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Overview
Now in its third edition, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones’s comprehensive history of the Central Intelligence Agency is widely acclaimed for its thorough and even-handed analysis. A renowned U.S. intelligence expert, Jeffreys-Jones chronicles the evolution of the agency from its beginning in 1947 to the present day. With clarity and acuity, he examines the CIA’s activities during some of the most dramatic episodes in American history, from McCarthyism to the Bay of Pigs, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Iran-Contra affair, and many others.
A new prologue by the author also covers the CIA’s history from the end of the Cold War to the terror attacks of September 11th, 2001. A landmark of intelligence history since its first edition in 1989, The CIA and American Democracy is “a judicious and reasonable...sophisticated study” (David P. Calleo, New York Times Book Review).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300208504 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/11/2020 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 348 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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The CIA and American Democracy
By Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1989 Rhodri Jeffreys-JonesAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-20850-4
CHAPTER 1
THE LESSONS OF AMERICAN HISTORY
In the second half of the twentieth century, it has been vital for America to have at its disposal a competent, secret foreign-intelligence agency capable of commanding respect and attention at home. The need for an intelligence organization with high standing stems largely from a modern circumstance: the emergence of the United States as a world power at a time when the Soviet Union, a clandestine society, started to pose a potent threat to world security. The Soviet media simply do not give sufficient information on Russian atomic strength and strategic intentions. There has therefore been a need for clandestine techniques to gauge a purposely concealed threat; and there has been a change in attitudes resulting in loss of status for the State Department and in considerable prestige for a new national-security bureaucracy of which the Central Intelligence Agency is a prominent part.
Yet, the CIA has not always concentrated its main energies on foreign intelligence, and, when it has, it has sometimes failed to impress U.S. policymakers with the significance of its findings. One reason is that White House officials and other Americans have misperceived, or disagreed over, its role. Another reason is that the American spy's search for higher status began prior to the emergence of the Soviet threat and is discernible well before the CIA's formation in 1947. Among the factors worthy of review are not just secret agents' ambitions and taste for publicity, but also presidential desires to circumvent congressional scrutiny, and congressional suspicions of White House conspiracies. These personal and political drives, which still exist side by side with modern security fears and justifications of secret intelligence work, have tended to divert the Agency from its main contemporary functions: the assessment of the Soviet threat, and analysis in connection with arms-reduction negotiations. In the heat of debate, intelligence partisans have sometimes fought for higher standing in ways and for reasons that undermine the real justifications for the agency that they champion.
The justification of a necessary phenomenon by means of erratic reasoning can have distorting and damaging effects on the phenomenon itself. Justifications of the CIA therefore invite scrutiny. One can begin by inquiring what lessons the founders of the CIA drew from American history. By the end of World War II, historical experience had suggested to those concerned with the intelligence problem two sets of principles, each of which produced guidelines—some informal, others official—which governed the performance of the CIA. The first set had to do with efficiency, justifying, for example, a centralized system. The second had to do with restraints on power, or how to keep the intelligence community respectable and status-worthy by saving it from the consequences of its own excesses. The resultant guidelines as a whole proved amply reassuring at the time of the founding of the CIA and underpinned the Agency's "Golden Age" in the 1950s. By the 1970s, however, some of their inadequacies had become painfully evident, and reforms took place. With the wisdom of hindsight, as one might expect, it is possible to discern both the strengths and the weaknesses of the principles behind the original CIA.
One principle that CIA advocates and apologists emphasized was bureaucratic continuity. Their lesson from the past was that the United States had too readily dismantled its spy networks in peacetime, too often been caught unprepared by new crises. Such a viewpoint, however, reflects the grim priorities of the Cold War, when it has indeed been necessary to maintain a permanent vigilance. Before the Cold War, one might argue, bureaucratic rigidity was undesirable. Certainly, in their first century of independence, Americans saw little need for a major, permanent, foreign-intelligence effort. This was largely because they were preoccupied with internal affairs and protected on each side by great oceans. At the same time, successive generations took the pragmatic and perhaps still instructive view that spying should be undertaken at the time and in the manner prescribed by circumstances.
Sporadic though they were, early American espionage efforts did slowly build up an awareness of some of the principles involved. Thus, immediately after the Constitution's ratification, Congress recognized that, in the interest of efficiency, espionage should be an executive prerogative. It voted secret funds to enable the president to make unvouchered payments for intelligence services. President Washington initiated espionage ventures as and when necessary, setting a precedent for his successors.
Presidents never ceased to commission individual clandestine missions, but the hostilities of 1861–65 produced a new need. Spy networks came into being. One of these networks dissolved with the Confederacy, but Lincoln's last cabinet meeting created the present-day Secret Service. The formation of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) in i88z and the Military Information Division (MID) three years later helped prepare the way for America's emergence as a great power. It was also the beginning of intelligence-agency proliferation and called for some form of coordination. By 1898, the year of the Spanish-American War, technological change had made such coordination more feasible. Secret Service chief John E. Wilkie utilized two recent inventions, the typewriter and carbon paper, to help with the central direction of counterespionage. He was not in a position to centralize foreign, or offensive, espionage, but he did demonstrate the potential of the coordination principle when the Secret Service, with help from the MID and ONI, mounted a defensive watch on a Spanish spy ring run from Montreal. In a blaze of publicity, Wilkie achieved its destruction.
Bureaucratic flux did not mean that the United States was caught unawares in World War I. By then, the Secret Service had ceded pride of place in the counterintelligence field. In 1908 the inauspiciously-named attorney-general Charles Bonaparte had established the Bureau of Investigation. With help from other agencies, the bureau mopped up German secret agents trying to operate in the United States. After the war, the leadership of the FBI, as it was now called, showed a rare gift for publicity and for role flexibility (as evidenced later in the fable of J. Edgar Hoover and his G-men). One American "spymaster" had already come to regard prestige as a goal in itself, rather than as a means to a single end.
President Woodrow Wilson's foreign-intelligence effort in World War I was largely an open operation, conducted through a large-scale, government-financed, instant university known as the Inquiry. Its nonsecret nature reflected Wilson's proclamation of faith in "open diplomacy" and in the relatively accessible nature of the information that U.S. policymakers were seeking. At the same time, the president's advisors did recognize a need for secret intelligence. The State Department took over the coordinating role that the Secret Service had assumed in 1898. The officials of its central intelligence bureau coordinated both counterintelligence and the limited amount of foreign secret intelligence which the United States undertook in World War I. Their office was well-known neither before nor after its later designation, U-1. Its obscurity was, of course, appropriate to its secret function, but, in the context of American democracy, that obscurity also implied low status, and it contributed to U-1's demise in 1927. By this time, however, U-i had confirmed the principle established by the Secret Service: there was to be civilian control over centrally coordinated intelligence.
In addition to the principles of continuity, executive control, centralization, and civilian leadership, the CIA's founders acknowledged the further principle of legislative sanction. From the beginning, Congress had been alert to possible abuses arising from the president's access to unvouchered funds. Particularly odious was the president's use of secret or executive agents for policy and diplomacy purposes. Long before Henry Kissinger ran into trouble for such activities in the 1970s, James Buchanan was defending secret agents in Cuba against those senators who feared an extension of presidential power and of Southern slavocracy. Later in the nineteenth century, the Hoar amendment allowed that the president could appoint "a mere agent ... or spy," but "such a person, so appointed, could be in no sense an officer of the United States."
Historical precedent suggested that Congress would also be alert to violations of domestic liberties. Strenuous objections to employers' use of Pinkerton detectives in labor disputes in the 1890s, to the overzealous activities of federal agents in the Red Scare of 1919, to government snoopers trying to enforce Prohibition, to President Hoover's use of the ONI to spy on political opponents, and to employers' renewed deployment of labor spies in the 1930s indicated a profound disquiet about the domestic use of secret agents. Even before the specter of the Gestapo, and, later, the KGB, reinforced such fears, congressmen and their constituents were on guard against an overweaning federal intelligence apparatus. The separation of foreign and domestic spying bureaucracies was an accepted principle by the 1940s.
Another feature of past congressional attitudes toward intelligence matters was that they sometimes stemmed from prejudice or opportunism. Objections to the intelligence services were occasionally spurious. For example, congressmen who opposed the creation of the Bureau of Investigation spoke in the name of liberty, but were influenced by the Secret Service's recent exposure of some of their number who had been engaged in Western land fraud. Diatribes against secret activities welled, at times, from sentiments independent of those activities: Populists' sectional loyalties and hatred of large-scale Eastern capital lay at the root of their objections to Pinkerton detectives to a much greater degree than sympathy with civil liberties. Congressional self-interest and irrationality meant that legislative attempts at intelligence reform could be inadequate or flawed. Legislative shortcomings also produced cynicism and resistance in the intelligence community toward congressional oversight, and encouraged the development of a defensive propaganda that was correspondingly flawed.
The central coordination of foreign intelligence had disappeared with the scrapping of U-1 in 19x7, with the result that intelligence gathering was at a low ebb in the 1930s. Army intelligence reached its nadir, judged by both expenditure and personnel, in 1937. The ONI was a little better off, but had nonetheless suffered severe cutbacks. The codebreakers in the Army's Signals Corps were achieving only limited successes on their low budget. One might, of course, argue that none of this mattered. The nation's leaders, especially Roosevelt, needed no intelligence experts to warn them of Hitler's aggressive intentions. It is possible, however, that a better-coordinated intelligence effort might have warned of less obvious threats, notably the ambitions being nurtured—against the dictates of military and industrial reason—in Japan. Furthermore, the Nazi threat was so serious that it demanded complex analysis.
A German spy scare jolted President Franklin D. Roosevelt into an awareness of intelligence needs. In 1938, eighteen members of a Nazi spy ring were arrested. But the jurisdictional lines between the FBI, army intelligence, the New York police, and other interested parties were so confused that the prisoners were poorly guarded, and fourteen of them escaped. Roosevelt demanded better coordination and began to grope his way haltingly forward, first in the counterintelligence field, then more broadly.
The revival of a centralizing mechanism similar to the defunct U-i should have fallen to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle, one of Roosevelt's brain trusters. After his appointment in 1938, Berle did sit in on intelligence coordination meetings but, despite the Nazi threat and American entry into the war, he found the intelligence business dirty and distasteful. He refused to take an initiative. The Department of State thus relinquished control of intelligence, which would be an increasingly important factor in diplomacy. Berle's omission in wartime was to be repeated after 194$, to the chagrin of those who believed that the State Department should be the prime and sole executor of presidential foreign policy.
In search of a man who would take the initiative, Roosevelt turned to Colonel William J. ("Wild Bill") Donovan. Donovan had won his "Wild Bill" nickname for bravery in 1917–18, when he commanded New York's 69th regiment, the "Fighting Irish." His grandfather had been a Fenian immigrant to Buffalo's shantytown. From his quarterback days at Columbia, Donovan was marked out as a fighter on the way to the top. By 1940, he was a Republican, conservative, millionaire recruit to the American business elite. With his enormous capacity for getting things done regardless of the enemies he made in the process, he became a charismatic figure in U.S. intelligence circles.
Roosevelt had known of Donovan since their days at Columbia Law School. In June 1940, he sent him on a mission to assess Britain's chances of surviving the Nazi onslaught. Upon his return, Donovan predicted that Britain would have the will and capability to fight on against the Germans who had already overrun much of continental Europe. His report was important in the diplomatic context, for it helped to correct earlier assessments, notably from Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy in London, which had been pessimistic about Britain's prospects for survival.
In the context of intelligence history, another aspect of Donovan's report is significant. Navy Secretary Frank Knox had originally charged Donovan with the job of analyzing Britain's handling of Nazi fifth-column activities. Donovan was glad to do so. The British, for their part, were keen to promote the idea that Germany's early victories were the result of dirty tricks, not real military prowess, for that implied that Britain might yet fight off the Nazi assault if only America gave enough assistance. Donovan upheld this idea because he wanted to support the British, and because he wanted Americans to believe the British were worth supporting.
But there was another, equally important reason why Donovan bruited the notion of a Nazi fifth-column menace. This was that it helped him in his campaign to establish a new American intelligence agency. Donovan's syndicated articles on the Gestapo's dirty tricks and psychological warfare paved the way for America's own clandestine ventures in World War II, and foreshadowed the use, in later years, of the KGB bogeyman. He realized that, in the context of an open democracy characterized by vigorous debate on all important issues, he had to publicize his case for a new agency. He resorted to headline-grabbing tactics and dubious arguments in pursuit of what was, indeed, a good cause. Yet, whereas the end did justify the means, the methods he and his successors used had a distorting effect on the end product itself, the American intelligence community.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The CIA and American Democracy by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones. Copyright © 1989 Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION, vii,PROLOGUE: 9/11 AND THE POST-COLD WAR CIA, ix,
INTRODUCTION, 1,
1. THE LESSONS OF AMERICAN HISTORY, 11,
2. THE BIRTH OF THE CIA, 24,
3. THE MISTS OF BOGOTA: EXPANSION AND OBFUSCATION, 42,
4. SURVIVING MCCARTHY: A WEAKNESS FOR IMMUNITY, 63,
5. THE GOLDEN AGE OF OPERATIONS, 81,
6. INTELLIGENCE IN THE GOLDEN AGE: THE FIGHT FOR CREDIBILITY, 100,
7. PRESIDENTIAL SHAKE-UP: KENNEDY AND THE BAY OF PIGS, 118,
8. PRESIDENTIAL NEGLECT: LBJ AND THE CIA TO JUNE 1966, 139,
9. HELMS, JOHNSON, AND COSMETIC INTELLIGENCE, 156,
10. NIXON, KISSINGER, AND THE FRUITS OF MANIPULATION, 176,
11. DEMOCRACY'S INTELLIGENCE FLAP: TOWARD A NEW LEGITIMACY, 194,
12. RESTRAINED INTELLIGENCE AND THE HALF-WON PEACE, 2l6,
13. IGNORING THE CREDIBLE: THE CIA IN THE 1980S, 229,
CONCLUSION, 248,
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES, 253,
NOTES, 255,
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 297,
INDEX, 319,
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