8/16/96

J. Ransom Clark wrote:

> Deutch, like Stansfield Turner, has never understood that CIA personnel are
> not as likely as military types to salute and ask, "How high?" when told to
> "jump."  Told to "go forth and reinvent yourselves," the military will
> throw a enormous quantity of staff and line time into a "bottom-up" study,
> along the way developing a whole new vocabulary to describe what they are
> already doing.  The end product will look new and sound new, but (surprise,
> surprise) is probably going to require additional resources.  Deutch
> expects that what he says to be treated as gospel; when it is not, he
> ascribes the fault to the personnel with whom he has to work, not to any
> failure of understanding on his part.


   My own experience with CIA instructs me to agree with Deutch. 
At one point in my 25-year career I served as chairman of 
a promotion panel for CIA operations officers and was surprised 
to see that analytical ability had nothing to do with the Directorate 
of Operations personnel. (One person out of several hundred officers was 
noted as having analytical ability and it was only with a great deal of 
effort that I had this person considered for promotion).

      You need look only at the consequences of CIA operations to
get some measure of the quality of its personnel -- the Bay of
Pigs, the CIA-supported war in Vietnam that lasted for 25 years 
to a major degree caused by its unbelievably bad, policy-supportive 
intelligence. In this case I (and others) tried for a number of 
years to make the CIA face the reality of a "People's War People's 
Army," but was unable to make a dint in its granite-like  facade.

   We also have the successful operation in Afghanistan that
trained, motivated, armed and disbursed radical Islamic
fundamentalists throughout the Middle East and other parts
of the world -- this in opposition to the primary Pakistani
officer for that operation who constantly advised against
igniting the radical Muslims with arms, money, training,
and demolitons.

   The list of CIA inabilities and failures is virtually endless
and I have included them in my data base. One cannot deny those 
records as many are based on official studies and documents.

Ralph McGehee