Rear Admiral Gene LaRocque (USN, Ret.)
Director, Center for Defense Information
INTERVIEWER & NARRATOR:
Sanford Gottlieb, Senior Producer
MARKETING & OPERATIONS:
Mark Sugg
PRODUCERS:
Matthew Hansen
Nick Moore
Daniel Sagalyn
Lori McRea
PRINCIPAL ANALYST & SCRIPTWRITER:
Matthew Hansen
PROGRAM PRODUCER:
Matthew Hansen
ORIGINATION:
Washington, D.C.
PROGRAM NO.:
541
INITIAL BROADCAST:
28 June 1992
CONDITION OF USE: Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR"
(Center for Defense Information).
(C) Copyright 1992, Center for Defense Information. All Rights Reserved.
Videotapes also available.
MEL GOODMAN
CIA Analyst on Soviet Military, 1967-1990
Rep. DAVE McCURDY, (D-OK)
Chairman, House Intelligence Committee
JOHN PRADOS
Author, National Security Researcher
Vice Adm. JACK SHANAHAN, (USN, Ret.)
Commander, Second Fleet, 1975-77
NARRATOR: To fight the cold war, the United States needed ammunition. Much of this ammo took the form of bullets, tanks shells, and aircraft carriers. It even took the form of thousands of nuclear weapons, always at the ready to begin a worldwide Armageddon. The cold war military was supported by a vast intelligence bureaucracy.
But things are different now. Without any real enemies, what are we spying for?
Vice Admiral JACK SHANAHAN (USN, Ret.): We're programming money, we're spending money to protect us against uncertainty and unpredictability, which tells me the intelligence community isn't doing its job.
NARRATOR: Do we need the CIA?
["AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" program introduction.]
Admiral GENE LaROCQUE: Welcome once again to "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR."
Ever since the founding of this nation, our officials here in Washington have needed information. War planners have needed information about potential adversaries in order to make war plans. Members of Congress need information in order to make wise decisions on the size and composition of our armed forces.
The question we have before us today though is do we need this great big bureaucracy that we built-up during a period when we were fearful of communist expansion and an attack by the Soviet Union? Our program is about that today.
NARRATOR: There's a branch of the federal government that few Americans know much about: A network of agencies and offices that provide top level political officials and military leaders with classified information. Intelligence is collected, analyzed and disseminated to help the national leadership make informed decisions about the world outside of the United States. The US military is the primary collector and user of an enormous amount of intelligence.
In the 45 years since the beginning of the cold war, the intelligence bureaucracy has grown dramatically. Taxpayers spend an estimated $30 billion each year to bankroll some 30 different intelligence agencies.
Since these agencies are shrouded in secrecy and exempted from many standard checks and balances, citizens have no way of knowing how much bang they get for their intelligence buck, or even how many bucks they spend in the first place.
Many believe now's the time to change the CIA and the host of agencies working in that field. The KGB has ceased to exist as we have known it and observers think now is the time for similar change in the United States.
JOHN PRADOS: One thing that the end of the cold war should enable us to do is to better define our intelligence community and take it back a few notches to a point at which it's more manageable, more efficient and more cost-effective.
NARRATOR: John Prados is a widely respected author and national security researcher. Others, like General William Odom, who directed the super-secret National Security Agency from 1985 through 1987, agree that change for the intelligence bureaucracy is long overdue.
General WILLIAM ODOM (USA, Ret.): "Old organizations were very functional for years and anybody who's run a big organization in the private sector or the government knows that there are no perfect structures and that one likes the functionality of it for awhile and is prepared to live with the dysfunctions. After awhile, the dysfunctions become larger than the functionality, so you re-organize, and we're way overdue for that."
NARRATOR: One of the people trying to figure out how to change the old organization is Congressman Dave McCurdy. From his vantage point as the thoughtful chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, he has proposed legislation to reform the CIA and all of the other agencies that make up the intelligence system.
Rep. DAVE McCURDY (D-OK): Well, even before the collapse of communism, I thought it was important that we review the organization of the intelligence community. Unlike the Department of Defense, it's spread out through a number of different areas. It has a very convoluted organization chart. And because it's veiled in secrecy, it's very difficult to get your hands around the community and understand exactly what it is.
NARRATOR: Almost everything is highly classified and withheld from public view, so it's hard to figure out what the problems are. The cold war architects of the intelligence network feared that public disclosure of budgets and programs would give important information to the other side, the communists.
Representative Lee Hamilton, who chaired the House Intelligence Committee and now sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, describes the extend of secrecy in the US Government.
Rep. LEE HAMILTON (D-IN): "I recently asked the General Accounting Office to estimate the volume of classified information in the possession of our government. They told me the amount is so vast, it cannot be measured."
NARRATOR: Secrecy became addictive. The cult of secrecy is so strong in the CIA that the official report on CIA openness was itself classified until public outcry forced its release.
Congressman McCurdy wants the CIA to follow through.
Rep. McCURDY: Well, you have to go beyond saying we're going to have a new policy on openness and then classify the new policy. It has to be implemented. It has to permeate the community as a whole. One of our efforts in the re-organization bill was to create a facility and a site so that we could have a greater exchange between academics, and business, and the intelligence community to address some of our broader national issues. So, I think there is a real opportunity to be more open.
NARRATOR: Even so, old habits die hard, as seen by the testimony of Robert Gates, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
CIA Director ROBERT GATES (before Select Intelligence Committee): "While the results of NSR-29 are classified -- and I will discuss them greater in detail in the closed session and will also provide the priorities to both committees -- let me briefly summarize the results here. The Commonwealth of Independent States emerged as the..."
NARRATOR: NSR-29 is the top-to-bottom classified review of the entire intelligence community conducted by Director Gates shortly after he assumed office. US citizens cannot know specifically what plans the CIA has for reforming itself.
The secrecy extends to how much money the intelligence agencies spend each year. Buried within the Pentagon budget is an estimated $30 billion dedicated to spying. John Prados thinks it's high time to open it up and discuss specifics.
Mr. PRADOS: The problem from the government's standpoint is that it's easy to make things secret, it's tempting to make things secret. There is, at some point, a national security aspect, so let's make it national security. Let's talk about national security.
NARRATOR: National security. It has been the buzz word that justified the secrecy, enormous levels of military spending, the hidden growth of the intelligence bureaucracy. Now that competition with the Soviet Union is over, Americans have a golden opportunity to end a national obsession with this fuzzy phrase.
Before the cold war, the Army, Navy and Marines each had its own intelligence branch. These organizations have primarily wartime functions to seek out enemy locations, troop movements and battle plans.
After World War II, however, wartime intelligence agencies became the nucleus of a vastly expanded intelligence operation directed against the Soviet Union and its allies.
Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan commanded the US Navy's Second Fleet from 1975 to 1977 and has extensive background in the use of intelligence. He explains its purpose in military planning.
Adm. SHANAHAN: It's the foundation, basically, for how a military planner goes about getting his job done. Let's put it in precise terms. We have a system called the Programming, Planning, Budget Cycle. Now a planner, before he can decide how much he wants to spend, needs to know what the opposition is. That is the justification for going in and asking the American people to spend X number of dollars.
NARRATOR: Intelligence measures military capabilities -- hardware -- and intentions, or motivations. With this kind of information, national military planners are able to judge what their needs are. Without this information, military planning would take place in a vacuum. The need for this kind of information, however, can turn into an obsession.
The feverish desire to have as much military information as possible led successive presidents to add agency after agency to the cold war bureaucracy. Many of these agencies had similar functions, but each military service wanted its own intelligence branch so it could have control.
Beginning with the National Security Act of 1947, the Truman administration created the Central Intelligence Agency to collect, organize and analyze all intelligence gathered by the government and to supply it to national leaders. Today, the intelligence establishment is a mammoth network of organizations.
In addition to the CIA, there are the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Defense Mapping Agency, the Armed Forces Medical Intelligence Center, the Defense Investigative Service, the intelligence divisions of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, and intelligence divisions for each of the nine major military commands.
But it doesn't stop there. Many civilian departments have their own intelligence wings. These offices collect information on the world economy, terrorism and world political developments. All told, there are as many as 30 agencies and subdivisions of the federal government tied into the $30 billion web of the intelligence structure.
This huge network collects and distributes many different kinds of information. The three major types of intelligence are imagery, signals intelligence and human intelligence. Imagery is pictures taken from billion dollar satellites in the sky, high flying reconnaissance aircraft and other pictures. The satellite effort alone costs taxpayers as much as $6 billion a year.
Signals intelligence includes eavesdropping on telephone conversations and military and diplomatic communications. The National Security Agency employs as many as 50,000 people listening in on the world's telecommunications.
Human intelligence includes clandestine spying and analysis of openly published information, such as the media.
One reason why intelligence costs so much is that many military agencies collect the same information. In a desire to have control over that information and be assured access to it, the military intelligence agencies march to their own drummers.
Admiral Shanahan explains how this redundancy costs taxpayers billions a year.
Adm. SHANAHAN: Of course, everyone spent a great deal of time defending and protecting their turf. I mean, even to the point of saying, gee, I got a piece of information here, but I'm not going to pass it to that intelligence agency, I want to bring it forth because it's going to give us a gold star.
NARRATOR: Some insiders, like Mel Goodman, a distinguished CIA Soviet military expert from 1967 to 1990, believe we spent too much on a redundant intelligence system.
MEL GOODMAN: Oh, I think we spend far too much. Clearly, if we can cut the defense budget radically, and perhaps we can, we can also cut the intelligence budget in a significant way. Look at the Soviet cuts in defense spending and intelligence spending. They're extremely significant. We have to look at the international environment in the wake of that reduced Soviet threat.
NARRATOR: The US military has a huge appetite for information about foreign armed forces. Some analysts think the military's appetite cannot be satisfied.
Mr. PRADOS: There was an argument made that the battle-field intelligence in the Persian Gulf was insufficient, was not enough, that more in fact of this kind of information is necessary.
INTERVIEWER: Can you ever have enough then?
Mr. PRADOS: That's precisely the problem: They can never have enough battlefield intelligence.
NARRATOR: Like secrecy, a never ending desire to collect more military information became a habit. Even so, the estimates can be wrong. In the war with Iraq, the military intelligence agencies greatly over-estimated Iraq's military capabilities and willingness to fight.
CIA Director GATES (before Select Intelligence Committee): "Moreover, as our military capability shrinks, we had best be cautious about too quickly weakening our early warning capability, our intelligence capability, what the president has called 'the nation's first line of defense.'"
NARRATOR: The warning military intelligence provides is essential. The CIA was created in part to ensure that the United States would never suffer another Pearl Harbor. But in a new era without a massive Soviet Union, it is clear that a redundant, expensive intelligence machine can be pared down with no added risk to the United States.
Sometimes, to please policymakers, intelligence analysts and managers may hold information back, or even doctor it. Mel Goodman describes this phenomenon.
Mr. GOODMAN: Politicization is slanting intelligence in such a way that it supports a political line or a policy line. And for the CIA to be effective and for the CIA to exist, integrity is the most important aspect of how the CIA goes about its business.
NARRATOR: To drum up public support for the cold war military, successive presidents have come up with bomber gaps, missile gaps and the threat of communist armies marching north from Central America. This required intelligence to support these claims, even though the facts were otherwise.
Adm. SHANAHAN: I'd like to equate the intelligence kind of people to -- You recall, "The Untouchables"? You've seen all those movies? We were finally successful in putting Al Capone in the slammer because we finally found a group of cops, or police officers, who couldn't be corrupted and they finally built a case against that man.
Now in the intelligence business, intelligence people are corrupted -- and I don't mean that in the sense that they do things for money, or they're disloyal, or they're traitors. I'm talking about the fact that they become corrupted by the idea that they're serving their own particular organization or they're serving their bosses, and so they want to come to him and tell him what he wants to hear, as opposed to telling him what he ought to hear.
NARRATOR: This distortion reached its height during the 1980s when CIA Director William Casey produced intelligence to support the strongly anti-communist policies of the Reagan administration. Congressman Lee Hamilton describes how that administration ignored intelligence reports for political purposes.
Rep. HAMILTON (before Select Intelligence Committee): "The ability to classify information plays great unchecked power in the hands of the executive branch. For example, certain members of Congress, including myself knew that US intelligence did not support President Reagan's claim that Nicaragua's Sandinista government was shipping a flood of arms to communist guerillas in El Salvador during the early 1980s. But we were unable to respond publicly to the president's assertions because the information was classified."
NARRATOR: One of the most controversial activities of the CIA is its ability to conduct covert operations. A covert operation is a secret effort to bring political or military change in another country, but covert operations often undermine the goals of the operation itself.
Mr. PRADOS: In the Iranian instance in the early 1950s, there was a question of who was going to control Iranian oil.
NARRATOR: John Prados describes the US-led effort to over-throw the Iranian government in 1953 and put the shah in power.
Mr. PRADOS: And the British controlled Iranian oil at the time. A nationalist ruler came to power and nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and that was the genesis really of that covert activity. The British and Americans joined together to overthrow the nationalist leader, who had nationalized the oil, to restore this economic control.
NARRATOR: While the CIA's effort to overthrow the Mossadegh government in Iran was successful, it paved the way for the ruth-less, bloody rule of the shah. The Shah of Iran, while a friend of the US Government and a major arms buyer, so repressed his own people that they overthrew him in 1979. Many Iranians did not forget the US role in their repression.
Mr. PRADOS: I think what it illustrates is that the success or failure of an operation is not to be found in the short term success or failure of a mission, but rather that the long term interests of American foreign policy require an above-board, up front approach to other countries and not the kind of sort of quick fix, which covert operations became for American foreign policy in the 1950s and the 60s.
NARRATOR: Americans will have to do some hard thinking about what kind of intelligence system we want to have now and in years to come. The CIA is trying to reform itself, trying to adapt to a new era.
Unfortunately, the CIA is finding new missions every- where. The new missions include monitoring the spread of nuclear weapons, drug trafficking, and every economic intelligence.
CIA Director GATES (before Select Intelligence Committee): "There was one category in which the national security review was a failure. I inserted in the draft a request to the policy agencies to tell us what we can stop doing. There was not a single submission, not one."
NARRATOR: Mel Goodman is skeptical of letting the CIA reform itself. He's fearful that the status quo is being wrapped in a veneer of reform.
Mr. GOODMAN: But I would be very careful of any program that is essentially a rationalization for maintaining an intelligence community at its current level or, indeed, expanding the intelligence community or expanding CIA. We can do better with less.
NARRATOR: A sweeping reform proposal comes from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York Democrat who was vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the 1980s. Senator Moynihan wants to eliminate the CIA and transfer much of its information collection and distribution duties to the State Department, as had been the case before the cold war began.
Senator Moynihan's end-of-the-cold war act would also end covert assistance to foreign groups when that assistance is forbidden by US law, as was the case in the Iran-contra affair. The bill would also make the intelligence budget public and end the practice of denying foreigners access to the United States for ideological reasons.
Senator Moynihan states that the obsession with national security -- military superiority -- helped to create a national identity. He hopes the end of the cold war will herald new thinking in the United States, new thinking that could break the habit of seeing threats everywhere and military responses to them.
Congressman McCurdy and Senator David Boren, respectively the chairman of the House and Senate committees on intelligence, have also proposed reform of the intelligence bureaucracy. The two Oklahoma Democrats recently held the first open session of the Joint Intelligence Committee in that commit-tee's history.
The McCurdy and Boren bills would create a director of national intelligence, a single official responsible for the nation's intelligence efforts. Having one person in charge would do much to reduce the problem of coordinating many intelligence agencies and the duplication of effort.
The director of national intelligence would have overall control of the intelligence budget, which would be a public figure. Congressman McCurdy thinks taxpayers cannot afford to bankroll the same old expensive, unaccountable intelligence system.
Rep. McCURDY: It's clear we don't need to keep going in the same direction. The question is how do we come about in an area that is going to be the most productive. What we're saying is, as you make the shift, don't just keep all those people and organizations just because we've been there for 45 years, but let's see what the priority needs of the future are.
NARRATOR: As reform efforts shake out, the intelligence network may become more responsive to new realities. Congressman McCurdy thinks we can make it work.
Rep. McCURDY: I think the key is that people have to realize there is a role for intelligence, and it's an important function, but it should not be exempt from government scrutiny and it should not be exempt from budget reductions over time. It probably will not decline as rapidly as the overall defense budget because it can be used in a number of areas. But it's clear from my standpoint we can become more efficient, we can be more open, in many respects, and still have a world class intelligence capability.
NARRATOR: A world class intelligence capability does not necessarily mean that the old organizations must stay. The two functions of intelligence, measuring military capabilities and political intentions, can be collected and analyzed by groups other than the CIA.
The Defense Intelligence Agency could collect and analyze information about foreign armed forces. The State Department and the Foreign Service could handle collection of political information.
The CIA has a lot of bad habits: covert operations, slanting intelligence for political purposes, and an inertia developed over its 45-year existence. The United States can be secure without a huge overlapping intelligence system.
It's a new era, an era without any significant military threats to the United States. It's an era where we do not require cold war institutions to safeguard our security.
Admiral LaROCQUE: Well, I found the comments very interesting because we in America pride ourselves on the free and open society that we have. But many of us are troubled when we learn that we have within our body politic a secret organization, an organization which spends approximately $30 billion a year, an organization that conducts its affairs in almost total secrecy away from the rest of the public.
So, the question that has been posed today -- "Do we need the CIA?" -- is a good question. Certainly, now that he cold war is over, we ought to look very carefully at our whole intelligence establishment to decide if we want to continue, as we have been, at the height of the cold war, or is it time now to restructure, reshape and perhaps open up the intelligence community to closer scrutiny. The decision's up to you and me, and the Congress, and the executive branch of our government.
Until next time, for "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I'm Gene LaRocque.
[Over credits]
MEL GOODMAN: Well, certainly, we have to take a very hard look at covert action. Covert action greatly expanded during Casey's period of leadership at the CIA. There was the introduction of covert action in almost every policy and substantive area. I think a lot of it not only was unnecessary, it was extremely counter-productive. And I think only in extreme cases can you justify the need for covert action when it's in support of a very sensitive policy issue.
INTERVIEWER: What might those cases be?
Mr. GOODMAN: I think, in this day in age, it's hard for me to think of one.
[End of broadcast.]
CONDITION OF USE: Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR"
(Center for Defense Information).
(C) Copyright 1992, Center for Defense Information. All Rights Reserved.
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