Washington Decoded

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 ODNI has grown so quickly that in late March it even roused the anger of the House Intelligence Committee. Republicans and Democrats on the panel, several of them full-throated supporters of reorganization, voted to reduce the ODNI’s budget pending receipt of an “architecture study” from Negroponte. “We don’t want more billets, more bureaucracy, more buildings,” Rep. Jane Harman, the panel’s ranking Democrat, told the Los Angeles Times.

    Apart from the issue of more bureaucratic layers, of course, are questions of bureaucratic loyalties, lines of authority and responsibility, and overlapping duties. The new legislation mandated the creation of “national centers” to work on high-priority topics like terrorism and proliferation, and then placed these in the ODNI. As Paul Pillar, a 28-year veteran of the CIA, recently asked, where do the new National Counterterrorism Center’s responsibilities begin, and those of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, in existence since 1986, end?

    Negroponte has also now asked that CIA station chiefs abroad report to his office as well as to their superiors at the CIA, which carries the potential of getting ODNI involved in operational matters. Pillar succinctly summarized the situation for The Washington Spectator when he said that the implementation of the 9/11 Commission’s plan was “not really a consolidation or unification of the intelligence community but rather the grafting of what amounts to a new agency on top of existing ones.” Ironically, the problems long attributed to the impossible job of being DCI may be in the process of being replicated in the DNI.

The flip side of the intelligence reorganization, in many ways, has been the demotion of the CIA into just another agency. As U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner, a reorganization critic, pointed out in a March 24 speech in Washington, while the “names of government agencies often don’t mean a lot,” there was “a special significance to the word ’Central’ in the CIA’s name.” The agency was meant to be the hub of the intelligence community, not just a spoke, the place where data collected by all the other agencies was sifted and integrated before being presented to the White House.

    The CIA’s fall from grace would be difficult to manage under the best of circumstances. But it is suffering a double-whammy under the directorship of Porter Goss, an undistinguished CIA case officer for ten years before he ran for Congress in 1988. In its nearly 60-year existence, the agency has never seen the kind of turmoil it has experienced in the 18 months since Goss took over.

    The former Florida congressman, who chaired the House Intelligence Committee for seven years, has run the agency with a bevy of inexperienced aides—derisively referred to as the “gosslings”—that he brought with him from Capitol Hill. Goss is viewed internally as the most partisan CIA director ever, brought in to discipline an unruly agency that has failed to toe the administration line, notwithstanding appearances, on Iraq. As a direct result, the senior ranks have been decimated during Goss’s short tenure. Twenty of the highest posts in the clandestine service have been vacated by career officials, largely because they believed they were being “disregarded or mismanaged,” according to a February article in U.S. News & World Report. An earlier account, in the American Prospect, estimated that as many as 90 senior officials have exited, agency-wide.

    A revealing indicator of Goss’s philosophy that has so far escaped notice in the press concerns Studies in Intelligence, the agency’s widely respected journal. When Studies was initiated in 1955, the literature on intelligence was almost nonexistent. It was thought that the intelligence profession would not become a real discipline without a literature that could be shared and accumulated. Over the decades, several of the CIA’s most esteemed minds served on the editorial board of Studies, which became a venue for wide-ranging and often self-critical articles. The only criterion for publication was whether the article made a “contribution to the literature of intelligence,” in the editorial board’s opinion (disclosure: this writer has had two articles published in Studies).

    But at Goss’s CIA, free expression and thoughtful criticism have been trumped by political correctness. The problem erupted in the fall of 2005, when Studies published an excerpt from a postmortem on the intelligence community’s failure to assess accurately Iraq’s WMD capabilities. The postmortem had been ordered by former DCI George Tenet, who wanted at least one inquest done by experienced officers, without a special ax to grind, and beyond the glare of publicity. Tenet contracted a group of outside consultants headed by Richard Kerr, a much decorated former deputy director of the agency, to conduct the review.

    It is not apparent why Kerr’s postmortem incited Goss and the gosslings, since the published portion was far more critical of the intelligence community for feeding policy-makers erroneous estimates than it was of the policy-makers for allegedly cherry-picking the intelligence or pressuring analysts. Perhaps Kerr’s major transgression was to point out that the other intelligence assessments about Iraq have proven to be right on the mark; the most important being the forecast of sectarian violence after Saddam Hussein’s overthrow. Under the Goss regime it is apparently forbidden to depict the intelligence community as being anything other than in lockstep with the administration’s rosy scenarios.

    Seven months later, the offending issue still has not been posted on-line, even though unclassified articles in Studies are normally put up within weeks of publication. Paul Johnson, the director of the office that publishes Studies and chairman of the editorial board, has resigned, along with the editor, Barbara Pace. The most chilling aspect is that there are newly established editorial hurdles at the journal. Merit is no longer the sole criterion governing publication.

    It is hard to determine which circumstance is worse: the poorly implemented, even ill-conceived makeover of the intelligence community, or the demoralization and resignations that have been the signal feature of Porter Goss’s tenure as CIA director. Both will take years to overcome.

    In the meantime, the sheer volume of U.S. intelligence resources that have been devoted to Al Qaeda may make another surprise akin to 9/11 unlikely. Yet, as Judge Posner points out in his new book, Uncertain Shield: The U.S. Intelligence System in the Throes of Reform, intelligence is imperfectible, and failures are endemic to even the best clandestine services. What remains to be seen are the costs of a dysfunctional intelligence apparatus, particularly one that is viewed with the utmost suspicion by the White House.

    Postscript: Porter Goss was forced to resign as CIA director in May 2006. Meanwhile, John Negroponte’s brief tenure as DNI ended on January 2007, when he resigned to become deputy secretary at the State Department.

     This article first appeared in The Washington Spectator, 15 April 2006
                                                   © 2006 by Max Holland

The Propagation and Powerof 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.