CIA and military intelligence - forced union
After taking office as President of the United States in 1976, the representative of the Democratic Party, Jimmy Carter, nominated for the position of Director of the CIA "a man from his team," T. Sorensen, who was determined to radically reform the country's intelligence community. The views of Sorensen, with whom he shared when discussing his candidacy in Congress, caused an extremely negative reaction from not only the leadership of the special services, including military intelligence, but also the members of both chambers of the main legislative body of the country who represented their interests in the legislative bodies. As a result, Carter had to propose a new candidate - Admiral Stansfield Turner, former NATO commander in chief for the South European theater, which, according to the new president, had its advantages in terms of leveling the "eternal rivalry" between the two branches of intelligence - "civil" and military .CARTER INITIATIVES
Carter, who won the elections under the slogan of “combating abuse in all branches of government and for human rights in the international arena,” tried through his protégé to soften the hard line of national special services by subordinating them to their instructions. The new president, like his predecessors, was not satisfied with the fact that the members of the Intelligence Community had practically no choice of the field of their activities and, as he believed, weak coordination of their programs. Carter decided to strengthen the centralization in the management of the special services through his personal leadership (through the director of the CIA) with all the intelligence activities.
At the suggestion of the president, the new head of the CIA again put forward the idea of establishing the position of a certain “intelligence king” who would have absolute power over the expanded Intelligence community. Turner indignantly noted that, despite his formally combined post of director of Central Intelligence and at the same time director of the CIA, he actually controlled only an insignificant part of the entire significant amount of intelligence activities and, accordingly, the budget of the Intelligence Society as a whole. In 1976, at a hearing in the Senate Intelligence Committee, it was reported that the CIA director was only responsible for 10 – 15% intelligence activities, while the remaining 85 – 90% belong to the military department.
Almost immediately, Turner’s intentions regarding the unification of all intelligence activities under his control ran into harsh opposition from the military in the person of the appointee of President Defense Minister Harold Brown. It was a compromise decision that Turner would "only supervise" military intelligence, but not lead it. Within the framework of this formula, an extensive mechanism was created, in which it was decided to more clearly separate the “producers” from the “consumers” of intelligence information. The Council of National Security (SNB) created a kind of body - the Policy Review Committee (CPC), which was chaired by either the Secretary of State or the Minister of Defense. This supposedly ensured a balance in the assessment of intelligence information by “civilian” intelligence agencies, including the CIA, and the military.
Intelligence assessments were specified in the tasks that came from the National Center for the Distribution of Intelligence Missions (NCRHD). Lieutenant-General F. Kamm, a military representative, was appointed to head this center, which was structurally part of the CIA. Further, the “products” came to the National Center for International Analysis (NTSMA), led by the “clean” deputy director of the CIA. From the point of view of compliance with the principle of balance and counterweights, as well as greater objectivity, independent specialists were involved in work at both centers, including from academic (scientific) circles. Further reports and other documents were submitted to the Political Analysis Committee (CPA) under the National Security Service, in which officials who were close to the president — the Secretary of State, the Minister of Defense and the Assistant President for National Security — had the decisive word. In this case, the aim was to balance the preparation of important political decisions, taking into account the views of the military.
However, at the end of 1977 — the beginning of 1978 — media leaked to the media pages that during the discussion of incoming intelligence information, the newly created agencies often did not agree with the assessments of the CIA and military intelligence, but also diametrically contradicted each other. Under these conditions, inevitably there should have appeared a person endowed with a certain authority, whose opinion would be decisive for the preparation of this or that important political (foreign policy) decision. When the system of power created when Carter was the country's president, this figure was Z. Brzezinski, the presidential aide for national security, a well-known “hawk” and a Russophobe.
NEW COORDINATOR
Brzezinski single-headed the Special Coordinating Committee (SCC) of the National Security Council, whose activities, unlike its predecessors - the 303 and 40 Committees - were not limited to overseeing the work of Central Intelligence, but extended to monitor all state intelligence activities, including military intelligence. The director of the CIA, Admiral S. Turner, from that time had practical access to the president only through his national security assistant. Thus, Brzezinski emphasizes in his memoirs, for the first time, the practice of complete control over the activities of the Intelligence community in accordance with the law “On National Security” was introduced. It is noteworthy that it was during the leadership of the JCC Brzezinski that “complete harmony” was noted in assessments of the foreign policy situation on the part of the CIA and military intelligence.
However, this practice of “over-centralization”, “unification” and “uniformity in assessments”, which Brzezinski sought, had obviously negative sides, which is emphasized in many analytical articles of American researchers on the activities of special services. And if, through the combined efforts of the CIA and military intelligence, Washington managed to unleash a civil war in Afghanistan and carried out numerous "successful" sabotage actions against the Soviet Armed Forces contingent, "forcing" it, including leaving this country, in some other countries the "monotony" of final assessments of the situation had for the US clearly negative consequences. Thus, the White House, supported by “concentrated” intelligence assessments from the National Security Service, was unable to adequately respond to the anti-government demonstrations that began in 1978 in Iran, which ultimately paralyzed the US efforts to save the friendly regime of the Shah in this country. The CIA and military intelligence were not able to organize and carry out properly in the spring of 1980 of the year the "rescue mission" of 52 of US citizens held hostage in Tehran.Some analysts attribute the failures of American intelligence when Carter was president of the country to the fact that neither he nor his right hand, Brzezinski, could step over the “non-viable principles” of foreign affairs that were formulated by them as an imaginary fight for human rights and at the same time, the methods of real intelligence activity that were allegedly completely divorced from many years of practice. This is evidenced by the de facto failure of the administration in promoting the draft law “On Control over Intelligence” and the Intelligence Charter, which met with powerful, albeit non-advertised resistance from virtually all members of the Intelligence Society, including military intelligence.
The failures of the democratic administration in the foreign policy field were successfully used in the election campaign for the presidency of the Republican Party headed by Ronald Reagan, who directly accused Carter and his entourage of failing to organize the interaction of the country's intelligence services and achieve a “real assessment of the situation” in one or another region of the world . In the 1980 election campaign of the year, the keynote to Reagan’s intelligence issues was a promise, if he was elected president, to give the Scout community the opportunity to “do work without any interference.” It is not surprising that practically all the influential organizations in American civil society that united former intelligence officers, including the military, supported the Republican candidate in the 1980 presidential election of the year, who won a convincing victory.
And in January of next year, a CIA veteran, a prominent leader of the winning party and a person close to the president, William Casey, was appointed director of the CIA. With the very first orders of his own, Casey, with Reagan’s consent, returned to the reconnaissance many retired intelligence officers who had been dismissed by Schlesinger, Colby and Turner. As a gesture denoting the “unity of the national intelligence community,” Casey’s first deputy elected Admiral B. Inman, who left the post of director of the National Security Directorate, which was under the jurisdiction of the US Department of Defense. Prior to that, Inman headed the intelligence of the Navy and the DIA. It is indicative that the new vice-president George W. Bush also once headed the CIA and enjoyed prestige among the intelligence officers.
RESEARCHERS RECEIVE CART BLANCH
President Reagan, following the recommendations of the conservative grouping in the US establishment, whose interests he represented, changed the procedure for hearing intelligence information and pushed the NSS to secondary positions. From now on, persons whose views were currently of interest to the leadership of the country were invited to the intelligence briefings in the White House. It is mandatory from the military at these meetings, which were held in the form of discussion, attended by Secretary of Defense C. Weinberger. Informational support of the meetings was mainly occupied by the CIA. However, this order of discussion soon ceased to satisfy the president, since, as historians of the American special services later noted, the discussions "unreasonably delayed" and "turned into a source of contention." Not distinguished by hard work, and besides, prone to authoritarianism, Reagan "quickly brought order."
Under the National Security Council, it was decided to create three Higher Interdepartmental Groups (VMG) - on foreign policy headed by the secretary of state, military policy led by the minister of defense and intelligence headed by the director of the CIA. Each of them was subordinate to the lower level groups, whose members included, among other things, the leaders of military intelligence.
President Reagan's executive decree on intelligence No. 12333 (December 1981 of the year) contained a considerably expanded list of functions of the CIA director compared to all previous periods, which once again underlined Casey’s increased authority in the administration. Moreover, the decree for the first time quite strictly regulated the subordination of military intelligence officers to the director of Central Intelligence (besides, naturally, their subordination to the Minister of Defense). The resignation of his post as representative of the military, Admiral Inman in the middle of 1982, outlined the unprecedented importance of the CIA as the only one of its kind and the main intelligence organization in the United States, this time "purely civil."
During this period, the military represented by Minister Weinberg did not particularly oppose the growth of the influence of the CIA on the system and mechanism for making foreign policy decisions in the White House, since, as experts on stories The secret services, the secretary of defense, and the country's "chief intelligence officer" had close personal ties and "unity of views" on everything that happened in the international arena and on the measures that were to be taken to neutralize the "threats" to US national security. Naturally, the military didn’t resist “some impairments” in the growth of its financing in comparison with Central Intelligence: the increase in the budget of the Defense Ministry in 1983 by 18%, including military intelligence, in comparison with 25% - for the CIA. In the same period, the National Intelligence Information Council (NSIA) was created under the CIA, which actually meant the revival of an almost similar information evaluation agency that was abolished when it was CIA director Colby. The revived body received information from all special services, where it was analyzed and reported to the president.
The implementation of the decisions to “optimize” intelligence activities was expressed in a sharp increase in sabotage work in all “conflict” regions of the world, including primarily Latin America and the Middle East (Afghanistan). So, for the intensification of the “struggle against communism” in Nicaragua, as well as “communist rebels” in the countries adjacent to it, the CIA and military intelligence were sent to the reserve, re-hired and trained by sabotage methods of hundreds of US citizens and Latin Americans. Despite criticism (even in Congress) of unprecedented interference in the internal affairs of sovereign countries, President Reagan issued a special statement in October 1983, which for the first time in American history interpreted the law of the year 1947 as a direct justification for such interference.The close coordination of the efforts of the CIA and US military intelligence in South America was demonstrated during the British-Argentine conflict 1982 over the Falkland Islands (Malvinas). The British contingent of troops in the region in the phase of active confrontation between the two states on a regular basis received intelligence data from the CIA and military intelligence, including data from the National Security Bureau and space intelligence, which ultimately influenced the outcome of the conflict in favor of the UK.
In the course of the carefully designed operation 1 of September 1983 of the year to uncover a Soviet air defense force in the Far East, which resulted in the shooting of the South Korean Boeing 747, close cooperation was also demonstrated among all US intelligence agencies, including those under American military intelligence.
In the first, and especially at the beginning of the second period, the Reagan presidency marked a sharp escalation of sabotage activities in Afghanistan, where, thanks to CIA instructors and military intelligence, several thousand so-called resistance fighters (“mujahideen”) were trained, causing serious damage to the economy of this country, its armed forces and Afghanistan’s limited contingent of Soviet forces.
PRESIDENT FROM DEVELOPMENT
At the beginning of 1987, W. Casey was forced to resign due to illness. This ended the so-called Casey era, which, from the point of view of the influence of the CIA on all aspects of the country's domestic and foreign policy, is reasonably compared by US intelligence researchers to the X-Numx era of Dulles. It was under Casey, who enjoyed the unchallenged prestige of the president, that the size of the CIA doubled, and the management budget grew to unprecedented proportions. In order to avoid “revealing the work of the intelligence officers” and “excessive leaks of information about the work of the administration,” Reagan was forced to put at the head of the Central Intelligence “punctual” and “restrained” William Webster, who had previously led the FBI for nine years. Well-versed in the work of the “whistleblowers”, Webster generally coped with this task, although under pressure from some influential lawmakers who were dissatisfied with the “excessive autonomy” of Casey’s comrades-in-arms who remained in the CIA, the new head of the department had to dismiss some of them.
In the foreign policy arena, the CIA continued the course designated by the administration, aimed at a comprehensive confrontation with the USSR. At the same time, Afghanistan remained the main “painful point” in this struggle. CIA operations in this country turned into a powerful military program with a budget of 700 million, which amounted to approximately 80% of the total foreign budget of covert operations. At the same time, the funds allocated for the “fight against the Soviets” were distributed in a certain proportion between the officers of the department and representatives of the American military intelligence involved in most of the sabotage operations in the countries of the region as a whole. In this regard, the fact of formal allocation of significant funds for the so-called electronic espionage with the involvement of reconnaissance satellites for tracking the Soviet armed forces is indicative. These funds were held in secret items of expenditures by the CIA, but in fact were controlled and applied by the relevant military intelligence structures. It was precisely in this period that the specific nature of the close cooperation between the two leading members of the United States Intelligence Community, the “civilian” and military intelligence services, lay.
20 January 1989 representative of the Republican Party, George Bush Sr. was sworn in as the new US president. This fact was enthusiastically greeted not only by the CIA, but also by all organizations that were part of the country's intelligence community. In the history of the United States, Bush was the only supreme commander of the armed forces who thoroughly knew all the nuances of the work of national intelligence agencies.
The new president respected the director of the CIA, but, having experience in this organization, often neglected the established practice of reporting information on a particular problem, entering into the analytical structures of the CIA from members of the Intelligence Society, and directly analyzed the "raw" information, or summoned to a conversation residents of various intelligence agencies. In a number of cases, this practice was effective and yielded relatively quick results. An example is the operation of American intelligence to overthrow the leader of Panama, General Noriega, who was disliked by Washington in 1989. Moreover, the "forced" direct intervention of Bush in the implementation of this operation for the first time led to the formulation of the question of replacing the CIA Director Webster as "having lost the necessary contact with the executors of the action." The negative opinion of the military in the person of Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and the military intelligence subordinated to him regarding the business skills of the CIA leadership in solving “sensitive problems”, such as direct US military intervention in sovereign states, contributed to this in many ways.
Turned out to be "unexpected" for Washington, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990 was another occasion for President Bush's decision to purge the CIA. In addition, the US Defense Ministry has already openly filed serious claims against the CIA, the relevant structures of which, in particular, were not able to issue accurate target designation for the American aviationAs a result, in the first phase of hostilities in January 1991, the US Air Force made a series of oversights and attacked secondary, including civilian, targets. As a result, the American commander of Operation Desert Storm, General Norman Schwarzkopf, officially refused CIA assistance and switched entirely to assisting military intelligence in military operations. This included, among other things, the unsatisfactory work of “civilian intelligence agents” in deciphering images obtained from reconnaissance satellites. This fact was one of the reasons that led, after the end of the “war in the Gulf”, to the formation of a special, so-called military command within the CIA, which was supposed to “play along with the Pentagon” and fulfill the secondary role of intelligence in the upcoming clashes.
In November, 1991 of the year, Robert Gates was appointed director of Central Intelligence (he is the director of the CIA), who had previously served as Assistant Head of State for Intelligence and enjoyed the special confidence of the President. Five months before this appointment, when the issue of a new appointment was resolved in principle, by decision of President Bush, Gates and his “team” were commissioned to draft a fundamentally new document that in late November of that year, entitled “National Security Review No. 29 ”Was sent to all government agencies involved in the problem, instructing to determine the requirements for US intelligence in general for the next 15 years.
In April of the following year, 1992, with the approval of the president, Gates sent the legislators a document containing a generalized analysis of proposals and a list of external threats to national security from 176: from climate change to cybercrime. However, due to the formal end of the Cold War, under presidential congressional pressure, the presidential administration was forced to agree to a certain cuts in the budget of the Intelligence community, including military intelligence, which later could not but affect the quality of its military operations tasks, but now in the new geopolitical conditions.
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