Daring Amateurism: The CIA's Social History

In his 1928 Ashenden stories, W. Somerset Maugham, who had undertaken missions for British intelligence in the First World War, portrayed espionage even for our side as morally corrupting, usually incompetent, and more likely to harm our friends than our enemies. Graham Greene and John le Carré later made these their themes. We now know that this body of literature should not be classified as fiction.

Even by the standards of a le Carré thriller, America's Central Intelligence Agency suffers from a singularly bad press. On the front page of the October 15, 1995, New York Times, we read that in its initial essays in economic espionage, eavesdropping on Japanese officials, the agency flunked out. To the Commerce Department, the cia's efforts looked "amateurish." A top American official told the Times that "the important stuff is garbled. And most of what you get is garbage."

That is praise compared to what is being written about the agency's performance of its original and basic mission: the conduct of political and military intelligence. When it became known, a couple of years back, that Aldrich Ames, chief of counterintelligence for the Soviet--East Europe division of the cia, had been working since 1985 for the Soviet Union and then for Russia, Angelo M. Codevilla, a former senior staff member of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and certainly no dove, commented that "the United States would have been better off not having an intelligence service at all."

But the Ames affair was only 1994's bad news. The revelation for 1995, datelined October 31 and printed on the front page of the November 1 New York Times, is that the agency "knowingly gave the White House and the Pentagon inside information on the Soviet Union from foreign agents it knew or strongly suspected were controlled by Moscow." According to members of the relevant congressional committees, "The information was crucial to Washington's perceptions of Moscow in the last seven years of the Cold War. . . ." In effect, U.S. policy toward Russia was being shaped by the Kremlin.

Ten days later the Times disclosed something about employees of the cia who, knowing that America's information about Russia came from tainted sources, had taken it upon themselves to withhold this vital knowledge from three directors of central intelligence, the Pentagon, and three presidents of the United States. They were mid-level officials.

Why would they have felt entitled to decide what their leaders should and should not know? A plausible theory is that it was only one aspect of an arrogance that dates back to the years in which the agency was created, the special dispensation from the rules of law and morality that cia agents were granted, and the sort of men who stepped into that environment and set the tone for the agency.

fragmented beginnings

In 1990 and 1992, the cia published two volumes of a history of itself, which it had commissioned for its own internal use and had long held secret. The volumes covered the first few years of the cia's existence.-1 The first was written more than four decades ago, in 1952-53, by Arthur B. Darling of Yale, who went on to become the first official historian of the cia. The second volume, completed in 1971, was the work of Ludwell Lee Montague, trained as a historian, who spent his life as an intelligence community professional. These books take the reader into a world in which nations and peoples, national interests and political causes are relegated to the background, and conflicts concern not politics and morality but turf and personality, organizational charts and chains of command.

The Darling and Montague histories begin at the end of the Second World War. Intelligence authority was fragmented. At the top was an interdepartmental Joint Intelligence Committee, chaired rather than headed by its senior officer. Its six members represented departmental rather than national interests. But its staff, we are told, developed into a unified and coherent group; and it was the staff that proposed, at war's end, the appointment of an independent director of intelligence reporting directly to the president.

Competing plans were proposed by the Department of State, the Bureau of the Budget, the several armed services departments, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and by General William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan, the colorful commander of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS). All of them, and the ambitions that animated them, were opposed by J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, who wanted no competitors.

President Truman, even before deciding whether to have a centralized agency, created the position of director of central intelligence (DCI). His first appointee to the position, fellow Missourian Rear Admiral Sidney Souers, a reserve officer eager to return to civilian life, saw himself as a mere interim appointee: he served for six months. He was followed by the dashing, well-connected Air Force Lieutenant General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, who served for less than a year but set in motion the processes that led to legislation to create a central intelligence agency.

The legislation consisted of the National Security Act of 1947 and the Central Intelligence Act of 1949. The deliberately vague terms of Section 102(d)(5) of the 1947 act, which provided that the agency should "perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct," was intended, according to Clark Clifford, counsel to the president, to authorize covert actions. But the cia's general counsel advised otherwise. He did not believe that Congress intended to make so great a grant of authority.

Kennan's precaution