The CIA at War by Ronald Kessler

Author:Ronald Kessler [Kessler, Ronald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2015-12-16T00:00:00+00:00

Usually, Tenet held an 8:30 A.M. meeting of fifteen of the agency's top officials in his conference room each day. Each official contributed news from his or her area, without revealing the most sensitive information or its source. Besides the chiefs of each of the three directorates, William Harlow, Tenet's choice as director of public affairs, attended. If Harlow was not present, his deputy, Mark Mansfield, the director of media relations, sat in for him.

A former Navy captain, Harlow had been officer of the deck aboard the aircraft carrier USS Midway, then spent most of his twenty-year Navy career in public relations. He was assistant press secretary for national security and foreign affairs in the Reagan White House and continued in that role under George H. W. Bush. In 1992, he became special assistant for public affairs in the Office of the Secretary of the Navy and ended his military career as deputy director of the American Forces Information Service, where he managed the Defense Department's worldwide internal information efforts.

Harlow was also an accomplished novelist, having written Circle William, about a White House press secretary who, with his brother, the commander of a Navy ship, scrambled to prevent a Libyan plot to use chemical weapons against Israel and the U.S. Harlow had a wry sense of humor, which he used to good effect when reporting at the morning meeting on press coverage of the agency.

“CNN is going to say we're morons,” he would say, adding, “They're behind Fox.”

Leaning over backwards to be ethical, Harlow vetoed listing his CIA affiliation on his novel, but in a broadcast interview, Terry Gross of NPR brought up his day job.

“Does keeping secrets come pretty naturally to you?” Terry Gross asked him.

“No comment,” Harlow said.

As director of public affairs, Harlow was in charge of thirty people, including two speechwriters and other specialists who attended to internal communications, community relations, and event planning. That compared with a staff of one in the 1970s, when it was Angus Thuermer's job to say, “No comment.”

In those days the CIA had an Alice-in-Wonderland approach: If the agency were actually to deny a charge, the reasoning went, then a “no comment” on other charges would imply that those allegations were true. And, if other intelligence services noticed the CIA talking to the press they would never deal with the agency. Sources and methods must be protected, the CIA would declare, refusing to acknowledge that there were shadings of secrets. Almost anything—including the fact that the CIA had a headquarters building in Langley—could be considered a method in carrying out CIA operations. That did not mean everything about the CIA should be secret. It was unrealistic and self-defeating for the agency to withdraw from American society.

Tenet tried to strike a reasonable balance between the need for secrecy and the need to account to the American people. “We're a secret organization,” Tenet said. “We have to maintain that secrecy if we're going to do our business. At the same time, the American people deserve to know just what we're doing and how we're doing it.

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