David M. Barrett

An INS Special Forum: Implications of the Snowden Leaks

In 2013, the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States became embroiled in controversy – again. Its questionable use of wiretaps (Operation MINARET) and its improper reading of international cables sent and received by Americans over decades (Operation SHAMROCK) had been revealed by the Church Committee in 1976; and in 2005 theNew York Times disclosed that the NSA had been wiretapping selected American citizens without a warrant, contrary to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. In this most recent scandal, the NSA hired Edward J. Snowden to help with some of its computer work. At the time of his hiring in 2013, Snowden – a 29year-old high school dropout from suburban Maryland and a former CIA computer specialist – was under contract as a data specialist with the giant defense firm Booz Allen Hamilton. In his short stint with the NSA, Snowden reportedly stole some 1.7 million classified documents from the agency’s computers.He leakedmanyof these documents over the next year toAmerican and British journalists, as a protest against what he viewed as improper surveillance methods used by the NSA against American and British citizens. The stolen documents also revealed that the NSA had been wiretapping the communications of some leading US allies, including the cellphone of German Chancellor Angela Meckel. She was not pleased to learn about this intrusion. ‘Surveillance Revelations Shake US-German Ties’, observed a New York Times headline. Nor were other Europeans happy about the revelations of widespread NSA surveillance against them. Before releasing the first of his documents, Snowden fled the United States in search of a safe haven, first to Hong Kong and then (when other options fell through) to Russia. The leaks revealed that the NSA had been gathering ‘metadata’ (the records of telephone numbers dialed and the duration of calls) on about a third of all the telephone calls made by American citizens, both

An Early “Year of Intelligence” CIA and Congress, 1958

The phrase “Year of Intelligence” gained currency during and after 1975, when, as the late Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) William Colby once recalled, “the CIA came under the closest and ha...

The Essence of Non-Decision: CIA's Deferral of Declassifying JFK-Era Documents

The 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy (JFK)’s assassination passed in November 2013, but the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) still refuses to declassify numerous documents related to major events of his presidency. How many individuals have unsuccessfully requested declassification of JFK-era papers in the past decade is unknown, but a few scholars have publicized the existence of particular documents that, desp i te the i r Freedom of Informat ion (FOIA) or Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) requests, are still being kept secret. Among the unsuccessful have been efforts of the National Security Archive to get the CIA to declassify a major document relating to the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba. I have an indirect relationship with that document and the related declassification I have pursued unsuccessfully for

Confrontations in Asia

Bruce Riedel had a three-decade career at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In his latter years there, his analyses of South Asia had Presidents and some of their top advisers as an audience. More recently, he has served as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and authored a number of books dealing with al-Qaeda, Afghanistan, and surrounding nations. Here, he has taken on the topic of the U.S. and Tibet during the presidency of John F. Kennedy. To deal with Tibet, India, Pakistan, and China (of which Tibet was and is a part) must be taken into consideration. The particular focus of JFK’s Forgotten Crisis is the war between India and China in 1962, which occurred when Mao Zedong had had enough with the United States’s (and India’s) support of the Tibetan nationalist movement and rebellion in that part of China. In order for the United States to give support to India, then reeling from an invasion by China, President Kennedy found himself breaking a pledge he had given a year earlier to the leader of Pakistan, Ayub Khan, that no U.S. aid would go to India, even in the event of a Chinese attack on India.

“Why don’t you teach a course about intelligence?”

Abstract This article notes that it was a student who suggested to me that I teach a course on intelligence. After some thought, I acted on his idea. Selecting books for the course was a significant task. One ‘lesson learned’ in doing so was that, while some books on intelligence can be great reading for those already knowledgeable on the basics, they can be too sophisticated for undergraduates who (like most Americans) are ignorant about U.S. intelligence agencies and their place in the larger government. Other books have been nearly perfect for such students. Since Villanova University is a few hours from Washington, D.C., students have rarely encountered anyone who actually works in intelligence. Therefore, bringing alumni of our school who do just that work back to campus helps the course seem less ‘ivory tower’ to students. As I am a historian, as much as a political scientist, I find that certain documents I have found in archives can be fascinating reading for students in the course.

JFK, FBI, and CIA: playing hardball over an intelligence leak to the New York Times

Abstract On 26 July 1962, the New York Times published a front-page story by reporter Hanson Baldwin which, among many things, showed the vulnerability of Soviet land-based missiles, in the event of a first strike by the US. Drawing at least indirectly from a National Intelligence Estimate, it also showed how US intelligence had obtained that information. The story infuriated President John F. Kennedy, who believed it harmed the security of the United States. This article details an aggressive FBI investigation of who had leaked to Baldwin, as well as an initiative at the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct its own future leak investigations inside the US, both authorized by President Kennedy.

Did the CIA Reproduce ‘Soviet Satellite’ Imagery of the US During DCI McCone’s Era? Evidence from a Document at the National Archives

Abstract The US developed the capability to see and reproduce photo imagery taken by Soviet satellites crossing the American landmass, according to notes of a conversation between DCI John McCone and Secretary of State Dean Rusk in 1963. We analyze the implications of this conversation, and report results of a literature search to explore how the US might have developed such a capability, and whether it lasted.

Beetle: The Life of General Walter Bedell Smith

and journalism, while more surprisingly perhaps showing clear areas of overlap between these two fields. Burrows’s book is a great and a fascinating read, racing to the climax of the period of the Terror, as readers wait to learn of Morande’s fate at a time when many from his social origin ended their lives as victims of the guillotine. This book offers a completely different view of the build-up to 1789 from the more traditional historiography on the causes of the French Revolution. By presenting the history of this period as the biography of a charismatic but unsavory personality, Burrows has crafted a nuanced and intricate narrative which, while retaining an awareness of wider social and political change, nonetheless humanizes the story by allowing us to see it from an individual’s unique point of view.

Sampling CIA's New Document Retrieval System: McCone Telephone Conversations during the Six Crises Tempest

Documents recently made available at the National Archives by the CIA are accessed through non-traditional archival means: researchers use keywords at computers to obtain them. Most of the documents will be uninteresting or worthless to scholars. Some add important or colorful details to our knowledge of the Agency. An example is a small set of documents detailing 1962 telephone conversations of DCI John McCone with President Kennedy, former DCI Dulles, and former Vice President Nixon about the latters best-selling book Six Crises, which charged Kennedy with having acted unscrupulously as a presidential candidate in 1960 by advocating covert action against Cuba.

Doing “Tuesday Lunch” at Lyndon Johnson's White House: New Archival Evidence on Vietnam Decisionmaking

Over the past decade, a number of political scientists have employed presidential papers and other archival materials in order to test various hypotheses regarding American politics. This has been particularly true concerning the Vietnam War and the American presidency (Kahin 1986; Burke and Greenstein 1989; Berman 1982, 1989; Kolko 1985; Hatcher 1990), as scholars have explored the interconnections between ideology, political style, presidential character, and other variables which may explain Americas participation in that war. Thus, while some in the profession may have disdained the use of traditional historical research and methodology, there clearly has been a modest resurgence of archival research for the purposes of theory building. While I am among those who see real possibilities for illuminating political processes by drawing on archival sources, their usefulness should not be overstated: even rich archival collections-may not “solve” debates over causation of political phenomena.