The cia and the cult of intelligence pdf download

See more about this book on Archive. This edition doesn't have a description yet. Can you add one? Previews available in:. Add another edition? Donate this book to the Internet Archive library. If you own this book, you can mail it to our address below. The courts sided with the government. The issues raised in these proceedings resurfaced in subsequent disputes concerning prepublication agreements in connection with classified information in particular and government secrecy in general in Snepp v.

United States , Haig v. Agee , and United States v. Morison 4th Cir. In all of these cases, the courts ruled that national security concerns trumped the rights of freedom of communication. This article was originally published in Occasionally, clandestine operations backfire spectacularly in public—the U-2 shootdown and the Bay of Pigs invasion, for example—and, further, investigations by journalists and uncowed members of Congress have in these instances given the public some idea of what the CIA actually does.

Most recently, investigation of the Watergate scandal has revealed some of the CIA's covert activities within the United States, providing a frightening view of the methods which the agency has employed for years overseas. The assistance given the White House "plumbers" by the CIA and the attempts to involve the agency in the cover-up have pointed up the dangers posed to American democracy by an inadequately controlled secret intelligence organization.

As the opportunities for covert action abroad dwindle and are thwarted, those with careers based in clandestine methods are increasingly tempted to turn their talents inward against the citizens of the very nation they profess to serve. There can be no doubt that the gathering of intelligence is a necessary function of modern government. It makes a significant contribution to national security, and it is vital to the conduct of foreign affairs.

Without an effective program to collect information and to analyze the capabilities and possible intentions of other major powers, the United States could neither have confidently negotiated nor could now abide by the S. The proven benefits of intelligence are not in question. Rather, it is the illegal and unethical clandestine operations carried out under the guise of intelligence and the dubious purposes to which they are often put by our government that are questionable—both on moral grounds and in terms of practical benefit to the nation.

The issue at hand is a simple one of purpose. Should the CIA function in the way it was originally intended to—as a coordinating agency responsible for gathering, evaluating, and preparing foreign intelligence of use to governmental policy-makers—or should it be permitted to function as it has done over the years—as an operational arm, a secret instrument of the Presidency and a handful of powerful men, wholly independent of public accountability, whose chief purpose is interference in the domestic affairs of other nations and perhaps our own by means of penetration agents, propaganda, covert paramilitary interventions, and an array of other dirty tricks?

The aim of this book is to provide the American people with the inside information which they need—and to which they without question have the right—to understand the significance of this issue and the importance of dealing with it.

It has become an operational arm and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. The country he was referring to was Chile. In his capacity as Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, Kissinger was chairman of a meeting of the so-called 40 Committee, an interdepartmental panel responsible for overseeing the CIA's high-risk covert- action operations.

It is this small group of bureaucrats and politicians—in close consultation with the President and the governmental departments the men represent—that directs America's secret foreign policy. On that Saturday in June , the main topic before the 40 Committee was: What, if any, secret actions should be taken to prevent the election of Salvador Allende?

The Chilean election was scheduled for the following September, and Allende, a declared Marxist, was one of the principal candidates. Although Allende had pledged to maintain the democratic system if he was elected, the U. Korry feared Allende would lead his country into the Communist bloc, and thus he strongly favored CIA intervention to make sure that Chile did not become another Cuba.

Most of the American companies with large investments in Chile were also fearful of a possible Allende triumph, and at least two of those companies, the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation ITT and Anaconda Copper, were spending substantial sums of money to prevent his election. They hoped that Allende would not win, but they opposed active—even if secret—American intervention against him.

To try to manipulate the Chilean electoral processes, believed the State group led by Assistant Secretary for Latin America Charles Meyer, would likely succeed only in making matters worse and further tarnishing America's image in Latin America. On the one hand, the 40 Committee was that day considering plans for covert intervention which had been drawn up by the Agency's Clandestine Services;[1] and like the American ambassador, the CIA's principal representative in Chile strongly supported covert action to keep Allende out of office.

But, on the other hand, there was a lack of confidence among senior CIA officials that secret agency funding and propaganda would have the desired effect.

They were concerned that a large influx of CIA money might lead to discovery of the agency's role by the Chilean press—perhaps with help from the Soviet KGB—or by American reporters, and that such disclosures would only help Allende. Helms' position at the 40 Committee meeting was influenced by memories of the Chilean presidential election of At that time he had been chief of the Clandestine Services and had been actively involved in planning the CIA's secret efforts to defeat Allende, who was then running against Eduardo Frei.

Anti-American feeling had grown in Chile since , and one reason was widespread resentment of U. The Chilean leftist press had been full of charges of CIA involvement in the elections, and these reports had not been without effect on the electorate.

Additionally, in the exposure of the Pentagon's ill-advised Project Camelot had further damaged the reputation of the U. Ironically, Chile was not one of the principal target countries of the Camelot project, a multimillion-dollar social-science research study of possible counterinsurgency techniques in Latin America.

But the existence of Camelot had first been made public in Chile, and newspapers there—of all political stripes—condemned the study as "intervention" and "imperialism. The final result was to cause Washington to cancel first Camelot's limited activities in Chile, and then the project as a whole.

While the CIA had not been a sponsor of Camelot, the project added to the fears among Chileans of covert American intelligence activities.

The central conclusion had been that forces for change in the developing Latin nations were so powerful as to be beyond outside manipulation. This estimate had been endorsed by the Intelligence Board, whose members include the heads of the government's various intelligence agencies, and had then been sent to the White House and to those departments that were represented on the 40 Committee.

The estimate had in effect urged against the kind of intervention that the 40 Committee was in considering with regard to Chile. But as is so often the case within the government, the most careful advance analysis based on all the intelligence available was either ignored or simply rejected when the time came to make a decision on a specific issue. Kissinger was also concerned about the need for absolute secrecy and the near impossibility of hiding massive American involvement.

He, too, knew that discovery would work to Allende's advantage. While CIA men and money would be brought into play to prevent an Allende victory, there would be no repeat of the agency's massive effort to fix the election in Within the next few days, President Nixon endorsed the 40 Committee's decision, and the American ambassador and the CIA chief of station in Chile were notified to start the covert propaganda programs.

Ambassador Korry reacted to the go-ahead from Washington by sending a cable back to Assistant Secretary Meyer through "Roger," a communication channel, which, at least in theory, only the State Department could decipher. Korry knew that Meyer had actively opposed his recommendation for intervention, and Korry stated in the cable that he would not begin the anti- Allende campaign without the direct approval of Meyer, his nominal superior. Since the decision to intervene had been approved by the President of the United States In keeping with the guidelines set down by the 40 Committee and approved by the President, four hundred thousand dollars were made available from the CIA director's secret contingency fund and earmarked for the Chilean election operation.

The agency's chief of station in Santiago, working with the close cooperation of Ambassador Korry, put the money and his undercover agents to work in a last-minute propaganda effort to thwart the rise of Allende to the Presidency.

But despite the CIA's covert action program, Salvador Allende received a plurality in the September popular vote. During the next two months, before Allende was officially endorsed as President by the Chilean congress, the CIA and Ambassador Korry, with White House approval, tried desperately to prevent the Marxist from taking office.

Attempts were made to undercut Allende through continued propaganda, by encouraging a military coup d'etat, and by trying to enlist the support of private U.

None of the secret actions, however, proved successful. Some months afterward President Nixon disingenuously explained at a White House press conference: "As far as what happened in Chile is concerned, we can only say that for the United States to have intervened in a free election and to have turned it around, I think, would have had repercussions all around Latin America that would have been far worse than what happened in Chile.

His response: "Why should you care? Your side won. Columnist Jack Anderson had only recently reported "the ITT story," which among other things revealed that the CIA had indeed been involved in an effort to undo Allende's victory—even after he had won the popular vote. His Marxist government was replaced by a military junta.

What role American businesses or the CIA may have played in the coup is not publicly known, and may never be. ITT and the other giant corporations with investments in Chile have all denied any involvement in the military revolt. So has the U. Colby, himself the former director of the bloody Phoenix counterintelligence program in Vietnam, also told the Congressmen that the executions carried out by the junta after the coup had done "some good" because they reduced the chances that civil war would break out in Chile—an excellent example of the sophistry with which the CIA defends its strategy of promoting "stability" in the Third World.

Even if the CIA did not intervene directly in the final putsch, the U. Henry Kissinger set the tone of the official U.

Another measure of the White House attitude—and an indication of the methods it was willing to use—was the burglarizing of the Chilean embassy in Washington in May by some of the same men who the next month staged the break-in at the Watergate.

And the U. State Department officials testifying before Congress after the coup explained it was the Nixon administration's wish that the Allende regime collapse economically, thereby discrediting socialism. Kissinger had already been supervising the CIA's most secret operations for more than four years when he made this disparaging remark.

Whether he was telling the truth about the CIA's non-involvement in Chile or was simply indulging in a bit of official lying called "plausible denial" , he along with the President would have made the crucial decisions on the Chilean situation. For the CIA is not an independent agency in the broad sense of the term, nor is it a governmental agency out of control. Despite occasional dreams of grandeur on the part of some of its clandestine operators, the CIA does not on its own choose to overthrow distasteful governments or determine which dictatorial regimes to support.

Just as the State Department might seek, at the President's request, to discourage international aid institutions from offering loans to "unfriendly" governments, so does the CIA act primarily when called upon by the Executive.

The agency's methods and assets are a resource that comes with the office of the Presidency. Thus, harnessing the agency's clandestine operators is not the full, or even basic, solution to the CIA problem. The key to the solution is controlling and requiring accountability of those in the White House and elsewhere in the government who direct or approve, then hide behind, the CIA and its covert operations. This elusiveness, more than anything else, is the problem posed by the CIA.

Intelligence versus Covert Action The primary and proper purpose of any national intelligence organization is to produce "finished intelligence" for the government's policy-makers. Such intelligence, as opposed to the raw information acquired through espionage and other clandestine means, is data collected from all sources—secret, official, and open—which has been carefully collated and analyzed by substantive experts specifically to meet the needs of the national leadership.

The process is difficult, time-consuming, and by no means without error. But it is the only prudent alternative to naked reliance on the unreliable reporting of spies. Most intelligence agencies, however, are nothing more than secret services, more fascinated by the clandestine operations—of which espionage is but one aspect—than they are concerned with the production of "finished intelligence. This aspect of the modern intelligence business—intervention in the affairs of other countries—is known at the agency as covert action.

Taking lessons from the more experienced British secret services, the Office of Strategic Services OSS learned to use covert action as an offensive weapon against Germany and Japan. When the war ended, President Truman disbanded the ass on the grounds that such wartime tactics as paramilitary operations, psychological warfare, and political manipulation were not acceptable when the country was at peace. At the same time, however, Truman recognized the need for a permanent organization to coordinate and analyze all the intelligence available to the various governmental departments.

He believed that if there had been such an agency within the U. It was, therefore, with "coordination of information" in mind that Truman proposed the creation of the CIA in Leading the opposition to Truman's "limited" view of intelligence, Allen Dulles stated, in a memorandum prepared for the Senate Armed Services Committee, that "Intelligence work in time of peace will require other techniques, other personnel, and will have rather different objectives We must deal with the problem of conflicting ideologies as democracy faces communism, not only in the relations between Soviet Russia and the countries of the west but in the internal political conflicts with the countries of Europe, Asia, and South America.

Although fifteen years later Truman would claim that he had not intended the CIA to become the covert-action arm of the U. Wisner, Jr.

Truman did not go to Congress for authority to form OPC. As part of this effort, he sought to bring Wisner's operations into the CIA. Truman eventually concurred, and on January 4, , OPC and the Office of Special Operations a similar semi-independent organization established in for covert intelligence collection were merged into the CIA, forming the Directorate of Plans or, as it became known in the agency, the Clandestine Services.

With its newly formed Clandestine Services and its involvement in the Korean War, the agency expanded rapidly. From less than 5, employees in , the CIA grew to about 15, by —and recruited thousands more as contract employees and foreign agents. During these years the agency spent well over a billion dollars to strengthen non-communist governments in Western Europe, to subsidize political parties around the world, to found Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty for propaganda broadcasts to Eastern Europe, to make guerrilla raids into mainland China, to create the Asia Foundation, to overthrow leftist governments in Guatemala and Iran, and to carry out a host of other covert-action programs.

While the agency considered most of its programs to have been successful, there were more than a few failures. Two notable examples were attempts in the late s to establish guerrilla movements in Albania and in the Ukraine, in keeping with the then current national obsession of "rolling back the Iron Curtain. In the early s another blunder occurred when the CIA tried to set up a vast underground apparatus in Poland for espionage and, ultimately, revolutionary purposes.

The operation was supported by millions of dollars in agency gold shipped into Poland in installments. Agents inside Poland, using radio broadcasts and secret writing techniques, maintained regular contact with their CIA case officers in West Germany. In fact, the agents continually asked that additional agents and gold be sent to aid the movement. Occasionally an agent would even slip out of Poland to report on the operation's progress—and ask for still more agents and gold.

It took the agency several years to learn that the Polish secret service had almost from the first day co-opted the whole network, and that no real CIA underground operation existed in Poland. The Polish service kept the operation going only to lure anti-communist Polish emigres back home—and into prison.

And in the process the Poles were able to bilk the CIA of millions of dollars in gold. One reason, perhaps the most important, that the agency tended from its very beginnings to concentrate largely on covert-action operations was the fact that in the area of traditional espionage the collection of intelligence through spies the CIA was able to accomplish little against the principal enemy, the Soviet Union.

With its closed society, the U. The few American intelligence officers entering the country were severely limited in their movements and closely followed. The Soviet Union's all-pervasive internal security system made the recruitment of agents and the running of clandestine operations next to impossible.

The agency's operators could recruit agents somewhat more easily there, but strict security measures and efficient secret-police establishments still greatly limited successes. Nevertheless, there were occasional espionage coups, such as the time CIA operators found an Eastern European communist official able to provide them with a copy of Khrushchev's de-Stalinization speech, which the agency then arranged to have published in the New York Times. Or, from time to time, a highly knowledgeable defector would bolt to the West and give the agency valuable information.

Such defectors, of course, usually crossed over of their own volition, and not because of any ingenious methods used by CIA. A former chief of the agency's Clandestine Services, Richard Bissell, admitted years later in a secret discussion with selected members of the Council on Foreign Relations: "In practice however espionage has been disappointing The general conclusion is that against the Soviet bloc or other sophisticated societies, espionage is not a primary source of intelligence, although it has had occasional brilliant successes.

Increasingly, the CIA turned to machines to perform its espionage mission. By the end of the decade, the agency had developed the U-2 spy plane. This high-altitude aircraft, loaded with cameras and electronic listening devices, brought back a wealth of information about Soviet defenses and weapons. Both Bissell and Dulles, however, believed that the successful use of human assets was at the heart of the intelligence craft.

In the immediate postwar years, CIA covert-action programs had been concentrated in Europe, as communist expansion into Western Europe seemed a real threat.

The Red Army had already occupied Eastern Europe, and the war- ravaged countries of the West, then trying to rebuild shattered economies, were particularly vulnerable. Consequently, the CIA subsidized political parties, individual leaders, labor unions, and other groups, especially in West Germany, France, and Italy.

It also supported Eastern European emigre groups in the West as part of a program to organize resistance in the communist countries. By the end of the s, however, pro-American governments had become firmly established in Western Europe, and the U. This change reflected to a certain extent the CIA's bureaucratic need as a secret agency to find areas where it could be successful.

More important, the shift came as a result of a hardened determination that the United States should protect the rest of the world from communism. A cornerstone of that policy was secret intervention in the internal affairs of countries particularly susceptible to socialist movements, either democratic or revolutionary.

Years later, in a letter to Washington Post correspondent Chalmers Roberts, Allen Dulles summed up the prevailing attitude of the times. Referring to the CIA's coups in Iran and Guatemala, he wrote: "Where there begins to be evidence that a country is slipping and Communist takeover is threatened Assignments to Europe became less coveted, and even veterans with European experience were transferring to posts in the emerging nations, especially in the Far East.

The countries making up the Third World offered far more tempting targets for covert action than those in Europe. These nations, underdeveloped and often corrupt, seemed made to order for the clandestine operators of the CIA, Richard Bissell told the Council on Foreign Relations: "Simply because [their] governments are much less highly organized there is less security consciousness; and there is apt to be more actual or potential diffusion of power among parties, localities, organizations, and individuals outside the central government.

Relatively small sums of money, whether delivered directly to local forces or deposited for their leaders in Swiss bank accounts, can have an almost magical effect in changing volatile political loyalties. In such an atmosphere, the CIA's Clandestine Services have over the years enjoyed considerable success. Swashbucklers and Secret Wars During the s most of the CIA's covert-action operations were not nearly so sophisticated or subtle as those Bissell would advocate in Nor were they aimed exclusively at the rapidly increasing and "less highly organized" governments of the Third World.

Covert operations against the communist countries of Europe and Asia continued, but the emphasis was on clandestine propaganda, infiltration and manipulation of youth, labor, and cultural organizations, and the like. The more heavy-handed activities— paramilitary operations, coups, and countercoups—were now reserved for the operationally ripe nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

His exploits under agency auspices, first in the Philippines and then in Vietnam, became so well known that he served as the model for characters in two best-selling novels, The Ugly American by William J. In the former, he was a heroic figure; in the latter, a bumbling fool. Lansdale was sent to the Philippines in the early s as advisor to Philippine Defense Minister later President Ramon Magsaysay in the struggle against the Huks, the local communist guerrillas.

But Lansdale, backed up by millions of dollars in secret U. One such venture was the establishment of the Filipino Civil Affairs Office, which was made responsible for psychological warfare. After a interview with Lansdale, now living in quiet retirement, journalist Stanley Karnow reported: One [Lansdale-initiated] psywar operation played on the superstitious dread in the Philippine countryside of the asuang, a mythical vampire.

A psywar squad entered an area, and planted rumors that an asuang lived on where the Communists were based.

Two nights later, after giving the rumors time to circulate among Huk sympathizers, the psywar squad laid an ambush for the rebels. When a Huk patrol passed, the ambushers snatched the last man, punctured his neck vampire- fashion with two holes, hung his body until the blood drained out, and put the corpse back on the trail. As superstitious as any other Filipinos, the insurgents fled from the region. In the eyes of the U. He quickly became involved in organizing sabotage and guerrilla operations against North Vietnam, but his most effective work was done in the South.

There he initiated various psychological-warfare programs and helped Diem in eliminating his political rivals. His activities, extensively described in the Pentagon Papers, extended to pacification programs, military training, even political consultation: Lansdale helped design the ballots when Diem formally ran for President of South Vietnam in He used red, the Asian good-luck color, for Diem and green—signifying a cuckold—for Diem's opponent.

Diem won with an embarrassingly high 98 percent of the vote, and Lansdale was widely credited within American government circles for having carried out another successful operation. He left Vietnam soon afterward. Meanwhile, other agency operators, perhaps less celebrated than Lansdale, were carrying out covert-action programs in other countries. The Guatemala coup of was directed by the CIA.

Less successful was the attempt to overthrow Indonesian President Sukarno in the late s. Agency Bs even carried out bombing missions in support of the insurgents. Although U. Within a few months after being released from prison four years later, Pope was again flying for the CIA—this time with Southern Air Transport, an agency proprietary airline based in Miami.

As the Eisenhower years came to an end, there still was a national consensus that the CIA was justified in taking almost any action in that "back alley" struggle against communism—this despite Eisenhower's clumsy effort to lie his way out of the U-2 shootdown, which lying led to the cancellation of the summit conference.

Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles would be staying on in his administration. It took the national shock resulting from the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion in to bring about serious debate over CIA operations—among high government officials and the public as a whole. For the first time, widespread popular criticism was directed at the agency. DOI: Marchetti , J. Save to Library Save. Create Alert Alert.

Share This Paper. Background Citations. Methods Citations. Citation Type. Has PDF. Publication Type.