Transcripts

"Can the CIA Be Fixed?"

GUESTS:

Richard Pipes William Odom Neil Lewis Jeffrey Richelson

Airdate: November 10, 1995

ANNOUNCER: "Think Tank" has been made possible by Amgen, a recipient of the Presidential National Medal of Technology. Amgen, bringing better, healthier lives to people worldwide through biotechnology.

Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Randolph Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

MR. WATTENBERG: Hello, I'm Ben Wattenberg. The Central Intelligence Agency is under heavy fire. A traitor at CIA headquarters betrayed spies in the field, sold secrets to the Soviets, and now it is charged that the agency knowingly gave tainted information to the president. Can the CIA be fixed or has it outlived its usefulness?

Joining us to evaluate the intelligence community are: Richard Pipes, Baird professor of history at Harvard and former director for East European and Soviet affairs on the National Security Council during the Reagan administration; General William Odom, director of the National Security Agency from 1985 to 1988, now at the Hudson Institute; Neil Lewis, correspondent for "The New York Times" and coauthor of the recent book, "Betrayal: The Story of Adrich Ames, an American Spy"; and Jeffrey Richelson, author of the recent book, "A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century."

The topic before this house: Can the CIA be fixed? This week on "Think Tank."

Moles, murdered agents, comprised sources, Cold War cloak-and-dagger games all played parts in the recent scandals that are rocking the Central Intelligence Agency. Despite unheralded successes, CIA flops have always grabbed headlines, from the disastrous attempt to overthrow Cuba's Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 to its perceived failure to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In 1994, Adrich Ames, the man in charge of Soviet counterintelligence for the CIA was arrested as a Soviet spy. He passed on many sensitive documents to the Soviets and gave them the names of at least 10 CIA agents working for the United States, who were subsequently killed.

More recently, the CIA stands accused of passing on tainted reports from known double agents to Presidents Bush and Clinton.

The current director of Central Intelligence, John Deutch, has promised Congress that he will clean house.

JOHN DEUTSCH (Director, CIA): (From videotape.) But I will say this, that we will do the rebuilding necessary, changing the practices, the attitudes, the performance of the directorate of operations so that we once again have the most effective clandestine intelligence service in the world. And I am dedicated to making sure those changes take place.

MR. WATTENBERG: The latest scandals are causing some in Congress to ask whether spending $3.1 billion annually on the CIA is worth it.

Gentlemen, thank you for joining me. Let's go around the room, starting with you, General Odom, and then up to Boston for Dick Pipes. What is wrong with the CIA?

MR. ODOM: Well, there is a bigger problem than the CIA -- the intelligence community. It's performed well over a long period of time, but increasingly, like IBM when it ran into business competition, or General Motors or Chrysler or Lockheed, when they got into real trouble, they needed restructuring. The intelligence community needs fundamental restructuring.

What you're seeing at CIA is essentially symptomatic of these larger issues. Some fairly major structural changes are long overdue.

MR. WATTENBERG: All right, we will come back to that. Jeffrey Richelson, what's wrong with the CIA?

MR. RICHELSON: Not as much as people would think. I think there's been a myth that they failed to predict the Soviet collapse, which isn't true. And the real problem that's emerged with the CIA is really in the directorate of operations as opposed to the agency as a whole.

And other than that, I would mention that I would disagree with General Odom. I think that revolutionary change in the structure of the intelligence community would be a very bad idea.

MR. WATTENBERG: All right, well, that's -- that bodes well. Neil Lewis.

MR. LEWIS: I think the CIA's greatest problem now is that it's lost the trust of policymakers. Current policymakers and any policymakers in the future would be reluctant to rely on the agency. But also, this happens at a time when the kind of people who would be traditional allies of the CIA, the most fervent allies, Republicans in Congress, are much focused on budget cutting. And the CIA in this state is very vulnerable.

MR. WATTENBERG: Dick Pipes in Boston.

MR. PIPES: Well, I would say, in the first place, the CIA is too large. The most successful intelligence agencies in the past abroad and even in this country have been composed of a small number of very bright people. The CIA is tremendously bureaucratized, and its recommendations generally get terribly diluted. It's very difficult in the agency to come up with strong recommendations because they go through a process which dilutes them and eventually ends up hedging.

The CIA knew what was wrong with the Soviet Union, and it is not true that it did not expect it to collapse, but not exactly when it happened. But the recommendations on the subject were so diluted that in the end, they got a black eye.

MR. WATTENBERG: General Odom, you mentioned in your original statement that of course the CIA is not the whole intelligence community. Could you sketch in for us how the American intelligence system operates, how it's structured, but briefly, if you could?

MR. ODOM: Basically, there are three military -- four military service intelligences -- in other words, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. And that plays probably the biggest role in most of the --

MR. WATTENBERG: They each have their own intelligence.

MR. ODOM: Each have their own intelligence, but it's not essentially duplicative except in some ways. Then there is the National Security Agency, which has all of the signals communications intelligence. There is --

MR. WATTENBERG: That's what you headed.

MR. ODOM: That's what I headed.

MR. WATTENBERG: As a lieutenant general.

MR. ODOM: That's the largest agency, two or three times as the others. Then there is the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is largely an analytic element, although it runs some activities, such as the attache program abroad. And there's the I&R, Intelligence and Research at the State Department.

MR. WATTENBERG: State, right.

MR. ODOM: And there are many other analytic elements in some of the other departments. Then there is CIA. And CIA is essentially three things: an S&T directorate --

MR. WATTENBERG: What does that mean?

MR. ODOM: A science and technology directorate, an intelligent, analytic directorate, and a clandestine service.

MR. WATTENBERG: And the directorate of operations is this clandestine service?

MR. ODOM: That's the clandestine service.

MR. WATTENBERG: That Jeffrey was talking about.

MR. ODOM: And what you're reading about in the newspaper and what the books have been about are largely about the clandestine service. So we're talking about a very, very small part.

MR. WATTENBERG: Can someone explain to us what this recent case was where the front page of "The Washington Post" had a big story about how beyond Adrich Ames, there were many people at the CIA who were, according to Walter Pincus's story, doing terrible and evil things by sending along tainted information to the president and to the secretary of Defense. And down in paragraph 37, buried in that story, was a little sentence, is that they thought the intelligence was good nonetheless, because I guess turned agents sometimes will continue to provide good material.

MR. LEWIS: Some of it was still good. You force me on the defensive. "The New York Times" also had a similar story about these revelations. But the Adrich Ames story as we knew it before was about Ames selling out many of the double agents whom the United States had recruited.

And this was a horrific thing, but he rationalized what he did by saying -- to the great dismay of the intelligence community, he made some sense in part, because he's a repulsive, repugnant man in his behavior -- he said, Well, I did this in part because what's become is this heavy, bureaucratized rivalry, spy versus spy, the KGB and the CIA, they exist and sustain each other, that we want to know who their spies are, they want to know who our spies are, but very little of it, very little of what goes on in this -- he asserted -- very little of this affects policy and affects what the policymakers do.

The latest revelations give us kind of a quantum leap into a new dimension, that maybe some of the effects of what happened with Adrich Ames and the CIA did indeed affect policy. But I must say, even if that's so, we don't know how much. Supposedly it's in the nature of that false information was passed along, along with good information, because after all, if you have a dangle -- a false spy that the Soviets are trying to pass along false information, they will salt it with real information, and perhaps the counterintelligence people in Langley think they can distinguish what's real and what's not.

But in essence, it was that information about weapons systems helped distort priorities for policymakers when they decided how to spend our money.

MR. WATTENBERG: Dick Pipes.

MR. PIPES: Well, I can't comment on these latest revelations, but I do want to stress something that Bill Odom alluded to, that the spying and counterspying is really a very minor aspect of the work of the intelligence community. Ultimately, overwhelmingly what the community does is analyze the data, the bulk of which is obtained from open sources. In many respects, what they do is what we do at universities.

MR. WATTENBERG: Uh-oh.

MR. PIPES: Well, I don't mean that we deal with clandestine information.

MR. WATTENBERG: No, I understand.

MR. PIPES: But when I dealt with -- you know, when occasionally I consulted the CIA, they would show me their reports on the political developments in Russia and so on. This was not very different from what we were doing here in the Russian Research Center. That is really the bulk of the work.

And for that what you need -- I'm setting aside now the issue of loyalty of people like Ames, and so on -- you need first-rate analysts. I don't think the CIA attracts first-rate analysts, and when it does, as I have said before, they tend to get lost in this mass of personnel, that makes it impossible to come up with strong statements and judgments.

MR. WATTENBERG: Does everyone agree that the people involved in this so-called tainting scandal, unlike Adrich Ames, who was clearly a traitor and, as you have pointed out, a repugnant individual, that these people were doing what they thought was best for the country and the agency? This was an error of judgment, these were not people doing evil things.

MR. LEWIS: Oh, most definitely.

MR. WATTENBERG: Is that established by everyone?

MR. ODOM: Oh, I don't accept that.

MR. WATTENBERG: You do not?

MR. LEWIS: An error of judgment or -- I was going to say it's an error of culture, though. Do you mean you think it was --

MR. ODOM: Well, I don't know what they thought about themselves, but I think if I found people like that, I would fire them before the sun set. I mean, if we had that kind of behavior --

MR. LEWIS: For their judgment?

MR. ODOM: Absolutely, or integrity, either one, whichever one you want to call it. Imagine --

MR. WATTENBERG: But they were not like Ames.

MR. ODOM: No, they're not.

MR. WATTENBERG: They're not traitors, they were not getting money, nothing like that.

MR. ODOM: That's not it, but the issue is, intelligence is warfare, and if you're going to lie up the chain of command or you're going to deceive up the chain of command, you're objectively in opposition to what we're trying to do. And the standards in that community ought to be those standards. They are in the military. If a ship captain runs his ship aground, he can't say, "Well, some sailor down there didn't pull the right switch, and therefore, you know, I really shouldn't be blamed for this."

Or military commanders in Korea were relieved preemptively. If General Schwarzkopf had complained about something and he had been relieved in the desert instead of having a great victory, you wouldn't have had these kinds of arguments for how they were, you know, mistreated or misguided and therefore shouldn't be held accountable.

MR. LEWIS: So, General, one of the underlying debates here is the former directors of central intelligence, how accountable are they? Is that what you're saying?

MR. ODOM: They and people under them. I don't have any problem with holding them accountable for that. But I want to make a point.

MR. WATTENBERG: What does that mean, holding them accountable? I mean, did your agency when you headed it as a three-star general, the National Security Agency, did it not make mistakes?

MR. ODOM: Sure, and I was prepared to accept the responsibility for them. And I -- to me, that's part of a military culture. And the intelligence --

MR. PIPES: The problem here is, of course, of deliberate lying, that is, passing on information which you know is tainted. I find this mind-boggling, if it's true.

MR. WATTENBERG: Let's go away from this specific case to a broader case about the CIA and I guess about the intelligence community generally, that they failed -- allegedly, that they failed to predict the fall of the Soviet Union.

MR. ODOM: That's a red herring.

MR. WATTENBERG: Sir? Why?

MR. ODOM: The Soviet Union would still be alive and well if Gorbachev and a few of his friends didn't decide to tear it up. There's no way you can predict a person's free choice. If you could, it wouldn't be free choice, free will. So that --

MR. PIPES: That's right. Gorbachev himself did not predict the fall of the Soviet Union.

MR. ODOM: You can go back and look, as Dick said earlier, in some of the things that are written. You can find pretty good arguments that it would go a particular way. But I was a participant in a lot of those discussions, and I'll tell you right now, no matter what's written, if you went to a National Foreign Intelligence Board meeting and said, "What do you mean when you say Gorbachev is going to succeed," you would be told, "Well, he's going to succeed." Succeed at making it a liberal empire? You just got nonsense kinds of answers.

So there was a lot of confusion of the very kind that Dick was talking about that meant that some of these very poignant and clear insights on the part of individual analysts didn't make it through and did not become the consensus and conventional wisdom to policymakers.

MR. WATTENBERG: Dick Pipes, you were trying to get in. I'm sorry.

MR. PIPES: Well, I was saying that in 1980s, late 1980s, if you asked Gorbachev, is the Soviet Union going to survive or not, he would have told you, "Yes, we will survive." Therefore, as Bill said, it's simply impossible to predict the actions of individuals.

However, I remember when I was in Washington in the National Security Agency in '81, '82, we used to get a steady diet of analyses from the CIA, and they very heavily stressed the economic and the political crisis affecting the Soviet Union, and that was one of the reasons why President Reagan took such a tough stance.

MR. WATTENBERG: Jeffrey Richelson, you have written that also, basically in agreement with General Odom and Professor Pipes.

MR. RICHELSON: Yes. I think the CIA did -- even better than the intelligence community as a whole, did a very good job in warning policymakers of the situation that was developing in the Soviet Union, that Gorbachev was having an increasingly difficult time, that a hard-line coup was a possibility, and they really laid it all out for any policymaker or aide to a policymaker to understand what might happen. And as General Odom said and Professor Pipes said, the idea that they should have five years in advance said that the Soviet Union is going to collapse at the end of 1991 because of a coup attempt in August of 1991 is a completely unreasonable standard.

MR. WATTENBERG: I want to test Neil Lewis's courage. Now you have these three distinguished colleagues of yours all saying the CIA really did a pretty good job about the Soviet Union.

MR. LEWIS: Sure, and they make it sound like it was not really that much news to all of us. Let us remember that the person who has put this on center stage is Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who has used the alleged failure of the intelligence community to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union as the first count in the indictment for his case that the CIA could probably be eliminated or reduced sharply.

I wanted to say two things to that. First of all, that's only count A. There are other apparent failures of the CIA over recent years and --

MR. WATTENBERG: Well, but this would be a Himalayan fact if the charge --

MR. LEWIS: It certainly would, it certainly would.

MR. WATTENBERG: -- if in fact it was so.

MR. LEWIS: I was going to tell you about a couple of other foothills, but --

MR. WATTENBERG: Sure, sure. Go ahead, go ahead. Give us a couple.

MR. LEWIS: You know, the Bush administration complained about the intelligence in the days before the Panama invasion. I believe it's known that the CIA predicted the Sandinistas would win the 1990 election in Nicaragua by a certain percentage. In fact, the other side won by the exact same percentage. It's part an accretion.

MR. WATTENBERG: Listen, let me move on and go first to Dick Pipes in Boston because I don't want to lose him on the satellite, and move on to the question of the future of the CIA.

MR. PIPES: I have absolutely no hesitation to say we do need some kind of central intelligence agency. Whether it's the CIA or some other body, I'm not prepared to say. But you need an organization in Washington that collates the information that comes in from all the different intelligence groups to which Bill Odom referred.

It has now been established that in 1941, we had enough information to predict the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but it was scattered through the various intelligence groups in Washington and there was no one collating this information. And it is precisely to avoid another Pearl Harbor that the CIA was established.

So we do need some kind of central organ. Whether it is the CIA or not the CIA is not really important, but that you cannot do what some people suggest, that is to scatter once again the intelligence community to various departments as had been the case before 1941.

MR. WATTENBERG: But you would make it leaner and meaner, wouldn't you?

MR. PIPES: Definitely much leaner and meaner, yes. It's much too vast. It has to be cut down severely.

MR. WATTENBERG: Neil Lewis, you seem -- well, you and General Odom seem to be the anti-CIA people here.

MR. LEWIS: Well, to some degree, and I wanted to reflect on a comment that Professor Pipes and General Odom said. Both emphasized how the clandestine services of the CIA are a small part of the larger intelligence community.

Well, if the CIA has its future pondered in various quarters, the directorate of operations is in fact, some of its members will tell you, the heart of the agency, or certainly the part that distinguishes the agency. We heard General Odom list a vast array of intelligence-gathering agencies in the government. What was unique about the CIA was that it ran clandestine operations, covert operations.

MR. WATTENBERG: In other words, that they had spies.

MR. LEWIS: They had spies and they did things. They bribed governments, they recruited agents. They did these things. None of these other ones do that.

MR. WATTENBERG: Well, except that our adversaries did it.

MR. LEWIS: I'm talking about of our own.

MR. WATTENBERG: No, no, I understand. I'm just -- right, okay.

MR. LEWIS: So therefore, the threat to the CIA now, as I mentioned before, is I don't think this president, I don't think his successor, whether it be in two years or six years, is going to be very eager to engage the CIA in covert operations. So I think the special character of the CIA is in danger of becoming extinct, and as Professor Pipes said, it requires -- and as General Odom and I think Jeffrey as well -- some genuine restructuring of what you're going to do about it, because I think the part that's really threatened is the directorate of operations. You may say it's small, but it is the character that distinguishes the CIA from everything else.

MR. WATTENBERG: So what you're saying is, because there are no bad-guy Soviets around, we no longer need spies? Is that --

MR. LEWIS: No.

MR. WATTENBERG: Is that your argument?

MR. LEWIS: No, we might well, but I don't think any policymaker, anyone in an administration is going to really turn to the CIA in the immediate future. I think they have no stature anymore to do these kind of covert operations.

MR. WATTENBERG: General Odom, I mean -- go ahead.

MR. ODOM: Well, I agree with what you just said in many regards. Let's take Dick Pipes' concern about central control so that it's not dispersed. Absolutely, Dick, and I think if you kept -- we have to keep a director of central intelligence. I think we need a national intelligence council, and we may need a very small subsidiary analytic effort to support it. But you don't need the big DDI that tries to do intelligence for everybody who -- MR. WATTENBERG: Now wait. Hold it. DDI?

MR. ODOM: The big analytic effort.

MR. WATTENBERG: What does DDI stand for?

MR. ODOM: The deputy director for intelligence. In other words, the analysis.

MR. WATTENBERG: Right.

MR. ODOM: Now, to the heart of the agency, the DDO, the clandestine service.

MR. WATTENBERG: DDO is the?

MR. ODOM: Deputy director for operations, the clandestine --

MR. WATTENBERG: He's in charge of spies, he's in charge of spying.

MR. ODOM: In charge of spies.

MR. LEWIS: The spy master.

MR. WATTENBERG: The spy master, right.

MR. ODOM: The clandestine service is, I think, as he said, on the way to extinction. Let me ask you a question. If you were a potential agent who wanted to work for American intelligence abroad, given the public image of the CIA, would you dare you risk your life by being recruited by it?

You have a dynamic at work here. There is no way for this -- we definitely need a strong clandestine service. But this clandestine service --

MR. WATTENBERG: You are saying that this culture cannot support it.

MR. ODOM: This clandestine service, this particular clandestine service has outlived its usefulness. If you want a clandestine service, you have to start over. There is no other --

MR. WATTENBERG: I mean and just put a -- I mean, the government should continue to sponsor spying, but put a different label on it.

MR. LEWIS: Well, put it elsewhere. You mean --

MR. WATTENBERG: Put it in another building.

MR. LEWIS: -- put it in the Defense Department?

MR. WATTENBERG: Put it in another building, in another box on the chart.

MR. ODOM: There are many alternative ways to go about it, but you cannot repair the present activity. It's just outlived its usefulness.

MR. WATTENBERG: All right, Jeffrey Richelson, what do you think?

MR. RICHELSON: Well, I'd be skeptical that you can't repair the present activity. I mean, I'd really like to know exactly how many people are involved in activities that General Odom would, you know, fire them for before I said you should scrap all 5,000 or so people involved in the operation.

You also have a network and an apparatus that has been set up over the years, and I don't know that you can simply scrap it and start all over.

MR. WATTENBERG: Dick Pipes, do we still need spies?

MR. PIPES: Oh, well, I don't like to use the word spies. Human intelligence.

MR. WATTENBERG: Human intelligence.

MR. PIPES: Human intelligence is critical. It's absolutely critical because it is only through human intelligence that you can find out what people's intentions are, what people's mood is, what people's attitudes are. There is no way satellites will tell you that.

MR. WATTENBERG: Give me an example of where you would want a spy today and for what purpose?

MR. PIPES: Again, I don't say spy.

MR. WATTENBERG: I mean human intelligence. Sorry.

MR. PIPES: Well, take China, for example. I think in order to find out where China is moving, where the next leadership is likely to come from, the only way you can get it is from people on the spot who have the knowledge and who are willing to pass it on to us. And it's necessarily spying. It's -- spying is too narrow a word because a spy is somebody who works in disguise. They are people who provide you with information who are bona fide people on the other side.

And a lot of information I got about Russia when I was traveling in the Soviet Union in the '50s, '60s and '70s came from people who were not in any way agents. They were just well-informed people who passed around information.

MR. ODOM: See, I think Dick is making an extremely -- Professor Pipes is making an extremely valuable point. Human intelligence, a lot of it not formal from the intelligence community, does inform the decision process. What's interesting, if you've sat there and watched this process internally, is how little impact what CIA analysts have to say, what little impact there is on the decision process, because there is a vast amount of information, first-rate analysis available in the open press, in selected university publications, articles, et cetera, and people that you talk to that travel. Therefore this is vital information, but the amount that's actually produced by the clandestine service for that is trivial.

MR. WATTENBERG: All right, listen. We have to get out, and I want to give Richard Pipes in Boston the last short word. Sir. MR. PIPES: Well, in sum, I would say that the CIA is not as bad as people think and not as good as it could be, so there is room for improvement. But in some form, a central intelligence-gathering organization should be maintained.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Thank you, Richard Pipes via satellite in Boston, and thank you, William Odom, Neil Lewis and Jeffrey Richelson.

And thank you. Please send your comments and questions to: New River Media, 1150 17th Street, NW, Suite 1050, Washington, DC, 20036. Or we can be reached via e-mail at thinktv@aol.com, or on the World Wide Web at www.thinktank.com.

For "Think Tank," I'm Ben Wattenberg.

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"Think Tank" has been made possible by Amgen, a recipient of the presidential National Medal of Technology. Amgen, unlocking the secrets of life through cellular and molecular biology.

Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Randolph Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. END