Duane (Dewey) Clarridge was a legendary CIA operations officer deeply involved in many of the Agency's most important covert actions in the Cold War. The following is a spirited defense of covert action

Duane Clarridge Speech Reprinted From
Monday, January 27, 1997
6:00pm-8:00pm
Smithsonian Associates

Good Evening.

I appreciate this opportunity to share my thoughts on the future of U.S. intelligence ...particularly the Clandestine Services.
It is a particular honor to be speaking at the Smithsonian. This remarkable institution was my home away from home where I spent many hours when I first came to Washington as a summer intern.
Those of you who have read my book know that I was pretty pessimistic about that future. In the year since I finished the book I've gotten a bit more optimistic. Moreover, we have today a new opportunity to correct many of the problems.
We have a president on his second term, a new congress, a Secretary of State who knows far better of any of her predecessors the dark sides of life under oppressive regimes, a secretary of defense who probably knows more about the intelligence business than anyone who preceded him and we will have above all a new director of central intelligence.
Finally, if there is any reality to the spirit of bipartisanship that both political parties are currently espousing, then we do indeed have the moment to work towards to the solution to many of the aggravations of the past few years.
In speaking to this subject tonight, I am a bit intimidated for I see many old friends and familiar faces in the audience who have as good a claim to wisdom on this topic as I.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the CIA. It's a good time to reflect on what has been accomplished. We, for one thing, won the Cold War.
Michael Oatley, the brilliant British intelligence service officer whose courageous work led to the initial dialogue between the British government and the Irish terrorists - Michael said the Cold War was largely an intelligence war.
At first I was skeptical of this, but the more I thought about it the more I agreed. The Cold War was an intelligence war. Espionage and covert action operations played a key role - and some would argue, the key role - in the free world's victory
Of course, there were other factors. The courage of some political leaders; military preparedness and sacrifice; and the inherent baseness of Marxism. Thus, the quicksand upon which the Soviet Empire was erected.
Spies don't come home to march in ticker-tape parades after a victory, but I think the 50th anniversary should be an occasion to celebrate the unseen work of the thousands of nameless, faceless unheralded men and women who dedicated their lives to that victory.
Winning the Cold War was a monumental intelligence success. Let's salute the silent soldiers of the intelligence services who made it possible.
There was another angle to this cold war victory. It surfaced about the day after the Berlin wall came down and the Soviet Empire ceased being a major national threat to our country. From all over, the Congress, the media, academia and even parts of the Executive came the shrill cry that the United States no longer needed its intelligence services absent a major nation state threat.
Nonsense. The world is a more dangerous place now than it was then.
Proposals on the roles and missions for the intelligence community abounded -- from outright abolition to fragmentation and so on.
However, interestingly on closer examination, these plans were largely focused only on CIA and the Clandestine Services in particular.
This despite the fact that the pentagon spends about 85 percent of the intelligence budget and CIA and a few other agencies share the rest - with the Clandestine Services portion, where the real spying is done, minecule.
What it all came down to was that antiseptic spying by NSA, the NRO was acceptable. Whereas intelligence acquired by those dirty human sources and above all covert action was a ugly business, always had been and now could be dispensed with.
What nonsense. Human sources are usually the only sources of intelligence on the intentions of ones adversaries of life threatening information.
A more rational approach to the new situation occasioned by the collapse of the Evil Empire would be to downsize the community as a whole including those heretofore untouchables such as NSA
.
But let's look specifically at the Clandestine Services in this new world without the Evil Empire. It needed downsizing. Its tasks need to be reprioritized and its manpower distribution overseas adjusted to reflect the new priorities.
I assume that much of this has been done or is underway.
But you can't just downsize willy-nilly - it has to be judicious and will require some change in attitudes in the White House and Congress. For example: From the beginning, a guiding principle of Clandestine Services has been, "no surprises." What this means is that the President of the United States should not have to wake up in the morning to learn that 25 American missionaries have been hanged from lampposts in some dusty corner of the world - or that a friendly leader has been toppled by a coup. Pulling personnel out of the field and closing facilities abroad carries a great risk.
We pulled out of El Salvador in the late 70's and we know what happened there. We had no presence on Grenada in 1983 and we saw what happened there as well. Once you pull out, it is not easy to go back in. It's not like restocking a supermarket shelf.
Training and placing agents and acquiring intelligence takes time. That said, I have my own theory as to why CIA continues to come under persistent attack since the fall of the wall. It goes back to Oatley's observation that the cold war was an intelligence war; we won; ergo CIA was a winner.
The adversaries of the CIA on the other hand claim that in reality CIA failed because it didn't predict the date the Evil Empire would implode. However, Bob Gates has ably demolished this canard. Washington D.C. is and always has been a provincial town. Like all such towns it has a narrow self-centered unreal view of the world and its place in it. As such, it succumbs easily to jealousies and envy. Wantabes abound. What this all generates is abhorrence of success or certainly too much success. This massive insecurity complex necessitates that success must be marginalized. The victims of this provincial malice are legion.
Thus, CIA as a success was an obvious target. And it was easy to argue that it wasn't needed anymore. I submit that it is still required. Even with the demise of the Soviet Evil Empire, the world is a dangerous place. And perhaps even more dangerous than before.
Moreover, and this is important, while the Soviets were the main enemy the Clandestine Services was heavily engaged with other serious threats that remain out there today. Let's look at two of the key factors that impact an effective Clandestine Services - its mission and its political support.
You don't have to be in CIA to figure out what missions confront the Clandestine Services today. The proliferation of the means of mass destruction such as chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and the means of their delivery; religious and ethnic mayhem; stability issues in the former colonies of the Soviet Empire and even Russia itself; terrorism; plans and policies of rogue states like Libya, Iran, Iraq and so on; support of the U.S. military; economic intelligence; counterintelligence; narcotics/international crime/human rights; and the maintenance of an effective covert action capability. Rational observers agree that we need to collect intelligence on proliferation, terrorism, and the renegade nations.
There is general support for the need to provide intelligence to assist the diplomatic effort to foster peace and democracy and counter general strife in the Middle East, the Balkans, parts of Africa and elsewhere.
There are, however, other requirements or missions that are more controversial, particularly some of the factors involved in their implementation. Let's take a look at four missions of the post Cold War CIA that are controversial both within and outside the intelligence community:

*    SUPPORTING THE MILITARY
*    ECONOMIC INTELLIGENCE
*    SUPPORT TO LAW ENFORCEMENT
*    COVERT ACTION


SUPPORT TO THE MILITARY:

The U.S. military should have the best tactical intelligence possible. Good intelligence is a force multiplier on the battlefield. No argument about that. Let's remember -- the CIA was designed for and has provided strategic intelligence from human and technical sources to the president and his policymakers to assist in their policy decisions on the protection of American security.
The military has insisted on gathering its OWN tactical intelligence-the specific information it needs to fight on the battlefield or when U.S. forces are placed in harms way. The military has jealously guarded this domain. Then, when things went wrong, they blamed CIA for lack of intelligence. As a result of the Gulf War the military thinks that the Clandestine Services human sources national imagery and signals collection systems (satellites) should be deployed in support of the military's tactical intelligence requirements - in the current jargon it's called battlefield awareness.
Most of these technical systems and certainly the human sources were designed, however, to provide strategic intelligence for policymakers. If these technical systems will assist the military, which I doubt in most of their current configurations, I am for it as long as it does not diminish the strategic intelligence available to the president. From what I understand, the military seems to be making a grab to control the technical systems at the expense of the president's strategic needs.
Probably in today's world there needs to be a better balance between tactical and strategic systems. And coming from the commercial world, I can see a greater use of lower cost commercial satellites to satisfy military requirements for communications and imagery rather than the more expensive government. owned systems.
Furthermore, I think the time has come when the military services must put aside inter-service rivalry and establish a UNIFIED military intelligence service for collection and analysis of tactical information. This service would also run agent operations to support their tactical requirements, leaving the CIA to collect and analyze the strategic intelligence as it was set up to do. In other words, I am suggesting a military intelligence service similar to the Israeli Directorate of Military Intelligence, and for that matter any other country with a significant military capability. I propose that the Defense Intelligence Agency absorb the individual tactical military intelligence services.
In its new configuration it would continue to provide strategic military intelligence to the military and centralize the collection and analysis of tactical intelligence. It would not duplicate the political, economic, and other collection and analysis done by CIA and other agencies. Only with such a professional service will the military ever obtain the quantity and above all the quality of the tactical military intelligence it has sought and have an institution of which it can be proud. I know this is controversial in many quarters, but the time has come. Budget restraints and other changes have forced the US military to discover the concept of "jointness."
However, all change is threatening. In this case, matters of inter-service rivalries, turf, egos, promotions, budgets and above all the issue of equitable prioritization of requirements between the services must be overcome. It is maddness to do otherwise.

ECONOMIC INTELLIGENCE

Economic intelligence, for me, has two parts. One is just that -- economic intelligence which is information that supports the federal government in trade negotiations, alerts the Federal reserve to say changes in interest rates in other nations central banks, ensures no surprise technological breakthroughs abroad, and so on. None of this aids directly any particular U.S. industry.
At least in the past, the Clandestine Services could be very proud of its successes in this arena. The second component is industrial espionage which is the collection of proprietary business information like contract negotiations, inventions/patents, and the like. No U.S. government agency currently engages in industrial espionage.
However, many nations do like the France, Israel, China, Korea, Japan and practically every country with or aspiring to an advanced technological base. Because others do, some have suggested that the Clandestine Services should so engaged on behalf of U.S. industry. Leaving aside the issue of the protection of sources and methods which I believe is solvable in most cases, the Clandestine Services has been reluctant to become engaged in industrial espionage for two principal reasons.
One, some case officers argue that industrial espionage has no bearing on this country's national security and they are not prepared to take risks to increase the bottom line of General Motors. Besides, U.S. industry already has its own private sources of such data. Based on eight years with U.S. industry, I doubt the latter contention as a general condition. And, I would argue that the success or not of U.S. industry abroad does affect national security and increasingly so as the global market expands and competition escalates
Two, and this is the principal argument against engaging in industrial espionage - how can the fruits of such activity be fairly and securely imparted to U.S. industry? The example I use in my book probably best explains the problem, and although my example has been overtaken by the merger of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, it still illustrates my point. Say, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas are competing against the European consortium Airbus for a foreign aircraft purchase. The Clandestine Services acquires some information which would be useful to the U.S. companies in winning the contract. Arguably it would be better to give the information to only one of the two companies, but given our society, the CIA would find itself in court being sued by the company denied the data.
Other nations have solved this problem. Their industries are use to receiving information from industrial espionage on one occasion and not on another. In other cases, foreign industries are owned by their governments or are essentially their creatures. Thus handling the data is simple. None of this works in America. But here the dilemma can be mitigated by providing the data to all U.S. competitors - not the best solution but better than doing nothing. In many instances, I contend, the information should be published overtly for the world to see. This would really level the playing field and offset to a degree the effect of the bribery too often employed by some foreign firms.
The current economic situation of the U.S. does not make coming to grips with conducting industrial espionage or not an imperative for our government. But I predict that in the not too distant future our economic viability will drive the issue.

Now: COVERT ACTION

Nothing arouses the mice more than the covert action mission of the Clandestine Services. I will tell you categorically: Covert action - especially a paramilitary operations capability - is more vital to the President than ever.
There is no longer a need for "propaganda" or perception management in modern terms. There is plenty of real news available; the issue is one of its distribution. There are many areas of the world where information is still controlled by governments. Individuals more knowledgeable than I believe you can chart the beginnings of the collapse of the Berlin Wall with the success of MTV in Eastern Europe.
Oppressed people of this world already know more than they really want to know about their own particular hell on earth. What they really want to know is what the alternatives are - what is going on in the rest of the world - how does the rest of the world live. The covert action informational mission and challenge today is through imaginative technical and other means to distribute the real news to those deprived of it.
Now for the really contentious issue within covert action's bag of tricks - paramilitary operations. This country still needs a well trained, professional paramilitary capability outside the military establishment. There will be no more "secret wars". As we have seen CNN is now on the beaches to greet the forces.
However, there will be occasions when a small, secret paramilitary unit will be required to accomplish certain specific goals. Just consider two possibilities. If, for example, Peru asked for US help in rescuing the hostages still being held in Lima...they probably would not want to see uniformed US military. If someday we really want the bombers of Pan Am 103 extracted from Libya and brought to trial...would we want to give the job to the military and be accused of invading Libya? NO Still there are observers who continue to insist that the paramilitary capability in all its facets should be transferred to the U.S. military. It won't work. Like it or not the U.S. military in large part wants nothing to do with paramilitary operations.
Vietnam taught the military to be wary of politicians who will feed them piecemeal into military operations and then limited their actions. Also, the military has trouble conducting operations with minimal manpower which paramilitary activities often require. Our military prefers hands on types of operations, not those which require indirect support as many paramilitary operations do.
Finally, paramilitary operations are often contentious politically and I suppose threaten other more important military budgets. None of this is meant to slam the military; it just has a different way of doing things. And there are many incidents where you don't want to bring in a fire breathing dragon just to light the candles. And it does not stop here.
Generally, the so-called "straight leg" or regular military doesn't like or want its own special forces, the obvious candidates for the paramilitary mission, in its midst. Period. It was over the dead bodies of the U.S. military and the Office of the then Secretary of Defense that Congress mandated the creation of the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict and the Special Operations Command.
And it may surprise some of you tonight that recently a former very senior general officer of Special Operations Command told me that he thought it essential that the Clandestine Services maintain a professional paramilitary capability for there were just too many bureaucratic and other impediments to the effective use of SOCOMS capabilities Whereas a truly professional Clandestine Services paramilitary force was the solution in many potential scenarios.

Finally, SUPPORT TO LAW ENFOREMENT

I include in this category counternarcotics, some counterterrorism activity, counterfeiting, human rights abuses, money laundering and alien smuggling. ALL OF THESE ACTIVITIES THREATEN OUR SOCIETY. We need to bring all our resources to bear against them.
Without knocking the FBI and the DEA, it is a fact that the CIA has the best and most comprehensive access to information beyond our borders. Although CIA has no law enforcement authorities, I believe that its access can and should be used to collect the information needed to prosecute criminals. Some will maintain that my assertion is true but the use of the data in the courtroom will put sources and methods at risk. Real life however proves my assertion. Sure there will be exceptions but they are not an excuse for doing nothing.
For example: The arrest and delivery to the US for trial of Fawaz Yunis is a case in point. Yunis was a terrorist who hijacked a Jordanian airliner with Americans abroad - the Omnibus Crime Act gave the US legal jurisdiction. Working closely with all appropriate agencies of the US Government , the Clandestine Services enticed Yunis into international waters in the Mediteranean and delivered him to the FBI for arrest.
The case makes it clear that the Clandestine Services can accomplish such an operation without compromising CIA officers in the courtroom or agents in the field as long as there is complete and careful coordination within our government, particularly with those responsible for enforcement.
In order to provide this assistance to law enforcement, perhaps it is time for the Clandestine Service to establish a new type of agent. Traditionally, CIA agents were developed for their ability to provide intelligence over a long period of time, preferable on a variety of subjects. In today's world, perhaps the CIA needs a short term "informant" much like DEA and the FBI, which will be used for law enforcement cases and serves only this one-time purpose. These informants would need to have the same access to the witness protection program and other services if they are used in criminal prosecutions.
Two other aspects to this spy business I'd like to discuss: public support and politics. I'll take the easy one first, which is NOT POLITICS. There has always been a generic occupational hazard to the spy business and it is probably more true today than in the past. Case officers of the Clandestine Services frequently must deal with unsavory individuals not because they like to but because like it or not these people often have the secrets this country needs to know. The FBI has informants in the underworld often killers and abusers of American human rights in America. Same for the DEA The CIA too must obtain information from unsavory people. There's a simple explanation for that - those people have the information we need. Nice people don't know where the next letter bomb is going to be delivered. Nice people don't smuggle nuclear material or illegal aliens.
Yet, for reasons I fail to comprehend, when the Clandestine Services is found to be dealing with the same unsavory creatures and organizations overseas as does the FBI in the US, the Clandestine Services and its officers are often pilloried by the media, Congress, and often the Administration. Ladies and gentlemen: this is unconscionable; a double standard which is perverse, and so illuminates the cravens largely among a few of our Congressmen of both political parties and the media who have not the slightest interest in the your welfare, but rather pander for some material or local electoral gain to a real or imagined miniscule constituency.
This is one of the reasons I wrote this book - to de-mystify the work of the agency and offer the public some insight into the way the CIA really works. It is difficult for the Clandestine Services to continue to attract and retain the kind of competent, dedicated individuals who will put in long, hard days confronting the ugliness of the world (not to mention the ugliness of the bureaucracy) --- if they have to go home to children who wonder why their Mother or Father works for this terrible organization that is regularly vilified in the media.
Finally, POLITICS. The CIA needs leadership. The DCI must be an effective leader, one who is around long enough for the staff to learn his name, and who is trusted completely by the President. The DCI does not need to be a member of the cabinet to be a player in the room. However, he must be the president's man period. Thus, the notion that the DCI should have mandated, specific term of office like the Director of the FBI is wrong. The DCI reports to the president and is his chief intelligence advisor on a variety of matters of national security. The Director of the FBI reports to the attorney general and his writ is far more limited than that of the DCI.
If the DCI is not the president's choice and does not have a bureaucracy to back him up, he will have little influence at the table. The DCI must also provide the CIA and the intelligence community with direction, goals, and vision. And this leadership, which starts with the DCI, must be present at all levels of the agency. The DCI cannot run CIA alone.
I hear from some who have recently left the Clandestine Services that they would never have left had the leadership been better at all levels. Note that I said leadership - not management, for there is a world of difference between the two contrary to popular opinion. Most Clandestine Services personnel are acutely aware of the difference. It is one thing to get an in-box emptied everyday. It is clearly something else, leadership, to set a direction, a goal, have a vision {although I detest that word}and above all be able to lead the troops to accomplish the goal.
The good news is that I also hear that able and serious personnel at the middle and bottom of the pay scale are still soldiering on and that some really inspired work is being accomplished apparently without the assistance or perhaps inspite of management.
This, in part, has caused me to rethink the final paragraphs of my book. Those of you who have read to the end of the book know that I was greatly pessimistic about the future of the Clandestine Services. That was about a year ago; it takes seemingly forever to publish a book by the way. My dispair was largely caused by the escalating political debate and actions directed at the CIA and the lack of support for the Clandestine Services from the then DCI, the President and the Congress.
Today, I believe that all is not lost. There is yet an opportunity to contain the politicized atmosphere -- you are never going to be rid of it - and get on with rebuilding the Clandestine Sercices into a more effective organization. We must not lose this opportunity. CIA and its Clandestine Services is still a neutral bureaucracy; it marches for whomever is president.
But I tell you friends, if the politics doesn't diminish, I guarantee you that the United States will end up with a partisan intelligence service similar to that of the French having little import in the councils of government and being relatively ineffectual in protecting American security. Hand in hand with this goes the requirement of political support for CIA from the president, congress and its DCI. Because of the nature of its work and the fact that much of it must remain secret, particularly its successes, it is the hard fact that most of what the public will know of the Clandestine Services' activities are its screwups and failures.
It is thus up to the president, congress and the DCI to get up on the step and tell the public that the Clandestine Services is worth the candle. However, the Clandestine Services must be worthy of the candle and thus in a way we come full circle in our discussion.
Ladies and gentlemen, the stakes are too high not to make the effort. What is needed most is for the president, Congress, and all levels of the Agency to work once again together as a team advancing and protecting the security and interests of the American people, and the latter should tolerate nothing less.
Thank you.

Return to Reading TOP