Mr. R is a member of the intelligence community. He reads the classified literature and he knows the players. He doesn’t like what he sees. This is his story.
“Let’s talk about collection first, what we pick up on the other side. You have to understand that, despite all the Church committee noise, we’ve never really had a clandestine service. Almost all of our agents abroad have official cover—political officer at the embassy, or whatever. Now that journalists have gotten religion, as a matter of fact, the only non-official cover left is commercial agents, and commercial agents account for less than 15 per cent of our field presence. So . . . operating under official cover, our agents are known to be representing the government and they are treated accordingly by foreign nationals. We thus tend to collect what others want us to report to Washington, and those reports, in turn, tend to become indistinguishable from diplomatic reports. Where’s the clandestinity?
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