The Family Jewels (43 page)

Intelligence operations required positive control. There was a logic to the way Family Jewels evolved. Typically, much was promised at the proposal stage, there were initial results, and then the collection programs failed to be the gold mines advertised. The usual argument was that effectiveness suffered because not enough was being done, and the result was, in effect, escalation. CIA mail-opening became massive in this way. Project Chaos went from simply targeting agency collection elements to employing its own agents. The NSA's Project Minaret expanded its coverage and solicited names for its watch list. Iran-Contra started by accosting allies for contributions in cash or in kind to collecting money from direct arms sales—to enemies. Escalation of the Terrorist Surveillance Program remains hidden, but will no doubt prove to be considerable. When there was a balance to be struck between perceived collection requirements and the rights of citizens, the latter were minimized.

Mission creep has complemented ineffectiveness argu
ments in accounting for project escalation. A search for useful propaganda themes motivated CIA mail-opening, which turned to watching Americans. Project Chaos aimed at antiwar protesters but expanded to encompass black radicals. The rendition and interrogation program similarly targeted Al Qaeda, but soon widened to include terrorist suspects of all stripes. Successes with NSC activism in aiding the
contras
led to a supposition the same operatives could free hostages in Lebanon. The CIA drone program began with discrete, individual missions and mushroomed to constant aerial coverage over multiple combat theaters. At each stage the programs became more dangerous and an even greater public concern—but secrecy kept the public from learning until the Family Jewel was revealed by leak or by failures in the operational arena.

These attributes of Family Jewels are typical of intelligence ventures, and their importance is magnified by some others. One crucial aspect is that projects are relatively easy to initiate, but then very difficult to shut down. Not only do opponents of continuation have to counter the “do more” argument, they have to overcome the accumulated inertia of the activity. Project Chaos and CIA mail-opening are ideal examples. Chaos endured complaints from an internal management group at Langley, a negative finding from the agency's Inspector General, and the end of the war protests it was intended to counter. Even then it survived into the postwar period by shifting to counterterrorism, finally to demise as it lost focus. Project Lingual, the mail-opening, stayed afloat in the face of knowledge of its illegality from the beginning, two adverse IG reports a decade apart, and two years of the responsible office trying to get rid of the program. In the case of NSA's Minaret eavesdropping, the program continued for more than a year after a court decision rendered it plainly illegal. In the modern era, so far as can be discerned from the Department of Justice legal opinions and the disclosures
made about “enhanced interrogation,” the techniques seem to have become discredited and fallen into disuse by about 2005, yet the Bush administration bent heaven and earth to preserve the legal authority—if you can call it that—to use them. The “authority” survived President Bush's acknowledgment of the black prisons and was canceled only after revelation of the destruction of the torture videotapes.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all is that Family Jewels seem to have a tendency to replicate, suggesting that abuse fulfills some functional purpose. Vietnam-era surveillance is reprised by war on terror surveillance. Vietnam-era eavesdropping yields to the Terrorist Surveillance Program. Harsh interrogation tactics used in the CIA molehunt are followed by the even greater horrors of the Bush administration's treatment of its detainees. The assassination plots of the Cold War have been succeeded by the real killings of the drone program. In all these cases the replication occurred
despite
the knowledge among intelligence officers of just how controversial and painful were the consequences—to them—of the same kinds of actions in bygone days.

Secrecy cloaks the daggers. Security classification protects legitimate national security information, but as frequently or more so it has been used to evade accountability. The Central Intelligence Agency's suppressive maneuvers—and the other members of the intelligence community play in the same key—attempt to shape public discussion, minimize criticism, and produce an idealized image of the secret warrior. Friendly journalists are coddled, critics obstructed. Former agency persons attempting to present their views to the public have been the special victims of suppressive maneuvers. The entire concept of flap potential—which first led to the Family Jewels documents—aims to avoid negative publicity or, failing that, structure the outcome in the way
most favorable to the agency. This is not to say that every government institution does not engage in similar kinds of public relations—but in the case of Family Jewels, the manipulation of knowledge in the public domain has legal and ethical aspects that elsewhere exist within much narrower boundaries.

This review of the Family Jewels has touched only tangentially on the way in which the CIA complies with its legal responsibility to release records to the public and respond to Freedom of Information Act and other declassification requests, but it has shown in great detail how the agency engages in suppressive maneuvers and has erected a fortress of secrecy to control the voices of its own. Suffice it to say that there is a huge—and exactly parallel—story in Langley's formal treatment of records. Those secrecy practices impinge directly on Family Jewels. Managing flap potential is all about what the public learns and what is denied to it.

Secrecy also has an operational aspect. Not only does secret knowledge have extremely seductive power, when spooks walk on the dark side they experience the greatest invitation to excess, believing that security classification shields their actions from scrutiny. If doing more means threatening the human rights of citizens or foreign nationals, the spooks would prefer the public not know. Under conditions of secrecy the Family Jewels have flourished, and the more secret the activity, the greater the temptation to evade safeguards. The Bush administration succumbed to that allure in the way it handled congressional notification about its eavesdropping, rendition, and interrogation programs.

But abuse festers amid secrecy. The challenge of preserving an intelligence agency in a democracy is precisely that public confidence is required to ensure effectiveness. The compact between the CIA and the American polity is a delicate one—and it is affected by Family Jewels revealed in the past. Dirty laundry that is not aired gets smellier. All secrets
are revealed sooner or later, and if citizens know or believe that spooks have kept the lid on their actions so as to avoid accountability, their suspicions of the CIA and its cohorts will only be further magnified.

Presidents and their staffs are some of the most dangerous violators of secrecy, because they know what the public does not. Whenever a Family Jewels crisis erupts, the president is of course enveloped in whatever political situation happens to exist at that moment. A president can respond to a Family Jewels crisis in four basic ways. The first is to leap to the CIA's defense. In the crises surveyed here, no president did that, at least not exactly. George W. Bush held the line for a time, but only so long as he needed to mollify the agency on some level while he cited its flawed intelligence to defend himself against charges of aggression in starting the Iraq war. A second possibility is for the president to lead the charge, professing himself surprised, demanding efforts to get to the bottom of the mysteries revealed. This is not difficult to do, since presidents are not, in fact, familiar with every detail of the CIA's activity. The president takes command, shows himself to be active and responsive to challenge. Thus Gerald Ford, at the outset of the Year of Intelligence, created the Rockefeller Commission. Bill Clinton did the same, quickly assigning his Intelligence Oversight Board to investigate the Guatemala affair. The third option is for the chief executive to do nothing, to leave the CIA flapping in the wind and hope the controversy dies out. Ronald Reagan did that with Iran-Contra, resisting any comment until political upheaval became so intense that the cost of silence became excessive. The final strategy is to manipulate the CIA to ensure that it, not the White House, becomes the main target, which is what Richard Nixon attempted to do in Watergate.

One tactic in any of those strategies is to reveal secrets.
The first the public learned that there had been any question of the CIA intervening to quash Watergate inquiries was when Richard Nixon—whose own conspiracy this had been—outed it. Mr. Nixon's minion Henry Kissinger leaked all the time. Gerald Ford's assassination disclosure was inadvertent, or was it? The effect of that revelation was to turn public attention away from the White House. Leaks proliferated during Iran-Contra. The Bush White House deliberately leaked intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq—and then outed a CIA undercover officer in a harebrained scheme to discredit a critic. Presidents and staff leak to protect themselves, to deflect attention, or to focus the public in a direction they want.

The complement to leaks is obfuscation and amnesia. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller warned Bill Colby not to remember so much when testifying before his commission. Vice Admiral John Poindexter had a clear recollection that President Reagan had approved a covert action finding, but could not remember where this key document was located. Oliver North's shredding party would be a legendary episode in Iran-Contra too. Alberto Gonzales and Richard Cheney asserted that a group of legislators had agreed to aggressive NSA eavesdropping when the congressmen maintained they had posed objections. The Church Committee could not reach a conclusion as to whether presidents had approved assassinations, because national security advisors Gordon Gray, McGeorge Bundy, and Walt Rostow could not remember ever discussing the topic with them. The combination of leaks and obfuscation is used to shape inquiries and protect the president from accountability. The White House plays the same games as does the CIA.

Before continuing, it is worth spending a little time on some of the ringmasters of the Family Jewels crises
recounted here. Many, many people—officials and operatives—at Langley, at Fort Meade, and in the White House helped grind and polish the Jewels, but a few figures stand out as key players. These ringmasters sparked action, pushed for programs and resisted halting them, or when the crises came stood against inquiry. Sometimes the ringmasters did all those things. At some level their actions put presidents, colleagues, and subordinates all in jeopardy.

Vice President Richard Cheney has to be ranked the leading ringmaster. He exercised a remarkable influence through the Family Jewels crises described here. Over a period of three decades starting with the Year of Intelligence, Dick Cheney remained a central figure. As deputy assistant to the president, Cheney set up the Rockefeller Commission and ensured its narrow scope. Promoted to assistant with Donald Rumsfeld's departure, Cheney spearheaded President Ford's responses to the congressional investigators. In the Iran-Contra affair, Representative Cheney was crucial in limiting the joint committee inquiry and in drafting a minority report to discredit Congress's findings. In the second Bush administration, the vice president stood at the forefront of those actually ordering the operations that created Family Jewels, functioning as George W. Bush's manager for the dark side. Mr. Cheney was at the heart of rendition and interrogation as well as NSA eavesdropping, not to mention the invasion of Iraq. Cheney's involvement in the Family Jewels can hardly be overstated.

Before turning to the lower ranks, Barack Obama's role also needs to be considered. A number of President Obama's actions have damaged America's real interests. Obama effectively quashed the public's push to impose accountability on former Bush administration officials and CIA operatives. He lightened that offense somewhat by forcing release of the “torture memos,” the documents that underlay Bush-Cheney activities, but further clouded the issue by permitting the
prosecution of whistleblower John Kiriakou in a context in which none of the actual transgressors in the earlier abuses had been brought to justice. No doubt President Obama faced a delicate situation—he needed to forge good relations with the spooks. He had taken office with little standing on national security issues. They were under fire. The president coddled the spooks here—and expanded their role by approving intensification of the drone war. It is impossible to escape the impression that Obama bought into the basic premises of the war on terror. But as he showed with his initial push to close the Guantanamo prison camp, the president also had a moral center. Obama's failure to sustain the effort to close Guantanamo and his acquiescence in continued authority for the wireless intercept programs show poorly. He either lacked the courage of his convictions or let himself be led by the intelligence mavens. Unlike his predecessors, however, President Obama did not add new Family Jewels. Obama functioned as an enabler for the jewelers, not as their ringmaster.

The other major ringmaster, at least for the early period, was an agency official. Richard Helms was CIA's spy par excellence. His fingerprints are all over the domestic abuses that formed the early Family Jewels. Helms held sway during the first era much as Cheney has dominated the more recent period. As a division chief and operations directorate official, Helms was present at the creation of illegal mail-opening and mind-control experiments, and he held the top directorate job during the post–Bay of Pigs Castro assassination plots. Though he later issued orders prohibiting assassination plots, Mr. Helms considered he held a field marshal's baton the day he left the Oval Office after Richard Nixon ordered CIA to go after Allende of Chile. As deputy, and then Director of Central Intelligence, Helms presided over the spy wars and harsh interrogation of Yuri Nosenko, the CIA's projects aimed at the antiwar movement, the NSA's Minaret and Shamrock operations, the initial effort to construct a fortress
of secrecy by prosecuting Marchetti and persecuting Agee, and the CIA's involvement in Watergate. Dick Helms, though uneasy about Nosenko's treatment, could not bring himself to simply order inquisitors to desist.