The Spy Masters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future, by Chris Whipple.
This book was a bear. It was only a bit over 300 pages long, but it was dense. This summary is really long. I of course think that the whole piece is interesting, but more centered individuals may want to skip down to read about your favorite or least favorite presidents and his CIA directors.
Chris Whipple wrote The Gatekeepers (2018) which was a history of presidential chiefs of staff. That was interesting in that it showed the wide range of people who were tasked with essentially organizing the activities of their bosses. It was not surprising to see that Jimmy Carter, who for most of his term did not have a chief of staff, was similar to Donald Trump, who had many chiefs of staff and pretty much ignored all of them.
The Spy Masters is a very detailed history of the CIA. The book starts with what went wrong with the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba under the Kennedy administration in April of 1961. The CIA (Central Intelligence Agency which is charged with finding out what’s going on in the world so the US can act in its best interests) set up the invasion and convinced newly elected John Kennedy to approve it. Lots went wrong as the invading force was defeated, and most of what the CIA developed as intelligence was plain wrong. It was a colossal failure.
The book is organized by CIA directors and the presidents they worked for.
Lyndon Johnson and CIA Director Richard Helms. The Vietnam War was raging when Helms took over the CIA in June of 1966. The CIA analysts – the data gatherers – had figured out that the war wasn’t going well, despite the assurances of the military that we were winning the body count. The CIA operatives on the ground in Vietnam, including future CIA Director William Colby, thought that we were doing great and that the war was winnable. There were some basic differences of opinion. The military estimated the North Vietnamese’s army at 250,000. The CIA said that it was 500,000. That’s a big difference. Initially Helms was brutal in giving LBJ the actual facts. Eventually Helms started to shape his reports to fit the president’s false beliefs about how well the war was going.
In September of 1967, Helms gave Johnson a detailed report on the war that basically said that we were in trouble and that it wasn’t worth the cost of continuing to fight in Vietnam. LBJ didn’t read it. Twenty years later, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara saw the memo for the first time as he was going through Vietnam reports in a library. LBJ never distributed it to senior staff as he was supposed to do.
This is a common pattern in the book. Even when the CIA has accurate information, most of the time the president doesn’t want to hear it, especially if it means that some action has to be taken.
Helms stayed on whenNixon took office in 1969. The president was concerned that Salvador Allende, a communist, would be elected president of Chile. Nixon ordered Helms to prevent Allende from winning the election, but he did win. The CIA simply did not have the power to intrude in a free election in a foreign country. Eventually Allende was deposed in a coup that had the CIA’s fingerprints all over it.
The big deal with Nixon was Watergate. Once the break-in was discovered, Nixon and his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, called Helms in to discuss damage control. Two of the burglars, Jim McCord and Howard Hun, were former CIA employees, so Haldeman told Helms to say that it was a CIA operation. Helms resisted. Haldeman then threatened to expose the CIA’s connection to the Kennedy assassination if Helms didn’t play ball. “What connection?” asked Helms as he refused to cooperate. Helms was fired in early 1973.
Later, Helms said that what struck him about Nixon was his arrogance and contempt for the government he led. Nixon “constantly disparaged everyone…. He would describe the State Department people as a bunch of pin-striped cookie-pushers who really didn’t have America’s interest at heart…the implication being that the only smart fellow in town was Nixon…. But along comes Watergate, where he uses the most terrible judgment in the world and this to me is the crowning irony of his administration. That here he thought he was such a bright guy and he pulls the dumbest trick that anybody could pull and loses the presidency.”
Sound familiar?
James Schlesinger replaced Helms in February, 1972. The new sheriff in town thought that the agency was bloated, with too many Vietnam War holdovers so he fired a lot of people precipitously. He also thought that the agency had done a lot of shady things. (It had; it was an intelligence agency. You do what you need to do.) He sent out a memo, asking employees to report activities outside of the scope of the CIA charter. Schlesinger had ticked off a lot of people and after five months was replaced by William Colby, a CIA insider.
William Colby. Early in his tenure, a 693-page report came out detailing the abuses of the CIA as requested by Schlesinger. This became known as the Family Jewels and it caused a stir as it detailed decades of CIA activities and overreach. Colby eventually gave the report to the Department of Justice and to the Congress where hearings opened up lots of ugly CIA secrets. In 1975, the Church Committee (a Senate investigatory body) examined potential CIA involvement in the murders of prominent leaders around the world. It turns out that the CIA was trying to kill various people but failed. “In short, Congress ruled that the CIA hadn’t succeeded in killing anyone, though it had repeatedly tried.”
George H. W. Bush and President Ford. In November of 1975, George H. W. Bush was US Envoy to the People’s Republic of China. He got a call offering him the job of CIA Director. Bush, no dummy, saw the chaos the agency was in and figured that he was being set up as a fall guy. When he took over the agency he made a lot of personnel changes but did it in person, as opposed to standard operating procedure that sent out bad news in a letter. He kept a lot of the staff and promoted from within, unlike some previous directors who brought in their buddies.
Bush knew that the agency was reviled by just about everyone. The Church Committee Report was devastating in exposing bad things. Bush made countless appearances before congressional committees and gave lots of speeches to the public as well as lots of press interviews – things CIA directors did not do – in an effort to redeem the CIA. It worked.
Despite Bush’s wanting to stay on the job (which was the norm in presidential transitions, at least for a while), Jimmy Carter moved on when he took office in 1977. (Here the author notes that had Carter kept Bush, H. W. would never have been elected president. A Republican who worked for a Democrat is not going to get nominated for president.)
Stansfield Turner. He was in Carter’s class at Annapolis. He was a retired four-star admiral who was probably smarter than Carter, who was a nuclear engineer, and is regarded by many as the brightest US President. Unfortunately, Stan wasn’t very good with the people stuff. He abruptly and precipitously fired 820 CIA officers as soon as he got there. He thought that you could replace human intelligence – spies on the ground – with technology. And he had a brittle personality. Carter didn’t even like him very much, and the director was frozen out of many security meetings.
Carter’s problem was the Shah of Iran. He had been put on the throne by the CIA in 1953 and was losing support among the people who were being fired up by Muslim fundamentalists. Iran was changing and we never noticed it. The CIA had resources in the country but they were not connected to the opposition. They were more plugged into the Shah’s happy talk.
As a result, in February, 1979, Iranian students overran our embassy. By then the Shah had left the country and Ayatollah Khomeini had taken over. His government straightened things out. No such luck seven months later when “students” (this time radicals) took over the embassy and held 52 people. This led to the famous ABC News Program, The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage, from whence I derive Bob Held Hostage.
As Turner admitted, “We were caught flat-footed.” There was a botched rescue mission in April of 1980 that cost 8 lives. The hostage crisis helped Ronald Regan beat Carter in November.
Whipple pauses here to consider if better CIA intelligence would have prevented the crisis. He concludes that it might have, but that things were moving so fast in Iran in 1979 that our established information sources were not plugged into the new reality. You get comfortable with the sources you develop over decades and don’t realize when they’re way past their sell-by date. There’s also the problem that most presidents don’t want to hear bad news, so that even if we did know what was going on, there was no guarantee that Carter would have listened.
William Casey was Ronald Reagan’s CIA director. Casey was a larger-than-life personality who yelled for martinis at some meetings. He made his own rules. Congressional oversight was an annoyance. He didn’t coordinate activities or information-sharing with the National Security Agency or anyone else. He met with Reagan alone. He wanted to beef up covert operations that had taken a hit when its sins had been revealed by the Church Committee. Casey looked to fringe sources to convince him that the Soviet Union was behind much of the terrorism in the world. It wasn’t.
Reagan’s tenure saw a bombing in Beirut, Lebanon, April of 1983, that killed 63 people, including 17 Americans and 8 CIA officers. Six months later, 241 Marines died in a bombing at a Marine barracks in Beirut. Shiite radicals were behind the carnage. Further, Hezbollah, a terror group based in Lebanon, kidnapped Americans including Casey’s new Beirut CIA station chief, William Buckley. Things were getting sticky.
On top of that, Casey was selling arms to Iranian moderates in an effort to have them intercede with Hezbollah to free the American hostages. The only problem was that there were no Iranian moderates in power. They had all been killed.
Casey also wanted to get rid of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, even after Congress passed legislation specifically prohibiting the CIA from using funds to topple the regime. Later, that effort – the Iran-Contra scandal – would come back to taint Reagan’s legacy.
Colonel Oliver North handled the second part of the Iran-Contra program, getting money from the arms sales to the contras in Nicaragua.
Americans continued to be bombed so Casey launched an attack against Sheikh Fadlallah, the leader of Hezbollah. In March of 1985, the CIA parked a car loaded with bombs near his residence and exploded it as his SUV drove by. Eighty people were killed but not the Sheikh, who wasn’t in the car.
A Lebanese magazine broke the arms-to-Iran story in 1986 and people got nervous since that transaction was specifically forbidden by Congress. Attorney General Edwin Meese reviewed the information on the weapons just as he was finding out about Oliver North’s funneling money to the Contras. Whoops!
“What did Reagan know and when did he know it?” was the constant refrain. Reagan was never a hands-on president and he was beginning to have some cognitive problems. He really didn’t seem to know about what actually happened, and he gave a mea culpa speech that worked. He was off the hook.
Casey got a brain tumor and resigned in early 1987. He died in the spring.
FBI Director William Webster replaced Casey. He was a buttoned-down lawyer who liked to float above the fray, unlike his predecessor.
The CIA had been supplying Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to the Afghan rebels who were fighting the Russians. The missiles made the difference as they took away Russia’s air superiority and made the fight a ground game that the Soviets could not win. This set up the fall of the Soviet Union on George H. W. Bush’s watch. He assumed the presidency in 1989 and retained Webster, who hadn’t caused any scandals.
In 1990, CIA analysts warned that Saddam Hussein was likely to invade Kuwait for its oil. Egypt and Jordan assured President Bush that there would be no invasion so he ignored the warnings. That Mid-East war went well.
Robert Gates. In late 1991, Webster retired and Bob Gates became director. He worked to change the culture of the agency which, since its inception, had been focused on dealing with the Soviet Union which ceased to exist.
James Woolsey, Bill Clinton’s pick as director. Vice President Al Gore knew Woolsey and recommended him. That was OK with Bill, who had very little interest in foreign policy. On February 26, 1993, President Clinton became interested in foreign policy when a car bomb exploded in the basement of the World Trade Center. The CIA had no information on this although the FBI did have files on the terrorists, information they would not share with the CIA.
In early 1993, the war in Bosnia was characterized by genocide as Serbs persecuted Muslims. One problem was that we had very little information about what was going on in the field. CIA Director Woolsey was a techie at heart and he worked with former MIT professor and current Defense Department Deputy for Acquisitions and Technology, John Deutch, to fly reconnaissance drones. These became a real resource for spycraft and later became efficient killing machines.
In 1994, the CIA finally tracked down its mole that Richard Helms had warned about ten years earlier. He was Aldrich Ames, who began spying in 1985 to take care of his massive debts. Ames had been living way above his salary for years yet no one noticed. Woolsey was the fall guy on this, although Aldrich had been scamming several CIA directors. Woolsey resigned on December 28, 1994.
John Deutch. When he became the new director he promptly announced that he was going to change the culture of the CIA. He began by massive firings, which did not endear him to the troops. Deutch didn’t do much beyond ramping up the drome capacity of the agency. He oversaw a ridiculous attempt to kill Saddam Hussein who had been harassing American planes and who had tried to kills former President Bush in 1993 when he was visiting the region. The CIA’s plan which was to surround Hussein at one of his palaces, demand his surrender, and then when he refused, blow him up. Needless to say, it didn’t work.
The plan was never formally approved, but that did not stop Bob Baer, a CIA Middle East operative. (Baer was famous was famous for something he did as a student at Georgetown University. He drove his motorcycle into the Georgetown University library with his girlfriend on the back. He popped a wheelie and went on his way. George Tenet, a future CIA director, was there and never forgot it. He liked it.) Baer went rogue and implemented the plan to get Saddam. Needless to say, it failed miserably, with 1,000 Kurds being killed in the attempted uprising. A few months later, there was another botched plot to eliminate Saddam, who used the failed efforts to strengthen his grip.
Director Deutch resigned at the end of 1996. It turned out that he had 31 highly classified files on his home computer with absolutely no security. He could have been prosecuted and given ten years in prison, but the charge was knocked down to a misdemeanor. President Clinton promptly pardoned him but he did lose his security clearances.
George Tenet. At the beginning of his second term, Clinton cleaned out his security house and installed George Tenet, a CIA veteran, as director.
During Tenet’s seven-year watch, we had the attacks of 9/11; the uproar over enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT - also known as torture to some); and the CIA’s botched intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Tenet survived all of those for several reasons. First, he knew a lot of CIA personnel and he had a good connection with employees. That bought him a lot of good will at a time when his agency was once again in free fall. Second, he rebuilt the CIA, improving and modernizing training and stopping the erosion of talent from the agency. Third, he took out a seasoned terrorist, Imad Mughniyah, who was behind the 1983 Beirut bombings, airline hijackings, and kidnappings and murders of Americans.
Meanwhile, some intelligence experts were focusing on Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. CIA counterterrorism director Cofer Black was seeing an increasing volume of chatter from Al Qaeda. He knew something big was in the works. He drafted a comprehensive report, Blue Sky, and gave it to the president, recommending eliminating bin Laden. Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno did not want to do that. In August of 1998, Al Qaeda bombed the American embassy in Tanzania killing 224 people including CIA officers. Two years later, Al Qaeda was the primary suspect when a bomb exploded next to the USS Cole, a Navy destroyer docked in Yemen. Seventeen sailors died.
Still, the administration did nothing. The 9/11 Commission found that our lack of response to these attacks helped convince bin Laden that attacking the US was risk-free.
George Tenet and W. George W. Bush took office in January, 2000. He decided to keep Tenet on as director. The CIA counterterrorism team, led by Richard Clarke and Cofer Black, resurrected their <em>Blue Sky</em> paper on the danger of Al Qaeda and gave it to Bush’s national security team which promptly rejected it as had Clinton. Bush’s people still saw the geopolitics as involving countries, not ideological groups. That turned out to be a mistake. “They were in a time warp,” said one CIA principal. Another opined that they were “eight years behind” what was going on in the Middle East.
Richard Clarke met with Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s National Security Advisor, but she didn’t feel that there was a serious threat and never pushed the recommendations up the command chain. Most of the Middle East foreign policy focus was on Saddam Hussein, who was rattling sabers and also had tried to kill the president’s father in 1993.
By July of 2001, the Al Qaeda chatter was deafening. Something was about to happen. Richard Clarke and Cofer Black briefed Director Tenet and he got the message. They met with Rice who also seemed to get it, but she took no action once again. She says that she cannot remember that meeting.
Between the FBI and the CIA, there was solid knowledge that several suspicious men from the Middle East had entered the country and had taken flying lessons. Since there was no principals’ meeting called to exchange information among agencies (which was Rice’s call), no one took any action.
Then 9/11 happened. The CIA did figure out what was going on and did make several attempts to get higher-ups to act. Later the 9/11 Commission blamed the CIA for not coming through and deflected any blame from Clinton, Bush and Rice. Director Tenet did acknowledge that the CIA failed to track down the terrorists over the summer. That would have taken coordination between the CIA and the FBI, something that just wasn’t done back then. The CIA did provide paramilitary teams that worked with other US forces to drive Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan.
Enhanced interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, came into disfavor around 2005 when they were prohibited by Congress. It isn’t clear that these techniques actually worked, but they were outlawed.
The biggest problem of the Bush administration was the Iraq War that was spawned by allegations that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. While some people on the national security team had doubts about the existence of the weapons, the decision was made to invade. Secretary of State Colin Powell presented the case to the UN. He was very suspicious of the intelligence and begged Director Tenet and others to double and triple source everything. They didn’t. The one source that they had confirming the existence of the weapons was “Curveball”, an Iraqi defector who drank too much. Saddam himself preened about having such weapons, but that was a front.
Powell gave the speech, and we invaded Iraq. The rest is history, history that changed the face of the Middle East and created the conditions that bred rampant terrorism in that part of the world.
The author cites several sources that don’t believe that even accurate intelligence would have prevented the invasion. George W. Bush was very focused on Saddam and thought that he had something to do with 9/11. He didn’t. Hussein and bin Laden were like oil and water; they didn't mix well. Bush also may have held a grudge since Saddam tried to kill his Dad. Finally, W’s world view was based on bringing democracy to the Middle East by nation building. He thought Iraq was a good place to start.
By the spring of 2004, George Tenet had been CIA Director for seven years. A year earlier, he had assured senior Bush administration staff that it was a “slam dunk” that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The Iraq incursion was not going well. Tenet handed President Bush his resignation.
John McLaughlin, a CIA careerist was named acting director. He was a very different personality. McLaughlin was professorial and low-key. He was an amateur magician who entertained his colleagues with magic tricks but he couldn't make the CIA’s problems go away. Just as McLaughlin was taking over, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its report on 9/11 which sharply criticized the CIA for missing the boat on the attacks. McLaughlin left, probably relieved to be off the stage.
CongressmanPorter Goss, an intelligence expert, was Bush’s choice to lead the agency. Goss came in determined to save the CIA by purging it of bad apples. Against advice, he brought his congressional staff into top leadership positions. They of course had no experience running a complex, embattled agency and they failed miserably. His inner circle, known as the Goslings, wiped out much of the agency’s top staff and lost valuable institutional memory. Goss’s executive director had to resign because he was caught shoplifting. His replacement, Kyle Foggo, had a history of “alcohol abuse, physical violence, philandering, and corruption.” What could go wrong?
In April of 2004, CBS’s 60 Minutes broke the story of Abu Ghraib, an Iraqi prison that tortured/used enhanced interrogation on prisoners. Of course, someone made videotapes of the action which would surface a few years later.
The CIA was reorganized under Goss’s watch with a Director of National Intelligence added to the intelligence mix. They never quite figured out the power dynamic between the DNI and the CIA Director which made for a lot of tension. Goss couldn’t navigate the new terrain and was let go in early 2006. He was relieved.
As a side note, Kyle Foggo, the amiable drunk who was Goss’s executive director, ended up serving 37 months in prison for fraud, conspiracy, and money-laundering. As they say, you can’t make this stuff up.
Next up General Michael Hayden. Hayden had extensive national intelligence experience. Hayden’s first problem was the <em>New York Times</em> asking about the tapes of torture at Abu Ghraib. As it turns out, the tapes were destroyed, supposedly to protect the lives of people in the videos who were torturing prisoners. After a lot of congressional hearings and hoopla, nobody was punished for destroying the tapes, but the era of enhanced interrogation was over. Hayden also weaponized the drone program so that they could blow people up.
Under Hayden, the CIA worked with Israel to cripple Iran’s nuclear weapons development program, primarily supplying intelligence to Israel’s Mossad (their CIA) agents who wiped out many Iranian nuclear scientists.
Leon Panetta. Barack Obama took over the White House in January of 2009 and replaced Hayden with Leon Panetta, who had been Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and also had worked in intelligence while serving in the Army. He also was a Washington insider who could help Obama run the country.
(On a Bob in the Basement personal note, Leon Panetta washed dishes at his father’s restaurant, noble work that prepared him well for life.)
Panetta was garrulous, swore a lot, knew everybody, and had a dog, Bravo, who attended high-level meetings. When the conversation got tense, Panetta would ask Bravo what he thought, pet him, and send him around the table where everyone else petted him and calmed down. “He was a therapy dog,” one observer said.
Panetta did a good job of asserting turf over the Director of National Intelligence and outflanked him. President Obama really liked Leon, which helped.
Panetta oversaw an increase in drone warfare, which had become an acceptable way to take out terrorists. As a Catholic, Panetta thought a lot about killing people from afar, but he believed that the evil these people did, and could do, justified the drone activity. During Obama’s first nine months in office, there were as many drone strikes as during George W. Bush’s last three years.
Panetta was in charge of taking out Osama bin Laden. Intelligence agents had tried for years to figure out where he was hiding and caught a break when a source in Pakistan came through with a tip on bin Laden’s whereabouts. Satellite pictures confirmed that a tall man with a beard wandered around the house’s courtyard; that was most of the confirmatory evidence. Panetta had to make the call. He decided to go, which triggered the helicopter mission that led to bin Laden’s death. It was a close decision - maybe 70% to 80% certainty that it was the terrorist - but Panetta thought that the evil bin Laden represented was worth taking the chance. Obama agreed and it worked.
General David Petraeus. Panetta became Secretary of Defense and was replaced as CIA director by General David Petraeus, a hero of the Iraq War. He was a great soldier and an egomaniac. He demanded to be coddled with creature comforts, something a general was used to. Petraeus had trouble adjusting to running a much smaller agency than the US Army deployment in Iraq. He also wanted to make policy instead of gathering intelligence, which often put him at odds with Obama.
Under Petraeus’ watch, drone killings continued, sometimes taking out civilians who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. This was controversial then and it is still controversial.
On September 11, 2012, the US State Department facility in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked by Islamist extremists, killing four Americans and Ambassador Chris Stevens. This was a big deal, with Republicans saying that the CIA and the administration should have known about it, and the administration insisting that the assault was the result of a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Muslim movie. What one believes depends on one’s political ideology.
General Petraeus had a girlfriend, Paula Broadwell, who was writing a book about him. The affair came to light when the FBI investigated harassing emails that Paula had sent to a Petraeus family friend. The agency found emails between Broadwell and Petraeus which revealed the affair. The investigation found that the general had given Broadwell classified information. Petraeus dodged a serving-time-in-prison bullet by pleading down to a lesser charge and paying a hefty fine.
John Brennan. This seasoned CIA operative took over the agency after Petraeus left. Syria and Isis blew up on his watch, and the Senate went after Brennan for his role in the enhanced interrogation/torture of an earlier time.
Another big thing that happened during his term was Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. This started small in 2014 as Russia realized that the next frontier of its conflict with the US would be in the cybersphere. The CIA figured this out and brought it to President Obama who had a dilemma. We warned the Russians to stop, but there was hesitancy about disrupting Russian commerce since they might retaliate and damage our economy. Another problem was that Republicans didn't believe that the Russians were interfering in an attempt to help Donald Trump win. Partisanship ruled the day. Sound familiar?
No one knows if the Russians elected Trump. If 80,000 votes changed in three states, Hillary Clinton wins, so it’s certainly possible.
Mike Pompeo. Donald Trump came into office having little use for any governmental entities including the CIA. He, like Richard Nixon, saw the agency as populated by clueless elites. Trump made former Tea Party Congressman Mike Pompeo director. Trump disdained briefings and believed that he knew more than anyone else. Pompeo was close to Trump and briefed him, often telling the president what he wanted to hear. That was not the first time that the CIA director shaped intelligence to please the boss. Trump liked to meet with high-level strong men - Vladimir Putin, Saudi Prince Mohammad bin Salman, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. It’s clear now that nothing positive was accomplished by these meetings. At their 2018 summit meeting, Putin assured Trump that he hadn’t meddled in our elections, despite the fact that Trump’s intelligence community had confirmed the interference.
Gina Haspel. The president soon tired of Rex Tillerson and replaced him as Secretary of State with Mike Pompeo. Gina Haspel, a career CIA operative, took over the agency. She had baggage from her involvement in enhanced interrogation but she was approved on a largely partisan vote.
Meanwhile Trump continued to belittle and ignore our intelligence work. On October 2, 2018, Washington Post columnist Jama Khashoggi was killed by Saudis at their consulate in Istanbul. The murder was denied by the crown prince, but an investigation, led by Trump’s CIA Director Gina Haspel, confirmed that the Saudis executed the journalist, a finding rejected by the president who was busy selling weapons to the Saudi kingdom. Later, Haspel, caving into Trump, refused to show up at a congressional hearing on the matter. Apparently, her conscience got the best of her, and she finally did testify behind closed doors and confirmed the murder. The author sees Gina Haspel as a good operative who lost her way with Donald Trump and became a cheerleader. That’s not the role of the CIA director.
The last chapter goes into detail about Trump’s conversation with Ukraine President Zelensky that included the president asking Zelensky to do “whatever you can do”' to investigate Joe Biden. That led to the first impeachment.
The Epilogue takes Trump to task for essentially eviscerating America’s intelligence community, part of the deep state he abhors. The American intelligence community’s annual Worldwide Threat Assessment of January 2019 warned of the vulnerability of the US to a worldwide pandemic. Trump didn’t want to hear it, similar to George W. Bush’s not heeding warnings presaging 9/11. On January 3, 2020, Robert Redfield, head of the Centers for Disease Control, learned about the virus and talked to Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar who called Trump who was not interested. His aversion to science and facts no doubt played some role here.
Ironically, Donald Trump was done in by the virus that he ignored.
Bob’s Take
This is a really challenging book to read. It is very detailed, with lots of characters and moving parts to keep track of. Bob in the Basement got confused a lot. I underlined half of some pages, and I am not a big underliner.
The Spy Masters is a very detailed history of the CIA that makes two essential points. The main takeaway is that developing accurate information about what our potential enemies are doing is really, really hard. Most of what gets reported turns out to be incomplete or just plain wrong. The second point is that presidents generally don’t want to hear intelligence news that may require them to make tough decisions.
It was fascinating book, especially for those of us old enough to have lived through the events captured on the pages. It is no surprise to us that over the years the CIA got a lot wrong – the Bay of Pigs invasion, events leading up to the Iranian hostage crisis, the Iran-Contra affair, missing the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ascendance of Al Qaeda during the Clinton administration, and, perhaps most damaging in the long run, misreading the Middle East, particularly concerning Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction. That last miss set up the world we have today, laced with terrorists and instability.
The agency got some things right, most notably identifying the threat to the country that led to the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001. That the intelligence was ignored is beyond the control of the CIA. While the agency was blasted in the official 9/11 report, you could make a pretty good argument that a major goal of the report was to whitewash the responsibility of Presidents Clinton and Bush in the attacks.
Our intelligence and policy agencies are often a few years behind the curve in understanding current threats. We consistently use tools and strategies that might have worked five or ten years ago but aren't too effective now. Both the Clinton and the George W. Bush administrations did not understand that, in the 1990s and 2000s, the major threats came from ideological terror groups, not traditional countries.
There is a tension between getting it done and getting it done while coloring within the lines and not risking congressional opprobrium. Some intelligence operatives thought that enhanced interrogation worked, but it was not within the lines. Initially drones were just for surveillance. That mission was broadened to include killing targets.
The CIA directors were all over the place in terms of personality and experience. Panetta was jovial and down to earth. George H. W. Bush was the adult in the room who was goofy but effective in resurrecting the agency. James Schlesinger and William Casey were arrogant. Porter Goss was just over his head. David Petraeus was a Caesar-like figure who thought that he could fix anything but was wrong. Gina Haspel, the first female director, started off well but soon faded to irrelevance when she fell under the sway of President Trump who called his own shots on everything.
The best of the bunch was probably George Tenet, a consummate professional who did some things well and some things not so well. He eventually got caught in the trap of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction which damaged his reputation. He did last seven years in the job, a modern record. The one you want to have a beer with was Leon Panetta, who seemed more down-to-earth than the rest.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that when the agency got it right, presidents usually didn’t want to hear it. White House staff is in a bubble and bad news is not welcome, especially if it may require some bold action.
After reading The Spy Masters, you realize how hard it is to try to gather information on what our enemies are up to in the world around us. Hats off to the spooks and spies and analysts and directors of the Central Intelligence Agency.
