33 results
Acknowledgements
- Huw Dylan, King's College London, David Gioe, United States Military Academy at West Point
- Edited by Michael S. Goodman, King's College London
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12 - Watching Khomeini
- Huw Dylan, King's College London, David Gioe, United States Military Academy at West Point
- Edited by Michael S. Goodman, King's College London
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Summary
The fall of the Shah of Iran in January 1979 was a momentous event. Not only had the Iranian royal family ruled for 2,500 years, but the ushering in of an Islamic Republic irrevocably altered regional politics. For the CIA the revolution came as a great surprise, and almost instantly questions arose as to why it had not been foreseen. Many accounts have concentrated on the 1979 revolution in Iran as an intelligence failure, pondering the reasons behind it. This chapter will take a different tack and will focus more squarely on CIA assessments of the main protagonist, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, rather than the revolution itself.
Khomeini was no stranger to the CIA, nor indeed to the Iranian political establishment. In fact, the Shah, who had been returned to power in 1953 following a coup, engineered in the West and orchestrated by the CIA, had long been a critic of, and target for, Iranian religious leaders. While Khomeini would not be the first Iranian religious leader to speak out against the ruling leadership, his vitriol would become one of the most vocal and prolific. For CIA analysts, writing sometime afterwards but looking at this early period (albeit with the benefit of hindsight), ‘the emergence of a strong religious leader on a national level was inevitable’. But it would be difficult to have made such a judgement at the time. A major factor behind this is contained in a post-mortem that the CIA conducted in the immediate aftermath of the revolution: collecting intelligence on domestic Iranian issues was a low priority.
The CIA post-mortem was explicit in its findings: ‘most NFAC [the CIA’s National Foreign Assessment Center] analysts began with the belief that the Shah and his regime were strong and the opposition weak and divided’. Just like a badly shaped snowball at the top of the hill, once such an erroneous assumption was used as the starting position, the process quickly moved off track and lost its shape and direction. So what was known about Khomeini and why was his trajectory misjudged?
Khomeini was born in 1902 and developed a religious identity from an early age. His first book, written in his late thirties, was as much a religious tract as a political one.
11 - 1975: The Year of the ‘Intelligence Wars’
- Huw Dylan, King's College London, David Gioe, United States Military Academy at West Point
- Edited by Michael S. Goodman, King's College London
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One could easily imagine a CIA officer who cut his or her teeth during the ‘golden era’ of the early years of the CIA looking back in 1975 on those heady, sometimes swashbuckling days with a fair degree of nostalgia. The fledgling agency had set a strong pace in intelligence collection and analysis, in cutting-edge technological development and in covert action, in Europe, Latin America, Asia and beyond. It had achieved notable successes; even its failures had resulted in policymakers’ concluding that it needed more money, resources and support, not less. The agency enjoyed a curious relationship with Congress and the public during those early decades. On the one hand, certainly compared to its sister services in the UK, MI5 and SIS, it enjoyed a much higher public profile. Its creation had, after all, been the culmination of a long public debate, and had been set in stone in the 1947 National Security Act. Certain issues, such as the failed operation at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, ensured that its profile never dropped too far. But, on the other hand, it had managed to sustain a cloak of secrecy over the scale of its operations and had enjoyed a significant degree of latitude from lawmakers who approved its budgets. Successive presidents had seen the agency as a tool at their disposal when dealing with all manner of issues; there had been very little pressure to create a more democratically robust system of oversight. That changed after 1975, and the fallout of ‘the year of intelligence’, when a series of revelations about the agency's activities was made public. The fallout and the attacks endured by the agency were judged by CIA officer Ray Cline to have ‘nearly destroyed its effectiveness at home and abroad’. The revelations gave rise to the infamous, though inaccurate, charge that the CIA ‘may have been behaving like a rogue elephant on rampage.’
Tolerable though the light-touch oversight of intelligence activities may have been throughout the first decades of the Cold War, by the 1970s the political, media and public mood was beginning to shift towards control, transparency and investigation.
16 - The Soviet Leadership and Kremlinology in the 1980s
- Huw Dylan, King's College London, David Gioe, United States Military Academy at West Point
- Edited by Michael S. Goodman, King's College London
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Most academic attention on the Soviet system in the 1980s has focused on General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's dual policies of perestroika (reforms) and glasnost (openness) and how the Soviet system imploded. Far less studied, and certainly no less important, is the precise focus on the leaders of the Soviet Union and how their different approaches affected the political, economic and military course the country followed. By the early 1980s the Soviet leadership of the worldwide communist movement appeared to be running out of ideas. In the Kremlin was the aging and increasingly paranoid leader Leonid Brezhnev. He had ruled since 1964, but his involvement at a senior level extended to the period of Stalin’s rule. His tenure had seen an increase in military expenditure but this had been coupled with a growth in economic and industrial stagnation. The CIA keenly monitored his health and well-being, just as they had with his predecessors, and there was little surprise in late 1982 when he died.
A common aspect of the CIA's work was ‘Kremlinology’: the precise watching of individuals within the Soviet system, looking at the movers and shakers, studying those rising and falling politically and pondering what it all meant. With Brezhnev having been ill for so long there had been lots of attention and discussion about who might replace him. Brezhnev had surrounded himself with other aging, old Soviet hands. Would one of these be the successor, or might someone younger take the helm? Such questions were consequential not only for the Soviet Union itself, but also for the CIA and the policymakers it informed.
The debate cannot have lasted long. Within twenty-four hours of Brezhnev's death, his replacement had been chosen: Yuri Andropov. Andropov was no stranger to power, having risen up through the Soviet system. He was ambassador to Hungary in 1956 at the time of the uprising and forcibly urged a swift and brutal Soviet military response. This experience persuaded him that any opposition to Soviet rule should be dealt with in the harshest possible manner, and a year after taking over as head of the KGB in 1968, he urged that the Czechoslovak liberalisation movement under Alexander Dubček be crushed. He remained the head of the KGB until his appointment to replace Brezhnev in 1982.
Contents
- Huw Dylan, King's College London, David Gioe, United States Military Academy at West Point
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Frontmatter
- Huw Dylan, King's College London, David Gioe, United States Military Academy at West Point
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Index
- Huw Dylan, King's College London, David Gioe, United States Military Academy at West Point
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14 - Martial Law in Poland
- Huw Dylan, King's College London, David Gioe, United States Military Academy at West Point
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Summary
There is perhaps no greater value that an intelligence agency can provide than a well-placed, reliable source at a time of unrest and uncertainty. For an agency focused primarily on human intelligence (humint) like the CIA, having an agent in place, one who can be hurriedly tasked and has a rapid means of passing information, as a crisis develops, provides the best example of why it is invaluable to US policymaking. The events in Poland in early 1980 were a classic example of this. The episode is important not only as a case study in humint, but also because of how it presaged the growing nationalist sentiments and discontent within the Soviet Union that would come to mark the 1980s.
Poland had been one of the original and more involved nations within the communist, Soviet bloc. Throughout the 1970s food supplies in Poland, like many other places within Eastern Europe, became more and more stretched and so prices began to rise. Quite unrelated to this a movement began to grow within one of the main dockyards which, in late 1980, was crystallised into the first non-communist union, Solidarity. Amongst its major objectives was not to replace communism per se, but rather to foster support for the growing discontent at rising food prices, growing unemployment and the shrinking economy. As its membership swelled its focus began to shift, and increasingly it became a mouthpiece for anti-Soviet sentiments.
In Moscow the reaction was one of indecision and uncertainty, much as it had been with previous signs of discontent in the past. The leaders of the more hardline Satellite states urged a forceful response while Brezhnev dithered. Ultimately the answer came from within Poland itself: in late October 1980 the government began plans for imposing martial law. In Moscow there was general support for the Polish government and its decision. Unlike the previous instances in Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) and Afghanistan (1979), this time around the government in question worked closely with the Kremlin in coordinating a response. The assurances provided by the government in Warsaw – that matters could be controlled without recourse to military intervention – persuaded Brezhnev to allow martial law to proceed.
Bibliography
- Huw Dylan, King's College London, David Gioe, United States Military Academy at West Point
- Edited by Michael S. Goodman, King's College London
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6 - The CIA and the Bomber and Missile Gap
- Huw Dylan, King's College London, David Gioe, United States Military Academy at West Point
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Summary
Geography ensured the relative security of the United States for most of its early history. Unlike Britain, it had no pressing need to develop a foreign intelligence capacity because it faced no real, plausible foreign threats. Technology changed this in a limited way in the 1930s. The aircraft carrier, in the possession of competitor powers in Asia, afforded them the power to threaten American naval bases. In 1941 aircraft launched from six Japanese carriers attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, drawing the US into the Second World War. But none of the enemy powers during the war possessed the capability to inflict significant damage to the US homeland. By the end of the war, however, it was clear that geography would not afford the US the same level of security it had historically enjoyed. Scientists and engineers in belligerent countries had developed new machines that, when perfected, would allow them to attack inter-continental targets with munitions of almost unimaginable destructive power. These technologies included long-range bombers, jet-engines, ballistic missiles and the atomic bomb. The German V-2 rocket attacks on London demonstrated the vulnerability of urban centres to ballistic missiles; the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated the revolutionary power of atomic bombs. It was obvious that sooner or later these technologies – long- range delivery systems and atomic bombs – would be combined, and that when they were the US homeland would be vulnerable like never before.
The exposure of elements of Soviet atomic espionage efforts left Western leaders in no doubt about Stalin's atomic ambitions. The scale of the Soviet Union's penetration of the Anglo-American atomic infrastructure was extensive. It included reports from several members of the Cambridge Five spy ring in the UK. John Cairncross, for instance, reported to his Soviet handler in September 1941 that the British were intent upon developing an explosive device that harnessed the power of the atom. This was but the first of many reports that reached Moscow through the latter half of 1941 and early 1942; ultimately they would convince Soviet scientists that the plans were feasible, and Stalin to start work on a Soviet bomb.
3 - A ‘Gangster Act’: The Berlin Tunnel
- Huw Dylan, King's College London, David Gioe, United States Military Academy at West Point
- Edited by Michael S. Goodman, King's College London
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Berlin has rightly been at the heart of every serious study of the Cold War. Germany's divided capital had strategic importance beyond any other foreign capital. Though military lines had ossified into a series of potential battlegrounds with border checkpoints, and a foreboding wall with watch towers sprouted where families once freely crossed, intelligence operations were much more fluid. As Richard Aldrich observed, ‘the Cold War was fought, above all, by the intelligence services.’ Intelligence officers from many countries found themselves in both East and West Berlin attempting to discern the next move of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact. David E. Murphy, a former Chief of CIA's Berlin Base, and his unlikely co-author, former KGB Officer Sergei Kondrashev, characterised the city as a ‘battleground’ of enormous importance.
If the battleground was enormous, so were the audacity and scale of intelligence collection efforts within it. Between 1952 and 1956 the CIA and its partner, the British SIS, undertook the largest data exfiltration operation from a single point of presence in the pre-cyber era. The Berlin Tunnel, whose daring matched its logistical and technological complexity, was codenamed Operation Gold by the Americans and Stopwatch by the British. Its primary purpose was to discern indications and warning that would suggest the Soviets were planning a military invasion of Western Europe. The roots of the operation, however, were in the failure of another signals intelligence operation.
As world war turned to Cold War, both East and West refitted their intelligence machinery for the contest to come. In October 1948, the USSR clamped down on the poor information assurance practice of multiple uses of one-time pads to encrypt sensitive information before transmission thanks to the betrayal of William Weisband, a Soviet MGB (forerunner of the KGB) agent in the Russian section of the US Army's Security Agency (succeeding the Army Signals Intelligence Service) at Arlington Hall. In the context of the national emergency in the Soviet Union during its so-called Great Patriotic War, this vulnerability created by the one-time pads was perhaps understandable, but afterwards the Soviets readopted more systematic information security procedures to safeguard their most sensitive global intelligence operations.
15 - Able Archer and the NATO War Scare
- Huw Dylan, King's College London, David Gioe, United States Military Academy at West Point
- Edited by Michael S. Goodman, King's College London
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Few events have earned the dubious honour of being described as ‘the closest the world came to nuclear war’. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 is one; the 1983 Able Archer war scare is another. The episode has produced a vast amount of literature, focusing on the US and Russian sides and, to a lesser extent, the British perspective. The episode has all the hallmarks of a great spy film: a paranoid, aging dictator in the Kremlin; a military exercise that almost ended in disaster; and a disillusioned spy providing intelligence that was pivotal in attempting to understand the complicated cycles of reaction and overreaction, perception and misperception.
On 2 November 1983 NATO forces began the latest in a series of scheduled military exercises. Able Archer-83 was a command post exercise designed to include senior officials from across the US government, the movement of 40,000 NATO troops, and hundreds of different missions. Importantly, it also included a component designed to simulate the release of ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons against a variety of Soviet and Warsaw Pact targets. From a Western perspective this was simply another in a regular series of war games and as far as the military was concerned, it ultimately passed off without incident and little more attention was paid to it.
That feeling did not last long, though, and there was some initial concern that the Russians had reacted in a peculiar and unconventional manner, particularly that the Soviet Air Force in East Germany had moved to a heightened state of alert. This fact had been noted but was not interpreted, initially at least, as being especially significant. What limited analysis there was at this stage suggested that the Soviet reaction could be attributed to the paranoia of the ailing Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, in the Kremlin. This view would soon change, though.
As Andropov lay dying in a hospital bed in the last weeks of 1983 and start of 1984, his KGB rezident in London was busy providing snippets of high-value intelligence to the British Secret Intelligence Service. Oleg Gordievsky had volunteered to work for SIS whilst stationed in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1974. He claimed to have become disenchanted with the Soviet system following the violent crushing of the 1968 uprising in Czechoslovakia.
9 - The CIA and Arms Control
- Huw Dylan, King's College London, David Gioe, United States Military Academy at West Point
- Edited by Michael S. Goodman, King's College London
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Securing insight into foreign scientific and technical developments has always been a significant priority for spies – just as important as protecting a home nation's own engineering developments. Intelligence, weapons proliferation and counter-proliferation have historically been closely related. Intelligence was, in several senses, crucial to the development of the Cold War superpower nuclear arms race. The relentless intelligence effort of the USSR's intelligence services yielded the secrets of the Manhattan Project, easing Stalin's development of his first atomic bomb. Thereafter, all sides expended tremendous effort to understand the adversary's nuclear infrastructure and gauge their capabilities and intentions. But as the twentieth century progressed and the superpowers shifted, incrementally and stutteringly, from arms races to a degree of arms control, the intelligence machinery found another role beyond espionage and counter-intelligence: namely, monitoring and verification.
For at least the first twenty years of the Cold War, the US enjoyed a marked strategic advantage over the USSR. Despite certain key instances where the Soviets had stolen a march in developing strategic systems, such as developing versions of intercontinental bombers in the 1950s, or testing their first ICBM before the US in August 1957, these gains were soon offset. The US, with its NATO allies, compensated for any lag in long-range strategic capability by deploying shorter-range assets in Europe, closer to the USSR; and they soon developed their own ICBMs and intercontinental bombers and proceeded to build more of them more quickly than the USSR. Despite fears of a strategic imbalance in favour of the Soviets in the 1950s, most notably manifested in the bomber and missile ‘gap’ controversies as discussed in Chapter 6, by the 1960s the US retained this lead. US intelligence could, essentially, prove this beyond reasonable doubt owing to the rapid development of overhead reconnaissance technology: first the U-2 high-altitude aircraft from 1956, and then the CORONA reconnaissance satellite programme after 1961. This intelligence was supplemented by human sources, the most significant being GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky (introduced in Chapter 7), who was recruited by SIS and run in partnership with the CIA. Penkovsky provided detailed information on the Soviet strategic rocket programme, before being identified and executed.
22 - The Terrorist Hunters Become Political Quarry: The CIA and Rendition, Detention and Interrogation
- Huw Dylan, King's College London, David Gioe, United States Military Academy at West Point
- Edited by Michael S. Goodman, King's College London
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- 18 March 2020, pp 451-468
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Summary
After the national trauma of the attacks of September 11th, 2001, there was alarm in the intelligence community that al-Qa’ida was not done terrorising Americans with high-profile mass-casualty attacks in the homeland. In response, CIA requested that the George W. Bush administration provide it with expanded funding and authorities, in a focused mission to prevent follow-on attacks. As former Director of the National Clandestine Service (D/NCS) Jose Rodriguez memorably phrased the request: ‘We needed to get everybody in government to put their big boy pants on and provide the authorities that we needed.’ With smoke still billowing from lower Manhattan, the Bush administration was eager to oblige. In time, however, as this chapter will explore, the authorities granted to CIA–or CIA's interpretation and exercise of those authorities–would stretch CIA's relations with its political masters to the breaking point.
After the post-Cold War malaise, CIA had a new mission–one it would follow relentlessly–and a mandate to find the masterminds of 9/11 ‘dead or alive’, as President Bush put it. CIA wasted no time in retooling for a new fight. Working with military, interagency and law enforcement partners, CIA foiled several post-9/11 attacks by collecting, analysing and disseminating threat intelligence. Beyond refocusing on interagency partnerships with other elements of the US government, CIA also worked jointly with international partners, some of whom it had theretofore been unwilling to have deeper liaison relations with given other concerns, such as their human rights records. These ‘nontraditional liaison partners’ provided capabilities, resources and access to people and places that CIA did not have before 9/11, but also came with moral hazard that would prove difficult to navigate in practical and political terms.
To say that 9/11 changed the agency would be an understatement. As voiced by Cofer Black, a well-regarded career agency officer who served as Chief of the DCI Counterterrorist Center (C/CTC) between 1999 and 2002, ‘there was before 9/11 and after 9/11’. Indeed, the agency was placed on a war footing, and that meant new partners, new technologies (such as drones armed with precision missiles) and new rules for how to deal with what then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called ‘the worst of the worst’ terrorists.
10 - The CIA’s Counter-Intelligence Conundrum: The Case of Yuri Nosenko
- Huw Dylan, King's College London, David Gioe, United States Military Academy at West Point
- Edited by Michael S. Goodman, King's College London
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- 18 March 2020, pp 171-189
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Whilst all intelligence work is, by its very nature, somewhat uncertain, the world of counter-intelligence is even more fraught with complications. In the words of one US journalist, it is the ‘wilderness of mirrors’, where facts can be interpreted in various, often contrasting ways, depending on the starting assumption. Frequently conflated with counter-espionage in the academic literature, the art of counter-intelligence is to protect the integrity of your intelligence from counter-measures by the adversary: domestically, therefore, it focuses on those inside your own service who are surreptitiously working for the other side. Sometimes this can refer to your own nationals; sometimes it refers to foreigners who offer their services but whose loyalty might be questionable. The 1947 National Security Act provided a starting point in the US for such endeavours:
The term ‘counterintelligence’ means information gathered, and activities conducted to protect against espionage, other intelligence activities, sabotage, or assassinations conducted by or on behalf of foreign governments or elements thereof, foreign organizations, or foreign persons or international terrorist activities.
– National Security Act of 1947, as amended (50 USC 401a)Counter-espionage has been described by one former CIA officer in a practical way: ‘Successful counterespionage brings with it new or enhanced knowledge of the adversary. When a spy is found, a service may observe his activities and learn how the other side runs him, or may double him and begin gathering information that way. When a spy is arrested and confesses (as most do), his interrogations will yield a wealth of information about the other side, as well as lessons for his own.’ Verifying authenticity is often based on a very simple principle: what is already known about the subject and can therefore be checked. Following this, a variety of other factors come into play, often based on psychology. The CIA has historically also relied upon the polygraph test as a means of assessing the veracity of subjects, though it is not foolproof. Counter-intelligence and counter-espionage work, history shows, can breed paranoia. Within the annals of counter-intelligence there is no figure more notorious than the long-serving head of CIA's counter-intelligence staff, James Jesus Angleton.
21 - The ‘Slam Dunk’: The CIA and the Invasion of Iraq
- Huw Dylan, King's College London, David Gioe, United States Military Academy at West Point
- Edited by Michael S. Goodman, King's College London
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There are few worse sins for an intelligence agency than getting dragged into a political battle where it is seen to lose objectivity, integrity and, consequently, reputation. On the heels of what was seen as the CIA’s largest intelligence failure since its inception, the agency's reputation and capability were soon to be again in question. On 20 March 2003 the combined forces of the US, UK, Australia and Poland invaded Iraq. The US military contingent was the largest, comprising roughly 150,000 troops. For President George W. Bush, ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ was designed to ‘disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people’. Although the war was initially supported by many Americans, it was also fiercely opposed – particularly internationally. Many felt that a diplomatic solution was a more viable option, and this view was endorsed by the governments of Germany, France and New Zealand.
The primary factor for debate concerning the cause for war centred around Iraq's supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Did it possess any? If so, what threat did they pose, and would Saddam use them? Prior to the invasion, significant efforts took place in public and behind the scenes to convince the world that Iraq had such weapons. Multinational diplomatic efforts took place through the prism of the UN and the on-site inspections undertaken by the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), led by Hans Blix.
A fortnight before the invasion took place, Blix informed the UN that no such weapons had been found so far. Proponents of an invasion argued that it would only be possible to find the weapons once Saddam's government had been toppled and proper searches conducted, without Iraqi obfuscation. Meanwhile, high-profile presentations were designed and delivered with the objective of convincing those who were unsure or wavering that Iraq did indeed possess prohibited weapons. These included what would become the most infamous public defence of the case for war: Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the UN in February 2003, when he held aloft illustrations of mobile biological warfare laboratories.
17 - The CIA and the (First) Persian Gulf War
- Huw Dylan, King's College London, David Gioe, United States Military Academy at West Point
- Edited by Michael S. Goodman, King's College London
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Iraq has proven to be a crucible in which US intelligence, and the CIA in particular, was tested over and again. The operations of the CIA and its sister services in and concerning Iraq have demonstrated their impressive capabilities, but also the limits of their reach. The high points include the detail with which the US intelligence community (USIC) profiled the Iraqi army before and during Operation Desert Storm, in 1991. The USIC's satellites and technical sensors, combined with the all-source intelligence fusion of CIA and other agency analysts, provided allied forces with a hitherto unprecedented level of insight into the locations, disposition and strength of the opposing forces, the difficulty encountered in disseminating this information down to tactical commanders notwithstanding. The low points included the long-term weakness in gathering intelligence on, and correctly assessing the nature of, erstwhile Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programmes. This was clearly underlined both in the assessments of Saddam's nuclear capabilities in the late 1980s and before the Persian Gulf War, which underestimated the progress and strength of his programme, and a decade later in the intelligence estimates preceding the 2003 Iraq War, which overestimated his capabilities. The second Gulf War (2003) and the subsequent investigations into the intelligence failures that surrounded it have resonated as one of the most significant and painful episodes in the CIA's history.
Both successes and failures relate to the struggle US intelligence grappled with over the years of the Cold War, namely the challenge of spying on closed, secure and secretive authoritarian and police states, and the solutions it found to the problem. These solutions were often based on technical means of peeking in from the outside. A variety of sensors – including aircraft, satellites, radar stations and even submarines – intercepted and collected all manner of communications, telemetry, signature and imagery intelligence from behind the Iron Curtain. This was melded with the more limited volume of human intelligence and open-source reporting that was available to allow the US to gauge the strength, readiness and leadership of the Soviet military. The results were not always perfect. But technical sources offered the West a competent understanding of Soviet military capabilities from fairly early in the Cold War.
8 - The CIA in Vietnam
- Huw Dylan, King's College London, David Gioe, United States Military Academy at West Point
- Edited by Michael S. Goodman, King's College London
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Summary
The long war in Vietnam left an indelible mark on the fabric of innumerable elements of American life. It shaped elements of America's military and political debates for decades following the end of the war. Its divisiveness and polarising impact generated a profound cultural shift in some quarters, which subsequently bled over into literature, film and, more generally, the contested nature of the national memory. The nature of the fighting, and the general character of the war, was a harbinger for the types of challenges that would come to dominate America's wars in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: asymmetric, both conventional and ‘among the people’, and to a greater or lesser extent, reliant upon good intelligence for their effective prosecution. Just as with more contemporary wars, the intelligence war in Vietnam has generated several narrative strands that dominate the popular imagination: paramilitarism and violence, controversy and politicisation, and accusations of profound failure. Some of these narratives withstand historical scrutiny, others do not. But the scope of the intelligence war in Vietnam is both broader and deeper than credited in the popular imagination.
The historiography of US intelligence, and the CIA in particular, in Vietnam and South East Asia more broadly is well developed, and has continued to grow over recent years. Elements of it have been immortalised in fiction, most notably from the early days of US involvement in Indochina in Graham Greene's The Quiet American, published in 1955. And the intelligence element has, of course, been a staple feature of general histories of the war for decades owing, in no small part, to the very public controversies that surrounded it. More recent histories have benefited from greater perspective – for example, from the memoirs of key CIA individuals – and from access to declassified materials that have been published by the US government. These include John Prados’ study of the war, published in 2009, which offers an illuminating perspective on the CIA's evolving role in the conflict. These general histories of the war have also been supplemented with volumes focused on the CIA and its work more specifically; some, such as Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, offer a very critical perspective.
4 - The CIA and the USSR: The Challenge of Understanding the Soviet Threat
- Huw Dylan, King's College London, David Gioe, United States Military Academy at West Point
- Edited by Michael S. Goodman, King's College London
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- Book:
- The CIA and the Pursuit of Security
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 24 September 2020
- Print publication:
- 18 March 2020, pp 64-76
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Summary
The CIA was created as relations between the Soviet Union and its erstwhile allied partners deteriorated markedly, from wartime cooperation to mutual, simmering hostility that occasionally threatened to boil over. This hostility determined the CIA's priorities for over four decades, which could be summarised quite simply as ‘watching the bear’. The agency's main target was the USSR. The agency's objectives were to observe, assess and determine Soviet capabilities and intentions. Its role was to provide the US policy and military community with information and analysis that would allow them to form effective policies and to avoid surprise. This was a big task. Several studies have delved into the scale of the challenges the CIA faced, and how it set out to resolve them. Many of these studies have been produced by the CIA or former officers to illustrate, and occasionally defend, their record. The complexity and scale of the undertaking has often been understated by those who comment on the agency's record; this is a mistake. The CIA, and Western intelligence in general, faced an extremely difficult task in the early years of the Cold War, particularly in attempting to gain insights into the Soviet leadership, its deliberations, and what they intended to do. Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union was, in several if not most respects, a secret state.
In the absence of concrete intelligence from the Soviet Union, intelligence analysts needed to form judgements based on the best, although almost inevitably incomplete, information that they possessed at the time, as well as their expertise and key assumptions about Soviet policy. Observers often suspected that the conclusions of some assessments were more than a little reliant on a degree of Kremlinology (see the chapter in this volume on the end of the Cold War). But to assume so in general would be a disservice to the complicated work that underpinned the CIA's analyses. The analysts’ task became a highly specialised one, requiring a large number of deep, specialist subject matter experts on all manner of Soviet weapons systems and doctrines, politics, industry, education and economics. The CIA probably amassed the greatest concentration of Soviet experts in the world. Generally, they were more successful at gauging Soviet capabilities than Soviet intentions; but the record shows that they could be extremely perceptive, and could offer policymakers in Washington insights into developments in Moscow.
24 - Entering the Electoral Fray: The CIA and Russian Meddling in the 2016 Election
- Huw Dylan, King's College London, David Gioe, United States Military Academy at West Point
- Edited by Michael S. Goodman, King's College London
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- Book:
- The CIA and the Pursuit of Security
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 24 September 2020
- Print publication:
- 18 March 2020, pp 481-492
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Summary
As the leaves began to turn in the cool October air, the Kremlin's electoral rhetoric was heating up in the final weeks leading to the hotly contested American presidential election. With an economic recession eight years in the rear-view mirror, America's economy was again booming, even if its ill-conceived overseas military efforts were going badly in the face of a determined insurgent force hiding among a sympathetic populace. As the generals were complaining about dwindling force levels, politicians were again debating the proper scope of national health insurance legislation. But there was trouble afoot.
From his office overlooking the brilliant autumnal foliage, a worried senior CIA official decided to inform the Director, a registered Republican, ‘In the last few months … new elements in [Moscow’s] attitude have become evident.’ Specifically, since the nomination convention, Moscow’s leaders ‘have taken up a harsher propaganda line’. Speaking for the Board of National Estimates, its Chairman observed that this ‘propaganda line reflects some genuine concern’ along the Moskva river. Indeed, something was different this campaign season. ‘This year’, wrote the Chairman, the veteran intelligence officer Sherman Kent, Moscow had ‘made it plain that there are sharp distinctions between the contending parties and policies’ and that the Kremlin has made ‘their preference’ known. It was 1964.
If Director of Central Intelligence John McCone was alarmed upon receipt of the Board's assessment of Soviet propaganda, he need not have been. Its impact was probably marginal. Lyndon Johnson certainly did not need Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's assistance to secure his crushing victory over Barry Goldwater. This was not the last time, however, that the Director of Central Intelligence would receive an October memo warning about Soviet meddling in a presidential election. Nearly twenty years later, the Politburo would again discern marked policy differences between the White House incumbent and his challenger.
A politically attuned lawyer, Bill Casey served as Ronald Reagan's campaign manager before being named Director of Central Intelligence. Less than two years into the job, he received a memo proposing a ‘study to determine the evidence, if any, of Soviet efforts to influence previous US elections … and to judge the prospects for such activity in 1984’.