Army Intelligence Support Activity was established in 1980 to provide assistance to a possible second mission to rescue the American hostages in Iran. When the rescue mission did not materialize, USAISA, known as “the activity,” received a formal charter on 5 July 1983 to provide military operational support for the army, other Department of Defense (DOD) components, and non-DOD agencies; human intelligence (HUMINT) and signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection in support of the army, Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), and DOD contingency and wartime operations; and clandestine HUMINT and SIGINT collection in response to high-priority or quick-reaction requirements. It also acquired limited authority to engage in special activities pursuant to a presidential finding that assigned the missions to the Defense Department and specifically tasked the army and USAISA. Over its lifetime, USAISA conducted operations in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and approximately 10 Latin American countries. USAISA grew in the decade of the 1980s in personnel, scope of its missions, and the areas of the world where it operated. However, the secrecy surrounding the work of USAISA, as well as the perception that USAISA was not under effective military control, sparked calls to disband the organization, which came about on 1 April 1989. Its component parts eventually found their way into the Army Special Operations Command.
ARMY SECURITY AGENCY (ASA). See NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY.
ARNOLD, BENEDICT (1741-1801). A hero of the Revolutionary War prior to his treason, Benedict Arnold was recruited by his wife, Peggy Shippen, to spy for the British. He did so probably because he felt slighted by his comrades and the Continental Congress over issues of military rank, seniority, and pay. Arnold likely was already in the employ of the British by 1779, corresponding with the British commander over the possible capture of West Point in New York. When American forces captured a courier—Major John Andre—with correspondence implicating Arnold, he defected to the British, receiving a substantial reward for his defection in the form of pay, land, and a pension. The British, who distrusted Arnold, refused to give him a military commission, and he died in London in 1801 in relative obscurity. Benedict Arnold’s name has become a euphemism for treason in the United States.
ASPIN/BROWN COMMISSION. See COMMISSION ON THE ROLES AND CAPABILITIES OF THE UNITED STATES INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY.
ASSASSINATIONS. The Hughes-Ryan Amendment of 1974 was the first piece of legislation to ban political assassinations by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which had been implicated in such schemes as Operation Mongoose against Cuba’s Fidel Castro and the overthrow and death of Chilean president Salvador Allende in 1973. President Jimmy Carter’s Executive Order (EO) 12036 extended the ban to the rest of the U. S. government. Executive Order 12333, which still is in effect, reaffirmed EO 12036’s application. The ban is still in effect, although the USA PATRIOT Act and other legislation passed in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 now allow the president to authorize the assassination of terrorists and other select individuals on a case-by-case basis.
ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT FOR NATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS (APNSA). Commonly referred to as the national security advisor, the APNSA advises the president on national security matters and heads the National Security Council (NSC) staff.
ASSOCIATION OF FORMER INTELLIGENCE OFFICERS (AFIO). Established in 1975 by retired and former intelligence officers, AFIO is a nonprofit educational organization, promoting understanding of the role of intelligence in American national security and foreign policy. It also provides a forum in which former intelligence professionals can exchange ideas and make their expertise available to the corporate and private sectors. The association’s central office is located in Arlington, Virginia, which has a small cadre of professional staffers. Much of its work, however, is carried out by volunteers in various chapters around the country.
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BASIC INTELLIGENCE. Basic intelligence refers to descriptive data about a country, region, or issue. It involves not only data about a country’s geography, topography, population, political structures, resources, and capabilities, but also information about its history, culture, and social composition. Intelligence analysts and policymakers often employ the usually unclassified basic intelligence as contextual information or for background purposes.
BAY OF PIGS INVASION. The Bay of Pigs invasion, code-named Operation Zapata, was an ill-fated incursion into Cuba by exiles trained by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in April 1961. The purpose of the invasion was to encourage a popular uprising on the island against the regime of Fidel Castro, who had come to power in 1959. However, the operation failed totally, largely because of inadequate preparations, insufficient political backing, faulty assumptions about what the Cuban population thought of the Castro regime and what it might do in the wake of the invasion, and “reckless” expert opinion about its outcome. President John F. Kennedy was compelled to accept responsibility for the failure and ransom the captured exiles by paying $10 million in medical supplies to Cuba. In addition, the failure prompted the Kennedy administration to seek alternative ways of ousting Castro, one of which was Operation Mongoose. However, the Bay of Pigs debacle convinced President Kennedy that force and covert action should be applied only as a last resort.
BERLIN TUNNEL. See GOLD (OPERATION).
BLACK CHAMBER. The cryptologic arm of the Military Intelligence Division (MID), the Black Chamber was established immediately after World War I and operated out of a townhouse in New York City under commercial cover. As part of the MID, it was officially known as MI-8, for Military Intelligence-8, and was actually a joint operation between the army and the Department of State to break the diplomatic codes of several different nations. Cryptologists of the Black Chamber were responsible for breaking Japan’s “Purple” codes in 1919. The intercepted communications gave the United States an enormous advantage in diplomatic negotiations and strategic matters. For example, one set of decrypts were used by U. S. secretary of state Charles Evans Hughes to improve his diplomatic position during the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-1922. He was actually reading Japanese diplomatic traffic on Tokyo’s negotiating positions every day before he went into the bargaining sessions. Despite its apparent usefulness, the State Department closed down the Black Chamber in 1929, although the army Signals Intelligence Corps continued cryptologic work in secret. See also CRYPTOLOGY; YARDLEY, HERBERT O.
BLACK PROPAGANDA. See PROPAGANDA.
BLAKE, GEORGE (1922- ). George Blake was a British intelligence officer who spied for the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Blake became involved with intelligence work during World War II, first as a courier for Dutch resistance in Nazi-occupied Holland, but he escaped to Britain in 1942, joining the British navy. After the war, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) recruited Blake into its ranks and sent him for a short time to West Germany to run agents in the Soviet zone. In the late 1940s, SIS sent Blake to Korea, where he was captured by North Korean forces on 24 June 1950. During his incarceration, he became a communist.
North Korea repatriated Blake in 1953, and SIS assigned him to work on intercepted Soviet communications. In 1955, Blake was assigned to Berlin to recruit Soviet officers, and while there, he gave the Soviets the names of British intelligence officers. He also gave Moscow operational details, including those of Operation Gold, the Berlin tunnel caper. On his return to Britain in 1959, Blake came under suspicion from tips provided by a defector and was eventually arrested for espionage. He received a 42-year jail sentence in 1961. However, he escaped from prison on 22 October 1966 and fled to the Soviet Union.
BNL AFFAIR. The Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) affair in 1989 centered on charges that the Department of Justice and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) covered up the channeling of military assistance to Iraq by the administration of President George H. W. Bush prior to the 1991 Persian Gulf War. BNL’s Atlanta branch was alleged to have engineered billions of dollars in unauthorized loans to Iraq and other nations. There were also charges that the same branch laundered CIA money to enable it to finance covert actions outside of channels. Congressional investigations and court testimony showed some illegal activity by BNL managers but were unable to establish any links to the CIA or covert actions.
BOARD OF NATIONAL ESTIMATES. Established on 1 December 1950, the Board of National Estimates was the first formal intelligence entity to seek to produce coordinated national intelligence estimates (NIEs). Specifically, the board was charged with initiating and directing the production of the national estimates, evaluating current intelligence circulated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) outside the agency, and assisting the director of central intelligence (DCI) in the coordination of intelligence relating to national security and in providing for its appropriate dissemination. The board over the years evolved into the present-day National Intelligence Council (NIC). See also OFFICE OF NATIONAL ESTIMATES.
BOLAND AMENDMENTS. The Boland amendments were a series of congressional amendments that sought to define the relationship between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Nicaraguan Contra rebels. Named after Congressman Edward P. Boland (D-MA), the first Boland Amendment was enacted in the wake of a series of CIA-sponsored sabotage acts in 1982 against the ruling Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, about which the Congress had no knowledge and to which it had not given consent. The so-called Boland I amendment prohibited the CIA and the Department of Defense (DOD) from providing military support to the Contras in order to overthrow the Sandinista regime. Boland II, enacted in October 1984, prohibited the CIA from any contact with the Contra rebels. Boland III, passed in December 1985, authorized the CIA to provide the Contra rebels with communications equipment and to exchange intelligence. See also NATIONAL SECURITY DECISION DIRECTIVE 17.
BOLAND, EDWARD P. (1911-2001). Democratic congressional representative from Massachusetts, Congressman Boland was instrumental in the enactment of various prohibitions against giving assistance to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels in the early 1980s. Representative Boland, elected to the House of Representatives in 1952, was also the first chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) from 1977 until 1985. See also BOLAND AMENDMENTS.
BOREN, DAVID L. (1941- ). David L. Boren was U. S. senator from Oklahoma between 1980 and 1994. Prior to his election to the Senate, Boren, a Yale graduate and a Rhodes Scholar, served as governor of Oklahoma from 1975 until 1979. In the Senate, Boren served on the Senate Finance and Agriculture Committees as well as chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), the principal committee in the Senate overseeing the activities of U. S. intelligence. Prior to leaving Congress, Boren authored the National Security Education Act of 1992, which established the National Security Education Program (NSEP), a grants and scholarship program to promote the study of foreign languages, area studies, and national security issues. He is currently the president of the University of Oklahoma.
BOYD, BELLE (1843-1900). A Confederate spy during the American Civil War, Belle Boyd is credited with supplying General Stonewall Jackson with intelligence on the strength and disposition of Union forces around Front Royal, Virginia, in 1862. Although imprisoned and released several times, Belle Boyd undertook many risky assignments, one of which was to act as a Confederate courier to England in 1864. The war ended before she could return, and so she stayed in England to establish a stage career. Boyd eventually came back to the United States to pursue her career in the theater.
BRILLIANT PEBBLES. Brilliant Pebbles was successor to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), first proposed by President Ronald Reagan, in 1984. Brilliant Pebbles, originally conceived in a series of 1986 war games by Edward Teller, the father of the American hydrogen bomb, was designed to thwart a Soviet nuclear strike by intercepting the missiles before they reached American soil. The initial plan called for space - and ground-based interceptors and sensors as well as a battle management system. Later on, a new Brilliant Pebbles design replaced space-based interceptors with an early warning and tracking system in support of thousands of small space-based miniature computers and sensors—therefore the title “brilliant”—each capable of autonomous interception of enemy missiles that traveled within range. This change supposedly was to make the system less vulnerable to enemy antisatellite weapons. Brilliant Pebbles gave way to theater-level antimissile defense proposals during the William J. Clinton administration in the 1990s and the land-based missile defense initiative of the George W. Bush White House in 2001 and 2002.
BRITISH SECURITY COORDINATION. See STEPHENSON, WILLIAM SAMUEL.
BROWSER, MARY E. (Dates of birth and death unknown). Mary E. Browser was born a slave and worked on the John van Lew plantation. In 1851, Elizabeth van Lew freed her and the other family slaves and sent Mary Browser to school in Philadelphia. During the Civil War, Elizabeth van Lew recruited Mary Browser as a spy by planting her as a maid in the home of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Browser read war dispatches as she dusted furniture and traveled to the van Lew mansion at night to report her information. Her intelligence was sent directly to General Ulysses S. Grant, greatly enhancing the Union’s conduct of the war. Mary Browser probably was the highest placed agent of any of the spies during the Civil War.
BUCHANAN, JAMES (1791-1868). Fifteenth president of the United States between 1857 and 1861.
World History
