Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century

National Review, August 3, 1992 by Ralph De Toledano

IT WAS Henry L. Stimson, then Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of war, who uttered the classic reproach against intelligence services: "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail." This did not deter Naval Intelligence from breaking the Japanese code--a major factor in the stunning U.S. sea victories in the Pacific. But that accomplishment aside, U.S. intelligence operations in the twentieth century have hardly been brilliant.

The problem with assessing the intelligence record of the United States is that a cottage industry of reportage and fiction, full of sweeping cloaks, flashing daggers, and tiptoeing feet in the dark, has given Americans a distorted and somewhat ludicrous picture. We know a great deal about the Soviet Union's successful spies--the Philby-Burgess-Maclean group, Richard Sorge, the Rosenbergs, Walter Krivitsky--but our matching roster seems limited to Nathan Hale. Meanwhile such CIA "coups" as the "defection" and subsequent re-defection of Vitaly Yurchenko have left egg all over CIA's face.

Of three new books on intelligence, only one, Angelo Codevilla's Informing Statecraft, is of value. The also-rans are The Spy Who Saved the World, by Jerrold L. Schechter and Peter S. Deriabin, and The Old Boys, by Burton Hersh. Schechter-Deriabin's savior spy is Oleg Penkovsky, a midlevel Soviet official who may or may not have been a double agent when he purportedly was delivering secrets to CIA and MI-6, bargaining always for more money. There is some unintended humor in the book's account of Penkovsky stopping tourists in the street and in hotel lobbies to ask them to convey to the British or the Americans his desire to work for their secret services. But even if the SchechterDeriabin story is accurate, the claim that Penkovsky "saved the world" is a lover of Nazis, with "heart-stopping sour breath." Toward facts, The Old Boys takes roughly the same approach as the Confidential series published in the 1950s by Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer. For example, it has Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C., running through Georgetown--as neat a trick as discovering the Champs-Elysees somewhere on the Lea Bank. Its accounts of OSS and CIA operations are also peppered with embarrassing misstatements, but I will cite only one of which I have inside knowledge the Guatemala campaign which broke the Communist hold on that country. Hersh confesses that his account of the anti-Communist coup in Guatemala is based on a book so propagandistic that only the Left took it seriously. Hersh described Jacobo Arbenz, the Communizing president who was overthrown, as a well-meaning liberal. He dismisses Carlos Castillo Armas, the leader of the coup, as a "mestizo," and his supporters as working-class "debris." And Jack Peurifoy, the American ambassador, is accused-- falsely-of earlier having betrayed the State Department by delivering the Alger Hiss security file to congressional investigators.

In contrast to Hersh's compendium of fancy and malice, there is Codevilla's Informing Statecraft--a thoughtful, insightful, and richly informed study of the nature and function of intelligence. Here is no collection of exposes of U.S. intelligence activities. Codevilla is more interested in examining the principles of intelligence, and he does so by dividing his book into three parts. The first "explains what intelligence is, and what happens to states that have good intelligence and those that don't." The second part demonstrates our lack of understanding of those principles, and shows that the U.S. acted "with little thought of matching what we could do to what we had to do." The third part breaks down the elements of intelligence and tells us what works and what doesn't, and why.

Codevilla stresses that intelligence cannot replace responsible policymaking. The essential function of intelligence is to help government arrive at an understanding of the characteristics of putative enemies and current friends, of their histories and national psychologies. Cloak-and-daggery attempting to gauge the performance of Soviet weaponry has cost billions, but one captured Soviet tank turned over to us by the Israelis was of greater value than all the microfilm delivered by CIA agents.

The CIA failed so signally to report accurately on the Soviet Union because those it employed to interpret mountains of data frequently had come no closer to that country than a Harvard Russian Studies course. Long after the impending collapse of the Soviet economy was more than a mene mene tekel upharsin on the Kremlin wall, the CIA was insisting on its soundness. When it was clear that Gorbachev could not survive, CIA was still counseling President Bush to prop him up and to jettison Boris Yeltsin. In Moscow, Bush brushed aside the Ukrainian independence movement, describing it as mere "local despotism." In this, of course, he was pursuing the same kind of determined CIA ignorance that he had shown as its director when he informed Congress, at a time when millions were on the verge of starvation, that there was "no malnutrition in China."