As someone who spent most of my career dealing with military issues, I am frequently asked to talk to groups about the military. I'm also a graduate of a Quaker high school, and I usually begin my speeches by describing the Nelson Axiom: The only concentration of pacifists in Washington is located in the Pentagon.
Unfortunately, this rarely elicits a laugh, though it does draw any number of querulous stares as I explain that the military has become reluctant to use military force. Sometimes it seems only generals and Quakers can say no. Conservatives want to use the military to bash folks they hate, like Libya's Muammar Qadhafi. Liberals want to use it to protect the weak in places like Somalia. Diplomats want to use it to gain leverage to solve problems they have been unable to solve through traditional diplomacy. Congress members want to use it to solve their frustration over unsolvable problems like drug smuggling and the flow of illegal immigrants. And the White House wants to use it to avoid criticism for not using it-and will generally approve its use in doses small enough to avoid arousing public ire but not large enough to do any good.
But the military has a deep-seated reluctance to deploy massed force. Some citizens have come to understand that curious bent in the last few years as a multitude of articles have described how Gen. Colin Powell found one excuse after another to fight fighting in the Persian Gulf.
Now, for the Nelson Corollary to the Nelson Axiom: The largest concentration of opponents to covert operations is in the Central Intelligence Agency.
Just as the military got stung in Vietnam, so the CIA has gotten stung-oh, so many times-in its covert actions. The response has been the same-think twice (make that 20 times) before taking action.
I have just finished reading the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the Iranian arms deliveries to Bosnia. As is often the case, the meatiest part was totally ignored by the media. The report explains how State and Defense department officials were concerned that the Bosnian Army was on the verge of defeat in 1993 and began mulling over trying to save it through a covert delivery of weapons, in violation of the U.N. arms embargo.
Built-In Reluctance
"CIA's reaction to talk of covert operations was largely defensive," the report says. "The Agency is a generally cautious institution regarding covert action, especially among personnel who handle European and Eurasian affairs. In the wake of intermittent scandal over more than two decades, most CIA personnel want covert actions to be handled by the book, pursuant to explicit presidential and policy maker direction. Legal strictures in Title V of the National Security Act of 1947 and in Executive Order 12333 are reinforced by the memory of Iran-Contra and the sense that any out-of-channels activity is dangerous, if not illegal."
In fact, the committee said this built-in reluctance has reached such extremes that one CIA officer asserted that CIA employees were statutorily barred from even proposing covert actions-a myth that reminds me of the kid in sixth grade who wouldn't join in putting pennies on the railroad tracks because he said it was illegal.
The Senate report says the professional corps at the CIA greeted the Bosnia proposals emanating from other agencies with "institutional caution." It says at various times CIA professionals argued that such a covert operation would be costly (the budget argument) and could not be kept secret for long (the political embarrassment argument) and urged the director of central intelligence to oppose the covert aid proposals "strongly."
When a proposal was aired that the United States look the other way while the Muslim world provide arms clandestinely, CIA officials who were not lawyers argued that such a policy would be a covert action and would thus require a written "finding," a formal bureaucratic process and notification to Congress. This legal argument was raised even though, as the report states, "Executive branch lawyers would later be far from certain that such encouragement to a third party would constitute covert action, arguing that only actually supporting the foreign action through assistance, direction, direct participation or the like would constitute 'covert action' under the law; but CIA officials erred on the side of caution."
Notice this portrait of the CIA is vastly different from that provided in the media, where the latest wrinkle has the intelligence agency giddily marketing crack cocaine in Los Angeles like church ladies at a bake sale trying to raise funds for new pews. The report describes the CIA as cautious, not as champing at the bit to get out there and play James Bond-as the public would believe.
Shedding the Image
Unfortunately, the image of the CIA as an institution eager to kill clandestinely and the military as an institution eager to kill publicly is hard to, well, kill. The horrid truth would be the ruin of far too many cheap novels and adventure films. Imagine Sylvester Stallone as an agent who checks with the lawyers before lifting that .50-caliber machine gun to his shoulder. Contemplate 007 spending his days behind a desk crafting a "finding" for the President's signature that would describe not only his mission but circumscribe the means by which he could carry it out. Imagine in a Tom Clancy novel, the admiral telling Jack Ryan his brilliant idea had been disapproved because it was not in compliance with Section so-and-so of the National Security Act. Or, more to the point, imagine those rough-and-tough characters all telling the National Security Council that its proposal for a covert action is cockamamie: "Don't you understand? It's too expensive and will bust our budget. It'll be impossible to keep from the media and will embarrass us all. Furthermore, it's illegal. And on top of that, it won't work no matter what kind of poison-gas-shooting pen combined with satellite communication system old Q has invented for us."
A natural reaction is: "Why should we bother having a military if it's reluctant to fight, and why should we bother having a CIA if it's reluctant to go out there and pitch over prime ministers?" Actually, to modern officers and agents that's exactly what citizens should want in their military and intelligence agencies-reluctance.
Covert Converts
R. James Woolsey, who served as the director of central intelligence during the first two years of the Clinton administration, puts it this way: "Just as a doctor should not advocate surgery in the first instance, just as a lawyer should not advocate going to court in the first instance, so intelligence officers ought not to advocate covert action and the military ought not advocate war in the first instance. But they need to be prepared and willing to do so when the President makes a firm decision to order them into action." (Woolsey, by the way, is a practicing lawyer.)
Woolsey has often said covert action is a small part of what intelligence agencies do-less than 1 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget. (Note: Covert collection is spying, gathering data to make better-informed policy makers; covert action is trying to change the world, toppling governments and such.)
That wasn't true in the 1950s. Some estimates put covert action at two-thirds of the intelligence budget before the Bay of Pigs brought some restraint. Back in those days, the CIA was in the philosophical domain of Frank Wisner Sr., Richard Bissell and others who saw their mission as defeating communism and changing the world. Shunted aside were men like Richard Helms, who argued that the real mission of the agency ought to be to collect and analyze intelligence for policy makers. After the Bay of Pigs, the Wisners and Bissells were shunted aside and the Helms view came to prevail in successive decades.
That doesn't make the CIA a land of nerds. There are lots of aggressive case officers in the CIA today. And one former intelligence official underscored the word "aggressive" and emphasized it as a compliment. "You want an officer who can be very aggressive, who is a risk taker, when he is out there trying to recruit members of the Hezbollah in Lebanon," he said. "That's collection. That's the key mission of the agency. I don't know anyone who any longer would say the agency's key mission is covert action."
When someone in the White House, Pentagon or State Department proposes a covert action, the former official said, the CIA has a tendency to accentuate the negative. "From top to bottom, everyone will say, 'Whoa! That's dangerous. That's difficult. People could get killed. The logistics are a lot more difficult than you think. Are you sure you want to do this?' " If the political leadership persists, the next step is to draft a formal plan followed by a written "finding," which the president must sign. None of this "wink and a nod" stuff anymore. While this sounds bureaucratic and time-consuming, the former official said approvals have been done in a matter of days when time was crucial.
He said the proof that the Wisner-Bissell days are a "historical artifact" came in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan's CIA chief, William Casey, had to "dragoon" the agency into Afghanistan. Once ordered in, the agency saluted and was committed. But the agency at the start was opposed to diving into the Afghan pool for fear we might be at the shallow end.
The popular "cowboy" images of the military and the CIA are, of course, related to the popular image of government as cocksure-pockets packed with too many tax dollars and offices staffed with too many people too eager to spend those tax dollars on stupid ideas.
The challenge for agencies like CIA and DoD-as well as every other agency-is to convey to the public that, despite a few loose cannons, the dominant attitude within the public service is, however odd it may seem, cautious and restrained public service.
Warren L. Nelson is a Washington-area independent writer who spent a decade as a national security reporter and two decades as a Capitol Hill staffer.
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