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===The CIA with Sen. Helms of the Foreign Relations Committee - on KAL 007 matters===

==History==

In 1941 President [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]] was relying on intelligence information provided by British intelligence (and slanted by them to favor their position.) In 1941 he created the '''OSS''' [[Office of Strategic Services]], which was the first independent US intelligence agency. After the war  the functions of the OSS were split between the Departments of State and War.

In 1990, debriefed Jewish new immigrants to Israel that had been in the Soviet military reported, contrary to previous public perception, that [[Korean Airlines Flight 007]] carrying 269 passengers and crew, shot down by the Soviets off Sakhalin Island on Sept. 1, 1983, had come down safely in the waters of the Tatar Straits. Other informants reported  that passengers were taken captive, including passenger Congressman Larry McDonald of Georgia.These reports were conveyed to Senator Jesse Helms, the ranking minority (Republican) member of the Committeee on Foreign Relations.  

[[Allen Dulles]], who had been a key OSS operations officer in Switzerland during the Second World War, took over from Smith, at a time where US policy was dominated by a containment policy, with serious discussions of roll-back policies going on, especially in the State Department. Dulles enjoyed a high degree of flexibility, as his brother, [[John Foster Dulles]], was simultaneously Secretary of State. Allen Dulles was head of CIA 1953-61.

Helms requested the CIA to evaluate the evidence coming from Israel. Crucial evidence was verified by the CIA and the Committee drafted the 1991 Republican Staff Study on KAL 007 [http://www.rescue007.org/republican_staff_study.htm] with heavy CIA input. The report would conclude, "KAL-007 PROBABLY DITCHED SUCCESSFULLY, THERE MAY HAVE BEEN SURVIVORS, THE SOVIETS HAVE BEEN LYING MASSIVELY, AND DIPLOMATIC EFFORTS NEED TO BE MADE TO RETURN THE POSSIBLE SURVIVORS".  Here is the Feb. 11, 1992 letter of Admiral Bud Nance [http://www.rescue007.org/nance_letter.htm], Chief of Staff under Helms on the Committee, to the director of the Israel Research Center for Prisons, Psych-Prisons, and Forced Labor Concentration Camps of the U.S.S.R. affirming partial but crucial confirmation of the information by the CIA and also affirming that it was due to this CIA-confirmed information that Helms had written a letter (Dec. 10, 1991) to Boris Yeltsin, requesting the Russian real time military communications of the shootdown, and information about survivors, including location of camps, and information in particular about Congressman Larry McDonald. Here is Helms' letter to Yeltsin [http://www.rescue007.org/helms_letter.htm]

Allen Dulles became the trusted advisor on what was going to happen in the world to President Eisenhower and to his brother John Foster Dulles. The CIA gathered information and provided written assessments of the capabilities and intentions of all world leaders. Its regular briefings gave each president the sense that he knew exactly what was happening across the globe. Like ingenious prognosticators through the ages, the CIA's predictions seemed highly explicit yet never could quite be pinned down. They failed to predict any of the major surprises of the postwar era. On the other hand, estimates of the performance of the Soviet economy proved much more accurate than the information Moscow itself possessed, and forecast the failure of that economy in the 1980s.

On Jan. 8. 1993, Yeltsin would respond by handing over to the International Civil Aviation Organization of the U.N. the requested military communications, the vaunted Black Box tapes from the flight which the Soviets for the previous 10 years had denied having recovered (but avoided all mention of passenger survival). The National Security Agency was also involved in the supply of information  but it was the CIA which was the primary intelligence agency interfacing with Helms and the Committee on Foreign Relations.

 

Dulles devoted 80% of his much enlarged budget ($82 million) to covert (secret) operations to contain Communism. On the other side was the Soviet [[KGB]]. The head of the K.G.B.'s first chief directorate, Leonid Shabarshin later explained, "The essence of the KGB's active undertakings was to inflict political and moral damage on our basic opponent, the United States. . . . [so] We compromised political figures, organs of the press, and Americans whose activities were in some way unwelcome [to the Soviets]." The KGB veteran revealed that every "active measure" against the enemies of the Soviet Union abroad was submitted by KGB to the Politburo “and was implemented only with its permission. The results of the action were also reported to the Politburo."<ref> See [http://www.iwp.edu/news/newsID.139/news_detail.asp Herbert Romerstein,  "Divide and Conquer: The KGB disinformation campaign against Ukrainians and Jews," ''Ukrainian Quarterly'' Fall 2004 online edition]</ref>  Which side performed better remains an open question. CIA money subsidized anti-communist intellectuals and strengthened liberal political parties across Europe and the Third World. Striking low-cost successes early on reinforced the CIA's mastermind image. CIA-supported parties defeated the Communists in Italy and France in the late 1940s. A handful of agents provided assistance to opposition groups which forced anti-American prime ministers out of office in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954) and Chile (1973). CIA counterintelligence tried to neutralize the KGB and other hostile agencies, like the GRU (Soviet military intelligence), Communist East Germany's [[Stasi]] and Cuba's DGI.

In Guatamala in 1954 the CIA operation was marked by chronic lapses in security, the failure to plan beyond the operation's first stages, the Agency's poor understanding of the intentions of the Guatemalan Army, the local communist party (the Guatemalan Labor Party), and the government, the hopeless weakness of invasion leader Carlos Castillo Armas's troops, and the failure to make provisions for the possibility of defeat. Just as the entire operation seemed hopeless, and before there were any significant violentattacks on it, the leftist Guatemalan government suddenly, inexplicably collapsed and a pro-American government took over.<ref> Nick Cullather, ''Secret History: The CIA's Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954.'' (1999)</ref> 

The CIA sent hundreds of agents to Vietnam and Laos to build up anticommunist guerrilla groups. The CIA assisted (but did not actually operate) the "Phoenix" program by which South Vietnamese police forces identified and arrested Viet Cong leaders (torturing many and killing several thousand of them).  In the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, it planned several assassinations, with [[Fidel Castro]] a target of "Operation Mongoose." Castro was never harmed. Indeed, as a hostile Senate committee concluded, the agency did not in fact assassinate anyone. Congress has never passed a law forbidding assassinations, but every president since Ford has issued executive orders that prohibit direct (or indirect) attempts at assassination.

In 1981 President Reagan appointed his campaign manager [[Bill Casey]] to run the CIA; Casey, a dynamic veteran of O.S.S. espionage, revived the CIA into a powerful instrument of rollback policy. With nuclear deterrence tying the Kremlin's hands, Casey used the CIA to attack the weak links in the Soviet empire. In Afghanistan, it funded and trained Mujahidin guerrillas who deliberately created "another Vietnam" to weaken the Soviet invaders, and indeed finally did defeat the Soviet invasion. Anti-Soviet operations in Afghanistan and Cambodia received strong support from Congress, but operations in Angola and especially Nicaragua became the focus of intense political controversy. When Congress one year prohibited the CIA from operating in Nicaragua, Reagan's White House exploited a loophole by sending its own staffer, [[Oliver North]], to funnel arms and money to the Contra guerrillas. 

With the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1991, intelligence operations became a natural target for budget cutters. Defenders (including ex-CIA head George Bush) argued that absence of a main enemy meant it was necessary to keep watch on many small potential enemies. Critics responded that it was one thing to spy on Soviet intercontinental missile capability, and quite another to figure out how many AK-47 assault rifles were loose in Somalia. 

A major criticism is failure to forestall the [[9-11 Attack]] in 2001 because of three organizational deficiencies: the inability of multiple American intelligence agencies to work together, organizational incentives to take the wrong analytical actions, and resistance to new technologies and ideas.<ref>Amy B. Zegart, "CNN with Secrets": 9/11, the CIA, and the Organizational Roots of Failure." ''International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence'' 2007 20(1): 18-49. Issn: 0885-0607 </ref> The ''9/11 Commission Report'' identifies failures in the IC as a whole. One problem, for example, was the FBI failing to "connect the dots" by sharing information among its decentralized field offices. The report, however, criticizes both CIA analysis, and impeding their investigation. The CIA Inspector General in 2007 concluded that former DCI [[George Tenet]] failed to adequately prepare the agency to deal with the danger posed by [[Al Qaeda]] prior to the [[9-11 Attack]].  

The Directorate of Science & Technology was established to research, create, and manage technical collection disciplines and equipment. Many of its innovations were transferred to other intelligence organizations, or, as they became more overt, to the military services. Albert D. "Bud" Wheeler (1963-66) and Carl E. Duckett (1966-76) built the directorate into a strong component of the CIA and then guided it through its golden age of technical innovation. In contrast, decisions by Ruth David (1995-98) contributed, Richelson (2001) argues, to a decline in the importance and status of the directorate as it lost control over key responsibilities, including the analysis of satellite photography.

 

 

Cloak and dagger stories became part of the popular culture of the Cold War in both East and West, with innumerable novels and movies that showed how polarized and dangerous the world was.  Soviet audiences thrilled at spy stories showing how their KGB agents protected the motherland by foiling dirty work by America's nefarious CIA, Britain's devious MI 6, and Israel's devilish Mossad. After 1963, Hollywood increasingly depicted the CIA as clowns (as in the comedy TV series "Get Smart") or villains (as in Oliver Stone's "JFK" (1992). Leftists around the globe routinely blamed the mysterious CIA for events that displeased them, putting the image of the USA as a champion of freedom and democracy in disrepute. The CIA lost influence after 1963. President [[Lyndon B. Johnson]] disliked its pessimistic forecasts about Vietnam; President [[Richard M. Nixon]] and his national security advisor [[Henry Kissinger]] did not seek its advice. After Watergate (1974) it came under heavy attack for promoting right-wing governments, hampering the success of genuinely democratic protest movements, illegally monitoring dissent inside the USA, and frustrating democracy at home by its secrecy and lack of  accountability. Was it needed in an age of detente? With 15,000 employees in 1973, it had a budget of about $740 million, of which $440 went to clandestine operations. Congressional committees began to monitor the agency closely. Employment and budgets were cut sharply (the totals are secret), and most covert operations were abandoned. Morale plummeted as the agency retreated to a mission of collecting and interpreting information about the Soviets.

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