Legacy of Ashes discussion

Q. How did the CIA get started?

A. During World War II, the United States created, after some fits and starts, a wartime civilian intelligence service, the OSS. It had a mixed record and was not terribly trusted by the military. President Roosevelt had commissioned an internal report on the OSS, and it was quite scathing. It allowed that some of the analytical work was good, but that the operational work was not. Truman ordered it abolished. At the end of the summer of 1947, CIA was established. The problem then was much the same as the problem now: we Americans are not very good at espionage — the secret work designed to steal secrets — which is the core mission of the CIA. We’re not very good at this because it’s new to us. The British had been at it for 500 years since Elizabeth the First, the Chinese for 2,500 years. But secrecy and deception are not part of the American makeup.

Q. What was Truman ordering up when he ordered up the CIA?

A. Originally, what Truman wanted was a newspaper, a daily digest of all the knowledge in the government about what was happening abroad, so he wouldn’t have to read a two foot high stack of cables everyday. He wanted information about the world coordinated, analyzed, digested, and put on his desk every morning. But the Cold War was heating up in Western Europe. There was political warfare notably in Italy and France, and guerilla warfare in Greece, and the agency quickly because involved in fighting fire with fire — that is, is doing what the Soviet Communists were doing: trying to buy elections, support paramilitary operations, and struggling for dominion in Europe. By the time of the Korean war it was a global struggle. Again, we were not set up to do this, and the first era of the agency’s life from the beginning of the Bay of Pigs can largely be read as learning by doing — and, in most cases, failing.

Q. So the basic problem is a confusion in the mission?

A. The British do it differently. Other services do it differently. But what you had under one roof was the collection of information through espionage overseas, the analysis of information, and a third and, in the 50’s, much more powerful branch, which was devoted not to knowing the world but to changing the world through political warfare, through para-military operations through clandestine support for political parties, political tribes, and in many cases for coups.

Q. Something that really struck me is just how many lives were lost on this early learning curve.

A. This is where the experience of the OSS bleeds into the early years of CIA. The OSS had operated a number of paramilitary operations in occupied western Europe, notably France, but elsewhere, too. They were dropping paratroopers and paramilitary people into occupied territory and they would then link up with partisans to fight the Nazis. The leaders of the CIA in the 1950’s all came out of this experience and they thought that they could operate behind the Iron Curtain in eastern Europe and behind the Bamboo Curtain in Korea and in China in much the same way. And they were wrong. We’ll never get an accurate body count, but thousands of people died on these missions, not only recruited foreign agents who were dropped behind enemy lines, but also the people they were trying to help.

Q. And, perhaps to oversimplify, the reason these people died oftentimes is because the people who sent them there just didn’t know what they were doing.

A. Right. They didn’t know what they were doing. They were also taken in in a number of cases by communist subversion and disinformation operations. The Polish Service, aided and abetted by the soviet intelligence service, created a fictitious resistance army in Poland and made the CIA believe that this fictitious army existed. The CIA dropped weapons and gold, and this went on for years until they finally figured out that they were being had. They found out when the Communist service came up on state radio in Warsaw at Christmas, 1952, and they essentially went “nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah” and blew the operation sky high. There was a lot of that in the 50’s.

Q. So, contrary to popular myth, CIA performed poorly throughout the Cold War?

A. There are three CIA’s in the American mind. There is the mythical CIA, the ‘Bourne Identity’ CIA that is omnipotent and all seeing. You know, parachutes into a foreign capital at dawn, overthrows the government before dinner, goes home to the hotel room for a cold martini and some hot sex and then leaves in the middle of the night. That is a myth.

There is a public relations CIA. The CIA, in order to protect and defend its position inside the American government,has to represent itself as a strong silent successful organization. And that, unfortunately, is a myth, too.

The reality is that there are very few long term successes in the history of the CIA. There are a number of short term successes, but there are a far greater number of long-running failures. We are brought up a child’s version of history about our government, about our military, about our diplomacy, and about our intelligence services. The record is not good, and we have squandered a great deal of power and blood and treasure due to bad intelligence.

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