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March 2000

Fixing the Spy Machine By Arthur Hulnick Praeger Click on the title to buy the book

There used to be an expression about the CIA: "Once in the company, always in the company." Arthur Hulnick, the author of Fixing the Spy Machine, spent 28 years in the CIA and his new book reads very much like he's still in it.

To Hulnick, "things are not as bad as they seem" and, with a "good tune-up," the agency will be well-prepared to handle threats to American national security in the next century. This is a bit odd. In view of the operational breakdowns that led to the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, the intelligence-collection problems that led to the failure to anticipate Indian nuclear testing, the counter-intelligence errors that surrounded the Aldrich Ames scandal, and the intelligence-analysis failure that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union, it would appear that the CIA needs far more than a "good tune-up." But Hulnick is obviously more concerned with establishing a "new legitimacy" for the CIA than reforming an institution that is out of touch with the realities of the post-Cold War world.

Hulnick devotes very little attention in his book to "fixing the spy machine." Instead, the reader confronts a generally out-of-date review of the various functions of the CIA and the intelligence community in America. For example, the author describes a "merger" or "partnership" between the directorate of intelligence and the directorate of operations which no longer exists. The brainchild of former director James Woolsey, the merger did not solve the problem of intelligence analysis politically slanted to conform to the goals of CIA clandestine operations and covert actions. Woolsey's successor, John Deutch, ended the merger in 1995.

Hulnick clearly favors the clandestine collection efforts of the CIA over the technical collection of the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office. He praises the CIA's focus on "strategic issues" and criticizes the intelligence gathering of NSA and NRO as "fragmentary and of little value" in the case of the former and as collecting "far more information than we can process" in the case of the latter. This will come as a shock to both the disarmament community and war-planners at the Pentagon who rely on NRO imagery and NSA communications and signal interceptions for monitoring weapons programs and military maneuvers. Over the years, the NRO and NSA have frequently supplied data pointing to future military events and strategic trends that the CIA simply failed to analyze. For example, there was sufficient intelligence pointing to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the October War between Arabs and Israelis in 1973, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and Indian nuclear testing in 1998. Unfortunately, the CIA failed to interpret the data in each of these cases.

Hulnick is also so focused on his rearview mirror when examining the CIA that it is difficult for him to look forward. He denies that there has been politicization of intelligence analysis and states that the "alleged failure to predict the fall of the USSR wasŠ incorrect." How did he come to this conclusion? Perhaps because his major source for the CIA's so-called accuracy regarding the collapse of the Soviet Union is Douglas MacEachin, the director of intelligence on the Soviets in the 1980s and the one agency official most responsible for the failure. Hulnick would have a hard time convincing former president George Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, who recall no CIA warnings about the Soviet demise or the collapse of the Berlin Wall. He would have an even harder time convincing former secretary of state George Shultz. Shultz believes that the CIA's analysis of the Soviet Union was "distorted by strong views about policy" that blocked any discussion of Soviet weakness.

Despite the evidence of politicization that was introduced into the confirmation hearings for Robert Gates in 1991, Hulnick argues that former Director William Casey "never actually suppressed the judgments of his more neutral analysts." Hulnick also does not mention the CIA's assessment in 1985 of a non-existent Soviet plot against Pope John Paul II or a wildly off-the-mark estimate of a Soviet threat to Iran, which had been used to justify arms sales to so-called moderates in Iran. Even Gates acknowledged at the hearings that he watched Casey "on issue after issue sit in meetings and present intelligence framed in terms of the policy he wanted pursued."

Despite the difficulty in gaining access to agency documents on covert action and clandestine collection, the book argues that the "American intelligence system has become the most open in the world" and that certain aspects of intelligence have become "so open that little secrecy is left." This is a shocking observation in view of the recent remarks of William Z. Slaney, the respected historian of the State Department, who criticized the CIA's refusal to release certain historical documents as "unreasonable." Several years ago, the CIA agreed to release documents dealing with covert actions for publication in the official Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series but current CIA director, George Tenet, has blocked their release.

Former directors Casey and Gates are credited by Hulnick for creating this "environment of openness." In fact, they were responsible for the cover-up of intelligence that recorded CIA awareness of Contra drug sales in the United States, capital crimes committed in Central America, and human rights abuses in Guatemala. All of this activity should have been reported to the Justice Department and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. William Webster, Gates, and Deutch, moreover, were responsible for the dissemination of tainted intelligence to Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton concerning Aldrich Ames.

In his own campaign against openness, Hulnick favors keeping the intelligence budget secret ("the intention of the Founding Fathers, as we know from the documents in the Federalist Papers," according to Hulnick). He thus ignores Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, which states that "a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time." The reader can therefore choose between Hulnick's interpretation of the Federalist Papers and the Constitution of the United States.

Hulnick agrees with George Tenet that openness has gone too far and that the CIA has become "so open that little secrecy is left." The author's reform measure in this category is bizarre: Establish a "display at an existing facility, such as the Smithsonian's Museum of American History," to show the public some of the agency's "more interesting artifacts." Since "there is nothing wrong with the present system," the only reform steps he endorses are a 10-year statutory tenure for the agency director, getting the CIA out of suburban Virginia, ending the Congress' micro-management of the agency, and increasing salaries to end the brain drain.

Unfortunately, systemic problems receive little scrutiny from Hulnick and he leaves major issues unaddressed. What is the proper role for espionage and covert action in the post-Cold War era? What is a proper level of expenditure for intelligence? How can intelligence reporting and analysis be protected from policy bias? Which intelligence programs are making a difference in addressing national security threats and which programs can be reduced or abandoned? What can be done about the militarization of the intelligence community and the redundancy in military intelligence? How can the process of intelligence oversight be fixed? It remains a feckless exercise to discuss reform of the CIA without at least addressing these questions.