Carlucci: Big Man About Intelligence

A year ago he ran a small, money-losing division of Sears. Two weeks ago he was in charge of a micro-sized unit, the National Security Council, in the White House. Today Frank C. Carlucci, the newly appointed Secretary of Defense, directs the activities of close to 3 1/2 million people and supervises the spending of more than a quarter of a trillion dollars. At the same time, in a far less visible role, he directs the free world’s largest and most complex intelligence organization.

Carlucci’s swearing in last week completes a revolution in the U.S. intelligence community that began with the appointment of former FBI chief William H. Webster to take over the critically ill Central Intelligence Agency. Although little noticed by the public, responsibility for the collection of intelligence has shifted dramatically over the last three decades from the CIA to the Pentagon. The primary reason is technology. In the 1950s, former CIA Director Allen W. Dulles chose to concentrate on the traditional human side of espionage, allowing the Pentagon to grab onto the budding techno-spies--satellites, listening posts and reconnaissance planes.

Eventually, because it became more efficient to take a high-resolution photograph from space or eavesdrop on key communications than attempt the difficult task of recruiting an agent-in-place, the Pentagon began getting a larger share of the intelligence dollar. So the CIA, to justify its existence, began shifting efforts away from its original purpose--espionage--toward the risky and questionable areas of covert action and paramilitary operations.

Today the Pentagon controls the largest intelligence machine the world has ever known and it will be one of Carlucci’s most difficult tasks to bring it under control. Among the organizations now under his authority is the National Reconnaissance Office, the highly secret and expensive joint Pentagon-CIA agency responsible for the development and operation of the nation’s growing fleet of spy satellites. For the last several years the NRO has been in a state of near emergency, as the launch systems designed to put new and replacement satellites into space--the space shuttle and Titan rockets--encountered serial disasters. The organization now appears on its way to recovery with the successful launch last month of the Titan 3/34D rocket carrying a critically needed KH-11 photographic satellite.

Another large network now under Carlucci is the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s own expanding organization that performs myriad tasks--from analyzing photos by spy satellites to running the Defense Intelligence College to collecting human intelligence from a worldwide corps of military, naval and air attaches.

But there are two areas the new secretary will have to take an especially close look at: the National Security Agency and the ad hoc intelligence units set up by various military services. NSA eavesdrops on communications and makes and breaks codes, making it the agency that could most effectively spy on U.S. citizens if directed to do so. In 1975 then-Sen. Frank Church (D-Ida.), who conducted a Senate investigation of intelligence abuses, said of NSA technology: “That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left; such (is) the capability to monitor everything . . . there will be no place to hide.”

Because of its potential for abuse, NSA directors must demonstrate absolute trustworthiness or else be replaced. And this is an evaluation Carlucci will have to make about the current director, Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, whose actions during the Iran-Contra affair raised important questions. Because of the agency’s enormous capability to intercept communications worldwide, it picked up many messages and telephone conversations among and involving the participants in Iran, Israel and Washington. Instead of passing this information on to his boss, then-Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger, as required, Odom bypassed the normal chain of command and gave it to the National Security Council. Thus Weinberger did not find out the policy he had opposed was being implemented.

This led to Weinberger’s extraordinary admission during last summer’s Iran-Contra hearings: his first discovery that the United States was negotiating with Iran came through an NSA intercept that was placed on his desk by accident. He was then told by the NSA, his subordinate agency, that he had been given the report by mistake and wasn’t entitled to know anything more. The American public needs reassurance that such behavior will not be repeated.

The other area requiring a hard look by Carlucci is the maze of small, specially trained intelligence and paramilitary units hidden under layers of secrecy within the armed forces. One is the Army’s Intelligence Support Activity, set up in 1981. At the time, NSA’s Odom, then the Army’s intelligence chief, argued that the ISA was needed to fill a gap in the CIA’s many activities. Congressional intelligence committees were never informed of the unit’s creation and, like Weinberger in the Iran negotiations, discovered it only by accident. Eventually, the ISA placed agents throughout the world, operating under various covers. In Panama, for example, the agents used a refrigeration company as a front.

Among its activities was an unauthorized plan to conduct a raid into Laos in search of missing Americans from the Vietnam War. According to one report, Weinberger became so incensed that he ordered the ISA disbanded. But it survived nonetheless. Other mysterious, highly compartmentalized intelligence units set up in the Army have now come to light, including those with such bizarre names as Sea Spray, Yellow Fruit and FOG (Field Operations Group). When one such organization gets into trouble and has to be disbanded, it often simply reemerges under a new name. A secret naval intelligence unit known as Task Force 157, for example, became public and was supposedly disbanded in 1976. But a few years later a nearly identical unit, Task Force 168, quietly emerged and still exists.

There are probably few people better equipped to deal with these problems than Carlucci, who has served in the Office of Management and Budget, as a U.S. ambassador and in the State Department, as the former No. 2 man at the Pentagon and as the CIA deputy director under Stansfield Turner. To some extent the problems may seem like deja vu.

In his book, “Secrecy and Democracy,” Turner wrote that Carlucci “had come to perceive that running the CIA from the director’s office was like operating a power plant from a control room with a wall containing many impressive levers that, on the other side of the wall, had been disconnected. We decided that we were not really in charge of a single CIA, but of three separate organizations operating almost with autonomy. Neither of us had ever seen anything like it before.”