Intelligence and Strategic Culture by Isabelle Duyvesteyn

Author:Isabelle Duyvesteyn [Duyvesteyn, Isabelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317967033
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2013-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

Access to the Oval Office and the Politicization of the Intelligence Process

The fifth and final strategic cultural factor is the near-total phobia that every CIA director (and now the Director of National Intelligence) has felt since the days of the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s about maintaining their unfettered access to the President of the United States. It is difficult to understate just how important the personal relationship between the President of the United States and the head of the US intelligence community has increasingly become. According to a declassified CIA history:30

A DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] in frequent contact with and fully supported by his President will have few equals in Washington in his influence on the policymaking process. Conversely, a Director lacking entry into the innermost circles of the White House quickly finds himself – no matter how well informed his sources or accurate his intelligence – isolated from the administration’s central decisions. His warnings and advice will fall unnoticed into the waste bin of rejected and ignored memorandums Washington daily spews out.

Some CIA directors had excellent relations with the White House, such as General Walter Bedell Smith (1950–1953) during the Truman administration and Allen W. Dulles (1953–1961) during the Eisenhower administration.31 But DCI John McCone angered President Lyndon B. Johnson by disagreeing with the White House on Vietnam policy. President Johnson punished McCone by shunning him and denying him access to the White House, leading to McCone’s resignation in April 1965. As a declassified CIA history put it: ‘McCone found resignation preferable to being ignored.’32

As directors of the CIA have increasingly been forced to do whatever it takes to stay in the good graces of the President of the United States, over time this relationship has had a disturbing effect on the independence and integrity of the US intelligence community, and negatively impacted on the community’s willingness to ‘speak truth to power’, as was the case during the events leading up to the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

One can argue that the White House first began to overtly interfere in the intelligence process during the administration of President John F. Kennedy (1961–1963), when the US intelligence community moved for the first time into the policymaking arena. For instance, in early 1963 the CIA was forced to rewrite a critically-worded National Intelligence Estimate on the security situation in Vietnam to reflect a more positive assessment of the situation on the ground.33

The political pressure on the CIA from the White House intensified dramatically during the tenure of President Lyndon B. Johnson (1963–1969). One of the most extreme examples of how politics can, and often does, intrude on the intelligence effort in the United States occurred when President Johnson launched the United States into the Vietnam War after an alleged attack on two US Navy destroyers cruising in the Gulf of Tonkin on the night of 4 August 1964. Newly declassified documents have confirmed that the attack on two US Navy destroyers never occurred, and that the

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