Rural Ruminations

[Originally published in the Randolph Herald.]

President Obama has nominated Leon Panetta as his candidate for the Director of the CIA. That decision has provoked a flurry of commentary in the media, most of which focuses on the fact that Mr. Panetta has no experience in the intelligence business.

It’s logical that CIA outsiders who have no personal experience with the intelligence business might think of a lack of experience as a shortcoming. Many former insiders share that belief, but for different, more emotional reasons.

The simple fact is that there is very little connection here. An intimate knowledge of the intelligence business, where it may occasionally be useful to a CIA Director, is certainly no guarantee of success.

The most important issue at stake in the choice of a new Director is whether or not the candidate is going to be effective. What makes any given Director effective can be defined: The Director must be willing and able to speak truth to power, he must have access to the President and he has to be a person of established substance outside the CIA who will command respect at the White House, with the public and on Capitol Hill.

One of the most effective Directors during the CIA’s first thirty years was John McCone. McCone knew nothing of the intelligence business, but he had a high reputation in his own right. He was a successful industrialist, a former Director of the Atomic Energy Commission, and a long-time senior governmental advisor. He was respected in the Congress and in the White House and his reputation gave him easy access to a president who valued what he had to say.

In direct contrast, there stands a long line of CIA Directors who were either promoted from within the Agency, or who, by dint of past experience elsewhere, were assumed to be well suited for the intelligence business. Their experience, by and large, is less effective. None of them had much of an established reputation outside the intelligence world, which meant that in order to maintain a relationship with their President, some were tempted to do injudicious things for their Presidents as in Richard Helms’ support to the Watergate burglars, and George Tenet’s positive WMD assessment provided to the White House during the run-up to the Iraq invasion.

As a group, and despite the affection and respect they may have inspired within the Agency, they were less effective as Directors. They knew us all by name and that made us feel good, but they often had imperfect relationships with their Presidents and their reputations outside their Agency experience were often non-existent, further diminishing their effectiveness.

George Tenet, who spent years on the staff of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, will always be remembered for his positive “slam dunk” assessment on the existence of WMD in Iraq – an opinion reportedly offered because he knew the truth was inconvenient and would not support the Administration’s already chosen policy for an invasion of Iraq. If so, he compromised the truth he should have spoken in order to preserve a relationship with the President, which was based entirely on his status as CIA Chief.

So, we come to Mr. Panetta, a man of broad and diverse experience in the Government who carries with him great respect for his past deeds as a lawyer, US Representative, White House Chief of Staff and professor.

His nomination by, and access to, President Obama is clearly built on a reputation earned during a diverse career that had nothing to do with the intelligence business. If it is felt that this lack of experience will be a drawback to him, the Obama Administration should be able to find the right kind of person with the right kind of experience within the CIA, perhaps from the National Clandestine Service, to serve as his Deputy Director of CIA. In addition, the choice of experienced Deputy Directors of the various CIA directorates should give Mr. Panetta all the expertise he could possibly want.

It’s difficult to see this nomination in anything but a positive light. The last thing the CIA needs today is an “old pro”. To do its job properly, the CIA needs to be professionally connected to the White House and Mr. Panetta will clearly do that.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA Station Chief who served in East and West Europe and the Middle East and as Chief of the Counterterrorism Staff. A longtime resident of Brookfield, he now lives in Williston.

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[Originally published on AmericanDiplomacy.org.]

A retired CIA station chief and Soviet specialist examines the Agency’s heritage from the OSS of World War II and finds that it produced a bias toward covert action to the detriment of intelligence gathering. As CIA evolved and gained experience, its intelligence capabilities improved, but it had little success in divining Soviet intentions during the Cold War. The Politburo was a tough target; so are today’s Middle East terrorist groups. – Ed.

Prior to World War II, the United States had no centralized intelligence collection, analysis and production structure. The State Department was involved in the overt and some minor ad hoc covert collection of intelligence. The FBI was active collecting information in Latin America in what were essentially criminal law enforcement activities. The military had its tactical military collection imperatives, and there was a small unit, the Signals Intelligence Service of the U.S. Army, collecting signals intelligence. All of these activities were minor, unconnected, and uncoordinated.

During the Second World War, the requirements for intelligence and intelligence-related activity rose sharply. This hot war on foreign soil brought with it U.S. support of anti-Nazi and anti-Japanese guerrilla operations in Europe and East Asia. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was formed in 1942 to deal with those realities and soon went into business full bore, conducting resistance operations, which were essentially covert action (CA) operations that were not assigned to other agencies.

Numerous guerrilla groups had sprung up spontaneously in occupied Europe, China, and French Indochina. In Europe, France, Holland, Belgium, and the occupied Scandinavian countries all had their movements. The British, who had long had their own intelligence organizations, were in touch with many of those resistance movements. They were also very much involved in getting the OSS off the ground and properly trained. Ultimately, OSS established contact with a number of resistance groups, and as the war progressed toward the Allied invasion of Europe, the OSS got more involved in coordinating and leading some of those groups in demolition operations and in harassing German occupation troops. The late CIA Director William Colby parachuted into both France and Norway to lead resistance activities against the Germans.

That was the primary OSS activity — contacting, supporting, and leading these resistance groups by parachuting personnel into occupied Europe. In effect, the birth of OSS was a hot war reality that demanded extraordinary heroism from its personnel. It also signaled the onset of CA operations, including resistance operations, on behalf of the U.S. government. It was a really high-risk business that attracted heroic and adventurous people who did their jobs well.

OSS was disbanded at the end of the war in l945. The State Department took over the research and analysis function. To preserve OSS’ clandestine intelligence capability, the War Department took over secret foreign intelligence (FI) and counter-espionage (CE) activities under the aegis of the newly formed Strategic Services Unit. This unit was then transferred to the Central Intelligence Group in 1946 and became the Office of Special Operations (OSO) when the CIA was created under the National Security Act of 1947. In 1948, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was created to oversee all psychological and covert action (CA) operations. It was absorbed in 1952 into OSO. Thus, the hot war covert action capability of the OSS, most emphatically including many of its personnel, was preserved in the new CIA.

CIA was created at the beginning of the Cold War in response to the ongoing Soviet geographic expansion into Eastern Europe as well as Soviet attempts to expand into Western Europe. CIA’s job was to stop Soviet expansion and, in the minds of the wishful thinkers of the time, to bring down the USSR.

Under these conditions, it was predictable that the CIA would go back to its roots, back to the activities it had known and successfully carried out during the war. It got heavily into émigré operations in East Europe and the USSR, which were designed to overthrow the USSR’s satellite governments. In that context, it supported resistance movements in Eastern Europe, dropping agents and supplies behind the lines as in World War II. At the same time, CIA prepared for guerrilla “stay-behind” operations. In anticipation of successful Soviet expansion into Western Europe, it buried caches of arms, supplies, gold, and communications gear throughout the European countryside.

In the early days of the Agency, there were normally two stations in most of the important countries around the world. The OPC station was responsible for all covert action operations, and the OSO station was responsible for intelligence collection, counter-espionage, and counter-intelligence operations. This proved to be a self-defeating structure, as it put the two CIA stations in competition for identical individual sources. For that reason, in 1952 the two entities were combined both in the field and at headquarters under the Directorate of Plans. Despite a few name changes, the structure of the Directorate remained pretty consistent throughout the Cold War.

U.S. intelligence collection requirements for the USSR were two-pronged. The Pentagon needed to know what military hardware was under research and development in Soviet design bureaus, and the White House wanted to know what the Soviets planned to do with this hardware — what their intentions were. Any time a case officer talked to a new Soviet defector, refugee, or agent, the mandatory first question was, “Does the Soviet Union plan to attack the United States?” It was felt that these national requirements could best, if not only, be filled through clandestine human recruitment operations.

By the mid-1950s, a modest number of Soviet officials had volunteered to work with the CIA. The cumulative experience showed the CIA just how productive such sources could be in fulfilling the basic requirements. So, the word went out to the CS (clandestine service, or directorate of plans) that we were to recruit Soviets of high intelligence value.

This was during the Eisenhower administration when John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State and his brother Allen was Director of Central Intelligence. It was a time when the United States was wildly paranoid and anti-communist. It was a time when the covert action arm of the clandestine service was being tasked continuously with the overthrow of foreign regimes that were thought to be heading toward the Soviet camp.

Even though there were discrete components in the CS that were tasked solely with operations against the USSR and her East European allies, there was not much interest within the CS in running operations against those targets. This came for a number of reasons, the most important of which was that the management of the CS was comprised mostly of OSS veterans who, because of their wartime experiences, were far more interested in and comfortable with covert action operations than they were with intelligence recruitment operations against the Soviet Union. In addition, it was generally understood in the CS that recruiting Soviets was the most difficult task it faced. It was easier to do covert action, even including the often-dangerous business of overthrowing governments; and for the career-minded officer, success was far more likely.

It is additionally true that during the l950’s CIA was not terribly adept at the conduct of operations behind the Iron Curtain. There was absolutely no experience with such operations in the conditions that existed there. Our officers were under virtually constant surveillance, or at least had to assume they were. In the early post-war years they had not yet developed the techniques or the understanding of that kind of environment which were necessary to safely run sensitive and productive operations. The Penkovskiy case demonstrated the extraordinary access to important intelligence that such an agent had. At the same time, his arrest by Soviet authorities in Moscow underlined the need for new, operationally secure approaches to the problem of agent handling in those denied-area environments.

The Penkovskiy case was a really mixed bag for the CIA. Its positive aspect was the extraordinary product that Penkovskiy provided. The down side was that Agency management lost faith in the ability of the CS to securely run such cases and began a period of not approving even potentially productive cases for handling.

In the late fifties and early sixties, officers were chosen for assignment to the denied-area posts on the basis of the strength of their cover. An experienced officer who had done anything that might have come to the attention of the KGB was automatically disqualified. Young officers with no field experience who were thought probably not to be known to the Soviets, were the ones selected for those posts. This was a two edged sword. If a potentially productive case came their way, their inexperience was likely to disqualify them for handling agents. On the other hand, they were not afflicted by either operational preconceptions or relevant operational training and so were free to let their creative juices flow. Suffice it to say that by the mid-sixties, every station in the Warsaw Pact countries had the operational techniques and personnel needed to securely handle the most productive cases.

One might think that by that time, with White House pressure for intelligence production and the personnel and operational techniques needed to produce that intelligence, the CIA would have been in very good shape against the USSR and her allies. Quite the opposite was true. The CS, with the exception of those components and personnel charged with Soviet operations, was essentially disinterested in the work of recruiting Soviets. It was far too interested in other operational pursuits to use its time and budgets on such difficult and, up until then, unproductive efforts.

Senior management talked a good game. With few exceptions, every station’s operational directive listed the USSR as its primary target. Yet the process never took hold, largely because it was still the OSS veterans in charge and they had other fish to fry. Agency managers, in the true OSS spirit, permitted its field personnel to choose whatever targets were on their lists, without sufficient managerial pressure to pursue the most important Soviet target. The simple result was that the CS ran a virtually ad hoc operation against the Soviet target, whereas it should have been running a focused and concerted, CS-wide attack aimed at the production of high level intelligence on Soviet military R&D and Soviet intentions.

None of this explains the fact that while the CS was successful against Soviet military R&D targets, it was largely unsuccessful collecting intelligence on Soviet intentions. During the early Cold War years, Soviets abroad were very much the products of the Stalin era. They, too, were paranoid. At any given function, they huddled together in their colorless, bell-bottomed suits in one corner of the room, talking only to each other. Clearly, the Soviet Union had not evolved to the point where its representatives abroad had any professional reason to get out into the foreign community.

This changed pretty radically sometime in the sixties, as did the nature of Soviet man. He lost the bell-bottomed trousers, bought Western style clothes, got advanced degrees in the West and learned Western languages accent-free. He fit right in, and on some occasions it was impossible to tell whether or not the person a case officer had just met was a Soviet or a Westerner.

This was a problem for the Soviets. They had political, economic, and foreign policy imperatives that made it mandatory for Soviet citizens to get out and about. At the same time, that removed them from the strictures of Soviet society and put them squarely in the middle of the temptations of the West. It also put them in touch with CIA case officers who were completely comfortable in that world.

And the CIA had its problems, too. Perhaps this came because of the lack of success the Agency had in the fifties and sixties in Soviet recruitment operations. It would be difficult for senior managers who thought themselves to be outstanding to admit that there was anything wrong with the Soviet recruitment program they had designed and were running. It simply may have been less threatening to posit that the Soviets were 10 feet tall. If, as they postulated, the KGB had sufficiently penetrated the CIA, then they would know of any “successes” that the CS had against them.

According to this logic, any and all such “recruitments” would have been controlled by the KGB and thus invalid as producers of intelligence on behalf of the CIA. That attitude prevailed through the sixties and only came to an end in the early seventies with the retirement and reassignments of its chief proponents and the assignment of new management to the Soviet recruitment effort. At that point, CS success against the Soviet target began slowly to increase. Those increases continued and grew until the demise of the Soviet Union.

It is a gross overstatement, as for example in the recently published “unofficial” CIA history by Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, to say that the CIA was a failure against the Soviet Union. It is not an overstatement to say that we could have done a lot better. The reasons for that are complicated but involve some of the following realities.

The CIA is a part of the executive branch of the U.S. government. When the president speaks, presumably legally, the CIA follows. In the fifties, U.S. presidents were preoccupied with the overthrow of foreign governments and in weakening the USSR and were less concerned about intelligence on the USSR. The CIA hamstrung itself during the sixties with its paranoid conviction that it was impossible to successfully penetrate the Soviet Union. However, perhaps the most important element in this continuum was the legacy from the OSS. The CIA was managed by a group of fine men whose experiences were from the hot war. They never really turned the CS loose against the USSR, and because most of them had never run clandestine recruitments, they never really understood what post-World War II clandestine operations were all about.

The Cold War CIA was what it was. It was a product of the OSS experience of World War II and was run by officials of that organization. As it matured and grew out from under the OSS influence in the sixties and seventies, it became increasingly successful at its designated tasks. In fact, it produced some extraordinary intelligence on Soviet weapons research and development. Its significant lack of production came in the area of Soviet intentions. But to produce hard intelligence on that topic, given Soviet realities, required a penetration of the Politburo. The Soviet system did not make such people readily available to foreign cultivation and, as a result, CIA officers rarely, if ever, even saw them. That was the reality of the Cold War.

The same situation of access probably exists today in our efforts against terrorist targets. Given the realities that obtain in the Middle East, It’s tough for an American to establish contact with the terrorists lurking in Waziristan’s caves. That may change as terrorist movements mature, but it puts us roughly in the same predicament with terrorism today as we were with the USSR in the fifties.

The moral here is that any intelligence organization, regardless of the regime it serves, is not only at the mercy of the policies of that country, but of the realities of the targets against which it is operating. That really never changes.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief. He was educated at Exeter and Dartmouth, served in the Army Security Agency, undertook Russian regional studies at London University, and then joined the CIA. He served in Prague, Berlin, Beirut, Tehran, and Washington. During those 25 years, he worked primarily in Soviet and East European operations, recruiting and handling agents or managing that process. He was also chief of the counterterrorism staff and executive assistant to Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Frank Carlucci. Since his retirement in 1980, he has lived in Vermont.

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[Originally published in the Rutland Herald.]

In our democracy, credibility is the lifeblood of any national intelligence organization. If the public, or the administration in power, doesn’t believe it is getting told the truth, then the organization has lost its purpose and effectiveness and it is the public perception of credibility that matters most.  Thanks to current White House tasking and use of the CIA, the Agency appears to be losing that battle today.

The role of any intelligence organization is to examine the facts and provide intelligence information and estimates to policy makers in support of security and foreign policy issues.
During the Cold War, the CIA did its best to do just that.  It was not always as effective as it might have been, but it was a principled organization staffed by motivated, reputable people who did their best to do their job and do it right.   The Cold War CIA did not lie or fabricate intelligence for policy makers or for public consumption.

CIA management occasionally suffered from poor judgment and did some really stupid things, however, with the possible exception of Iran/Contra – who knows if Reagan knew and approved? – The CIA never undertook covert activities without White House direction.  It was never the “rogue elephant” that its fiercest critics persistently alleged it to have been.

Unfortunately, concerns about CIA credibility have grown since 9/11.  The role of the CIA in enabling the Iraq invasion is probably still not fully understood, muddled as it is by the machinations of the Bush Administration.  The persistent, unprecedented visits by Vice President Cheney to CIA Headquarters during the run-up to the Invasion, reportedly to seek changes in CIA estimates on Iraq which would support such an invasion, have never been fully explained.

Perhaps most importantly, the Bush administration has permitted, if not encouraged the country to believe that CIA was responsible for the intelligence failures that lead to 9/11.   Further, the “slam dunk” moment on Iraqi WMD; allegations of CIA waterboarding, renditions, a gulag of prisons around the world and, most recently, the question of why the waterboarding tapes were destroyed have all added fuel to the credibility fire.

Structural changes have weakened CIA credibility, as well.  The post-9/11 creation of the new Office of the Director of National Intelligence at the expense of the CIA was senseless and bureaucratic.  The persistent efforts of the Pentagon under SecDef Rumsfeld to usurp CIA functions and to denigrate the CIA, its processes and its products have added further to an atmosphere in which CIA credibility is routinely publicly questioned.

In early September 2007, Israeli jets flattened a structure in the Syrian Desert. Israel, Syria and America all acknowledged the act, but none gave any explanation for it, that is until recently.  Now we see pre-raid photos of the inside of the Syrian structure with virtually identical companion pictures of North Korean nuclear sites. The Syria photos presumably were obtained from the Israelis.

In the meantime, the Syrian Ambassador in Washington, who can hardly be viewed as impartial, claims the photos are CIA fabrications.  This claim has since become the object of speculation in the American media!  What’s going on here? Why was this information held so tightly and only released now, 7 months later?   Is the CIA lying about this issue?  Has the CIA fabricated these photos?  Have the Israelis done the fabrications and passed them on to us?  All of these questions and more are now under media examination.

Ultimately what is true and what is false about this Syria incident is of secondary importance to the effect that a media examination of the subject has already brought and will continue to bring. What will matter is that further doubt will arise in Americans’ minds about CIA credibility.

For better or worse, the CIA provides the only real organizational capability the US government has for the clandestine collection of intelligence.  Unfortunately, the US involvement in the “War on Terror” and in Iraq have put tremendous pressure from the White House on the CIA to undertake activities which even if not illegal, create an aura of mistrust in the public mind. In today’s world, no one is quite sure if the CIA is on the “right” side of anything.

That creates a legacy of mistrust in and a lack of credibility for the CIA that will continue for years after the Bush Administration is gone.  This legacy may be serving this White House well right now, but it will disastrously serve its successors.  In a world plagued by terrorism, the US can ill afford to have in doubt the credibility of its only effective intelligence service, its best potential protection against that terror.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA Station Chief who served abroad in Europe and the Middle East, as Executive Assistant in the Director’s Office and as Chief of the Counterterrorism Staff.  He lives in Williston.

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[Originally published in The Valley News.]

Earlier this summer, when the CIA released the “family jewels” — nearly 700 pages of documents detailing some of its most infamous and illegal operations dating back to the 1950s — the question that immediately came to mind was: Why now?

After all, Director of Central Intelligence Bill Colby had let some of those secrets out during the Church Committee hearings in the early 1970s. When Colby made the initial revelations, there was widespread anger among the old agency hands, particularly those from World War II’s Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s precursor. Much of this anger resided in the division known as the Clandestine Service, which thought it owned most of the jewels. Colby had betrayed them. More gems dropped out of the bag in subsequent years.

Today, there is no cadre of old-timers to rise up in anger. Most of them are either dead or so far removed from the realities of espionage that they do not care much what happens in Langley, Va. It was, therefore, a pretty safe time for Gen. Hayden to put his jewels on the table, as it were.  Or perhaps the CIA released the information because it wanted some cover for its questionable activities in the rendition and interrogation business. Framed against a backdrop of past sins, today’s CIA might seem less horrendous.

Still, these explanations aren’t sufficient. It could be that the agency knew that Tim Weiner’s book Legacy of Ashes was about to be published.  Weiner had unique access to the CIA leadership of the early years, and he was about to expose their secrets himself. By releasing the secrets first, Hayden preempted Weiner.

One unintended result of the release of the vast store of CIA secrets is that it denigrates covert action operations in favor of human intelligence collection, which will play such an important part in our struggle with terrorism. And to understand the difference between covert action and human intelligence, you have to understand the reality of the CIA, which evolved from the OSS.

During World War II, OSS personnel parachuted behind enemy lines to establish contact with and organize resistance groups to harass the Germans and Japanese. It was a classic hot war operation. Those who did it were heroes in the truest sense of the word.

When CIA’s existence was legitimized in the post-war years, its management was handed over to those senior OSS officers who chose to respond to the challenge of the Cold War–Allen Dulles, Richard Helms and Des Fitzgerald. Their experience was almost entirely in paramilitary operations, which today are part of the world of Covert Action. That is what they knew and understood, so when successive presidents wanted someone assassinated or a foreign government overthrown, that kind of covert action was right up their alley.

They were less knowledgeable about Humint operations, particularly against difficult targets like the U.S.S.R., China and terrorism, which are time-consuming, frustrating, tedious and only occasionally successful. Compared with the flash and bang of covert actions, they are mundane and boring.

Because the old OSS types had so little experience in Humint, there was never a sufficiently strong worldwide effort against those hard targets. Presidents and CIA management were interested, instead, in covert action. It was infinitely easier to recruit some Third World newspaperman to place articles favorable to the United States in his paper than it was to recruit a Soviet. A lot of CIA officers got promoted doing just that.

So, the CIA of the post-war years was primarily a covert action organization, which, according to the newly exposed record, wasn’t even terribly good at covert action. For those officers who saw the USSR as a real threat, covert action operations were an impediment that drew resources away from the really important job of recruiting Soviets. This was a major factor in the inability of the CIA to penetrate the highest policy-making levels of the USSR.

Take an Agency management that neither promoted or understood the nuts and bolts of Humint operations, couple it with the paranoid madness of those Agency managers who believed the Soviet KGB controlled everything we tried to do against them, and you have a Clandestine Service that was destined to under perform against the most important and difficult target we had.

Has any of this changed? One of the major messages of the Weiner book is that with the possible exception of former DCI George H. W. Bush, no president has ever understood what the CIA could and could not do. The CIA probably failed in its Cold War covert action operations because most Americans (the Mafia excluded) are not very good at assassinations. Picture an Ivy Leaguer planning Castro’s assassination.

Whether presidents like it or not, the CIA is a reflection of the American ethos. When it ceases to be that, this country will have made a major change for the worse.

We may be approaching that point now.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA Station Chief who served in East and West Europe, the Middle East and as Chief of the Counterterrorism Staff.  He lives in Williston, Vt.

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[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.

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[Originally published in The Valley News.]

In an informal speech in 2004, Paul Pillar, then CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, said that the White House had ignored CIA warnings that military intervention in Iraq would intensify anti-American hostility throughout the Islamic world. The White House was furious. Robert Novak, commenting on the speech, wrote, “This leads to the unavoidable conclusion that the president of the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency are at war with each other”.

The White House believes that there is a cabal of active and retired CIA officers who have done everything in their power to undermine the president, including an attempt to defeat him in the 2004 presidential election. Apparently, the president, vice president and Karl Rove all share this view of the CIA.

The White House is also said to be furious that a senior CIA analyst, Michael Scheuer, was allowed to publish the book Imperial Hubris, which was cleared by the CIA while he was still employed there and was highly critical of White House Middle East policy.

Further, after the Iraq invasion, the White House received a number of special messages directed to the president from CIA’s chief of station in Baghdad, saying that the insurgency was going badly for us and would get worse because there were many, many Iraqis who hated us and who supported the insurgents. The president was said to respond angrily after he read one of the reports: “Who is this guy anyway? Is he some kind of defeatist wuss?”

Add to that a goodly number of op-ed pieces and speeches by CIA retirees unfavorable to the White House and its Middle East policies, and a picture emerges of a White House that regards the “CIA cabal” as a major instigator of negative comment on the administration’s foreign policy.

So, the president sent Porter Goss and his minions from the House Intelligence Committee to run the CIA. Given their insensitive, negative and ham-fisted approach, most of which has been aired extensively in the press, it’s clear that the White House placed no constraints on how Goss ran the CIA. It looked both from the inside and from the outside as if Goss was sent to Langley to punish the CIA rather than to reform, improve or redirect it.

The troubling point here is that the White House appears to have put its personal (and wrongly directed) anger above the good of the nation and well above the recommendations of the 9/ll Commission and the Commission on the Intelligence of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. Before 9/11 ever happened, everyone who looked at America’s intelligence shortcomings said that “human intelligence” (HUMINT) – the collection of intelligence through recruited human sources – really needed fixing and that the CIA’s Operations Directorate therefore had to be strengthened.

Despite that analysis – and apparently out of personal pique – the White House seems to have set out to weaken the institution still further by having Goss, whom even the White House was said not to respect, keep the CIA in a constant state of turmoil. Recently departed senior CIA officials say they left the agency because of the nasty and vindictive top-down management style employed by Goss and his “gosslings”.

It is absolutely true that there are a number of active and retired CIA officers who, like many other Americans, have taken issue with the White House’s Middle East policy. Many of them have served there. Many focused professionally on that region for decades. Their knowledge of the history and realities of the region led them to view the administration’s radical new foreign policy of pre-emptive unilateralism in Iraq as ill advised at best and dangerous at worst. Only time will tell whether they were right or wrong, but they took those positions because they truly believed the White House policies were disastrous and that not saying so would be a disservice to their country.

The old CIA is now dead and will never be reconstituted. The assignment of Goss to Langley is now mercifully over. The president has proposed a very smart general, Michael Hayden of the Air Force, as his replacement. However, he is a technologically experienced general from the National Security Agency who has never had any experience with human intelligence operations.

The real issue here is what this administration wants and expects from what is left of the CIA. It is generally assumed that the remnants of the CIA – to be known as the National Clandestine Service – will provide human intelligence coverage of critical targets abroad. Given the miserable state of the current CIA, it will need infusions of money, people and, most important, savvy and experienced leadership. The president probably should have picked someone who really understands the human intelligence business.

The fact that he did not leads to all kinds of questions about what he really wants to accomplish and whether or not Hayden’s appointment is simply another example of the White House taking it out on the CIA.

Given the way the White House treats the world around it, it is no surprise that its attitude toward the CIA is punitive and retaliatory. It is sad that the disintegration of the CIA is rooted in petty vindictiveness. Actually, it is more than sad. As the 9/11 Commission made clear, having a capable CIA is the country’s only real hope in addressing the critical need to have human intelligence operations as a tool for fighting terrorism.

Haviland Smith, who retired from the CIA as a station chief in 1980, served in Europe and the Middle East as chief of counterterrorism and as an executive assistant in the CIA director’s office.

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[Originally published in the Baltimore Sun.]

The CIA is finally dead.

It started with President Bill Clinton’s “peace dividend,” declared after the fall of the Soviet Union, which brought bipartisan underfunding and inattention to the CIA for over a decade.

It continued with recriminations from the Bush administration for its putative failures to predict 9/11 and White House anger at and retribution for what it believed to be the CIA’s lack of support for its foreign policies.

It is now ending with the 20-month disaster of Porter J. Goss, which clearly demonstrated the Bush administration’s desire to punish the CIA and reflected its proposition that the CIA is no longer needed.

So we now have the skeleton of an organization that once contained the government’s pre-eminent intelligence analytical component plus its unequaled espionage, covert action, paramilitary, counterespionage and counterintelligence capabilities. What remains is the new National Clandestine Service (NCS) – the old Operations Directorate, or Clandestine Service, by a different name.

Analysis and the counterterrorism center have gone to the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, making him responsible for presidential briefings and thus diminishing the CIA’s role.

Espionage, paramilitary operations and covert action are expanding unilateral enterprises in the Pentagon, challenging even the CIA’s proposed new NCS role.

The FBI, which never has had organizational understanding of, or commitment to, counterespionage, counterterrorism or counterintelligence, continues as the lead organization on all those disciplines.

What appears to have been lost in rearranging the deck chairs after 9/11 is the unavoidable fact that the U.S. desperately needs a functioning human intelligence-collection component to conduct operations against its enemies abroad. Only the new NCS has the potential to provide this capability.

That the NCS does not have the personnel, experience or linguistic talents to successfully conduct on-the-ground spying is the fault of those in Congress and the White House who should have been supporting and funding this country’s intelligence operations from 1990 to 2006 but did not do so adequately.

Running intelligence operations abroad, which is based on breaking the laws of other countries, is tricky. It requires that the NCS be pre-eminent in running spies. For both the NCS and the Pentagon to be conducting uncoordinated spy operations in the same geographic area would be an invitation to disaster. In addition, the NCS, in order to maximize and protect its operations, needs to be in charge of liaisons with foreign intelligence services and responsible for overseas counterintelligence and counterterrorism.

Finally, NCS will need unfettered access to the best government analysts. It is the interplay between intelligence collector and analyst that moves any operation toward its optimal results.

The NCS as a spy operation will function better without responsibility for covert action, which is defined as operations intended to manipulate foreign groups or governments to take actions favorable to the United States. The ability to mount and run such operations was always viewed by CIA directors as a plus in the old Washington power game. It was a capability that many presidents could not and did not refuse.

But covert action operations in the Clandestine Service complicated its role as intelligence collector and diverted resources. It was always easier to place a pro-American, anti-Soviet article in the local press than it was to run a complicated recruitment operation against a Soviet official, and it got people promoted.

Since the CIA has been all but destroyed and because the spy activities it formerly undertook remain even more tactically critical today than during the Cold War, everything needs to be done to regain and improve the capabilities that existed before the dismemberment of the organization.

Clandestine operations need to be kept clear of the existing bureaucracies and remain under independent leadership. Human intelligence is not a job, it’s an art form. A bureaucratically managed spying effort working under some other bureaucratized government component such as the Pentagon or the director of national intelligence will never get the job done.

In that respect, it’s difficult to understand, assuming that the White House wants to bolster our human spy capability, why Gen. Michael V. Hayden, with only a technological background, would be nominated to head an organization in which experience in conducting human intelligence should be the first requirement for employment. This is a dangerous time for our country to have a CIA director with a steep learning curve.

Haviland Smith, who retired from the CIA as a station chief in 1980, served in Europe and the Middle East as chief of counterterrorism and as an executive assistant in the CIA director’s office.

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[Originally published in the Washington Post.]

Porter Goss, the new CIA Director (DCI) and a devoted political ally of President Bush, has brought with him to Langley a Praetorian guard of hatchet men from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.  Against the backdrop of his hands-off management style, they are running wild.  They are said to be thoughtless, brusque, rude and intimidating.  What clearly is true is that they have come to shake the place up.

Whatever is going on, it is at the behest of the White House and probably does not involve faulty intelligence on WMD, but rather on the conduct of the Iraq war and its aftermath.  In that context, the Administration’s wrath seems directed primarily toward the Clandestine Service (CS), that component of the Agency that recruits and handles spies, not the component that publishes intelligence estimates.  Since Goss’ arrival in Langley, much of the senior management of the CS has been fired or has quit, reportedly to be replaced with more compliant officials.

David Brooks of the New York Times wrote in a scurrilous, vituperative column in mid-November that we were viewing a death struggle between the White House and the CIA.  He opined that the CIA had been trying to contribute to the President’s defeat in the election by systematically leaking classified material designed to bolster the idea that the Iraq policy was ill conceived and going badly.  Incidentally, it would now appear that idea was absolutely correct.

It appears that CIA, both the CS and the Intelligence Directorate, had been leaking a wide variety of secrets.  They could and should have been prosecuted for the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.  They were not.  Instead, it would appear that the Administration has found a welcome excuse for the collective punishment of the CIA.

Given the way the Bush White House has handled intelligence during the last three years, it makes sense that they are angry at the Clandestine Service.   CS officers are often required to give their opinions about policies in advance of their implementation.  It is unlikely that any CS officer, having spent a career in the Middle East, would see our current policy there as unflawed.  The White House probably sees the CS as a nest of enemies.  Consider the alternate possibility that they really are professionals who would like to save their country from the further embarrassment and potential difficulties of a truly flawed and dangerous Iraq policy.

Once a year, every CIA Station Chief writes a message to the DCI giving his or her analysis of how things are going in the country to which they are assigned.  These analyses are totally straghtforward and normally show extraordinary understanding of local, on-the-ground-realities.  They contain the kind of candor, which, if they were to get unvarnished to a Bush White House or to the press (as the most recent one from Baghdad recently did), it would likely infuriate this Administration.

After all, this is the President who will not acknowledge any shortcomings in either his policy or its outcomes in Iraq.  Given his dogged adherence to the righteousness of that policy, it makes sense that the President would be angry with the CS.  It seems quite possible that the CS is being punished for having been right, or at least unsupportive of Administration policy.

Would any President in touch with God want a CIA that told him that what he wanted to do was wrong? The Agency’s statutory responsibility is to speak the truth whether the truth supports the President’s plans or not.   It would appear that this concept is not shared by this Administration.

Porter Goss and his troops from the Hill are wreaking havoc on the best current line of defense we have against terrorism.  However angry this Administration is with the CS, whose officers run Human Intelligence operations, those operations are the last best hope we have to keep up with the terrorist problem.

But then, the White House is angry with the CS, presumably because of their position on Iraq, and the Bush Administration has always had trouble clearly separating Iraq from our real problems with Al Qaeda and its allies.   Purging the CIA at this unfortunate, badly timed moment when we need to be dealing with real issues of terrorism is like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA Station Chief who served in East and West Europe, the Middle East and as Chief of the Agency’s Counterterrorism Staff.

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