Webster Takes Judicious Road on CIA Reforms

At one stop in a six-nation Middle East tour this summer, Bill Webster and an aide were distracted by an insistent buzzing. A search led them to a nearby door.

Webster pulled it open to reveal an eavesdropper, a wire in each hand and a mortified look on his face.

The reaction of the new U.S. director of central intelligence was true to form. “I smiled,” he said.

William Hedgecock Webster, successor since last May to William J. Casey atop the American intelligence bureaucracy, doesn’t act rashly. Most people find that admirable.

Harangued by Congress to clean up a CIA battered by the Iran-Contra scandal, he instead asked a private lawyer to review the list of alleged misdeeds and wrongdoers--a review now in its sixth month. The lawmakers have been mollified, so far, with paper reforms that some say have as much public-relations value as usefulness in reining in the U.S. espionage apparatus.

Changes are coming at the CIA and other arms of the intelligence community, Webster said in an interview, but they will be “more evolutionary than revolutionary.”

“He’s right to be judicious,” said Sen. David L. Boren (D-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a member of the Senate Iran-Contra investigative panel. “He’s off to a good start.”

Yet his measured pace already has members of Congress fidgeting and intelligence experts inside and outside the community “waiting for the other shoe to drop,” several said in recent interviews.

‘Hasn’t Had Impact Yet’

“He’s still an enigma,” one veteran Washington expert said last month in describing the CIA’s internal assessment of the 63-year-old former FBI director. “He hasn’t had any impact yet.”

Some legislators, and fewer experts, demand a CIA housecleaning that will send an unmistakable message about Webster’s standards of conduct. More experts want a tough look at an intelligence empire that has mushroomed under seven years of lavish funding--annual budget hikes have neared 25%--and capricious management.

Crucial to Defense

They say Webster must boost morale and recruiting, increase the surveillance from space that is crucial to defense and arms control, fix a counterintelligence program that currently cannot catch foreign spies and use more humans, not machines, to gather “street intelligence” that the United States lacks in areas such as the Middle East.

Some fear his concern over learning the espionage ropes and pacifying Iran-Contra critics will push more urgent tasks too far into the future.

“He has no time,” said Allan E. Goodman, a senior CIA staff member from 1976 to 1980 and now an associate dean at Georgetown University in Washington. “What needs to be done is a long-term process.”

Hopes to Outlast Reagan

Webster clearly hopes to serve in the top intelligence post past the Reagan presidency. If so, some experts say, he has the 15 months left in Reagan’s term to prove himself, both to the next President and to his internal constituency.

Otherwise, said one analyst, “the guy may well be perceived as a lame duck, and the career guys may just decide to wait (him) out.”

Webster takes the prodding seriously. “I have to accept any criticism of what is humanly possible to do that I haven’t done in the four months that I’ve been on board,” he said this month. But since May, he noted, he has visited 10 nations, toured most of the intelligence bureaucracy and spoken around the country.

Webster has given some management tasks in his first months to Robert M. Gates, his deputy and before that Casey’s. Among other duties, Gates accompanies Webster to congressional briefings and plays a key role in budget matters.

Meanwhile, Webster is attacking the intelligence community’s most pressing problem, its lost credibility and trust:

--Both Webster and congressional leaders have overhauled old rules for reviewing such covert operations as the ill-fated arms shipments to Iran. CIA review panels now include top analysts--scholars of intelligence on regional affairs--who had been excluded. The Senate Intelligence Committee now reviews all covert operations four times annually; staffers review them almost weekly.

Spot-Checking Spending

Boren also has set up a Senate accounting team to spot-check CIA spending, bypassing agency bookkeepers.

--Webster helped secure an agreement giving lawmakers prompt White House notice of new covert operations, a sore point in the Iran affair. The two congressional intelligence panels, for example, were briefed days before Lebanese terrorist Fawaz Younis was arrested Sept. 13 on a Mediterranean yacht where he had been lured by the FBI. The operation was planned by the CIA’s counterterrorism center.

“They’ve been absolutely candid,” Boren said. “We’ve had every kind of information shoved on us.”

--Webster has reworked guidelines for the production of intelligence “estimates”--briefing papers for policy-makers--to ensure, for example, that dissenting views are not buried in footnotes. By separating top CIA officials from the estimate process, he has signaled that analysts’ views should not be tailored to please superiors, but should present the facts “with all the bark off,” one senior CIA official said.

CIA analysts came under fire for producing incorrect estimates of Iran’s political instability which supported the White House’s arms-for-hostage dealings in mid-1985.

Blunt Warning on Iran

Webster’s backers say he signaled a change last June by approving a blunt CIA warning that Iran would harass U.S. naval escort operations in the Persian Gulf--a view at odds with U.S. policy but ultimately justified by events.

--Webster’s special counsel on the CIA’s Iran-Contra dealings, Washington attorney Russell J. Breummer, has free rein to review other investigations of the scandal and to “fill in the gaps” in the record. Breummer, who compiled a similar report after Webster took over a scandal-plagued FBI in 1978, is expected to deliver his findings in mid-November.

Despite those moves, Boren and some other lawmakers are openly impatient for Webster to clean house at the CIA, ousting anyone who may have violated laws or policies or who lied to Congress during the Iran-Contra affair.

“To me,” Boren said of Webster, “the test will come around Thanksgiving time: Will he show himself willing to take action, or will he leave things as they are?”

Senate Intelligence Committee member Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) sees no need to delay. “I have concern about people who have appeared before the intelligence committee who have not told the truth,” he said, “and I don’t think action ought to await the Iran-Contra committee’s report” expected in about two weeks.

His Personal Stamp

Specter said Webster’s actions against the officials, whom he did not name, “will give his stamp of approval or disapproval to the agency’s conduct for some time to come.”

Webster acknowledges the pressure but rules out job changes until Breummer and the House and Senate Iran-Contra panels issue their reports.

“On those things that have been troublesome, he is proceeding with care . . . so that he doesn’t have a morale problem,” said his deputy, Gates, in an interview. “He’s going to see what the special counsel says before deciding not just ‘who should I fire or reassign, if anyone,’ but ‘are there procedures that should be changed?’ ”

Reports suggest that some CIA officials linked to former White House aide Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North’s arms pipeline to the Nicaraguan Contras will depart on their own. One, a Honduras CIA officer who has not been publicly named, has been routinely reassigned, officials say. Two others, former Costa Rica station chief Joe Fernandez and a second, unnamed Honduras agent, are on paid leave. Three more, including deputy director for operations Clair George, the agency’s top covert-operations official, are said to plan to retire from the agency.

Webster has taken great pains to praise the dedication and talent of CIA workers in the scandal’s wake, and his aides stress that only a few officials have come under a cloud.

Underline Disapproval

Still, some observers say, Webster should take action to underline his disapproval of any misconduct. Otherwise, one former congressional expert said, “it leaves the impression that this is something acceptable and leaves the opportunity in place to duplicate this sometime in the future. If there’s anything the agency’s very good at, it’s hiding the facts.”

There is another reason for quick action: Tougher battles lie ahead.

Admirers and critics alike are alarmed by the CIA’s soiled image in the United States and abroad and its impact on recruiting foreign informants and top American analysts and agents.

Georgetown’s Goodman said the Iran-Contra affair could be “the nail in the coffin” for CIA recruitment of informants in unfriendly countries because the scandal’s disclosures suggest the agency cannot keep a secret.

“The brave guy in a Communist country or in a crazy government abroad, who we may need to give us that crucial piece of information--he won’t come forward anymore,” Goodman said. “It’ll take 10, 12 years to rebuild that credibility.”

Similar Impact Foreseen

Retired Adm. Bobby Inman, Casey’s deputy early in the Reagan Administration, foresees a similar impact at home, where he said it was becoming possible again for the CIA “to carry on conversations again with academics, and U.S. businessmen were at least willing to be more helpful.” He said the scandals may lead to higher turnover within the intelligence bureaucracy and difficulty in finding top-notch replacements.

Goodman estimates that student inquiries about intelligence careers have fallen in half since the Iran-Contra affair broke.

Webster differs, saying the CIA is besieged for jobs by some of America’s best academic talent. But image clearly concerns him, and he has sent Gates and others to brief reporters and to speak with unusual openness about the espionage business.

Webster also faces rising concern over the quality of CIA, FBI and Pentagon counterintelligence--spy-catching, double agents and deception operations--despite years of study by a task force that Webster himself headed.

The community has been hit by at least seven spying debacles since 1985, including a Moscow embassy spy ring uncovered this year and Cuban double-agent operations revealed this summer.

Conservatives Enraged

The failures have enraged conservatives who now seek tougher domestic security measures to thwart spies. But they also have led some experts to suggest revamping CIA foreign counterintelligence operations, which were partly dismantled in the mid-1970s.

Webster must also deal with one of the most contentious intelligence debates in years--on arms control--when it moves to the political front burner early next year. He supervises intelligence estimates of U.S. ability to monitor Soviet compliance with nuclear weapons treaties, such as the anticipated ban on medium-range missiles.

Verifying Soviet compliance is as much an art as an exact science, and a key means of verification--electronic and photographic surveillance by satellite--is crippled by the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Whatever estimates his agency produces are likely to come under sharp attack by foes in the arms control debate.

“The director is likely to get in the position of having to contribute to a judgment with a big political tail to it,” said Gregory Treverton, a Harvard University intelligence expert and former National Security Council staff member.

Webster has long experience with difficult judgments. He was a federal appeals court judge before his appointment as FBI director. His current style is like that he employed at the FBI in 1978, where he tamed a hostile bureaucracy and restored an agency tarred by a lingering scandal over improperly authorized domestic break-ins by FBI agents. There, Webster deliberated at length before punishing only three of nearly 70 FBI officials accused of exceeding their authority.