Judging Spies and Eyes

During the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, a youthful intelligence officer frequently appeared before U.S. officials and reporters and traced the Soviet missile bases on huge blowups of aerial photographs taken over Cuba. So it was perhaps fitting that the same man--John T. Hughes, now 54 and a deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency--picked up his pointer again to conduct last week's briefing on Nicaragua's military buildup. Hughes' performance was professionally impressive, yet questions remained about the reliability of the evidence he was called upon to interpret.

The most solid evidence the U.S. has about events in Central America comes from IMINT (image intelligence). The photographs of airfields and military encampments in Nicaragua were taken by SR-71 Lockheed reconnaissance planes, so-called Blackbirds, that are capable of flying higher than 80,000 ft. and at speeds of more than 2,000 m.p.h., as well as by U.S. satellites orbiting more than 100 miles above the earth. The U.S. has also relied on electronic eavesdropping to pick up radio communications between rebel forces in El Salvador and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; one key U.S. listening post was a communications ship stationed from last December until mid-February in the Gulf of Fonseca, between Nicaragua and El Salvador. Finally, agents of the CIA gather information from undercover agents and sympathetic local "assets," whose material can be as tangible as documents from guerrilla camps and as elusive as street-corner gossip.

Intelligence experts rate the photographs as "Al" evidence--accurate as to both source and interpretation. Intercepted radio messages, which are often in code, are not always fully understood, and thus their meaning may be distorted. The HUMINT (human intelligence) gathered from local spies is considered especially unreliable in Central America, where passions run deep and tips are often twisted. Complains one U.S. intelligence official: "The level of emotion in the information we receive is pretty high."

Over the years, the quality of U.S. intelligence emerging from Central America has ranged from superb to poor to just plain awful. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, as the CIA'S attention shifted to Southeast Asia and Washington relied more on space-age technology than undercover agents, intelligence operations in Central America deteriorated. In 1973 U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua Turner Shelton consistently underplayed the opposition to President Anastasio Somoza in his reports home, thus blinding Washington to the signs of rising turmoil. Complains one U.S. specialist on Central American affairs: "Too often [our] ambassadors in the region felt it was their job to play poker with dictators."

During the Carter Administration, the CIA began beefing up its network of agents in Central America and shifted its focus from tracking Soviet infiltration efforts to reporting on local politics.

Throughout the Nicaraguan civil war, which ended in the overthrow of Somoza in 1979, Washington was able to follow the turmoil quite well. Since the Sandinistas have taken control, however, undercover agents in Nicaragua have been stymied, partly because so many Cubans are engaged in counterintelligence there.

In El Salvador, the CIA station chief was quite close to the right-wing security forces, which clouded his judgment; he was replaced in 1980, but Reagan Administration officials complain that they inherited a network that had poor contacts with the leftist guerrillas. Nonetheless, a senior CIA official insists: "We are building up our assets and, while not the best, our resources are pretty good now." Members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence agree that, as one puts it, "We've had to play catch-up." The quality of information has greatly improved over the past few months. Yet even when the information is gilt-edged, Washington is not always eager to listen if the details do not mesh with policy. One U.S. expert praises the intelligence collected by the U.S. Army command (dubbed SOUTHCOM) headquartered in Panama, but he believes its accurate--and pessimistic--assessments of the situation in El Salvador go largely unheeded. Says he: "Policymakers have been getting some very high quality stuff out of SOUTHCOM, and they don't like it one bit."

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