Washington Decoded

Senator Mathias: An Appreciation

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By Max Holland  

    When Charles Mathias died on January 25, his death generated the kind of coverage one would predict for a three-term senator who was long a favorite of the mainstream Washington media. In addition to the obligatory coverage in his home state of Maryland, there were lengthy obituaries in The Washington Post and The New York Times, and both newspapers also noted his death in editorials, a sure sign of respect given their shrinkage.

    The eulogies recounted Mathias’s positions on a slew of issues—civil rights,  Vietnam, Supreme Court nominations, campaign finance reform—that put him at odds with either his party or the White House incumbent, and sometimes both. Curiously, however, none of the articles mentioned his service in 1975-76 on the Senate Select Committee to Study Intelligence Activities, more commonly known as the Church Committee. Nothing Mathias did in his 34 years of public service was more revealing of the man’s integrity and decency than his performance during this probe, which Mathias had been instrumental in bringing about.[1]

    In hindsight, and save for dissent over US involvement in Vietnam, no single event reflected the breakdown of the cold war consensus more than the Congressional investigations into the intelligence community in the mid 1970s. Unlike the controversy over the war, however, the season of inquiry on Capitol Hill threatened to do great and lasting damage to a cold war instrumentality that almost everyone recognized as necessary. One could argue that if the war’s critics were heeded, and Washington extricated itself from Vietnam, the United States would actually emerge in a better position to wage its policy of containment versus the Soviet Union. In contrast, few people were making the argument that the congressional investigations would lead to better intelligence. All the talk was in terms of exposing alleged wrong-doing and bringing the community—chiefly the CIA and FBI—to heel.

Why Did I. F. Stone Sidestep the Hiss Case?

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Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted from a longer essay entitled “I. F. Stone: Encounters with Soviet Intelligence,” which appears in the Summer 2009 issue of the Journal of Cold War Studies. To read the entire essay click here.

By Max Holland

    Any reconsideration of I. F. Stone should specifically address how he viewed the Cold War spy and loyalty controversies—or chose not to—even if one accepts a minimalist interpretation of Stone’s brushes with Soviet intelligence.

    Stone often commented about the cases that rocked the country in the late 1940s and were responsible for the repression, fear, and culture of conformity that he repeatedly decried. Most frequently, Stone wrote in passionate defense of government officials, high and low, who had been unfair targets of smears and leaks, sometimes when their real crime was to have opposed a powerful congressman on a point of policy. One such occasion was the March 1948 attack by Representative J. Parnell Thomas (R-NJ), chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, on a government physicist named Edward U. Condon. (Condon had been a prime mover in asserting postwar civilian control over nuclear energy, which Thomas had bitterly opposed). In the summer of 1949, Stone wrote a stinging series of articles in defense of Condon, all of which roundly attacked J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI for compiling the innuendo that Thomas had used in his blundering effort to destroy the outspoken physicist, who also happened to be Stone’s friend.[1]

    The case in which Stone became the most personally involved was the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—but not during their sensational trial, when he stayed uncharacteristically silent. Because he did not want to “play into the hands of reaction,” he eschewed the “shrill, hysterical and mendacious” propaganda campaign that insisted the Rosenbergs were completely innocent and victims of a heinous government frame-up. Instead, he attempted to sit on the fence: “we just don’t know” whether the Rosenbergs are guilty or innocent, Stone wrote.[2] When he did become fully engaged, it was to crusade against the great and unfair disparity between their death sentences and the limited prison terms meted out to others convicted of nuclear espionage.[3]

    Although Stone mainly railed against the injustices that occurred, he was also prone to discounting the significance of a given spy case and insisting that the truly bad actor was some element of the US government. That was the line of argument he employed when the first spy case, involving a foreign policy journal called Amerasia, broke in June 1945. Stone was quick to suggest—falsely—that the prosecution was the work of a “reactionary clique” inside the State Department, which, among other things, was scheming to save Japan from decisive defeat so that it could be preserved as a bulwark against Soviet socialism.[4] Four years later, in a similar vein, Stone hammered on the theme of FBI misconduct during the first trial in the Judith Coplon espionage case, until her own appearance on the witness stand proved disastrous to her credibility.[5] Decades later, he disingenuously suggested that Victor Perlo, his former source at the War Production Board, had been unjustifiably “purged” from the federal government. “Now he would have been a sitting duck if he was passing any secrets,” Stone observed. “But the government never laid a finger on him.”[6]

In Denial: Round 11

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By John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr

    While we were writing Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, based on Alexander Vassiliev’s notebooks, we anticipated a hostile reaction from battered but still rancorous remnants of the pro-Communist left in the academic world and partisan pundits. Together they have denied for more than fifty years that Soviet espionage in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s had much significance, denounced claims linking the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) with Soviet espionage, and proclaimed the innocence of many of those identified as Soviet agents. 

    We expected the most antagonistic reaction would involve the traditionally two most contested cases: that of Alger Hiss, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. No one who studies 20th century American history can fail to be astounded by the quantity and the viciousness of the assaults leveled on scholars who dared question the innocence and martyrdom of Hiss and the Rosenbergs. Historians Allen Weinstein and Ronald Radosh, most notably, were subjected to years of attacks on their personal integrity and professional competence for their pioneering and superbly researched books on the Hiss-Chambers and Rosenberg cases.[1]  

    The opening chapter of Spies, entitled “Alger Hiss: Case Closed,” ended with our conclusion that in light of new and definitive evidence from the KGB archives recorded in Vassiliev’s notebooks, as well as the ample evidence available earlier from other sources, “to serious students of history continued claims for Hiss’s innocence are akin to a terminal form of ideological blindness.” But we also noted, “it is unlikely that anything will convince the remaining die-hards.”[2] Similarly, we foresaw continued protests of innocence from the ranks (albeit much-thinned ranks) of the Rosenberg defenders in the academy and elsewhere to the extensive documentation in Spies of the extraordinary size of the espionage apparatus Rosenberg established. Spies revealed for the first time, for example, that Rosenberg had recruited a second atomic spy, Russell McNutt, in addition to the his long-identified brother-in-law David Greenglass.

    Somewhat to our surprise, however, the defenses of Hiss and the Rosenbergs, while not disappearing, have taken a back seat to the protection of I. F. Stone.

    In the grand sweep of Spies, which tells the story of KGB activities and networks in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, Stone is a very minor player, with only a bit part. Most of the references to him are in passing, and the totality of his activities take up only six pages out of 548 pages of text. In contrast, Hiss has an entire chapter, thirty-one pages, devoted to his case, while the section on Julius Rosenberg and his extensive technical and atomic espionage apparatus is even longer. Indeed, numerous other Americans who assisted Soviet intelligence receive more attention in Spies than Stone simply because their roles were more important than his were.

    Stone, however, is an icon in certain journalistic precincts, and to his devotees those six pages are the only ones in Spies that matter. Their responses match in distortion, whitewashing, spinning, and ad hominem viciousness any that we have received over the years and give us a better understanding of what Weinstein and Radosh had to put up with. The history of communism and Soviet espionage have never been fields for those seeking the scholarly quiet life, but the displays of rage (real and faux) in regard to Stone have been impressive.

“Izzy, We Hardly Knew Ye”

    To be sure, we anticipated there would be considerable interest in our new material on Stone because the matter of his cooperation with Soviet intelligence had been murky, and Spies brought forward some significant new information. In a 1999 book, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, we had examined the evidence of WWII KGB cables deciphered by the National Security Agency’s Venona project about Soviet contacts with Stone and concluded that while the cables showed that the KGB hoped to establish a covert relationship “there is no evidence in Venona that Stone was ever recruited by the KGB.”[3] The Vassiliev notebooks, however, provided additional documentation, and in Spies we wrote that the evidence shows that Stone was recruited in 1936 to assist Soviet espionage in the United States and functioned into 1939 as a talent scout for new sources, a courier linking the KGB with sources, and a source in his own right for insider journalism information. 

    The notebooks also showed that sometime in 1939 Stone’s assistance to Soviet espionage ceased, although at whose initiative is unknown. Stalin’s purge of his own security services had forced Soviet intelligence to shut down most of its agent networks in America by that year and, in any event, Stone was so revolted by the Nazi-Soviet pact that he undoubtedly severed whatever relationship existed by that time. In late 1944 the KGB again approached Stone, hoping to reestablish a relationship, but the evidence was (and remains) ambiguous on whether that was successful.

The Politics of Postmortems

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By Max Holland

   

    How objective and useful are intelligence postmortems of the kind produced in Washington?

   The press usually accords them an exalted status from the moment they are released, whether they are produced by the executive branch, Congress, or semi-independent commissions. Postmortems are regarded as a reliable account of what went wrong and why, if not an authoritative and objective one.

    But should postmortems be embraced at face value? Or are they subject to personal/political/institutional pushes and tugs that can easily distort their findings?

    In the aftermath of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, four separate postmortems examined the performance of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The first two were internal reviews; the third was coordinated within the intelligence community by the US Intelligence Board (USIB); and the fourth was conducted by the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB).

    Despite the sameness of the facts at issue, the four ex post facto analyses varied dramatically. They were subject to extraneous influences that distorted their findings and even their presentations of fact. The key conclusions depended on who wrote the postmortem, when, and for whom.

    The lesson from these once-classified postmortems is that after-the-fact inquests in Washington should be viewed  with the utmost caution.

The Critical Issues after October 1962

    The public terms of the settlement all but guaranteed that the missile crisis would be  perceived as a sorely-needed triumph for the Kennedy administration and the intelligence community, both of which were still smarting from the Bay of Pigs debacle of the previous year. As Richard H. Rovere, the New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, observed in early 1963, “the handling of the October crisis was, of course, superb (an easy ex post facto judgment, based wholly upon success).”[1]

    Yet the CIA’s margin of success had actually been dangerously narrow. When all the facts were in, the missile crisis could be fairly called a “near-failure of American intelligence . . . of the first magnitude,” as the late Alexander George, a Stanford professor, put it in 1974.[2] All the intelligence estimates prepared prior to mid-October predicted that the Soviets were not likely to implant surface-to-surface missiles (SSMs) on Cuban soil. Of equal if not greater moment, the first hard evidence of the SSMs’ deployment was not in hand until October 15, more than a month after they had arrived in Cuba and just days before the CIA would deem some of them operational. That meant Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had come shockingly close to accomplishing his strategic fait accompli.

The “photo gap”: the CIA discovered Soviet missiles in Cuba belatedly because

the Kennedy administration attenuated U-2 coverage in September 1962.

    Both these intelligence deficits—one analytical, one a matter of collection— were hinted at in newspaper stories published just after the acute phase of the crisis peaked. As a October 31 article in The New York Times put it, the first question was whether intelligence “estimates [had been] tailored to fit top policy beliefs,” or if administration officials had “reject[ed accurate] estimates as erroneous.” Meanwhile, the collection issue—which would be dubbed the “intelligence” or “photo” gap—turned on why it had taken the administration so long to detect the SSMs’ deployment. “[T]here is general mystification about how the Russians could have built so many missile sites so quickly without warning,” the Times article noted.[3]

    All four secret postmortems would address these two primary questions. There was, however, a dramatic difference in the political consequences attached to each one.

The Politics of Intelligence Postmortems: Cuba 1962-1963

By Max Holland

   

    In the aftermath of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, four separate postmortems examined the CIA’s performance. The first two were internal exercises; the third was coordinated within the intelligence community by the U.S. Intelligence Board (USIB); and the fourth was conducted by the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB).

    Despite the sameness of the facts at issue, the four ex post facto analyses varied dramatically in their findings and conclusions regarding the CIA’s performance. Everything depended on who wrote the postmortem, when, for what audience, and from what perspective. The lesson of these postmortems from 1962-1963 would seem to be that all such after-the-fact inquests should be viewed critically, and with the utmost caution.

    This article originally appeared in the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 20, No. 3 (2007), and may be purchased from Taylor & Francis by clicking here.

The Power of Disinformation: The Lie That Linked CIA to the Kennedy Assassination

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By Max Holland

    The 1967 arrest and indictment of Clay Shaw for conspiring to kill President Kennedy was one of the greatest travesties in the history of American jurisprudence.

    That much was understood by 1969, once Shaw was acquitted after 54 minutes of deliberation by a New Orleans jury. What was not understood until fairly recently, though, was the lie at the core of DA Jim Garrison's persecution of Shaw. Garrison was duped by a  false allegation published in a  Communist-controlled Italian newspaper, Paese Sera. The Garrison saga would be almost laughable, given how the DA was so easily fooled, save for the tragedy inflicted on Clay Shaw, and the lasting damage Garrison wrought to the public  perception of what happened in Dallas on 22 November 1963.

    Garrison forever changed the terms of public debate on the assassination. Before the New  Orleans district attorney became involved, the worst criticism made of the U.S. government was that it had not been sufficiently devoted to, or diligent about, finding the true  perpetrators. Garrison made the U.S. government--specifically, the CIA--complicit in the assassination itself.

    Click on the title to read “The Power of Disinformation: The Lie That Linked the CIA to the Kennedy Assassination,” which appeared in Studies in Intelligence in 2001.

    Oliver Stone, whose 1991 film JFK exalted Jim Garrison, critiqued the Studies article in a 2002 paid advertisement that appeared in The Nation magazine.

© 2001 by Max Holland

Politics and Intelligence: The “Photo Gap” That Delayed Discovery of Missiles in Cuba

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By Max Holland

    The Kennedy administration harbored three great secrets in connection with the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, not just two, as widely understood.

    The most sensitive, of course, was the quid pro quo that ended the acute phase of the crisis. In exchange for the prompt, very public, and verified withdrawal of Soviet missiles, President Kennedy publicly pledged not to invade Cuba and secretly committed to quietly dismantling Jupiter missile sites in Turkey in 1963. Management of this first secret was so masterful— involving public dissembling, private disinformation, and a plain lack of information—that the quid pro quo remained a lively, but unconfirmed, rumor for nearly three decades.

    The second secret involved keeping a lid on Washington’s ongoing effort to subvert Fidel Castro’s regime. Operation MONGOOSE, which was overseen by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, played a significant role in fomenting the missile crisis. Yet that covert effort was not part of the public discourse in 1962 and remained a secret in this country until the mid-1970s. Only after an unprecedented Senate probe into intelligence activities did enough information seep out to reveal that Castro’s fears of US military intervention (and Soviet claims to that effect) were not wholly unfounded, however mistaken.

    It was the administration’s third secret, however, that has proven the hardest to unpack. The Kennedy administration “shot itself in the foot” when it limited U-2 surveillance for five crucial weeks in 1962, which is why it took the government a full month to spot offensive missiles in Cuba. If proved, this “photo gap,” as it was dubbed by Republican critics, threatened to tarnish the image of “wonderfully coordinated and error-free ‘crisis management’” that the White House sought to project before and after October 1962. The administration’s anxiety over whether cover stories about the gap might unravel even trumped, for a time, its concern over keeping secret the quid pro quo. After all, an oral assurance with the Soviets concerning the Jupiters could always be denied, while proof of the photo gap existed in the government’s own files.

    Largely because the administration labored mightily to obfuscate the issue, the photo gap remains under-appreciated to this day, notwithstanding the vast literature on the missile crisis. Recently declassified documents finally permit history to be filled in 43 years after the crisis, and these same records alter the conventional story in at least one important respect. John McCone, the director of Central Intelligence (DCI), and the CIA as a whole were deeply distrusted by key administration officials in the weeks leading up to discovery of the missiles. Moreover, the rampant uncertainty that prevailed within the Agency, itself, has been downplayed, if not forgotten, to the detriment of depicting the complexity of what actually occurred.

    The literature on the crisis has painted a rosier-than-warranted picture of how human intelligence, assiduously collected in September, finally overcame self-imposed restrictions on U-2 overflights. What actually happened was not a textbook case of how the system should work. And although tension between the CIA and the administration abated after the crisis, it was not by very much. Lingering sensitivity over the photo gap left a chill in the relationship between the DCI and the Kennedy brothers, a result that can only be labeled ironic, given McCone’s role in securing the critical photo coverage.

    An article on the “photo gap” appeared in the Winter 2005  edition of Studies in Intelligence, and may be read by clicking here.

    Postscript: As the story of the “photo gap” shows, the relationship between policy-makers, who prefer to learn whatever corroborates their conceptions, and intelligence officers, who are often cast in the role of telling the White House what it doesn't want to hear, is a never-ending struggle. It is grounded in human nature, and human nature is inveterate. Still, the abuse of that relationship during the Bush administration was unprecedented.

© 2005 by Max Holland

One Year After a Major Realignment, The Intelligence Community Is in Disarray

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By Max Holland   

    In the short space of five years, Americans have witnessed two major intelligence debacles: first, a sin of omission in 2001 (failure to detect and prevent the 9/11 attacks), followed by a sin of commission in 2002–03 (the estimate that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction). These failures produced four major investigations, two by Congress and two by special commissions, and eventually the most drastic restructuring of the intelligence apparatus since 1947.

    The press is currently focused on the White House’s calculated leaks, undertaken to mask their misuse of bad pre-war intelligence. Yet the reordering of intelligence agencies is vastly more significant, albeit less titillating. This reorganization shows signs of creating a system more dysfunctional than the one it replaced. If nothing else, the revamped intelligence apparatus is going to cost U.S. taxpayers a lot more money with no discernible gains.

    The centerpiece of the reorganization enacted into law in December 2004 was the creation of the Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). It had been argued that the three-hatted job of Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) was too much responsibility for any one person. Managing the CIA, along with serving as the president’s principal intelligence adviser, was said to be a full-time job, one that left the DCI too little time for, and not enough authority over, the 17 other agencies that constitute the “intelligence community.”

    The 9/11 Commission made reallocation of these three responsibilities one of its top recommendations in its effort to “rebuild the bloated and failed intelligence bureaucracies,” as John Lehman, one of the commissioners, put it in a November 2005 op-ed article. “We wanted a strong national intelligence director to smash bureaucratic layers, [and] tear down information ’stovepipes.’”

    After George Bush appointed John Negroponte, a career diplomat, as the first DNI in March 2005, all eyes immediately focused on whether Negroponte would assert for himself the role of principal intelligence briefer of the president; that was not a foregone conclusion, not having been legislated. Negroponte did in fact step into that role—“face time” with the president being the single most precious commodity in Washington—and that marked a turning point. Besides representing a demotion for the CIA director and the agency as a whole, it turned the ODNI away from the lean structure touted by the 9/11 panel. Instead of presiding over the intelligence community as an overall coordinator, the DNI suddenly needed troops, and lots of them.

    The ODNI now reportedly boasts 1,000 employees, including a principal-deputy DNI, three associate DNIs, four deputy DNIs, and 19 assistant-deputy DNIs; not to mention its own general counsel, inspector general, and all the other accouterments of any self-respecting federal entity. The restructuring has led (some would say all too predictably) to an entirely new bureaucracy on top of the already swollen bureaucracy that was supposedly a prime cause of the intelligence failures.

The Propagation and Power of Communist Bloc Dezinformatsiya

By Max Holland

    One of the KGB’s most effective active measures during the Cold War was the use of disinformation (dezinformatsiya) to defame the U.S. government or at least prominent elements of it, such as the FBI and CIA.

    The false allegations leveled via disinformation ranged from charges that Washington had deployed biological weapons in the north during the Korean War, to assertions that elements of the U.S. government (chiefly, the CIA) were involved in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

    This article about Communist bloc dezinformatsiya originally appeared in the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2006), and may be purchased from Taylor & Francis by clicking here.

Operation PBHISTORY: The Aftermath of SUCCESS

By Max Holland

    PBHISTORY was the cryptonym for a CIA covert operation dedicated to the gathering and exploitation of Guatemalan Communist documents following the agency-supported overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954.

    There were few, if any, sensational disclosures from this effort, although PBHISTORY supplied the U.S. intelligence community with a ground-level look at a Communist takeover by slow motion. But the covert operation did not succeed in its most vital purpose: to persuade Latin America to look at Communist penetration of the hemisphere from the standpoint of the United States.

    The article about PBHISTORY orginally appeared in the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2004), and may be purchased from Taylor & Francis by clicking here.