Double Agent Double Talk

The Wall Street Journal, 20 November 1995

Cast your mind back to the 1980s and consider the following scenario
for a spy thriller on a Soviet plan to win the Cold War: The KGB “turns”
some American agents reporting to CIA headquarters at Langley, and feeds
them false reports of a big Soviet military buildup. So the naive
Americans rush into building a lot of unnecessary and costly weapons.

There’s just one thing wrong with this picture: It was a blueprint
for Cold War victory not by the Russians but by the U.S. It would have
been nonsensical for the KGB to have thought up such a screwy plot. Yet
some in Washington put forward this preposterous scenario as Cold War
history. The point is trying to prove that, as liberals wailed at the
time, the famous Reagan-Weinberger defense buildup was “unnecessary.”

The proximate cause of this screwiness is a new CIA report on double
agents. It all started when CIA Director John Deutch went to Capitol
Hill a few weeks ago and told closed sessions of the House and Senate
intelligence committees that in the late `80s and early `90s, some
mid-level CIA officials sent information to the Administration that they
knew or suspected came from double agents. The double agents were
recruited by the Soviets from the approximately 100 American agents
identified by super-traitor Aldrich Ames.

Mr. Deutch called these lapses “inexcusable” and “devastating.” Well,
perhaps. The tainted reports are a serious matter and ought to be
investigated carefully. That does not mean, however, that all the rest
of us have to accept the revisionist political spin.

The information that Mr. Deutch took to the Hill comes from a highly
classified report on the Ames case by CIA Inspector General Frederick
Hitz. But this report apparently didn’t pay attention to whether the
actual material in the double agents’ reports was accurate; the way a
double agent gains credibility is to offer good information along with
the bad, and much of the information in the reports undoubtedly was
true. But all Mr. Hitz cared about was whether the reports were sent
upstairs without a caveat alerting readers that the source was
questionable.

Second, it’s not at all clear that the CIA knew at the time that the
reports were coming from suspect sources. Nor is it yet clear how many
tainted reports made it up the line. Our information is that the number
of reports that reached the White House from agents the CIA knew were
questionable was in the single digits.

In any event, no decision on defense spending is based solely on a
report by a spy. For starters, each branch of the armed services has its
own intelligence network; the multisource nature of American
intelligence sees to it that information of this sort is checked out.
The CIA is just one input used in deciding how much defense to buy. In a
front page story in its November 6-12 issue, Defense News Weekly
interviewed a host of current and former military intelligence officials
and concluded that “virtually no significant investment in U.S. military
weapon systems or research was made as a result of tainted intelligence
supplied by double agents.”

In the weeks since Mr. Deutch first reported on the tainted
intelligence reports, the rhetoric has died down some. The House and
Senate intelligence committees continue to study the matter, as well as
the CIA itself and a Defense Department panel. We hope that none of
these investigations reverses the outcome of the Cold War, but that they
will put an end to the wild double talk about double agents.