CIA

G

The CIA under President Reagan

President Reagan made good on his promise to rebuild the CIA and secured a major expansion in the budget and personnel of the agency. (The CIA budget was a secret until 1997, when it was officially revealed to be US$26.6 billion. Rough estimates suggest that the agency’s budget was about US$20 billion in 1981, and that it reached a Cold War high of about US$36 billion at the end of the 1980s. The most recent figure is US$26.7 billion for 1998.) Reagan named CIA veteran William Casey as DCI, and he became a key presidential adviser. Reagan relied heavily on Casey and the CIA to lead his campaign to end what he called the “evil empire” of Soviet communism. At Reagan’s direction, the CIA created reports that exaggerated the economic and military threat presented by the USSR. The distorted estimates helped Reagan persuade Congress to approve massive funding for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a research programme to develop a defence system to destroy incoming enemy missiles. The Soviet economy, already suffering chronic problems, was too weak to support a military effort to match SDI.

H

Covert Operations in Central and South America

Reagan also put the CIA at the centre of his aggressive Cold War strategy by ordering the agency to launch a new wave of covert operations against the communist world. In El Salvador, Reagan’s CIA gave covert assistance to that country’s brutally repressive right-wing regime on the mistaken assumption that Nicaraguan communists were operating from bases in El Salvador. In Nicaragua, the CIA supported the Contras ('counter-revolutionaries'), which set out to overthrow the left-wing Sandinista government. The CIA’s sometimes ruthless tactics in Nicaragua became controversial, and in one embarrassing episode, a CIA contract employee instructed the Contras on how to assassinate people on their own side, and then blame the atrocity on the enemy Sandinista army. The Nicaraguan Sandinista government eventually did lose power in 1990, but in a peaceful election.

I

Covert Operations in Other Parts of the World

During the 1980s the CIA ran covert operations in many other parts of the world. Several African countries, for example, became the battleground for Cold War rivalries between the United States and the USSR. As part of this conflict, the CIA supported insurgencies against quasi-Marxist regimes in Angola, Chad, Ethiopia, and Mozambique. The CIA also trained anti-communist guerrillas in Afghanistan and supplied them with sophisticated Stinger ground-to-air missiles that could shoot down Soviet-supplied helicopter gunships. In Poland the CIA supported Solidarity, a large pro-democracy trade union federation. By the late 1980s some of the countries targeted by the CIA had started moving away from communism. Rebels in Afghanistan and Chad succeeded in ousting the pro-Soviet governments, and Polish authorities were forced to legalize Solidarity and to schedule democratic elections. But in Angola, Mozambique, and some other countries, the CIA’s covert backing of rebel forces produced only stalemates that left thousands of civilians dead and wounded.

J

Iran-Contra Scandal

Despite the CIA’s successes during the 1980s, the agency became embroiled in a serious scandal concerning Nicaragua and Iran. Relations between the United States and Iran deteriorated after the 1979 Iranian Revolution left the country in the hands of fundamentalist, anti-Western mullahs (see Islamic Fundamentalism). Tensions grew even worse during the Iran-Iraq War, where, the CIA supported the brutal Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and imposed an arms embargo on the sale of US weapons to Iran. But officials in Ronald Reagan’s NSC ignored the embargo and in 1985 sold about US$30 million worth of weapons to Iran. Members of the NSC also broke the law when they used the profits from those arms sales to fund the CIA’s support of the Contras in Nicaragua, despite a 1984 law that barred the government from providing assistance.

The CIA’s activities in Nicaragua were already controversial, so the Reagan administration came under even more intense criticism when the news broke in 1986 about the diversion of funds to support the Contras. But Reagan enjoyed so much popular support and his foreign policy seemed so successful that he escaped much of the blame. The CIA also got off lightly, partly because the NSC had initiated the questionable activity and partly because CIA director Casey collapsed into a coma in December 1986 (he died in May 1987), before the scandal broke. The scandal did, however, result in one change. In the future, the person nominated to be inspector general of the CIA had to be approved by Congress, giving the inspector the independence and stature to investigate malpractice more thoroughly.

K

The 1990s

In the early 1990s, the CIA faced a great deal of criticism for its continued use of questionable covert operations and also because of its alleged analytical incompetence. Why, asked the agency’s detractors, had the CIA overestimated the economic strength and political durability of the USSR? Why had it failed to predict the fall of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991? The CIA’s critics were eager to rein in the agency, and they scoured the history books for stories of past inadequacies, such as the agency’s failure to predict the fall of the shah in Iran in 1979.

The CIA also faced a crisis because of the end of the Cold War. President Truman had conceived the CIA in the 1940s as a weapon to be used in the Cold War, and in its first 40 years the agency’s main goal had been the destruction of the communist threat. Many people saw the collapse of Soviet-directed communism as a triumph for the CIA, but it also seemed to eliminate the agency’s main mission. See also Collapse of Communism.

Against this already troubled background, the CIA faced sharp criticism in 1994 when senior counter-intelligence official Aldrich Ames was arrested and charged with spying for the old USSR. Ames had been in charge of the Soviet section of CIA counter-intelligence (responsible for protecting the United States from Soviet spies). Beginning in 1985, Ames sold US secrets to the KGB (the Soviet intelligence agency). His betrayal was believed to have led to the deaths of several US secret agents. He also fed many Soviet disinformation documents to US policy makers, possibly affecting US decision-making. The FBI detected Ames’s misconduct and found the evidence to put him in prison. But the CIA faced severe criticism because Ames spied for so long, and because the agency security staff failed to notice that Ames had used over US$2 million from the KGB to buy a luxury car, an expensive house, and other items that he could not afford on his CIA salary.

In the wake of the Cold War, many political leaders debated the CIA’s future. One group, led by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, demanded the dissolution of the CIA and the establishment of a more open government. A second group defended the CIA’s record, and recommended it be left alone or strengthened. A third group thought that the CIA should survive in a somewhat reduced and reformed mode.

Facing a crisis, the CIA accepted the need for some change. In 1993 it slashed hundreds of jobs and cut back its spy satellite programme. It agreed to the gradual declassification of documents dealing with its intelligence history. CIA supporters and officials proposed new roles for the agency, including monitoring the spread of weapons around world, fighting threats to the US economy, and stopping the flow of drugs into the country.

President Bill Clinton appointed a commission that conducted the largest-ever inquiry into secret intelligence. When the commission reported in 1996, it rejected a proposal that the DCI should become a so-called intelligence tsar, with immense powers over the whole intelligence community. But it also recommended that the CIA should continue to operate, if in a more open and accountable manner. The president endorsed the findings of the commission, and the CIA’s post-Cold War crisis subsided. The moderates had won the debate.