The Hidden Hand

A Brief History of the CIA

Richard H. Immerman

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781444351378, 9781444351361
• eBook ISBN: 9781118835586
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

THE HIDDEN HAND

Since its inception in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency has played an outsized role in the political life of the United States, whether by formulating and implementing policy or by fueling popular culture and imagination. The Hidden Hand is an accessible and up-to-date history of the agency that succinctly takes the reader from its early days of intelligence gathering and analysis to its more recent involvement in the execution of foreign policy through covert operations, psychological warfare, and other programs. In manageable chapters and easy-to-digest prose, the author — a respected scholar who has researched intelligence for more than 30 years and also served as a high-ranking officer in the intelligence community — covers all aspects of the CIA from its mission to its performance to its record. He draws on the latest evidence and research to assess the agency's successes and failures over the last half century, highlighting key operations of the past and present. Throughout, his assessment is balanced and thorough with an eye on the complex and controversial nature of the subject. This is a masterful account that demythologizes the CIA's role in America's global affairs while addressing its integral place within American political and popular culture.

Chapter 1

Birth of an Enigma: 1945–1949

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is America's most enigmatic institution. Its mission requires secrecy, and, as a consequence, it and its history are shrouded in mystery. The “Company,” nevertheless, is among America's most well-known institutions, with its own YouTube site, Facebook page, and Twitter account. “CIA” is likewise among the world's most recognizable acronyms, and millions of people around the globe and within the United States consider the agency both a primary instrument of and an appropriate metaphor for US foreign policy.

The enigma of the CIA goes beyond its notoriety. Opinion poll after opinion poll in the United States reveal that it is among America's most unpopular, disrespected, and mistrusted institutions. “The agency's a funny place,” reads a recent comment, by one of its own veterans no less. “It's like middle schoolers with clearances,” he explained. Politicians and officials of both parties, from the president on down, are fine with this description and reputation. Attributing a policy disaster, security lapse, or even a war to an intelligence failure is easier for the American public to understand than would be a deep dive into the policymaking process, and of course the policymakers and legislators escape blame. Further, intelligence gaffes seem susceptible to quick fixes. The offending intelligence officers can readily be replaced, institutional reforms can be enacted, more spies can be sent into the field and better satellites built, and analysts can be more rigorously trained. For most Americans, writes another CIA veteran, the Company is a “combination of hope chest, voodoo doll, and the portrait of Dorian Gray.”¹

Still, despite, or in a perverse sense because of, the CIA's image and reputation, the Company is unequivocally a cultural icon. The year 2001 and the tragic attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center brought unprecedented and unwelcome attention to the agency for its failure to “connect the dots” and prevent al-Qaeda's long-gestating operation. It was also the year that three popular series focusing on the CIA debuted on network television: “Alias” on ABC; CBS's “The Agency,” and Fox's “24”. All featured an attractive cast of racially and ethnically diverse men and women who are committed, competent, and courageous. Coincidentally, yet in retrospect appropriately, each of the programs aired for the first time only weeks after the 9/11 tragedy. In fact, CBS changed the sequencing of “The Agency's” episodes because the framework for the pilot script, an al-Qaeda plot to attack the West (Harrods in London) that repeatedly refers to Osama bin Laden, would have struck a raw nerve. Shortly after the show proved a success, however, CBS ran the pilot.²

While coincidental (the writers and producers were of course unaware of al-Qaeda's plans), the plot lines and character of these programs are revealing and suggestive of how twenty-first century Americans have come to perceive and understand the CIA. The television shows prior to 2001 that revolved around the agency were very different. “Get Smart” (1965), for example, was a slapstick comedy. “I Spy” (1965), with Bill Cosby, the first African American to play a lead in a television drama, was a light-hearted vehicle for promoting civil rights. And “Mission Impossible” (1966), which featured a make-believe CIA and decades later was turned into a series of movies to show off Tom Cruise, was pure escapism. None made an attempt to portray the CIA seriously; none raised any one of the multiple ethical, let alone legal, questions inherent in its responsibilities and behavior. This is how the CIA wanted it. Indeed, the agency went so far to buy the movie rights to novels to ensure that they never became movies and to refuse to cooperate with those movies that actually illuminated the CIA.³

This changed with the films about the CIA made during and in the wake of the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the Congressional hearings held in the mid-1970s to investigate the agency's misconduct. These were big Hollywood productions that represented the agency as not only un- or anti-American, but also as institutionally evil. There was the deadly and paranoid CIA featured in the director Michael Winner's “Scorpio” (1973), the misanthropic CIA portrayed in Sydney Pollack's “Three Days of the Condor” (1975), and the reprobate and renegade CIA of Oliver Stone's imagination in his 1991 “JFK.” The “Hunt for Red October” (1990), “Red Storm Rising” (1992), and “Patriot Games” (also 1992), all based on Tom Clancy novels, were the exceptions that proved the rule. Through the exploits of Harrison Ford's Jack Ryan, they sought to evoke what the historian Walter Hixson calls the Reagan-era “Cult of National Security.” Because these films received Washington's cooperation, they signaled a transition in the CIA's filmography.⁴

With the end of the Cold War and as a result of the increased attention to domestic concerns paid by the White House, Congress, and the American public, the CIA leadership concluded that the agency was desperately in need of a public makeover. In the popular consciousness, James Bond was out, and Gordon Gecko was in. The CIA thus judged it vitally important to refurbish its image in order to bolster appropriations and to recruit America's best and brightest at a time when many Americans defined the Company as an unsavory relic of a bygone era. In 1996, therefore, the agency appointed Chase Brandon as its official liaison to Hollywood and permitted former employees to serve as consultants and even extras. For the purpose of projecting authenticity, “The Agency” was the first television program to receive official sanction to film inside the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Although the three shows that came out in 2001, as illustrated most forcefully by “24's” Jack Bauer, uniformly concede the moral ambiguity that so pervades the CIA's culture and mission (that mission is all but exclusively identified with operations; intelligence analysts typically make only cameo appearances if they are present at all), they present agency personnel in virtually every instance as discovering that a career spent battling against the forces of evil is as rewarding as it is exciting.⁵

Blockbuster movies that came out during this same brief window of time after the 9/11 tragedy and before America's invasion of Iraq turned into a nightmare, such as “Spy Game” (2001) and “The Recruit” (2003), project the same dynamics as the trio of 2001 television series. They portray the CIA as a bastion of patriotism and a dream job. In the former, megastars Robert Redford and Brad Pitt engage in virtually criminal behavior, but the viewer cannot help but applaud their professionalism, courage, noble self-sacrifice, and sense of brotherhood. As an MIT-trained computer whiz in “The Recruit,” Colin Farrell forfeits the certainty of earning great wealth, endures the rigors of training at the “farm” (the CIA's facility at Camp Peary in Virginia), and becomes a dazzling and dashing mole-hunter simply because, as Al Pacino explains, he “believes.” The demographics of the recruits at the farm also showcase that the Old Boys network that once defined the CIA had become a mix of race, ethnicity, and gender. Indeed, the CIA in 2004 hired Jennifer Garner, the seductive Sydney Bristow who in “Alias” is as well educated (she is fluent in countless languages) as she is expert in martial arts, to introduce the recruitment video it showed at college job fairs as the agency sought to bolster its work force after years of erosion. “In the real world, the CIA serves as our country's first line of defense,” Garner says. “Right now,” she continues, “the CIA has important, exciting jobs for U.S. citizens.”⁶

The silver and television screens have remained vehicles for communicating Garner's message. “Burn Notice,” which debuted in 2007, and “Covert Affairs,” first broadcast in 2010, have once again treated viewers to stylish and gorgeous agents who are highly principled and display almost superhuman skills and wisdom. They even reflect wholesome family values. Nevertheless, the contemporary environment's influence on popular representations of the CIA is palpable. Intense public criticism of the agency attended the congressional investigations of 9/11 and the production of the fatally flawed National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in 2002. That estimate erroneously claimed that Iraq's tyrannical dictator Saddam Hussein had a hidden cache of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) which he was trying to supplement with a nuclear capability. The CIA was further pummeled as the death totals mounted in Iraq and it was branded as an agency that kidnapped, tortured, and assassinated. Adding insult to injury, Congress knocked it off its pedestal by enacting the 2004 reform legislation that established a director of national intelligence, effectively “demoting” the director of central intelligence (DCI) and, in principle, the agency itself.

Within this context, the darker images of the CIA resurfaced. In the 2004 summer miniseries “The Grid,” which serendipitously premiered in a two-hour special the week that the report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (9/11 Commission) became public, turf wars within the Intelligence Community marred the Global War on Terror that President George W. Bush declared soon after the 9/11 attacks. The chief culprit is the Tom Skerritt-played CIA director, who is only slightly less dastardly than the Middle Eastern terrorists. The next year, in “Syriana” George Clooney won an Oscar for portraying Bob Barnes, a CIA assassin whom the Company scapegoats, double-crosses, and ultimately kills when he unwittingly jeopardizes agency operations in the Middle East that almost unintelligibly blend geopolitics, oil, and arms sales. Matt Damon's Edward Wilson in “The Good Sheperd” (2006) is a composite of James Jesus Angleton and Richard Bissell: one a former chief of counterintelligence, the other a former deputy director of plans, both renowned, for different reasons and with various degrees of validity, as evil geniuses. Not only does a mole penetrate the highest corridors of the CIA and an agent fall victim to a seductress, but also the agents in this movie sanction an interrogation that ends up in suicide and are complicit in a woman's falling to her death from a plane. Although former agents consulted on these films and programs as well, they essentially “went rogue.”⁷

The complexity of these depictions proved popular. Playing a very different kind of character, Damon turned the series of Bourne movies into a franchise; CIA assassins are out to get him because he was a CIA assassin. Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe, both “A-listers” like Damon, costar in “Body of Lies” (2008), a film based on a novel by the Washington Post's respected national security columnist David Ignatius. It portrays counterterrorism as the equivalent of just war, but the CIA's ends-justifies-the-means philosophy intentionally raises troubling questions for the viewer. “Salt” (2010), starring Angelina Jolie, whom one assumes the producers intended to supplant Jennifer Garner as the “face” of the CIA, is replete with so many double agents and so much double dealing that distinguishing the good from the bad becomes virtually impossible. “Fair Game” (2010) is faithful to the memoir by Valerie Plame Wilson about her “outing” as a covert CIA officer by the Bush administration. Allegedly, the White House cost Plame her career and potentially her safety in retribution for her husband, Joseph Wilson (Sean Penn was pointedly cast in the role), publishing an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times. Wilson maintained that the White House and Pentagon built the march to war in Iraq on a foundation of sand by challenging the claim that Saddam Hussein sought to purchase “yellowcake” uranium in Niger. As Plame, Naomi Watt is allied with angels; her CIA colleagues are not.

What is especially distinctive about “Fair Game” is that, absent from virtually all media portrayals of the CIA, analysts make a brief yet highly instructive appearance. Analysts are the bedrock of the CIA. For good reason, however, they do not fit the agency's conventional storyline. Nevertheless, as “Fair Game” intimates but does not make explicit, analysts were the lead actors in the mistaken Iraq War. Dramatically embodying the challenges posed by the need to estimate likelihoods based on weighing knowns against unknowns, what Richard Betts has famously labeled the “enemies of intelligence,” Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, berates a poor analyst both for not being able to eliminate uncertainty in his estimating and also for failing to appreciate the consequences of that failing. Insight and sophistication drive the dialogue. “I don't make the call, Sir,” explains the young analyst. “Yes, you do Paul,” retorts Libby. He then exposes the intelligence analyst as naive and, judging from each of their facial expressions, somewhere between useless and fraudulent. “Each time you interpret a piece of data. Each time you choose a ‘maybe’ over a ‘perhaps,’ you make a call. A decision. And right now you're making lots of little decisions adding up to a big decision and out there's a real world where millions of people depend upon you being right. But what if there's a one percent chance you're wrong. Can you say for sure you'll take that chance and state, as a fact, that this equipment is not intended for a nuclear weapons program?”⁸

“Fair Game” is evidence that in an era defined by insecurity and counterterrorism, popular representations of the CIA, while often critical, seek to complicate the agency's story by projecting its complexity. The agency envelops the good, the bad, and the ugly. Merely by casting Tom Hanks as Charles Wilson, the Texas Congressman whose memory would have been erased from the public consciousness had he not had such great success appropriating funds for the CIA's “covert” war in Afghanistan, the director (Mike Nichols) and screenwriter (Aaron Sorkin, made famous by his liberal rendering of the White House's “West Wing”) of “Charlie Wilson's War” (2007) signaled that clandestine or not, and notwithstanding the leadership role of CIA Director William Casey, this was a “good war.” Despite later developments associated with the formative experiences of Osama bin Laden and the rise of Taliban rule, in Afghanistan the United States in the 1980s was on the right side of history.

The same holds true for the more recent Ben Affleck-directed “Argo” (2012), which won the “Best Picture” Academy Award and in which the celebrated actor also starred. The film's introduction does refer to the CIA's 1953 operation to restore the Shah to Iran's Peacock Throne, a catalyst for the movie's subject: the 1979 Hostage Crisis. Further, reminding CIA age...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Note on Redactions
• Chapter 1: Birth of an Enigma: 1945–1949
• Chapter 2: Halcyon Days and Growing Pains: 1950–1961
• Chapter 3: The CIA and its Discontents: 1961–1976
• Chapter 4: A Time of Troubles: 1977–1987
• Chapter 5: Victory Without Redemption: 1988–2000
• Chapter 6: 9/11, WMD, GWOT, IRTPA, and ODNI: 2001–2004
• Chapter 7: Crisis of Identity: 2005–2013
• Index