Opening Up the CIA
Espionage, covert action and the trouble with 'dangles'
By EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN
July 14, 2007
http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB118436115647966211.html

A Review of "Legacy of Ashes" By Tim Weiner
Doubleday, 702 pages, $27.95

With great fanfare, the CIA recently released a set of internal
reports describing such supposed skeletons in its closet as Castro
assassination attempts, illegal break-ins and mind-altering drug
experiments on unwitting subjects. As it happens, such "family
jewels," as they are known, had been released (or leaked) in the mid-
1970s: first to the Rockefeller Commission, then to the Senate's
Church Committee (which issued some 14 reports based on them) and
then to the House Select Committee on Intelligence. Despite three
decades of familiarity, such unsecret secrets again made headlines
around the world.

The unwarranted and hyperbolic response to the CIA's new "openness"
only underscores how little the public and press really know about
the CIA. Fortunately, Tim Weiner's prodigiously researched "Legacy
of Ashes" fills in the gaps. Mr. Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize- winning
reporter for the New York Times, lays out the agency's 60 years of
operation, unearthing many newly declassified reports -- and he
details exactly where he found them. He has written a powerful
exposé of a secret arm of the American government without using
anonymous sources, off-the-record interviews or blind
quotes. "Legacy of Ashes" is the best book I've yet read on the
CIA's covert actions.

When the Central Intelligence Agency was officially created after
World War II, its supreme mission, Mr. Weiner notes, was "to steal
Soviet secrets" -- that is, to practice espionage. Of course
espionage is no minor matter. It requires building an organization
that can approach foreign officials clandestinely and persuade them
to betray their government's most prized secrets -- usually in
document form. Espionage also means manipulating the careers of such
officials so that they can gain access to the documents that are
needed and pass them along undetected. The CIA itself thus required
an environment of absolute secrecy. The National Security Act of
1947, authorizing the agency, created exactly such an environment.

But once presidents had at their disposal an entity armored by
secrecy, they began using it to hide covert actions, including
paramilitary operations, that had nothing to do with espionage. Soon
enough the CIA became the home for an assortment of executive
actions, including coups d'état, attempted assassinations, election-
fixing and sabotage. Hence those "family jewels," at one time
zealously protected.

It is Mr. Weiner's thesis that housing two such different
activities -- espionage and covert action -- under the same roof led
to a confusion of the agency's purpose and a shifting of its
attention: Over time, the CIA became obsessively concerned with
covert action and neglected its (crucial) espionage mission. Mr.
Weiner concludes that "the CIA never possessed a single [spy] who
had deep insight into the workings of the Kremlin." In nearly a half-
century of work, he says, the agency succeeded in recruiting only a
handful of Soviet spies "with important information to reveal." Tens
of thousands of "clandestine service officers" ended up
gathering "the barest threads of truly important intelligence."

Such an assessment runs counter to a more conventional view that
claims great success for the CIA in its penetration of the Soviet
empire; e.g. its recruiting of Soviet officials such as Pyotr Popov,
Oleg Penkovsky, Vitaly Yurchenko, Anatoly Filatov and Adolf
Tolkachev. These figures, it is said, provided valuable facts,
including revelations by Popov about Soviet enhanced military
capabilities in Europe and by Penkovsy about Soviet missile accuracy.

The real issue is what constitutes success in the intelligence game.
No doubt those "tens of thousands" of CIA officers worked at
recruiting an equivalent number of Soviet-bloc diplomats, scientists
and military officers posted at embassies and military missions and
at the United Nations. But Soviet intelligence did not sit idly by.
It countered U.S. recruitment attempts by dispatching "dangles" --
loyal officials who feigned disloyalty to the Soviet Union in order
to sow disinformation and confuse the CIA. And the Soviets through
their own recruiting embedded moles -- such as Aldrich Ames at the
CIA and Robert Hanssen at the FBI -- within the U.S. intelligence
establishment. These spies could identify, in turn, CIA moles among
the Soviets.

Thus short-term "success" was often thwarted in the long-term. That
was the view of James Jesus Angleton (1917-87), the legendary head
of the CIA's counterintelligence staff from the mid-1950s until the
mid-1970s. Angleton explained to me before he died that recruiting a
Soviet-bloc official was the easy part. The difficult part was
winnowing out the "dangles" and then invisibly managing the careers
of genuine turncoats so that they could commit useful treason.

Angleton famously believed that many -- if not all -- the Soviets
recruited by the CIA were either dangles or compromised agents who
might mislead U.S. intelligence. So in the late 1960s Angleton
effectively blocked the CIA's Soviet-bloc recruitment efforts by
having his counterintelligence staff label supposedly recruited
agents unreliable -- since their bona fides had not, in his view,
been established. When Angleton was fired on Christmas Eve of 1974,
the CIA's Soviet Bloc Division re-opened the recruitment floodgates
and was back in the espionage business.

Was Angleton's obsession with moles and disinformation misguided?
From the evidence in "Legacy of Ashes," probably not. After Angleton
left, the CIA discovered that Aldrich Ames, the agency's own head of
counterintelligence for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, had
been a KGB mole. And it discovered that it had been receiving Soviet
disinformation from myriad sources. One of Mr. Weiner's more
stunning revelations is that for eight years (1986-94) a large
number of the CIA's highly classified "blue border" reports
contained information from CIA recruits who were "controlled by
Russian intelligence."

The CIA director signed these blue-border reports -- so called
because of their distinctive blue stripes -- and sent them directly
to the president, the secretary of defense and the secretary of
state. Thus Soviet disinformation from the KGB -- and Russian
disinformation after the dissolution of empire -- had routinely made
its way to President George H.W. Bush and President Clinton. Mr.
Weiner says that, astonishingly, the CIA inspector general, upon
looking into this scandal, found that the "senior CIA officers
responsible for these reports had known that some of their sources
were controlled by Russian intelligence." CIA officials continued to
forward the Russian disinformation to the White House because it
would be, as Mr. Weiner puts it, "too embarrassing" to admit that
the CIA had been so badly deceived.

What distinguishes "Legacy of Ashes" from most other books about the
CIA is that it places the agency's assassination attempts, coups
d'état and other covert actions within a real political context. By
tracing the relations between successive presidents and the CIA, Mr.
Weiner refutes the paranoid myth that the agency was an out-of-
control, rogue entity or, as some claim, a kind of shadow
government. The CIA has always been a carefully honed instrument of
executive power.

I do not agree with all of Mr. Weiner's characterizations of CIA
officials. I find his portrayal of James Angleton as an incompetent
and an alcoholic at odds with the trust that Angleton won over many
years from six CIA directors -- including Gen. Walter Bedell Smith,
Allen W. Dulles, George H.W. Bush and Richard Helms. They kept
Angleton in key positions and valued his work. Helms wrote in his
autobiography: "In his day, Jim was recognized as the dominant
counterintelligence figure in the non-communist world." Such esteem
would explain Angleton's long tenure at the CIA.

But such differences of opinion in no way diminish my admiration for
what Mr. Weiner has done. "Legacy of Ashes" is a fascinating and
revealing history -- a jewel of a book, to borrow a term.

Mr. Epstein is the author of "Deception: The Invisible War Between
the KGB & the CIA" and, most recently, "The Big Picture: Money and
Power in Hollywood."

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