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 consc
