Classified Information Procedures Act, enacted on 15 October 1980, governs the use of classified information in criminal proceedings. The CIPA tries to balance the right of a criminal defendant to access relevant information with the right of the government to know in advance the damage that might accrue if classified information were revealed during the course of a trial. The act was passed after some former intelligence officers, brought up on criminal charges for official and nonofficial activities, began demanding the use of classified materials during the conduct of their legal defense.
CLINTON, WILLIAM JEFFERSON (1946- ). Forty-second president of the United States between 1993 and 2001. President Clinton, like President Jimmy Carter, campaigned as a Washington outsider and defeated incumbent president George H. W. Bush over economic issues. Clinton was a beneficiary of the end of the Cold War, which allowed him to cut back on government spending, including intelligence, as part of the “peace dividend.” However, the end of the Cold War also thrust President Clinton into new and unchartered foreign policy waters that compelled him, in his second term, to boost spending on defense and intelligence.
During his two terms as president, Clinton successfully dispatched peacekeeping forces to war-torn Bosnia, bombed Iraq when Saddam Hussein stopped United Nations (UN) inspections for evidence of weapons of mass destruction, lobbed a cruise missile at al Qai’da terrorist hideouts in Afghanistan, and conducted a coalition war against Serbian forces in Kosovo. He also became a global proponent for democracy, an expanded North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), more open international trade, and a worldwide campaign against drug trafficking.
COAST GUARD. The nation’s premier maritime agency, the Coast Guard is an amalgam of five historical federal units that over time have come to be united under the Coast Guard umbrella: the Revenue Cutter Service, the Lighthouse Service, the Steamboat Inspection Service, the Bureau of Navigation, and the Lifesaving Service.
The Coast Guard has traditionally performed two roles in wartime. The first has been to augment the navy with men and cutters. The second has been to undertake special missions, including the enforcement of boating safety regulations, search and rescue, maintenance of aids to navigation, enforcement of merchant marine safety regulations, environmental protection, enforcement of customs, fisheries, and immigration laws, and port safety. In wartime, the Coast Guard performs port security, ship escort, and transport duty as part of the U. S. Navy. In peacetime, the Coast Guard is part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and an independent member of the intelligence community (IC).
COBRA DANE (SYSTEM). Aphased-array radar deployed in 1977 that was intended to acquire precise data on the system characteristics of Soviet ballistic missile weapons. Located on the northwestern section of Alaska’s Shemya Island, the radar, the responsibility of air force intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance is part of the Integrated Tactical Warning and Attack Assessment network. It can track a basketball-size object at a range of 2,000 miles. It can also track up to 300 incoming warheads and up to 200 satellites. COBRA DANE also has a space-object tracking and identification mission, providing warning of all Earth-impact objects, including ballistic missiles on the United States. As such, it is an integral part of the Measurement and Signature Intelligence (MASINT) technique of intelligence collection.
COINTELPRO (OPERATION). COINTELPRO is the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) acronym for a series of covert action programs directed against domestic groups from mid-1956 until 1971. In these programs, the FBI went beyond the collection of intelligence and conducted clandestine operations to “disrupt” and “neutralize” target groups and individuals within the United States.
The origins of COINTELPRO were in the Bureau’s jurisdiction to investigate hostile foreign intelligence activities on American soil. In 1956, the FBI decided that a formal counterintelligence program, coordinated from headquarters, would be an effective weapon in the fight against the American Communist Party and its sympathizers within the United States. The Bureau’s covert action programs were aimed at five perceived domestic threats: the Communist Party of the United States (1956-1971); the Socialist Workers Party (1961-1969); white hate groups (1964-1971); black nationalist hate groups (1967-1971); and the New Left (1968-1971). COINTELPRO activities against these groups comprised 2,370 separate counterintelligence actions, including many “dirty tricks,” among which were such actions as mailing anonymous letters to a member’s spouse accusing the target of infidelity; using informants to raise controversial issues at meetings in order to cause dissent; falsely labeling a group member as an informant; encouraging street warfare between violent groups; contacting an employer to get a target fired; notifying state and local authorities of a target’s criminal law violations; and using the Internal Revenue Services (IRS) to audit a professor in order to audit political dissidents. In the politically charged atmosphere of the Vietnam War, during which there was near paranoia about the government’s actions against its own people, the FBI decided to discontinue COINTELPRO. The program came to an end on 27 April 1971.
COLBY, WILLIAM E. (1920-1996). Tenth director of central intelligence (DCI), serving between 4 September 1973 and 30 January 1976. Colby was a Princeton graduate who served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II and earned a law degree from Columbia in 1949. He joined the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) in 1950, serving tours in Italy and South Vietnam. He was chief of station (COS) in Vietnam in 1960 and, later, Director of Civil Operations and Rural Development Support, which was the pacification program that included Operation PHOENIX. He later became deputy director of central intelligence (DDCI) under DCI Richard Helms.
At the time of his appointment as DCI in 1973, Colby was under pressure to make major changes in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Consequently, on 7 September 1973, Colby sent President Richard M. Nixon an ambitious set of proposed DCI objectives to improve the intelligence product. Colby’s most significant innovations were to abolish the Office of National Estimates (ONE) and to establish the national intelligence officer (NIO) system under the National Intelligence Council (NIC). In his first three months as DCI, Colby also established an Office of Political Research (OPR) in the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence (DI) to provide in-depth intelligence support to top-level decision makers, revitalized strategic warning capabilities, created “Alert Memorandums” for key policymakers, and ordered postmortems prepared on the intelligence community’s (IC’s) performance in various crises.
DCI Colby also faced a series of unexpected crises as soon as he took office. His tenure began with the CIA’s failure to warn U. S. policymakers of the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973. The CIA and intelligence community also failed to warn of the ensuing oil crisis brought on by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting States (OPEC).
Colby spent much of his tenure as DCI trying to deflect criticism of U. S. intelligence with regard to alleged illegal activities, especially the overthrow and death of Chilean president Salvador Allende. As a way of thwarting efforts to dismantle the CIA, Colby completed a study of CIA wrongdoing since its inception and shared these “Family Jewels” with the Congress, thus earning him the enmity of American intelligence professionals. Colby died under mysterious circumstances in 1996.
COLDFEET (OPERATION). Initiated in May 1961 on a trial basis, the operation sought to drop agents onto an abandoned Soviet ice drift station, designated NP8, in order to explore it and exploit intelligence information about Soviet intentions. The U. S. Navy dropped two Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) contract employees by parachute on the station and retrieved them later by using the Skyhook system. Assessments of the operation later confirmed the practicality of parachute-drop and aerial-retrieval techniques to investigate otherwise inaccessible areas.
COLD WAR. A term coined by American journalist H. B. Swope and made popular by Walter Lippman, the Cold War refers to the state of neither war nor peace between the Western and Eastern blocs after World War II. The two bloc leaders, the United States and the Soviet Union, spent most of the Cold War in adversarial diplomacy, interspersed by periods of detente, although they did come close to armed confrontation on several occasions, including during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1973, and the Soviet war scare in the early 1980s.
Several themes dominated the Cold War between the East and the West. One, the contest over Germany gave rise to two Berlin crises, one in the 1948-1949 period and the other during 1958-1962. It also led to the establishment of rival military alliances, first the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on 4 April 1949 and then the Warsaw Pact on 1 May 1955. Two, the American policy determination to limit Soviet expansion through a policy of “containment” and Soviet efforts to frustrate the policy defined the conduct of much of the Cold War. Three, the ideological conflict was played out through surrogates in Korea in the early 1950s, in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the mid 1950s, in Cuba beginning in 1960, in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, and in Afghanistan, Central America, and Africa in the 1980s. Four, there was the occasional drive for accommodation that included the development of a whole body of international law based on arms control treaties to reduce tensions, establish a record of confidence-building measures, and set the stage for collaborative efforts in such areas as space exploration, antiterrorism, environmental protection, and international rule making. Five, the Cold War was fought largely in the shadows, in a silent and secret intelligence war to ferret out secrets and gain advantage over each other in a game of one-upmanship over nuclear capabilities and political influence. See also KENNAN, GEORGE; NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL 68.
World History
