Handbook of intelligence studies / edited by

HUMAN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE
the first to supply photographs of Soviet medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles
being transported to, unloaded and installed in Cuba. Signals intercepts pointed to a heavy buzz
of communications around the part of the island where the missiles were being installed, and
human sources witnessed the transfer of mysterious long tubes on highways too small to
accommodate them. Although there were many details that human sources were unable to
provide, our principal spy, Oleg Penkovsky, from his vantage point at the pinnacle of Soviet
military intelligence, reported on the ranges and characteristics of the IRBMs and MRBMs
which were being installed; and also revealed that General Secretary Khrushchev was way out
in front of his Politburo in thus challenging the US so close to its home territory. The fact that
President Kennedy had Penkovsky’s insights into Khrushchev’s over-exposure, confirming the
observations of his own former ambassador to the USSR, Llewelyn Thompson, meant that
JFK was prepared to give up the strategic advantage of a surprise attack on the installation
and, in a masterstroke of statecraft, give General Secretary Khrushchev an opportunity to
escape from the corner into which he had painted himself. In my view, this was the apex of US
intelligence support to the President during the Cold War.
After October 1962, prosecution of the Vietnam War became the over-riding national
security concern of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. CIA built up its presence in
South Vietnam and collected useful human intelligence, from captured Vietcong and North
Vietnamese prisoners especially, that permitted it to report consistently that the Government of
South Vietnam (GOSVN) was unlikely to prevail in the war unless it took a more active role in
the fighting and was able to win over greater support in the Vietnamese countryside. CIA’s
rejection of the validity of high body counts, that were held by American military intelligence
to signal attrition in the North Vietnamese capacity to wage the war, is reminiscent of
today’s intelligence controversy about the import of the non-existence of Weapons of Mass
Destruction (WMD) in Iraq. In the case of Vietnam, CIA more or less stuck to its guns that
North Vietnam was not being defeated in 1968 despite its loss of manpower, whereas it was
“dead wrong” in its assessment of the existence of chemical and biological weapons stores
in Iraq in 2003, according to the Silberman-Robb Presidential Commission Report. In both
cases the requirement of good, on-the-ground, contemporaneous human source reporting
was critical to CIA’s intelligence judgments. In Vietnam we had it, while in Iraq we did not.
Silberman-Robb found that the critical National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 2002
on Iraqi WMD was based on unilateral spy reporting that dated from 1991, and UN Weapons
Inspector reporting that dated to 1998. There was no direct, on-the-ground humint after that
before the outbreak of the war. Over the decades, the NIE process had taken on its share of
taxing intelligence puzzles, but it was clearly compromised and out of date in this one.
It is ironic that, as today, the great blows to the quality and competence of CIA human source
reporting in the 1970s were delivered during a Republican presidency, on the watch of a
national security establishment that valued and to some extent depended on good intelligence
for its activist foreign and defense policy. Although Richard Nixon privately disparaged the ivy
leaguers at Langley whom he believed had favored his opponent in the 1960 presidential
race against JFK, he needed good intelligence on Vietnam to support the Paris Peace talks his
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was conducting with the North Vietnamese, and also his
overtures to China. Indeed, when it looked as if an unabashed Marxist, Salvador Allende, was
poised to win the Chilean presidential election of 1970, it was to CIA that President Nixon
turned, improperly bypassing the rest of his foreign policy establishment and the US Congress
to mount a coup against a democratically elected Latin American leader.
Watergate and the Nixon resignation turned the tide against this manifestation of executive
imperialism, while the CIA caught a fair measure of popular and Congressional backlash.
121