Shaping Tomorrow's CIA

Never before has a secret agency received such public scrutiny. It is indeed a unique event that a modern nation is exhaustively examining one of its chief weapons of defense for all the world to see--including its adversaries. Yet this unprecedented exposure of the Central Intelligence Agency is perhaps the inevitable result of attacks on a vast bureaucracy that operated too long out of the public eye. America's premier defense agency has been under intense fire both at home and abroad for violating what many critics felt were proper standards of international conduct.

Once a proud company of proud men acting with the confidence that not only would their accomplishments serve their country but that their fellow citizens would support them, the agency has found its very functions and rationale severely questioned. It has had five directors in five stormy years. Its chiefs seem to spend more time before congressional committees than in planning and administering. Its agents, never public heroes because of the secrecy of their work, are now portrayed in the harshest of press accounts as conspiratorial villains. Somehow the rules of the spy game changed and, as the CIA men keep telling themselves, changed in the middle of the game.

The result has been inevitable--sagging morale, deteriorating ability to collect intelligence, and declining quality of analysis. Increasingly, this has worried Government policy framers, who are all too well aware of the need for prime intelligence sources and evaluation.

It has also, not incidentally, comforted those who work against the CIA. A Soviet KGB agent told a TIME correspondent in Cairo last week: "Of all the operations that the Soviet Union and the U.S. have conducted against each other, none have benefited the KGB as much as the campaign in the U.S. to discredit the CIA. In our wildest scenarios, we could never have anticipated such a plus for our side. It's the kind of gift all espionage men dream about. Today our boys have it a lot easier, and we didn't have to lift a finger. You did all our work for us."

In an effort to restore the CIA'S esteem, reorganize the U.S. intelligence community, and deflect further criticism from the agency, President Carter last week signed an Executive order that places all nine U.S. intelligence agencies under the direct budget control and loose coordination of one man: CIA Director Stansfield Turner, 54. Incorporated in the order were sharp curbs on the kinds of clandestine practices that brought the CIA much of its criticism.

The new appointment and the new directives were received with mixed emotions in the U.S. intelligent community. There was skepticism that the overall problems of intelligence, coordination and direction could be cured either soon or simply. In addition, since taking over the CIA last March, Admiral Turner has become one of the most controversial men in Washington. His unpopularity in his own agency stems in part from the brusque way in which he eliminated 212 jobs in the Directorate of Operations, the arm that deals with covert activities and intelligence gathering (the other arm handles analysis). The sackings reflected a longstanding desire to reduce the size of the CIA and scale down its covert operations.

It was the exposure, and to some extent the misrepresentation, of these covert activities that got the CIA into so much trouble. While zealous agents sometimes overstepped legal limits, the agency more often took the rap for activities that were ordered or approved by higher authorities. The abortive Bay of Pigs invasion was approved by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. It is still debated whether Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson knew of or supported assassination attempts against foreign leaders, such as the bizarre plan to supply poisoned cigars to Fidel Castro. L.B.J. approved Operation Phoenix, in which agents directed the killing of Viet Cong terrorists. In Chile, the CIA gave money and other help to opponents of Marxist Salvador Allende. But there is no evidence connecting the CIA to the coup that overthrew and killed Allende in 1973, though the episode gave the U.S. a black eye. The CIA'S surveillance of American citizens was grossly exaggerated by much of the press. One clear abuse by the agency, which it apparently carried out totally on its own initiative, was experimenting with LSD and other drugs on unwitting victims.

Paradoxically, more is expected of the CIA just when its capabilities are being restricted. Last week, when a Soviet spy satellite broke up over Canada and invaded the atmosphere like a streak of fireballs, it served as a blazing reminder that the world remains a dangerous place, far from a Utopia where a democracy can conduct all its business openly.

Detente or no detente, the Soviet Union is a formidable antagonist that continues seeking power and influence, or at least the ability to apply pressure, all over the world. Spending a higher percentage of its gross national product on weaponry and troops than the U.S. does, Russia is striving to outstrip American military prowess in many areas. This means that a secret service capable of ferreting out Soviet intentions as well as capabilities is vital to U.S. security. Says Cord Meyer Jr., a much-decorated retired CIA official: "We need a very, very alert advance warning capability, not only for weapons but for times when Soviet leaders may have reached a decision or when they are tending toward a decision."

Good intelligence has made it possible to cooperate with Russia to contain the arms race. Mutual spying by satellite enables the U.S. and the Soviet Union to monitor the weaponry in each country and provide some prospect that the other side is not cheating. Says a State Department official: "The SALT initiatives would not have been possible without intelligence."

The rise of Third World forces has put an additional burden on American intelligence. Most of the new nations have authoritarian regimes that do not freely supply the kind of political and economic information that is routine in the West. If the U.S. expects to stay abreast of developments in these vast areas of the globe, it needs a sophisticated and sensitive intelligence apparatus. Says a former deputy director of the CIA: "Totalitarian countries can use naked power; an open society has to depend on its wits." On top of the normal tensions of national rivalry, there is now the added danger of international terrorism. The U.S. has escaped serious incidents so far, but it needs intelligence to help protect its allies from this latest scourge of political fanaticism.

Among their responsibilities, the CIA and the other U.S. intelligence agencies have provided psychological profiles of such key leaders as Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Premier Menachem Begin. Intelligence has supplied background information to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance on every step of his diplomacy in the Middle East. The CIA is probing the likely consequences of the French and West German elections later this year, the course of Sino-Soviet relations, the ethnic conflicts that could rend Yugoslavia after Tito dies, and the possibility of intervention there. Attempts by the U.S. to prepare for world political developments would be inconceivable without intelligence.

All this work is jeopardized if the intelligence community is unreasonably weakened by public attacks. Policymakers and intelligence officials abroad are especially worried that outside pressures could all but incapacitate the CIA. They fear that Americans are too susceptible to periodic bouts of moral outrage, that they fail to understand their cherished democratic freedoms must be protected from a world that in large part does not cherish them. Appearing on the David Susskind Show in January, Jack Fishman, a British expert on intelligence, said he was "appalled by the way the American public is falling into the trap of slandering and smearing its own security organization. The CIA may have made many mistakes, but that does not mean you should smash your own security in the name of freedom of speech. You can't destroy yourself."

Last week former CIA Director Richard Helms made much the same point: "If we treat people who do this kind of work as second-class citizens, we are not going to be able to get anybody to do our dirty work for us."

Most foreign intelligence officials do not think the damage has gone so far that it is not containable. Says a top West German intelligence officer: "The CIA'S work is still very good, but it's not up to past lev els. What the CIA urgently needs now is to settle down, get a clear sense of direction and confidence again. This is vital for all of us, not just those in intelligence work."

Carter's Executive order on intelligence is intended to restore this balance and confidence. The President said that his reorganization directive was the product of the most extensive and highest-level review ever conducted. Just under a year in the making, the order expresses a rough consensus among the intelligence and defense communities, the White House and Congress.

Carter, characteristically, had been hard to please. He returned four drafts to his staff for revision. Says a top Administration official: "Only practice will tell if the reorganization works, but there was plenty of anguished howling as well as celebration in drawing up the order." The controversy suggests that, like any other bureaucratic reshuffle, this one will work only as well as those involved want it to work.

The document aims to achieve greater efficiency by streamlining the intelligence community under Turner, and to curb misdirected actions by imposing new restraints on covert activities. Says David Aaron, deputy director of the National Security Council: "It was important to end once and for all the notion that effective intelligence can't be carried out within constitutional limitations."

Under the new Executive order, responsibility for CIA and other intelligence operations is clearly lodged with the President and his top aides. Presidential passing of the buck for any unsavory covert activities will now be much harder, if not impossible. The National Security Council remains at the top of the intelligence pyramid. Two of its committees, set up last year by NSC Director Zbigniew Brzezinski, will have expanded powers. The Policy Review Committee will continually examine all intelligence operations. Chaired by Turner, the committee will include the Vice President; the Secretaries of State, Treasury and Defense; the National Security Adviser; and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Special Coordination Committee, chaired by Brzezinski, includes the members of the NSC, along with other senior officials who are chosen to attend. It will be responsible for special intelligence operations, thus sharing with the President the supervision of all sensitive covert activities carried out by the CIA.

This committee will also take over coordination of counterespionage, an activity that is handled by the FBI within the U.S. and by the CIA abroad. No one is sure how this change will work, since counterespionage has become the unwanted stepchild of intelligence. The FBI admits flatly it no longer has the manpower to keep track of all the Soviet KGB agents flowing into the U.S. and its efforts, like the CIA's, have been impeded by growing restrictions on surveillance. Admits one Carter aide: "Counterintelligence is still a mess. We haven't resolved anything except to deal with it in the classic bureaucratic sense: move the function and rename it."

The new set of prohibitions is extensive and severe. Perhaps most important, the Attorney General is drawn into the heart of intelligence to ensure a legal basis for all domestic operations. His approval is needed for an intelligence agent to open mail sent through U.S. postal channels, to join any domestic organization, or to contract for goods and services in the U.S. without revealing his identity.

Surveillance of American citizens within the U.S. can be conducted by the FBI only in the course of a formal, lawful investigation; surveillance of a U.S. citizen abroad is allowed only if he is thought to be involved in some activity inimical to national security. The Attorney General is instructed to make sure that any "intelligence activity within the United States or directed against any United States person is conducted by the least intrusive means possible."

Assassinations are flatly prohibited.

So is any experimentation with drugs, unless it is done with the subject's consent under Health, Education and Welfare Department guidelines. U.S. spies will not be permitted to join any other federal agency without their identity being disclosed--a directive that has drawn fire from CIA officials, who rightfully claim there are very few places left where their agents can get secure cover.

When last week's executive order was finally hammered out, Admiral Turner, perhaps only half in jest, threw up his arms, sighed and told Brzezinski: "They call me the intelligence czar, but you're the boss." The admiral had a point, but then he has nothing to complain about from the reshuffle. For the first time, one man has been told to take charge of the nine all too often freewheeling, intensely competitive and sometimes overlapping intelligence agencies.

Precisely how much power Turner will wield remains to be seen. The legislation establishing the CIA in 1947 gave the director, as his title suggests, a certain degree of authority over all the intelligence agencies; he was charged with "coordinating" their activities. But he only loosely performed that function. The new executive order considerably enhances the director's authority and responsibility. He has control of the total intelligence budget (an estimated $7 billion a year) and the right to give assignments to all the agencies. Turner's position ultimately depends on the power realities of Washington and his own abilities.

No one who knows Stan Turner doubts that the driving, fiercely ambitious admiral will make the most of his new job. He is one of the armed services' new breed of activist intellectuals who pride themselves on their grasp of nonmilitary matters: politics, economics, psychology. Born in Highland Park, Ill., a Chicago suburb, Turner decided on a naval career instead of joining his father in real estate. After graduating 25th in his class at Annapolis (Jimmy Carter finished 59th out of 820 in the same class of'46), he studied at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. He served on a destroyer during the Korean War; from 1972 to 1974 he was president of the Naval War College, where he gained a reputation as a man of unconventional opinion. As he wrote in an article in Foreign Affairs, he preferred to "focus on trends rather than statistics."

Named commander of the Second Fleet in the Atlantic in 1974, Turner resorted again to unconventional tactics. He checked on the readiness of his ships by making surprise visits by helicopter. Then he would toss a life preserver into the ocean and order sailors to save a hypothetical man overboard. His ambition was to become Chief of Naval Operations, but his plans were interrupted last March by his Commander in Chief. Since Turner remains in the Navy, he is accused by critics in the CIA of using the intelligence post as a steppingstone to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The truth is, he probably could have found a safer route.

At the office through long days and into the night (his average work day is 12 hours), Turner spends his remaining time with his wife Patricia at their home in northwest Washington. His son Geoffrey is a Navy lieutenant stationed in Monterey, Calif. Daughter Laurel is married and lives in San Diego. Turner, who seldom drinks and does not smoke, likes to play tennis and squash or swim when he has the chance. His social life usually involves old friends from the Navy, not new ones from the CIA.

Turner's difficulties at the agency come, at least in part, from his carrying out the duties assigned to him. It has been common wisdom in recent years that the CIA had become too large. Staff reductions began under James Schlesinger, who was director in 1973, and continued under his successor, William Colby. When Turner took over, he found various options on his desk for eliminating some 1,500 positions over five or six years. Rather than leave people in suspense for so long a period, he decided to make a quick cut of 820 jobs over two years.

He did it none too diplomatically.

With scant regard for the feelings of people who had served their country unsung for decades, he permitted a photocopied memo informing 212 employees of their dismissal to be distributed last Oct. 31. Some of the people fired thought he bore them a personal grudge. Says one of his former aides: "Stan is deeply suspicious of the clandestine services. He is very uncomfortable with their basic uncontrol-lability. He doesn't like their fine clothes and accents, their Cosmos and Yale and Georgetown clubs. They're simply not good sailors. He finds them sneeringly elliptical. It drives him crazy. He just can't get hold of this maddening quicksilver."

Turner could not have been pleased with his victims' undisciplined response. They dubbed the occasion the "Halloween massacre" and passed around a takeoff of the admiral's song in Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore:

"Of intelligence I had so little grip

That they offered me the directorship.

With my brassbound head of oak so stout

I don't have to know what it's all about."

Only 45 people, in fact, have been fired outright. Others have been retired, and the CIA personnel office is looking for Government jobs for the rest. Sums up Turner on the agency's cutbacks: "What do you want--happy spies or effective and well-controlled spies? The gripes are mainly from those who were asked to leave. It is ironic that the media are so enthusiastic about all those good old experienced spies--who brought all those things that the media railed against for all those years."

The CIA boss has support where it counts the most. At the signing of the executive order last week, Carter went out of his way to stress "my complete appreciation and confidence in Admiral Stan Turner." Carter sees Turner more often than previous Presidents saw their CIA chiefs. The admiral has briefed the President once or twice a week in hour-long sessions, usually alone. Turner prepares the agenda and spends ten to twelve hours reading background material for each session. According to a presidential aide: "Carter likes Turner's crispness, his grasp, his 'yes sir, no sir,' no-nonsense naval officer's style."

All the furor over the CIA's real and putative misdeeds has obscured its solid accomplishments over many years. Except for rare periods of war, the U.S. did not even have an overall intelligence service until the Office of Strategic Services was created in 1942; it provided Americans with a hazardous and exhilarating cram course in espionage. OSS members formed the nucleus of the CIA, which was started in 1947 in response to Soviet expansionism. The agency attracted talented recruits from campuses in the 1950s, and its activities spread adventurously, and occasionally recklessly.

Now, as the 1980s approach, what kind of CIA can--and should--the nation have? To hear Turner and other intelligence authorities, the agency will be smaller, with more sharply focused analysis, and with covert operations scaled down and sparingly used.

While the quality of CIA analysis in general is not what it used to be, the agency is still unsurpassed in interpreting technological data. The American public was exposed to the awesome possibilities of aerial espionage when a U-2 spy plane was brought down over the Soviet Union in 1960, and its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was put on trial and jailed for two years. Since then the U-2 has been supplemented by an ever expanding array of observation satellites and eavesdropping devices. As a senior member of the National Security Council puts it, "The agency is best when there's something very specific that you want to know, preferably a question that can be answered with numbers, or, if not with numbers, then at least with nouns. The fewer adverbs and adjectives in a CIA report, the better it tends to be." But since this is a world of adverbs and adjectives--that is, of emotions that cannot be measured scientifically --more subjective analysis is needed. "We're neglecting soft input, the human factor," says a top foreign policy adviser to the White House. "There is insufficient keen political analysis."

White House officials complain, perhaps excessively, that the agency has failed to give them advance warning of crucial developments. Why, they ask, was the CIA not better informed about the reaction Vance would receive when he took his SALT proposals to Moscow last March. Common sense, however, might have indicated that the Secretary would run into trouble because the proposals were too sweeping to be acceptable to the Soviets. The White House felt that the CIA should have had some inkling of Sadat's decision to go to Israel; yet U.S. intelligence had warned that Sadat was frustrated and looking for a bold step. The CIA had satellite photos of a secret South African nuclear facility in the Kalahari Desert, but had not interpreted them. The White House was considerably embarrassed when it learned that the Soviets had already discovered the installation.

Policymakers sometimes fail to use sound intelligence when it is offered. President Johnson disregarded the discouraging CIA reports on Viet Nam; they were not what he wanted to hear. The White House rejected CIA warnings of a Middle East war in 1973. Why would the Arabs want to start a war they could not win? reasoned the policymakers. It did not occur to them that the Arabs could win something just by fighting better than they had the last time.

As the CIA has grown bigger, it has become more bureaucratic. Too much superfluous paper is circulated. Analysts are more conscious of job and status, and less daring and imaginative than they were in the '50s and '60s. Says an Administration official: "There's a lot of bureaucratic ass-covering that goes on when guys write long-range stuff. They don't want to be wrong, so they tend to be glib and platitudinous."

Though covert operations involving intervention in the internal affairs of other countries are being reduced, some have been successful. The CIA-backed overthrow of Iran's Premier Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and of Guatemala's President Jacobo Arbenz the following year headed off threats of Communist takeovers and stabilized conditions to the benefit of the Western world. Other operations were more dubious. In the Dominican Republic, Dictator Rafael Trujillo was assassinated in 1961 by rebels supplied with guns by CIA agents. The ensuing chaos forced President Johnson to send in the Marines four years later. Notes New York University Law Professor Thomas Franck: "By using dirty tricks that backfired, we set ourselves up as the universal scapegoat for every disaster caused by either God or incompetent governments."

But not all covert CIA operations can --or should--be ruled out. "There is a mean, dirty, back-alley struggle going on in which many other governments are participating," says former Secretary of State Dean Rusk. "If we withdraw unilaterally, they aren't going to stop. We must maintain a first-rate covert capability."

Potential dangers exist in many parts of the world, especially where the ever expanding KGB is active. What if a revolutionary group with Soviet ties were plotting a coup against the government of Saudi Arabia, thereby threatening the world's oil supply? Surely the U.S. would need a clandestine force to support the legally constituted government and oppose such a disruptive act. Says former CIA Director Colby: "There really has to be something between a diplomatic protest and sending in the Marines."

It is difficult to prescribe exact behavior for a covert undertaking. Strict rules of conduct could be damaging in certain situations. Suppose terrorists manage to obtain and hide an atomic weapon, then threaten to blow up a city--a not inconceivable happening in the decades ahead.

Says Telford Taylor, a law professor who served in intelligence during World War II: "If the safety of a city were at stake, I'd say go ahead and burn up their toenails. Absolute morality is a little hard to swallow in this kind of thing."

But all agree that proper authority must be exercised over covert operations. It is much debated whether--and how much--successive Presidents knew about the various CIA projects; practically everyone else was kept in the dark. "I didn't learn about the Castro assassination plots until two years ago," admits Rusk. "That is intolerable. The Secretary of State must know what is going on. There has to be an inventory of ongoing things."

Yet former CIA Director John McCone, among many others, argues that only a few leaders of the Administration and Congress should be informed of sensitive intelligence projects, and other officials should be let in on secrets only if they "need to know." After the rush of disclosures about the CIA, everybody on Capitol Hill wanted to find out what the agency was doing. Oversight was spread among eight, sometimes sievelike, congressional committees. The eight still exist, but Turner increasingly is reporting to only two intelligence committees, one each in the House and Senate. The new executive order confirms this arrangement. The trend is toward reducing the number of people involved in oversight, though they will be more watchful than their predecessors in the '50s and '60s.

With the new supervision and tougher regulations, the national uproar over the CIA can be expected to subside. Damage has been done, but the U.S. intelligence community will survive. Jonathan Moore, director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard, feels that the attacks on the CIA might have "put us at a disadvantage under certain circumstances, but I'd put it in the category of runnable risks. After the debate is ended, after Chile, Viet Nam and Watergate, we say we are going to clean up our act, but we sure as hell are going to have an act. We might be more potent than before."

There even seems to be a swing of public opinion in support of the CIA, a recognition of the basic point that it is not a contradiction for an open democracy to have a secret intelligence agency. Senator Daniel Inouye, the Hawaii Democrat who formerly chaired the Senate intelligence committee, feels that: "If a poll were taken today, it would find spying is still essential. We hate wars, but we must maintain our defense posture. Our spies are not monsters." Nor will they be saints in a world and an occupation that produce very few. A certain realism and perspective is necessary. Intelligence must be recognized for what it is: occasionally dangerous, sometimes dirty, sometimes exhilarating, often tedious, very necessary work.

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