Volume 48, Number 1 (April 2004): 11-25
Intelligence
reform is a critical element of democratization, but it is frequently relegated
to the back burner in the early days of post-authoritarian regime transitions.
This is due, in part, to a reflexive aversion to what was commonly the most
brutal legacy of the former regimes. Transition populations tend to favor the
destruction of intelligence apparatuses, not their reform.
In the
post-communist transitions in central and eastern Europe, competing priorities
also distracted attention from intelligence reform as political, economic, and
other security institutions simultaneously underwent changes. Western biases
shaping the packaging of reform assistance added to the relative neglect of
intelligence. The West's early focus on market economy formation instead of the
establishment of rule of law, as well as its pronounced unwillingness to assist
what were still considered the "instruments of repression," kept
intelligence near the bottom of the reformist agenda during the first few years
of transition.
The
mechanics of intelligence liaison relationships between the West and the former
communist states perpetuated this "hands off" attitude. Liaison
officers sent into the region were chiefly responsible for obtaining
information of use to their countries. They were not sent to advocate or
undertake the reform of local intelligence structures and practices. If
information was flowing in a satisfactory manner, the unintended consequence
was a distinctly anti-reform ethos driven by the logic: "If it ain't
broke, don't fix it."
Given
recurrent intelligence and "political policing" problems in the
transition states, it was inevitable that reform in those domains would
eventually become a western priority, particularly after NATO opened its doors
to new members in 1993. Unbridled political competition within the
post-communist states, where the rules of the game were still in contention and
abuses of executive power common, heightened concerns regarding the impact of
partly reformed or unreformed intelligence services on an enlarged western
alliance.
Unfortunately,
the West's attempts to evaluate the intelligence reform process in the various
states of the region were handicapped by the differences among the new
democracies, which limited comparative analysis;1 by the
inappropriateness of western models developed under different political,
social, and economic circumstances; and by the failure of western analysts to
recognize that the post-Cold War revolution in intelligence affairs conflicts
in many respects with the classic model of intelligence reform. This article
examines these challenges.
Intelligence Reform in the West
Despite the
reputation of intelligence-gathering as the world's "second oldest
profession," national intelligence services were one of the last
components of the modern state to be formally instituted, becoming prevalent
only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This paradox
underscores the informal and secret nature of what is essentially a
practitioner-driven task. The characteristics of informality and secrecy
reinforced the tendency among intelligence bodies to operate within limits set
chiefly by their relative effectiveness, unhindered by restrictive mandates or
clear regulation. The potential for abuse was always inherent in such
wide-ranging discretionary powers.
The vital
need for intelligence and the often-secret nature of intelligence-gathering
make the effectiveness and control of national intelligence services two of the
most important challenges faced by all democracies. Lacking effective
intelligence services, a state cannot anticipate, prevent, or protect itself
against major threats to its national security.2 Where control
is lacking, intelligence cannot be directed to serve legitimate national
interests, civil liberties are placed at risk, and democracy itself may be
undermined.3
Until the
late 20th century, intelligence reform remained an internal concern
of the respective services, just as oversight and control over intelligence
activities was the monopoly of the executive. Neither reform nor control was
considered an appropriate topic for public discussion; in some cases, the very
existence of the service was denied to the public.4 Legislative
oversight – the essence of democratic control – was completely absent even
among the consolidated democracies; virtually no standards of democratic
accountability were applied to intelligence beyond that exercised by the
democratically elected executives to whom the services were subordinated. As a
result, intelligence services enjoyed an extremely large degree of operational
autonomy in the national security arena.
Shortly
after World War II, the United States took the initial step toward major change
when it introduced the first public laws establishing the mandates and powers
of the intelligence services: the National Security Act of 1947 and the CIA Act
of 1949.5 The next step
was also undertaken in the United States, provoked by public revelations
regarding civil rights abuses by various civilian and military intelligence
services during the late 1960s and early 1970s.6 Scandals
prompted the creation of the Senate and House Committees on Intelligence in
1976 and 1977 to ensure that abuses could not be so easily perpetrated in the
future.7
Within a
short time, similar scandals erupted elsewhere in the democratic world as more
sophisticated populations began demanding greater accountability and respect
for civil rights from their intelligence services and executives.8 In all cases,
resulting reforms were undertaken in a relatively benign security environment.
The general consequence in the northern half of Europe was the creation of
various, primarily legislative, oversight bodies entitled to the necessary
levels of information that would permit them to better control intelligence
organs.
It is worth
emphasizing that this wave of intelligence service reform did not reach the
shores of all western democratic states. It affected North American and
northern European services principally, and southern European services hardly
at all. As of 2004, parliamentary oversight of intelligence was virtually absent
in France and marginal in Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain.9
The central
tasks of this wave of intelligence reform were to establish effective civilian
control over intelligence, reduce the role of intelligence agencies in
non-intelligence areas, and ensure respect for civil rights. Widespread
consensus on the need for substantive reform to enable real democratic
oversight was accompanied by a similar consensus on the need for competent
intelligence services. The aims of the reformers were to restructure legal and
oversight frameworks, intelligence bodies, and intelligence procedures and
practices in full conformity with democratic principles and in such a manner as
to retain their effectiveness. Democratic oversight and operational
effectiveness were maintained as goals of equal value, even if effectiveness
was not an explicit element in the reform project.
Changing the Reform Model
After the
Cold War, especially after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on US soil,
a new wave of reform focused more on effectiveness and functional coordination
than on control per se. The propelling force behind this wave was the
recognition that combating the new threats of terrorism and the activities
whereby it is funded – drug trafficking, money laundering, and organized crime
– required greatly enhanced interagency communication, cooperation, and
intelligence sharing on the national and international level. The ramifications
of this coordination are broad, including the building of common databases,
creation of intelligence clearinghouses, invention of new forms of
organizational collaboration, and even institutional mergers. Paradoxically,
apart from the new threat that prompted it, these reforms were undertaken in
perhaps the most benign security environment – in terms of traditional threats
– that the United States and western Europe had faced in over half a century.
Law
enforcement organizations had the advantage over intelligence agencies as the
paradigm shifted from a classic realpolitik world of unmitigated
inter-state competition towards greater cooperation in the post-Cold War era.
International police cooperation was initiated with the rather half-hearted
organization of INTERPOL in 1914, and evolved into the more effective TREVI
Group in 1975 and the European Police Agency (EUROPOL) in 1991, before
encompassing regional arrangements, such as the Southeast European Cooperation
Initiative to Fight Cross-Border Crime (SECI) in 2000.10 In contrast,
intelligence services remained relatively isolated from their counterparts in
the security sector, as well as from international and globalizing
developments. Regular European intelligence cooperation began only at
the end of the Cold War with the informal Club of Berne.
The 9/11
attacks accelerated efforts to transform the orientation of intelligence
services from rivalry, both domestic and international, to cooperation against
the new threats. This was an unprecedented situation for intelligence services
where considerations of secrecy, trust, and national security made them the
strongest bastion of the nation-state and its sovereignty against all other
states and their institutions.11
While
acknowledging the critical need for expanded cooperation, a number of experts
have called attention to the problems that greater collaboration is likely to
pose for both effectiveness and control. "The capacities embedded in
existing intelligence organizations are both powerful and hard to create,"
one scholar observes, raising the danger of "demolishing them for
something new" that may not meet the current challenges.12 Another
expert points out:
However
much they are interleaved, domestic and foreign intelligence agencies in
democracies are subject to very different legal and political restraints, and
develop distinctive casts of mind as a result. Merging them hardly seems
practicable or desirable.13
The few
institutionalized cooperative intelligence arrangements that existed prior to
the end of the Cold War could be divided into two categories: those that grew
out of historically and culturally conditioned voluntary alliances, and those
that resulted from direct subordination of a service to a foreign state. The
first category was largely confined to the Anglophone states – the United
States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The second
category included the Bulgarian, Czechoslovak, East German, Hungarian, Polish,
and Romanian intelligence services, which had been directly subordinated to the
Soviet NKVD/KGB since the late 1940s.14
Early
post-Cold War attempts to establish broader cooperation illustrate the continuing
"bleed over" of Cold War mentalities and rules of the game into the
new environment. For example, in May 1993, the United States and Romania
co-sponsored the first joint meeting of Black Sea intelligence services in
Romania. Although by many measures the meeting was considered a success, the
CIA representative delegated to chair the meeting accused his Romanian
co-sponsor of breaking into his briefcase during the proceedings, thereby
scuttling the initiative and setting the US-Romanian intelligence relationship
back several years.15 The CIA
representative, Aldrich Ames, was later exposed as a Soviet/Russian double
agent.
[Author’s
Note 22/12/15: Jeanne Vertefeuille,
the CIA’s lead investigator in the Ames case, and Ioan Talpeş, former Director of Romanian Foreign
Intelligence (SIE) have clarified several inadvertencies of this author. First,
the Black Sea intelligence service meeting took place in May 1995 and not in
1993. Second, Ames was not the presiding CIA representative. Although Ames had
previously headed up the Black Sea Center at the CIA and was aware of initial
planning for the meeting, he was arrested as a Soviet agent in mid-1994.
Finally, and most importantly, the intentionally clumsy break-in attempt was
most likely orchestrated by former deputy SIE director Constantin Silinescu, an
ex-Securitate officer brought into SIE in 1990 by its first chief, Mihai
Caraman – identified as a Soviet agent more than a decade earlier. Silinescu
further attempted to compromise efforts to establish SIE-CIA cooperation in
1997 by denouncing Talpeş – the chief
architect of Romanian NATO and EU integration – as an alleged American agent to
then-President Emil Constantinescu. See Talpeş’ interview, “Un grup, cu o clară dependenţă estică, a incercat împiedicarea
integrării României în NATO” [A Group with a Clear Eastern Dependence Tried to Block Romania’s
Integration in NATO], Independent (Bucharest), 18 January 2008, pp. 6-7.]
Other
intelligence cooperation initiatives launched since 1989 include the
Dutch-sponsored Middle European Conference in 1994 and two Romanian-sponsored
conference series, one bringing together the Balkan services and the other NATO
and candidate-member services in 2002.16
A number of
conditions sharply differentiated the post-1989 intelligence reform efforts of
central and eastern Europe from earlier reform in the West. Among the most
important were: an appreciably less benign security environment; the fragility
of new political regimes and their institutions, along with the democratic
values and norms that underpin them; the profound lack of intelligence
expertise and competing priorities for reform attention and resources; foreign
control of local intelligence services; the availability of outside assistance;
and the widespread perception of legacy institutions as "the enemy"
to be vanquished and of legacy personnel as criminals from whom an accounting
was demanded. Each of these conditions affected intelligence reform.
General Insecurity and Unconsolidated Institutions
To achieve
its twin goals of control and effectiveness, intelligence reform in the West
had been the product of serious analysis and cautious planning. The measured
pace of reform presumed the existence of stable democratic institutions and a
secure environment free of perceived immediate threats that might otherwise
drive or condition the reform process. In most post-authoritarian states such
conditions do not prevail. They certainly did not exist in the central and
eastern European post-communist states, where simultaneous political, social,
and economic transformations commonly resulted in unstable domestic
institutions and perceived "threat-rich" environments.
Generally
speaking, security and stability were stronger in those states that bordered
directly on western Europe (Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland), particularly
in those that had engaged in regime-society dialogue long before their
transformations (Hungary and Poland). The more isolated southeastern European
states of Bulgaria and Romania, whose transformations did not benefit from such
a dialogue, were less secure in the face of the armed conflicts that appeared
along their borders as the result of the disintegration of neighboring states.17 It did not
help that some western democracies publicly encouraged the intervention of
third parties or expressed support for further territorial divisions in the
region during this period of institutional uncertainty.18
With the
single exception of East Germany, all post-communist states either continued to
rely on their legacy intelligence bodies irrespective of their compromised
nature or created new institutions to fulfill this vital function before time
could be devoted to a comprehensive reform plan. Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, and Poland all initially chose to maintain their intelligence services
in basically the same structure and with the same personnel as under communist
rule. Romania opted to dissolve its Securitate in the midst of the
December 1989 revolution, creating its principal replacement service only three
months later.19 Under
conditions of insecurity and instability, immediate need rather than careful
planning drove the functioning of these services.
Also in
contrast to western democracies, the lack of widespread popular identification
with or allegiance to newly-formed core institutions in central and eastern
Europe resulted in an internal fragility that amplified external sources of
insecurity and raised fundamental rule-of-law issues. As one analyst notes:
"A combination of open borders, general poverty, and unparalleled
opportunities for enrichment through illegal enterprise create[d] the
conditions for the emergence of criminal organizations rich enough to corrupt
the political system to its core, to purchase immunity from prosecution, and in
some instances to drain a major share of public resources."20
The fact
that democratic norms and values were not yet internalized contributed to these
difficulties. The weaknesses associated with parliamentary, semi-presidential,
and presidential democratic systems were exposed with regularity, as
authoritarian reflexes continued to mark the behavior of new leaders,
regardless of their rhetorical commitment to democracy. Insufficient attention
to these political and security realities impeded the West's ability to judge
the direction and pace of intelligence reform.21
Nato Membership 2004
When the
Western democratic countries undertook intelligence reform, none was
simultaneously engaged in the fundamental reform of all state and government
institutions that characterized most of the post-communist transition states.
Theoretically, this could have been an advantage since it offered the potential
for a coherent and holistic security-sector reform – basically, the chance to
compress evolutionary development of intelligence institutions and move
directly to a 21st century mode of operation. Practically, however,
the recasting of entire states has meant thinly spread resources, insufficient
administrative capacity, high levels of political uncertainty, and
institutional confusion.
In the
intelligence realm, competing priorities resulted in a shortage of experts
outside the legacy intelligence services capable of initiating and carrying out
coherent reform – a far different situation than that which characterized the
West when it engaged in the overhaul of intelligence. Intelligence reform
projects in the West were able to draw on expertise and evaluative capabilities
developed over decades within the system, not only among intelligence producers
but also among their consumers and controllers.22
Post-authoritarian states have not had enough time to build up the independent
expertise necessary for conceptualizing and implementing intelligence reforms.
In many
post-authoritarian states, legislatures must first be created – or recreated –
and have time to establish their own legitimacy before they can begin to
consider the problem of legacy intelligence services, much less oversee their
reform. Once created, the parliaments of transition states frequently are
unable to devote attention to this domain. In emerging democracies,
intelligence reform often has to wait while fledgling institutions struggle to
address the most visible public demands – such as economic development, health
care, and education.
Legacy
services have neither the organization nor the capability for public relations
and civic outreach, handicapping their chances for burnishing their images.
Referring to the Bulgarian services, one knowledgeable observer explains that
communicating with the public has "never been part of the intelligence
chiefs' tool-box."23 In many
transition states, therefore, the public debate on intelligence issues has been
dominated by the media, whose traditional suspicion of authority and
institutions that operate in secrecy has been heightened by a tendency toward
economically motivated sensationalism.
National Control and Loyalty
The history
of institutional dependence on the Soviet Union for most eastern European
services has posed unusual problems for intelligence reform. Czechoslovakia's
immediate post-communist foreign-intelligence branch, for example, continued to
function "under KGB tutelage and tasking" until the collapse of the
Soviet Union.24 And after
Czechoslovakia divided, the Slovak intelligence service sent its officers to
Moscow and welcomed Russian instructors to run programs in Slovakia until at
least July 1996.25 Analysts have
continued to air concerns about "Russian penetration and vested
interests" in Bulgarian intelligence because of Sofia's traditionally
close relationship to Moscow.26 This problem
persisted right up until the second wave of NATO enlargement--the replacement
of intelligence reformers and the reappearance of Soviet/Russian-trained
intelligence officers in positions of leadership and influence threatened to
block the NATO membership bids of both Slovakia and Bulgaria in 2003.27
In addition
to NATO integration, Soviet and Russian influence over intelligence bodies had
important ramifications for internal democratization in eastern Europe. The
states that negotiated their revolutions – Hungary, Poland, and, initially,
Czechoslovakia – "grandfathered in" substantial numbers of personnel
from the former regimes as part of the negotiation process, which caused considerable
apprehension in NATO both before and after their accession.28 Thus,
establishing sovereign national control over the domestic security apparatus
and the loyalty of its personnel became major objectives of post-communist
reform efforts.
Romania's
situation was somewhat the reverse of its regional confreres, with
residual Russian influence stronger among intellectual and dissident groups
than within the security services, a circumstance that affected post-communist
intelligence missions, personnel, and institutional culture.29 Romania had
made significant strides toward getting out from under Moscow's thumb in the
1960s. According to a former NATO intelligence service director responsible for
monitoring the activity of Soviet bloc services during the Cold War, this break
ended the participation of Romanian intelligence officers in joint operations
with the KGB and GRU.30 Bucharest
even went so far as to create departments that specialized in anti-KGB
counterespionage, underscoring the difficult relationship with Moscow.31
Since
Romania's communist leadership had usurped the national banner when the country
became autonomous, the goals and activities of anti-government activists in
succeeding years inadvertently made them "natural allies" of Moscow,
which targeted many for recruitment.32 Judging from
the size of its embassy cultural section, Soviet efforts to influence dissident
intellectuals increased during the last years of Ceausescu's reign.33 In one
supremely self-serving operation mounted in the immediate aftermath of
Romania's 1989 revolution, a demonstration was whipped up and maintained for
several days in front of the previously secret office of the Securitate's
anti-KGB unit calling for the unit's dissolution as a "repressive
organ." Unable to dissuade the demonstrators and fearing bloodshed, the
new leadership disbanded the unit. Romania did not recreate a
counterintelligence unit for combating the operations of hostile foreign
services until 1994.
The Role of Western Assistance
Globally,
models for intelligence reform in post-authoritarian states either did not
exist or were not attractive. Therefore, willing cooperation with more advanced
partners provided a key impetus to the intelligence reform process. Not only
could service personnel come into close contact with more functional
organizations and effective procedures, but also such relationships placed
independent experts in positions to judge the performance of the new services
by the quality of their product. Such cooperation had the potential to
jump-start stalled reform in some cases, as was shown for a short while at
least in Bulgaria during the Kosovo campaign.34
Despite the
potential value of outside help for intelligence reform, however, barriers to
obtaining assistance in the immediate aftermath of the communist collapse
included the reluctance of Western governments to dirty their hands by dealing
with formerly repressive institutions. Exceptions were made, but the general
policy was that the new political and institutional leaders should complete
their intelligence reforms before Western states and their services would
engage with them – a counterproductive policy, given that those leaders had no
expertise to address the issue coherently or effectively. Without expertise or
outside assistance, the results of intelligence reform efforts were uniformly
sub-optimal – and sometimes disastrous.
States that
either engaged in more organized transformations (Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
Poland) or built their intelligence services from scratch (the Baltic States)
received aid sooner than the states of southeastern Europe where greater
transformation problems existed across the board. Thus, access to Western
intelligence assistance initially was not available to those states and
services most in need of it. It is hard to overemphasize the significance of
this factor. It not only perpetuated the inability of the south-eastern
European states to deal effectively with the threats that arose with the end of
the Cold War – threats that also impacted on the national security of European
Union and NATO states – but also barred those services from benefiting from the
only existing repository of democratic intelligence reform expertise.
NATO, which
lacks a standing intelligence capability beyond support for combat operations,
was not a natural institutional model for intelligence reform. Nonetheless, the
alliance played an indirect role by establishing criteria for membership that
were subsequently fulfilled to a greater or lesser degree by the entire group
of former Warsaw Pact transition states (with the exception of Russia). The
availability of outside assistance, particularly from an international alliance
that the new leaders and populations of central and eastern Europe wanted to
join, proved extremely valuable for reforming intelligence bodies.
The
imperative for intelligence services to cooperate rather than compete with each
other against the variety and multiplicity of post-Cold War threats also proved
a major boon to intelligence reform in central and eastern Europe. Cooperation
has required the creation of mechanisms for judging the effectiveness and
control of services in the emerging democracies and has provided experience to
officers of those services regarding the organization and procedures of more
effective and better-controlled western services. It has even created an
informal set of common standards. The demands of procedural interoperability in
the new security environment have already contributed to the success of these
services in adapting to the new paradigm.
Testing Loyalty
For the
first decade after the collapse of communism, citizens' memory of former secret
police organs continued to dog the reputation and image of most of the
post-communist intelligence services. As of 2003, for example, the Czech
intelligence service's Web site stated that the experience of the communist-era
security apparatus "still raises fear and suspicion that the new service
will once again turn into a secret political police."35
Post-authoritarian
intelligence services undergoing reform are inherently vulnerable to charges of
"continuity," and the post-communist services were no different. By
maintaining some of the same structures and personnel as under the previous
repressive systems, they were open to accusations that few, if any, changes had
occurred. That some of the same types of units continued to exist is
understandable, given that alongside their repressive political policing
activities, authoritarian security apparatuses had units that performed
legitimate core intelligence functions identical to those performed by
intelligence services in long-established democratic states. The continued
employment of experienced personnel is likewise logical if effective
intelligence collection is to remain a priority.
East Germany
and Czechoslovakia were the only two eastern European countries that avoided
the continuity trap. In East Germany, the Stasi disappeared along with
the East German state, and the well-functioning services of a unified Germany
immediately took over all intelligence tasks. Czechoslovakia initially opted
for a smaller version of the communist StB, manned exclusively by ex-StB
officers, but then decided in December 1990 to completely remodel the service
and remove all legacy StB personnel. The Czechoslovaks were able to undertake
this measure, resulting in the loss of an intelligence capability for some six
to seven years, because Western partners offered them security assurances.36
For
countries that cannot obtain outside security guarantees, adoption of the
"zero option"-- eliminating all experienced personnel--is untenable
because it would render the new services incapable of performing intelligence
tasks over the short and medium terms. For institutions undergoing major
reform, excessive turnover would similarly compromise the effort.37 Institutional
memory is required for real transformation. Without it, new structures are
likely to behave in old ways. Even where the temporary loss of intelligence
capability is accepted and the requisite security guarantees are received,
implementing the "zero option" requires time. In Czechoslovakia, for
example, the number of ex-StB officers was reduced to 14 percent of the
new service within a year, but six years later legacy personnel still
represented 4 percent of the service.38
The argument
for maintaining continuity of personnel is perhaps strongest for
foreign-intelligence operations. The principal comparative advantage of the
technologically-challenged and resource-poor services of the post-communist
space is their human intelligence (HUMINT) capacity, particularly in areas of
the world where terrorism and trafficking flourish. Since HUMINT is based above
all on personal relationships, the replacement of all personnel necessarily
destroys that capability over the short and medium terms. Therefore, in central
and eastern Europe, parties interested in destroying the effectiveness of the
intelligence services joined in the chorus with those advocating the complete
removal of legacy personnel for the more noble reason of a democratic fresh
start. The exhortations of NATO and other Western institutions were often
misrepresented as calling for the replacement of all experienced
personnel when their concerns were confined to individuals previously involved
in human rights abuses or operations against NATO, or those with questionable
allegiance, since they would be handling NATO classified information.39
All of the emerging
democracies have reduced the number of personnel in domestic security
intelligence, primarily because their all-purpose security apparatuses were
divided up to varying degrees into separate institutions with more specific
tasks. Some also initiated a vetting – or lustration – process to purge the new
services of personnel compromised either by their actual involvement in abusive
actions or by their affiliation with sub-structures within the security
apparatus most associated with repressive political policing.
Romania was
the first of the communist transition states to initiate a formal vetting of
intelligence personnel – the culling began immediately after the security
apparatus was subordinated to the defense ministry at the end of December 1989.40 The process,
completed at the beginning of February 1990, found 4,944 out of 15,312
personnel acceptable for re-employment in the new intelligence service. A
further cut of 800 personnel that same month resulted in the re-employment of
4,144 (28 percent) of the ex-Securitate personnel in the new security
intelligence service (SRI).41
Other
countries followed suit. Czechoslovakia's formal vetting, which lasted from
February 1990 until the following August, found 11,395 (66 percent) of all ex-StB
officers suitable for re-employment in the intelligence domain.42 Poland
initiated its vetting at the end of July 1990 and completed it in mid-September
1990, judging 10,451 (42 percent) of all SB officers suitable for
re-employment in the UOP.43 Hungary did
not initiate a formal vetting procedure. Its 1994 Act on Investigating Persons in Certain Important Positions was
directed at politicians rather than active intelligence personnel. As one
authority noted, this "lustration experiment has not resulted in the
removal of any of those supporters of the previous totalitarian state security
system still active in the reorganized intelligence community."44 Likewise,
Bulgaria did not initiate a formal culling.
Undeniably,
early post-communist vetting was useful. But it was not the panacea that
all had anticipated. In the first place, personnel vetted out as undesirable
were often recruited into other structures (especially interior ministries)
where no vetting requirement existed. Secondly, even where substantial numbers
of personnel were designated as unsuitable, enough were left to dominate the
new services. Throughout 1990, for example, over 90 percent of the roster of
Poland's new UOP was composed of former SB officers. Similarly,
Czechoslovakia's new UOUD was a miniature of its StB predecessor.45 Only Romania's
SRI had significant new blood, but, even there, ex-Securitate members
made up 60 percent of the personnel. Moreover, the SRI's first director not
only was a former Securitate officer but also had willfully concealed
his background to get the post.
After 1990,
Czechoslovakia showed the greatest dynamism in personnel policy, decreasing its
ex-StB officers from 14 percent of its domestic-intelligence personnel
in 1991 to 4 percent in 1993. After the division of the country, the successor
service in the Czech Republic retained this exclusion. In contrast, the Slovak
service created in 1993 relied almost entirely on former StB personnel
for the next decade. Romania decreased the weight of ex-Securitate
personnel in its SRI from 60 percent in 1990 to 36 percent in 1994, and then to
less than 20 percent in 1999. By 2003, it retained only 15 percent of its
former security apparatus personnel. Poland's service remained dominated by
ex-SB officers through most of the 1990s, decreasing to 50 percent only in
1998.46 Former
officers also continued to dominate in Hungary and Bulgaria.
Problems with Vetting
One of the
principal reasons vetting and lustration could not deliver the anticipated
benefits was that the various justice and legal systems – the bases for
impartial evaluation – remained weak, vulnerable to corruption, and highly
partisan throughout the first decade of reform. Consequently, political
expediency often won over rule of law and fairness. Credible allegations of
personal and political vendettas were widespread.47
The practice
of limiting the process to the new domestic security services was also a
drawback. None of the post-communist states began their transitions with a comprehensive
vetting of all intelligence and security services. Czechoslovakia was
exceptional in vetting its police force and interior ministry, but it did not
put its military intelligence service through the same scrutiny.48
Foreign-intelligence careerists, especially, were rarely subjected to serious
vetting, even though many had freely transferred to and from domestic-security
units within the communist security apparatus.
As of
mid-2003, the Czechoslovak Office of Foreign Contacts and Information (USZI)
had not been vetted even though it had been under Soviet tutelage until at
least 1990 and all of its personnel were ex-StB.49 Although the
1990 Law on the UOP in Poland was also supposed to result in the verification
of foreign-intelligence personnel, only "two or three of its 1,000
officers were found unsuitable," and there was no review of its 1,600
military intelligence officers.50
While all Securitate
officers were ousted from Romania's military intelligence service immediately
after the revolution, vetting of its foreign-intelligence personnel was so poor
during 1990-92 that an officer identified as having been doubled by the Soviet
Union (and France) in the 1960s was appointed as the first head of the new
institution in January 1990.51 Consistent
intelligence failures during this officer's tenure prompted his replacement in
1992, and the number of former Securitate officers was subsequently
reduced to 18 percent of the foreign-intelligence service by 2003.
The lack of
complete records on which to base vetting decisions and the malleable nature of
evaluation criteria also undermined the credibility of the process. Many files
were destroyed, lost, or stolen during the transition, making the process
haphazard at best.52 In addition,
security personnel subject to vetting were generally savvier than those
carrying it out and were often able to manipulate the process.
The
legitimacy of those carrying out the vetting was also problematic. None of the
members of the civic groups involved in vetting and lustration first submitted
themselves to verification. In some cases, the vetting boards were dominated by
"expert" former officers of the communist security apparatus. The
first chief of Czechoslovakia's post-communist intelligence service, for
example, denounced the Civic Forum experts that carried out the process as
"morally discredited" because two of the three persons on the
citizens' committees that made vetting decisions were ex-StB officers,
while ex-StB personnel made up 17 of the 23 persons on the expert panel
that advised them.53
The highly
subjective and politicized nature of the vetting and lustration process, and
media exploitation of the issue, reduced its impact on intelligence personnel
rosters. Even where the targets of lustration were high-profile politicians,
the process was not successful in implementing change. Hungarian Prime
Ministers Gyula Horn and Peter Medgyessy did not pass vetting, for example, but
neither was compelled to resign. At the same time, spurious charges were
launched in the press against Polish President Lech Walesa and Prime Minister Aleksandr
Kwasniewski, Romanian President Ion Iliescu, and a host of domestic- and
foreign-intelligence chiefs in the region.
Despite less
than ideal results, many of the central and eastern European states have
expended significant time and resources on vetting and lustration, making
headway in this difficult area. Vetting officials for access to NATO-classified
information proved to be particularly effective primarily because the national
security authorities that carried it out had been set up in close coordination
with the alliance, importing its well-established procedures and criteria, and
the process was monitored by NATO officials. In other cases, reliable vetting
still awaits the longer-term development of embedded institutions and
established procedures.
Conclusion
Evaluating
intelligence reform in the emerging democracies of central and eastern Europe
is complicated by their simultaneous response to conflicting security
paradigms, their varying reform contexts, and the often very different criteria
used by the evaluators, ranging from the ridiculous – the presence or absence
of scandal – to the sublime – the extent of actual democratic oversight and
real operational effectiveness.
The Cold War
"model" of intelligence reform in the West was aimed above all at
implementing democratic control through greater oversight and restricting the
potential for abuse by separating intelligence agencies according to specific
missions, constructing bureaucratic barriers to cooperation (and feared
collusion), and encouraging interagency rivalry as part of the system of checks
and balances. The same precepts held true for post-communist intelligence
reform in an even more fundamental manner: "Monolithic" services were
broken up into smaller services with each assigned a more narrowly defined
mission, barriers were erected, and rivalries were encouraged.
However,
this model stood in tension with, if not outright contradiction to, the
requirements of the post-Cold War security environment, where effectiveness
against new threats necessitated new forms of inter-service cooperation and
reorganization. While traditional principles of separating military and
civilian intelligence services may remain valid, the separation of foreign- and
domestic- intelligence services and their tasks, as well as the separation of
intelligence from law-enforcement bodies and their tasks, may be on less
certain ground. Clearly, the new levels of cooperation and convergence
complicate the exercise of oversight and control and conflict with traditional
models of reform. It is likely that new oversight and control mechanisms, or
the modification of older arrangements, will be necessary.
The dynamism
inherent in countries adapting to two contradictory reform paradigms adds
immensely to the challenges facing the intelligence analyst, challenges already
complicated by the substantial differences among the services of central and
eastern Europe that prevent straightforward comparisons. How does one evaluate
the salience of personnel vetting for intelligence sharing when the group of
services includes one that was independent before 1989 along with six that were
directly subordinated to Moscow until 1989-91? How can analysis factor in the
effect of western expertise and material assistance that some have received
since 1990, but others only since the middle or end of the decade? How does one
judge the political neutrality of services in different parliamentary,
presidential, and semi-presidential systems?
A new
template must be developed to gauge intelligence reform in the post-communist
countries. NATO's role in defining the security sector reform agenda through
its Partnership for Peace and Membership Action Plans (MAP) has proven a major
boon to intelligence reform in the region, but there is no NATO model to
emulate. Nor does the European Union provide a useful template. Both NATO and
the EU fall short of supplying needed guidance because many of their long-time
members exercise poor or no democratic control over their intelligence services
and/or have recurring problems with operational effectiveness. The reforms that
have proven of greatest utility are those previously undertaken largely in
North America and northern Europe.
If the NATO
MAP experience has proven anything, it is that outside assistance, when sought,
is critical to the nature of intelligence reform. What is taught is important.
It is imperative, therefore, that the West identify and agree on what
constitutes "best practices" – even if Western countries do not yet
meet all of the standards themselves. Once agreed upon, these best practices
could be made part of the official reform agenda for central and eastern Europe
and incorporated into MAP requirements and EU conditions for membership. Useful
evaluation against a system of almost universally valid "best
practice" criteria might then be possible--as applicable in Brussels and
Berlin as in Bratislava and Budapest.
Footnotes
1. Regarding
Romania, for example, see V. G. Baleanu, The Enemy Within: The Romanian
Intelligence Service in Transition (Camberley, UK: Royal Military College
Sandhurst, Conflict Studies Research Centre, January 1995); V. G. Baleanu, A
Clear and Present Danger to Democracy: The New Romanian Security Services Are
Still Watching (Camberely, UK: Royal Military College Sandhurst, Conflict
Studies Research Centre, 1996); and Dennis Deletant, "The Successors to
the Securitate: Old Habits Die Hard," in Kieran Williams and Dennis
Deletant, eds., Security Intelligence Services in New Democracies: The Czech
Republic, Slovakia and Romania (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2001).
2. Elizabeth
Rindskopf Parker, The American Experience: One Model for Intelligence
Oversight in a Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Project on
Justice in Times of Transition, 15 October 2001), p. 1.
3. Intelligence
Services and Democracy, Working Paper Series No. 13 (Geneva, Switzerland:
Geneva Centre for Democratic Control of Armed Forces, April 2002), pp. 1-2.
4. Swedish
citizens became aware of their service in 1973 as the result of public scandal.
Until quite recently, the existence of the US National Security Agency was
officially denied, despite general public knowledge of it.
5. The Act of
1949 also established the Department of Defense and a number of other
fundamental structures and hierarchies in the national security sphere. Michael
Warner, Central Intelligence: Origin and Evolution (Washington, DC:
Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 2001).
6. See, for
example, Athan Theoharis, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from
Hoover to the Huston Plan (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press,
1978). Reforms introduced as a result of abuses are described in John T. Eliff,
The Reform of FBI Operations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1979); and Loch K. Johnson, America's Secret Power: The CIA in a Democratic
Society (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1989). especially pp.
133-255.
7. See Johnson, America's
Secret Power, and Glenn Hastedt, ed., Controlling Intelligence
(London, UK: Frank Cass, 1991).
8. In Sweden,
for example, the Defense Intelligence Operations Committee was set up in July
1976 following the 1973 "IB-Affairen" scandal. Geoffrey
Weller, "Political Scrutiny and Control of Scandinavia's Security and
Intelligence Services," International Journal of Intelligence and
Counterintelligence 32, no. 2 (Summer 2000), p. 181.
9. Alain Faupin,
"Reform of the French Intelligence Services After the End of the Cold
War," paper presented at the workshop on "Democratic and
Parliamentary Oversight of Intelligence Services," Geneva, Switzerland,
3-5 October 2002, Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, pp.
6-10; and Jean-Paul Brodeur and Nicolas Dupeyron, "Democracy and Secrecy:
The French Intelligence Community," in Jean-Paul Brodeur, Peter Gill, and
Dennis Tollborg, eds., Democracy, Law, and Security: Internal Security
Services in Contemporary Europe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003),
pp. 19-23.
10. Paul
Swallow, "International Police Cooperation and the Interface with the
Security Services," paper presented at the conference "Intelligence
and Security Services in the 21st Century Security Environment," 26-28
September 2002, Snagov, Romania, p. 5.
11. Ibid.
As Swallow notes: "Given their role in defending the interests of their
nation-states, often from espionage, there is no formal mechanism for them to
cooperate internationally."
12. Gregory F.
Treverton, Reshaping National Intelligence for an Age of Information
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 249.
13. Michael
Herman, "Intelligence After 9/11: A British View of the Effects," in
Commentary (a publication of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service), no.
38 (Summer 2003), p. 7.
14. Romania
weaned its services from Soviet control in the 1960s, while the other services
remained under Soviet control until 1989-91.
15. Derrin
Smith, "US Intelligence on Romania--Affected by Traitors Nicholson and
Ames?" in AFIO Weekly Intelligence Notes #49-00, 8 December 2000,
section IV.
16. The
NATO-designated Dutch representative who played a critical role in setting up
these meetings was subsequently tried for attempting to transfer potentially
illicit funds into Romania, resulting in a press scandal in Romania and the
Netherlands that sought to discredit many of the same people who were trying to
build a closer US-Romanian intelligence relationship in 1993.
17. Many
successor states (Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzogovina, Macedonia, Republic of
Moldova, and Transnistria) became embroiled in civil conflict, were plagued by
economic crisis, and faced the possibility of political collapse throughout the
1990s. Economic and political instability in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus
fueled insecurity in the already threat-rich environment.
18. For example,
in an NBC broadcast of 24 December 1989, US Secretary of State James Baker
expressed American support for Soviet intervention in Romania during the
then-occurring revolution that overthrew Nicolae Ceausescu. Strobe Talbott and
Michael Beschloss, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the Cold War
(Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1993), p. 170 of 1994 paperback version. For
Austrian and German support of the Yugoslav breakup, see Susan L. Woodward, Balkan
Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution After the Cold War (Washington, DC:
Brookings, 1995), pp. 105, 146-190.
19. Council of
the National Salvation Front, Decree No. 33 Regarding the Suspension of the
Department of State Security, 30 December 1989; and Provisional Council of
National Unity, Decree No. 181 Regarding the Establishment of the Romanian
Intelligence Service, 26 March 1990.
20. Lawrence
Lustgarten, "National Security and Political Policing: Some Thoughts on
Values, Ends and Law," in Jean-Paul Brodeur, Peter Gill, and Dennis
Tollborg, eds., Democracy, Law and Security: Internal Security Services in
Contemporary Europe, p. 331.
21. Ibid.,
pp. 332-33. Referring to the security intelligence domain in transition states,
Lustgarten argues that a "fragile democracy may reasonably take measures
that would be grossly excessive in a more secure political order," with
the provision that: "As democratic institutions and allegiances become
more deeply-rooted, the tolerance of risk should steadily increase."
22. Intelligence
Services and Democracy, p. 16.
23. Nikolai
Bozhilov, "Reforming the Intelligence Services in Bulgaria: The Experience
of the Last Decade," paper prepared for workshop on "Democratic and
Parliamentary Oversight of the Intelligence Services," Geneva Centre for
Democratic Control of Armed Forces, 3-5 October 2002, p. 10.
24. Kieran
Williams, "Czechoslovakia 1990-92," in Williams and Deletant, p. 64.
25. Kieran
Williams, "Slovakia since 1993," in Williams and Deletant, p. 145.
26. Bozhilov, p.
11.
27.
"Security Concerns in Bulgaria" and "Slovakia: NBU Chief
Sacked," in Jane's Defense Intelligence Weekly, 8 October 2003.
28. Jane Perlez,
"Touchy Issue of Bigger NATO: Spy Agencies," New York Times, 4
January 1998; and "Spionage bei Freunden," Der Spiegel, 6
April 1998.
29. US 98th
Congress, Senate, Committee of the Judiciary, "Communist Bloc Intelligence
Activities in the United States," testimony of former Czechoslovak StB
officer, Josef Frolik, 18 November 1975.
30. Interview
with Tjeerd Sbbeswijk Visser, former director of Dutch Intelligence and
president of the Europe 2000 Association, by Radu Tudor, "Traditia
anti-KGB a Romaniei poate fi un avantaj in cursa pentru integrare [Romania's
Anti-KGB Tradition Can Be an Advantage on its Integration Path]," Ziua,
8 June 2002. Set up in 1989-90, Europe 2000 assists reform of law enforcement
and intelligence bodies in the former communist space. A number of journalists
and commentators in the Romanian press reject any difference between Romania
and the rest of the Warsaw Pact in intelligence cooperation with the KGB. See,
for example, Dan Pavel, "Imunitatea politica a Securitatii [The Political
Immunity of the Securitate]," Ziua, 4 November 2002.
31. The Romanian
services supplied advanced Soviet technology to the United States beginning in
the late 1970s. Benjamin Weiser, "One that Got Away: Romanians Were Ready
to Sell Soviet Tank," The Washington Post, 6 May 1990.
32. The loyalty
of Romania's first head of domestic intelligence, Dr. Virgil Magureanu, was
suspect for these reasons. Magureanu was named to the post in March 1990
primarily on the basis of his "dissident" status when teaching at the
communist party's social science academy during the 1980s. He hid his previous
membership in the Securitate from the authorities that named him to the
post (an affiliation exposed in the press only years later). Immediately after
his appointment, in April 1990, he met secretly with KGB Chief Evghenii
Primakov without informing political authorities in Romania. The Romanian
presidency and government remained unaware of Magureanu's Soviet contacts until
2003, when the Western services that monitored those contacts informed
Bucharest. Magureanu's activities, the fact that the CIA chief in Bucharest
during 1990-92, Harold James Nicholson, was later exposed as a Soviet agent,
and the 1993 Ames incident, effectively rendered closer intelligence relations
with the West impossible during the first half of the 1990s.
33. One Russian
agent, known as "Volodya," was particularly active with journalists
and intellectuals in the mid- and late-1980s. Individual Securitate
officers were still targeted and turned the old fashioned way, but
institutionalized penetration of the services was ended and service relations
discouraged. Securitate officers working under diplomatic cover abroad,
for example, were forbidden to accept any invitations to Soviet embassy functions.
34. Bozhilov,
"Reforming the Intelligence Services in Bulgaria," p. 11.
35. Web site for
Czech security intelligence service: http://www.bis.cz/eng/a_index.html
(accessed on 30 May 2003).
36. They were
able to accomplish their goal by radically downsizing their service-- from
around 7,000 personnel to 1,000-- primarily by transferring units to other
security institutions, including the interior ministry, and restricting the new
security intelligence service to purely local concerns.
37. Dan Eggen,
"Turnover Hinders Reorganization of FBI," The Washington Post,
4 August 2002.
38. Williams,
"Czechoslovakia 1990-92," in Williams and Deletant, p. 69.
39. See, for
example, Dan Tapalaga, "Romania, Indemnata Sa Scape de Securisti [Romania,
Required to Rid Itself of Securitate officers]" Evenimentul
Zilei, 27 October 2003.
40. Council of
the National Salvation Front, Decree no. 4 on Transferring the Department of
State Security and other bodies from under the Ministry of Interior to the
Ministry of National Defense, 26 December 1989.
41. Gen. Victor
Stanculescu presented the personnel figures for the fifth and sixth
directorates (VIP protection and military counterintelligence) shortly after
his appointment as Defense Minister in February 1990. SRI Director Magureanu
gave a fuller accounting in his first report to parliament in November 1990,
although he apparently undercounted personnel by about 1,000. See, for example,
Deletant, "The Successors to the Securitate," in Williams and
Deletant, pp. 215-17. The SRI has since reconstructed a more accurate roster
and made it public.
42. Williams,
"Czechoslovakia 1990-92," in Williams and Deletant, p. 60.
43. Andrzej
Rzeplinski, "Security Services in Poland and their Oversight," in
Brodeur et al., p. 112.
44. Istvan
Szikinger, "National Security in Hungary," in Brodeur, et al.,
p. 92.
45. Rzeplinski,
"Security Services in Poland," in Brodeur et al., p. 112;
Williams, "Czechoslovakia 1990-92" in Williams and Deletant, pp.
62-3; and Oldrich Czerny, "Czechoslovak (Czech) Intelligence After the
Cold War," paper presented at workshop on "Democratic and
Parliamentary Oversight of Intelligence Services," Geneva Centre for the
Democratic Control of Armed Forces, 3-5 October 2002, pp. 4-5.
46. Rzeplinski,
"Security Services," in Brodeur, et al., p. 112.
47. Williams,
"Czechoslovakia 1990-92," in Williams and Deletant, pp. 57-59, 73-76.
See also Helga A. Welsh, "Dealing with the Communist Past: Central and
East European Experience after 1990," Europe-Asia Studies 48, 3
(1996), pp. 413-28; and John Torpey, "Coming to Terms with the Communist
Past: East Germany in Comparative Perspective," German Politics 2,
3 (December 1993), pp. 415-35.
48. Tomas Horejsi,
"Minister Tvrdik to Replace Army Intelligence Chief," Lidove
Noviny, 8 April 2003, http://www.fas.org/irp/world/czech/armyint.html
(accessed on 4 November 2003).
49. Williams,
"Czechoslovakia 1990-92," pp. 64-65, "The Czech Republic since
1993," p. 111, in Williams and Deletant.
50. Rzeplinski,
"Security Services in Poland," in Brodeur, et al., pp. 112,
115.
51. Former Securitate
officer Mihai Caraman was named to head foreign-intelligence in January 1990 on
the proposal of Prime Minister Petre Roman, despite the fact that he had been
identified as a Soviet agent in 1979 and then publicly exposed by a Securitate
defector in his book whose contents were broadcast into Romania before 1989.
See archives of the Romanian Intelligence Service, collection D, file 11200,
vol. 37, pp. 2-5, and vol. 35, pp. 309-316, as cited in Mihai Pelin, Culisele
Sopionajului Romanescu: D. I. E. 1955-1980 (Bucharest: Editura Evenimentul
Romanesc, 1997), pp. 272-76, 306-07. Also, Ion Pacepa, Red Horizons:
Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway,
1987).
52. According to
press reports, SRI Director Virgil Magureanu sold some files of extreme-right
leader Corneliu Vadim Tudor for five paintings in the early 1990s. Razvan
Sovaliuc, "Tribunal Recunoaste Ca L-A Mituit Pe Magureanu [The `Tribune'
Admits that He Bribed Magureanu]," Ziua, 7 November 2003. Magureanu
illegally published part of his own file in 1992. It then
"disappeared" from the archives, as did the microfilm roll on which
it had been copied.
53. Williams,
"Czechoslovakia 1990-92," in Williams and Deletant, pp. 60-61.
Larry L. Watts
a former Rand consultant and adviser on military reform to the Romanian Defense
Ministry, advises the Romanian government on intelligence matters.
Historical
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Posted: Apr
14, 2007 07:59 PM
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