You may not remember Philip Agee, but I do. Agee worked for the CIA during the 1960s and, after resigning from the CIA in 1968 (or being forced to resign for a variety of reasons, depending on who you talk to), went on to write a book entitled Inside the Company which was first published in Britain in 1975. Among other things, the book identified some 250 CIA officers and agents. Covers were blown, and people had to be pulled out of undercover positions that had been painstakingly constructed. Years of effort were destroyed. In 1978, Agee and a group of supporters started publishing the Covert Action Information Bulletin, the stated purpose of which was to promote “a worldwide campaign to destabilize the CIA through exposure of its operations and personnel.”
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, we’ve learned a lot of things from KGB records that have been made public, and former KGB agents and officials who have gone public with what they know. You probably haven’t heard a lot of coverage about this, because some of it is extremely embarrassing to those who cover the news – like the revelations that there really were Russian agents in this country who were manipulating the anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s. And we now know a lot more about Agee’s motivations as well.
According to Vasili Mitrokhin, Agee’s “bulletin” was supported by both the KGB and the Cuban General Intelligence Directorate. Oleg Kalugin, the former head of the KGB’s Counterintelligence Directorate, stated that Agee had approached the KGB in Mexico City in 1973, and been turned away, whereupon he “…went to the Cubans, who welcomed him with open arms…The Cubans shared Agee’s information with us.” In fact, talking about his 1975 book, Agee himself said, “Representatives of the Communist Party of Cuba also gave important encouragement at a time when I doubted that I would be able to find the additional information I needed.” Not surprisingly, his former CIA colleagues and U.S. officials called Agee a traitor. Agee, on the other hand, said he thought of himself as part of “the American tradition of dissent.” (Gee, where else have we heard that?)
Agee was never prosecuted in the United States. According to Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, this was because U.S. officials feared that a trial would expose Soviet defectors who were living here under new identities. This, by the way, illustrates one of the biggest reasons why terrorists we capture on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan should not be prosecuted in the U.S. civilian court system. Under the rules of evidence “discovery,” it would be impossible to effectively prosecute them without giving away crucial information on how we know what we know about them. But I digress.
Agee’s book hit the market in the midst of the “Church Committee” hearings of 1975-76 – a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho (who also sought the Democratic nomination for president in 1976). For a summary of the impact of the Church Committee, and subsequent Congressional restrictions on the operations of America’s intelligence agencies, I strongly recommend reading Congressional Oversight and the Crippling of the CIA, an excellent article by Stephen F. Knott, published by George Mason University’s History News Network. It says, in part:
“The damage done to the CIA by this congressional oversight regime is quite extensive. The committees increased the number of CIA officials subject to Senate confirmation, condemned the agency for its contacts with unscrupulous characters, prohibited any further contact with these bad characters, insisted that the United States not engage or assist in any coup which may harm a foreign leader, and overwhelmed the agency with interminable requests for briefings (some 600 alone in 1996)…The CIA was also a victim of the renowned congressional practice of pork barrel politics. The intelligence committees forced the agency to accept high priced technology that just happened to be manufactured in a committee member’s district…On some occasions, members of Congress threatened to leak information in order to derail covert operations they found personally repugnant.”
Now, the essence of “human intelligence” (a.k.a. spying), is either infiltrating your own people into the target organization, or convincing someone who is already part of it to pass information to you. While we might want to think that those whom we recruit have decided to work with us for altruistic reasons (because we are the good guys, after all, and they surely recognize the inherent superiority of the American way of life) - and indeed some do work for us for precisely that reason - you can’t always find someone who fits that description. You must then work with whomever you can find to get the intelligence you need. You might even have to (gasp!) pay money for it. And people who are willing to betray their country or (in the case of Al Qaeda) their comrades for money tend to be, by definition, “unscrupulous characters.” If you prohibit the CIA from working with them, you are, as my daddy used to say, cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Spying is a dirty, dangerous job. It often requires ruthless decisions and unscrupulous characters to get the job done. For most of human history, a spy who was caught faced immediate (and often spectacularly brutal, to discourage others) execution. But the intelligence gathered is indispensible. Information about your enemy is the most valuable weapon you can have in any kind of conflict. It can sometimes give you the leverage you need to defuse a situation without resorting to force. It can also help you spot the situations where armed conflict is going to be inevitable, and you might as well get it over with. And sometimes, in the real world, a surgical covert operation can save thousands of lives on both sides.
Henry Kissinger once said, in referring to the Church Committee, that it’s an illusion to believe that “tranquility can be achieved by an abstract purity of motive for which history offers no example.” Still, there are those who insist on living in a theoretical, idealistic world where, if we would just be nice to other people, they will naturally be nice to us in return. In 1974, seventeen Senators, including Senator Joe Biden (Democrat – Delaware), voted to ban all covert operations. During his 1988 presidential campaign, Biden proudly noted that he had threatened to “go public” with covert action plans during the Reagan administration, thus causing those operations to be canceled. (Judging from his recent statements, Biden hasn’t learned much in the last 30+ years, either.) Former Congressman Leo Ryan (Democrat – California) contended that leaks were an important tool. As Knott points out in his article, “Leaks have occurred repeatedly since the mid-1970s, and in very few cases has the offending party been disciplined.” (And Congress has the nerve to complain that they’re not fully briefed on every intelligence operation we conduct.)
Robert Ellsworth (former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, former Deputy Secretary of Defense, and former 3-term Republican Congressman from Kansas) said, referring to the Church Committee, “They were very specific about their effort to destroy American intelligence [capabilities].” That the committee did not succeed in dismantling the CIA and other intelligence organizations entirely was due largely to the efforts of Ellsworth and the much-maligned Donald Rumsfeld (in his first stint as Secretary of Defense under President Gerald Ford).
Over the years, the actions of a Democrat-controlled Congress, aided and abetted by the Carter and Clinton administrations, have cut the heart out of our “Human Intelligence” operations, and forced us to rely more and more on electronic intelligence. Presidents Reagan and Bush (the Elder) did their best to improve things - Bush, after all, had been Director of the CIA during the Ford administration, so he knew a few things about the business - but “human intelligence assets” take years to cultivate and very little time to destroy. And since we are often asking those “assets” to risk their lives to pass intelligence to us, once you’ve lost their trust, it’s really hard to get it back.
So we found ourselves on 9/11 wondering how our intelligence apparatus could have failed so miserably. And we find ourselves today faced with an enemy that knows not to use electronic communications channels that we can intercept – thanks in part to a helpful news media that’s only too glad to report on, for example, how intercepting satphone transmissions was helping us locate Al Qaeda members. (Guess what? They’ve stopped using satphones! What a surprise!) And this enemy is extremely difficult to infiltrate, because we have very few human intelligence assets who can pass themselves off as convincing Islamic jihadists. (Never mind the things they would probably be forced to do to “prove” themselves.) And the same politicians who were instrumental in putting us in this position are now blasting the intelligence community that they crippled because our intelligence is “flawed.”
But some of us are old enough to remember the 60s and 70s, and the Church Committee, and Philip Agee, and the Carter administration, and we know exactly why our intelligence community is in the situation it’s in today. And we’re not particularly excited about handing more political power to the party that’s largely responsible for it.
Thanks for listening.
No comments:
Post a Comment