CIA Director Research Articles

The Protean Enemy

HAVING SUFFERED the destruction of its sanctuary in Afghanistan two years ago, al Qaeda's already decentralized organization has become more decentralized still. The group's leaders have largely dispersed to Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and elsewhere around the world (only a few still remain in Afghanistan's lawless border regions). And with many of the planet's intelligence agencies now focusing on destroying its network, al Qaeda's ability to carry out large-scale attacks has been degraded. Yet despite these setbacks, al Qaeda and its affiliates remain among the most significant threats to U.S. national security today. In fact, according to George Tenet, the CIA's director, theywili continue to be this dangerous for the next two to five years. An alleged al Qaeda spokes person has warned that the group is planning another strike similar to those of September n. On May 12, simultaneous bombings of three housing complexes in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killed at least 29 people and injured over 200, many of them Westerners. Intelligence officials in the United States, Europe, and Africa report that al Qaeda has stepped up its recruitment drive in response to the war in Iraq. And the target audience for its recruitment has also changed. They are now younger, with an even more menacing attitude, as France's top investigative judge on terrorism-related cases, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, describes them. More of them are converts to Islam. And more of them are women. What accounts for al Qaeda's ongoing effectiveness in the face of an unprecedented onslaught? The answer lies in the organization's

The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology (review)

The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology (review)

The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology

The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology

In the shadow of the Ayatollah: a CIA hostage in Iran

Still vivid in many Americans' memories are the 444 days of 1979 when Islamic militants held U.S. diplomatic personnel hostage in Iran. Though their story has been told before, never has it been related from such a perspective. Unique among the hostages, the author was an officer for the Central Intelligence Agency serving at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Once his CIA connection was discovered, Bill Daugherty became a special target of his captors and was subjected to extraordinarily harsh treatment. He managed to survive the ordeal by relying upon his Marine Corps training and combat experience and his remarkable inner reserve of fortitude. Ultimately he was awarded the State Department Medal of Valor and the CIA Exceptional Service Medal.Drawing on intelligence information not readily available to previous writers, recently declassified materials, interviews with such key government officials as former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and former CIA director and ambassador to Iran Richard Helms, and to his own firsthand knowledge, Daugherty sheds light on this disturbing event, particularly with respect to the decision-making process in the White House. Among his revelations is the involvement of the Soviet Union.Despite his personal involvement, Daugherty has produced an impressively objective account of the tragedies and triumphs that marked this black time in U.S. history. It is both a harrowing adventure story and a serious look at U.S.-Iran relations. The pivotal event continues to evoke emotions and begs careful analysis for potential lessons learned.

The wizards of Langley: inside the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology

The wizards of Langley: inside the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology

Interview with Wilson Bryan Key

What Lies Behind Subliminal Advertising: Stuart Ewen Interviews Wilson Bryan Key Stuart Ewen and Brian Key Wilson Abstract Stuart Ewen (Distinguished Professor of Film & Media Studies at Hunter College) interviews Wilson Bryan Key (author of Subliminal Seduction, Media Sexploitation, Age of Manipulation, The Clam-Plate Orgy, and Subliminal Adventures in Erotic Art) at the Park Lane Hotel in New York City on June 29, 2002 about the influence of hidden sexual messages embedded in advertising. The interview covers the following topics: 1) how subliminal images impact the unconscious lives of potential consumers; 2) the extent to which subliminal messages constitute the true locus of persuasion in advertising; 3) the uses of subliminal messages within recent Republican political advertisements; 4) the relationship between “subliminals” in advertising and in the history of art more broadly; 5) the influence of psychoanalytic theory on Key’s thinking; 6) interesting features of Key’s life, including his work in advertising, the hostility that his ideas have garnered from advertisers and academics, and his removal from a tenured professorship at the University of Western Ontario. SE: I’ve known your work since 1973, when Subliminal Seduction first came out. I teach a course which is a broad social history of the media, and I have a unit within it that deals with advertising and consumer culture. And over the years, after the first lecture in this series, the number of times that students have come up to me after the class and said, “Do you know about this book called Subliminal Seduction by Wilson Bryan Key? It’s amazing!” [WBK chuckles] SE: And I was just talking to my wife, who teaches in the SUNY system, and she says, “My students have always loved his stuff.” WBK: That book went two-and-half million copies—including translations into Spanish and Japanese. SE: I would imagine that most people reading this are familiar with you and your work, but for those that aren’t, maybe you would begin by laying out what you see as some of the key premises, or arguments, or discoveries that your work, over the years, has made. WBK: Well, I can do that in terms of how many dirty ads I found last week, or I can talk about the philosophical implications. I think the significance of this, looking back on it now—I have five books on subliminal persuasion—I don’t ever accept anything in this society, or probably in any other society, at face value. Nothing is ever what it appears to be. We’re not taught that. We’re taught to believe, to accept. We’re not taught to discriminate between reality, which is hard to find anymore, and fantasy. Our fantasies now are far more engrossing, far more entertaining, far more stimulating. Reality is a drag, let’s face it. So we have doctored up reality to a point, and I think you get this most disturbingly out of young people, who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. This condemns them to a lifetime experience of endless bouts of consumerism—buying, buying, buying, in order to save money—and never realizing that they are caught in a major paradox. So, I think what I have poked my fingers into in these five books is human gullibility — which we exploit to an unbelievable degree. Our present president of the United States got himself elected by one vote from a mole his father had planted on the Supreme Court way back. Of course, his father is a former CIA director, he knows about these things. Bush used subliminals in his campaign commercials. If you walk into a TV studio and you say the word “subliminal,” they will kick you out. They’ll try to get rid of you, because all their advertisers are doing it, and they don’t want to deal with the subject. The advertising director on [George H. W. Bush’s] campaign was Alex Castellanos. He’s one of the world’s noted authorities in the advertising industry on subliminal persuasion. He did a campaign for Jesse Helms against a black candidate in North Carolina, where he used subliminals. SE: What kind...

Justice Department Conducting Criminal Probe in Former CIA Director Activities

Justice Department Conducting Criminal Probe in Former CIA Director Activities

Making It Unpopular

Making It Unpopular

The Unfinished War

The Unfinished War Charles E. Neu (bio) Sam Adams. War of Numbers: An Intelligence Memoir. South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press, 1994. xxx 210 pp. Appendix, sources and notes, and index. $22.00. David M. Barrett. Uncertain Warriors: Lyndon Johnson and His Vietnam Advisers. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993. xii 194 pp. Appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00. George C. Herring. LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War. Austin: University Press of Texas, 1994. xiv 186 pp. Notes and index. $29.95. Deborah Shapley. Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993. xvii 615 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Peter Macdonald. Giap: The Victor in Vietnam. New York: Norton, 1993. 346 pp. Illustrations, epilogue, and bibliography. $25.00. Michael Lee Lanning and Dan Cragg. Inside the VC and the NVA: The Real Story of North Vietnam’s Armed Forces. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1992. xiii 260 pp. Illustrations, appendixes, source notes, bibliography, and index. $20.00. On many levels and in many different ways, the process of coming to terms with the Vietnam War continues to unfold. As Morley Safer writes, each witness to that conflict is “still imprisoned, to one extent or another, by that place and that time.” 1 Memories of the conflict remain vivid among many Americans, who are still trying to understand why we fought so long and so hard in such a distant place, and why, in the end, we and our allies in Saigon suffered such a humiliating defeat. Recent literature has given us a better sense of the evolution of American policy, of how decisions were made within the American government, and of how these decisions were carried out in the field. Many aspects of American policy, however, remain obscure, while we [End Page 144] have only begun to learn about the calculations of communist revolutionaries in Vietnam. These six books, written by scholars, journalists, and participants, are only a small part of what is a fascinating effort to fit together all of the pieces of the Vietnamese puzzle. Sam Adams was one of those witnesses to the war, a young CIA analyst whose study of the Vietcong became first a great adventure, then a compelling cause until his untimely death in 1988. In August 1965 Adams was transferred to the Southeast Asian Branch of the CIA’s Deputy Directorate of Intelligence, where he was given the task of studying Vietcong morale. He was the first person in Washington to give the enemy in South Vietnam his undivided attention. Poring over captured enemy documents, POW interrogations, and interviews with defectors, Adams concluded that the war was far larger than the Military Assistant Command Vietnam realized and that all the calculations of the American government about the numbers of troops needed and the time it would take to win were inaccurate. One captured document, on Vietcong strength in Binh Dinh province, listed 50,255 enemy soldiers, while MACV’s figure was only 4,668. Adams gradually realized that the Vietcong consisted of a vast, intricate organization, most of which was hidden from view. General William Westmoreland’s command was concerned with Vietcong main force units, but it failed to realize that these well-armed soldiers were only the tip of a large funnel that ran all the way down to the village level, and that main force units were augmented by many specialized units, such as sappers, secret police, service troops, and political cadre. The result was a resilient organization that could replace its losses quickly. Adams’s passionate curiosity about the Vietcong resulted in a series of superb, detailed studies, but it also brought an unwillingness to appreciate the dilemma CIA Director Richard Helms eventually confronted. Burdened with a White House that wanted only good news, and challenging the military’s figures in the middle of a major war, Helms felt that he could only push so far. Or as he explained to Adams, “You don’t know what it’s like in this town. I could have told the White House there were a million more Vietcong out there, and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference in our policy...

Short reviews

In an attempt to publish some reviews sooner after material comes out, the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars has added this section of short reviews of individual books, movies, TV series, and so on. If you are interested in writing a short review, please contact Peter Zarrow (for more information, see the introduction to the list of books to review on p. 84 of this issue).As someone who proudly served in the antiwar movement, I tend to believe we can't have too many books about the righteous struggle waged in the United States to end the Indochina wars. So on one level I welcome Tom Wells's expansion of his Berkeley Ph.D. thesis into the volume under review here. The War Within has many strengths. It mercilessly exposes the ignorant, reflexive anticommunism of such war managers as CIA director Richard Helms, White House advisor (and ideological architect of the wars in Indochina) Walt Rostow, the Nixon entourage, and others. Furthermore, Wells does what no other writer has done: narrate the interfamilial generational conflict between government officials and their children brought on by the Indochina conflicts. Offspring of Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, Spiro Agnew, H.R. Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman joined (or as in the case of Kim Agnew, wanted to join) the movement. Daniel Ellsberg has told us how pressures from those he loved helped transform a once gung-ho Marine and prowar government policy maker into an antiwar militant, and Wells cites Ellsberg's experiences, adding horrifying details on the savage assaults mounted on him by the Nixon administration.

Safeguarding the Nuclear Peace in South Asia

In February 1993, CIA Director James Woolsey testified before Congress that the arms race between India and Pakistan represents the most probable prospect for the future use of nuclear weapons. I The history of strained relations between the two countries undoubtedly contributed to this alarming assessment. India and Pakistan have fought three wars against each other since 1947, and miscalculation or misunderstanding between the two almost led to the outbreak of hostilities in 1987 and 1990. Neither country is a party to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), neither accepts international safeguards over all their nuclear facilities, and both are actively enhancing their ballistic missile-delivery capabilities. Now that each of these countries has the ability, according to Woolsey, to assemble nuclear devices on short notice, the next crisis could very possibly escalate to the nuclear level, with devastating consequences for millions of people in South Asia. While this nuclear capability and history of belligerence would be sufficient cause for concern, it is the deteriorating domestic and regional environment in which this nuclear competition occurs that has made it particularly worrisome. The mixture of rising religious tensions, weak leadership, multiplying domestic burdens, and underdeveloped democratic institutions, coupled with advanced nuclear weapons programs, does not bode well for future peace and stability in South Asia. The potentially

The Civil War Battlefield Guide (review)

book reviews185 Aside from these oversights, Dawson's work is a well-balanced reference source to this period in American military history. On the whole, it provides a good departure point for the study of the army's place in American society and the liabilities it faced as it attempted to execute its multidimensional mission in the post-Civil War era. James W. Geary Kent State University The Civil War Battlefield Guide. Edited by Frances H. Kennedy. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990. Pp. 317, $29.95 cloth; $16.95 paper.) Just at a time when interest in Civil War battlefields is receiving increased national attention, when battlefield preservation has become the "hottest " and most popular preservation issue in Washington, The Conservation Fund has brought forth an outstanding guide to some 65 Civil War battlefields and campaigns, using essays on the subjects from an outstanding array of Civil War historians and other less expected authors. U.S. Senators Sam Nunn of Georgia and John Heinz of Pennsylvania, and CIA Director William Webster (whose grandfather was mortally wounded at Perryville) join with historians of the caliber of James McPherson, James I. Robertson, Stephen Sears, Ed Bearss, Gary Gallagher , William C. Davis, Ludwell Johnson, Richard Sommers, Herman Hattaway, the father-son team of Harry and Donald Pfanz, and literally dozens of others to present the best one-volume coverage of Civil War battles ever available anywhere. Under the able editorship of Frances Kennedy, the director of the Civil War Battlefield Project of The Conservation Fund (the Virginia-based group that acted as agent for the recent Mellon Foundation gift of over one hundred thousand acres, including several significant Civil War sites, to the National Park Service), the book is eminently qualified for the hoary, cliched recommendation, "... deserves a place on every Civil War buff's bookshelf." This book, in fact, could easily form the core of any Civil War buff's bookshelf, for the person who is primarily interested in Civil War battles can find no better primer than The Civil War Battlefield Guide. Photos show modern landmarks compared and contrasted with those same scenes in the 1860s. The individual field maps are drawn on modernday U.S. Geological Survey topographical maps with troop movements colored in, while the maps for the seven "campaign essays" were reproduced using originals in the Library of Congress. Not only is the book excellent both in content and in presentation, but the price is a good one. Proceeds will go toward the preservation 186 CIVIL WAR HISTORY of the very battlefields this unparalleled guide will enable you to study and understand. Jerry L. Russell Civil War Round Table Associates ^tY Wm m ...

Making Sense of Europe (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 239 and how the advice of experts advocating political means to hold the Sandinistas accountable was discarded. Although the stated goal of the administration's policy was to get the Sandinistas to the negotiating table, Gutman demonstrates that when an agreement was within reach, hard-liners, such as UN AmbassadorJeane Kirkpatrick and Constantine Menges, torpedoed any chance of attaining the government's stated goal. Menges did this on at least three occasions, heading off Secretary ofState George Shultz's attempts to open a dialogue with the Sandinista government by calling in both CIA Director William Casey and Ambassador Kirkpatrick to meet with President Reagan, who then told Shultz not to pursue his plans. Furthermore, when a viable peace plan was put on the table inJune 1984, it also fell apart. Because the United States was unwilling to send an observer to, or establish any links with the Contadora meetings, it had no knowledge of the Contadora and its proposals. The policy of negotiation was concomitant with the policy of confrontation. The contradictions inherent in this approach doomed the peace process from the start. The book's greatest asset is its examination of how foreign policy was made and conducted during the Reagan administration. According to Gutman, often contradictory policies and ignorance on the part of high-level administration officials, especially Secretary of State George Shultz, undermined foreign policy efforts and exacerbated problems. The author further states that at one point in 1 984 National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane deceived Shultz by not telling him that the Saudis were contributing a million dollars a month to the Contras. At the same time McFarlane was being deceived by his aide Oliver North, who was not telling McFarlane of his plan to create a private network to supply the Contras, according to Gutman, on the advice of William Casey and with the help of Richard Secord. Eighteen months after he resigned, McFarlane summed up the administration policymaking thus: "The organization of the administration for the conduct of foreign policy is, I believe, intrinsically unworkable. . . . There must be one person who is advocate, conceptual creator, and implementor of foreign policy. That is the Secretary of State." Roy Gutman gives a good account of the events surrounding the making of U.S. policy toward Nicaragua, showing its lack of direction and inconsistencies . In the process, he demonstrates that when ideologues took over policymaking toward Nicaragua, policy suffered as a result. Making Sense of Europe. By Christopher Tugendhat. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. 230 pp. $25.00/hardcover. Reviewed byfohn T. Shaw, M.A. candidate, SAIS. Making Sense ofEurope is a valuable addition to the literature on the European Community (EC). Christopher Tugendhat, a former journalist, member of 240 SAIS REVIEW the British House of Commons, and member of the European Commission, has written a book that is successful on several levels: it outlines the history of the European Community; explains the key institutions; describes how the various member states work within the community; considers the major problems facing Europe; and sketches an agenda for the future. Tugendhat argues that the evolution of the EC has been shaped by the competition between the ideas of federalism and intergovernmentalism. The federalist view, championed by Jean Monnet and Walter Hallstein, envisioned a "United States of Europe" administered by a powerful supranational institution , the European Commission. The intergovernmentalist view, advocated most vigorously by Charles de Gaulle, envisioned an association of European nations in which the nations would work together on certain matters while retaining complete sovereignty. Intergovemmentalists fought to ensure that decisionmaking authority for the European Community was vested in the Council of Ministers, where representatives of member states bargained and protected their nations' interests. Tugendhat believes that the battle between these competing views was resolved in favor of the intergovemmentalists by the Luxembourg Compromise in 1966, following a crisis engineered by de Gaulle. This ensured that, among other things, member states could invoke "vital interests" to halt EC action if they found it unacceptable. Tugendhat writes, "This row marked the moment at which the supremacy of the inter-governmental over the federal approach was established .... It gradually became clear that the Community would evolve as...

Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 239 is not currently economically feasible, in the future seabed deposits may prove to be a significant source of some of the minerals discussed. On the whole, however, Maull provides a sound analysis of resources and Western security and gives worthwhile suggestions for managing the risks involved. Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair. By Michael Beschloss. New York: Harper and Row, 1986. 401 pp. $19.95/cloth. Reviewed by ChristopherJ. Littel, M.A. candidate, SAIS. In the preface to Mayday Michael Beschloss states that the U-2 incident "deserves renewed attention because of the light it sheds on U.S. -Soviet diplomacy and other battles being fought in our own day." Given the roller coaster path of superpower relations over the past three years, Beschloss's book could not have come at a better time. Mayday is an insightful and analytical attempt to place the U-2 incident of 1 May 1960 in a clearer historical perspective; his reconstruction of the history of the U-2 program clearly identifies the underlying assumptions of the postwar U.S. strategy toward the Soviet Union. Beschloss has two basic premises: first, the intelligence community— particularly CIA director Allen Dulles— was determined to prevent another strategic surprise attack like the bombing of Pearl Harbor and sought to use the surveillance capabilities of the U-2 as part of this defensive strategy; and second, despite president Eisenhower's tightfisted management of the program, bureaucratic politics and inadequate supervision were partly responsible for the president's actions in April 1960, when Ike became "a bit careless with success ." Beschloss further argues that none of Eisenhower's top aides shared either his priorities or his optimism that détente "would or should be established." On the Soviet side, the author portrays Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev as an outspoken, volatile, and inconsistent leader who usually angered his own party members more than his U.S. counterparts. Beschloss does maintain, with some credulity, that Khrushchev was also a "leader with an extraordinary sense of vulnerability" who genuinely sought better relations with the United States. On balance, the author's analysis is thoughtful and detailed. He argues that "involving the public can strengthen the conduct of foreign policy," a popular notion, but not one supported by the circumstances of the U-2 incident . Beschloss is, moreover, a master of integrating the factual and the dramatic, portraying the spy plane's pilot, Gary Powers, as a pawn in a larger game of global chess. The real story of the U-2 affair, not lost on the author, is how governments respond in crisis situations. Although Beschloss criticizes Eisenhower's improvisatory approach to damage control, perhaps it was and still is the most appropriate model for crisis management. As Beschloss indicates in his conclusion , uncertainty often fuels speculation. It is perhaps less important how Power's aircraft was downed than the impact the event had on the actors involved. In Beschloss's words, "The U-2 was a flaming javelin unwittingly thrown into the dry forest of suspicions and 240 SAIS REVIEW misperceptions that surrounded American-Soviet affairs of the period." Beschloss has made an important contribution to the conduct of U.S. foreign policy with a thorough discussion of all parties involved in this exercise in diplomatic sensitivity. ...

The Socio-Educational Composition of the CIA Elite: A Statistical Note

Attitudes within United States towards CIA have played a governing role in its history. Preconceptions about social and educational background of Agency's employees, and particularly its ?lite, have formed one dimension of those governing attitudes. Within intelligence community, therefore, concern about educational standards in CIA has manifested itself for public relations reasons as well as in connection with efficiency. For example, Doolittle Report on covert activities took note in 1954 of prevailing complaint that there was too much dead wood in Agency. The Report indicated that 47 percent of Agency employees had a B.A. degree or equivalent. In event, this turned out to be not dramatically below a figure of 5 2 percent arrived at for Foreign Service in 1959. But senior CIA officials continued to be defensive: in 1965, much-criticized CIA Director, Admiral Raborn, told President Johnson about merits of Agency's 50 senior officials: Their academic credentials are impressive. Eighty percent of them held degrees, and ten percent doctorates.1 Other commentators, outside as well as inside CIA, looked at Agency more from a social, or socio-educational perspective. Retired CIA Director William Colby recalled that in 1950s we were... cream of academic and social aristocracy. The journalist Stewart Alsop agreed that pre-1960s generation were the Ivy Leaguers, Socialites, Establishmentarians.2 Alsop and Colby found this all very congenial and, indeed, one might argue that a tightly knit clique close to traditional sources of power and relatively immune from outside penetration is ideal group to be in charge of foreign intelligence.3

Response to Lucien S. Vandenbroucke, "The ?Confessions?of Allen Dulles: New Evidence on the Bay of Pigs"

In “The ‘Confessions’ of Allen Dulles: New Evidence on the Bay of Pigs,” Lucien Vandenbroucke has performed a scholarly service. He describes and analyzes successive drafts, which he unearthed from the former CIA director's papers in Princeton, of what was to be a magazine article defending the agency's conduct of that operation. Vandenbroucke's analysis of this fascinating material is focused on the question of what President Kennedy was led to understand during his first three months in office by his intelligence and military advisers about the nature of and the prospects for the impending operation and whether he was misled by them, deliberately or not, in an effort on their part “to steer past” him a project he deeply mistrusted. Essentially, the writer concludes that he was. The thesis is that the promoters of the operation deliberately allowed Kennedy and his senior political advisers to ignore major weaknesses in the invasion plan by making no effort to dispel serious misconceptions about it which became current in the White House and contributed to wrong decisions about whether to proceed and how the operation was to be conducted. At least four major misconceptions held in varying degrees and at different times by the president and some, or all, of his advisers are identified.

CIA Director Warns Scientists

CIA Director Warns Scientists

CIA Director Warns Scientists

CIA Director Warns Scientists

CIA Director Warns Scientists

CIA Director Warns Scientists

Soviet Vulnerabilities in Iran and the RDF Deterrent

I t is difficult to imagine a region at once so vital economically and so volatile politically as the Persian Gulf today. To its economic importance, the Arab oil embargo of 1973 was, for many, the first rude awakening. Since then, a stormy sequence of events has underlined its political instability. The Iranian revolution, the fall of the Shah, and the bitter ordeal of the hostages were, for many Americans, a shocking demonstration of that fact; the seizure of the Great Mosque at Mecca and the Iraq-Iran War, part of its grim and continuing confirmation. Concurrent with these stark realizations, the West saw Soviet foreign policy enter a particularly adventurist phase, one in which regional instabilities-in Angola, in Ethiopia, and in South Yemen-were made targets of military opportunity. The possibility that a crumbling order in the Gulf would present the Soviets with even more attractive opportunities was lost on a very few. And when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the West's worst fears suddenly seemed ominously at hand. Jolted by the alarming convergence of events, former President Carter threw down the gauntlet, warning in his 1980 State of the Union Address that an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region-will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.' Today, few would deny the claim of former CIA Director, Admiral Stansfield Turner that . . the most demanding need for military force in the region would be to oppose a direct thrust by the Soviets into Iran. 2 Indeed, this contingency, under the Carter Doctrine has served as a principal basis for planning of the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDF).