that had been willing to take risks on behalf of U.S. interests, and had encountered no serious political criticism of the CIA or U.S. foreign interventions when they were recruited. When I arrived in the 1960s, however, there was widespread criticism because of Vietnam.
I arrived at the CIA in 1966 as the war was becoming costly and unpopular. Several supervisors were curious as to why someone who opposed the Vietnam War would join a CIA that was becoming infamous due to the war’s horrors, particularly the violent Phoenix program, which was responsible for the deaths of innocent Vietnamese people. I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t give much thought to the role of the CIA in Vietnam or in places such as Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, or Cuba, where the CIA had conducted some of its most destructive operations. The CIA’s involvement in the overthrow of the government in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954 as well as the targeting of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1959 and Fidel Castro in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs were far from my mind.
I was naïve, leaving the first round of CIA interviews believing that it was a large research institution specializing in international relations. I gave little thought to the security investigation that would take up most of that year, which included an oppressive lie detection test. The CIA had an excellent library in my fields of interest, a helpful and professional staff to assist in research, opportunities for additional language training, and access to the most sensitive secrets of the U.S. government on the Soviet Union and East Europe. I was impressed with the people I met in the interviews, and I was excited by the possibility of overseas travel.
There is no excuse for not focusing on the clandestine operations of the CIA, and not weighing the pros and cons of the agency’s violent role in undermining the governments of other nations, many of which were democracies. While the CIA had a legitimate role to play in the collection and analysis of intelligence, its role in the field of clandestine operations and covert action was questionable at best. CIA training courses were quite boastful of the covert actions behind the overthrow of governments in Iran and Guatemala, but I eventually concluded these events were strategic failures. We are still dealing with strategic setbacks caused by the pursuit of regime changes in nations lacking political stability outside the authoritarian strongman model. It took me too long to realize that CIA covert actions, as well as military intervention, had registered no strategic successes, but had been responsible for a series of strategic failures for the United States, and catastrophe for families and communities in foreign lands. It was particularly shocking to learn that the father of containment, George F. Kennan, whose books I had devoured as a graduate student, was a leading proponent of a covert action role for the CIA in the late 1940s—over the objections of the first CIA directors and their general counsels.
I learned early on, however, that the CIA was no “rogue elephant out of control,” but a secret agency that simply carried out the orders of the White House. CIA director Gates ordered the destruction of nearly all of the operational documents on the overthrow of Iran’s government (Operation Ajax) in 1953, presumably because one of the coup’s planners prepared a secret history that described the Eisenhower administration’s direct involvement. The coup may have been a tactical success, but it was a strategic nightmare that still burdens U.S.-Iranian ties. The same could be said for most covert actions.
The bureaucratic wall between the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence and Directorate of Operations contributed to my belief that I was doing legitimate work as an intelligence analyst and had nothing to do with the covert activities of the CIA’s “case officers.” The CIA headquarters building contributed to this feeling, because it was divided physically and ideologically between the two major directorates, or the “two sides of the house.” Analysts resided in the northern half of the building, and operations officers in the southern half. We ate in different cafeterias to make sure that visitors to the CIA would never stumble into covert operatives who worked under cover. The physical layout was cumbersome, and it inhibited contact and communication between analysts and collectors. The latter wanted this system because analysts were viewed as progressive eggheads who didn’t understand the harsh international environment. Few analysts objected, because we viewed many of the operatives as knuckle-draggers with little substantive expertise.
There was a double standard in the training of new hires. The CIA’s Directorate of Operations—in charge of clandestine activities in foreign countries—recruited operations types who were given rigorous training for nearly a year at a training facility in Virginia. They received training in paramilitary activities as well as operational tradecraft. The career trainee program was devoted to preparing incoming officers for a career in clandestine activities. There was no comparable training for new analysts. A few analysts received mentors when they got to their regional offices, but most were on their own.
A useful preparation for life as an intelligence analyst was reading studies from the senior research staff. I learned that the research in the academic community was not as up-to-date as the work being done by the senior research staff. The work of this small, elite group suggested that the best way to get good assessments is to recruit good students and give them enough time and independence in their areas of expertise to pursue their work. Since papers by the senior research staff were considered “working papers” and not final intelligence, they did not require formal coordination within the CIA or the intelligence community, which is the best way to encourage out-of-the-box thinking. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger knew that the best intelligence in Washington came from informal papers and not the formal estimates and assessments that carried the endorsement logos of myriad intelligence organizations. Coordinated intelligence is typically intelligence that forswears the most radical or experimental thinking.
Before facing the cultural challenges of the Intelligence and Operations Directorates, however, I encountered a personal challenge. Returning to my graduate studies at Indiana University’s Russian and East European Research Institute, I encountered strong hostility to the CIA among faculty members and fellow students. They were aghast at my career choice. One member of my dissertation committee, Professor Bernard Morris of the Department of Government, immediately resigned from my committee without any explanation either to me or to the Department of History. He refused to speak to me for years, let alone help with my research.
Morris had had a bad experience while serving in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which was the intelligence arm of the State Department. He told a mutual friend that the “Goodman thing” really bothered him because he did not want to be perceived as a former government official from the intelligence community whose students were seeking job counseling and, in my case, a job with the dreaded CIA. The episode with Morris left me angry and frustrated.
I learned later that Morris had faced a rigorous and unfair security investigation at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research and wanted nothing to do with anyone considering a career in intelligence, let alone at the CIA. Professor Morris, an engaging and exciting professor, was victimized by the wave of McCarthyism that swept over the State Department in the 1950s.
Morris was extremely important to me because he had arrived at Indiana University in 1963, a year after my enrollment, as a vigorous and articulate critic of the U.S war in Vietnam. I was opposed to the war too, but Morris had a deeper understanding of the relevant history and politics, and their implications for international stability. He soon developed a close circle of followers within the graduate student community, and a few of us became active in the teach-in movement against the war, which was later investigated during my polygraph examination for the CIA.
I was also sympathetic toward Owen Lattimore, another professor who was victimized by McCarthyism in the 1950s and, as a result, was treated shabbily by our university, Johns Hopkins, where he was a professor. Neither Morris nor Lattimore received the protection they should have had from their institutions, and their experience should have made me more critical about bureaucratic politics in Washington, craven bureaucrats who occupy important positions, and the cowardice of academic and governmental institutions.
The reaction from some of my closest
