Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

completed training as a clandestine officer and joined the Latin America Division in late 1969, the CIA was, by historical standards, still a fledgling agency—just twenty-two years old. We would go through middle age together: I wouldn’t retire until after its fiftieth anniversary in 1997. But at the time of my first posting, it had already matured greatly since its overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh’s government in Iran in 1953 and the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. And by my time, it was already an established arm of the U.S. government—and a lightning rod for criticism, particularly from those on the left concerned about the “invisible government.” This was well understood within the upper reaches of the government and the intelligence community, where the pluses and minuses of espionage and covert action were being critically reviewed.
    As I prepared to enter clandestine training, a committee of academics and former intelligence professionals convened by CIA director Richard Helms and called the Covert Operations Study Group submitted its report on “Covert Operations of the United States Government.” It was December 1, 1968, and though they presented it to President-elect Richard M. Nixon, 2 I wouldn’t be able to read the document until it became public decades later.
    Even then, the intelligence community’s thinking on covert action was nuanced. In a cover letter accompanying the report, Franklin A. Lindsay, an OSS operative and close associate of Frank Wisner, the man who founded the CIA’s Clandestine Service, stated that the “CIA has not been a political organization. Its people have served successive administrations with equal loyalty.” It’s a point worth repeating, because it is as true now as it was then, even as critics on the left and right demonize the Agency. The report made clear that the CIA had been, and should remain, squarely under the president’s control. “Covert operations are an instrument; their only legitimate objective is to serve the foreign policy of the president,” the document stated. “They are not an independent aspect of U.S. foreign policy, but simply one way of furthering that policy. The expertise of the clandestine service is secrecy. Covert operations should be called upon only when something should be done in a secret manner—and only when secrecy is possible. It is up to the President to determine what he wants done and whether it should be done secretly or openly. A covert capability is like a military capability. Its use is a presidential prerogative. As with the military service, the clandestine service should not be pursuing any projects, much less self-generated ones, except by presidential decision.”
    The Lindsay panel described covert action—appropriately, in my judgment—as a useful tool for the president, enabling him to engage in “forms of conflict” while avoiding open hostilities. Clandestine operations allow the CIA to maintain important relationships in foreign countries and support causes without the need to give all countries in a region “equal treatment.” And they “permit the Government to act quickly, bypassing domestic U.S. political, bureaucratic, and budgetary controls.” But the panel was also sanguine about the limitations of covert operations, which, they said, “rarely achieve an important objective alone” and often “cannot be kept secret … At best, a successful covert operation can win time, forestall a coup, or otherwise create favorable conditions which will make it possible to use covert means to finally achieve an important objective.” At the same time, there are grave risks involved with covert action, as the report spelled out clearly. “Our credibility and our effectiveness” as advocates for the rule of law around the globe, it stated, are “necessarily damaged” when our covert activities in foreign countries are revealed.
    Much has changed since the panel made its report. Indeed, some of its