Spartan Profiles: Burton Gerber
TRANSFORMING U.S. INTELLIGENCE
The 9/11 attacks and the missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have both been blamed largely on intelligence failures. The United States Government's response—adding a director of National Intelligence and making other bureaucratic fixes—is not enough. So argues Burton Gerber, ’55, a retired CIA operations officer with 39 years of experience and station chief in Moscow before the fall of the Soviet empire.
“When faced with a crisis, we tend to legislate and make organizational changes,” says Gerber, co-editor with Jennifer Sims, a professor at Georgetown University, of Transforming U.S. Intelligence (Georgetown University Press, 2005). “But the key to a real solution must focus on the policies, practices and leadership of intelligence programs.”
Burton joined the CIA in 1956 and was an operations officer, recruiting and running spies in Warsaw Pact countries. “It was an awesome task with awesome consequences,” he notes. “People died if we made a mistake.”
That happened in the 1980s when CIA officer Aldrich Ames volunteered to be an agent for the KGB. At the time he was in Burton's operational component. But on the plus side, Burton’s operations work contributed to the demise of Communism. “What we did had an important role in the downfall of an empire,” he allows.
Now a frequent lecturer on the ethics of public policy and of espionage, Burton was on campus last fall to meet with students and faculty.
After growing up in Columbus, he came to MSU on a Detroit Free Press scholarship. “MSU was a very good experience,” he recalls. “I had wonderful courses and professors. In particular, I was influenced by Ralph Smuckler, Wesley Fishel and Joe La Palombara, as well as Walter Adams and Leland Traywick.”
Burton was also active with Beta Theta Pi fraternity and was the editor of the 1955 Centennial Wolverine, the university yearbook. “I’m still damned proud of it,” he says. “It was of major use by those working on celebrating the Sesquicentennial.”
With his late wife Rosalie, he has funded several scholarships in the Dept. of Political Science and at James Madison College for MSU students interested in pursuing careers in international affairs, the military or national security organizations, international law or commerce. A friend of Burton’s recently cracked, “It looks like you’re trying to find a clone of yourself.”
