The Point of the Spear: The Cold War Years

By David Bush

The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies lasted from the late 1940s through the late 1980s. But the armed forces of the two superpowers met only through proxies. The primary front-line soldiers in the Cold War were diplomats, political leaders, and intelligence officers. David M. Bush was a career military analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency during the last decade and a half of the Cold War. This is a first-person narrative of his experiences providing intelligence support to US Government decision-makers for several crises involving the USSR and its Caribbean Basin allies Cuba, Grenada, and Nicaragua.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Nov 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781685629212

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About the Author

David Bush earned Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts Degrees in Political Science (Russian Studies) from The Ohio State University. A US Army veteran, he worked for 31 years as a civilian military analyst at the CIA. Following his retirement from the Agency in 2004, he remained active in the Intelligence Community as an instructor and guest lecturer on Indications and Warning at both the CIA and Department of Defense. He lives in Northern Virginia with his wife.

Dedication

To the men and women of the Central Intelligence Agency. You might not ever learn their names, but they will protect you all the same.

Copyright Information ©

David Bush 2023

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Ordering Information

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Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Bush, David

The Point of the Spear

ISBN 9781685629205 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781685629212 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023906366

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

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New York, NY 10005

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Acknowledgment

I have many people to thank for their help in producing this book. First, I must include my family. My parents, William Leonard Bush and Frances Eileen (Pletcher) Bush, were born in the mid-1920s, grew up during the Great Depression, came of age during World War II, and raised me and my five younger siblings during the 1950s through the 1970s. My father was a lawyer and church missionary; my mother was a high school teacher. Both earned post-graduate degrees. They owned more books than any family I knew and encouraged me to be an early reader.

My family has a tradition of military service. My father served in the Army Air Corps in the Pacific during World War II, along with his naval officer older brother, George (no relation to the future President). All four of my mother’s brothers were US Army officers. One served in World War II, two in Vietnam, and all four in the Ohio National Guard. I have several cousins and one nephew who served in the army, navy, or marines in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

In college at The Ohio State University, I want to thank Professor Ronald Smith, who led the 1970 Russian Language Study Tour to the Soviet Union; Professor Louis Nemzer, who taught the major Political Science lecture courses on the USSR, and who later allowed me to be his graduate assistant in 1972. Finally, I owe a great debt of gratitude to Professor Phillip Stewart, whose Soviet Elite Studies seminars I took as both an undergraduate and graduate student. He taught me the importance of computer analysis, guided me as Chairman of my Master’s Degree Examination Committee, and was instrumental in helping the CIA to recruit me in 1973.

There are so many people that I need to thank at the CIA, many of whom I cannot acknowledge except by their first names. Two have given me explicit permission to identify them. Frank Reynolds was my boss for most of the first 11 years of my career. He gave me hard jobs, and whenever I accomplished one, he gave me an even harder one. I learned to be flexible, and I learned that tough jobs have to be done by someone, so if I was capable, then it was my duty to do them. I also need to thank my friend, Jim Simon. We were junior Soviet command and control analysts together in the mid-1970s, computer enthusiasts, war-gaming buddies and military history buffs. He became a manager and helped guide my career after Frank Reynolds retired.

I want thank the CIA’s Pre-publication Review Board for all their time and effort reviewing my manuscript. We spent 17 months wrangling over which stories to include and which I had to delete. When we finally reached agreement on approved text, I was then free to hire an agent and seek a publisher. I want to thank my agent, Karen Ganz of Karen Ganz Literary Management in New York, for taking on my project and seeking a publisher.

I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Austin Macauley Publishers for accepting my manuscript and processing it for publication. After so long a search and so many rejections, it was a great relief to find a company that not only thought it was worthy, but also inspiring. In addition to their acquisitions board, I want to thank their editors, spell checkers, and proofreaders.

I want to thank my son Benjamin for continuing to encourage me to seek a publisher and my son Michael for his help in scanning, editing, and enhancing all the photographs. Finally, I thank my wife, Gretchen, for all she went through during my employment by the CIA. She first had to suffer the indignity of being investigated by the CIA before we could marry and then had to carry on during all the late nights and weekends I had to work, the missed birthdays, and the weeks I spent in training or overseas when she didn’t hear from me. My career, and this book, would not have been possible without her.

Author’s Foreword

The Cold War between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies lasted for four decades (from the late 1940s through the late 1980s). Although military forces were major players during that time, the armed forces of the two super powers never met each other on a battlefield. Instead, the primary front-line soldiers in the Cold War were diplomats, political leaders, and intelligence officers.

I was one of those front-line soldiers. From October 1973 through October 2004, I was a career military analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency. During the last decade and a half of the Cold War, I provided intelligence support to senior US Government decision-makers for a number of crises involving the Soviet Union and its Caribbean Basin allies—Cuba, Grenada, and Nicaragua. This is my story.

I grew up in a small town in eastern Ohio and attended The Ohio State University during the height of the Vietnam War. I earned a Bachelor’s and a Master’s Degree in Political Science with a specialty in Russian Studies. I spent the spring of 1970 as a student in the Soviet Union.

My strong interest in the Soviet Union began in high school, first with the movie Doctor Zhivago, which I saw numerous times, and then when I played the USSR’s ambassador during an all-school Model UN Conference. I had spotted the Russian Language Study Tour of the USSR in the Ohio State course catalog before I graduated from high school, and set it as one of my primary goals. This was a total immersion program with five weeks of intensive, full-time Russian study in class, followed by five weeks in the Soviet Union. The prerequisites were two years of Russian language and a signed pledge that students would speak only Russian during the entire time on tour.

We stayed in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) for a week, then went to Moscow for a week, flew south to the Caucasus to attend The Institute of Foreign Languages in Pyatigorsk for two weeks, and finished in Ukraine with a few days each in Yalta and Odessa. During the first week, one of the women in our group struck up a rather intense friendship with an 18-year-old Russian girl. The night before we left Leningrad, Cheryl gave Olga her sorority pin and told her that they were sisters now. Both women wept openly when we boarded the train for Moscow.

Cheryl and I were the only members of the tour who were in ROTC. We had a long discussion on the train that night. Cheryl’s brother was a helicopter pilot serving in Vietnam. She learned that Olga’s brother was in North Vietnam, training Vietnamese soldiers how to shoot down American helicopters. She wondered how we could love and become friends with some people that our country might call on us to fight. We agreed that people in Russia were just like us and that it had to be all right to like them while continuing to oppose their political system. We understood now that the freedom to seek personal contact and communicate in each other’s language was essential for world peace. We decided that we had done the right thing by going to the Soviet Union and we needed to redouble our efforts to speak and understand Russian.

American students and Russian Instructors at the Institute of Foreign Languages, Pyatigorsk, Russia in May 1970. The Author (age 20) is at the right end

of the top row.

Barely a week after I returned home from Europe, I had to report for active duty to the US Army’s Indiantown Gap Military Reservation in Pennsylvania. This was my six-week ROTC Summer Camp, which is the equivalent of Basic Training for cadets. It was rather disconcerting being in the Army so soon after the Soviet Union, and I caught myself more than once during the first week almost starting to talk in Russian when I first woke up in the morning.

At graduation, I was commissioned an officer in the US Army and following graduate school, served active duty for training from October 1972-February 1973. I moved to Washington, DC in the spring of 1973, where I had no idea that I would end up working for the CIA. I had nothing against the Agency; I just had never given it a serious thought before. The Agency recruited me while I was working as a computer intern at the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis during the summer of 1973.

In writing this account of my career in the CIA during the Cold War, I hope to shed some light on what the real Agency is like and to tell the stories of some of its past successes. I believe that the American people in general and historians in particular need to know these details. CIA authorities have reviewed every word of this narrative and have been given an opportunity to delete those stories they believe are too sensitive to reveal.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.

Of necessity, this is a personal account because I have no right to expose the identities of those who worked with me. I will be protecting their anonymity by using only their first names. The only exceptions will be senior managers who already have been publicly identified and those who have explicitly granted me permission to use their full names. Consequently, this narrative tends to overemphasize my role while underemphasizing the contributions of others.

Chapter 1

CIA Culture

The Central Intelligence Agency is a secret intelligence organization whose primary mission is to protect the national security of the United States from all potential foreign threats. It was created in 1947 by the National Security Act that also established the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and unified the military under the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The CIA has no law enforcement capabilities because the FBI is responsible for security inside the United States and the Justice Department handles all federal criminal prosecutions.

This difference in primary mission has contributed to a major difference in culture between CIA and FBI employees that sometimes hinders cooperation between them. A long-time CIA friend who worked in the Crime and Narcotics Center told me about a raid on a suspected drug cartel hideout that he and some of his colleagues went on with several FBI agents. The CIA guys immediately started going through documents and pocket litter, looking for operational details. The FBI guys hung back and told them, Don’t touch any of that stuff. That’s evidence!

Although espionage played a role in the long history of the United States dating back to George Washington, prior to World War II such operations were always ad hoc and totally decentralized. Presidents, various departments of the US Government, and individual military commanders hired their own spies and set up their own intelligence gathering networks according to their perceived needs. There was almost no coordination in planning or deconflicting parallel efforts, and no central place where all information could be brought together and evaluated as a whole.

Partly due to this lack of coordination of intelligence collection and analysis, Japan was able to mount a surprise attack on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in December 1941. President Roosevelt created the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1942 to address this problem and appointed a Coordinator of Intelligence, Army General William Donovan, to head it. Donovan recruited talented civilians and military personnel who could speak foreign languages and brought them together with engineers and captains of industry to form this new organization.

Inside the OSS were found the forerunners of all four major components of the future CIA: clandestine spy masters who planned and ran agent networks overseas, analysts who brought together secret intelligence with open source information and produced estimates of future threats, engineers who designed and built gadgets to aid in collection and protect the identities of overseas personnel, and support people who provided training, logistics, communications, security and covert financing to run all these operations.

But Donovan and the OSS were not entirely successful in becoming the coordinator of all US foreign intelligence and analysis. The military services remained almost solely responsible for signals intelligence and code breaking. OSS employees, except for a few counterintelligence officers, did not have access to the most secret Ultra or Magic intercepts.

Jealousies and turf battles between existing organizations limited the geographic span of OSS operations. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover successfully lobbied Roosevelt to prohibit the OSS from running agents in Latin America, which the FBI counted as its turf. Similarly, General Douglas McArthur, a long-time rival of Donovan’s, prohibited any of Donovan’s boys from working in the Far East Theater of Operations, where he had his own spy networks.

After Roosevelt died in April 1945 and the war with Japan ended later that year, Harry Truman disbanded the OSS and most of its support structure. The President replaced Donovan as his Coordinator of Intelligence with a series of other senior military officers and changed their title to the Director of Central Intelligence. But his early DCIs had almost no staff, and no budget except for non-attributable funds allocated to the Office of the President.

When the OSS disbanded, many of its components were broken up and others were transferred to existing agencies. The paramilitary arm of the OSS went to the Army and became the US Special Forces. The OSS clandestine spy networks in Europe also were transferred to the Army, which was worried by the growing threat from our wartime ally the Soviet Union.

The Washington based research and analysis portion of the OSS was transferred to State Department in early 1946. But senior State Department officials didn’t want it. They thought that secretive analysts were alien to the department’s culture and neglected to set aside any budget to pay them. Over the next several months, most of them left government service.

But in mid-1946, General Hoyt Vandenberg, Truman’s second DCI, convinced the President that the nation needed a permanent, secret organization to coordinate national intelligence and oversee clandestine operations. The President then proposed creation of a Central Intelligence Agency; but turf battles between powerful Congressional committee chairman and disputes over who would control intelligence budgets and how much authority the DCI would have over intelligence operations held up its passage for more than a year. The compromise legislation enacted in 1947 did not give the DCI control of Department of Defense military intelligence budgets and left him with a mandate to coordinate intelligence but no real authority to do so. Periodic debates over whether and how to resolve this ambiguity have continued even since.

Two principal missions were explicitly assigned to the CIA by its chartering legislation. One was to coordinate and produce all-source intelligence for the President and his National Security Council by evaluating all foreign threats to the security of the United States and its allies. The second was to manage and operate clandestine, overseas human intelligence collection and reporting on behalf of the United States government. A third important mission was hidden in the charter’s language behind the euphemism: and carry out additional tasks as requested by the President of the United States. This statement provided the authorization for covert action.

World War II profoundly changed the Soviet Union’s worldview. Stalin and other Soviet leaders saw their victory as vindication of their political ideology. They were determined never again to appear weak, and wanted to use the economic resources of the captured territories to rebuild the Soviet state and make it invincible. Furthermore, they believed that history was on their side and now was the time to use their new military power to spread Communism to the rest of the world.

By 1950, every country or territory in Europe and Asia except Finland and Austria that the Red Army occupied was being ruled by a totalitarian Communist regime. Opposition political parties were outlawed and local economies and military structures were reoriented toward subservience to the Soviet Union. Soviet-backed Communists also took control of Yugoslavia, Albania, China and North Korea; and began insurgencies in Southeast Asia and Greece.

As the threat of Soviet expansion grew more ominous, President Truman and his foreign policy advisors saw the need for a secret organization that could do what the OSS had done against Nazi Germany during World War II. It could develop stay-behind networks of support agents and weapons caches in areas in danger of being overrun by the Red Army. It could direct propaganda toward the oppressed populations of the conquered territories and give them hope and perhaps the clandestine means to resist. Finally, it could direct covert funding to opponents of the communists and help pro-Western politicians win elections in key areas of the world.

The existence of the CIA gave the US a foreign policy tool it could use when diplomacy was not enough and direct military action was too risky. To be effective, this organization had to operate in complete secrecy. It needed a large, worldwide structure, a secret budget, and ways to funnel money and material that could not be directly traced to the US Government. Although the world has changed since 1947, this purpose behind the CIA’s creation is essential to understanding why the Agency works the way it does, and why its cult of secrecy is so important to its mission.

CIA headquarters is located on a large wooded campus overlooking the Potomac River about seven miles north of the White House. During the 1960s the highway sign at the exit on George Washington Parkway that leads to the Agency named only Virginia’s Fairfax County Highway Research Center. But since most people in Washington knew it was there, DCI James Schlessinger had new signs erected in 1973 calling the compound CIA Headquarters. In 2000, it was renamed in honor of President George H. W. Bush, who served as DCI in 1976.

The original headquarters building is an attractive, seven-story white concrete and glass structure with an outside auditorium on the northeast side, and a ground level cafeteria on the west side. A second headquarters building consisting of two separate six-story towers connected by an arcade-style entrance was added to the complex in the late 1980s. It was built on a hillside just west of the original building’s cafeteria and is linked to it by first floor walkways. In addition to the main buildings, a parking garage, numerous parking lots, a printing plant, a motor pool building, a mail handling facility, and a children’s day care center are located inside the compound.

The entire compound is surrounded by alarmed security fences and patrolled by well-armed guards who form the Agency’s own special protective force. Traffic barriers and tire puncture devices were added to the main gate access road after a drunk driver ran the gate in a pickup truck on Christmas Eve, 1996 and managed to drive his truck across the lawn and up the steps of the headquarters front entrance without being stopped. Additional antiterrorist measures were added following September 11, 2001.

One reason for the Agency providing so many on-campus facilities for employees is to allow them to remain inside all day and minimize the risk of being identified while entering and exiting the compound. The headquarters cafeteria provides hot meals, grill service, sandwich lines, and a soup and salad bar. A food court with several commercial fast food outlets was added in the early 1990s after the new headquarters building was finished. In 2001, the Starbuck’s franchise at CIA was said to have the second highest volume of any Starbuck’s in the Washington DC area, trailing only the Pentagon. In addition to the main cafeteria, there also are snack bar vending machines on each wing of every floor, a barbershop, a small store, and a gym with a running track in the basement. Most offices also have coffee service, small refrigerators, and microwave ovens for those who bring their lunch from home.

Nevertheless, many employees occasionally go off campus for lunch. I tried to do this about once per week, just to cut down on the monotony of the cafeteria food. Langley, Virginia is a bedroom suburb with no town center and almost no commercial establishments. Its only public building is a high school about a mile north of the CIA campus. So most employees leaving for lunch drive to McLean, Virginia, about two miles west of the Agency, or to Tyson’s Corner, a major business and commercial shopping district about five miles to the west.

It is time to demolish some of the stereotypes about the CIA that have been created by Hollywood writers and spy novelists. CIA employees are secretive, but their work is nowhere near as glamorous or dangerous as it has been portrayed on television and in the movies. TV shows like Homeland, 24, Alias, and The Threat Matrix are purely fictional. A show that depicted the real CIA workforce would not be interesting enough to attract many viewers.

I’ll start with the most obvious differences. In the 31 years that I worked there, I never heard anyone on the inside refer to the CIA as the Company. We always called it the Agency. The CIA History Staff investigated the possible roots of this myth and thought that some clandestine service officers might have used the term the Company during the 1950s. But no specific examples were found and if it ever was used, it’s not anymore.

Second, there are no American CIA agents. The term agent usually is reserved for those foreign nationals recruited to work overseas. We are not allowed to recruit American citizens as agents. The use of the term CIA agent probably came from the Ian Fleming spy novels in the early 1960s, where James Bond (who was British) was called a Secret Agent. The FBI calls its field officers Special Agents and it’s possible the media simply assumed the CIA would do likewise.

The Agency calls its employees that work in the field and direct espionage operations case officers. There also are reports officers, communications officers, logistics officers, and security officers. At headquarters, those of us who did analysis called ourselves analysts, except for those doing economics research, who called themselves economists.

The Secret Agent Man of the 1960s song who lived a life of danger and was given a number instead of a name is purely fictional. James Bond had a license to kill and followed a glamorous lifestyle full of sex and violence. CIA case officers are not allowed to do this. Anyone who did would draw too much attention to themselves and probably not be very effective.

Alas, I now have to debunk Sydney Bristow. She was the smart, sexy, glamorous CIA officer of many disguises in the hit television series Alias. Similar characters have appeared in Homeland and other TV series. I’m happy to say that the CIA has many women who are as attractive and smart as Sydney Bristow. We just don’t have any women who dress or act like her.

CIA’s Directorate of Operations prohibits agency officers from using sexual enticement to recruit foreign agents. I first heard of this policy when I took the Introduction to CIA orientation course in 1974. It was reiterated when I took the Agency Mid-Career Course in 1982. On both occasions, I asked the senior operations officer who was briefing us what the reasoning behind this policy was, and whether or not it put us at a disadvantage with the KGB or the Cubans, both of whom were known to use sexual entrapment for recruiting.

These managers answered that the CIA does not want to put any of its officers in the position of having to sell their bodies to accomplish their mission. Furthermore, the clandestine service believed that sexual enticement and entrapment were not sufficiently effective motivators. Either the target would accept the sexual bribe and then reject the pitch, or if recruited with sex, could be easily bought back by the other side.

Another myth about the CIA involves trained assassins. In 1975, some friends of a girl I was dating took her to see the movie Three Days of the Condor and scared the living daylights out of her. The plot involved a former CIA officer being pursued by a legion of Agency assassins who kept trying to kill him because he knew too much. Numerous novels and movies depicting rogue CIA assassins have come out in the years since then. All of them are fictional. There are no trained CIA assassins. There never were any.

Following allegations against the CIA by Seymour Hirsh published in The New York Times in December 1974, DCI William Colby launched an internal investigation to uncover possible wrongdoing by CIA officers since the Agency was founded. This investigation turned up two cases from the early 1960s in which CIA officers were planning potential assassinations of Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Congolese leader Patrice Lmumba. They also found evidence that one CIA office obtained shellfish toxins for possible use in assassinations.

None of these plans were ever approved by Agency management and none were carried out. After Colby revealed this evidence to Congress in 1975, President Ford issued an Executive Order banning the CIA from planning or participating in assassinations. According to Robert Woodward of the Washington Post, this ban was partially rescinded following the events of 9/11.

The CIA has always been a major customer for personality tests and profiles. Since the 1980s the Agency has been enamored with Myers-Briggs Personality Type profiles. These tests never are the sole determining factor in whether to hire someone, but they often are used to guide where in the Agency to place someone.

The Operations Directorate tends to choose extroverts who like people because they spend much of their careers talking with people and attempting to recruit them. The Analytical Directorate prefers to select from among the more intellectual thinkers and doesn’t mind if they are obnoxious and opinionated since they have to argue with people for a living. The Directorate of Science and Technology wants talented engineers and researchers, but needs them to have strong personal relationship skills since so many of their officers are contract managers.

I spent a year in CIA’s Office of Training and Education in the mid-1980s and saw first-hand how personality profiling was applied to studies of the CIA workforce. One study attempted to identify factors that were predictive of career success. In CIA, there was only one that was consistently reliable: high intelligence. The Agency gives its officers a lot of freedom to innovate because it believes that very smart people will figure out what needs to be done and do it. Consequently, the CIA expects its employees to show a high degree of self-initiative and to accomplish a lot more than other government workers.

In addition to the four months I worked for Commerce Department before joining the CIA, I spent more than two years on rotation to the Department of Defense, and 14 months in the Department of Interior during the 1990s. The workforces and cultures in those departments were very different from the norm at CIA. Like every federal department, the CIA has some crusty old bureaucracy; but there is far less dead wood at CIA, and far fewer retired-in-place workers who use rules and regulations to severely limit how much work they have to do.

I’ll give an example of how this difference in work culture struck me when I was on rotation to the US Geological Survey in 1994. I was leading the implementation of a new project using classified satellite imagery to monitor active volcanoes in the United States. I was stationed at the USGS’s classified exploitation facility and was responsible for submitting the requirements to acquire the imagery. Before starting to acquire imagery, we had to have a proper use statement signed by the Central Imagery Policy Office certifying that it was legal for USGS to use this imagery of US territory because we weren’t spying on any American citizens.

A long-time USGS officer who had done this many times before was writing the proper use statement and was responsible for getting it approved. I became concerned with how long it was taking and kept checking with him to see if it was done yet. One day he finished it and put it into the classified mail for a courier to take downtown to the Policy Staff. I went to the registry to find its status, and was told that the letter had been submitted too late to catch the classified courier that week. The next courier was not expected until Wednesday of the following week.

All of the USGS employees I complained to considered this an accepted way of doing business. We would just have to wait a week or two for the approval to come back before we started the project. It was not acceptable to me. I took the letter back from the registry, jumped into my car and drove to the Policy Office, showed the letter to the person responsible for approval and got her to sign it immediately, then drove back to USGS. We started the project that afternoon.

I tell this story not to imply that I was a better, more conscientious worker, but simply to show that I had been trained in a different way. CIA selected me for employment because I showed a penchant for individual initiative. They trained me to take personal responsibility for getting a job done, no matter what it required. This is not normal in other departments of the government, and is one reason other federal agencies are usually pleased to have CIA employees work for them on rotational assignments.

In addition to being smart self-starters, CIA employees also are required