Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [212]
A second important question prompted by changes in values is whether new standards should be imposed after the fact. For example, during the cold war the United States often supported regimes that were undemocratic and sometimes brutal, but they were anticommunist. Although some people in the United States found these relationships objectionable, many accepted their apparent necessity. In the mid-1990s, Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) John M. Deutch (1995-1997) ordered the CIA to review all of its contacts and operations to see if any involved links to human rights abuses. Many in the CIA felt that this review, and some of the actions that the CIA leadership took against some officers, was an unfair ex post facto imposition of standards. (The Constitution bars laws that are ex post facto in nature.) Was Deutch’s action a necessary cleaning up of past errors or an unfair imposition of new standards on officers who had acted in good faith under old standards? In the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks, many people felt that the so-called Deutch rules had placed hobbling limits on human intelligence (HUMINT). The CIA claimed that no useful contact had been turned away because of the rules, but critics argued that their mere existence and the threat of some later punishment bred extreme caution in the Directorate of Operations. At any rate, the Deutch rules were abandoned after the terrorist attacks.
Markus Wolf ran East German intelligence operations for years, successfully penetrating many levels of the West German government, including the chancellor’s office. When East Germany collapsed and was absorbed by West Germany, the German government put Wolf on trial for treason. Its rationale for doing so ran as follows: According to the constitution of West Germany, it was the one legitimate government of all Germany, and Wolf had carried out espionage against that government. (Despite its constitutional claims, West Germany had granted East Germany diplomatic recognition, and the two states had exchanged ambassadors.) Wolf argued that he had been the citizen of a separate state and therefore could not be guilty of treason. In 1993 he was convicted of espionage, but in 1995 the highest German court voided the verdict, accepting Wolfs argument that the charge should not have been made in the first place because he had not broken the laws of the state he had served, East Germany. After receiving a suspended sentence for kidnappings carried out by agents under his authority, Wolf, in 1998, was jailed for refusing to identify an agent he had referred to in his memoirs.
A case similar to Wolf’s—but with an odd twist—is that of Col. Ryszard Kuklinski, a Polish general staff officer. Kuklinski provided the United States with crucial intelligence on the Warsaw Pact during the late 1970s and early 1980s, including a December 1980 warning that the Soviets were preparing to invade Poland to end the protests of the labor movement Solidarity. The intelligence allowed the United States to use diplomatic means to forestall the Soviet invasion. Kuklinski was brought out of Poland just before martial law was declared. Kuklinski was sentenced to death in absentia. But even after the fall of the communist regime in Warsaw, many Poles were ambivalent about what Kuklinski had done. He had been motivated by his dislike of the Soviet Union and the regime it had imposed on Poland. Some Poles, however, felt that Kuklinski had spied on