PRINCIPALS COMMITTEE. The National Security Council (NSC) principals committee was established by President George H. W. Bush and continued with some modification by President William J. Clinton as the senior interagency forum for the consideration of policy issues affecting national security. President George W. Bush has continued the use of the principals committee.
The function of the principals committee is to review, coordinate, and monitor the development and implementation of national security policy. According to the NSC’s website, the Principals Committee, as a flexible instrument, is intended to be “a forum available to cabinet-level officials to meet to discuss and resolve issues not requiring the President’s participation.” The national security advisor chairs the Principals Committee. Its members, along with the national security advisor, include the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the U. S. representative to the United Nations (UN), the director of national intelligence (DNI), the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), the assistant to the president for economic policy, and the assistant to the vice president for national security. President George W. Bush also includes the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the principals committee.
The secretary of the treasury, the attorney general, and other heads of departments and agencies are invited as needed. The secretaries of energy and commerce, or their deputies, are routinely invited to Principals Committee meetings involving proliferation and nuclear related issues. Other members of the White House staff, including the president’s chief of staff, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs (APNSA), may also attend, depending on the agenda.
PROJECT JENNIFER. See JENNIFER (PROJECT).
PROJECT RODRIGUISTA. SeeRODRIGUISTA (PROJECT).
PROJECT SAFEHAVEN. See SAFEHAVEN (PROJECT).
PROPAGANDA. Refers to dissemination of information intended to further one’s cause or damage the adversary. Numerous U. S. agencies, including the Department of Defense (DOD), engage in propaganda activities, but, in the lexicon of U. S. intelligence, propaganda is part of covert action programs of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Propaganda activities range from white propaganda-broadcasting news about the United States by Voice of America (VOA), for exam-ple-to black propaganda, which is the spreading of disinformation. Gray propaganda falls somewhere in between the two and includes broadcast activities intended to cast the United States in a positive light. During the Cold War, U. S. propaganda focused on exposing the dark side of communism and warning of its dangers. It also sought to win the hearts and minds of various publics toward the West by focusing on freedoms and democratic principles. Entities like Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty (RL) were covert efforts to influence opinion behind the iron curtain. U. S. agencies like the United
States Information Agency (USIA) employed a variety of open tech-niques—cultural exchanges, newspapers, newsreels, libraries, and the like—to disseminate favorable information about the United States. Propaganda activities continue to be integral parts of open and covert government propaganda activities. See also UNITED STATES INFORMATION AGENCY; RADIO MARTI; RADIO SAWA.
PROPRIETARY COMPANY. Proprietaries are front organizations covertly owned by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to carry out special activities and other covert actions. These seemingly private commercial or nonprofit entities have facilitated and provided cover for clandestine operations.
Historically, there have been two types of proprietaries. Operating companies actually served the general public and even generated income; nonoperating companies appeared to be doing business but actually performed services exclusively for the CIA. Among the more prominent proprietaries were the International Armaments Corporation (Interarmco) and the Civil Air Transport (CAT), which operated out of Taiwan and was organized as a Delaware corporation in the 1950s. The CIA expanded its holdings to include Air America (which operated in Southeast Asia and grew huge with the American involvement in Vietnam), Air Asia (a major repair and maintenance facility based in Taiwan), Southern Air Transport (SAT), acquired in 1963, and Intermountain Aviation (a parking, repair, and maintenance facility and “charter service” operating from a private airfield near Tucson, Arizona).
Because these proprietaries in some cases have been highly profitable, legitimate carriers have complained of unfair competition. Although the CIA continues to own proprietaries for covert action, it divested itself of most of its air proprietaries by 1975.
PROTECTING SOURCES AND METHODS. The protection of sources and methods is the justification for the classifying and com-partmenting of intelligence information. What is secret about intelligence is the identities of information sources and the methods employed to acquire information. Intelligence officers must protect their sources, virtually at all costs, because without them, they have no intelligence information. They must also obfuscate their intelligence methods in order to thwart denial/deception operations.
PSEUDONYM. An internal designation used by an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to refer to himself in communications. CIA officers use their pseudonyms to sign cables sent back to headquarters and are sometimes referred to by their pseudonyms in internal discussions. Pseudonyms are not employed during operations. See also ALIAS.
PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE (PSYWAR). The Department of Defense (DOD) defines psychological warfare as the planned use of propaganda and other psychological actions with the primary purpose of influencing the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of hostile foreign groups in such a way as to support the achievement of national objectives. Because psychological warfare intends to manipulate the adversary’s fears and desires, it is often confused with propaganda. PSYWAR includes such activities as distributing leaflets, beaming carefully scripted radio or television messages, placing a particular strategy in a specific perspective to elicit a particular response (such as “shock and awe” in the 2003 Iraq War), renaming cities and other places when captured, and terrorism.
P-3C ORION AIRCRAFT. This airplane is an airborne intelligence collection platform used by the U. S. Navy. The aircraft is equipped with radar and an electro-optic camera system for both live video and radar images of the tactical situation on the ground and has the ability to stay aloft for 10 to 12 hours without refueling. The Orion can operate in all weather, day or night. A downlink to ground stations provides instant access to intelligence gathered during a mission. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) forced down an Orion aircraft in international airspace off its coast in 2002 after it collided with a Chinese fighter.
PUEBLO INCIDENT. The North Koreans seized the lightly armed U. S. naval vessel, the USS Pueblo, on 23 January 1968. A spy ship, the Pueblo was tracking maritime activity and intercepting electronic messages when North Korean gunboats attacked. Commander Lloyd M. Bucher thought the ship was ill equipped to respond to the North Korean assault and so surrendered the ship without destroying classified materials. The Pueblo was the first U. S. ship since the War of 1812 to surrender. North Korea imprisoned commander Bucher and 82 crewmembers aboard and subjected them to 11 months of interrogation and torture. After forced confessions and an apology from the U. S. government, later repudiated, North Korea released the prisoners on 23 December 1968.
The decision to surrender the ship without resistance led to a naval inquiry that recommended the court martial of commander Bucher, but the secretary of the navy overruled the board. However, the incident prompted the navy to undertake a modernization program to reinforce armaments on intelligence ships and to provide them with destruct systems, secret weapons, and rapid scuttling devices. The navy also reexamined and improved operational doctrine as well as communications between command-and-control forces.
PURPLE. Purple was the American designation for the Japanese code used to encode diplomatic and military communications prior to World War II. The U. S. government gave the acronym MAGIC to intercepted and decoded messages from Purple. The first successful Purple decoded message was sent to Washington in August 1940, but the government encountered legal problems because the Federal Communications Act of 1934 prohibited wiretaps and the interception of messages between the U. S. and other countries. Because of this law, American cable companies initially refused to hand over messages but eventually agreed to limited cooperation. See also CRYPTOLOGY; SHAMROCK (OPERATION).
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RABORN, WILLIAM, JR. (1905-1990). Seventh director of central intelligence (DCI) between 28 April 1965 and 30 June 1966. A U. S. Naval Academy graduate, Admiral Raborn made substantial contributions to the U. S. Navy prior to his appointment as DCI. During World War II, he commanded a gunnery school and after the war was assigned to command ships. In December 1955, Admiral Raborn was put in charge of the development of the Polaris, a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) weapons system. Subsequently, he managed the development of various missiles, guidance systems, and launches for the navy. In 1962, he became deputy chief of naval operations and retired from the navy in 1963. Throughout his career,
Admiral Raborn had the reputation for getting along with people during stressful situations and for his management abilities.
President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Admiral Raborn to be DCI because he thought that the admiral’s standing in Congress would facilitate the mission of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). His short tenure as DCI, however, did little to endear the CIA to President Johnson, who continued to ignore the agency’s analytic assessments that the Vietnam War could not be won. On leaving his DCI post in June 1966, Admiral Raborn became a senior manager of Aerojet General in California and later headed his own consulting firm until his full retirement in 1986.
RADARSAT. Launched on 4 November 1995, RADARSAT is a Canadian satellite that is occasionally used by the U. S. Air Force for imaging purposes. The satellite has a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor onboard, which is capable of imaging the earth regardless of time of day or cloud, haze, or smoke over an area. Because different applications require different imaging modes, RADARSAT gives users tremendous flexibility in choosing the type of SAR data most suitable for their application.
RADIO FREE EUROPE/RADIO LIBERTY (RFE/RL). Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty were covert propaganda programs of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Cold War. Radio Free Europe went on the air in 1950, beaming a prodemocracy, anticommunist messages to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. The CIA also founded RFE’s sister station, Radio Liberty, which broadcast similar messages to the Soviet Union in both Russian and the languages of the non-Russian peoples.
Managers of RFE/RL approached their propaganda tasks with finesse and sensitivity. They did not laud American popular culture or the American way of life, and any comparisons were limited to Western Europe. The stations focused instead on such issues as the ills of agricultural collectivization, the persecution of religion, the suppression of culture, party purges, and the like. Indeed, each station, staffed by exiles from East European countries and the Soviet Union, functioned much like the press of a democratic opposition movement. In fact, the stations became so well known and respected, some Polish leaders later asserted that the stations played an important role in bringing down at least three
Polish Communist Party leaders and were instrumental in sustaining the Solidarity trade union in Poland when it was forced underground by martial law in 1981. During Romanian strongman Nicolae Ceausescu’s time, RFE was Romania’s most popular source of news.
American isolationists in the 1970s tried to shut down the radio stations, claiming that they were relics of the Cold War and served no useful purpose other than to goad the Soviet Union and its puppet regimes in Eastern Europe. This attempt at closing the stations failed, but the management of RFE/RL eventually was transferred from the CIA to an independent agency. When communism collapsed in 1991 and the exiled RFE/RL journalists visited their native lands — some for the first time in 40 years — they were greeted as conquering heroes. RFE/RL were officially closed down on 28 November 2003 as a cost-saving measure.
RADIO MARTI. On 23 September 1981, President Ronald Reagan announced plans to establish a radio station to transmit news reports to Cuba. Despite controversy and occasional attempts to disband the station, Radio Marti continues its broadcasts as part of the Voice of America (VOA). See also TELEVISION MARTI.
RADIO SAWA. After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the
Administration of President George W. Bush created the position of undersecretary of state for public diplomacy in the Department of State. This office launched Radio Sawa on 23 March 2002, which is currently broadcasting on FM transmitters in Amman, Jordan; Kuwait City, Kuwait; and in the United Arab Emirates cities of Abu Dhabi and Dubai. It also transmits from Cyprus to Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria. According to various polls, however, listeners consider the radio to be American propaganda and reject its political messages outright.
RAINBOW (OPERATION). Operation Rainbow was a purported covert deception campaign during the 1956 Suez Crisis to convince oil-producing Arab states that the United States was on the verge of overcoming its dependence on their oil and thereby affecting the future expectations of producing countries. According to former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative Miles Copeland, the deception was supposed to involve a fake experimental facility secluded in the western United States as well as fake operations to support the
Ruse. Copeland claimed that the plan was discarded when experts demonstrated that, even under the most optimistic scenarios, the U. S. would still be dependent on Middle Eastern oil. The nature, substance, and veracity of Operation Rainbow is in dispute, largely because of Copeland’s tendency to exaggerate his stories. Some experts, however, have found evidence to support his claim.
RC-135 RIVET JOINT AIRCRAFT. This aircraft is an airborne intelligence platform used by the air force to eavesdrop on radio conversations or pick up signals from radars. The airplane flies some distance from the target, employs an array of sensors to collect the intelligence, and then sends warnings about the location of threatening forces. The aircraft has been used to great effect in peacekeeping and contingency operations, such as the 1999 war in Kosovo.
REAGAN, RONALD (1911-2004). The 40th president of the United States between 1981 and 1989. A Liberal Democrat in his youth, President Reagan joined the Republican Party in 1962 and began to champion conservative causes, enthusiastically endorsing presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964. In the California gubernatorial election of 1966, he defeated incumbent governor, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, and served two terms (1967-1975) as governor. President Reagan also unsuccessfully ran twice, in 1968 and 1976, for the Republican presidential nomination but lost to Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, respectively. In 1980, with the help of his friend, William J. Casey, Ronald Reagan won his party’s nomination for president and went on to defeat incumbent president Jimmy Carter.
Ronald Reagan advocated a balanced budget to combat inflation and pursued supply-side economic programs of tax and nondefense budget cuts through Congress. Adopting a hard-line stance against the Soviet Union and other communist countries, President Reagan advocated and presided over an escalation of military spending, which included his 1983 proposal for a space-based defense system known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).
During his two terms as president, Ronald Reagan was keenly interested in strengthening U. S. intelligence capabilities. He installed William Casey, a veteran of the Office of the Strategic Service (OSS), as director of central intelligence (DCI), issued Executive Order 12333 on 4 December 1981, approved various anti-Soviet covert actions in Africa and elsewhere, and launched a covert war in Nicaragua to unseat the Sandinista regime that had come to power in 1979.
During his second term, President Reagan began softening his anti-Soviet stance — in his first term, he had branded the Soviet Union the “evil empire”—in response to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s initiatives to open up the Soviet Union. The two leaders met four times between 1985 and 1987, when they concluded the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) Missile Treaty, which not only sharply reduced medium-range nuclear forces but also sought to eliminate an entire class of weapon system.
President Reagan’s second term, however, was marred by the Iran-Contra Affair, which broke in late 1986 and involved the White House’s complicity in the illegal diversion of profits from arms-for-hostage deals with Iran to the Contra guerrillas fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
RED CELL. The Red Cell is a unit of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) established after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001
To engage in the analysis of low probability, high-risk alternative scenarios. The Red Cell is comprised of analysts from the Directorate of Intelligence (DI), although the unit is organizationally located in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), not within the organizational structure of the CIA.
RED SOX/RED CAP (OPERATION). A covert action designed by Frank Wisner, the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) deputy director for plans (DDP), to foment rebellion by the East Europeans in the late 1950s against the Soviet occupiers. According to the plan, once the rebellions sufficiently weakened Soviet forces, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops were then to be sent in as peacekeepers to conduct democratic elections. However, the whole plan began to come apart when the CIA was ordered not to assist in the Hungarian revolt of 1956, thus bringing the operation’s legitimacy and usefulness into question. President Dwight D. Eisenhower eventually terminated the program in the late 1950s.
ROCKEFELLER COMMISSION. Formally known as the president’s Commission on CIA Activities within the United States, the Rockefeller Commission, headed by former Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller, was established by Executive Order 11828 on 4 January 1975. It mandate was to determine whether the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) conducted domestic surveillance and other illegal activities within the United States in the period 1947-1975. It was also to conduct a narrower study of issues relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The commission’s report, issued on 6 June 1975, found that the CIA had engaged in illegal domestic acts, such as infiltrating dissident groups, opening private mail, testing drugs on unknowing citizens, and subjecting foreign defectors to physical abuse and prolonged confinement. The report did not delve into the assassination of President Kennedy, prompting critics to allege a “white wash” of the matter. The Rockefeller Commission’s work set the stage for the congressional investigations of the CIA, first by the Church Committee in the Senate and then by the Pike Committee in the House of Representatives. See also ANGLETON, JAMES J.; COINTEL-PRO (OPERATION); MKULTRA (OPERATION).
RODRIGUISTA (PROJECT). A Soviet covert action operation in support of the Chilean Communist Party to enable it to pursue an underground armed struggle against the regime of Augusto Pinochet during the early 1980s. The operation was supervised by the International Department of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, the KGB, and the GRU. The project’s goals were to develop an underground network for pursuing an armed struggle to depose the repressive regime, to train Chileans in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the doctrine and techniques of armed struggle, and to infiltrate these individuals back inside the country to direct the struggle. Specifically, the Soviet Union trained Chilean Communist Party members in underground activities and covert intelligence gathering techniques, provided forged documents and passports, gave financial assistance, and prepared “foreign comrades” in various paramilitary activities, including weapons training and explosives. The operation ended toward the end of the 1980s when the Chilean Communist Party renounced armed struggle against Pinochet. See also ALLENDE, SALVADOR; FUBELT (OPERATION); NATIONAL SECURITY DECISION MEMORANDUM 93.
ROOSEVELT, FRANKLIN D. (1882-1945). The 32nd president of the United States between 1933 and 1945. A wartime leader, President Roosevelt set the stage for the establishment of the contemporary U. S. intelligence community (IC). A lawyer by training, Roosevelt entered state politics in 1910, but in 1913, President Woodrow Wilson appointed him his assistant secretary of the navy, a position FDR held until 1920. His popularity convinced Democratic Party leaders to field him as a vice presidential candidate, but Warren Harding, the Republican candidate, won the presidency.
In 1921, Franklin D. Roosevelt contracted polio, which affected his legs. Yet, he pursued his political ambitions, first serving as governor of New York beginning in 1928 and then running for the presidency in 1932. His activism and personal charm, and the effects of the deepening depression, helped elect him to the presidency by a wide margin of votes.
President Roosevelt’s many contributions to the nation included numerous New Deal laws, such as social security, direct relief to the poor, the works projects administration, and the like. In addition, he led the nation into and through World War II, during which he established the position of coordinator of information (COI), which in 1942 evolved into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). His wartime strategy was to create a “grand alliance” against the Axis powers through the “Declaration of the United Nations” on 1 January 1942, in which all nations fighting the Axis agreed not to make a separate peace and pledged themselves to a peacekeeping organization in victory. President Roosevelt died in office on 12 April 1945 from a massive stroke.
ROSENBERG CASE. See VENONA.
RULE X. A rule of the House of Representatives that in 1977 established the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
(HPSCI), articulated its structure, and defined its authorities as an entity overseeing U. S. intelligence agencies and activities. Under the rule, the committee is restricted to no more than 18 members, of which no more than 10 may be from the same political party. The committee’s membership, moreover, must include at least one member from the Committee on Appropriations, the Committee on Armed Services, the Committee on International Relations, and the Committee on the Judiciary. The HPSCI evolved from the Pike Committee, which in the mid-1970s investigated the activities of U. S. intelligence, particularly the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Under Rule X, the HPSCI performs an annual review of the intelligence budget submitted by the president and prepares legislation authorizing appropriations for the various civilian and military agencies and departments comprising the intelligence community (IC). These entities include the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), as well as the intelligence-related components of the Department of State, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of the Treasury, the Department of Energy (DOE), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The committee makes recommendations to the House Committee on Armed Services on authorizations for the intelligence-related components of the army, navy, air force, and marines. The committee also conducts periodic investigations, audits, and inspections of intelligence activities and programs.
In February 2002, the HPSCI and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) agreed to conduct a joint inquiry into the failures of U. S. intelligence to anticipate the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. See also SENATE RESOLUTION 400.
RUTH, SAMUEL (1818-1872). As superintendent of the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad, a vital transportation route for Confederate forces, Samuel Ruth conducted sabotage operations for the Union by engaging in delaying tactics, deliberate inefficiency, and slowdowns. Ruth eventually became a member of the Union intelligence network in Richmond, Virginia.
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SAFEHAVEN (PROJECT). An operation initiated in May 1944 to track down and block German assets in neutral and nonbelligerent countries throughout Europe and the Americas. The fear was that the Nazi leaders, sensing defeat, would secretly transfer industrial and fiscal capital to neutral countries, thereby escaping confiscation by the victors. In addition, the victors feared that, if this happened, German economic and industrial power would be largely intact and would provide the power base from which unrepentant Germans might rebuild another Reich and spark another war.
The Department of State took the lead in SAFEHAVEN, although the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) came to play an important role in gathering intelligence from clandestine sources in neutral and German-occupied Europe. Headquartered in the U. S. Embassy in London, the operation tracked Nazi assets throughout Europe, thereby acquiring the capability to use the intelligence information to restore some of the assets looted by the Nazis. SAFEHAVEN also had a counterintelligence component, in that it sought also to prevent postwar German economic penetration in foreign economies, in which OSS also played a significant role.
SAFEHAVEN became a casualty of the postwar dismantling of the U. S. intelligence apparatus. The information gathered during the operation was used in negotiations with neutral governments, such as Switzerland, but those talks became sidetracked by the onset of the Cold War. None of the intelligence collected for SAFEHAVEN was useful in identifying assets stolen from the Jews and other victims of the Nazi regime.
SALOMON, HAYM (1740-1785). Salomon was a financier of the American Revolution and one of George Washington’s spies in New York City during 1776-1777. Salomon occasionally served as spymaster to the French forces in the United States and as banker to ministers of various foreign governments. The U. S. government never repaid Salomon for the substantial amounts of money he spent on the American cause.
SANDINISTA (FSLN/Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional).
The Sandinistas were the main Nicaraguan rebel group that opposed the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, whom they overthrew on 17 July 1979. On assuming power, the Sandinistas nationalized the principal industries and began to impose their own brand of Marxism in Nicaragua that infuriated the newly elected administration of President Ronald Reagan in the United States. In 1981, President Reagan accused the Sandinistas of supporting Marxist revolutionary movements in Latin America and authorized the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to finance, arm, and train the Contra rebels to fight the Sandinista regime. The civil war raged until 1988 when a truce brought the fighting to an end. The FSLN lost the elections of 25 February 1990 and has remained the leading opposition party to the current centrist Nicaraguan government.
SAVAK. Formed under the guidance of United States and Israeli intelligence officers in 1957, SAVAK developed into an effective secret agency of the Iranian shah, Reza Pahlavi. Attached to the Office of the Prime Minister, its director assumed the title of deputy to the prime minister for national security affairs. Despite its allegiance to the monarch, the shah did not trust SAVAK’s directors and changed them on a regular basis. Although officially a civilian agency, SAVAK also had close ties to the military; many of its officers served simultaneously in branches of the armed forces.
Founded to round up members of the outlawed Iranian Communist Party, Tudeh, SAVAK expanded its activities to include gathering intelligence and neutralizing the regime’s opponents. It established an elaborate system to monitor all facets of political life, including journalists, literary figures, and academics. It also conducted surveillance of universities, labor unions, and peasant organizations. Abroad, SAVAK monitored Iranian students who publicly opposed the Pahlavi rule.
Over the years, SAVAK became a law unto itself, having legal authority to arrest and detain suspected persons indefinitely. It operated its own prisons in Tehran and, many suspected, throughout the country as well. Many of these activities were carried out without any institutional checks. SAVAK was officially dissolved by Ayatollah Khomeini shortly after he came to power in 1979. The Islamic revolutionaries particularly singled out former SAVAK operatives for reprisals, and virtually all of them were purged between 1979 and 1981.
SCHLESINGER, JAMES R. (1929- ). Ninth director of central intelligence (DCI) between 5 February 1973 and 2 July 1973. After his reelection in 1972, President Richard M. Nixon fired DCI Richard M. Helms, who had been DCI throughout his first term. Intent on reforming intelligence, President Nixon appointed James Schlesinger as DCI on 21 December 1972. Educated as an economist, Schlesinger also brought to his new position an appreciation of the high cost of intelligence. Schlesinger was also critical of the intelligence community (IC), particularly of the quality of intelligence directed at policymakers.
In his five-month term as DCI in 1973, Schlesinger sought to cut personnel and reduce costs. To coordinate the activities of the departmental intelligence services and to maximize his role as DCI, Schlesinger almost immediately put a number of non-CIA personnel on the Intelligence Community Staff (ICS). Believing that the day of the spy was over, Schlesinger also focused his efforts on increasing technical collection and reducing the personnel levels in the Directorate of Plans (DP). He ordered William Colby, the newly appointed deputy director for plans (DDP), to purge the ranks of covert operatives and paramilitary specialists. Consequently, Schlesinger fired or forced to resign or retire nearly 7 percent of the CIA’s total staff, predominantly from the clandestine side of the house — whose name he also changed from Directorate of Plans to Directorate of Operations (DO). He also sold off the CIA’s proprietary companies, Air America and Southern Air Transport (SAT).
Soon after Schlesinger’s appointment, the Watergate scandal exposed the CIA to charges of involvement in that affair. Determined not to be blindsided, Schlesinger on 9 May 1973 ordered all CIA employees to report any activities they were aware of that might in any way appear inconsistent with the CIA’s charter. Later in May, the office of the inspector general gave Schlesinger a 693-page list of “potential flap activities,” which detailed CIA involvement in numerous misdeeds. This document came to be known as the “Family Jewels” and was turned over to the Congress by Schlesinger’s successor as DCI, William Colby.
SECRET SERVICE. Established on 5 July 1865, the United States Secret Service carries out two vital missions: protection of very important persons and criminal investigations. According to its mission statement, the secret service protects the president and vice president, their families, heads of state, and other designated individuals; investigates threats against those it protects; provides protection service to the White House, vice president’s residence, foreign missions, and other buildings within Washington, D. C.; and plans and implements security designs for special events. The secret service also investigates violations of laws relating to counterfeiting of currencies and securities, financial fraud, identity theft, computer fraud, and computer-based attacks on the United States.
The USA PATRIOT Act, passed in 2002, increased the role of the secret service in investigating computer fraud and related activities.
It also authorized the director of the secret service to establish nationwide electronic task forces to assist law enforcement, the private sector, and academia in detecting and suppressing computer-based crime; increased the statutory penalties for the manufacture, possession, dealing in, and passing of counterfeit U. S. or foreign obligations; and allowed protection of the nation’s financial systems. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) absorbed the secret service on 1 March 2003.
SECRET SERVICE BUREAU. The Secret Service Bureau was the Union’s short-lived intelligence organization created by Allan Pinkerton in mid-1861. Because of Pinkerton’s self-styled intelligence missions behind Confederate lines and his outlandish and dubious reports on Confederate movements, the Secret Service Bureau quickly languished and simply disappeared without making much of a contribution to the Union’s intelligence effort.
SECURITY POLICY BOARD. Established in 1994 by Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 29, it sought to develop government-wide integrated security policies across a broad range of security disciplines, from classification to personnel security. The Security Policy Board was composed of prominent Americans outside of government who brought an independent, nongovernmental, public interest perspective to security policy initiatives and the intelligence community (IC). It was also a national-level security policy committee, which provided leadership, structure, and coherence to the U. S. government’s personnel, physical, technical, and procedural policy, practices, and procedures. The Security Policy Board was abolished on 24 April 2001, pursuant to National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) 1.
SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE TO INVESTIGATE ALLEGATIONS OF ILLEGAL OR IMPROPER ACTIVITIES OF FEDERAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES. Impaneled in February 1975, the committee of the House of Representatives had a mandate to investigate allegations of illegal and improper activities by U. S. intelligence agencies, especially the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Also known as the Pike Committee, after its chairman representative Otis Pike, it focused on the cost of U. S. intelligence, its effectiveness, and its management. The committee’s staff did not develop the same cooperative relationship with CIA officials as had its counterpart in the Senate, the Church Committee, and so its investigations were mired in disputes with the CIA over access to documents and declassification of information.
The final report of the committee was highly critical of U. S. intelligence and of the CIA in particular. CIA officials countered that the report was factually erroneous, was based on bias, lacked any semblance of balance, and was highly pejorative. On 29 January 1976, the House of Representatives voted not to release the report, but it was nonetheless leaked to The Village Voice, which published it on 16 February 1976. Despite the recriminations and the acrimony surrounding the House investigations, the Pike Committee evolved into the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), the intelligence oversight committee in the House of Representatives. See also SENATE RESOLUTION 400; SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE.
World History
