No Brickbats for Casey : CIA Chief Has Done Just What the Reformers Demanded

When William Casey became the 11th director of central intelligence on Jan. 28, 1981, he assumed the leadership of a U.S. intelligence community, and particularly a CIA, in a state of considerable disarray.

The time of troubles in the mid-1970s--with its welter of accusations, investigations and resultant restrictions--had taken a toll in effectiveness and morale. Casey had his work cut out for him.

One of his most notable achievements has been a dramatic improvement in operational capabilities and intelligence analysis, both by the CIA and the intelligence community as a whole. Along with this have come matching improvements in utility and effectiveness--derived significantly from Casey’s relationship with President Reagan.

Casey has been given a degree of access to the President and to the highest levels of policy deliberation, symbolized by Casey’s Cabinet rank, that no previous director has ever enjoyed. Furthermore, his standing with the President and the White House has also enabled Casey to keep the budgets of the CIA and the intelligence community on a steady rise, even in an era of cuts and fiscal austerity.

But a boost in morale and effectiveness is not the whole story of Casey’s leadership.

To discharge his responsibilities, every director of central intelligence needs to fashion and stand on a three-legged stool. One leg encompasses his executive branch relationships, particularly with the President, the White House staff and the director’s Cabinet-level colleagues. The second encompasses his relations with his own staff and agency, with the rest of the U.S. intelligence community and, to a lesser extent, with friendly foreign services. The third leg encompasses the director’s relations with Congress, especially with the members and staffs of the Senate and House committees that have direct or indirect responsibility for intelligenceoversight. Casey has done admirably in strengthening this stool’s first two legs, but not the third.

Although things are better now than they were during Casey’s initial years as director of central intelligence, he never has developed a reserve fund of personal respect and good will on Capitol Hill that he can draw on in a time of stress or crisis. Precisely such a time, of course, is currently besetting Reagan and the upper echelons of his Administration--including his director, the CIA and the whole U.S. intelligence community.

The facts of the complicated Iran arms sale- contra aid imbroglio are too murky to warrant any interim conclusion other than that there is probably ample blame for everyone directly involved. Nonetheless, most of the criticism currently being leveled at Casey personally, and the CIA institutionally, is either deliberately disingenuous or patently wide of the mark.

It would be totally out of character for Casey ever to tell a congressional committee, under oath, anything that he did not know was true or, even less, anything that he knew not to be true. Hence, in the absence of overwhelming contrary evidence, of which none currently exists, we have to accept as accurate Casey’s assertions of his own lack of knowledge about this affair, and of the agency’s institutional non-involvement in it--save for the provision of occasional support to National Security Council staff activity whose full dimensions were not known.

Some contend that if Casey and the CIA were neither involved in nor aware of what was going on, they may be innocent of compliance but are guilty of incompetence. Those who so argue are actually demonstrating their own ignorance, since they are berating Casey and the CIA for not doing things that would have been improper and even illegal for them to do.

Liberal critics of the Reagan Administration, shocked by the realization that people other than Lillian Hellman are entitled to the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination, should also recognize that the strictures against U.S. intelligence services’ monitoring the actions of American citizens, imposed with such high moral fervor in the mid-1970s, keep these services from checking closely on contra supporters as well as Vietnam War protesters or, now, those who support the Sandinistas. Those who contend that Casey and the CIA should have made it their business to know what the National Security Council staff was up to are actually arguing that the CIA should run intelligence operations against our own government--a monstrous suggestion.

It is unfortunate when anyone is felled by a medical affliction, and doubly unfortunate that Casey was so felled at this particular time. His friends and even his critics can only wish him a speedy, complete recovery. The medical prognosis is perforce uncertain. To the extent that he has time for contemplative reflection in the hospital, however, Casey can look on the past six years, even the past weeks, with comfortable equanimity.

Strong, complex personalities generally leave complex legacies. Casey is both strong and complex, and his legacies in the intelligence sphere, not surprisingly, reflect both of these characteristics. Nonetheless, they are legacies in which he can legitimately take enormous pride, whether or not he ever returns to the seventh floor of the CIA’s Langley headquarters or to the director’s suite in the Old Executive Office Building.