For CIA: To Find the Right Wise Man

It “will be hard,” Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower predicted in 1947, to “find exactly the right man.” Testifying on Capitol Hill about a prospective director for the new Central Intelligence Agency, Ike showed foresight. Over the next 40 years, 10 CIA directors have given seven Presidents cause to wonder: Where was the right man?

The eighth postwar President, Ronald Reagan, has not joined in the lament, showing unswerving faith in his choice of William J. Casey as the 11th director of Central Intelligence--a more absolute confidence than Eisenhower felt when, after winning the White House, he put the CIA in the hands of Allen Welsh Dulles, widely acclaimed wartime “spy-master,” seasoned diplomat, international lawyer and, conveniently, brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. While Eisenhower recognized Dulles’ “strange kind of genius” for waging the most hush-hush campaigns of the “secret war,” he also saw and resigned himself to deficiencies in managerial skill and even occasional lapses in good judgment--curious departures from an otherwise uncanny intuition about world affairs. Not exactly the right man, but close enough for the next President, Democrat John F. Kennedy, to reappoint the Republican Dulles, an aging legend with whom he felt little rapport. This gave Dulles his Pyrrhic victory: Honored with the longest term in office of any CIA director, and then forced to resign in the haunting aftermath of the Bay of Pigs.

Whether or not Dulles’ latest successor will also leave office under a cloud, Casey’s eventual departure will certainly mark the end of a CIA era, the last hurrah of a generation of U.S. intelligence officers. While Dulles was a senior hero of the wartime Office of Strategic Services, Casey was one of its enfants terribles, both men having first enlisted in secret service when espionage agents parachuted from airplanes with radio transmitters strapped to their backs, when Gestapo sadists were the stereotypical enemy and ends justified almost any means.

Like his predecessor, Casey also reads voraciously, is a student (and writer) of history and has worked successfully in the law, politics, diplomacy and high finance. A “tougher nut” than the congenial Dulles, Casey is more adept at bureaucratic infighting, and better suited to administering his own vast bureaucracy, evolved from Dulles’ close-knit “band of brothers.” And where Dulles and Eisenhower settled into a comfortable relationship based on mutual respect, Casey has a close friend in the Oval Office. That well-known friendship guarantees a certain prestige to a battered agency that offers its people much stress and little glory. But the Casey-Reagan connection also points up a distinction between the directorships of the 1950s and ‘80s. Dulles had influence in Washington because he was admired, respected, even loved, as a man and sage-like public servant; Casey commands respect in the Capitol primarily because he has political clout. Whatever the final verdict on Casey’s geopolitical judgment, no discriminating observers will commend him as others commended Dulles in a less cynical decade, saying he was a wise man.

Dulles would have appreciated the epitaph. When, in 1947, he offered Congress his own notion about the desirable qualities of future CIA directors, he stressed that the agency should be led by a man of “judicial temperament” who displayed “discriminating judgment” and “common sense” which “can only come of long experience and profound knowledge” and constant vigilance against the “human frailty of intellectual stubbornness.” A spy-master? Maybe. But above all, a wise man.

This, of course, was all too philosophical and abstract for power-conscious Washington, where interested parties fastened instead, on Dulles’ strong prescription for a civilian director, preferably with expertise in secret intelligence work. If, in a pinch, a military officer were appointed, he should, said Dulles, “divest himself of military rank,” and “take the cloth” of the intelligence service. The religious analogy--from a Presbyterian pastor’s son--seemed appropriate to an agency dominated by a clandestine corps of operational officers who began, during the Cold War, to see themselves as warrior-priests, a select secret fraternity that blackballed “outsiders.”

Until Watergate, the conventional wisdom of CIA professionals was that the best directors were civilian insiders, like Dulles and Richard M. Helms, another OSS alumnus. The favorite whipping-boy of the pros was a military outsider, Adm. William F. Raborn, who headed the agency for one year of the Johnson Administration, while the popular and ambitious Helms waited in the wings as his deputy. One of many tall tales about the hapless Raborn involves a staff meeting when the director ordered his operational men to find a Soviet admiral who would defect to the West “in the next six months.” The silence was broken by some brave soul who tactfully explained that this would be extremely difficult, “because you see, sir, that would make the Russian a traitor to his country.” Raborn reportedly received that explanation as profound and enlightening.

Jimmy Carter’s CIA chief, Adm. Stansfield Turner, has since proven that the Navy can produce capable--if not brilliant or beloved--directors. Millionaire businessman John A. McCone, chosen by Kennedy to replace Dulles, put the lie to the professionals’ mythology that intelligence work is beyond the comprehension of the uninitiated. Hours after demanding to be told, “Exactly what is a double agent?” the newly appointed McCone went into conference with Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, West German spy-master. McCone discussed a double-agent case with such facility that Gehlen, an intelligence veteran since Nazi days, would never have guessed his American opposite to be an absolute novice in the business of espionage.

Finally, post-Watergate Director William E. Colby, still another careerist of OSS antecedence, shattered the last illusion of agency professionals: An “insider” could do no wrong. Choosing to save his agency from political damnation by selectively washing some old dirty linen--like assassination plots--in public, Colby brought upon himself such violent criticism by some old boys it was as if he had defected to Moscow.

What Colby recognized is that the CIA director’s task has become a difficult political balancing act between democracy and secret service, between Congress and the presidency, with the agency itself, a complex and mature institution, playing a somewhat inscrutable role--not always responsive to the whims of its director, whether he be insider, outsider or, like Casey, something in between. Among the many questions of “Contragate” is whether Casey was the man who kept the secrets, or the man from whom the secrets were kept.

After Casey’s departure it will be harder than ever to find the right man--with the necessary technical grasp, administrative know-how and political sensitivity. But it will be absolutely impossible to find such a director who will also meet Dulles’ standards for wisdom and wizardry.

Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, President Harry S. Truman’s director during the Korean War, complained that, among his problems, the American people expected him to be “on a communing level with God and Joe Stalin.” With all the demands on the CIA today, lofty and judicious wisdom about the world is too much to expect of any director. Even experienced civilians like Dulles and Casey fall prey to the official delusion that troubles all secret bureaucracies, or, at best, find themselves caught up in the stresses of day-to-day crises.

A solution? There ought to be a man of wisdom who can look out on the world--and down on the mundane, often sleazy workings of the intelligence community--a wise man who can be placed on that height by the stroke of a presidential pen. Now is the time to appoint a director general of intelligence service, a pretentious title reserved for someone of unquestioned integrity and experience, of the caliber of a U.S. Supreme Court justice. The director general should have a long tenure, command broad bipartisan political respect and be free of all administrative responsibility. Such men are to be found, though they will hardly be lured into public service if they face grueling congressional inquisition.

Consider the irony that we more readily find respected special prosecutors to probe the doings of men in high position than equally respected men to fill those positions. If we must be cynically convinced that no man who seeks office is pure enough to hold office, then let us search for our director general among the philosophers rather than the movers and shakers. It will, or course, be hard to find exactly the right man. But for the sake of keeping the peace in this very violent world, let the search begin.

DR, BARBARA D. CUMMINGS / for The Times