The CIA Must Rely More on
Collecting Human Intelligence

Earlier this summer, the CIA released the "family jewels"—nearly 700 pages of documents detailing some of its most infamous and illegal operations dating back to the 1950s.

One unintended result of the release of the vast store of CIA secrets is that it denigrates covert action operations in favor of human intelligence (Humint) collection, which will play such an important part in our struggle with terrorism. And to understand the difference between covert action and human intelligence, you have to understand the reality of the CIA, which evolved from the OSS.

During World War II, OSS personnel parachuted behind enemy lines to establish contact with and organize resistance groups to harass the Germans and Japanese. It was a classic hot war operation. Those who did it were heroes in the truest sense of the   word.

When CIA's existence was legitimized in the post-war years, its management was handed over to those senior OSS officers who chose to respond to the challenge of the Cold War--Allen Dulles, Richard Helms and Des Fitzgerald. Their experience was almost entirely in paramilitary operations, which today are part of the world of covert action. That is what they knew and understood, so when successive presidents wanted someone assassinated or a foreign government overthrown, that kind of covert action was right up their alley.

They were less knowledgeable about Humint operations, particularly against difficult targets like the U.S.S.R., China and terrorism, which are time-consuming, frustrating, tedious and only occasionally successful. Compared with the flash and bang of covert actions, they are mundane and boring.

Because the old OSS types had so little experience in Humint, there was never a sufficiently strong worldwide effort against those hard targets. Presidents and CIA management were interested, instead, in covert action. It was infinitely easier to recruit some Third World newspaperman to place articles favorable to the United States in his paper than it was to recruit a Soviet. A lot of CIA officers got promoted doing just that.

So, the CIA of the post-war years was primarily a covert action organization, which, according to the newly exposed record, wasn't even terribly good at covert action. For those officers who saw the USSR as a real threat, covert action operations were an impediment that drew resources away from the really important job of recruiting Soviets. This was a major factor in the inability of the CIA to penetrate the highest policy-making levels of the USSR.

Take an Agency management that neither promoted or understood the nuts and bolts of Humint operations, couple it with the paranoid madness of those Agency managers who believed the Soviet KGB controlled everything we tried to do against them, and you have a clandestine service that was destined to under-perform against the most important and difficult target we had.

Has any of this changed? With the possible exception of former DCI George H. W. Bush, no president has ever understood what the CIA could and could not do. The CIA probably failed in its Cold War covert action operations because most Americans (the Mafia excluded) are not very good at assassinations. Picture an Ivy Leaguer planning Castro's assassination.

Whether presidents like it or not, the CIA is a reflection of the American ethos. When it ceases to be that, this country will have made a major change for the worse.

We may be approaching that point now.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA Station Chief who served in East and West Europe, the Middle East and as Chief of the Counterterrorism Staff.  He lives in Williston, Vt.