CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CARTER

Jimmy Carter was a complex, insecure man whose personal virtues rapidly became vices in a presidency dogged by major international problems.  He was naive.  As the small-town peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, he won the 1976 election on an anti-Washington platform, the Washington of what he called the three national disgraces: "Watergate, Vietnam and the CIA".  He emphasised political purity and openness in the face of sordid compromises and hucksterism.  He was also quite ignorant about important areas of U.S. policy, notably international affairs, seeking to remedy gaps in his knowledge by swotting up vast quantities of facts and data.  His ignorance made him insecure and he was reluctant to delegate, thus increasing his workload.
	The strain soon told.  The Presidency is a wearing enough job at the best of times but Carter aged more rapidly than most.  He was hardworking and well-meaning but these qualities were not enough to meet the crises of his Presidency.
	The early 1970's witnessed a series of intelligence failures - failure to predict the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the 1973 OPEC embargo, the nature of the 1974 Portugese revolution, to monitor effectively India's testing of a nuclear device in 1974, and the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus.  Such failures mushroomed during the Carter administration, partly because of the shocks the agency had endured since 1974, partly because of Carter's distrust of the agency which in turn seriously affected morale, and partly because of divisions in Carter's approach to foreign policy and intelligence.  In Central America the administration's policies were notably vacillating with Carter blowing alternately hot and cold towards repressive regimes in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Negotiations for a SALT II agreement with the Soviets petered out as evidence mounted of massive Soviet arms expenditure as well as Soviet aggression in Afghanistan - both of which Carter at first had refused to believe. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 Carter expressed bitter disappointment in the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev who had assured him for months that he did not intend to invade.  Brezhnev had "lied" to him, Carter said, indicating that he had trusted the Soviet leader more than his advisers and the CIA.
	Carter did not understand intelligence and saw its product in the strictly narrow terms of order-of-battle detail.  His first choice as DCI was Theodore Sorensen, a Kennedy aide who did not impress Congress.  Sorensen withdrew his nomination, and Carter's next choice was Admiral Stansfield Turner who had been in Carter's class at Annapolis naval academy.  

TURNER

Turner had come to Washington in the 1950's.  He had been a liaison officer between the navy and the State Department.  He loved the whole milieu and caught what he called "Potomatic fever", determined to return to Washington to become an insider in the circles which so fascinated him.  
	From the start Turner's relations with the CIA were antagonistic.  One of his first and most urgent concerns, he announced, "was to put the CIA's much criticized past behind us", thus ignoring the work of Colby, Church, Ford and Bush.  He took a critical view of Bush:
"He was tops for CIA people.  They loved him.  He was just the kind of director they want.  He did exactly what they wanted him to do.  They run the agency.  That's what I came up against.  But I can't run anything without being in charge.  The place was a shambles in administration and needed somebody to take charge of it, and they didn't want that."  
	Turner did take charge, bringing with him a number of naval aides.  A White House adviser at the time recalled:
"One of Turner's problems was that he was a military man and didn't like anybody looking over his shoulder.  I often said to him, `Stan, you've never run an operation.  I have, and let me tell you, when somebody gives orders that don't make any sense you have to do what's best for the operation.  It's important to have people who know about the business.'"
	Within the CIA, Turner soon became the most unpopular DCI in memory, easily overtaking James Schlesinger.  He made it clear to the agency in no uncertain terms that not only was it a shambles organizationally, but that in his view it was a disgrace.  Every CIA officer who dealt with him felt that he made up his mind without paying attention to anything they said or what the consequences might be. He concentrated on technical intelligence and dismantled what was left of the clandestine service: 820 positions were abolished, including approximately 200 experienced covert operations officers and more than 600 backup officers and staff in covert action and espionage.  
	While it was true that the agency had become bloated because of Vietnam, and that reductions were necessary, the manner of Turner's managerial style made the dismissals extremely bruising to those concerned.
	Turner's emphasis on technical intelligence meant that during his directorship the technical experts were be pre-eminent.  He believed that those on the clandestine side, who relied on human intelligence, were living in the past and had simply never come to terms with change, explaining:
"The human people have not understood the revolution in intelligence collection brought on by the technical systems.  It means they have got to change.  You can't have this enormous flow of data coming into the system without it changing the way you go about all your intelligence.  One, you never send a spy when you can get the information you want by technical means.  Two, you now focus the human collector on the missing pieces: there's always going to be an element that isn't obtainable by the technical systems.  But that means that you recruit differently and that you target differently, and they're not willing to do that.  They don't understand that the role of human intelligence has got to be different in an environment where you've got huge quantities of data available from the technical systems."
	The tensions within the agency were exacerbated by Turner's extensive use of the polygraph which he regarded as "the most important specific tool of counterintelligence".  It was used for screening applicants seeking employment in the CIA as well as for periodic, unscheduled retesting of employees.  But Turner also attempted to have the use of the polygraph applied to civilian contractors and to certain other government personnel.  While the value of the polygraph was recognised by agency officers, Turner's over-reliance on it had a very unsettling effect on agency morale.  One officer who left during Turner's time as DCI found that polygraph information from his CIA file was leaked to the New York Times.  
	There was a fundamental weakness in Turner's approach.  The issue was not human versus technical intelligence: what was needed in the aftershocks of Watergate, Vietnam and the OPEC embargo was clear-eyed assessment of an unsettled world and the U.S. role in it.  What happened instead during the Carter administration was a retreat into neo-isolationism in search for old certainties.  Turner's systems and machines seemed to provide a kind of certainty.  Time would show how fragile it was.



NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE OFFICERS

"When intelligence producers have a general feeling that they are working in a hostile climate, what really happens is not so much that they tailor the product to please, although that's not been unknown, but more likely, they avoid the treatment of difficult issues".  
This comment was made by John Huizenga, the last director of the office of national estimates.  It was an accurate reflection of the difficulties faced by the analytical side of the agency during the 1970s.
	There was a complete overhaul of the estimating side of the CIA while Colby was DCI.  By June 1973, the membership of the board of national estimates had dropped from an average of twelve to six.  Colby felt that the process of estimates by committee had become increasingly unwieldy, inflexible, and inexact.  He wanted to make the agency's analysis more immediate, faster and less academically conscious.  Colby had sensed what he described as an "ivory tower mentality" in the board which had become rather fixed on certain issues.  He also found that compartmentalism within the agency meant that experts in particular facets of a country or an issue did not necessarily ever come together to compare notes and swap ideas and information.  He decided to replace the board with national intelligence officers who would enjoy a free run of the agency's information.  
	National intelligence officers would be familiar with all aspects of their area of responsibility.  Thus the NIO for the Soviet Union would deal with the Soviet economy and with Soviet military capabilities, whereas previously at least two officers would have been responsible, one for the economy, and one for military matters.  
	An important result of the new NIO system was that there was far less emphasis on achieving consensus. Dissent was incorporated in the text rather than footnoted.  Each NIO had a strong interest in maintaining his reputation by writing clear and effective estimates.  Since NIO's were not hamstrung by committees, they could respond to events more quickly.

IRAN
  
There was a painful symmetry about the fact that the event which sealed the fate of the Carter administration and signalled a sea-change in American history was the Iranian revolution of 1979.  In 1953, the CIA had overthrown Mussadegh and replaced him with the shah.  In 1973 the shah was one of the leaders of the OPEC embargo, yet he was supposed to be America's friend with a CIA man, Richard Helms, as U.S. ambassador in Teheran.  In 1979 his downfall and the arrival of the Islamic fundamentalist regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini followed several years of Carter demanding more democratic reforms in Iran and clearly indicating that he saw the shah as a dictator whose removal would not upset Washington.
	Both the CIA and the State Department were slow to realise the extent of domestic opposition to the shah's ruthless economic and social modernisation programme. Most of the agency's activity in Iran was concerned with monitoring Soviet missiles and communications.  It paid little attention to reporting the domestic situation which was left to U.S. diplomats.  By late 1978 it was clear that the shah was facing a revolution, and this caught the Carter administration on the hop.  It was an intelligence failure of epic proportions and was aggravated by vacillation on the part of the White House.
	Carter had a see-sawing relationship with his secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brezezinski, and his DCI, Stansfield Turner.  Vance and Brzezinski were often at odds, Vance taking a softly-softly approach and Brezezinski adopting a resolutely hard-line approach towards the Soviet Union.  Carter veered from one to the other, never deciding between the two.  Turner, for his part, concentrated on technical intelligence development and on rooting out secrets that had not been revealed during the Rockefeller, Church and Pike period.  He was also faced with Brezezinski as a major bureaucratic rival.  These disagreements and the lack of coordination permeated the handling of the crisis.
	When the revolution broke out at the end of 1978, culminating in the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran in February 1979, Carter could not decide whether to support the shah or the new leader.  One of the reasons for his indecision was the lack of intelligence about the situation in the country.  Gary Sick, the Iran specialist on the NSC, declared as the crsis broke:
"The most fundamental problem at the moment is the astonishing lack of hard information we are getting about events in Iran ...  This has been an intelligence disaster of the first order.  Our information has been extremely meagre, our resources were not positioned to report accurately on the opposition forces [or] on external penetration."
	The consequences of the investigations and of Turner's emphasis on technical intelligence (he reduced the clandestine service by 820 in two years) and the agency's and State Department's taking too much on trust from the shah, were coming home to roost, encouraged by a nervous White House.  On 11 November, 1978 Carter sent a note to Vance, Brezezinski and Turner, indicating his dissatisfaction with the standard of political intelligence:  
"To Cy, Zbig, Stan: I am not satisfied with the quality of our political intelligence.  Assess our assets and as soon as possible give me a report concerning our abilities in the most important areas of the world.  Make a joint recommendation on what we should do to improve your ability to give me political information and advice. J.C."
The consequence of depending on machines and thus not hearing the tone of voice and the nuances of information was at last slowly being recognised by Carter.  Turner, however, suspected that the note was aimed at making him and the CIA a scapegoat for the intelligence failure.  The agency had not recommended reducing the embassy staff, a fact which compounded criticism of its intelligence effort.
	In November 1979, eight months after the Ayatollah established a virulently anti-American, anti-communist Islamic revolutionary state, the exiled shah was allowed to enter the United States for cancer treatment.  Islamic militants reacted by occupying the U.S. embassy in Teheran, holding hostage sixty-nine diplomats, marines and staff.  Although Khomeini released sixteen women and blacks, the remaining fifty-three, including three CIA officers, were confined for 444 days.  
	Again, the agency was criticized for not seeing the danger of the embassy being occupied.  The CIA station chief in Teheran, Thomas Ahern, successfully managed to destroy most of the CIA files when the militants invaded the embassy.  However, most of the military attache's papers were captured, some of them sources within Iran, and the shredding machine used by Ahern made it possible for his files to be painstakingly reconstructed.  
	In April 1980, six months after the embassy was seized, Carter authorised a secret military raid to release the prisoners.  The CIA was only peripherally involved.  All the weaknesses of technical intelligence were evident in this mission.  There was no CIA network of agents in Teheran, and this meant that information gathering at a very basic level was slow and difficult. The U.S. was forced to rely on reports from British and Canadian diplomats.  They played an instrumental part in the intelligence side of the crisis.  It was only at the end of December 1979, that a former CIA agent was brought out of retirement and sent to Teheran.  
	No room was allowed for error or loss in the rescue mission.  Besides the lack of detailed information on the ground - the rescuers did not know, for example, where the embassy people were being held -every helicopter, every radio and every member of the rescue team had a vital job to do.  Carter, who insisted that the rescue mission be as small as possible, did not realize that by insisting on accuracy he was increasing risk.  If one element failed, the whole mission would be in danger - which is exactly what happened.  Two helicopters crashed into a transport plane, killing eight soldiers and the mission was aborted.

COMING TO TERMS WITH SECRECY

To many, Iran, the change to the NIO system, the hostility of the President, were symptoms of the inexorable decline of the agency.  Bureaucratically, the agency was no longer preeminent in the intelligence community either at home or abroad.  The DCI was only nominally the President's chief intelligence officer: the real power now lay with the national security adviser and the NSC.  The creation of the NIOs was an implicit slight on the CIA's analytic performance.
	The decline of the agency's power and influence was compounded by attitudes within the administration. Carter's adoption of a noisy human rights policy was all froth and no substance while Turner's dependence on technical intelligence meant that the element of human surprise and fallibility was dangerously discounted.
	The public utterances of Carter and Turner were full of antagonism toward the agency.  "I was deeply troubled by the lies our people had been told," said Carter, citing Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile and the CIA:
"I was familiar with the widely accepted arguments that we had to choose between idealism and realism, or between morality and the exertion of power: but I rejected those claims.  To me, the demonstration of American idealism was a practical and realistic approach to foreign affairs, and moral principles were the best foundation for the exertion of American power and influence".  
Turner adopted an equally high-minded tone:  
"There is one overall test of the ethics of human intelligence activities, that is whether those approving them feel they could defend their decisions before the public if the actions became public."
	But was the public so anxious to hear the secrets? Neither Carter nor Turner ever seriously addressed this question and in failing to do this they misjudged the gradual change in public opinion after the mid-1970's. No country can deal with others on matters of national security without withholding vital information that, if known, could threaten its very existence.  
	There was a very strong feeling by the late 1970's that all the disclosures and revelations about the CIA had gone far enough.  Carter and Turner confused temporary disaffection with the CIA with a settled popular determination not to have secrecy.  In Congress, many senators and representatives were concerned by Carter's ineffectiveness and his emasculation of the CIA and once again special care was taken in appointing qualified chairmen of the relevant committees.  It was a sign that Congress wanted to come to terms with the CIA and with secrecy.
	The Iranian crisis ultimately consumed the Carter Presidency.  People saw that by a combination of bad luck, bad judgement, vacillation, pushing the CIA to the edge of the administration, and lack of clear objectives, the President and his advisers had brought the U.S. to a position of international weakness.  What had actually happened was different.  Carter had come in with an idealistic view of the United States, of its world role, and of the possibilities of detente with the Soviet Union.  He found that much of what he had thought was wrong and "evil" was not.  By the end of his administration he had completed a policy U-turn, approving major increases in military spending and approving more CIA covert action than had Ford.  But politically he had missed the boat.  The seizure of the embassy in Teheran and the failure of the rescue mission sealed his fate as a one-term President.  U.S. failures were seen as failure of Presidential will. This, and the belief that America itself was not weak or weakened, was the message from Ronald Reagan, Carter's opponent in the 1980 Presidential election.