Low intelligence
Richard Luckett
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks (Jonathan Cape £395)
"A multi-purpose, clandestine arm of power.., an instrument for subversion, manipulation and violence, for secret intervention in the affairs of other countries." The words were originally used by Allen Dulles to describe the KGB; now Victor Marchetti and John Marks, both former members of the United States intelligence establishment, have turned them against the organisation that Dulles played so large a part in creating. They do so in a book that curiously complements the White House tapes. Richard Nixon's disinterested passion for sound-recording allowed us to admire his unrelenting grasp of political realities and his refusal to surrender to sentimental economic
policies, but we were denied the privilege of contemplating his adjectival prowess. In The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence deletions are also de rigeur, though in this case they disguise, not expletives, but state secrets.
It is one of the paradoxes of an unintentionally paradoxical book that the authors bewail this, almost as though they meant it. Given their intention to expose the CIA as a grotesque and tyrannical organisation they could scarcely have wished a better demonstration than the gap-toothed sentences which inform us, that for instance: "At another meeting in 1970 the special discussion was on whether or not a very sophisticated satellite should be targeted against the (DELETED) part of the (DELET ED) instead of (DELETED)." They can hardly, in their wildest dreams, have anticipated that some of the original cuts demanded by the Agency would be restored by court order, so that we can now ponder the motives of the censor who devotedly excised a catty allusion to an ex-Director's mispronunciation of "Ma lagasy". So the text of the book is at once a substantiation and qualification of their claims: a substantiation because it provides physical evidence of the truth of some of their contentions; a qualification because the mere fact of the book's appearance in its present form proves that the CIA is not the KGB. Little that the book divulges, or that can be surmised from the often absurd deletions, is new. David Horowitz published a good deal
about the same activities as early as 1965; Wise and Ross filled in gaps in The Invisible
Government; further details can be obtained
from The Pentagon Papers and the files of dissident magazines. Marchetti, as executive
assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA, and Marks, as staff assistant to the Intelligence Director of the State Department, were in a position to learn a few facts not hitherto released, chiefly the identities of CIA cover enterprises, and they also throw some light on the part played in policy-tnaking by various intelligence officials. But many of their observations rate no higher than gossip; they tell us, for example, that senior CIA officials have a private dining room where they can obtain higher quality food at lower prices than is available in the cafeteria, and that it is "served on fine white china with fresh linens by black waiters in immaculate coats." (After you, Mr Bond, and I'm glad the agency is doing something about its coloured quota.) The petulance of the comment is equalled only by the pettifogging absurdity of the CIA's deletions, and is as damaging to the authors as are the cuts to the Agency.
Marchetti, whose experiences provide more of the substantive matter for the book than do those of his co-author, claims to have left as a matter of principle but he writes as though he departed in a fit of pique. If the reform of the CIA is a serious matter, if the commonwealth is involved and human liberties — and lives — at stake, then it is hard to imagine what the authors hoped to accomplish in this garrulous and disorganised tome. The reader, much as he may detest censorship on moral grounds, will welcome it here as an editorial improvement. For there is no savage indignation, no challenge to our sense of rightness; the field of conflict is the canteen at HQ, not the bloody beach-head at the Bay of Pigs.
Intelligence organisations, like their servants the spies, are known by their failures and not by their successes. Marchetti and Marks have an extensive list of abortive operations and question the virtue of a number of the AgencY's achievements: they do not consider propping military dictatorships in South America a proper occupation for an organisation originally set up to collect, collate and evaluate information relevant to the defence of the nation. They maintain that the CIA consumes a disproportionate amount of the nation's treasure, that its direct responsibility to the President makes it a potentially dangerous instrument of personal policy, and that some means should be found of ensuring that it answer to the public for its activities. ite function should be restricted to the terms of its first mandate. Yet, though they claim this as their position, they are unable to articulate it with either force or conviction.
The reason cannot be that the position i9 untenable, for there is much sense in it. Nevertheless the book reads as though the authors themselves are not wholly convinced. In part they are deflected by their fascination with the CIA's operations and internal politics, but also, I suspect, they are inhibited by a knowledge that the CIA is not simply shadow boxing. Dulles' description of the KGB may. now be used back-handedly of the CIA, but there is nothing that makes it the applicable to the Soviet espionage and political warfare machine. The problem matches that or the arms race, with the difference that a societY which allows the publication of this book fights the society that exiled Solzhenitsyn with one arm behind its back.
It is idle to point to the disproportion between the CIA, huge as it is, and it5 overwhelming Soviet counterpart; the statistics can always be discounted. It is idle to argue the international aims of communism or to point to the continuing (if no longer Dullesian) reality of the Cold War; it is a theme that too. easily mutates to the moral nullity of a Le Carre spy story, or the desolation of The Quiet American. But I would maintain that these things are sufficiently real to Marchetti and Marks to inhibit their presentation of their views and prevent them from properly facing their implications: hence the wet-blanket effect of what ought by rights to have been an important book.
What is clear is that their criticisms, if not their answers, must be accepted. If you believe the CIA is a necessary organisation, then it has become gross and blundering, an Alden Pyle that survived into adiposity. Its incompetence, like that of the Watergate burglars, ha.s probably turned out for the best, and there is not much more to be said. If you see the CIA as a dangerous force in the national life of the United States, doctrinaire to the point of blindness, unheeding of the national interest, culpable of the Vietnam disaster and others besides, then this will merely confirm your view. In either case it could profitably have been a more thorough indictment, As for "the cult of intelligence," the definitive statement remains Compton Mackenzie's Water on the
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