The Craft of Intelligence (31 page)

Obviously it is somewhat more difficult for us to ferret out Communist activities in other parts of the Free World. But often it has been possible to achieve solid results which have prevented the Communists from reaching their objectives. Many Communist plots to subvert friendly governments have been discovered and thwarted. Local publicity in the early stages of a planned
Putsch
, pinpointing the plotters, tying them in to Moscow or Peking, has proved effective. This has been particularly useful in dealing with the bogus “front,” “youth” and “peace” organizations of the Communists and their highly advertised meetings and congresses. Here a free press is also a great asset.

Formidable as is the Communist subversive apparatus, it is vulnerable to exposure and to vigorous attack. Furthermore, the Communists are in no position to push their program of take-over simultaneously in all quarters of the globe. They must pick and choose the areas which hold out the greatest promise to them. Meanwhile, on our side, there is much to be done, and a good deal is being done to shore up weaker countries and to keep them beyond the reach of the Communist grip. Certainly we must not limit ourselves to maintaining a defensive position and solely to reacting to Communist aggression. There have been instances where we have taken the initiative, where we have turned back the Communists, and there should be more. Apart from their problems at home and among themselves, many of their well-laid schemes to penetrate free countries have failed. After many frustrations in Central Africa, the Soviets appear to be regrouping and rethinking their prospects. Also as I have mentioned, their large investment in the Middle East and North Africa has been a bitter disappointment. In some areas of the world, they have found that lack of experience and ineptitude on the part of their envoys and agents, their parties and front organizations, have led to disaster. Their ignominious flight from the Congo in the early 1960s is a chapter in their history to put beside their earlier retreat from Albania.

The indigenous Communist parties are often torn between local issues and the policies of Communism. It is hard for them to shift as fast as Moscow does. One day they must bow down to a Stalin; then Khrushchev tells them Stalin is a bloodstained tyrant who betrayed the “ideals” of the Communist Revolution, and then Khrushchev is in turn purged. The Soviets preach Moscow’s peaceful intentions and then have to explain the brutal crushing of the Hungarian patriots, just as earlier, in 1939, their strong appeal as an anti-Nazi force was dissipated overnight by Moscow’s alliance with Hitler to destroy Poland, which Molotov called the “ugly duckling” of the Versailles Treaty.

As long as Khrushchev or his successors use their subversive assets to promote “wars of liberation”—which means to them any overt or covert action calculated to bring down a non-Communist regime—the West should be prepared to meet the threat. Where the tactic takes the form of open, hot or guerrilla warfare—as in Korea, Vietnam or Malaya—the West, on its side, can provide assistance openly in one fashion or another. But Western intelligence must play its role early in the struggle while subversive action is still in the plotting and organizational stage. To act, one must have the intelligence about the plot and the plotters and have ready the technical means, overt and covert, to meet them.

Of course, all actions of this nature undertaken by intelligence in this country must be coordinated at the level of policymaking and any action by an intelligence service must be within the framework of our own national objectives.

This country and our allies have a choice. We can either organize to meet the Communist program of subversion and vigorously oppose it as it insinuates itself into the governments and free institutions of countries unable to meet the danger alone, or we can supinely stand aside and say this is the affair of each imperiled country to deal with itself. We cannot guarantee success in every case. In Cuba, in North Vietnam and elsewhere, there have been failures; in many cases, many more than is publicly realized, there have been successes, some of major significance. But it may be premature to advertise these cases or the resources used.

Where Communism has achieved control of the governmental apparatus of a country, as it had, for a time, in Iran and Guatemala and it still has in Cuba and in Czechoslovakia, in East Germany, Hungary, Poland and the other Eastern satellites and in North Vietnam and North Korea, should we as a country shy away from the responsibility of continuing efforts to right the situation and to restore freedom of choice to the people? Are we worried that the charge be made that we, too, like Khrushchev, had our own policy of “wars of liberation”?

In answer to these two questions, I would point out that this issue, one important for our survival, has been forced upon us by Soviet action. In applying the rule of force instead of law in international conduct, the Communists have left us little choice except to take counteraction of some nature to meet their aggressive moves, whenever our vital interests are involved. Merely to appeal to their better nature and to invoke the rules of international law is of little use. We cannot safely stand by and permit the Communists with their “salami” tactics, so well advertised by Rakosi in Hungary, to take over the Free World slice by slice. Furthermore, we cannot safely take the view that once the Communists have “liberated” in Soviet style a piece of territory, this is then forever beyond the reach of corrective action.

If the people of a particular country, of their own free will, by free popular vote or referendum, should adopt a Communist form of government, that might present a different situation. So far this just has never happened. Neither Russia itself nor mainland China adopted Communism in this way. Certainly Poland, Hungary, Cuba and the others did not do so.

In the conduct of foreign relations, it must, of course, be recognized there are limits to the power of any nation. A country’s enlightened self-interest, with all the facts taken into consideration, must guide its actions rather than any abstract principles, sound as they may be. No country could undertake as a matter of national policy to guarantee freedom to all the peoples of the world now under the dictatorship of Communism or any kind of dictatorship. We cannot go galloping around like Sir Galahad on his white charger, ridding the world of all its ills.

On the other hand, we cannot safely limit our response to the Communist strategy of take-over solely to those cases where we are invited in by a government still in power, or even to instances where a threatened country has first exhausted its own, possibly meager, resources in the “good fight” against Communism.

We ourselves must determine when, where and how to act, hopefully with the support of other leading Free World countries who may be in a position to help, keeping in mind the requirements of our own national security.

And as we reach our decisions and chart our courses of action in meeting Communist secret aggression, the intelligence services with their special techniques have an important role to play, new to this generation, perhaps, but nonetheless highly important to the success of the enterprise.

Free peoples everywhere abhor government secrecy. There is something sinister and dangerous, they feel, when governments “shroud” their activities. It may be an entering wedge for the establishment of an autocratic form of rule, a coverup for their mistakes.

Hence it is difficult to persuade free people that it may be in the national interest, at times, to keep certain matters confidential, that their freedoms may eventually be endangered by too much talk about national defense measures and delicate diplomatic negotiations. After all, what a government, or the press, tells the people it also automatically tells its foes, and any person who through malice or carelessness gives away a secret may be betraying it to the Soviets just as clearly as if he secretly handed it to them. What good does it do to spend millions to protect ourselves against espionage if our secrets just leak away? Basically, I feel that government is one of the worst offenders.

Our founding fathers put the guarantee of freedom of the press in our Bill or Rights, and it became the First Amendment to the Constitution: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedoms of speech or of the press.” As a result of this and other constitutional safeguards, it has generally been judged that although we have several espionage laws, we could not enact federal legislation comparable to that in effect in another great democracy, Great Britain. The British Official Secrets Act provides penalties for the unauthorized disclosure of certain specified and classified information, and British legal procedures permit prosecutions without publicly disclosing classified information.

Our own method of dealing with security violations can, I think, be improved, and I propose later on to make certain suggestions in this regard. Anyone working in our own intelligence organizations in this country comes to realize, however, that it is necessary to plan with care and skill if he is to succeed in keeping his activities secret, and under present law he cannot expect much help from the courts in deterring those who would expose his activities. In fact, in my own experience in planning intelligence operations, I always considered, first, how the operation could be kept secret from the opponent and, second, how it could be kept from the press. Often the priority is reversed. For the intelligence officer in a free society this is one of the facts of life.

The question is whether we can improve our security system, consistent with the maintenance of our free way of life and a free press, and whether, on balance, it is worthwhile to try at least to limit our security lapses and indiscretions. I am persuaded that it is.

There are these important areas to be considered:
first
, the “giveaway,” what is published with official approval;
second
, the “contrived leak,” what is secretly passed out to the press by disgruntled or dissatisfied government officials who dislike a particular policy and feel that they must defend the position of their “service” against the encroachment of a rival service or the exponents of a conflicting policy;
third
, the “careless leaks.” As a people, we talk too much; we like to show that we are in the know. Finally, there is the burning issue of the trustworthiness of the personnel who have access to classified information and the security of sensitive installations.

The recent disclosures of Pawel Monat, a Polish intelligence officer trained by Communist experts to carry on espionage in the United States, dramatize our national weaknesses. Colonel Monat was a high official of the Polish intelligence service before he was assigned to Washington in 1955 as military attaché. About three years later, in the spring of 1958, Monat returned to Poland, and after a year of further intelligence work there, and reflection on what he had experienced in the U.S.A., he decided to abandon his work and Communism. In 1959, he sought asylum in the United States through our embassy in Vienna. Here are some of the things he has to say about espionage in the United States in his book
Spy in the U.S.
:

America is a delightful country in which to carry out espionage. As a country it is rather ingenuous about keeping its secrets. . . . One of the weakest links in the nation’s security . . . is the yearning friendliness of her people. . . . they crave public recognition. . . .

I was able to find one American after another who seemed impelled—after a drink or two—to tell me things he might never have told his own wife.
1

But it was obviously in published form that Monat found his most precious sources. “Americans,” he says, “are not only careless and loquacious in their speech, they also give away far more than is good for them in public print.”

Then he goes on to outline what he was able to get from one issue of
Aviation Weekly
, the “24th Annual Inventory of Air Power,” which ran to 372 pages. “It would,” he says, “have taken us months of work and thousands of dollars to agents to ferret out the facts one by one. . . . The magazine handed it all to us on a silver platter.”

He pays tribute also to the publication
Missiles and Rockets
and very particularly to what he referred to as “house organs” of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, which fight “the battle of interservice rivalry” in print, and to the stream of manuals and reports published by each of the services. Finally, he emphasizes the value to the Communist intelligence effort of “Congressional hearings on the defense budget,” which he lists as one of his best sources.

“It must be extremely difficult,” Monat adds, “for the U.S. military to try to defend the nation and its freedoms when the very sinews of its defenses are being exposed, day by day, to anybody who can read.”

Douglass Cater, an eminent author and reporter, has frequently written about this whole problem and has dealt with it exhaustively and fairly. Describing the frustrations of both the Truman and the Eisenhower administration, he writes: “President Truman once claimed that ‘95% of our secret information has been published by newspapers and slick magazines’ and argued that newsmen should withhold some information even when it had been made available to them by authorized government sources.”
2
This, I feel, is a good deal to ask of any newspaperman, though I have known of cases where reporters or their editors on their own initiative have suppressed stories which they deemed harmful to national security, or have sought advice as to the sensitiveness of particular items.

In a press conference held by President Eisenhower in 1955, Cater quotes the President as saying: “For some two years and three months I have been plagued by inexplicable undiscovered leaks in this Government.” Cater also refers to a statement by Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson in which Wilson estimated that this country was giving away military secrets to the Soviets that would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars if we could learn the same type from them.

The intelligence community has been well aware of this problem, and when he was Director of CIA Bedell Smith was so disturbed by the situation that he decided to make a test. In 1951 he enlisted the services of a group of able and qualified academicians from one of our large universities for some summer work. He furnished them publications, news articles, hearings of the Congress, government releases, monographs, speeches, all available to anyone for the asking. He then commissioned them to determine what kind of an estimate of U.S. military capabilities the Soviets could put together from these unclassified sources. Their conclusions indicated that in a few weeks of work by a task force on this open literature our opponents could acquire important insight into many sectors of our national defense. In fact, when the findings of the university analysts were circulated to President Truman and to other policymakers at the highest level, they were deemed to be so accurate that the extra copies were ordered destroyed and the few copies that were retained were given a high classification.

Is there any way to stop the giveaway? One large and important sector of this problem is within the control of the government and the Congress, that is, what the executive and legislative branches of government publish or allow to be published, including particularly the publication of Congressional hearings and investigations.

In this field, there is certainly evidence of influential Congressional sentiment in favor of a move to curtail indiscriminate hand-outs. On March 7, 1963, Representative George Mahon, a highly respected member of the Congress and Chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, in a House speech widely reported in the press demanded an end to what he called an “outrageous and intolerable” situation. He asked that:

. . . the President, the Vice President, and the Speaker of the House . . . undertake to coordinate a course of action for the purpose of halting the rapid erosion of our national intelligence effort. . . . Officials in Moscow, Peking, and Havana must applaud our stupidity in announcing publicly facts which they would gladly spend huge sums of money endeavoring to obtain. Responsibility on our part is urgently required.
3

I, of course, recognize that in connection with appropriations and other legislation, particularly our defense budget, committees of the Congress need to receive a substantial amount of classified information from the executive. Does it necessarily follow that this must be published in great detail? It is often the intimate and technical details that are the most valuable to the potential enemy and of little interest to the public. I question whether, with respect to these technical details, there is a public “need to know.”

It is also often said that Congress can’t keep a secret. Past history belies this. The Manhattan Project, through which the atomic bomb was developed and billions of public funds spent, was a well-kept secret in a vital area of our national defense.

The reader may object that secrets can be kept in time of “hot” war but not under mere Cold War conditions. From almost ten years of experience in dealing with the Congress, I have found in my contacts with the subcommittees for the CIA of the Armed Services Committees of the House and Senate, and the Appropriations Committees of the two houses, that secrets can be kept and the needs of our legislative bodies met. In fact, I do not know of a single case of indiscretion that has resulted from telling these committees the most intimate details of CIA activities, and that included the secret of the U-2 plane. It is true, of course, that it is more difficult to preserve secrecy on matters which have to go before the entire Congress and receive its vote of approval. But it is not necessary to include intimate details of the kind that may have to be disclosed to certain Congressional committees by the Department of Defense in connection with its exhaustive budget presentations.

I would conclude that if this whole subject were discussed frankly and fully between the executive departments and the Congress, a method could be found for preventing the flow to hostile quarters of a part of the information which the adversary now obtains. There would still be a substantial trickle, to be sure, but not the great flood of information which is now made available. Is this not worth exploring?

A more difficult area is that of the press, periodicals and particularly service and technical journals. I recall the days when the intelligence community was perfecting plans for various technical devices to monitor Soviet missile testing and space operations. The technical journals exerted themselves to give the American public, and hence the Soviet Union, the details of radar screens and the like, which for geographic reasons, to be effective, had to be placed on the territory of friendly countries close to the Soviet Union. These countries were quite willing to cooperate as long as secrecy could be preserved. This whole vital operation was threatened by public disclosure, largely through our own technical journals, to the great embarrassment of our friends who were cooperating and whose position vis-à-vis the Soviets was complicated by the publication of speculations and rumors. Except for a small number of technically minded people, such disclosures added little to the welfare or happiness or even to the knowledge of the American people. Certainly this type of information did not fall in the “need to know” category for the American public.

Undoubtedly it is of the greatest importance in this nuclear missile age to keep the American people informed about our general military position in the world in ample detail. Of course we should have an informed public opinion, backed up with hard facts, authoritatively presented. There has been at times too much talk about bomber and missile gaps and the like. Personally, I am convinced that at no time has our military position been inferior to that of the Soviets. It is well that our people should know that and the Soviet Government, too. But what we don’t really require is detailed information as to where every hardened missile site is located, exactly how many bombers or fighters we will have or the details of their performance.

If the giveaway is generally a result of our practice of conducting government in the open, both contrived and careless leaks can be attributed to interests and acts of special groups or individuals within the government. The contrived leak is the name I give to the spilling of information without the authority to do so, and it has occurred most often in the Defense Department and at times in the State Department. There have been cases where subordinate officers felt that their particular service or the policy which it is promoting was being unfairly handled by the press or even by higher officials of government because “all” the facts were not available to the press and public. It is, in effect, an appeal by subordinates, over the heads of superiors, to public opinion. This occurred once in connection with the transfer of major responsibility in the whole field of strategic missiles from the Army to the Air Force. At other times, information regarding State Department policies has been leaked by subordinates who disapproved of what was going on or by other agencies, generally the military, where there have been differences from State Department policy.