldrich “Rick” Ames was sentenced to life in prison in 1994,the worst spy scandal in CIA history finally seemed over. The treasonous ex-agent would sell no more top-secret information to the former Soviet Union or Russia, but he hadn't finished talking. Before he was hustled away in chains, he leveled a final blast at the agency he had betrayed.
“The espionage business, as carried out by the CIA and a few other American agencies, was and is a self-serving sham, carried out by careerist bureaucrats who have managed to deceive several generations of American policy-makers and the public about both the necessity and the value of their work,” Ames said. “There is and has been no rational need for thousands of . . . agents working around the world, primarily in and against friendly countries . . . Frankly, these spy wars are a sideshow which [has] had no real impact on our significant security interests over the years.” [1]
Many CIA and government officials dismissed Ames' diatribe, coming as it did from such a notorious traitor. But many critics of the U.S. intelligence community felt that Ames, of all people, had spoken the truth - or close to it. One thing was certain: As a 31-year veteran of the fabled agency, he had had ample opportunity to assess its effectiveness and competency.
As counterintelligence chief of the CIA's Soviet branch, Ames had worked with the top spymasters at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. From his privileged perch in the secretive directorate of operations, Ames had made millions of dollars selling America's secrets. Over the course of nine years, Ames had exposed the identities of scores of Soviet citizens on the CIA payroll, at least 10 of whom were executed for treason.
Today, in the wake of the scandal, sweeping re-examinations of U.S. intelligence operations are under way by congressional committees, a special presidential commission and the CIA itself. “It is evident that the most difficult intelligence activity to manage is human intelligence, clandestinely collected intelligence by our men and women,” CIA Director John M. Deutch acknowledged during recent House committee hearings on the agency's future. “We are in a time of transition. This is a period like the era after World War II, where key decisions will be made that will shape the strength of the U.S. intelligence community for years to come.” [2]
After World War II, the Central Intelligence Agency and a dozen other American spy organizations emerged as key weapons in the Cold War pitting the U.S. against the Soviet Union and its allies around the world. In a war without tanks and guns, the combatants attacked and counterattacked using espionage, disinformation and covert political action to achieve their objectives.
The demise of the Soviet Union radically altered the nature of foreign threats to the United States. Suddenly, the world's most notorious and efficient espionage agency - the KGB - was greatly weakened and, in any case, no longer under the direction of a hostile superpower. Many Third World governments that had represented Soviet interests, such as Angola and Afghanistan, no longer were perceived as threats to the United States. The overthrow of anti-U.S. governments in several former Soviet allies further eroded the threat. The East German intelligence agency Stasi, second only to the KGB as the CIA's most effective adversary, ceased to exist altogether after German reunification in 1990.
The Cold War's end, coupled with the Ames debacle and other problems, made the CIA and the other spy agencies natural targets during congressional efforts to reduce the federal budget deficit. In fact, in 1990, long before budget cutters capped spending by other federal agencies, the CIA imposed its own 3 percent ceiling on agency budget increases. Although the cost of running U.S. intelligence agencies is buried in the classified portion of the Pentagon's budget, word got out that it amounted to some $28 billion in 1994. [3] The CIA received only about $3.1 billion of the total, with the remainder largely going to intelligence operations run by the Defense Department. These include the National Security Agency, which gathers “signals intelligence” using satellites and ground stations, and the Central Imagery Office, which provides reconnaissance data to military commanders in the field.
But the CIA's pre-emptive budget cutbacks did not stave off criticism of the beleaguered agency. It had never recovered public esteem after the 1986 Iran-contra scandal. Then, in February 1994, came the Ames scandal, which prompted CIA Director R. James Woolsey's abrupt resignation at the end of the year. Antagonism toward the agency continued to mount last year, when it was revealed that CIA officials had covered up the involvement of a paid CIA informant in the 1992 murder of a Guatemalan guerrilla leader married to American lawyer Jennifer Harbury.
By early last year, the CIA's prestige had dropped so low that when President Clinton asked then-Deputy Defense Secretary Deutch to find a new CIA director, there were so few candidates interested in that post that Deutch was persuaded to take the job himself. By the time he assumed the post in May, morale at the agency was at rock bottom.
“The thing that really tickles me, in a cynical sort of way, is that half of the press criticism is about the ineffectualness of the intelligence agencies,” says David Whipple, executive director of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. “The other half involves raising the red flag of alarm over the possibility of creating a monolithic organization which would be too effective. You just can't win.”
A few critics say the record of American intelligence is so poor that the government should get out of the spy business entirely. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., has submitted legislation that would dismantle the CIA and the other agencies engaged in espionage and limit information gathering to the State Department's diplomatic sources. “Secrecy is a disease,” he said. “It causes hardening of the arteries of the mind. It hinders true scholarship and hides mistakes.” [4]
But most experts and legislators say that intelligence gathering is a vital function of government, especially for the world's greatest power. “The focus of the CIA's operations has changed,” says Adm. William O. Studeman, CIA acting director in early 1995. “But the mission of the agency hasn't changed at all. And I don't think either the organization or its mission should change.”
The role of intelligence may be even more vital today, some experts say, than during the Cold War. In the place of a clearly identifiable menace - the Soviet bloc - the main threats to American security often come from small, transnational groups that require even sharper intelligence capabilities to identify and track before they can harm U.S. interests. “There are a lot of circumstances, when it comes to terrorism and narcotics, [arms] proliferation and other threats, where the American government is going to need to be able to act secretly,” says Robert M. Gates, director of central intelligence from 1991-1993. “So I think that capability needs to be a strong one.”
To cope with the changing nature of threats to U.S. national security, many experts are calling for a fundamental redesign of the intelligence community. They differ widely, however, in their suggestions on how the CIA and other agencies should deal with the new international environment. Last February, President Clinton named former Defense Secretary Les Aspin to head the independent Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community. The panel of 17 presidential and congressional appointees was asked to study the intelligence community's needs in the post-Cold War era and recommend possible reforms to the CIA and other spy agencies.
Although the commission suffered a setback with Aspin's death last summer, it has continued its work under Harold Brown, also a former Defense secretary, and is scheduled to present its recommendations on March 1. [5] As part of their oversight responsibilities, the congressional intelligence committees also have been holding a series of hearings on ways to prepare the intelligence community for the 21st century.
As former and current intelligence officers and lawmakers consider the nation's future intelligence needs, these are some of the issues they face:
Should an intelligence “czar” be appointed to oversee the entire intelligence community?
Since the CIA was created under the 1947 National Security Act, the director of the CIA has also held the title of director of central intelligence (DCI), with responsibility for collecting and analyzing all the nation's intelligence data for the National Security Council (NSC) and the president. [6]
One of Deutch's first undertakings upon becoming CIA director last May, in fact, was to hand over much of the agency's day-to-day administration to his deputies. The shift has allowed the new director to dedicate more time to matters involving the community as a whole, including testifying before the congressional committees now studying the role of intelligence in U.S. foreign policy.
Even if Deutch eventually proves more successful than his predecessors at wearing the two hats conferred on him by law - oversight of the CIA and the intelligence community - some experts say the dual role is intrinsically too burdensome to carry out effectively. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R- Pa., has proposed amending the 1947 law to create a new position: director of national intelligence. Like the drug “czar,” who coordinates the nation's war on drugs, the “intelligence czar” would oversee the entire intelligence community, with direct links to the White House. Under such an arrangement, CIA directors would have no more authority than the heads of the other intelligence agencies.
Some military intelligence officers, particularly those who have chafed under the CIA's dominance of the community, like the idea. Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, recalled a certain “CIA-centric point of view” when dealing with the directors of central intelligence. “There is an understandable bias that creeps into the decisions they make that I think subtly, and not so subtly, favors the agency,” Clapper said. “I think it would be better to have someone who can preside over the community Solomon-like and look at it objectively, particularly when issues arise within the agency which consume the DCI's time and energies, as we had with the Ames case.” [7]
To Gates, the potential benefits of an intelligence czar depend on how the role is defined. “The idea of strengthening the power of the director of central intelligence to truly manage the intelligence community is a good idea,” he says. “The idea of creating a director of national intelligence completely separate from CIA, where there's a different person who is the director of CIA, is a terrible idea.”
The problem boils down to power and money, Gates says. “In Washington, if you don't have troops, you don't count,” he says. “I've worked in the National Security Council and at the White House under four presidents, as well as at CIA, and I can tell you that's how it works.” An intelligence czar with no independent base would have to have authority over the entire intelligence budget to be effective, he explains.
“When you consider that 85 percent of that budget is under the Defense Department,” Gates continues, “there's no way any secretary of Defense is going to give up that kind of control over organizations for which he has ultimate responsibility. So you automatically have a situation in which the new intelligence czar sitting over in the Old Executive Office Building has no significantly greater budgetary or management authority than the current director of central intelligence. At the same time, because he does not head CIA he has been stripped of all of his organizational base and independence. That kind of position is guaranteed to fail.”
A better way to enhance the director's ability to manage the intelligence community, in Gates' view, would be to allow the director to move personnel and funds among the various agencies at his discretion and to wield veto power over high-level intelligence appointments. “We should enhance the DCI's authority to manage the community and American intelligence, rather than ripping him up by the roots and plunking him down in the Old Executive Office Building in a very grand suite but without any real power,” Gates says.
Other critics say creating a new intelligence czar runs counter to ongoing efforts by businesses and public agencies to downsize their operations by trimming unnecessary jobs. “I do not support an intelligence czar,” says Studeman. “I think it's quite honestly just another layer. It creates bureaucracy and is neither required nor desired. The director of central intelligence is more than capable of dividing his time between the issues associated with the management of the Central Intelligence Agency and those associated with the management of the intelligence community, provided that he organizes himself to do that.”
Deutch agrees with both his predecessors on the need to maintain the CIA director's authority over the entire intelligence community. “I believe that the director of central intelligence must put a priority on his or her role as head of the community,” he testified at a recent hearing. “It is a community of different organizations with one organization still at the hub of the wheel, independent of the policy departments and with a hand in every [type of] intelligence, and by that I refer to the Central Intelligence Agency.” [8]
Deutch also acknowledged the difficulties CIA directors will face if, as he proposes, Congress expands their budgetary authority over the other intelligence agencies. How will the other agency chiefs respond to such a change? Deutch said, “They'll go out of their minds.”
Should some law enforcement and intelligence agencies merge?
The 1947 National Security Act drew clear boundaries separating the CIA's intelligence-gathering function from the investigative role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other law-enforcement agencies. It also specifically barred CIA from conducting police activities.
But those lines have been blurred since the end of the Cold War and the preoccupation with Soviet military power. Now a number of other threats to national security have emerged as priorities for American intelligence, among them proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons; the potential for aggression by “rogue” nations; narcotics trafficking; international crime syndicates; and illegal- alien smuggling.
Because many of these threats involve groups of criminals working overseas as well as in the United States, the line separating the law enforcement and intelligence communities has become less distinct. At no time has this been more apparent than following the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City. More timely information from overseas intelligence outposts, some critics say, might have helped U.S. law enforcement agents stop the bombers before they could act.
The bombing sparked calls for closer collaboration between the CIA and FBI. “The resulting overlap in the concerns and activities of the intelligence and law enforcement communities has prompted some people to suggest that we should simply merge the two communities in an effort to achieve greater efficiency in the fight against international crime,” said Deputy Attorney General Jamie S. Gorelick. “We believe this would be a serious mistake. There are ample reasons, grounded in history and constitutional principles, to maintain a clear demarcation between the missions and authorities of the two communities.” [9]
Gorelick and other critics of a law enforcement-intelligence merger, which has been proposed periodically since 1947, say it invites abuse of power. Among other things, they say, a superagency could become a monolithic nightmare capable of evading congressional oversight.
Studeman calls the merger idea “patently ridiculous. . . . It is very important to recognize that the '47 act specifically bars CIA from having police powers,” he says. “They are not desired, and they would get the agency into activities that in my view it doesn't need to be engaged in.”
Another obstacle to a merger is their fundamental clash in missions. “Law enforcement wants to identify bad guys and put them in jail,” says Gates. “Intelligence wants to identify bad guys and follow them or recruit them, so they can keep getting information from them. These are very different cultures, and trying to merge them creates all kinds of potential problems.”
In Latin America and Southeast Asia, in particular, where the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has pursued narcotics traffickers, Studeman says the failure of law enforcement agents to play by the rules has been “a source of continuous tension.”
Many experts say that merging the law enforcement and intelligence communities is not the best way to coordinate their efforts. “We have been working over the last year to build a connection,” says Studeman. He cites the creation last March of the Intelligence-Law Enforcement Policy Board, which he co-chaired with Gorelick. “What we need to do in the modern world is create matrix organizations like this to deal with overlapping roles while keeping the missions and charters of the various organizations apart and separate,” he says. “This way, we can continue to protect our sources and methods while providing a lot of information to law enforcement, which they can then use, applying their own methods, to build their cases. It's really the best way to do it.”
Deutch agrees that intelligence and law enforcement should be kept separate. “Good spies make bad cops,” he testified last December, “and I also believe that good cops make bad spies. Accordingly, I believe the intelligence-gathering components of the United States government's attack on [international terrorism, crime and narcotics] should be in the hands of the intelligence community rather than through an expanded law enforcement presence overseas.” [10] At the same time, Deutch has continued Studeman's active promotion of the policy board, recently noting that CIA and FBI representatives now meet twice a week.
At the same time, Deutch acknowledged that the tensions between law enforcement and intelligence are unlikely to go away. “I don't have a magic solution to give you on this,” he said at the December hearing. “I will say that at a practical, working level, the cooperation is improving every day and is much better in the areas of terrorism and counternarcotics, especially between the bureau and the CIA,” he said. “But I do think that it continues to need some attention because of the changing nature of the threat.”
Should the CIA continue to conduct covert political action?
The CIA was originally conceived as an intelligence-gathering organization. But the National Security Act left vague the limits of this essentially passive function. Following the KGB's example, the CIA soon after its creation began to act on the information it collected, attempting to influence events in foreign countries.
Conducted by the directorate of operations, covert political action has been the most controversial feature of U.S. intelligence. At its most effective, the public has not even been aware of its work. “The covert actions which have succeeded, in my own experience, have been very important and very unpublicized,” says Whipple, who served as CIA station chief in such hot spots as Vietnam, Burma and Cambodia during his 35-year career. “If a covert action goes wrong, you're apt to hear about it, and there will be lots of criticism. If a covert action goes right, you don't hear about it at all because part of its success is that it was not exposed.”
Covert operations that have turned out well by most standards - and which have been publicized - include the CIA's role in arresting Carlos the Jackal, an international terrorist who had eluded capture for two decades until his 1994 arrest in Sudan. The CIA also helped track down Arab terrorist Ramzi Yousef, who was charged with masterminding the Trade Center bombing.
But when covert operations have failed, they have sometimes revealed questionable methods used to reach equally questionable ends. During the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, for example, the agency trained an improbably small force of Cuban exiles to invade Cuba and assassinate Fidel Castro. In retrospect, critics said the operation had been doomed to failure and never should have been undertaken under any circumstances.
Today, with the KGB and its dirty tricks apparently out of the picture, some say the United States should get out of the business of secretly manipulating events overseas. “Covert action has been overused as an instrument of foreign policy, and the reputation of the United States has suffered,” writes Roger Hilsman, an assistant secretary of State for intelligence and research in the 1950s. “And while one action, taken in isolation, might seem worth the cost of slightly tarnishing the national image, the cumulative effect of several hundred blots has been to blacken it entirely, thus corroding one of America's major political assets - a belief abroad in American intentions and integrity. Covert political action is not only something the United States can do without in the post-Cold War world, it is something the United States could have done without during the Cold War as well.” [11]
CIA officials counter that covert action is sometimes necessary to gain friendly foreign governments' support for U.S. policies, such as the pursuit of drug lords or terrorists in countries where such criminals are at least as powerful as government officials. “There are a lot of situations in which other countries won't cooperate with us if their cooperation is openly acknowledged,” says Studeman. “There are a lot of circumstances in which they know there will be leaks, but as long as it's not officially confirmed they're willing to work with us.”
The spread of transnational threats to U.S. security makes a strong covert-action capability as necessary as ever, in the view of many intelligence officials. “Covert action is a legitimate policy arm that falls between conventional defense and conventional diplomacy,” Gates says. “It is something that countries like ours, faced with proliferation and other threats, must execute.”
[1] Quoted in Caleb Carr, “Aldrich Ames and the Conduct of American Intelligence,” World Policy Journal, fall 1994, p. 20. Ames made the statement on April 28, 1994.
[2] Testimony before the House Select Intelligence Committee, Dec. 19, 1995.
[3] See “The New CIA,” The CQ Researcher, Dec. 11, 1992, pp. 1073- 1096; and “$28 Billion Spying Budget Is Made Public by Mistake,” The New York Times, Nov. 5, 1994.
[4] Sen. Moynihan addressed the Senate Jan. 4, 1995.
[5] At the Brown commission's only public hearing, in Washington on Jan. 19, 1996, six intelligence experts testified, including former Deputy CIA Director Bobby Ray Inman, former Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci and former Attorney General William Barr.
[6] For background, see Sen. Moynihan addressed the Senate Jan. 4, 1995 and “National Security Council,” Editorial Research Reports, Jan. 16, 1987, pp. 17-28.
[7] Clapper testified Nov. 16, 1995, before the House Select Intelligence Committee.
[8] Deutch testified Dec. 19, 1995, before the House Select Intelligence Committee.
[9] Gorelick testified Oct. 25, 1995, before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.
[10] From testimony before the Dec. 19, 1995, House Select Intelligence Committee hearing.
[11] Roger Hilsman, “Does the CIA Still Have a Role?” Foreign Affairs, September/October 1995, p. 112.