On top of everything else, not very good at its job

On top of everything else, not very good at its job

Aug 16th 2007

From The Economist

The United States has not, even in the eyes of well-disposed critics, been well served by its main intelligence agency

MANY books have sought to show how badly the Central Intelligence Agency behaves. In this thorough and persuasive study, Tim Weiner describes how poorly it does its job. As a New York Times journalist who has covered espionage for many years, Mr Weiner knows what he is talking about. He does not play down the seamier side—for example, the opening of letters, snooping on critics, trying out drugs on Russian prisoners, plotting to kill foreign leaders and so on. Yet illegality and immorality are secondary concerns. His principal charge is incompetence, and this he pursues with the zeal of a prosecutor. The most powerful country in the world, he complains, has yet to develop “a first-rate spy service”.

He starts in 1945, when President Harry Truman decided to set up the CIA's immediate forebear, the Central Intelligence Group. He closes with the agency's unhappy part in the “war on terror” and the invasion of Iraq, one result of which was the demotion of the CIA and its director in an attempt to co-ordinate America's often discordant intelligence outfits.

The 1947 act that set up the agency gave it two tasks: briefing the president with intelligence and conducting secret operations for him abroad. In Mr Weiner's view the CIA was lamentable at both—and most presidents must take a share of the blame.

The CIA failed to warn the White House of

• the first Soviet atom bomb (1949),
  
• the Chinese invasion of South Korea (1950),
  
• anti-Soviet risings in East Germany (1953) and Hungary (1956),
  
• the dispatch of Soviet missiles to Cuba (1962),
  
• the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 and
  
• Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
  
• It overplayed Soviet military capacities in the 1950s, then underplayed them before overplaying them again in the 1970s.

The record of covert action is little better.

• In Japan, France and Italy the CIA sought to protect democracy by buying elections.
  
• It sponsored coups in Guatemala, Iran, Syria and Iraq, where a Baath Party leader boasted in 1963, “We came to power on an American train.”
  
• When an invasion of Cuba masterminded by the agency failed, it plotted to kill Fidel Castro.
  
• In ascending order of bloodshed, it tooka hand in military coups in South Vietnam, Chile and Indonesia.

Was such skulduggery worth it? Did the extra security for the United States outweigh the immediate human cost, the frequently perverse geopolitical consequences and the moral damage to American ideals? Doubters repeatedly warned presidents that on balance the CIA's foreign buccaneering did more harm than good. Mr Weiner has dug out devastating official assessments of covert operations from the 60 years he covers suggesting that many were not worth it. The sceptics were not peaceniks or bleeding hearts but hard-headed advisers at high levels of government.

The CIA's defenders complain that only the bad news ever emerges. Yet if Mr Weiner is holding back good news, it is not for lack of searching. As 180 pages of end-notes attest, he has devoured congressional reports, former spies' memoirs and declassified papers from possibly the most unsecret service ever—a credit of a kind to American democracy.

Mr Weiner highlights many successes and is less harsh than many presidents. His title borrows a melancholy remark made by Dwight Eisenhower, who called what the CIA had wrought on his say-so “a legacy of ashes”. Richard Nixon, who had a sharp tongue, derided the agency's analysts as clowns reading newspapers.

Its very conspicuousness makes the CIA hard to put into perspective. Some people believe that its impact, for good or ill, is overdrawn. It is one American intelligence agency among many. Its budget is less than a quarter of that for eavesdropping and satellite spying, which the Pentagon controls. The armed forces also have intelligence organisations of their own.

At times recently the CIA has come to look almost dispensable. Mr Weiner's final chapter, “The Burial Ceremony”, describes the disdain in which the present administration came to hold it. By creating a new supreme post, the director of national intelligence, President George Bush has in effect robbed the CIA of direct access to the Oval Office. A 60-year struggle for influence ended with that change in 2004. In Mr Weiner's words, “The Pentagon had crushed the CIA.”

Though Mr Weiner strongly believes his country needs effective espionage, his hopes for it sound bleak. He ends with the bitter post-cold-war words of Richard Helms, one of the few CIA directors to whom he gives high marks:

“The only remaining superpower doesn't have enough interest in what's going on in the world to organise and run an espionage service.”