A Lot of Cloak, Not Much Dagger and a Bit of Genius

Deservedly or not, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has enjoyed a formidable reputation for omniscience, omnipotence and dark doings ever since it was founded in 1947. In most of the world, this view of American intelligence probably still obtains, notwithstanding the findings of recent investigations. How can the United States, with visible power that is so overwhelming, not also be possessed of invisible powers and secret intentions that boggle the imagination?

There is a certain justification for regarding the CIA as some sort of parallel universe. It is, after all, secret. Its resources truly are enormous (although no one but the president and a handful of lofty government officials know just how enormous).

It lives by different laws of moral physics than the rest of the American system. The purpose of an intelligence service is to commit on foreign soil acts that would be illegal in the homeland. As one of the men who trained me when I was a CIA rookie half a century ago cheerily observed: “Espionage is a criminal enterprise. Every time you recruit an agent, you suborn him to treason, which is a capital crime in every country in the world.”

Americans have always had difficulty coming to grips with that reality, but they have understood this: The CIA came into being, as its most revered director, the late Richard Helms, liked to put it, “so that there would never be another Pearl Harbor.”

During the bitterest periods of the Cold War, public opinion supported that rationale and accepted that a certain amount of distasteful practice, occurring offstage, was a reasonable price to pay for preventing the end of Western civilization.

Actually, in my time as a CIA covert operative in Europe, Africa and Asia in the 1950s and 1960s, I observed very little skulduggery. We and our prime adversaries eschewed violence against each other as a sort of charm against revenge. The one fellow officer who habitually did carry a gun was regarded as something of a cartoon figure by the rest of us.

Much of what we did could just as effectively have been done openly and owed more to gamesmanship than to concealed weapons. We were infinitely more likely to fund a democratic trade union or a political party than blow up the offices of a communist front.

My colleagues were highly intelligent, squeaky-clean workaholics who were, as one of them once said to me, “nice boys who went to Yale and wouldn’t hurt a fly.” This will come as a shock to those who imagined the old CIA as a fascist conspiracy, but the agency I knew was made up of wall-to-wall knee-jerk liberals who were deeply shocked when the New Left attacked them in the ‘60s.

Most of the American spies I knew are long since dead. Whoever the new people are in Langley, and whatever their hidden accomplishments and publicized mistakes may be, I’m pretty sure that they are at least as baffled by the anathema that is now being hurled upon them as were my late friends.

However, there has been a new Pearl Harbor on their watch, and the reports of the 9/11 commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee agree that it resulted, inter alia, from an intelligence failure.

As we reform and reshuffle and rethink, we should reflect that this is not the first time this has happened. We did not know that the Sioux and the Cheyenne were going to massacre the 7th Cavalry or that a German submarine was going to sink the Lusitania or that the Chinese would intervene in Korea (or would not intervene in Vietnam).

In one of my novels, a fictitious spy defines genius as the ability to see the obvious. As we all know now, five or six small facts that might have forewarned the country of the 9/11 attacks were gathered but never put together until it was too late. A genius might nevertheless have saved the day; the apparatus did not.

The question is, will making the apparatus bigger and more bureaucratic make it better? Is it possible that the problem is that we gather too much information, so that sorting it out becomes a matter of chance rather than method? Is it possible, even, that our spies are doing better than we think or they think despite this disaster that shook the nation?

Soon after the Berlin Wall fell, I attended the funeral of a former colleague. Afterward, over drinks, the old boys present talked about coronary bypass surgery and hip transplants and other preoccupations of the elderly. Then one of them lifted his glass and said, “Here’s to us!”

“What for?” asked the others. “We won,” he replied.

“Won what?”

“The Cold War.”

Faces brightened as it dawned on those grayheads that, by golly, they had done just that. Fifty years ago, hardly anybody expected an American victory to be the outcome. It might be good to remember that as we reflect on the present and its own imponderable dangers.