After taking office as president of the United States in 1976, the representative of the Democratic Party Jimmy Carter nominated for the post of CIA director “a man from his team” T. Sorensen, who was determined to radically reform the country's intelligence community. Sorensen's views, with which he shared during the discussion of his candidacy in Congress, caused an extremely negative reaction from not only the leadership of the special services, including military intelligence, but also members of both houses of the main legislative body of the country who represented their interests in the legislature. As a result, Carter had to propose a new candidate - Admiral Stansfield Turner, the former commander-in-chief of the NATO allied forces in the South European theater of operations, which, according to the new president, had its advantages in terms of leveling the "eternal rivalry" between the two branches of intelligence - "civil" and military …
CARTER INITIATIVES
Carter, who won the election under the slogan "fight against abuses in all branches of government and for human rights in the international arena," tried through his protégé to soften the harsh course of the national intelligence services by obeying them. The new president, like his predecessors, was not satisfied with the fact that the members of the Intelligence Community had practically independent choice of their field of activity and, as he believed, the weak coordination of their programs. Carter decided to strengthen the centralization in the management of the intelligence services through his personal leadership (through the director of the CIA) all intelligence activities.
At the suggestion of the president, the new head of the CIA again put forward the idea of establishing the position of a certain "king of intelligence" who would have absolute power over the sprawling Intelligence community. Turner indignantly noted that, despite his formally combined position of Director of Central Intelligence and simultaneously Director of the CIA, he actually controlled only an insignificant part of the entire significant volume of intelligence activities and, accordingly, the budget of the Intelligence Community as a whole. In 1976, at a hearing in the Senate Intelligence Committee, it was reported that the CIA director was responsible for only 10-15% of intelligence activities, while the remaining 85-90% belonged to the military.
Almost immediately, Turner's intentions to unite all intelligence activities under his control ran into fierce opposition from the military in the person of the president's protege, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown. A compromise decision was made that Turner would "only oversee" military intelligence, but not direct it. Within the framework of this formula, a ramified mechanism was created in which it was decided to more clearly separate the "producers" from the "consumers" of intelligence information. Under the National Security Council (SNB), a kind of body was created - the Policy Review Committee (CPR), whose meetings were chaired by either the Secretary of State or the Minister of Defense. This allegedly provided a balance in the assessment of intelligence information by "civilian" intelligence agencies, including the CIA, and the military.
The intelligence assessments were concretized in the tasks that came from the National Center for the Distribution of Intelligence Missions (NCRRZ). A representative of the military, Lieutenant General F. Kamm, was appointed to lead this center, which was structurally part of the CIA. Further, the "products" came to the National Center for International Analysis (NCMA), headed by the "pure" Deputy Director of the CIA. From the point of view of observing the principle of balance and balances, as well as greater objectivity, independent specialists, including those from academic (scientific) circles, were involved to work in both centers. Further, reports and other documents were sent to the Committee for Political Analysis (CPA) under the NSS, in which the final word remained with the officials close to the president - the secretary of state, the minister of defense and the presidential aide for national security. And in this case, the aim was to balance the preparation of important political decisions taking into account the opinion of the military.
However, in late 1977 - early 1978, information leaked to the media pages that, during the discussion of the intelligence information received by the newly created bodies, the assessments of the CIA and military intelligence not only did not coincide, but also diametrically contradicted each other. In these conditions, it was inevitable that a person endowed with a certain power had to appear, whose opinion would be decisive for the preparation of one or another important political (foreign policy) decision. Under the system of power created when Carter was president of the country, such a figure turned out to be the presidential aide for national security Z. Brzezinski, a well-known "hawk" and Russophobe.
NEW COORDINATOR
Brzezinski single-handedly headed the Special Coordinating Committee (JCC) of the National Security Council, whose activities, unlike their predecessors - Committees 303 and 40 - were not limited to overseeing the work of Central Intelligence, but extended to practically monitoring all intelligence activities of the state, including military intelligence. CIA Director Admiral S. Turner from that time had practical access to the President only through his National Security Assistant. Thus, Brzezinski stresses in his memoirs, the practice of full control over the activities of the Intelligence Community was introduced for the first time in accordance with the law "On National Security". It is noteworthy that it was during the leadership of the JCC Brzezinski that "complete harmony" was noted in the assessments of the foreign policy situation by the CIA and military intelligence.
However, this practice of "over-centralization", "unification" and "uniformity in assessments", which Brzezinski sought, had clearly negative sides, which is emphasized in many analytical articles of American researchers of the activities of the special services. And if, through the combined efforts of the CIA and military intelligence, Washington managed to unleash a civil war in Afghanistan and carry out numerous "successful" acts of sabotage against the contingent of the USSR Armed Forces, "forcing" it, among other things, to leave this country, then in some other countries the "monotony" of the final assessments of the situation had clearly negative consequences for the United States. Thus, the White House, backed by "concentrated" intelligence assessments from the NSS, failed to properly respond to the anti-government demonstrations that began in 1978 in Iran, which ultimately led to the paralysis of US efforts to rescue the friendly Shah regime in that country. The CIA and military intelligence failed to organize and carry out properly in the spring of 1980 the "rescue mission" of 52 American citizens held hostage in Tehran.
Some analysts associate the failures of the American intelligence service when Carter was president of the country with the fact that neither he nor his right hand Brzezinski could step over the "non-life principles" of doing business in the foreign policy arena formulated by them, covered with a shell of populism and an imaginary struggle for human rights and at the same time, allegedly completely divorced from the methods of real intelligence activities practiced for many years. This is evidenced by the factual failure of the administration in promoting the draft law "On control over intelligence" and the Intelligence Charter, which met with strong, albeit unannounced, resistance from almost all members of the Intelligence Community, including military intelligence.
The failures of the democratic administration in the foreign policy field were successfully used in the pre-election struggle for the presidency by the Republican Party led by Ronald Reagan, who directly accused Carter and his entourage of inability to organize interaction between the country's intelligence services and achieve a "real assessment of the situation" in a particular region of the world … In the 1980 election campaign, Reagan's leitmotif on intelligence issues was a promise, if elected president, would provide the Intelligence Community with the ability to "do its job without hindrance." Unsurprisingly, virtually every influential former intelligence organization, including the military, in American civil society, supported the Republican candidate in the 1980 presidential election, who ultimately won a landslide victory.
And in January of the following year, a veteran of the OSS, a prominent figure in the winning party and a person close to the president, William Casey, was appointed director of the CIA. With his very first orders, Casey, with Reagan's consent, returned to intelligence many of the retired intelligence officers dismissed by Schlesinger, Colby and Turner. Casey chose Admiral B. Inman, who had left the post of director of the US Department of Defense's Office of Homeland Security, as his first deputy as a gesture that signified "the unity of the national intelligence community". Prior to that, Inman headed the intelligence of the Navy and DIA. It is indicative that the new Vice President George W. Bush also headed the CIA at one time and enjoyed authority among intelligence officers.
SCORTERS RECEIVE CART BLANCHE
President Reagan, on the advice of the conservative group in the US establishment, whose interests he represented, changed the order of hearing intelligence information and relegated the NSS to a secondary position. From now on, persons whose opinion was at the moment interesting to the country's leadership were invited to intelligence briefings in the White House. Defense Minister K. Weinberger was present without fail on behalf of the military at these meetings, which took place in the form of a discussion. The CIA was mainly involved in information support of the meetings. However, this order of discussions soon ceased to satisfy the president, since, as historians of the American special services later noted, the discussions "were unjustifiably dragged out" and "turned into a source of discord." Not distinguished by hard work, and besides, inclined to authoritarianism, Reagan "quickly put things in order."
Under the National Security Council, it was decided to create three High Interdepartmental Groups (VMG) - on foreign policy, headed by the secretary of state, military policy, headed by the secretary of defense, and intelligence, headed by the director of the CIA. To each of them were subordinate groups of a lower level, whose members included, among other things, the leaders of military intelligence.
President Reagan's Executive Order on Intelligence No. 12333 (December 1981) contained a significantly expanded list of functions of the CIA director compared to all previous periods, which once again underlined Casey's increased authority in the administration. Moreover, the decree for the first time rather strictly regulated the subordination of military intelligence officers to the director of Central Intelligence (in addition, of course, their subordination to the minister of defense). The resignation from his post of military spokesman Admiral Inman in mid-1982 marked the unprecedented importance of the CIA as virtually the only one of its kind and the main intelligence organization in the United States, this time "purely civilian."
During this period, the military, represented by Minister Weinberg, did not particularly oppose the growth of the CIA's influence on the system and mechanism for making foreign policy decisions in the White House, because, as experts in the history of the special services point out, the secretary of defense and the "chief intelligence officer of the country" were connected by close personal ties and "unity of views "On everything that happened in the international arena and on the measures that had to be taken to neutralize the" threats "to the US national security. Naturally, the military did not oppose "some infringements" in the growth of their funding in comparison with the Central Intelligence Service: an increase in the budget of the Ministry of Defense in 1983 by 18%, including military intelligence, compared to 25% for the CIA. During the same period, the National Intelligence Information Council (NISI) was created under the CIA, which actually meant the revival of an almost similar body for evaluating information, abolished when Colby was director of the CIA. The revived body received information from all special services, where it was analyzed and reported to the president.
The implementation of the adopted decisions to "optimize" intelligence activities was expressed in a sharp intensification of sabotage work in all "conflict" regions of the world, including, first of all, Latin America and the Middle East (Afghanistan). So, to intensify the "fight against communism" in Nicaragua, as well as "communist rebels" in the neighboring countries, the CIA and military intelligence sent hundreds of US and Latin American citizens called up from the reserve, newly hired and trained in sabotage methods. Despite criticism (even in Congress) of unprecedented interventions in the internal affairs of sovereign countries, President Reagan issued a special statement in October 1983 in which, for the first time in American history, he interpreted the 1947 law as a direct justification for such interference.
The close coordination of the CIA and US military intelligence efforts in South America was demonstrated during the 1982 British-Argentine conflict over the Falkland Islands (Malvinas). During the phase of active confrontation between the two states, the British contingent of troops in the region constantly received intelligence from the CIA and military intelligence, including data from the NSA and space reconnaissance, which ultimately influenced the outcome of the conflict in favor of Great Britain.
During the elaborate operation on September 1, 1983, to uncover the Soviet air defense group in the Far East, as a result of which the South Korean Boeing 747 was shot down, the close cooperation of all US intelligence organizations was also demonstrated, including structures operated by American military intelligence.
In the first and especially at the beginning of the second period of Reagan's presidency, there was a sharp escalation of sabotage activities in Afghanistan, where, thanks to CIA and military intelligence instructors, several thousand so-called resistance fighters ("mujahideen") were trained, causing serious damage to the economy of this country, its armed forces and to the limited contingent of the Soviet armed forces located in Afghanistan.
PRESIDENT OF THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY
In early 1987, W. Casey was forced to retire due to illness. This ended the so-called Casey era, which, from the point of view of the CIA's influence on all aspects of the country's domestic and foreign policy, researchers of the US intelligence services reasonably compare with the “Dulles era” of the 50s. It was under Casey, who enjoyed indisputable prestige with the president, that the CIA's strength doubled and the management budget grew to unprecedented proportions. In order to avoid "exposing the intelligence work" and "unnecessary leaks of information about the work of the department," Reagan was forced to put the "punctual" and "restrained" William Webster, who had previously headed the FBI for nine years, at the head of the Central Intelligence Service. Experienced in the work of "whistleblowers" Webster generally coped with this task, although under pressure from some influential lawmakers, dissatisfied with the "excessive independence" of the "Casey associates" who remained in the CIA, the new head of the department had to fire some of them.
In the foreign policy arena, the CIA continued the course designated by the administration, aimed at an all-round confrontation with the USSR. At the same time, Afghanistan remained the main "painful point" in this struggle. CIA operations in the country developed into a powerful military program with a budget of $ 700 million, which amounted to approximately 80% of the total foreign covert operations budget. At the same time, the funds allocated for the "fight against the Soviets" were distributed in a certain proportion between the staff of the department and representatives of the American military intelligence involved in most sabotage operations in the countries of the region as a whole. In this regard, the fact of the formal allocation of significant funds for the so-called electronic espionage with the involvement of reconnaissance satellites to track the Soviet armed forces is indicative. These funds passed under secret CIA expenditures, but were actually controlled and applied by the relevant military intelligence structures. This was the specificity of close interaction between the two leading members of the US Intelligence Community - “civilian” and military intelligence services during the indicated period.
On January 20, 1989, GOP representative George W. Bush was sworn in as the new president of the United States. This fact was greeted with enthusiasm not only in the CIA, but also in all organizations that were part of the country's Intelligence Community. In US history, Bush was the only supreme commander in chief of the armed forces with a thorough knowledge of the nuances of the work of national intelligence agencies.
The new president respected the director of the CIA, but, having experience in this organization, he often neglected the established practice of reporting information on a particular problem that was received for generalization in the analytical structures of the CIA from members of the Intelligence Community, and directly analyzed the "raw" information himself. or summoned the residents of one or another intelligence agency for a conversation. In a number of cases, this practice turned out to be effective and brought relatively quick results. An example is the operation of American intelligence to overthrow in 1989 the leader of Panama, General Noriega, who turned out to be objectionable to Washington. Moreover, Bush's “forced” direct intervention in the implementation of this operation led for the first time to raising the question of replacing the CIA Director Webster as “having lost the necessary contact with the perpetrators of the action”. To a large extent, this was facilitated by the negative opinion of the military in the person of Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and the military intelligence subordinate to him regarding the business qualities of the CIA leadership in solving "sensitive problems", such as, for example, direct US military intervention in the affairs of sovereign states.
The invasion of Kuwait by Iraqi troops in the summer of 1990, which turned out to be "unexpected" for Washington, was another reason for President Bush's ripe decision to purge the CIA. In addition, the US Department of Defense has already openly made serious claims against the CIA, the relevant structures of which, in particular, were unable to issue accurate target designation for American aviation, as a result of which, in the first phase of hostilities in January 1991, the US Air Force made a number of mistakes and inflicted strikes on secondary, including civilian targets. As a result, the American commander of Operation Desert Storm, General Norman Schwarzkopf, officially refused CIA assistance and completely switched over to assisting military intelligence in supporting military operations. This concerned, among other things, the unsatisfactory work of "civilian intelligence officers" to decipher the images received from reconnaissance satellites. This fact was one of the reasons that led, after the end of the "Gulf War" to the formation within the CIA of a special, so-called military department, which was supposed to "play along with the Pentagon" and play a secondary role of intelligence support in the upcoming clashes.
In November 1991, Robert Gates was appointed to the post of Director of Central Intelligence (aka Director of the CIA), who had previously served as Assistant to the Head of State for Intelligence and enjoyed the special confidence of the President. Five months before this appointment, when the question of the new appointment was resolved in principle, by decision of President Bush, Gates and his "team" were instructed to develop a draft of a fundamentally new document, which at the end of November of the same year, entitled "National Security Review No. 29”Was sent to all government agencies involved in this issue with instructions to determine the requirements for American intelligence as a whole for the next 15 years.
In April 1992, with the approval of the President, Gates sent a document to legislators containing a generalized analysis of the proposals and a list of 176 external threats to national security: from climate change to cybercrime. However, in connection with the formal end of the Cold War, the presidential administration, under pressure from the Congress, was forced to agree to a certain cut in the budget of the Intelligence Community, including military intelligence, which subsequently could not but affect the quality of its tasks to ensure military operations, but now in new geopolitical conditions.
