Book Review

Flawed By Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS and NSC
By Amy B. Zegart
Stanford University Press, 1999

Reviewed by Nigel West for Intelligence Forum

Was the CIA ever destined to be a rogue elephant? Was it inevitable, bearing in mind the background against which the agency was created, that it would develop a bureaucratic, autonomous life of its own, independent of America's democratic institutions? The author, who is an academic at UCLA, clearly thinks so. She takes the view from the outset that "many of the excesses, problems and scandals of the Central Intelligence Agency appear to have organisational roots" and as evidence asserts that the CIA "was able to expand into illegal domestic operations and foreign subversion in part because no one was watching".

This highly contentious statement suggests firstly that there have been several examples of the CIA conducting illegal domestic operations, secondly that they were mounted independently of the proper authorities, and thirdly that such episodes would not have happened if there had been proper oversight.

The illegal domestic operation referred to here undoubtedly was the surveillance operation conducted by the CIA's Counterintelligence Staff in support of CHAOS, which from 1953 onwards monitored the mail exchanged between the Eastern Bloc and the United States. In terms of strict legality, there is a question about the status of mail from US citizens intercepted abroad, or that addressed to aliens within the USA. This may be less than relevant, especially when the entire program was certainly understood by the CI Staff's Chief, James Angleton, to be illegal, as he admitted with disarming candor in his evidence to the Church Committee.

It is probably true to say that Angleton and his team of molehunters were quite unconcerned about legal niceties because, as one retiree said to me recently, "they knew that they were acting for the benefit of Uncle Sam and not General Motors." Underlying this confidence was the general acceptance that intelligence agencies routinely break the law in other countries, and a noble cause could justify such behaviour at home. Thus the question arises whether the CI Staff arrogantly put itself above the law, or simply saw it as a minor obstacle that was expedient to circumvent. One definition is whether the individuals involved believed they would pay a personal penalty if caught, or whether the agency, administration or establishment would come to the rescue.

This issue was addressed by James Angleton who did attempt to obtain a Presidential sanction for CHAOS. One, and maybe two Directors of Central Intelligence declined to go to the White House with a plea for permission, but did nonetheless give their consent. Indeed, even James Schlesinger declined to terminate CHAOS completely, but merely suspended it. This latter point is, for it was not external oversight that finally ended the illegal domestic practices, it was the CIA's own management, long before any Congressional committees expressed an interest in pursuing the CIA's alleged excesses.

Could oversight have prevented the illegal operation? Definitely not. The committees are to be consulted in a timely manner, but the president has the reserved right to withhold information, judge for himself what is timely, seek retrospective consultation (not, it should be noted, approval) or even issue a retrospective finding.

At the heart of what is perceived to be an unsatisfactory state of affairs for the CIA is some ambiguity in the legislation that created the CIA back in 1947. Amy Zegart presents the scenario as a blueprint for abuse and chicanery, and makes some assertions that half an hour with the imperious Dr Walter Pforzheimer would disabused her of: "policymakers saw no need to continue widespread clandestine operations after the war"; The CIA "was never supposed to amount to much"; "The original CIA was never supposed to engage in spying"; The CIA "was never supposed to be more than an analysis outfit".

Doubtless, as the midwife of the CIA's legal birth, Dr Pforzheimer would have set Dr Zegart straight if he had been asked to do so, and I can only speculate that Allen Dulles would have given short shrift to such preposterous ideas. If ever there was a clandestine operator anxious to mount risky undertakings, rather than drive a desk in a bureaucracy of analysts, it was Dulles and his team of seasoned professionals who moved seamlessly from the hot war to the Cold War without realising that President Truman had intended to terminate America's ability to conduct espionage (and, presumably as an inevitable corollary, leave the great game to Britain, France and the Soviet Bloc).

The fact that the National Security Act contained a couple of impressively imprecise paragraphs that effectively let the CIA do whatever the president wishes was not a manifestation of sloppy drafting, but a very deliberate attempt to construct a peacetime intelligence operation hamstrung by the absolute minimum of legal limitations. So why does Zegart pursue the proposition that the 1947 legislation was either a hopelessly inadequate blunder foisted on the CIA by a conspiracy executed by the State, War, Justice and Navy Departments, or an authentic bill designed by well-intentioned politicians (and a president allegedly opposed to all intelligence-gathering) but subsequently usurped by unscrupulous practitioners.

The truth is quite obvious to anyone who has trod the same path as John Ranelagh (whose surname Amy Zegart cheerfully misspells throughout) or David Rudgers (whose excellent Creating the Secret State would have made many of Zegart's suppositions redundant, but was not published until earlier this year). Congress gave the CIA the widest possible powers, excluding only internal security and police functions. It did not exclude domestic operations, and deliberately gave the president considerable latitude.

In developing her theme that the 1947 architecture had been constructed on shifting sands, Zegart believes that 'organizational deficiencies... led to missteps and misadventures' and points to intelligence failures in 'Korea and the Bay of Pigs' as evidence. In reality, of course, intelligence will inevitably experience failure, as Mossad can acknowledge following Yom Kippur, and SIS admitted after General Galtieri had landed his troops in the Falklands. But was either Korea or the Bay of Pigs a disaster for which the CIA (or its structure) could be blamed? The Korean invasion was simply unforeseen (not entirely unlike Pearl Harbor, the Tet offensive, the fall of the Shah and the invasion of Kuwait) but it would be absurd to dismantle an entire agency because it had been unable to predict the exact date of a Pakistani atomic test.

As for the Bay of Pigs, the real blame for the catastrophe lies with John Kennedy and his failure of will at the last, most crucial moment. To suggest that his crisis of courage as an example of CIA 'missteps and misadventures' is difficult to sustain.

So what are the CIA abuses to which Zegart refers all to frequently? Certainly not Watergate, for Dick Helms and his DDCI Vernon Walters skillfully maintained a constitutional barrier between Langley and the disgraceful (and unsuccessful) efforts of John Dean to take cover behind a bogus but potentially plausible national security cover for the DNC burglars. Is she referring to the Chilean coups of 1970 and 1973? Definitely not, as the CIA acted strictly to the White House instructions, as the current series of declassifications make clear. What about assassinations? Some overlook Church's conclusion that no foreign leaders were murdered by the CIA, and more evidence to support the Agency's denial of complicity in Tshombe's grisly death in the Congo, disclosed by the local CIA Station Chief David Doyle in INSIDE ESPIONAGE, proves the point.

Maybe the mining of the Nicaraguan harbours is an example of abuse, or perhaps Iran-Contra? The former was an ingenious scheme that caused neither death nor injury, and was intended by its unrepentant author to close the ports through an insurance disincentive. Furthermore, it was reported to Congress (even if Bill Casey's incomprehensive mumbling made the full story slightly opaque). As for Oliver North's convoluted plan to out-manoeurve CIA oversight by running a clandestine operation under the auspices of the NSC, there is minimal evidence that anyone in the CIA's Directorate of Operations was complicit.

Apart from the author's treatment of the National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which is admirable but pedestrian, I could only concur in her condemnation of covert action which she says has 'borne little fruit at considerable cost'. Quite why either the CIA has been willing to undertake such paramilitary follies, or why successive presidents have seen the CIA as a suitable sponsor for undertakings that are wholly inappropriate for the quiet prosecution of the business of intelligence.

There may well be some truth in Dr Zegart's controversial opinion that "when most Americans think of the CIA, they conjure up images of a rogue elephant, a super-secret organization gone out of control" but it is to be hoped that academics will seek to correct that mistaken impression and not exacerbate the misconception. Actually Frank Church came to regret his ill-judged comment and later withdrew it, a fact overlooked in FLAWED BY DESIGN, a title that could easily be read as ironical.

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