New Orders for the Admiral

Now he directs more than the Central Intelligence Agency

Since becoming chief of the CIA last March, Admiral Stansfield Turner has come on like David Farragut at Mobile Bay: Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead! Turner gave orders to discharge 820 spooks. He then dismissed Deputy Director for Operations William Wells, who had carried out the firing. The admiral also surrounded himself with former naval officers as high-level subordinates.

Morale has listed at the agency, and old hands have loosed broadsides at Turner, so far with little effect. He has also caused nervousness and resentment at the Pentagon, State Department and several other federal departments by lobbying at the White House to gain control of their intelligence operations.

This week, despite the growing controversy about the admiral, he will get much of the broader powers that he wanted, and from his old Annapolis mate Jimmy Carter. The President on Tuesday will sign an order reorganizing the entire U.S. intelligence community, which embraces the CIA and the intelligence arms of the FBI, the State and Defense departments and the individual military services. The directive will give Turner authority over all intelligence budgets (estimated total: $7 billion). But, as decreed by the President last summer, the order stops short of giving Turner the job he most coveted: U.S. intelligence czar.

The executive order was one of the first projects begun by Carter after taking office, but it still took almost a year to produce. One reason: he rejected the first version, submitted in August by the National Security Council, as incomprehensible. An adviser recalls that the President said, "I don't understand it, and I doubt anybody else can."

Under the new order, Turner will get "full and exclusive authority" over preparing the intelligence community's budgets. He will also operate through a new National Intelligence Tasking Center--made up of officers from the entire intelligence community--to assign intelligence projects to each agency and coordinate their activities. But each department will retain operational authority over its own intelligence arms. Thus while the Tasking Center can order the Pentagon's National Reconnaissance Office to continue operating spy-in-the-sky satellites, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown will control the office's day-to-day operations. The spy agencies will also keep on making their own analyses of all the intelligence data that they get. This will ensure that dissenting views are sent to the White House. Particularly sensitive intelligence-gathering operations and other cloak-and-dagger activities will have to be approved ahead of time by a standing committee of the National Security Council, which is headed by Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The new directive also reaffirms the list of dos and don'ts for American agents that was signed two years ago by President Ford. It sets no limits on a CIA practice that attracted heavy criticism during recent congressional hearings: the use of newsmen, students or clergymen as agents. Though the general policy is not to use them, the White House asserts that it did not want specifically to single out any groups for exclusion. But agents cannot interview people in the U.S. without identifying themselves as spooks. Nor can the CIA, using a seemingly innocuous business firm as cover overseas, sign a contract with any Americans unless they know that the agency is involved.

After Carter signs the order, he will ask Congress to enact it, giving it the permanency of law. It is expected to encounter little opposition despite the rising concern in Washington about Turner. Some senior advisers to Carter regard him as a poor manager of people and somewhat overweening. But they believe that another change at the top would only further damage the CIA, which has had five directors in five years. Still, by getting a new charter for all U.S. intelligence activities written into law, the Administration hopes to make spy operations more orderly and efficient, and keep them under better control.

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