Helms believed that the extreme limits that President Richard M. Nixon had put on who was allowed to know about this effort (the secretaries of state and defense were excluded) precluded his answering. Helms also believed that his testimony was accurate, in that the CIA had tried to prevent Allende’s election but had not been part of the plot to overthrow him once he was in office. This fine line notwithstanding, what options did Helms have when he was asked about CIA activity in Chile?
Under the National Security Act at that time, the DCI was personally responsible for protecting the sources and methods of U.S. intelligence. (This responsibility has now passed to the director of national intelligence.) Helms found himself caught between that obligation and his obligation to testify fully and honestly before Congress. If he had stated that the CIA was involved in some way, he would have revealed operations in an open, public hearing. Alternatively, had he expressed the wish to answer that question in private, or in a closed session (although he had also not answered when in a closed session), it would have been tantamount to admitting CIA involvement. After all, if the CIA had not been involved, why not answer in public? Helms opted for a third choice: to view the question within narrow bounds, preserve secrecy, and deny CIA involvement. There may have been a fourth choice: to respond as he did in public and then visit the senators privately to discuss the realities of CIA activity in Chile. Helms apparently did not consider this choice. In 1973, oversight of CIA activity was the prerogative of a small group of members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, not those on Foreign Relations. Thus, he also construed his oversight responsibilities within a narrow spectrum.
Did Helms make the right choice? Should he have been prosecuted for perjury under these circumstances? How responsible were the senators for asking such questions in an open session (particularly Sen. Stuart Symington, D-Mo., who knew the facts of the matter because he was also a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which then had oversight of the CIA)?
THE TORRICELLI CASE. In 1995 Rep. Robert G. Torricelli, D-N.J., a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote a letter to President Bill Clinton accusing the CIA of having misled Congress about its activities in Guatemala and having had on its payroll a Guatemalan officer involved in human rights violations. Torricelli also made his letter available to the
New York Times.
He admitted having leaked the information to the press but argued that his duty as a member of Congress to preserve the integrity of government was greater than the oaths to preserve secret information that he had taken as a member of the House and the Intelligence Committee. Torricelli also argued that he had not violated committee rules, because he had received the information from a State Department officer in his personal office—that is, not within the House Intelligence Committee—and it was not clear to him that the information had been properly classified.
The chairman of the Intelligence Committee filed ethics charges against Torricelli, which were adjudicated by the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct (popularly known at the Ethics Committee). The committee decided that House rules concerning the handling of classified information were vague and ordered that in the future members would have a positive obligation to ascertain the true classification of information before releasing it. The committee went on to say that, had this ambiguity been resolved at the time Torricelli released the information, he would have been guilty of violating House rules.
Torricelli believed that the information provided by the State officer, a former employee on his House staff, revealed CIA duplicity. Having written to the president, was it necessary to release the information to the
New York Times
as well? Should he first have expressed his concerns to the committee leadership or his party’s leadership?
The only person in the affair who was punished was the State Department officer, Richard Nuccio, who gave the information to Torricelli. A panel appointed by DCI Deutch decided that Nuccio had provided the information without proper authorization. Nuccio lost his clearances and resigned from the State Department, eventually returning to work on Torricelli’s staff. Torricelli could have saved Nuccio by saying that he had asked Nuccio for the information. But, by doing so. Torricelli would have undercut his argument that he had been the innocent recipient.
In 1998 the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act became law, after much debate in Congress and the executive branch. The law established procedures by which intelligence community employees may report a complaint or urgent concern. They must first do so through channels in the intelligence community but are free to inform the Intelligence Committees if the community has taken no action by a specific time. Even then, the employees must inform executive branch officials that they are going to Congress and must handle their information in accordance with proper security procedures. Reflecting the Torricelli case, the whistleblower law states, “A member or employee of one of the intelligence committees who receives a complaint or information . . . does so in that member or employee’s official capacity as a member or employee of that committee.”
THE MEDIA
Reporters and their media outlets exist to publish stories. The First Amendment to the Constitution offers the press broad freedom: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom . . . of the press.”
The government has no way to prevent the media from reporting information that it has obtained, even if it has been classified. But freedom to publish is not the same as “the people’s right to know,” which is an enticing catchphrase but does not appear anywhere in the Constitution. The press’s right to report also does not obligate government officials to provide information, especially classified information.
But what, if any. obligations does the press have when it obtains information with national security implications? Should press limits be self-imposed, or should the press operate on the premise of “finders keepers, losers weepers”? Just as ethics and morals change in other areas, so, too. they change in the media.
In the past the press has come upon intelligence activities and agreed not to write about them for the sake of national security. For example, reporters discovered Cuban exile training camps in Florida prior to the Bay of Pigs and also learned about the construction of the
Glomar Explorer,
built by the Hughes Corporation for the CIA to retrieve a sunken Soviet submarine. More recently, in 2007, the
New York Times
said that it had initially refrained from publishing information it had obtained about U.S. efforts to help safeguard Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.
In the post-Watergate era of investigative journalism (a wonderful redundancy, as all journalism is investigative), it is difficult to imagine that many reporters or media outlets would be willing to suspend publication or drop a story entirely. One has only to think about such scenes as U.S. television camera crews waiting onshore as the first U.S. troops landed in Somalia in 1993 to question the premise. It is more likely that, at some point, the story will be published.
Still, the question remains. At what point, if any, should reporters put aside their professional and career interests for the sake of preserving the secrecy of some intelligence activity or information? What responsibilities, if any, does the press have for the results of a story it publishes?
CONCLUSION
Intelligence is not without its ethical and moral dilemmas, some of which can be excruciating. That these intelligence dilemmas exist also means that policy makers have choices to make that can have ethical and moral dimensions. Intelligence, perhaps more than any other government activity, operates on the edge of acceptable morality, occasionally dealing in techniques that would not be acceptable elsewhere in government or in private life. For most citizens, the trade-off between ethics and increased security is acceptable, provided that the intelligence community operates with rules, oversight, and accountability.
FURTHER READINGS
Barry, James A. “Covert Action Can Be Just.”
Orbis
37 (summer 1993): 375-390.
———.
The Sword of Justice: Ethics and Coercion in International Politics.
New York: Praeger, 1998. Erskine, Tom. “‘As Rays of Light to the Human Soul’? Moral Agents and Intelligence Gathering.”
Intelligence and National Security
19 (summer 2004): 359-381.
Godfrey, E. Drexel. “Ethics and Intelligence.”
Foreign Affairs
56 (April 1978): 624-642. (See also the response by Art Jacobs in the following issue.)
Helms, Richard, with William Hood. A
Look over My Shoulder:
A
Life in the Central Intelligence Agency.
New York: Random House, 2003.
Herman, Michael. “Ethics and Intelligence after September 2001.”
lntelligence and National Security
19 (summer 2004): 342-358.
Lauren, Paul Gordon. “Ethics and Intelligence.” In
lntelligence: Policy and Process.
Ed. Alfred C. Maurer and others. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1985.
Levinson, Sanford. ed.
Torture:
A
Collection.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Masters, Barrie P. “The Ethics of Intelligence Activities.” Washington, D.C.: National War College, National Security Affairs Forum, spring-summer 1976.
Posner, Richard A.
Not a
Suicide
Pact: The Constitution
in
a
Time
of National Emergency.
New York: Oxford University Press. 2006.
Powers, Thomas.
The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and
the
CIA.
New York: Knopf, 1979.
Sorel, Albert.
Europe under
the
Old Regime
Trans. Francis H. Herrick. New York: Harper and Row, 1947.
CHAPTER 14
INTELLIGENCE REFORM
E
FFORTS TO IMPROVE, alter, or reorganize the intelligence community are as old as the community itself. Richard A. Best Jr., in a Congressional Research Service (CRS) study prepared for the House Intelligence Committee as part of its review of intelligence community functions
(IC21: The Intelligence Community in the 21st Century),
examined nineteen major studies, reviews, and proposals, covering the period 1949 to 1996, for change in the intelligence community. For devotees and critics of the community, reform is something of a cottage industry. Like the caucus race in
Alice in Wonderland,
debates over intelligence reform seem to have neither a beginning nor an end.
“Intelligence reform” is a catchall phrase, used to connote any and all efforts to make significant changes in the intelligence community. However, in the mid-1970s, in the aftermath of the Church and Pike Committees’ investigations, “reform” took on a more specific meaning. It referred to efforts to prevent the recurrence of abuses of authority or illegal acts that had been uncovered by the committees and the earlier “family jewels” report, written at the direction of Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) James Schlesinger (1973), describing illegal Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) activities.
The use of the word “reform” remains problematic in that it can imply that something needs fixing, as opposed to simply being improved. In this chapter, “reform” should be read in the broader, more benign sense of the word—improvement, not the correction of abuses.
THE PURPOSE OF REFORM
When one sifts through the reform proposals, a key question must be asked: What is the purpose of the reforms? In his CRS study. Best delineated three broad chronological categories of proposals.
1. To improve the efficiency of the intelligence community in the context of the cold war
2. To respond to specific intelligence failures or improprieties, including the Bay of Pigs, the “family jewels,” the Iran-contra affair, and others
3. To refocus intelligence community requirements and structure in the post-cold war era
The third category, post-cold war efforts to update the community’s structure, reached a culmination with the passage of the intelligence legislation in 2004. This is not to suggest that the issue of intelligence reform is closed. It is not. The intelligence community will never reach an end state but will be subject to periodic reviews and organizational changes.
Efforts to redress glaring failures or misdeeds are easy to understand. Efforts to improve intelligence per se are more difficult to assess. Few reliable guidelines are available for measuring intelligence, which makes it difficult to determine what constitutes efficiency or how to achieve it. The problem may be more difficult for analysis than it is for collection or operations. Assessing the latter two activities is more straightforward. Either the capability to collect against a target exists or it does not, and if it does, then the collection has either been accomplished or it has not. Extenuating circumstances may arise, but the evaluation process for collection is simple. Similarly, for operations, the goals are either achieved or unmet. Some operations may go on without resolution, such as U.S. support to the Nicaraguan contras, but the lack of resolution itself may be an important indicator of the likelihood of ultimate success. Analysis remains more elusive. Few efficiencies are to be had in what is essentially an intellectual process. Volumes of reports or batting averages are not useful measurements.