An incomplete history of the CIA

How the CIA's daily presidential briefings have shaped history over the past 75 years is recounted in Current Intelligence, although with some notable events missing from the narrative

Current INTELLIGENCE

Author: David Charlwood 

Publisher: The History Press

Pages: 270

Price: £20

Current Intelligence by David Charlwood offers a portrayal of how the United States’ external espionage wing the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA’s) top secret presidential briefings shaped history over the past 75 years.

The catalogue covers successes and failures. But there is conspicuously no reference to the CIA’s role in the US’s close ally Pakistan’s momentous defeat to India in surrendering East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971.

But a segment is linked to India’s neighbourhood, namely Afghanistan. In 2001, President George W Bush was not completely in the dark about 9/11. On August 6, an item in the CIA’s Daily Brief headed “[Osama] Bin Laden determined to strike in US” was brought to his attention. It said: “We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as … that Bin Laden wanted to hijack US aircraft … Nevertheless, FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] information since that time indicates a pattern of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.” There were reportedly 40 other mentions of al-Qaeda or Bin Laden in Bush’s Briefs before 9/11.

In 1959, Cuba’s pro-US dictator Fulgencio Batista was ousted by communist revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro. As the crisis escalated, on the morning of October 16, 1962, President John Kennedy’s National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy barged into his bedroom to inform him based on the Brief of that day: “Mr President, there is now hard photographic evidence that the Russians have offensive [nuclear] missiles in Cuba.”

Thus, on the evening of October 22, Kennedy dispatched a letter to the Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev indicating that the US could not tolerate any action “which in a major way disturbed the existing … balance of power”. He expressed, however, his “desire to find through peaceful negotiation, a solution to the problems that divide us”.

Khrushchev in his reply to Kennedy the following day maintained the Cuban blockade by the US was a “violation of the freedom to use international waters … is an act of aggression which pushes mankind toward the abyss of a world nuclear-missile war”.

The Soviet leader’s second letter on October 26, though, proposed: “We, for our part, will declare that our ships, bound for Cuba, will not carry any kind of armaments. You will declare that the United States will not invade Cuba with its forces and will not support any sort of forces which might intend to carry out an invasion of Cuba.”

Kennedy’s response on October 27 sought a commitment from Khrushchev to remove the Soviet “weapons systems from Cuba”, adding, “We on our part, would agree … to give assurances against an invasion of Cuba.” The president’s brother and attorney-general Robert Kennedy in handing over the letter to the Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin secretly promised the US would also remove its nuclear missiles stationed in Turkey, which Khrushchev had demanded.

The following day, Dobrynin received a cable asking him to convey to the Attorney General: “The suggestions made by Robert Kennedy on the president’s instructions are appreciated in Moscow. The president’s message of October 27 will be answered on the radio today, and the answer will be highly positive.” No one in the CIA was privy to the concession on nuclear weapons in Turkey.   

On January 31, 1968, Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Cong fighters attacked 36 of South Vietnam’s 44 provincial capitals and five of its six largest cities. They stormed the American Embassy in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). Yet the Brief up to January 30 merely apprised President Lyndon Johnson that some enemy units were “completing battle preparations” — providing no inkling of an imminent offensive. In fact, the CIA had forecast Saigon would fall, but was eight months off target in its prediction.  

Johnson’s successor Richard Nixon did not trust the CIA. The latter’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, without the CIA present in negotiations, signed a peace accord in Paris in October 1972; thereby ending a war that had cost the US up to $30 billion a year.   

The narrative deals with the CIA’s overthrow of foreign governments, among them in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954 and in Congo in 1960. There’s no mention, though, of the CIA-backed military coup against Chile’s socialist President Salvador Allende in 1973 and his consequent suicide. Heavy redaction of files renders the narrative somewhat incomplete.

But there is reiteration that in March 2005 a Brief reported to President Bush: “The daily intelligence briefings given to you before the (2003) Iraq war were flawed. Through attention-grabbing headlines and repetition of questionable data, these briefings overstated the case that Iraq was rebuilding its WMD programs.” In other words, the US’s invasion of Iraq was an illegal war.     

On a lighter vein, President Ronald Reagan is said to have “never lost his love for the movies”. “One short movie, on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, led Reagan to call the CIA Director to tell him it ‘was a great film’, while the President noted in his diary in June 1985 that a biopic of Indian leader Rajiv Gandhi was ‘good preparation for his visit’ and left Reagan feeling ‘a sense of having met him before’.”