Transcripts For CSPAN3 The Presidency Presidents Their CIA

Historian talks about the evolving nature of the relationship between president s and they are cia directors, and how it is influenced by the president s needs and interests. One director, George H W Bush later became president himself. Smithsonian hosted this program. Good evening everyone. Its a pleasure to welcome you for our program. If you could put away our cell phones, we would appreciate it. If you are wondering why there are bright lights in here, you are going to be on tv. Im kidding, the speaker is going to be on cspan. When we get to the q a, wait until we bring the mic to you. The speaker will repeat the question so you can hear it. Our speaker is andr teaching at columbia working for David Rockefeller he joined the cia in 1980 nine and became a Political Leadership analyst on the middle east. Moved to the history staff in 1996 and was appointed chief historian of the cia in 1955. And his biography as director of Central Intelligence was recently declassified. Reviewscles and book and technical collections have appeared on studies in intelligence and intelligence in and the oxfordty handbook of intelligent security. He has taught intelligence history at George Mason University and georgetown university. Has also written a biography of chief justice john marshall. Ourse join me in welcoming speaker tonight, and enjoy the program. Good evening, i appreciate everybody turning out tonight. Largeood to have a audience for what i hope you will find an interesting find to be an interesting presentation. I spent a good time studying our directors. I did a biography of john mccone, a director in the early 60s, jfk assassination. I got interested in looking at the different ways in which the agencys leaders shape the agency itself. In particular their relations with the president s. I should stay debt should say before i start should say before i start im not going to be talking about the president and his relations with the agency currently. That will probably be very interesting. What i would like to concentrate is the ways in which the president s interact with the director. Choices,s, unlike often which are political payoffs or people who have some lobby behind him and are hoisted by the president. The president s pick the type of director they want to accomplish certain aspects of their foreign time in worldhat history and u. S. History. A powerfullitics is driver behind what the cia can do. When the president can have it do. The agency in which can effectively or ineffectively carry out its mission. The choice president s make about who will run the agency is very important index into how the president s are going to run Foreign Policy. About ourw enough American History since world war ii to realize different president s have very different foreignpolicy agendas, different outlooks on the world, different ideologies, different value systems. Many hadbeen part been occupied with domestic policies. Foreignpolicy has been at the forefront of what the United States is doing in the world. Fighting the global war on terror. These are the times when president s pick particular types of directors to do certain things with the agency that you wont find other president s doing at other times in our history. Diversity is in the first word that will come to your mind when you look up there. We dont have any with beards yet. Yes they are all white men. One other point i want to leave with you is this is an extremely diverse bunch of leaders coming from a wide variety of backgrounds. Each of them has brought a and body ofkill set experience and some cases inexperience they have applied to running the agency. Very Cardinal Point i want you to leave here with. We dont want to exaggerate the influence that directors have on foreignpolicy, this is the father for novels and tv series. One of the most important directors will tell you flat out that the director of Central Intelligence is one of the weakest political figures in washington, because he is totally dependent on the president for his influence. Thats kind of the theme of our discussion tonight. I thought i would have fun, because when i was waiting to get started i noticed a lot of you gazing up trying to figure out who these people are. I thought we would play directors jeopardy. I have not done this before. It may fall flat. Or i may spend the rest of the night doing that. Lets start with this. I am the longestserving director of Central Intelligence. And you can shout out the name. Allen dulles, correct. And there is right there. Conversely, im the shortest serving director. Pompeo was in for the better part of the year. So was george bush. Schlesinger, almost. He was in for about a year and a half. We have to go way back. The first one. He was a crony of harry truman. He made it very clear when he took the job that he only wanted to serve a few months. He was not experienced. Truman wanted a figurehead who could get the Intelligence Group up and running. I am the only convicted felon richard hounds. Regrettably. He was caught in a pretty nasty gotcha episode. He was testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during his hearings before he went out to iran and was asked by senator stewart and who knew the answer but for whatever was grandstanding at the time, did we ever try to covertly overthrow the government of chile . This is an open hearing. Richard helms should have said i cant answer in public. We will have to go in to closed session. For reasons he has never explained i helped him with his memoir and in writing, he says no. Three times to direct questions for this to direct questions. This is a flat out lie because we were doing quite a bit in chile in a twoyear suspended sentence and a small fine of a few thousand dollars which a group of friends paid on his behalf when they had a celebration at the Congressional Country Club after his sentencing. [laughter] david ok. I had my security clearance pulled. [indiscernible] and . One more. Where is he . I cant see him too well. Deutch, am i getting there . John deutch. He had laptop trouble. Round up losing his clearance because of some, the fact he had classified material on his laptop and his son was using the laptop to connect with internet sites that i wont discuss in any detail for this audience. Lets see. I am the only career analyst to become director. Robert gates. Brennan was an analyst for most of his life but had a hitch as chief of station, then he left the agency to become president obamas Homeland Security and terrorism advisor, and he came back to run the agency. Lets see. Here is an easy one. Im the only director to later become president. Bush, ok good. That was the 100 question. [laughter] i was Dwight Eisenhowers chief of staff during world war ii. Walter smith. I could also ask a tougher question, i resigned as director to take a better job, that was also smith. The better job interestingly was undersecretary of state which back in 1962 and 1963 was a much more prestigious position than the director of Central Intelligence. I later became chief of staff of the air force. Nope. Check out the military uniforms. [laughter] david we only have two air forcers up there. And i will also add i am the only dci who became the namesake for an important military post. Military installation. Vandenberg air force base. That is Hoyt Vandenburg who took the job as director, as a stepping stone to becoming chief of staff of the air force. It was a different world in the late 1940s which is why i say sometimes in history the director of Central Intelligence was not a very prestigious position. Here is one with four answers so you will at least get one right. I served in the o. S. S. We heard dulles, that is correct. Who else . Helms. Not bush. Did i hear colby . Yes. And bill casey. So we have four. This is an important point, four fomer directors who used to serve in one of cias predecessor organizations. They bring to their experiences as directors that on the ground, in the war intelligence experience and it was very influential for many of them. Lets see. I am the only former fbi director to be bill webster. I am the only judge to be webster. They are piling on. I was the classmate of the president who appointed me. Turner and president carter. Good. Lets say. See. I used to be white house chief of staff. [indiscernible] i used to be a congressman from california. Leon panetta. Good. I used to be one of the Senior Executives at the bechdel corporation. Thats a final jeopardy question. John mccone. He was a classmate of Stephen Bechtold at cal berkeley where they both were studying engineering. I was the only person to be director of cia and director of the nsa. Michael hayden. Ok. I used to be an officer in our directorate of operations before i changed careers and served in another capacity for a number of years and then became director. Well yes, you could say that because any of the oss grads. This is directorate of Operations Meeting cia position. He was a case officer for about 10 years. Gates was an analyst. Porter goss. He worked in the d. O. , had to leave for medical reasons and became a local politician in florida and then a congressional preservative, ran the House Oversight committee for a while, then became our director. I am the only person up here who is both director of Central Intelligence and director of cia. Goss again. He was running the agency when the dni position was set up, the intelligence, terrorism intelligence reform and prevention act passed in 2004, effective 2005. It abolished the position of dci and for the first time in history created statutory the director of Central Intelligence agency. We will talk about the effect that had in the prominence of the dci and the different authorities that they had. I think that is a pretty good warmup. You all did really well, super job. Let me go on and talk about the main points of tonights presentation. When the cia was set up, a couple of different models came to mind for the leaders. You had allen dulles, who at the time had his oss experience. He thought based in part on that and his dealings with the British Service during world war ii, that the cia should pretty much always be run by a careerist, somebody who grew up in the agency and was whetted to, devoted to that particular wedded to, devoted to, that particular line of work. We have only had a few directors who were careerists, people who started at the agency and worked up to be director. Bill colby, Richard Helms, gina haspel and bob gates, but not directly because he did do some tours at the nsc during the reagan administration. If you are talking directed straight from desk to the seventh floor, we have only had those three. That was one model. What has come about is the one Dwight Eisenhower specifies here, which is, and he is using the word peculiar in a variety of meanings, not just strange and not just oddball but peculiar in the sense of requiring special capabilities. What i think he was getting here is that, and we will see this as our talk goes on, but you have to be able to pick a certain type of person to run the agency at a particular time to fulfill you, the president s, Foreign Policy agenda. That became the pattern. These individuals were neither elitists from a small cadre of careerists like the british model but drawn from all walks of life. It became an important element of their strength and utility that they had this variety of backgrounds. Taking a quick statistical snapshot of them, we see that they are, region of birth, for what it matters, is a couple parts of the country. We now have our First Southern born director, gina haspel, previously nobody from that part of the world. Who is the only overseas born one . Any idea . John deutsche, born in belgium. As far as education goes, this is a pretty smart lot. A lot of advanced degrees, four doctorates, people like schlesinger and gates. Only one outllier, he only went to high school. Ironically this was one of our most influential directors ever. You go back and look at his record we are still living with many of his accomplishments. This is walter smith. The reason he is so influential is he established the directorate structure of the agency where we had analysts, operations officers, support officers in separate directorates and then a decade or so later the science and Technology Directorate is created and that was the structure from 1963 on until the modernization that occurred under director brennan when directorates still exists, the action in the agency occurs in a group of 12 Mission Centers that fuse together major components of the different directorates as a way of encouraging collaboration, getting rid of stovepipes, that sort of thing. This is where the diversity really comes into play. If you look at those variety of backgrounds and of course some people did more than one thing in their careers, we have 25 directors either dci or dcias, so this is a variety of backgrounds. This is a strength for them because they were able to bring, based on what the president s wanted at times, a specific kind of expertise and background to bear on foreignpolicy agenda. All three branches of government are represented as our three of the five military services. As are three of the five military services. Perhaps one of the keys that distinguishes many of these directors, in fact almost all of them, 24 out of 25, from other cabinet appointees, many of whom when you think about it dont have much experience in the Cabinet Department area of responsibility they are running farmers, they werent farmers or involved in energy, didnt have anything to do with military directly, on and on it goes. With the exception probably of William Raborn who served for one year 196566, and johnson picked him because he had no other alternatives and was looking for someone he was remotely familiar with, but his main point was he was trying to give Richard Helms, who he did want, a year of highlevel grooming. Director of operations helms is promoted to deputy director, and he is in the more prominent position getting more washington experience and his ability, then rayborn checks out almost by design and helms is elevated to the director in 1966. What i mean by direct experience is that an individual was either a practitioner of intelligence, analysts, case officer, or they ran an Intelligence Organization like they were the head of air force intelligence, in the case of vandenberg, or they were a senior officer in a military Intelligence Service like general hayden, air force attache for a while. You are either a protection are or run Intelligence Organization. Indirect experience means a person who was a consumer or user of intelligence in a Foreign Policy or National Security position, not practitioner but someone who had all the clearances needed, use intelligence to inform decisionmaking and 10 of them had that background. Admiral raborn was the only individual who had no background at all in intelligence. Some would argue leon panetta didnt because other than engaging with it when he was in congress and chief of staff at the white house, no direct or even indirect contact in any depth. That is an arguable proposition. It is a definite job for the middle agers. Who do you think was the youngest dci ever . Bush . David no. James schlesinger. He was 41. Who do you think is the oldest . Casey. Casey was in his 70s when he was appointed. The tendency of the spread is toward that mid50s age range. It is not a job with a lot of security though. We do have again a bit of a scatterplot. We have dulles serving over eight years, one of them over six. But almost like figure skating scores, souers with five months, bush 11 months and so forth. Three years is about as long as they last. It is kind of moving in the downward direction lately, but for the most part, and you will see why president s change or dont change directors when they are elected or if reelected they choose to maintain a director instead of picking a new one instead of the cabinet shuffle. That is an interesting factor is the surprising durability of directors through transitions or election times. When you are talking about the director being placed in the washington political environment, a couple of things need to be kept in mind. One is that a lot of intelligence people dont know much about intelligence. They come to it as overseers or managers of the agency, being the chief executive, overseers in congress with a lot of misapprehensions about what intelligence is, what it can do, capable of, how long it takes to set up intelligence networks, develop covert action programs, why analysis is a doggedly difficult proposition. They have a simplistic idea of what intelligence is, go steal secrets and tell me what they mean. That is the sort of simple stick view of what intelligence is. It is misrepresented in the popular culture. We all read trashy spy novels and seen horrible spy movies, nonfiction sometimes isnt much better. Journalism can be hit or miss when it comes to covering intelligence. Journalists in the National Security area can be good or sometimes sensationalist headline chasers. When you put it into the washington environment you have a tough situation for a director. He is under the spotlight all the time. The cia is the most open secret organization in the world. It is held acc