The Hidden Hand by Richard H. Immerman

Author:Richard H. Immerman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-01-09T16:00:00+00:00

The Reagan Revival

Reagan had been willing to excuse CIA abuses when he served on the 1975 Rockefeller Commission that Ford established to investigate the CIA's Family Jewels, even though he was rarely able to find the time to attend its meetings. As president a half-dozen years later, however, he was unwilling to excuse what he considered the agency's deplorable performance not only in Iran but, more important, also with regard to an array of intelligence matters concerning the Soviet Union. Drawn to the Team B critique of the relevant National Intelligence Estimates (Richard Pipes directed the National Security Council's East European and Soviet desk during Reagan's first two years in office) and the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD)'s warning that since Nixon and Kissinger the United States had become faced with an ever widening window of vulnerability against a nuclear attack (Reagan recruited many CPD members to his national security team), Reagan took office convinced that the CIA had grossly underestimated the Soviet's military power, military spending, and aggressive ambitions.35

Worse, the CIA according to Reagan had grossly underestimated the Soviet success in paralyzing the United States by practicing nuclear blackmail while it expanded its global influence through proxies in the Third World. During the interregnum, the president-elect assembled a transition team to recommend measures to enhance the CIA's capabilities across the board. It advised wholesale reforms, including bolstering the director's authority over all the elements of the community. In Reagan's judgment, however, improving the CIA required a change in leadership more than an institutional adjustment. It needed a DCI who appreciated that the United States was in danger, knew about intelligence but was not infected with the CIA's complacent culture, and was willing to take risks to secure the national interest. It needed William Casey. Reagan would follow in Carter's footsteps at least in one respect: he replaced the incumbent DCI with his own choice.36

Although their personalities contrasted sharply and their relationship was never an intimate one, Casey and Reagan saw eye to eye on the severity of the Soviet threat and the role the CIA must play in first combating and then eliminating it. To neither was improved intelligence collection and analysis the issue. Much like the members of Team B had concluded when critiquing the CIA, they adamantly believed that Soviet behavior and intentions could be assessed by what any attentive individual could observe or read in open sources; spies and advanced technologies were not necessary to reach the most basic judgments. The president and director of central intelligence, therefore, did not require a National Intelligence Estimate to tell them what they already knew: that the Soviet Union could not be trusted, that its goal was to develop the nuclear capability to hold the populations of both the United States and its European allies hostage, and that it relentlessly sought to extend its evil empire to Central America, Africa, the Middle East, and everywhere across the globe. The United States had to respond more aggressively to the Kremlin's geopolitical challenge.

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