Who Killed the CIA?
The Confessions of Stansfield Turner (page 3)

COMMENTARY
October 1985

by Edward Jay Epstein


Espionage can also succeed over relatively long periods of time, since an agent, once enticed into illegally cooperating, can be blackmailed into continuing and recruiting others. The most recent example is the present Walker-Whitworth case. Here the KGB induced John Walker, a warrant officer in the U.S. Navy's submarine-operations room, to provide it, over a twenty-year period, with cryptographic key lists. These lists, together with naval encoding machines that the Soviet Union's North Korean ally had captured, allowed it to decipher submarine codes. Walker then recruited other family members and friends in the Navy to help him. This espionage enabled Soviet intelligence to decipher submarine transmissions and penetrate electronic deceptions which otherwise would have rendered useless whatever data its satellites, underwater sonar buoys, and other technical collection devices had picked up. As it turned out, the Navy, not realizing that its codes had been compromised, went right on using them for a decade.

In each of these cases, espionage provided secrets that could not be garnered by even the most powerful machines of technical collection. But the distinction between these two modes of intelligence gathering-espionage is unexpected theft from within the enemy's inner sanctum, technical collection is expected interception from outside-was not fully appreciated by Admiral Turner. He was determined to make the espionage branch a part of his technological "team"-al though acknowledging that "it is never easy redirecting the thrust of an established, proud, and successful organization." By the time he left in 1981, he had not only drastically reduced the size and mission of the espionage branch -reassigning its case officers to such activities as poll-taking in friendly nations and servicing the scientific apparatus-but had radically revised the underlying assumptions on which intelligence was evaluated.

Up until Turner's reforms, for example, the CIA depended on a concept of disinformation in dealing with reports from Soviet espionage sources. Since Soviet officials recruited abroad by the CIA tended to be either intelligence officers, diplomats, or military attaches, the possibility had to be anticipated that some of them might report the contacts to Soviet security. If so, it was further assumed that these officials, known to be in contact with American intelligence, would be supplied with misleading messages-or "disinformation." In the CIA, disinformation meant private messages between adversary intelligence services that rarely, if ever, came to the attention of the media.

Sifting this disinformation, which often turned out to be an impossible task, required fitting it into the entire mosaic of reports from the Soviet Union and its allies over an extended period of time. The task also implied some conspiratorial theory of how the KGB operated. Turner rejected this sort of inductive analysis, which he associated with the past "paranoia of the CIA's counterintelligence staff." Instead, Turner preferred to rely on more scientific methods, such as the testing of volunteer Soviet agents by polygraph machines and CIA psychologists. He even provided multimillion dollar allocations from the intelligence budget for research on extra-sensory perception (ESP). All this allowed him to redefine disinformation, as he does in his book, as a threat to the public media rather than as one to the CIA. After discounting much of Soviet disinformation as chimerical, he asserts: "Any disinformation campaign must pass through our own media. Because those media are inherently probing and skeptical, and because there are so many sources of media information in our society, we have built-in defenses."

By abnegating the CIA's responsibility for defending against disinformation, Turner automatically downgraded the role of counterintelligence. If misleading messages could be ferreted out through scientific technology by case officers, there was no need for a centralized staff to review the intelligence in a synoptic context-or to supply any sort of "institutional memory." The counterintelligence staff, already purged of most of its long-time staff officers by Turner's predecessor, William Colby, now lost its conceptual raison d' etre. What remained of the counterintelligence function was relegated to police work. According to Turner's redefinition: "The job of counterintelligence is to find those Americans who do become agents of a foreign power." This greatly shrinks the bailiwick of counterintelligence, especially since the FBI, not the CIA, has jurisdiction in America for spy-catching (and the five spies he cites in his chapter on "Counterintelligence" were actually FBI cases).

Finally, Turner revised the concept of "operational security," which had, up to then, ruthlessly sealed off from any unnecessary risk data upon which foreign agents' lives depended. When, in 1978, a senior,.CIA officer-a station chief-came under suspicion after being identified by a CIA source in Soviet intelligence as a Soviet mole, Turner did not remove him from his position, even though he had access to highly secret data, or even place a warning in his file to restrict his access to future sensitive information. He explains: "That would have played it safe for the country but would have ruined the man's career without his knowing why."

Turner's presumption, which might have been laudable in any line of work other than secret intelligence, was that a staff officer had a right to retain his position until legally proved guilty. Turner therefore arranged a test for the suspected station chief in which he would be given secret material and placed under surveillance to see if he passed it to the Soviets. To Turner's great relief, the suspect did not contact the Soviets while under surveillance. While this non-event might have been explained in any number of ways-for example, he, or his Soviet contact, might have been warned or have detected the surveillance. Turner concluded: "I decided our entrapment effort had been sufficiently well executed for me to rest my suspicions. I then ordered that no record of our suspicions and the ensuing investigation be put in the man's personnel record." While Turner's new concept of "security" protected the civil rights and career tenure of CIA officers, it left espionage agents, like Filiatov, who was compromised and sentenced to death, out in the cold.

The new CIA undoubtedly provided its staff officers with a more efficient, ethical, and happier work environment. Turner, appreciating the need for a captain to know the "attitudes and morale ... on his ship,"'held regular group discussions with "middle-management people like espionage officers at mid-career, secretaries, analysis at the desk level, minorities, and the handicapped." By this time, however, under Admiral Turner's command, the "ship" was something other than a secret intelligence organization.


if you have any comments please reply below:
your email:

This is a totally commerce-free site. No charges, no advertising.
The webmistress can be reached at jooon33@yahoo.com