The CIA was being sacked like a conquered city. Congressional committees were combing through its files, the Senate focusing on covert action, the House homing in on failures of espionage and analysis. In the streets of Washington, handmade posters of Bill Colby had appeared, inscribed with skulls and crossbones and the ace of spades. The agency's senior officers feared personal and professional ruin. The White House feared political destruction. In the Oval Office on October 13, 1975, the president and his men met to weigh the damage.
"Any document which officially shows American involvement in an assassination is a foreign policy disaster," Colby told the president. "They also want to go into sensitive covert operations"--like Laos. Would the White House go to the courts to stop Congress? "We are better off with a political confrontation than a legal one," said Don Rumsfeld. To prepare for that fight, the president shook up his cabinet at the end of October 1975.
The move was instantly called the Halloween Massacre. Jim Schlesinger was dismissed and Don Rumsfeld became secretary of defense. Dick Cheney took his place as White House chief of staff. And, in an uncharacteristically Machiavellian move, Ford neutralized a potentially troublesome challenger for the 1976 presidential nomination by firing Bill Colby and making George Herbert Walker Bush the next director of central intelligence. It was on its face a strange choice.
Bush was not a general, an admiral, or a spy. He knew almost nothing about intelligence. He was a politician pure and simple. The son of Prescott Bush, a patrician U.S. senator from Connecticut who had been a good friend to Allen Dulles, he had moved to Texas to seek his fortune in the oil business. He served two terms in Congress. He ran for the Senate twice and lost. He had been United Nations ambassador for twenty-two months and Nixon's relentlessly cheery Republican National Committee chairman during Watergate. In August 1974, Ford had come very close to making Bush vice president. His failure to win the job was the worst blow of his political life. His consolation prize was a choice of prestigious ambassadorships, and he had chosen China. From Beijing, Bush had seen the struggles of the CIA through a thick prism, relying on the radio reports of the Voice of America and clippings from week-old newspapers.
But his political instincts told him what the job had to offer. "Bury Bush at the CIA?" he asked himself. "It's a graveyard for politics," he wrote. He told Ford: "I see this as the total end of any political future." The prospect depressed him. But his sense of propriety impelled him to say yes.
Within weeks after becoming director at the end of January 1976, Bush discovered that he loved the agency--the secrecy, the camaraderie, the gadgetry, the international intrigue. The CIA was Skull and Bones with a billion-dollar budget. "This is the most interesting job I've ever had," he wrote to a friend in March. In less than eleven months at the helm, he bucked up morale at headquarters, defended the CIA against all critics, and deftly used the agency to build a political base for his soaring ambitions.
Beyond that, he accomplished little. From the start, Bush ran headlong into Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who had control over 80 percent of the intelligence budget. That money belongs to me, Rumsfeld said; spy satellites and electronic surveillance and military intelligence were all battlefield support for American soldiers. Though the American military was in full retreat, Rumsfeld stiff-armed Bush. He was strongly disinclined to let the director of central intelligence have a say in shaping the secret spending. Rumsfeld was "paranoid" about the CIA and, convinced that the agency was out to "spy on him," cut off long-standing channels of communication and cooperation between the Pentagon and the CIA, the veteran analyst George Carver said in a CIA oral history interview.
The recruitment of new officers in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam was extraordinarily difficult. The agency was top-heavy with middle-aged bureaucrats playing for time; Bush eased out twelve of the sixteen most senior officers at headquarters to try to make some headroom. He wanted to name his own chief of the clandestine service, so he called in Colby's chief, Bill Nelson, and said it was time for him to leave. Nelson saluted and left, but not before dropping a memo on Bush's desk that told him that the clandestine service had two thousand too many officers. Bush, in the tradition of Allen Dulles, buried the study.
"THE CIA WAS CUT OFF"
"This is a turbulent and troublesome period for the Agency," Bush wrote to President Ford on June 1, 1976. "The intensive investigations by both Houses of the Congress for more than a year now have resulted in extensive public disclosures of past and current covert action operations." The investigations led the Senate to create an intelligence oversight committee while Bush was director; the House set one up a year later. If only the president could find a way to shield the CIA from Congress, Bush wrote, then "covert action operations will continue to make the positive contribution to our foreign policy that they have made over the past twenty-eight years."
But the agency, under a newly vigilant Congress, had very few new covert-action operations under way. In a written response to questions from the author, Bush contended that the congressional investigations did long-lasting damage to the agency. They "set back our liaison relationships around the world"--the CIA's links with foreign intelligence services, the source of so much of the information it gathered--and "they caused many people abroad to pull away from cooperating with the CIA." Worst of all, he said, "they devastated the morale of perhaps the finest group of public servants this country has."
Continuing failures in the field also sapped the CIA's spirit in 1976. Among the biggest was in Angola. Two months after the fall of Saigon, President Ford approved a big new operation to secure Angola against communism. The country had been Portugal's biggest prize in Africa, but Lisbon's leaders had been among the worst of the European colonialists, and they sacked Angola as they withdrew. The country was coming apart as rival forces went to war.
The CIA shipped $32 million in cash and $16 million worth of weapons to Angola through the agency's great ally, President Mobutu of the Congo. The weapons went to an unruly gang of anticommunist guerrillas, commanded by Mobutu's brother-in-law and aligned with the white South African government. The program was aided by President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, a genial leader who had long received under-the-table support from the United States and the CIA. It was coordinated at Kissinger's State Department by a talented young diplomat--Frank G. Wisner, Jr., the son and namesake of the late chief of covert operations.
"We had been forced out of Vietnam," Wisner said. "There was a real concern on the part of the Administration that the United States would now be tested" by the forces of communism across the world. "Were we going to see a new seemingly communist-led offensive move in, take over oil-rich Angola and begin to carry the Cold War into southern Africa, or were we going to try to stop it?"
"We weren't going to be able to walk down to Congress, in the aftermath of Vietnam, and say, 'Look, let's send American military trainers and equipment over there to Mobutu,' so Kissinger and the President made the decision to go to the Agency," Wisner said. But the CIA-backed troops in Angola faltered, and their enemies, strongly supported by Moscow and Havana, took control of the capital. Kissinger ordered up another $28 million in secret support. There was no money left in the CIA's contingency budget. Early on in Bush's short year at the CIA, Congress publicly banned covert support for the Angolan guerrillas and killed the operation while it was in progress. Nothing of the kind had ever happened before. "The CIA was cut off, and we were driven back," Wisner said.
"I FEEL LIKE I HAVE BEEN HAD"
On the bicentennial day of July 4, 1976, Bush prepared to meet the governor of Georgia at a hotel in Hershey, Pennsylvania. He had been extraordinarily responsive when Jimmy Carter requested intelligence briefings from the CIA even before winning the Democratic presidential nomination. No candidate had ever made such a request so early in the game. Bush and his national intelligence deputy, Dick Lehman--who had grown so frustrated watching Allen Dulles hefting reports instead of reading them--found Carter extremely interested. Their discussion ranged from spy satellites to the future of white minority rule in Africa. They agreed that the briefings could continue later in July at Carter's home in the hamlet of Plains, Georgia.
The director had a hard time getting there. The CIA's Gulfstream jet could not handle the sod airstrip in Plains. The agency sought logistical help from the Pentagon and learned that Bush would have to take a helicopter to Peterson Field. The CIA aircrew checked their maps. Where the hell was Peterson Field? Another phone call to Plains and they understood: "Peterson's field" was some farmer's forty acres on the edge of town.
The six-hour session touched on Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Rhodesia, and Angola. China took thirty minutes. The Soviet Union took ten times as long. The CIA's men talked all afternoon and into the evening. Carter, who had been a nuclear engineer in the navy, grasped the arcane details of the American strategic arsenal. He was particularly interested in the evidence spy satellites obtained about Soviet weapons, and he understood that the intelligence they gleaned would play a vital role in arms control. He learned that the Soviets would never show their hand with an accurate statement of the size of their nuclear forces; the American side had to come to the negotiating table and tell the Soviets how many missiles they had and how many we had. This gave Carter pause: the notion that the Soviets lied seemed to be a new idea to him.
Bush assured him that the photographs provided by the first generation of spy satellites had provided Presidents Nixon and Ford with the information they needed to pursue SALT, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, with the Soviets, and to keep a close eye on whether the Soviets would abide by their agreements. A new generation of satellites was coming on line that summer. Code-named Keyhole, they provided real-time television images instead of slow-to-develop photos. The CIA's science and technology division had been working on Keyhole for years, and it was a great breakthrough.
Carter's running mate, Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota, asked about covert action and the agency's liaisons with foreign intelligence services. Mondale had been a member of the Church Committee, the Senate panel that investigated the CIA. Its final report had come out two months before. The committee is remembered today chiefly for its chairman's statement that the agency had been "a rogue elephant"--a pronouncement that badly missed the point by absolving the presidents who had driven the elephant. Bush, infuriated by the very existence of the Church Committee, refused to answer Mondale's questions.
Eight CIA officers joined Bush in Plains two weeks later, sitting in a circle in Carter's family room as his daughter and her cat wandered in and out. To their surprise, Carter seemed to have a highly nuanced understanding of the world. When Carter and Ford went head-to-head in the first televised presidential debates since Kennedy and Nixon, the governor cleaned the president's clock on foreign policy. He also took a hard swipe at the agency, saying: "Our system of government--in spite of Vietnam, Cambodia, CIA, Watergate--is still the best system of government on Earth."
On November 19, 1976, there was one final, awkward meeting between Bush and President-elect Carter in Plains. "Bush wanted to be kept on" at the CIA, Carter remembered. "If I had agreed to that, he never would have become President. His career would have gone off on a whole different track!"
Bush's memo of the meeting shows that he revealed a handful of ongoing operations to the president-elect, including the CIA's financial support for heads of state such as King Hussein of Jordan and President Mobutu of the Congo and strongmen such as Manuel Noriega, the future dictator of Panama. Bush observed that Carter seemed strangely turned off. His impression was correct. The president-elect found the CIA's subsidies for foreign leaders reprehensible.
By the end of 1976, Bush was in bad odor with some of his former fans at the agency. He had made a baldly political decision to let a team of neoconservative ideologues--"howling right-wingers," Dick Lehman called them--rewrite the CIA's estimates of Soviet military forces.
William J. Casey, the most vociferous member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, had been talking with some of his friends and associates in the intelligence community. They were convinced that the CIA was dangerously underestimating Soviet nuclear strength. Casey and his fellow members of the advisory board pressed President Ford to let an outside group write their own Soviet estimate. The team, whose members were deeply disenchanted with detente and handpicked by the Republican right, included General Daniel O. Graham, America's leading advocate of missile defense, and Paul Wolfowitz, a disillusioned arms-control negotiator and a future deputy secretary of defense. In May 1976, Bush approved "Team B" with a cheery scribble: "Let her fly!! O.K. G.B."
The debate was highly technical, but it boiled down to a single question: what is Moscow up to? Team B portrayed a Soviet Union in the midst of a tremendous military buildup--when in fact it was cutting military spending. They dramatically overstated the accuracy of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. They doubled the number of Backfire bombers the Soviet Union was building. They repeatedly warned of dangers that never materialized, threats that did not exist, technologies that were never created--and, most terrifying of all, the specter of a secret Soviet strategy to fight and win a nuclear war. Then, in December 1976, they selectively shared their findings with sympathetic reporters and opinion columnists. "The B Team was out of control," Lehman said, "and they were leaking all over the place."
The uproar Team B created went on for years, fueled a huge increase in Pentagon weapons spending, and led directly to the rise of Ronald Reagan to the top of the list of front-runners for the 1980 Republican nomination. After the cold war was over, the agency put Team B's findings to the test. Every one of them was wrong. It was the bomber gap and the missile gap all over again.
"I feel like I have been had," Bush told Ford, Kissinger, and Rumsfeld at the last National Security Council meeting of the outgoing administration.
Intelligence analysis had become corrupted--another tool wielded for political advantage--and it would never recover its integrity. The CIA's estimates had been blatantly politicized since 1969, when President Nixon forced the agency to change its views on the Soviets' abilities to launch a nuclear first strike. "I look upon that as almost a turning point from which everything went down," Abbot Smith, who ran the agency's Office of National Estimates under Nixon, said in a CIA oral history interview. "The Nixon administration was really the first one in which intelligence was just another form of politics. And that was bound to be disastrous, and I think it was disastrous." John Huizenga, who succeeded Smith in 1971, put it even more bluntly to the CIA's historians, and his thoughts rang true in decades to come, into the twenty-first century:
In retrospect, you see, I really do not believe that an intelligence organization in this government is able to deliver an honest analytical product without facing the risk of political contention. By and large, I think the tendency to treat intelligence politically increased over this whole period. And it's mainly over issues like Southeast Asia and the growth of Soviet strategic forces that were extremely divisive politically. I think it's probably naive in retrospect to have believed what most of us believed at one time...that you could deliver an honest analytical product and have it taken at face value.... I think that intelligence has had relatively little impact on the policies that we've made over the years. Relatively none. In certain particular circumstances, perhaps insights and facts that were provided had an effect on what we did. But only in a very narrow range of circumstances. By and large, the intelligence effort did not alter the premises with which political leadership came to office. They brought their baggage and they more or less carried it along. Ideally, what had been supposed was that...serious intelligence analysis could...assist the policy side to reexamine premises, render policymaking more sophisticated, closer to the reality of the world. Those were the large ambitions which I think were never realized.
These thoughts did not trouble the director of central intelligence and the future president of the United States.
"THE GREATNESS THAT IS CIA"
In his farewell to the employees at CIA headquarters, Bush delivered a fond thank-you note, as was his wont. "I hope I can find some ways in the years ahead to make the American people understand more fully the greatness that is CIA," he wrote. He was the last director of central intelligence who received something approaching full support from his troops at headquarters. In their eyes, it was to his great credit that he had tried to save the clandestine service. But to his shame, in the end, he had let the CIA be cowed by politics.
"I find no degradation in the quality of intelligence analysis," Kissinger said at their last meeting before the inauguration of Jimmy Carter. "The opposite is true, however, in the covert action area. We are unable to do it anymore."
"Henry, you are right," said George Herbert Walker Bush, one of the greatest boosters the CIA had ever had. "We are both ineffective and scared."