TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/092391/0923100.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 12.1 KB | 249 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 16

INTELLIGENCE

Crisis in Spooksville


As the Senate grilling of Robert Gates begins, the CIA starts to
rethink its own mandate in a rapidly changing world

By RICHARD LACAYO -- Reported by Dan Goodgame and Bruce van
Voorst/Washington and William Mader/London


    Life could be worse for the Central Intelligence Agency.
There are no jeering crowds in front of its headquarters in
Langley, Va., and no one has tried to pull down the statue of
agency founder William ("Wild Bill") Donovan. Nonetheless, the
meltdown of Soviet power has startled the CIA nearly as much as
it has the KGB. So long as the Soviet Union faced off against
the U.S., the chief mission of American intelligence gathering
could be summarized in a microdot: watch Moscow and all its
worldwide doings. Now, confronted by the spectacle of a
dissolving Soviet Union, intelligence agencies face the question
of whether they should be refashioned for a world in which
counting Soviet missile silos may be less important than
tracking the intentions of well-armed Third World dictators or
keeping tabs on the Japanese trade ministry.

    That's one reason why the stakes are unusually high this
week as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence conducts
hearings on George Bush's choice of Robert Gates, the Deputy
National Security Adviser, to be the next director of the CIA.
Whoever holds that job will have to put the sprawling
intelligence community on a new path and defend the agency
against critics who are calling for it to be downsized or
disassembled.

    The discussion about the CIA's future, however, has been
overshadowed by questions about Gates' past, most notably the
extent of his involvement in the Iran-contra affair. That issue
scuttled his first shot at the job four years ago, when Ronald
Reagan proposed him as agency chief following the resignation
of William Casey. Gates had to withdraw because of skepticism
in Congress over his claim that Casey had kept him in the dark
about the contra-supply operation. The job went instead to then
FBI Director William Webster. When Webster announced his
retirement in May, Bush nominated Gates in the hope that
Congress had lost interest in Oliver North's misadventures.

    That might have been the case if Iran-contra prosecutor
Lawrence Walsh had not unveiled a major surprise in July. Just
days before the scheduled start of Gates' hearings, Alan Fiers,
a former top CIA official, pleaded guilty to withholding
information from Congress about his own knowledge of the
contra-supply operation. With Fiers willing to testify about the
involvement of former CIA colleagues, Walsh's investigation was
suddenly rejuvenated: How much of the Iran-contra operation had
been directed by the CIA? And just which CIA officials took
part?

    Fiers' testimony led to the indictment two weeks ago of
his boss, Clair George, the CIA's former chief of covert
operations. In a federal courtroom last week George pleaded
innocent to the 10-count felony indictment, which alleges that
he lied to three congressional committees and to the grand jury
that Walsh convened to probe the Iran-contra scandal. If
convicted on all counts, George faces up to 50 years in prison.

    On the day of George's arraignment, in another chamber of
the same courthouse, Walsh got a surprise of his own. Last year a
federal appeals court overturned Walsh's conviction of North on
one charge. In order for the convictions on two remaining
charges to stand, Walsh was directed to show that none of the
witnesses at North's trial had relied on his highly publicized
1987 testimony to Congress, which North had delivered under a
grant of immunity. During a courtroom hearing last week, Robert
McFarlane, Ronald Reagan's National Security Adviser, stunned
members of Walsh's team by insisting that his own testimony at
North's trial had been deeply tainted by familiarity with
North's Senate appearances. McFarlane's contention makes it more
likely that all remaining charges against North will be thrown
out. That would leave Walsh facing the question of whether to
try North again from scratch.

    Of greater concern to the White House is the possibility
that George or Fiers -- each was below Gates on the CIA chain
of command -- might implicate Gates. Nonetheless, the Senate
committee has been assured by Walsh that so far his
investigation has not turned up any evidence that would lead to
Gates' indictment. Bush once again reiterated his support for
the nominee last week, and Administration strategists hope that
with the help of Oklahoma Democratic Senator David Boren, the
committee chairman and another Gates supporter, the nomination
will reach the floor of the Senate anywhere from two weeks to
six months from now.

    All this unwanted attention comes at a time when the CIA
is trying to reshape its duties in a rapidly changing world.
Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA chief of counter terrorism
operations, has even suggested that the CIA is an "obsolete
tool" whose functions could be handled by the other branches of
the national-security bureauc racy, which include the National
Security Agency, responsible for eavesdropping; the
Reconnaissance Center, which handles satellite imaging; and the
enormous, separate intelligence arms of the military services.
New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan has called for the CIA
to be dissolved and its responsibilities turned over to the
State Department. If that is not possible, Moynihan says, the
agency should shrink its budget, a classified figure that is
currently between $25 billion and $30 billion a year. "Downsize,
downsize," Moynihan advises. "Don't look for silly, quasi-cold
war tasks like `Find the narco terrorists' or `Steal the
economic secrets of Albania.' "

    Intelligence officials know there is grumbling about their
performance in the recent past. In the years before the
Ayatullah Khomeini came to power, the CIA failed to gauge the
depth of resistance to the Shah among the people of Iran. Saddam
Hussein's invasion of Kuwait last year also caught the U.S. by
surprise. "The war might have been avoided if the President had
been told six months earlier that this man is thinking of
invading his neighbors," says Senator Boren.

    The U.S.S.R., whatever shape it takes, will remain a major
focus of intelligence efforts. Even a rump Soviet Union is
likely to be a formidable, if less truculent, nuclear power,
while the unsteady new republics that have declared their
independence will need to be watched. At the same time, the
KGB's morale may be hurt, but its espionage division remains
unchanged. By some estimates, it still maintains roughly 23,000
operatives in other nations. It is not inconceivable that the
Soviet agency might try to rebuild its reputation by scoring a
triumph abroad, such as filching technological secrets.

    But U.S. intelligence agencies will also have to be
reconfigured to fit the new map of the world. In an age of small
countries that are bristling with arms, one likely new target
of attention will be small and middle-size nations that have
considerable military arsenals and an inclination to use them.
"We've got to look at the proli feration of missiles, both
medium and long range, and the issue of weapons of mass
destruction, chemical, nuclear and biological," says
Representative Dave McCurdy, the Oklahoma Democrat who is
chairman of the House intelligence committee. Other jobs would
involve keeping close tabs on terrorist groups and drug
traffickers.

    A more controversial new role is economic-intelligence
gathering. In the absence of a communist superpower, the
foremost peacetime conflict will be economic competition among
nations. In that race the CIA could help give American companies
an edge by ferreting out industrial and technological
information from foreign companies and government ministries.
National trade strategies, technological advances, even the bids
being made by foreign companies for contracts open to American
firms -- all could be collected by the CIA.

    But there are real pitfalls to stealing industrial
secrets. In a world of multinationals, how do you even identify
an American corporation? And how should agencies make
information available without favoring one company over another
-- a prospect that opens the way to the possibility of
corporations bribing American agents to get access to
information that would give them an advantage over other
American companies.

    More important, the practice would place the U.S in the
uncomfortable position of spying regularly on allied nations.
Then again, some of them have already jumped into the race. On
a segment last week of the NBC news program Expose, Pierre
Marion, the former chief of French intelligence, admitted that
his government has been spying on U.S. corporations and their
executives in France. Marion, who headed the French spy agency
DGSE in 1981-82, told of a 10-year effort that stole secrets
from Corning Inc., a producer of glass and fiber optics; IBM;
and Texas Instruments. According to Expose's investigations,
French spies may be posing as flight attendants and passengers
on Air France in order to eavesdrop on the conversations of
American business travelers. "In economic competition we are
competitors," he explained.

    The debate about how information should be gathered is
also heating up. On one side are those who favor greater
reliance on technical means, such as satellite photography and
electronic interception of official communications. On the other
side are the proponents of what the spy business calls "humint"
-- human intelligence, better known as infiltrators, informants
and spies.

    Though collecting from the skies is expensive, it allows
access to places that were once unreachable, such as Soviet ICBM
sites. But such data do not always reveal intentions. Aerial
surveillance showed that Saddam had moved his army to Iraq's
border with Kuwait last summer. It could not reveal whether he
intended that merely as an act of intimidation or as a prelude
to attack. Neither will technical spying prowess be able to
predict popular uprisings like those that swept across Iran in
1979 or the Soviet Union this year. "You don't sense the mood
of the bazaar from a satellite 100 miles in space," says George
Carver, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies who was the CIA's special assistant to the director of
Vietnamese affairs from 1966 to 1973. "To do that you need human
beings in there mixing it up."

    American intelligence gathering is also hobbled by the
familiar Washington turf wars, especially the competition
between the CIA and the various branches of military
intelligence. Some blame that rivalry for the fact that during
the 1989 invasion of Panama, American troops spent four days
locating General Manuel Noriega. CIA defenders contend that the
agency was kept in the dark about the invasion until a few hours
beforehand, thus limiting what it could do. "There is too much
cowboyism going on, too much effort by agencies to duplicate the
work," says New Mexico Representative Bill Richardson, a member
of the House intelligence committee. "They don't share
information."

    The director of Central Intelligence is nominally in
charge of all U.S. intelligence-gathering operations, but the
Secretary of Defense is de facto boss of defense agency
intelligence. He's "the 900-lb. gorilla in intelligence," argues
Richard Helms, who was CIA chief under Lyndon Johnson and
Richard Nixon. There are calls for the creation of an
intelligence czar with unassailable authority. Failing that,
critics are insisting that the warring agencies work out clearer
terms of cooperation that the next CIA chief can unequivocally
enforce.

    However the CIA defines its mandate, the agency will have
to be headed by someone who not only has a sharply analytical
mind but would be a director Congress could fully trust. There
are few who doubt that Gates fits the first description. It is
now up to the Senate to decide whether he fits the second as
well.