60 Years of CIA

"The CIA station chief in Islamabad was busy arranging the necessary cooperation with Pakistan." With much vigour a four-day, full-dress rehearsal was held in the mud huts and caves from May 20. There were great expectations. But on May 29 the whole plan had to be "aborted because a day earlier Pakistan had conducted its nuclear tests. Coordination with Pakistan was no longer possible."

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by Inder Malhotra

(February 01, Washington, Sri Lanka Guardian) By one of those strange coincidences that abound in history, America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is roughly as old as Indian independence. So it was that in the midst of the haphazard and lacklustre functions organised by New Delhi in various cities of the United States to "project" India at 60, the CIA also celebrated its sashsti poorthi. Few heard of it, however, because the agency, on its own, kept the "festivities" very quiet for the obvious reason that its standing with the American public is at an "all-time low." Forgotten are the days when the heavily financed much hyped CIA was considered "omniscient and omnipotent."

At the birthday party most of the serving and retired CIA stalwarts — all the living former directors were invited, of course — looked doleful, if only because the CIA is no longer even the Cock of the Intelligence Walk. Its authority and functions have been curtailed drastically by the reforms introduced after 9/11 when it was caught — as on many previous occasions — with its "pants down right up to its ankles," in the words of an American commentator.

The first intelligence czar, above the CIA chief’s head, was a diplomat, John D. Negroponte. When, a year ago, he inexplicably resigned to become the number two at the state department, a retired admiral replaced him. In fact, the joke in the US capital these days is that Robert Gates, the only former director of the CIA to be defence secretary, finds that the Pentagon is now the lord and master of American intelligence establishment, with the powers of the Defence Intelligence Agency enhanced, and generals and major-generals presiding over every branch of intelligence worth the name. To the mortification of the CIA old-timers, some of its responsibilities have been "outsourced" to the private sector.

The surprise is not that an angry White House, acting on the recommendations of two blue-ribbon commissions, has cut the CIA to size, but that it took so long to do so, considering that many of its stupidities, dirty tricks and blunders have been known to the world for decades. My own awakening to the fact of this awesome monster really having feet of clay took place in May 1960. Gerry Powers’ U-2 flight over the Soviet Union had then ensured that an elaborately planned Big Powers’ summit in Paris would fall flat. The bizarre Bay of Pigs fiasco had followed. Yet, in the American power structure the terribly flawed agency went on marching from strength to strength until its incompetence became its Nemesis.

As it happened, a new book on the catalogue of the CIA’s catastrophic follies and failures was released around the date of its founding that has turned the knife in its multiple wounds. It has also won widespread acclaim for its devastating content and scintillating prose. Written by Tim Weiner, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter of the New York Times who has covered with distinction the CIA and American intelligence for 20 years, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday) is a truly outstanding study, deeply researched and superbly crafted. A lot, though not all, of what it says is doubtless in the public domain, but has never before been documented so thoroughly as in this volume. Weiner is also fair. He gives the agency the credit for its achievements, which are only a handful, and exposes pitilessly the plethora of the egregious disasters it has perpetrated.

Quoting one of the more skilled Cold War CIA station chiefs, Weiner concludes that even at the height of its power and glory, the agency "had a great reputation and terrible record." The reputation, he adds, was torn to shreds long ago, and the record has plummeted constantly. This, adds the author, should explain why "eleven Presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world, why nearly every CIA director left the agency in a worse shape than he had found it." In a series of indictments of the CIA, Weiner highlights the agency’s habit of compounding its monumental mistakes by hiding them and all the time "lying to the successive Presidents." Nor were the Presidents — excluding Eisenhower but not Kennedy — snow white innocents; each one of them had "misused" the agency for his "political purposes," and agency chiefs "had crassly complied" with improper presidential demands.

Yet, the tarnished CIA has its defenders. For instance, a respected columnist of Washington Post, David Ignatius, pointed out that the agency’s career analyst of the Middle East, Paul R. Pillar, had rightly warned of all the consequences of invading Iraq that have come to pass so cruelly. But Ignatius has had to admit that the CIA bosses suppressed Pillar’s report and "embraced" the Bush administration’s plan. An even more strident praise for the CIA has come from trans-Atlantic "cousins," especially Sir Richard Dearlove, the British MI6’s head honcho from 1999 to 2004. He accuses Weiner of "lack of subtlety" but is unable to contradict him on any point. Pillar is now a professor at Georgetown University.

Let me conclude with one telling extract from the book that concerns us: "One day in May 1998, the then CIA Director, George Tenet proclaimed at a headquarters prep rally, ‘I will not allow the CIA to become a second-rate organisation.’ A few days later on May 11, India’s Hindu Nationalist government conducted a series of nuclear tests. These should not have come as a shock but they did because the CIA did not have a clue, despite plenty of indications to show that they could take place." However, Weiner concedes that Tenet had "reason to look the other way. His troops were rehearsing at that time an operation to capture Osama bin Laden… The agency’s old Afghan agents were to snatch him for it. The CIA station chief in Islamabad was busy arranging the necessary cooperation with Pakistan." With much vigour a four-day, full-dress rehearsal was held in the mud huts and caves from May 20. There were great expectations. But on May 29 the whole plan had to be "aborted because a day earlier Pakistan had conducted its nuclear tests. Coordination with Pakistan was no longer possible."