[Originally published in The Valley News.]
What most Americans don’t ever consider is that the job of CIA case officers who work overseas in human espionage operations is to break the laws of the countries where they serve. During the Cold War, when we met a Soviet citizen in Moscow who was one of our agents, we were breaking Soviet law by that simple act. There is no other nonmilitary organization in the U.S. government whose job it is to break other countries’ laws.
Judging by recent news reports, the intelligence community’s emphasis on counterterrorism operations has led to a very different, more serious sort of law-breaking by CIA officers. Among the questions raised by those stories is: How important is this type of activity to our struggle with fundamentalist Muslim terrorism?
CIA officers have been accused of participating in “renditions” — the act of kidnapping people suspected of being involved with fundamentalist Muslim terrorism and removing them to a place where civil rights guarantees are not as stringent as they are in most Western democracies. In other words, torture is likely to be part of the interrogation process in the countries to which they are shipped. Both Germany and Italy have issued arrest warrants for CIA officers allegedly involved in kidnappings carried out in their countries as part of renditions.
Add to that reports about the so-called “CIA Gulag” — a string of CIA facilities alleged to exist in countries around the world where it is legal or at least tolerated to extract information from terrorism suspects using techniques that would be illegal in America.
Then there is the allegation that “civilian officials” at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were involved in the abuse and humiliation of prisoners. Although not clearly stated or confirmed, it was intimated that these were also CIA officers. There have also been reports of CIA officers at the military detention facility for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
For many CIA veterans of the Cold War, these activities represent a major, disturbing departure from the old norm. For most Americans who were drawn to the CIA in those years, altruism was a major factor. The Communists were intent on taking over the world, and we were the ones on the front lines, responsible for holding back the Red Menace. Most CIA officers of that period would have been appalled at the thought of rendering, torturing or facilitating the torture of anyone.
You could be a highly effective CIA officer and never raise a finger against anyone. If the KGB caught you in a clandestine relationship with an agent who was a Soviet citizen, you never had to fear for your life, you simply got expelled from the country. In the intelligence wars, there were tacit agreements that, however heated our rivalries with the Soviets and their allies became, there would be no rough stuff.
That changed after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, when Palestinian terrorism became an important intelligence target. If Black September, an early Palestinian terrorist group, caught you in a clandestine relationship with a member of their organization, you stood a very good chance of being gunned down along with your agent. No habeas corpus there! In fact, in Beirut in those years, when an officer had such a clandestine meeting, he normally was accompanied by armed colleagues who were there to protect him against just such a tragedy. It had become a different, unsettling world for the old Cold Warriors. Most regarded that sort of violence as not just undesirable but downright terrifying.
So now we live in a different, far more violent world. If there are any rules of behavior at all, they are undefined and likely to remain so. CIA officers who can function in that world share little in common with their Cold War predecessors.
What kind of CIA officers do you need for this new environment? Certainly not the old Cold Warriors with their rules and their high level of moral and ethical comfort in what they were doing. In this world, if your turn your other cheek, you are likely to get your head removed. We need officers who are comfortable in this new, more violent world, who can walk around the world’s slums without their hearts in their mouths and without it being immediately clear they are Americans. Perhaps where many CIA cold warriors were liberal arts majors, the new breed might better come from the Military academies or from the Special Forces. That certainly would prepare them better for today’s world.
However, the tools that will make contemporary CIA officers most effective in this new world do not include a willingness to engage in or facilitate brutality. The most useful skills are language fluency and an ability to blend seamlessly into the local environment. Most, but not all, Americans, aren’t much good at that.
Renditions, torture, Guantanamo, gulags — those things are not in the best interest of America. They produce little critical, actionable intelligence while severely damaging our image around the world. However, if one can make the distinction, we need the kind of officers in the CIA who can deal effectively and decisively with the difficult world in which those abhorrent activities prevail. That takes a different kind of American, and it does not include most old Cold Warriors.
Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief who served in the Middle East, East and West Europe and as chief of the counterterrorism staff. He lives in Williston, Vt.
