Handbook of intelligence studies / edited by

HUMAN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE
Turner. President Carter put CIA back on the offensive in his changing attitude to the
Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the covert action he instigated to oppose the Soviet take-over of
Afghanistan in 1979. Still it remained for Ronald Reagan to initiate an across-the-board
revitalization of both US defense and intelligence resources that would reverse the post-
Vietnam War drawdown and counter ongoing outbreaks of Soviet aggressiveness. President
Reagan authorized a covert action to train and reinforce the Contra resistance to the Marxist
Sandinista revolution of 1979 in Nicaragua, and a second covert program to build up the
mujahideen factions opposing the Soviet-controlled government in Afghanistan. At the same
time, he initiated a research program to intercept incoming missiles in space. The Kremlin
began to believe the US was trying for a first-strike capability against the USSR and initiated a
world-wide intelligence alert called Project Ryan to report on indicators confirming such an
effort. At the same time, old age and sickness were removing Soviet premiers at a record rate. In
March 1985, a completely new figure ascended to power in the Kremlin, Mikhail Gorbachev,
who was focused on curtailing Soviet commitments to defend communism everywhere (the
Brezhnev Doctrine) and reforming the economy to provide a better response to the needs of
the Soviet peoples. Meanwhile the Reagan administration was having a difficult time keeping
the US Congress on board for the operation to support the Contras. After the second amendment
curtailing CIA support for the Contras passed Congress – and was signed into law by the
President because it was attached to an omnibus year-end appropriations bill – some members
of the administration on the National Security staff and in CIA concocted a scheme to sell
embargoed weaponry to Iran in exchange for information about terrorists who had abducted
Americans in the Middle East, using the proceeds from the sales to supply weapons illegally to
the Contras. The Iran–Contra scheme finally blew up in the press in the fall of 1986, sending
the Reagan White House and William Casey’s CIA into a tailspin.
It took the appointment in 1987 of Judge William Webster as DCI, a former Director of
the FBI and US Court of Appeals judge, to restore legitimacy and integrity to CIA operations
after the Iran–Contra fiasco. Meanwhile CIA’s covert operators got Congressional approval to
supply Stinger missiles to the Afghan mujahideen, a policy that proved pivotal to driving the
Soviets out of Afghanistan. As unintentionally transparent as the Nicaraguan covert action was
to the world, so the cooperation by CIA with the Pakistani intelligence service to supply
armaments to Afghani and Arab guerillas in Afghanistan was painted as a state secret within
the boundaries of “plausible deniability.” The Soviets knew where the weaponry, especially
the Stingers, was coming from, but they were in no position to do much about it, despite the
concerns of Pakistan’s nervous chief of state, Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq.
To date, the Afghan covert action has been the last big successful clandestine political
operation mounted by CIA, where the US hand did not show to an impermissible degree.
By and large, the CIA officers involved kept their promise to Pakistan’s rulers that they would
physically stay out of Afghanistan, and work through the Pakistani intelligence service, the
ISI. Both the advent of round-the-clock cable news programming, and instant world-wide
communications via the internet have successfully impinged upon the US’s ability to maintain
the necessary secrecy of a major covert political operation. This was made manifest in the
administration of President George H.W. Bush, when the President, despite his tour of duty as
DCI and his appreciation for the role of intelligence, turned instead to the American military
to deal with both Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1989 and Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf
War in 1991. When President Clinton sought to make use of covert action in overthrowing
Saddam in the mid-1990s he found it was impossible. Congress had gained an appetite
for micro-managing an operation that could have high domestic stakes, and CIA had too few
covert assets to bring it off.
123