The Iron Mask

Evolving "The Agency" In The Iron Mask

information and knowledge bias within the CIA.

By Roy D. Follendore III

June 3, 2006

More than a decade and a half ago my general feelings about the CIA evolved to the point where I was frustrated. I was then at the point where I could see that the agency was a blindly focused and a compulsive organization. To me the CIA seemed to be largely composed self centered groups with nepotistic leadership styles. Don't get me wrong, there were very good individual people involved and in their own ways some of them were doing a good job. But the Agency itself felt jaded, tired and consumed. There was endemic over control by managers at the top that would react with such force that they occasionally caused the bottom echelon of lose control of their assigned objectives. The top management could never quite see where it was going or what it should be doing. They constantly demanded input from the lower echelons and when that feedback of reality arrived at their desks it was all too often rejected out of hand because management didn't like the story that was being told to them. Middle managers longed for their own brand of predictability as though predictability was synonymous with reliability.

In order to give a sense of how it feels while working in this kind of environment, you might think about putting on a cast iron mask and wearing it for a month. An iron mask is heavy and it restricts your vision. Wear it long enough and your shoulders will stoop. You will eventually tend to look down as you walk. You will no longer care to look where you are going. The mask wears you down and eventually dominates your life. Working within the CIA felt as if it was wearing an iron mask and if you worked there long enough it would make you feel like that too.

When I first arrived at the CIA, it became obvious that the old and outdated leaders had ran things with an iron will for too long. They did not understand the ever evolving importance of technology. At that time, the primary enemy, still the KGB, had provided the CIA with too many predictable challenges. A natural sort of oppositional symmetry had formed a scab and hardened the organization to resist change. Subtle rules concerning how things should be viewed was tightly integrated into the very fabric of the organization by years of operations.

Employees were asked to wear the iron mask even as they were intentionally stripped of their their personal identities and through those invisible veils of secrecy systematically and judiciously isolated from their families and their communities. Like their arch enemy the KGB, decisions were largely political policy driven and there were no valid internal structure to dispute decisions. Over its history even opposing groups actually begin working in concert and in sympathetic coordination, and it is natural that organizations who are enemies begin to become quite similar in their habits. It should be said that even the rat and the snake come to know each others habits through their common ways.

If organizations can internally create and share a special group sprit then their opposing counterparts eventually create and share one too. In the case of the CIA, it was as though we were in a deadly dance with our enemies, to the point where when the cold war ended and the wall went down, there really was not much internal celebration. The death bell of the Soviet Union was also noted the time of death of for a CIA way of life. When enemies suddenly begin to become friends, the structures meant to oppose them become confused. At that moment policies were then turned inward and there was even greater suspicion about employees who were just trying to do their jobs.

It is amazing to think that the internal politics of the CIA might have foreshadowed national politics and opinions. Those who were responsible for the inflow of funding that accompanied the Reagan administration attempted to instill a new respect for the need for fresh new ideas and solutions. But just like the dot com era, the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism in Europe and the collapse of cold war funding changed all of that. The struggle of internal political tides of conservative and liberal thinkers would constantly rose to the surface to the point where regardless of what my heart told me eyes and ears told me that the CIA had become an organization of alienation. The entrenched conservative old guard purged the creative thinkers and arrested control with all of benefits that entailed. It is my opinion that this was the greatest underlying reason why so many good employees were lost to America at the moment when she needed them the most. The cost cutting conservative thinkers won out, but even as they did, they were sewing the seeds of their own failures.

I believe that within the CIA, this poisonous atmosphere of 'everyone for themselves' became the primary reason why traitors like Aldrich Ames would come into existence. People like Ames came into influential positions essentially because they saw themselves as mercenaries without a personal sense of decency. They are political animals who operate through expediency. Looking back, I suppose that I removed my own personal iron mask and resigned from the agency when I realized the absolute barriers that such people presented and finally accepted the fact that there was no way that I could not help the CIA make a positive difference for my country and to the world. Perhaps I was right. As we all now realize, even with the reputation as the most influential organization in the most powerful nation on the planet, the CIA, has been the wrong organization for gathering intelligence in this new millennium.

But important underlying questions have remained in my mind for all of these years. Why is it that such an organization came to wear such a mask? What would motivate organizations of often brilliant and trusted individuals to operate with such obvious rational and logical limitations that they failed the very reasons for which they were organized? I believe that the answer to these kinds of questions begins at the beginning.

It is no secret that the CIA grew from the 'temporarily' abandoned remnants of the Office of Strategic Services or OSS. The OSS was created to oppose the Nazi war machine and just like the CIA of the 1980's, it resembled many of the aspects of its enemies.

The author of the OSS was of course the very brave lawyer named William Donovan. William's claim to fame after World War I was to fight organized crime by enforcing prohibition laws as a U.S. Attorney. Not many people today know that 'Colonel" (later to be Major General) Donovan was also a World War I Metal of Honor winner who also earned three separate Purple Hearts. In June 1941 "Wild Bill" Donovan's assignment was to put together an effective organization to defeat the Nazi government. Donovan's entire life was always where the 'action' was. He was known to be a 'can do' action oriented man who followed through with the defeat of Germany by becoming the special assistant to the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crime Trials. Donovan proposed to President Truman that the OSS be retained and Truman began the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) which had access to all source intelligence.

Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers, USNR, who had been the Deputy Chief of Naval Intelligence and was the first Director of the CIA was to create a new kind of intelligence agency though much of that had already begun with Donovan's support in reassembling the parts of much older institutions. By the time the CIA formally began to form, it already had most of its broken pieces in Europe ready and available to come together in the form of the silent, separated and broken pieces of the Resistance and the Gestapo organizations. There are public accounts that the CIA largely absorbed some of the worst of the Nazi regime in its early years. By this time the Soviet Union had a head start on the CIA with regard to development. But one might say that tne might say that the moment the CIA was formed, it and its counterpart the KGB, began their dance with a two step waltz in the broken segments of Germany.

As we can see, the CIA was spawned though the genius of "Wild Bill," who was obviously one truly brave and single minded man. The CIA was designed from the military perspective to achieve specific ends. Give the CIA a task and it would achieve the result by hook or crook, even if dong so chewed its best people up in the process. It ran like a military apparatus and with military precision. Like the military, the internal coin of the rewards system is not money but access to power. It is power which influences all intelligence agencies and of course it is power which can most misdirect it. The subsequent series of failures of the CIA that lead to 911 as well as the abysmal intelligence failures concerning Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in Iraq leading to public support of our invasion and quagmire was a gross misdirection in the struggle of internal direction that was brought upon by the insertion of political decisions within what was essentially a mechanical process. One might make the analogy that at the organizational level, the CIA was directed to dance to a different tune without knowing the steps. One might also say that the seed of failure was planted by the mind that originated it. The CIA was and remains an organization with an military orientation to do what is a principally an academic goal, to gather respectable information.

The essential objective of the CIA was and always has been to provide not just information but valued intelligence, while the conflicting organizational structure was and always has been designed simply to accept missions. All intelligence organizations throughout the world work through the principle that anything and anyone can be manipulated. It is a well known but little recognized fact that within all intelligence organizations the same methods that are used to sway allegiances of others are also used internally. The vital threads of those who hold together the fabric of intelligence can instantly be swayed, transferred, dismantled and/or retired. Once that delicate balance between truth and politics was bent by fear and ideologies of politics, the system of providing rational truth utterly disintegrates.

Upon reflection it is no wonder that the CIA, who's physical image originated from the reflections of extinct enemy military machines, produced so much war propaganda in support of our leaders. It was no wonder that this false intelligence was then supplied to the American public as if it were truth, so that Americans driven by so much frustration, anger and fear would choose to go to war and invade Iraq, a country that actually had no weapons of mass destruction, a country that regardless of its past had no way to prove that they did not have them and was not a terrorist threat. At this point in time most Americans realize that the CIA failed America, and that our leaders failed America, but we still have no way of knowing if those failures were intentional decisions on the part of the Bush administration. We know from public records that the chartered mission of the CIA was deliberately bypassed.

What we know for certain is that through CIA management failures and its inability to be properly tasked, and to properly analyze raw intelligence, not only did 911 become possible, it also created the impulse of a war in which terrorist insurgent conditions were generated on a far wider regional scale. By removing the delicate issue of internal bias from the equation, the CIA became the machine that creates more terrorists than it has destroyed. It is past time that the CIA forgot about fighting some nebulous war and began doing what it is supposed to be doing.

The primary problem of the CIA, as well as all intelligence organizations throughout the world, is and always has been a fundamental issue of the leadership involved in organizational engineering its own internal relationship of form and function. As with other intelligence organizations, the CIA has never quite been able to do its job while maintaining a clear understanding of itself. It is almost a revolution to state the obvious; that new data changes information and new information changes knowledge. Finally, knowledge changes organizations. What is making our world seem smaller and more difficult is that new data and information is moving at the speed of light creating new knowledge which is constantly colliding with organizational and personal traditions and expectations. In an age where intelligence is a part of doing business, many of the problems that face the CIA are facing all modern knowledge based organizations. Data, information and knowledge can be seen as weapons of military and political influence or they can be a means to help humanity better coexist on a planet with increasingly limited resources.

The bottom line is that the primary mission of all intelligence organizations is not to protect its country from the reality of truth. Propaganda is so dangerous because the organizations that distribute it tend to believe it. The core intelligence goal has and always has been the goal of the acquisition and delivery of truth in the form of timely data, information and knowledge. When organizations fail to accomplish this mission they fail in their purpose. To paraphrase the Chancellor of Germany and Propaganda Minister, Paul Joseph Gobbels, "good government depends on good propaganda just as much as good propaganda depends on good government." As with the best propaganda there is a grain of truth in this sentiment, for as the fall of Nazi Germany has shown us, as the authority of the Nazi propaganda machine began to conflict with it intelligence mission, it becomes even more critical that truth prevail. The reason why intelligence and propaganda become competitors is that those who invent the propaganda fall prey to the intricacies of their own manipulated lies. This is precisely why the existence of the concept of truth is so important. The concept that truth exists separates us from our own internal lies as well as the falsities perpetrated upon us by others. Truth represents our constant requirement to understand ourselves and others, and by doing this adapt to our changing sense of reality.

I say that it is time for the CIA to take off the iron mask and get to work changing what it is and not just its image. Forget the propaganda and redefine their objectives in terms of something as simple as centering itself around the truth. Lies quickly become too complicated and difficult to manage and it comes to a point where those who participate in lying believe that there is no such thing as truth. If the CIA sticks to the production of truthful data and information and the production of practical and useful knowledge then there might be light at the end of this tunnel that we and they have found ourselves in. Our leaders as well as the citizens of our nation desperately need to be able to see that clear path to the future. It is funny how beautiful the dawn of a new day can be when the heavy darkness of an iron mask has been removed.

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