In today’s era of nuclear and bacteriological weapons, regular armies are becoming less and less relevant. KGB General Aleksander Sakharovsky, who spent an unprecedented fourteen years as the Soviet Union’s spy chief, used to preach that because “nuclear technology has made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon.” The United States never will be a terrorist country. Therefore, our leaders in the White House, the Pentagon, and Congress are now debating how the United States can most effectively defeat the current nuclear threats to our country. That is all well and good, but few politicians seem to be paying enough attention to the power of intelligence, now a neglected weapon that at one time proved decisive in helping us win the Cold War without firing a shot.
In 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the U.S. to the brink of nuclear war. Today’s history books correctly give credit to President Kennedy for averting that disaster. Readers thrill to tales of the U-2 spy planes that secretly overflew Cuba collecting vital information to counter Khrushchev’s ambition to control the U.S. through nuclear missiles aimed at it. Lost in the euphoria over our victory, however, is the crucial role of the initial intelligence source, a courageous Soviet military intelligence officer named Oleg Penkovsky (the author of The Penkovsky Papers, (Collins, 1965). It was he who gave our intelligence community the tip that the Soviets were secretly installing nuclear weapons in Cuba, and it was his intelligence that enabled the United States to decode the images of the Soviet rockets that Khrushchev wanted to install secretly in Cuba, which our U-2 planes were then able to record. Unfortunately, Penkovsky was caught and executed by the KGB. His sacrifice, however, helped us avoid a nuclear war.
After the transformation of Russia into the first intelligence dictatorship in history and the birth of Islamic terrorism, our intelligence community did its best to persuade other enemy spy chiefs to join our intelligence community. A small ripple of intelligence defections followed, but in the 1980s the U.S. Congress prohibited the CIA from helping defectors—most of them resettled under protective identity—to publish in the United States. The result? To the best of our knowledge, no other enemy spy chief has followed in General Pacepa’s path in the last forty years.
In our view, this prohibition —unique in the Western world—has been devastating for the United States. Some three thousand Americans were killed on September 11, 2001, because we did not have a defector, or a source in place that hoped to end his life as American citizen, at the top of al-Qaeda to tell us what its terrorist leaders were plotting. Over four thousand Americans died in Iraq because we did not have a top Iraqi source to tell us that Saddam Hussein did not have nuclear weapons.
Another two thousand American soldiers have so far died in Afghanistan, where the CIA’s officers had to go disguised as civilian tourists on horseback in order to familiarize themselves with that virtually unknown terrorist country.1 Russia’s overnight occupation of Crimea also took our White House by surprise.
After 9/11, new public investigations raked our intelligence community over the coals. They did not focus on why we had no intelligence sources at the top of the Islamic terrorist organizations or on measures to correct that anomaly. Nor did they focus on how to increase the trust in our foreign intelligence community, although trust is the most valuable asset of any foreign intelligence service, no matter its nationality or political flavor. The 9/11 Commission devoted hundreds of pages to publicly blaming our intelligence community for not having identified the nineteen terrorists before they hijacked the airplanes, although terrorists entering the U.S. may be as elusive as needles in a haystack. Some 80 million passengers flew to the U.S. that year alone, on 823,757 commercial and 139,650 private flights; 330 million people crossed the Canadian and Mexican borders during that same year by car, train, and truck; and another 18 million entered the country by sea.2
Evidently, none of the members of Congress who authored the 585 pages of The 9/11 Commission Report, formally named Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, was familiar with the crucial role played by agents and defectors in foreign intelligence operations.
We hope that the president of the United States will correct that. We also hope he will take the CIA out of the daily news. A belled cat doesn’t catch any mice.