<< "They [CIA analysts] see . . . a challenge to what they believe is their due as the 'best and the brightest'--a monopoly on the right to determine how the U.S. Government views the world. . . .
"Robin Winke's sociology of CIA recounts that when World War II came,
'the coaches and the quarterbacks' of the nation's elite campuses went into
espionage, while 'the muscular athletes' went into special operations.
'The weenies and the wimps,' he writes, went into the Research and Analysis
branch of the Office of Strategic Services. After the war, this
overwhelmingly liberal group became the core of CIA analysts. The
principal concern of the group was not so much providing expertise as gaining
the bureaucratic prerogative to provide the basis for the U.S. Government's
policies. A 1948 report by Allen Dulles, William Jackson, and Mathies
Correa convinced President Truman to force all other government agencies to work
under CIA to produce a single set of intelligence products on the most important
issues. Thus protected from competition, this very peculiar group of
people came to believe that, just as the Constitution is whatever the Supreme
Court says it is, intelligence is whatever they say it is. During the
height of their influence under the Carter Administration these analysts
succeeded in calling themselves the National Foreign Assessment Center, as if no
one else had a right to speak authoritatively on foreign matters.
When
outsiders dare to speak on the subject, the CIA Brahmins ridicule them. When an
insider breaks ranks, they try to exorcise him. >>
National Review
By Angelo Codevilla
THOSE WHO listened to the Senate hearings on the nomination of Robert Gates to be Director of Central Intelligence heard Gates (a former CIA official) accused of having purveyed conservative ideological fancies at the expense of facts. The hearings themselves, however, consisted largely of gossip from the CIA bureaucracy rather than of arguments about the outside world. Listeners quickly got the feeling of witnessing a family squabble they did not really understand. What was going on? Two sets of liberals--Democratic senators and CIA analysts--were bashing Gates in order to push two somewhat overlapping agendas.
The senators' agenda was transparent enough. Ronald Reagan had build a decade's political dominance by depicting the Soviet Union as an evil empire at home and dangerous abroad. Now the Democrats asserted that their (highly unpopular) opposition to U.S. military spending and muscular foreign policy had been right all along because the "real" CIA had always known that the Soviet Union was collapsing at home and a paper tiger abroad. By filling intelligence documents with Mr. Reagan's favorite images--raw meat thrown to Reaganite lions--Gates and his former boss William Casey had indirectly disinformed the American people. Even Daniel P. Moynihan, who knows much better, pilloried Gates along these lines. Dogs bite man.
The agenda of the CIA analysts who testified against Gates--and hence made possible the senators' attack--was harder to figure out. Their personal vehemence was the sort normally reserved for criminals. One former analyst, Melvin Goodman, said that "Gates's role . . . was to corrupt the ethics of intelligence." Gates had been "responsible" for "misleading and false information" that had "cost lives." According to another, Jennifer Glaudemana, Gates contributed to "the culture of fear and cynicism among frontline analysts" and had left her "scarred."
Yet the specific charges were few, and Gates had little trouble rebutting their details. Had Gates introduced a false item into a CIA publication? True or false, the item had been introduced by somebody else on a day when Gates was out of town. Had Gates killed a draft estimate in 1982? At the time he had no authority to kill anything. Had he ordered somebody fired? The man's immediate boss testified that he had done it on his own initiative. Had Gates not paid attention to the possibility that the Soviet Union would fall apart? Paper aplenty showed that he was one of the few people in the government who had. Had Gates ordered the CIA to find the Soviets guilty of ordering the attempted murder of the Pope? He had not.
Details, however, were not what had fueled the passionate belief of many at CIA that Gates is their blood enemy, evil incarnate. Why then do they hate him so violently? Because they see in Gates a challenge to what they believe is their due as the "best and the brightest"--a monopoly on the right to determine how the U.S. Government views the world. A quick survey of two points of contention--the Pope plot and the Soviet collapse--will show that for CIA analysts what happens in the world is less important than their own feelings of superiority.
On Whose Account?
WHEN THE Italian police arrested Mehmet Ali Agca in St. Peter's Square, they quickly noticed that he did not have a religious or fanatical bone in his body. Cool and businesslike, he had no motive of his own for shooting the Pope. A check of border crossings and hotels showed that he had traveled Western Europe in style for weeks. But just before entering Western Europe, this penniless Turk had stayed at Bulgaria's luxurious Hotel Vitosha. Hence, even before Agca began to dribble out information about his acquaintance with Bulgarian intelligence officers who had given him the gun and had been in St. Peter's Square at the time of the shooting, the Italian authorities had build a solid circumstantial case that the Bulgarian secret service had paid him to shoot the Pope. If the Bulgarians had done it, it could only have been at the behest of the KGB.
CIA had no information at all that someone might attempt to kill the Pope. Thereafter, some of its sources delivered a few third-hand rumors. Hence one might have expected CIA to write nothing of its own, but merely to pass on the Italians' findings. But no. It quickly became orthodoxy at CIA that the Bulgarians and Soviets had nothing to do with the shooting and that to suggest otherwise was irresponsible sabotage of U.S.-Soviet relations. In November 1982 I sat with a CIA official in Rome as the Italian Minister of the Interior laid out Italy's case. The CIA man snapped: "You have no proof." The minister replied: "What proof do you want"? The CIA man warned that Italy was fouling up U.S.-Soviet relations and in the end would be left alone. In February 1983 CIA Director Casey, accompanied by Robert Gates, delivered to Congress the CIA analysts' critique of Claire Sterling's book, The Terror Network (the thesis of which is that the Soviets facilitated anti-Western terrorism through a network in Eastern Europe and the Middle East) as well as a refutation of the Italian magistrates' case against the Bulgarians. The refutation contained no facts. (There was an allusion to a "decisive," "sensitive source," but this turned out to be a defector who had heard a conversation amongst some Bulgarians who did not happen to know anything themselves.) The most typical sentence starters were "We believe . . . " and "We have no evidence . . ." Nevertheless. the document put the weight of the U.S. government behind the proposition that the Soviets would not sponsor terrorism in any way, shape, or form.
Bill Casey was uncomfortable both with the conclusion and with the craftsmanship. As a result, two years later (April 23, 1986) CIA wrote a paper "setting forth the basis for believing the Soviets might have been involved." The paper presents no independent factual evidence, only generalizations about Soviet behavior. Even this was still too much for some analysts, who, on May 20, wrote "the case against." It begins by protesting the fact that a "case for" had been written at all. Amusingly, it chides the paper Casey commissioned for being "conjectural," but makes its own case with such hard stuff as, "If in the unlikely event that the KGB instructed (the Bulgarians) to kill the Pope, there would have been greater attention paid to operational tradecraft."
Where does the truth lie? After the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, the German government captured scores of terrorists who had been headquartered in East Germany. The Czechoslovak government shut down terrorist training facilities. As a result, the level of terrorism in Western Europe has dropped dramatically. As for the Pope plot, in 1990 a Soviet defector told a press conference that in 1980 the KGB had commissioned a study on how best to physically approach John Paul II.
The point here is not so much that CIA analysts were mistaken. It is that they were so adamantly attached to the Soviets' innocence that, as far as they were concerned, any of their colleagues who thought otherwise had no right to say so Even less did they have the right to apply the CIA cachet to such statements. Let us be clear: Such an attitude can only come from the belief that the right to speak on certain matters belongs only to the politically and socially correct
Let us turn to CIA's treatment of the Soviet Union. The CIA line has always been consistent with that of the best and the brightest in academe. Communism had lifted Russia out of poverty and into the top rank of industrial nations. Soviet prosperity was spartan but well distributed. A first-class public-health system served a population deeply in love with socialist security. Hence, the Soviet Union was politically solid, and President Reagan's talk about doing away with Communism was right-wing lunacy. Soviet military spending, like American military spending, took up about 6 per cent of GNP, but of a GNP roughly half that of the United States. Above all, the USSR would not violate arms-control agreements and would surely not equip itself to fight and win a nuclear war. Nonetheless, regardless of cost, the USSR could be counted on to rebuild its entire nuclear arsenal to best an American anti-missile defense. Any American who thought otherwise was a war monger.
CIA held this line despite massive contrary evidence. There was never a shortage of refugees and émigrés who painted the pictures of Soviet squalor that today are accepted uncritically, nor a shortage of eloquent voices (e.g. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) that said the regime was universally regarded as a monstrosity, and that it would collapse if ever people spoke the truth to one another. Nor was there a shortage of economists (one thinks of Henry Rowen and Charles Wolf) who were arguing that the Soviet GNP was less than a third of America's and that (William T. Lee and Steven Rosenfielde) over 25 per cent of it was devoted to the military. There was even a team, chosen by the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and headed by Richard Pipes, that gave detailed evidence of how the arsenal the Soviets had impoverished themselves to build was designed to fight, survive, and win a nuclear war.
CIA stuck to its line, not by defeating opposing arguments but by maligning those who made them. The refugees had "axes to grind." Solzhenitsyn was at best a dreamer and at worst a fascist. As for Pipes's team, CIA ran a campaign to discredit it with charges of "leaking." The consummation of CIA's work on the Soviet Union may be seen on August 1, 1991. Eighteen days before the Soviet Union died to practically universal cheers, George Bush went to Kiev to tell the Ukrainian people to be good Soviet citizens, because the Soviet regime was reforming itself.
Never Wrong
Are CIA analysts proud of their performance? The question is off the mark. They are proud of themselves for having been on the politically correct side of the issues. There is an old saying at CIA: "We may not always be right, but we're never wrong." This attitude has deep roots in the social composition of CIA analysts and in the way the analytical process has been organized.
Robin Winke's sociology of CIA recounts that when World War II came, "the coaches and the quarterbacks" of the nation's elite campuses went into espionage, while "the muscular athletes" went into special operations. "The weenies and the wimps," he writes, went into the Research and Analysis branch of the Office of Strategic Services. After the war, this overwhelmingly liberal group became the core of CIA analysts. The principal concern of the group was not so much providing expertise as gaining the bureaucratic prerogative to provide the basis for the U.S. Government's policies. A 1948 report by Allen Dulles, William Jackson, and Mathies Correa convinced President Truman to force all other government agencies to work under CIA to produce a single set of intelligence products on the most important issues. Thus protected from competition, this very peculiar group of people came to believe that, just as the Constitution is whatever the Supreme Court says it is, intelligence is whatever they say it is. During the height of their influence under the Carter Administration these analysts succeeded in calling themselves the National Foreign Assessment Center, as if no one else had a right to speak authoritatively on foreign matters. When outsiders dare to speak on the subject, the CIA Brahmins ridicule them. When an insider breaks ranks, they try to exorcise him.
The analysts' attacks on Robert Gates, which made no sense as intellectual arguments, make perfect sense as social claims to bureaucratic turf. Mr. Goodman says that Gates sent reports to the President that "in terms of their message were at variance with the views of the Directorate of Intelligence." Horror of horrors, Gates also made "a conscious attempt to provide uncoordinated information to the NSC." And again, "The analysts . . . were not consulted." Miss Glaudemana blames him for (gasp!) violating "an atmosphere and a culture." Gates did not "clearly distinguish what were his personal views and what were CIA or intelligence-community views." Her views, you see, were proper CIA views, while his were not. Harold Ford hit hardest: "Everyone's views were not listened to."
In January 1982 Robert Gates had read the riot act to CIA's senior analysts. He had chastised "analysts pretending to be experts who did not read the language of the country they covered . . . who were unfamiliar with its history or culture . . and who argued that none of that mattered: flabby complacent thinking and questionable assumptions combined with an intolerance of others' views . . . verbose writing . . . and analysis that too often proved inaccurate or too fuzzy to judge whether it was ever right or wrong." Gates had also promised to compare each analyst's papers to actual events when deciding on salary raises.
So you see why Gates is unforgivable and why the Gates hearings were a typical Washington foreign-policy fight: they had nothing to do with the outside world. You see also why the U.S. Government should begin to reform intelligence by sending most CIA analysts to contemplate their own importance at home, on their own time.
Mr. Codevilla is a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of the forthcoming Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century (Free Press)
[Ed: Dr. Codevilla was also a senior staff member of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee in the 1980s]
