Oral and written cultures at FBI and CIA

Henry Crumpton’s fascinating book about his time working for CIA includes an account of his time in 1998 and 1999 seconded, as a CIA liaison, to a senior post in the FBI.   This account has a profound reflection of the cultural differences between the two organizations, differences which arise from their different primary missions: for FBI, the mission is to solve criminal cases (which is essentially a backwards-looking activity played against a suspect’s lawyers) versus, for CIA,  the identification and avoidance of potential threats (which is inherently forwards-looking and played for an intelligence client).  Crumpton summarized his reflections (contained on pages 112-115 of his book) in a Politico op-ed column here:

First, the FBI valued oral communications as much as or more than written. The FBI’s special-agent culture emphasized investigations and arrests over writing and analysis. It harbored a reluctance to write anything that could be deemed discoverable by any future defense counsel. It maintained investigative flexibility and less risk if its findings were not written — or at least not formally drafted into a data system. Its agents were not selected or trained to write.
This is also tied to rank and status: Clerks and analysts write, not agents. Agents saw writing as a petty chore, best left to others.
In contrast, most CIA operations officers had to write copiously and quickly. To have the president or other senior policymakers benefit from clandestine written reports — that was the holy grail. CIA officers prized clear, high-impact written content.
The second major difference between the FBI and CIA was their information systems. The FBI did not have one — at least one that functioned. An FBI analyst could not understand a field office’s investigation without going to that office and working with its agents for days or even weeks. With minimal reporting, there was no other choice.
CIA stations, in contrast, write reports on just about everything — because without written reports, there was no intelligence for analysts and other customers to assess. The CIA required high-speed information systems with massive data management, and upgraded systems constantly.

The third difference was size. The FBI was enormous compared with the CIA. The FBI personnel deployed to investigate the East Africa bombings, for example, outnumbered all CIA operations officers on the entire African continent. The FBI’s New York field office had more agents than the CIA had operations officers around the world. The FBI routinely dispatched at least two agents for almost any task. CIA officers usually operated alone — certainly in the development, recruitment and handling of sources.

A fourth difference was the importance of sources. While both the FBI and the CIA placed a premium on a good source, the FBI did not actively pursue them beyond the context of an investigation. The agents would follow leads and seek a cooperative witness or a snitch, often compelled to cooperate or face legal consequences.
FBI agents seldom discussed sources. When they did, it was often in derogatory fashion. But they discussed suspects endlessly. That was their pursuit. And for the FBI, sometimes sources and suspects were one and the same.
CIA officers, on the other hand, routinely compared notes and lessons learned about developing, recruiting and handling sources — though couched so that specifics were not revealed. Ops officers’ missions and their sense of accomplishment, even their professional identity, depended on the success of sources and the intelligence they produced. FBI agents wanted evidence and testimony from witnesses that led to convictions and press conferences.
A fifth difference was money. The FBI had severe limitations on how much agents could spend and how they could spend it. The process to authorize the payment of an informant or just to travel was laborious.
As a CIA officer, however, I routinely carried several thousand dollars in cash — to entertain prospective recruitment targets, compensate sources, buy equipment or bribe foreign officials to get things done. I usually had to replenish my well-used revolving fund every month.
When I told FBI agents this, they seemed doubtful that such behavior was even legal. I often had to explain that the CIA did not break U.S. laws — just foreign laws.
Sixth, the FBI harbored a sense that because it worked under the Justice Department, it had more legal authority than the CIA. Some, after a few drinks, expressed moral objections to the CIA’s covert actions. I would argue that covert action, directed by the president and approved by congressional oversight committees, is legal. But somehow the notion of breaking foreign laws seemed less than ideal to some of my FBI partners.
Seventh, the FBI loved the press and worked hard to curry favor with it. For the CIA’s Clandestine Service, the media was taboo. Most of us had experienced occasions when media leaks undermined operations. Sometimes, our sources died because of this coverage. On top of that, we felt that the media seemed intent on portraying the CIA in a negative light. A CIA operations officer avoided the press like the plague.

For the FBI, it was the opposite. Positive press could help fight crime and boost prestige and resources. Every FBI field office worked the media.

Eighth, the FBI collected evidence for its own use, to prosecute a criminal. The CIA primarily collected intelligence for others, whether a policymaker, war fighter or diplomat. The FBI, therefore, lacked a culture of customer service beyond the Justice Department. Without a customer for intelligence, the CIA had no mission.
Ninth, the FBI’s field offices, especially New York, acted as their own centers of authority, even holding evidence, because of their link to the local prosecutor. A city district attorney and civic political actors had great influence over an investigation.
The CIA station instead had to report intelligence to Langley, because the incentive came from there and beyond — particularly the White House.
Tenth, the FBI worked Congress. Every FBI field office had representatives dedicated to supporting congressional delegates. The FBI also had the authority to investigate members of Congress for illegal activity. So the bureau had both carrots and sticks.
But the CIA, particularly the Clandestine Service, had minimal leverage with Congress. Most CIA officers engaged Congress only when required to testify.”

The consequences of these differences for us all are immense.  Crumpton again:

The FBI is still measuring success, according to one well-informed confidant, based on arrests and criminal convictions — not on the value of intelligence collected and disseminated to its customers.

When I served as U.S. coordinator for counterterrorism, from 2005 to 2007, I was a voracious consumer of intelligence. Yet I never saw an FBI intelligence report that helped inform U.S. counterterrorism policy. Has there been any improvement?” 

Reference:
Henry A Crumpton [2012]:  The Art of Intelligence:  Lessons from a Life in the CIA’s Clandestine Service. (New York, NY, USA:  Penguin Books).

Jenny Biggar RIP

This is a belated tribute to long-time acquaintance, Jenny Biggar (1946-2008), for many years the Treasurer of the Budiriro Trust, a British-Zimbabwean educational charity.  I found the following obituary, written by Ann Young and published in the Loddon Reach Parish Magazine (July/August 2008, 1 (4): 16).

Jenny Biggar died on May 8th [2008] after a valiant fight against Lymphoma. All those who packed into St. Mary’s church for her funeral on May 19th bore witness to a life that had been well lived and truly Christian. It was a wonderfully uplifting service and a tribute to someone who had touched the lives of others, not only here, but across the world, and whose dying had been an example for us all.
 
Jenny was brought up at Manor Farm in Grazeley and attended the Abbey School in Reading. She was the middle child with two older brothers and two younger sisters. Family life was always central to her so it seemed natural that, when her mother died, she returned to the Farm in 1985 to look after her father and make a home for him. She had spent many years working in Africa, had read English as a mature student and was embarking upon a D.Phil at Oxford when she felt called back to her family. She quickly became a very active member of the Parish with jobs ranging from P.C.C. Secretary, to making curtains for the Church hall. She also worked hard for her two favourite charities – The Budiriro Trust (which maintained her links with Zimbabwe) and the B.R.F. She did some counselling work at the Duchess of Kent House and worked in the Estate Office at Englefield Estate.
 
Jenny was a wonderful cook and will be remembered for her soup at many Church events. She was a skilled needle woman and an accomplished musician, singing with the Farley Singers, the Dever Singers and the Church choir as well as playing the organ. She was also an intellectual with a deep love of literature.  She was honest and forthright in her opinions, but always with grace and good humour.  Throughout her life Jenny had more than her fair share of difficulties; she fought hard battles to overcome them and developed not only a stoical resistance to pain and discomfort, but huge inner strength. She gave so much to us all and will be sorely missed.”

And here is an obituary by Elspeth Holderness (1923-2009) in the 2007-2008 annual report of the Budiriro Trust.

Jenny Biggar died on 8th May 2008 after a valiant fight against Lymphoma. She was a very wonderful and exceptional person. St. Mary’s Church, Shinfield, was packed for the inspiring Funeral Service, which included several choirs which Jenny used to sing in herself – a wonderful tribute to someone who had so many friends here and abroad and who was always cheerful and quietly helpful and who had this deep inner strength.
 
Until not long ago, Jenny was a Trustee of Budiriro as well as Secretary and Fund-Raiser. She spent a great deal of time and energy in seeking out sources of funding, both from individuals and corporate bodies and managed to raise thousands of pounds with her tireless energy and enthusiasm. She was also involved in other ways (not least her home-made cakes, etc. after each Annual Meeting!). She was working at Manor Farm Estate, and also did some counselling.
 
She grew up at Manor Farm, run by her father, on the Englefield Estate, near Reading, and was part of a big, loving family. Her father, Bill, and Hardwicke [Holderness] (see obituary, Budiriro Trust Annual Report 2006-2007), had become great friends during the Second World War in the same squadron in RAF Coastal Command, and years later we found him and his family again on one of our rare visits to Britain – which was lovely. Around 1970, Bill wrote and said Jenny had decided to emigrate to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and could we perhaps “keep an eye” on her and we said “fine”.
 
She was, I think, very happy, working as a Medical Secretary, making new friends, joining St. Andrew’s Church [Salisbury], having her own flat, and also having the freedom of our house and garden. She also realised how some of the children around us needed education and to be able to read books. Jenny had a love of literacy and books and literature all her life.
 
After she rejoined her family some years later, she took a degree in English as a mature student at Reading University, and when we later went to live in Oxford, she had embarked on a DPhil at Oxford University, also in English. We introduced her to Ken and Deborah Kirkwood (who had been highly involved in Budiriro since the beginning and had already embroiled both of us), and she was happy to become involved too. She worked miracles.

Elspeth Holderness was the wife of Hardwicke Holderness (1915-2007), RAF pilot, Rhodesian MP and fighter for racial equality, whom I mentioned here.

Vale: Molly Clutton-Brock

Only the other day, I was reporting on revolutionary communists in the Rhodesia of the late 1950s.   One of those alleged revolutionaries, a founder of a non-racial co-operative farm and of rural health clinics, Molly Clutton-Brock, has just died aged 101.   Her obituary is here.   Her late husband, Guy, is the only white Zimbabwean buried at Heroes’ Acre national cemetery, outside Harare.

Julia Gillard as manager

A description of former Australian PM Julia Gillard’s parliamentary and office management style, by former staffer Nicholas Reece:

Gillard is one of the best close-quarters politicians the Federal Parliament has ever seen.
As prime minister, she ran a disciplined, professional office that operated in much the same way as a well-run law firm – a product of her early career at Slater & Gordon.
Cabinet process was strictly upheld and the massive flow of administrative and policy paperwork that moves between government departments, the prime minister’s office and the prime minister’s desk was dealt with efficiently.
There was courtesy shown to staff, MPs, public servants and stakeholders – every person entitled to a view was given a chance to express it before a decision was made.
Gillard would diligently work her way through the detail of an issue and then patiently execute an agreed plan to tackle it.
She was generous with her time and did not rush people in the way busy leaders often do. She was never rude and never raised her voice, unless for humorous purposes.
She had a quick mind and could master a brief at lightning speed. She was a masterful parliamentary tactician and a brilliant analyst of the day’s events and the politics of the Labor caucus. She was a genuinely affectionate person and had a quick wit that could be deployed to lift the spirits of those around her.
At her instigation, birthdays were the subject of office celebration. This would involve Gillard turning up for cake and delivering a very personal speech to even the most junior staff.
Significantly for a national leader, Gillard had no major personality defects. She is probably the most normal, down-to-earth person to have served as prime minister of Australia in the modern era.
In a crisis, she was supremely calm. While others wilted, Gillard had a resilience that allowed her to keep stepping up to the plate.
She was good at remembering people’s names, knowing their story, understanding their motivations and being able to see a situation from another’s perspective.
These were attributes that were very well suited to the fraught circumstances of the 43rd Parliament.
In the negotiations with the crossbench MPs to form government, Gillard easily outmanoeuvred Tony Abbott. She better understood the independents’ motivations – she focused on the detail of how the relationship between government and the crossbenches would work and committed to serving the full term.
The achievements include: the national broadband network, putting a price on carbon, education reform, children’s dental care and the national disability insurance scheme.
In federal-state relations, there was the negotiation of health reform with the conservative premiers and in foreign affairs there was a strengthening of relations with our major partners, particularly China and the US.
Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that Gillard was well-liked, even loved, among her staff, the public service and most of her caucus.”

 

Ineffective imperalism

British MP, Rory Stewart, has spoken in Parliament of our failure to deeply understand the cultures of the foreign countries we invade, with the consequence that invasion efforts are doomed not to succeed.   His view relates to an argument he has put before, about the failure of contemporary international aid organizations and personnel to reckon deeply with the cultures of their host countries, in a manner profoundly worse than that of 19th-century colonial administrators.   Colonial administrators may have typically been racist and exploitative, but at least they cared for – and sought to understand – the cultures and languages of the countries they administered, and were prepared to devote their working lives to those countries.
Video here and Hansard Transcript here.  (Note that in his speech, Stewart refers to Gordon Brown by name, but the Hansard reporter has recorded this as, “the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown)“.)

Rudd 2.0

Australian journalist Anne Summers writing about just-deposed (and unjustly-deposed) Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s legacy (original here):

On the day Julia Gillard’s signature policy revolution, the Gonski reforms, became law, her prime ministership was defamed and denigrated, characterised as being littered with errors. Those who tore her down gave her no credit for any of her accomplishments as our country’s leader. Not for the 532 pieces of legislation that, by Wednesday night, had passed both houses of Parliament this sitting. Remember, this was a hung Parliament where every piece of legislation needed to be painstakingly negotiated.
Julia Gillard told me recently (in an interview that will be published this weekend in my digital magazine Anne Summers Reports) that because of the minority Parliament, ”It’s more inclusive on the one hand and that’s not a bad thing, but it can be slower and can distort the process a little bit.”
By far the hardest but the most worthwhile piece of legislation to be passed, Gillard said, was the carbon price, which she is confident will endure.
Yet when Kevin Rudd spoke after his shameful coup on Wednesday night and praised ”Julia” for being ”a remarkable reformer”, he did not mention a single one of her prime ministerial accomplishments. Not the carbon price. Not the NDIS. Not the Murray-Darling agreement. Not the Gonski reforms. And certainly not her historic agreement with the new Chinese leadership that ensures an unprecedented annual leadership dialogue between our two countries, something that Rudd while he was prime minister was unable to bring off. No, Rudd did not mention any of these things.
”In Julia’s case let me say this, if it were not for Julia we would not have the Fair Work Act,” he said. ”If it were not for Julia, we would not have a national scheme which ensures that the literacy and numeracy performance of Australian schools is tested regularly and that interventions occur to lift those students who are doing poorly.”
All things she accomplished while she was deputy prime minister. And, the subtext was, while he – the man mocking her by outfitting himself in a blue tie for the coup – was prime minister.
Expect Julia Gillard’s record of reform to be swiftly excised from the political memory of the Labor Party. It started on Wednesday night and will continue apace.”

Of course, Kevin Rudd’s egotistical, erratic and hard-driving management style (Rudd Version 1.0) would not have lasted very long in a hung Parliament.   Perhaps Rudd Version 2.0 comes with added humility, although there are no signs of it so far.   If not, I don’t see Kevin-13 lasting very long or achieving very much.  In the words of Energy and Resources Minister, Gary Gray, last week, Rudd can “get himself into the media … what he can’t do is govern and what he can’t do is lead the Labor party”.
 
POSTSCRIPT (Added 2013-06-29):
 
From  The Stalking of Julia Gillard, by Kerry-Anne Walsh. (Published on Tuesday by Allen & Unwin, Australia, excerpted here.)
In the words of a former high-level Rudd adviser who penned a personal, unpublished account of his time in the Rudd government, the way Rudd operated was ”a powerful warning for future governments … The Rudd government was never and could never have been a functional government because of the man who ran it.” This adviser was in a trusted position; he was intimate with the running and functioning of Rudd’s cabinet and at the centre of much of its day-to-day mayhem.
 
Once deposed, Rudd’s toxic ambition appears to have been either to return to the leadership, or to destroy both the government that had dumped him and the woman who had replaced him. In this pursuit he was abetted by political journalists who became pawns in his comeback play, channelling the Chinese whispers of his spruikers and giving credibility and substance to exaggerated claims about the pretender’s level of support within the parliamentary party for a comeback.

Privately, there had always been deep unease among his colleagues about Rudd — his overpowering personal ambition, his ruthless use of people and power blocs to get the leader’s job, his lack of strong policy focus and his uneven temperament.
The oft-quoted fable that his crash in the opinion polls was the reason for his removal is hotly disputed by those central to Rudd’s fate. Anybody who had an ear to the ground in Canberra at the time knew Rudd was in a bad way; that he’d been unravelling since the disaster of the December 2009 climate change summit in Copenhagen; that his office, his department and the wider bureaucracy were paralysed by a prime minister who could not make the big decisions, but who sweated the minutiae of irrelevant tasks and board appointments; that he was so obsessed with polling numbers and day-to-day politics that months into 2010, with an eye to the election, he was designing ever more extravagant and untenable policies that would provide him with the quick fixes of media limelight he appeared to need.”

POSTSCRIPT 2 (Added 2013-06-30):
And here is Independent MP Robert Oakeshott’s moving Parliamentary tribute to Julia Gillard and her prime ministership.  Gillard met with the Independent and Green MPs each week during Parliamentary sittings to discuss and co-ordinate policy, so Oakeshott is speaking from direct personal experience.  

Distortions of history

Surfing idly, I came across this statement:

In 1958 Arthur Lewis married Gladys and moved to Rhodesia. Their first appointment to St. Faith’s Mission in Rusape proved to be something of a nightmare. While the mission had once been very successful, social work and the attached farm had come to take over and the Gospel work was side-lined. Rev. Lewis soon discovered that the farm was also used as a front for a communist revolutionary movement. After much hard work and a determined struggle, Arthur Lewis was able to re-establish the Church and Mission as a dynamic Christian enterprise. Amidst all the trauma of St. Faith’s Mission, their first child, Margaret Faith was born.”  (Source here.)

Wait a minute!  Communist revolutionaries in Rhodesia in 1958?  The first armed incursion in what became the Second Chimurenga took place in 1967 (and was undertaken by South Africans with the ANC, members of MK, and not Zimbabweans), and the war of liberation only took off from the early 1970s.  In 1958, neither ZANU nor ZAPU had yet been formed.  Of course, Doris Lessing and her then husband Gottfried Lessing, and their left-wing Royal Air Force friends in the Southern Rhodesia Communist Party may have counted as communist revolutionaries in the mid 1940s – although they only ever talked – but they had had little impact and were by then long gone from Rhodesia.
After a moment or two, I realized that there was a clue in the location:  St Faith’s, Rusape.  This was the site of a very famous multi-racial co-operative farm founded by Guy and Molly Clutton-Brock in 1950.   In 1957, the Clutton-Brocks and their colleagues on the farm were instrumental in founding a non-racial political movement, the Southern Rhodesian African National Congress (SRANC), which like its South African counterpart (itself founded as long ago as 1912!) called for majority rule.  The SRANC was successful in convincing the then Southern Rhodesian Prime Minister, Garfield Todd, of the justice of their case, but he could not persuade his own party or his (mostly white) parliamentary colleagues.  He was dumped, and the new PM banned the SRANC in 1959.
At no point was anyone a communist revolutionary, unless you happen to believe that running a multi-racial commercial enterprise is communist.  But, of course, many white Rhodesians did!
POSTSCRIPT (2013-07-03):  Molly Clutton-Brock died shortly after this post.

Recent reading 7

The latest in a sequence of lists of recently-read books:

  • Igor Lukes [2012]: On the Edge of the Cold War: American Diplomats and Spies in Postwar Prague.  Oxford University Press.   Some comments here.
  • Randall Woods [2012]: Shadow Warrior: William Egan Colby and the CIA.  Basic Civitas Books. Colby comes across as remarkably liberal, pragmatic and sensible in this account of his life, promoting agrarian socialism and grass-roots democracy to beat the communists in South Vietnam, for example.
  • Roger Hermiston [2013]:  The Greatest Traitor: The Secret Lives of Agent George Blake.  Aurum Press.
  • C P Snow [1969]:  Variety of Men.  Penguin Books, second edition. (HT:  Saul Smilansky at Normblog.)
  • Charlotte Joko Beck [1997]: Everyday Zen: Love and Work.  Thorsons.
  • James Button [2013]:  Speechless: A Year in my Father’s Business.  Melbourne University Press.   A mention here.
  • Robert Dessaix [2012]: As I was Saying.  Random House Australia.  A typically erudite collection of talks and essays, as smooth as a gimlet.
  • Charles S. Maier [1999]:  Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany.  Princeton University Press.
  • Meredith Maran (Editor) [2013]:  Why We Write.  Plume.
  • Marci Shore [2013]:  The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe.  Crown Publishing Group, New York.
  • Thomas Nagel [2012]:  Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.  Oxford University Press USA.  Any book so heavily criticized by Brian Leiter has to be of great value, and this was.

The photo shows the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, from 1954 home of the Berliner Ensemble.