A Lot of Cloak, Not Much Dagger and a Bit of Genius(A CIA old boy

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-mccarry30jul30.story
COMMENTARY
A Lot of Cloak, Not Much Dagger and a Bit of Genius
A CIA old boy brushes away some espionage myths.
By Charles McCarry
Charles McCarry is a former CIA operative. His 10th novel, "Old Boys," was published last month by Overlook Press.

July 30, 2004

Deservedly or not, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has enjoyed a formidable reputation for omniscience, omnipotence and dark doings ever since it was founded in 1947. In most of the world, this view of American intelligence probably still obtains, notwithstanding the findings of recent investigations. How can the United States, with visible power that is so overwhelming, not also be possessed of invisible powers and secret intentions that boggle the imagination?

There is a certain justification for regarding the CIA as some sort of parallel universe. It is, after all, secret. Its resources truly are enormous (although no one but the president and a handful of lofty government officials know just how enormous).

It lives by different laws of moral physics than the rest of the American system. The purpose of an intelligence service is to commit on foreign soil acts that would be illegal in the homeland. As one of the men who trained me when I was a CIA rookie half a century ago cheerily observed: "Espionage is a criminal enterprise. Every time you recruit an agent, you suborn him to treason, which is a capital crime in every country in the world."

Americans have always had difficulty coming to grips with that reality, but they have understood this: The CIA came into being, as its most revered director, the late Richard Helms, liked to put it, "so that there would never be another Pearl Harbor."

During the bitterest periods of the Cold War, public opinion supported that rationale and accepted that a certain amount of distasteful practice, occurring offstage, was a reasonable price to pay for preventing the end of Western civilization.

Actually, in my time as a CIA covert operative in Europe, Africa and Asia in the 1950s and 1960s, I observed very little skulduggery. We and our prime adversaries eschewed violence against each other as a sort of charm against revenge. The one fellow officer who habitually did carry a gun was regarded as something of a cartoon figure by the rest of us.<snip>