Date sent: Tue, 23 Apr 1996 10:06:06 -0500 Name: turner.txt Language: English Subject: CIA, Stansfield Turner Title: The CIA Under Turner Grade: B+ System: Northwestern University Age: 19 Country: USA Where I got the Evil House of Cheat address: Fraternity Newsgroup The CIA Under Turner In February 1977, the Commander of the Southern Flank of NATO, Stansfield Turner, received a phone call. The call was from the Secretary of Defense. Newly-elected President Carter wanted to meet with him. The next day, Turner was in the Oval Office. President Carter had a job for him, the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). Turner was a little apprehensive of the job. The CIA was under heavy fire for past and present abuses. He was leery of giving up his military status to take a civilian position. However, the President and others, including past Directors assured him that he could keep his military affiliation and that the job was well worth taking. Past DCI George Bush called it, "the best job in Washington" (Turner 24). Turner took the job. Everyone knew there were problems in the CIA. The press was highly critical of the agency. Turner was taking over at a time when Americans' idea of Central Intelligence was that of Watergate and spying on U.S. citizens. Congress was demanding oversight so they could personally monitor the way the taxpayers' money was spent. The days when government agencies could bend the law in the name of the cold war were over. The public demanded accountability from the CIA. It was Turner's job to change the organization and restore the credibility of the agency. This would be no easy task. One of the first problems Turner found was in counterintelligence. James Angleton ran this branch of the agency in the 1960's. However, it was not until the 1970's that his unbelievable behavior became public. Most of the attention centered on a Soviet defector named Yuri Nosenko. Nosenko defected to the U.S. in 1962. For various reasons, most of them unfounded, Angleton believed Nosenko to be a double agent. Angleton wanted to make Nosenko confess. He built a one-cell jail just outside Washington where Nosenko was kept for three years. He lived in poor conditions and was forced to answer questions for up to twenty-four hours at a time. It was amazing that Nosenko recovered from the ordeal and managed to live a normal life after that. Angleton's excessive behavior was not limited to the Nosenko situation. He also went overboard when investigating members of his own agency. If an agent was suspected of wrongdoing, he lost all access to sensitive documents. This practice often halted an agent's opportunity to advance because he was essentially locked- out of the promotion process. Sometimes Angleton threatened entire groups. If the CIA discovered that there was a mole in the agency whose name started with the letter "A," there was a distinct possibility that the CIA would monitor everyone whose name began with "A." Angleton's paranoia was so great that he said before Congress, "It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government" (Turner 178). By the time Turner became the DCI, Angleton was gone, but some of his policies were still in use. Another problem that Turner noted was that the DCI is not really in control of the agency. The people who made decisions were the department heads. This practice seems to have arisen from a strong need for compartmentation. Compartmentation was necessary to better protect secrets. A problem arises when the Director does not really know what is going on in his own agency. If a dispute breaks out between the branches, they will try desperately to settle it themselves. They do not want to risk the Director favoring one branch or another. Turner could not live with the system as it stood. First, because he felt it was his duty to know what the CIA was doing and what its performance level was. How could the American people put faith in a Director who was shut out of the agency's decisions. Another reason Turner did not like the compartmentalized CIA was it prevented him from doing his job, cleaning up the CIA. Besides shutting out the Director, the compartmentation also inhibited the teamwork necessary to properly run an intelligence agency. Nothing more clearly illustrated this point than the incident of "The Spy Plane in a Yam Patch" (Turner 223). The incident occurred during the negotiations for the SALT II treaty. President Carter asked Turner for some photos of a small scale war in a third-world country. The request was obviously a test of the agency's ability in the future to monitor Soviet compliance with the treaty. Turner said he could produce the photos within a couple of days. Turner was expecting the photos within three days, but he could not have anticipated what was going to happen. The overhead reconnaissance could not find the fighting. Desperate, Turner turned to the espionage branch. There he approved a two million-dollar plan to buy a plane and fly it over the area to take the pictures. They did not have a skilled pilot, however and the plane crashed into a yam patch. Turner still did not have the pictures. Finally, he called in the photo experts in to find out what was wrong. They were not even looking at the battlefield! Not knowing that the President wanted pictures of the actual battle, they were monitoring the routes into the area to watch for tanks. After discovering this and instructing them where to look, Turner had the photos almost immediately. Another distressing point of this story is that the Defense Intelligence had the photos the whole time. If any cooperation existed, the CIA would not have had to through all this trouble in the first place. A final change that Turner felt was necessary was oversight. Congress had long wanted to be the public's "watchdog" over the CIA. After all of the reports released in the 1970's, there was no question that the Congress would somehow oversee the agency. After the Church Committee report on abuses in the CIA, the CIA rewrote many of its own rules to prevent abuses. This helped to improve the public image of the agency dramatically. The hardest hit of all were paramilitary actions. Congress passed an amendment to the National Security Act that required the President to approve of all covert actions and report them to Congress. Congress was unhappy that the CIA was taking covert actions to overthrow a foreign government that was democratically elected in Chile. However, the reaction to Chile was not nearly as harsh as the reaction to Angola. Congress went as far as to pass a bill that forbid all covert action in Angola. Even such strict measures could not stop the uncontrollable CIA. Other covert actions also caused criticism. Congress was concerned about propaganda articles and books published by the CIA in foreign countries would reach the U.S. The CIA had for years placed these articles in nations not likely to hear the truth from their government. The government had to publish the books in the U.S. and had to have them reviewed. Therefore, Americans had to at least have exposure to the book before it ever went over seas. After Congress discovered this threat, the production of materials that were obtainable within the U.S. was sharply reduced (Turner 82). With these problems weighing him down, Stansfield Turner somehow managed to get things done. He reviewed the counterintelligence department and eliminated the paranoia techniques. He tried his best to unite the agency into one intelligence body, not three. He also supported the idea of Congressional oversight of covert actions. The actions he took made an impact on the agency. He sharply reduced illegal operations and scandal during his time as DCI. Above and beyond Congress, Turner enacted CIA regulations forcing extra clearance on highly-sensitive covert actions. However, there continue to problems in the CIA. Turner helped to straighten it out in the late 1970's but many of these reforms were internal and not permanent. When the Reagan administration took over with a new DCI, William Casey, the CIA regulations became lighter again. Someday there may be another Director like Turner who will clean up the agency again. Until there are strict regulations written into the law, there never will really be stability in the CIA. Works Cited Turner, Stansfield. Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986.