Strengthening the CIA

Ladies and Gentlemen:

This is a troubled world. Threatening forces continue to challenge us. For this reason, we must have a reliable intelligence service---the President's eyes and ears. Yet we are seeing and hearing dimly because of the present condition of the Central Intelligence Agency. In the past, the agency engaged in some practices that were not acceptable in America, but those days are behind us. The CIA has reformed; now we must stop punishing it. We must remove some of the constraints that keep it from doing its job. We must restore the confidence of its members and treat them as honorable men in an often perilous profession. A great power like America cannot survive without a great intelligence service.

Jimmy Carter may never make a speech like this, but he should. A combination of events has seriously disabled the CIA at a time when its services are needed more urgently than ever. To guide its foreign policy, to help its friends and restrain its foes, the U.S. must have adequate intelligence from those areas of the world where information is suppressed, confused or conflicting. The nation cannot afford to be caught off guard by sudden hostilities in the festering arc of crisis or in the vast arenas of Asia where Communist giants collide. With weapons technology advancing more rapidly than ever, the U.S. must keep abreast of the latest Soviet developments, since an undetected Russian breakthrough could jeopardize the ever fragile balance of power. In a world of turmoil, frequently erupting in anarchy, the U.S. must be able to exercise its influence to maintain stability. Where the U.S. fails to do so, some authoritarian power can be counted on to fill the void. That, for better or worse, is the way things are.

Today the CIA is not equipped for its role because it continues to operate under a debilitating cloud of suspicion. Until the early 1970s, its mission was pretty much taken for granted and its methods were seldom questioned. Then a series of revelations deluged it with hostile publicity for the first time. The agency was implicated in assassination attempts on foreign leaders--only a very few, but a few too many. Other abuses were also uncovered by a press seemingly ravenous for CIA misdeeds; inevitably there were gross exaggerations.

A punitive attitude toward the agency lingers on when there is no longer any real justification for it. The White House seems determined to keep reminding the agency of its past transgressions. Vice President Walter Mondale, in particular, has been the moralistic champion of a highly restrictive charter to govern U.S. intelligence agencies, though the legislation will probably be much modified before it is approved by Congress. CIA Director Admiral Stansfield Turner has responded energetically to a set of problems that did not confront his predecessors, but widespread Washington opinion holds that he is not the right man for the job. He may bring too rigid an outlook to what is, after all, an art form: the collection of educated guesses from incisive minds. Though the reduction of budget and personnel began before he took office, his critics charge that hundreds of senior officials with experience, dedication and language skills have been forced out. Turner feels that new blood is needed, but younger recruits may not be able to fill the vacuum for years. Ray Cline, former deputy director for intelligence, thinks that the "core of continuity has been destroyed. By and large, the historical memory is gone."

Foreign intelligence services, whose cooperation is essential, are bewildered and increasingly wary of dealing with a demoralized CIA that can apparently no longer be trusted to keep secrets. Says a top West German official: "What has happened to the U.S. is dangerous to all of us allied with the U.S." Chaim Herzog, former director of Israeli military intelligence, warns: "The self-flagellation that has gone on in the U.S. has destroyed the front line of defense of the free world. You can't raise your hands in horror unless you have agreement on both sides to stop playing the dirty game. What has been occurring is a very shortsighted policy to undermine and demoralize operatives who now must look over their shoulders whenever they want to do anything."

The first step is to restore the morale of the agency. For all the technological advances, much of intelligence--the gathering of information abroad and its analysis at headquarters in Langley, Va. --remains subjective. Good judgment depends on the commitment, loyalty, imagination and zest of the officials involved. Esprit is vital because CIA employment brings few other tangible rewards. Agency members cannot even tell their families what they are doing, their lives are closely monitored, they receive no publicity unless it is bad. Much of their undercover work is far from glamorous and numbingly routine. "Nobody who works for the CIA is going to have a statue erected to him like the one to Nathan Hale," says Energy Secretary James Schlesinger, who served as CIA director for five months. Says James Angleton, former chief of counterintelligence at the CIA and now chairman of the Security and Intelligence Fund: "Our generation believed that you go in naked and you leave naked."

Analysis, which provides the basis for so many key decisions in American foreign policy, must be improved. At present, it is spotty: good in some areas, bad in others. A prominent consumer of CIA reports on Capitol Hill gives the agency an over-all grade of Cminus. The agency gets pretty good marks for its reporting on Russia and China, and it feels it has stayed on top of developments in turbulent Central America. In Iran, on the other hand, it was embarrassingly inept. Says Birch Bayh, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence: "Technologically, it's unbelievable what we have the capacity to do. Our weakness is what we do with the information when we get it. We know the number of tanks belonging to the Warsaw Pact powers, but we want to know where they will go."

There is no substitute for the agent in the field to provide reporting on the intentions of foreign nations. "You can photograph and intercept all the messages that ultrasophisticated technology allows," says a West German expert. "But these cannot provide the sense of a place, the smell, sound and color that can tell so much." Because of declining morale and fear of leaks, CIA networks overseas have broken down. The agent who works abroad is often on his own. Says Jack Maury, onetime CIA chief of Soviet operations: "You can't just give orders from the top and expect them to be carried out. The real protection is integrity, not polygraphs and locks on the doors."

No less important is the analyst at headquarters who must make sense of copious, often conflicting information. He has to feel free to speak his mind, to dissent, to challenge. His independence needs to be safeguarded. Above all, he must have time to think. Caught up in a crisis, a President has a tendency to turn the agency into a kind of wire service to provide hour-by-hour commentary. This cuts down man-hours that should be available for the long-range analysis that may help a President prevent a crisis in the first place. The CIA fights a constant, often losing battle to protect the continuity of its basic research.

Inevitably, pressures mount to produce intelligence to support a President's policy. During the years when detente was emphasized, the CIA consistently underestimated the Russian arms buildup. The consensus was that the Soviets were seeking parity with the U.S., a comfortable assumption that was eventually exploded. When it turned out that the Soviets seemed determined to pull ahead of the U.S., the CIA hastily revised its estimates upward. "The greatest intelligence failures stem from preconceptions," says an agency critic on Capitol Hill. "First there is a faulty analytical model, then an unjustified persistence in squeezing the data to fit the model." Adds Cord Meyer, former assistant deputy director for operations: "When you have a wide consensus among policymakers on the assessment of a situation, then it takes a strong man with solid proof to go against the prevailing assumption."

Trying to obtain more sharply focused reports, Director Turner has called for inclusion of dissent in CIA analyses. He has also created an intelligence officer for warning, who has the job of scanning the horizon, looking for the unexpected, jumping into any situation. Much still remains to be done to encourage individual initiative. Promotions, which lag behind other Government agencies, can be speeded up. Usually when an analyst performs well, he is advanced to managerial level, where his laboriously acquired skills are then lost to the agency. A good analyst should be prized above all employees and rewarded accordingly.

While virtually everybody recognizes the need for reliable intelligence, the CIA's other function--covert actions--is much more controversial because of past efforts to "destabilize" certain governments perceived to be inimical to the U.S. Yet covert actions have generally been more modest in scope and supportive of friendly, usually democratic nations and political parties. Few CIA officials, past or present, defend the large-scale paramilitary operations that led to disaster in Cuba and to considerable controversy, at least, in Laos. "Our mission was much inflated," says Jack Maury. "Covert operations can support but not substitute for overt policies. You are not going to change the course of history by cloak and dagger." Ray Cline feels that the CIA is "better at subtle, indirect methods. It is late in the game when you have to shoot someone to get your way. The basic function of covert action is to tell people how to run a stable political system and how to deal with threats to that stability."

Too few covert operations, however, can be as dangerous as too many. Such actions used to consume about half the agency budget; today they account for a mere 2%. Certainly one of the worst setbacks the U.S. has suffered in recent months was the fall of the Shah, including the loss of CIA electronic listening posts in Iran; this equipment was extremely valuable for verification of Soviet weaponry, a key issue in the SALT debate. Though some observers argue that nothing could have been done to save the Shah or promote an acceptable successor regime, nothing was really tried. CIA activities had been curtailed in Iran because of too much publicity; there was no U.S. presence capable of influencing events. "A quick fix" is not possible in covert action, says Richard Helms, who served as ambassador to Iran after retiring as CIA director in 1973. But he believes ways can be found to help a friendly regime that is in trouble if there is a will to find them. What people do not realize, says Helms, is that "the war is being fought in back alleys, not with tanks, guns or nuclear weapons. The CIA must be strengthened or we will lose this war."

Oversight of the CIA, both executive and congressional, must be clear and rational. Until the CIA came under attack, the President was able to evade responsibility for covert actions even though he had initiated them. Currently the President is required by law to approve all covert actions. That makes him the only major chief of state who is not insulated from potential embarrassments caused by his intelligence arma situation that the services of other nations regard with horror. Nevertheless, it is probably the only workable system in the U.S. today.

Until the mid-1970s. Congress exercised oversight through powerful committee chairmen who did not examine covert actions closely, if at all. Now any plans for similar operations must be submitted to eight different congressional committees, far too many to keep anything secret. When the CIA proposed aiding anti-Communist forces in Angola in 1975, the plan was quickly leaked to the press by a hostile Senator and thus killed by exposure. The oversight committees should be reduced to the two current Select Committees on Intelligence, which, as a matter of fact, have taken their job fairly seriously and have avoided leaks.

There should be some relaxation of the laws currently hobbling the CIA. Because of all the restrictions, the agency's legal and inspection staff has more than tripled in the past years. As Schlesinger puts it, "A CIA officer can hardly do his job if he has lawyers following him around reading the U.S. Code to him." Especially nettlesome is the fact that the CIA is subject to the Freedom of Information Act, the only intelligence service in the world that has to produce information for outsiders on demand. Dozens of CIA officials are tied up responding to inquiries, many of them frivolous to say the least, e.g., information on UFOs. There is no way of telling how many inquiries originate with the KGB, which is operating more freely in America than ever before. The CIA, of course, does not release information it considers injurious to the national interest, but the steady accumulation of detail can reveal more than the agency intends.

A law should be enacted to prevent the disclosure of certain classified information, especially the publication of agents' names that puts their lives as well as their missions in danger. It is surely anomalous that people can receive a prison sentence for releasing data on bank loans, relief rolls or crop statistics, while others can reveal intelligence matters with impunity. At Washington's Dupont Circle, seven miles from CIA headquarters, a group is in business to publish the names of CIA agents abroad. Under the present espionage law, somebody who divulges secrets can be convicted only if it is proved that he acted with "intent" to injure his country or aid a foreign nation--almost an impossibility to establish in a court of law unless he is caught dealing with a foreign agent. No other democratic country is so lax about its intelligence: the U.S. can surely make it tougher for those, including the KGB, who want to compromise national security.

The CIA, to be sure, does not exist in a vacuum; its troubles are a symptom of a wider malaise. The White House shapes the policy in which the CIA plays a vital part. If there is indecision at the top and lack of a coherent strategy, the CIA will not be properly employed.

The White House and some elements in Congress seem to be lagging behind the rest of the country on the matter of reviving the CIA's capability. "The public mood is very supportive," says a top CIA official. "The question is how to mobilize that support." In the world as it is and not as it is sometimes fondly imagined, a major nation cannot function without a strong intelligence agency, and that is what is conspicuously missing in contemporary America. With the balance of power no longer as securely in America's favor as it once was, there may be little time left to get back into the intelligence business in a decisive way. Unless such a change is made, the damage that has been done by crippling the CIA may far outweigh the damage caused by the excesses of the agency when it was riding high and unchallenged.

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