Was the CIA useful for anything?

Carlos Alberto Montaner

Half a century ago, President Eisenhower, appalled by the CIA's ham-fisted behavior, stated his fear of leaving Americans “a legacy of ashes.” That was the expression used by New York Times journalist Tim Weiner to title his history of the Central Intelligence Agency, recently published by Doubleday.

The book's central theory is that American espionage failed in the basic task for which it was created: to inform the authorities about the dangers threatening the country. Apparently, the CIA seldom got it right. It was never able to substantively penetrate the Soviets, Chinese, Koreans, Cubans or Vietnamese, while the enemy's intelligence during the Cold War was a lot more skillful in learning the secrets or the intentions of the United States. Even today (although the book does not mention it), after the disappearance of the USSR, the aggressive Cuban intelligence was able to recruit a high Pentagon official, Ana Belén Montes, sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment for treason. There are suspicions that Cuba has other “moles” hidden in the U.S. administration.

Also -- and this is a parallel topic in the book -- the CIA was seldom successful in its covert operations, dubiously legal from the American point of view, with the exception of the overthrows of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, João Goulart in Brazil, and Salvador Allende in Chile, the collaboration in the assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael L. Trujillo, and the capture of Che Guevara, whose execution was decided by the Bolivians. In any case, in Weiner's book we read a clear condemnation of the CIA's participation in these actions and in the ideological battle waged against the communists throughout the second half of the 20th Century, for example, its bankrolling of political and cultural institutions, such as the Christian Democratic Party of Italy and the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

According to Weiner, aside from the possible violations of the law, the huge amounts of money spent by the CIA did not justify the meager and almost always counterproductive results of its efforts. Why did the agency fail? Basically, because of ignorance. Chiefs and subalterns barely knew other languages, did not know the culture, history or idiosyncrasy of the societies they were supposed to protect, attack or change, and frequently set for themselves goals that were impossible to achieve. But the politicians were also to blame: U.S. presidents -- both Republican and Democrat -- lied, distorted information, or subordinated the national interest to partisan concerns.

The book must be read with a critical eye, but it must be read. Everything it says is true. However, it ignores a fundamental fact: the USSR had a plan for world conquest that it put into high gear after World War II, and the only nation in the world that confronted it was the United States. The CIA -- like the Marshall Plan, NATO and the rest of the defense mechanisms -- must be judged within the context of the Cold War. It is too bad that the agency propped up the democratic parties in Italy, but if it hadn't done so, the powerful Communist Party of Italy, backed by Moscow, would have achieved power and forged a satrapy similar to the ones in Poland and Romania. It is a pity that the Greek generals staged a coup and installed a criminal dictatorship, but if Washington (through the CIA) had not confronted the communist threat in the post-war years, Greek would have disappeared behind the Iron Curtain.

It is true that the KGB had more successes than the CIA, but Soviet intelligence had at least three extraordinary advantages over its American counterpart:

• the total and unlimited backing of the Russian government, which did not fear the nonexistent public opinion or the weight of the law (the KGB wrote the laws);

• the unconditional support of the world's communist parties; and

• the well-oiled ideological complicity of thousands of intellectuals, journalists and artists who served as sounding boards for the political discourse that issued from the Kremlin. Quoth the melancholy opinion attributed to García Márquez: “Immortality is achieved only when one appears in the Soviet Encyclopedia.”

Would the United States have won the Cold War if the CIA had not existed? Probably. The USSR and communism went under as a consequence of their harebrained theories, contrary to human nature, executed with unparalleled cruelty (100 million corpses littered the road), after they faced a democratic model that was infinitely more efficient in material and scientific matters and a lot more comfortable on the emotional level. Nevertheless, we can never be sure. What cannot be questioned is that, when freedom was about to disappear in the world, the United States tried to prevent it. And somehow managed it.

September 10, 2007

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