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Who
Killed the CIA?
The Confessions of Stansfield Turner (page 3)
COMMENTARY
October 1985
by
Edward Jay Epstein
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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.
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