| By Wolf Shipon |
Typically, liberal Americans concerned about worldwide human rights will
The secrecy necessary to maintain effective operations can serve as a blank check on which the CIA can write its preapproved budget request |
Conservative Americans will say that the CIA exists to ensure national security by gathering intelligence about the activities of other nations, corporations, and terrorist groups in order to prepare actions against them -- in self-defense -- should the need arise. Essentially, CIA agents are reporters of sensitive matters.
Meanwhile, most of us remain stuck between these two views because we have no way of knowing which parts of both views to adopt.
I looked around, determined to find my opinion. I asked questions, got answers, and I've sorted some things out for myself. But here I'll present the material I collected, and maybe it will help you form your own views. Perhaps the greatest good will not come when we have the answers, but when we're asking the questions.
In an informal interview with a network executive who works on national security issues, I learned that the CIA is widely perceived to be the most effective intelligence agency in the world -- if for no other reason than no other agency can match the CIA' s resources. The man to whom I spoke also told me that only a very small part of the CIA's budget goes into special operations.
While this was comforting to me, I found out that such an assertion has been called into question before, and has been found untrue by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during the Church committee hearings of the 1970s.
There is a tremendous amount of material about the CIA on the World Wide Web. I started with the CIA home page, to read -- from the proverbial horse's mouth -- the justifications for having such a powerful agency whose actions are largely unknown to the people of the nation, who are sovereign.
On the "CIA Vision, Mission, and Values" home page, the CIA claims it exists to support the president, the National Security Council, and "all who make and execute US national security policy" by providing excellent information about foreign activities related to national security.
But the second half of the CIA mission statement is the one with which observers of international law may take issue: "Conducting counterintelligence activities, special activities, and other functions related to foreign intelligence and national security as directed by the President."(emphasis added)
The latter part of the mission statement can be widely interpreted as something analogous to the Elastic Clause (which gives the government sweeping powers to make new laws in the spirit of the Constitution), and many would argue that the CIA has exercised sweeping powers to act, rather than gather information, under its aegis.
As a journalist, I can identify with the first part of the CIA's mission; newspaper people gather facts and present them to the people of a nation, who in a democracy have the sovereign authority to decide the direction the nation will take. But I would not be a good fact-gatherer if I also acted in what I perceived to be the public interest -- this would ruin my credibility as an information gatherer because I would be tempted to report only the facts which supported my activities, ignoring those facts which point to the things I have neglected.
Many say this was the case during Vietnam, when the CIA did not accurately report the strength of the Vietcong in order to comply with the administration's wishes to continue the war. This is reported in Douglas Pike's chapter "The Vietcong's Secret War", which is contained in War in the Shadows: The Vietnam Experience, edited by Robert Manning.
Such covert operations, we have been told many times, make up less than two percent of the CIA's budget. But the 1975-1976 Church committee hearings revealed that in some years, nearly 80 percent of the CIA's budget was used to support covert actions.
The widely published transcript of former executive CIA operative John Stockwell's "The Secret Wars of the CIA" speech, which was broadcast by the Other Americas Radio in 1989, documents his side of the story as a man whose chief concern was overseeing special operations. Some events he mentioned include:
To add insult to injury, Stockwell was told not to question the directives he was ordered to give his operatives -- to "stop, you know, this philosophizing" when he told one of his coworkers that he couldn't understand why the CIA involves itself in matters that apparently have no effect on national security.
Events such as the ones Stockwell outlined are pooh-poohed by the CIA, which in recent years has offered the public a squeaky-clean, professional image to replace the nightmarish glimpses of CIA special operations which the public has gathered through the Senate Select Committee on intelligence and declassified documents. These are not so easily forgotten:
In 1970, corporate America tried to use the CIA to do its dirty work. ITT offered the CIA $1 million to spend against the Allende campaign in Argentina. Other U.S. companies contributed money, and a total of $700,000 was spent against Allende. The CIA supported the Pinochet regime after Allende's assassination and Pinochet's coup d'etat. The President approved $400,000 of covert actions to stop Allende.
In 1985, the CIA trained Contras in Arkansas with then-Governor Bill Clinton's knowledge. Also that year, a car bomb intended to kill a suspected terrorist leader in Beirut instead killed 80 bystanders -- all with CIA Director William J. Casey's knowledge.
The CIA was directly linked to placing mines in three Nicaraguan harbors according to memos recovered from that time. In typical CIA style, "Latino assets" -- not the CIA's own agents, but people paid by the CIA -- did the mine laying.
Of course, people like me are going to have some difficulty finding out information about the clandestine operations the CIA is performing now, and we are forced to believe the CIA's director when he tells us, and Congress, that less that two percent of the total budget is used for such activities.
In a July 1995 speech to the National Press Club, Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch addressed this concern:
"I would like to say a word about covert action-- those activities CIA undertakes to influence events overseas that are intended not to be attributable to this country. Since the public controversies of the eighties over Iran-Contra and activities in Central America, we have greatly reduced our capability to engage in covert action. I believe that the US needs to maintain, and perhaps even expand, covert action as a policy tool. But here again, we will not undertake covert action to support policy objectives, unless it is approved at the highest level of government and only if the President authorizes such action after a scrupulous review process, including timely notification of the appropriate Congressional oversight bodies."
Hence, the man in charge of the CIA would like to see special operations expanded, now that his organization's ability to perform such operations has been curbed by the indignant American public. This is all Deutch says about the expansion of covert action; he does not support his assertion with circumstances that indicate the need for such an expansion, but of course, that information is probably classified.
I know that I am not the first person to make this suggestion, but seems likely that the CIA could continue its survival quite comfortably if it created popular national security fears. That way, it could have the American public believe that the U.S. is in a continual state of war during which information can not be released to the populace. The secrecy necessary to maintain effective operations can serve as a blank check on which the CIA can write its preapproved budget request.
Any organization tries to maximize its freedoms and its budget by attempting to convince people that its role is necessary. The CIA does this through media relations and testimony to Congress, and what is said can also be found on the CIA home page.
During the National Press Club speech mentioned earlier, Deutch also said that the national security challenges faced by the CIA include prevention of rapid proliferation of chemical and nuclear weapon technology, the growth of international crime and drug trafficking, and the activities of hostile nations such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Interestingly, Deutch also included economic security in the same category -- an indicator that the CIA plays a role in economic espionage and activities as well.
In more recent testimony before Congress on March 20, 1996, Deutch showed his agency's progress by saying that the threat of distribution of nuclear weapons belonging to the former Soviet Union has been reduced. This was immediately followed by many pages of a report outlining the easy access to technological know-how and raw materials, which third world countries -- particularly those hostile to the U.S. -- have been pursuing. Moreover, the report states that while the weapons themselves are secure, the materials used to create the weapons and the former Soviet scientists who know how to do it are being pursued by Iraq, Iran, Syria, Algeria, and Libya. Terrorist groups were also listed as posing a serious threat to non-proliferation of nuclear technology .
The testimony lists numerous cooperative endeavors set up between the CIA and other nations, as well as internal cooperation between the agency and the Department of Defense, that have been set up to counter such threats. It looks like a lot has been done, and the CIA is planning more. There is no doubt that funding will come easily to these projects -- I know that if I had just heard testimony outlining such serious threats to national security, I would err on the side of caution and vote to fully fund t he agency, rather than be blamed after a disaster for providing the agency with inadequate preventative resources. Thus, from what the CIA tells us about itself, we can see that it does serve an important purpose: it gathers information about threats to the nation.
But in my opinion, the CIA should be restricted from special operations, such as government destabilization projects. Imagine how furious you would be if you heard that the French government was responsible for setting off a bomb which killed someone you knew, and it happened in your own borders. You will probably understand why much of the world regards the U.S. with hatred and fear, and ask yourself if your government is playing fair.
I don't think so. One of the fundamental guarantees under international law is that a nation has no right to interfere within another nation's borders except to intervene on behalf of its citizens in distress. The United States apparently has no compunctions about expanding that right to include the national interest, which is anything the President authorizes. Such power in the hands of so few people, particularly when its exercise is kept classified until the people involved are retired or dead, does not tell me that this country is one in which our government is held accountable for its actions.
Thus, I believe the CIA is given too much power to act and is causing the rest of the world to rightly question the integrity of the American people. I think it should be strictly limited to intelligence gathering in order to better perform its job. If the nation needs a group of sneaky reporters, they should at least be objective.