Cia : A Case of Domestic Intrigue

President-elect George Bush, who brought something of a “gee-whiz” attitude to the intelligence business when he was appointed director of Central Intelligence in 1975, will now get a chance to show what he learned about the job when he appoints his own man to run the CIA. The biggest surprise would be a decision to keep the current director, William H. Webster, who had the thankless job of picking up the pieces left by the death of William J. Casey. But unless Bush chooses to stick with a caretaker regime, he will want a director who owes the job to him.

Once upon a time, in the infancy of U.S. intelligence a generation ago, Presidents were told it would be safe to let trusted professionals go on handling the spooks when administrations changed. Thus President John F. Kennedy left the tweedy Allen W. Dulles with his wink and his nod and his big ho-ho-ho laugh in charge of the CIA in 1961, on the eve of the disastrous invasion of Cuba by an agency-run army at the Bay of Pigs. This was the sort of event that teaches small children not to sit on hot stoves.

No President made that mistake again. But choosing their own men does not always work either--witness the messy Iran-Contra affair largely orchestrated by Ronald Reagan’s trusted soul mate Casey, a malodorous political disaster sure to occupy several chapters in every future history of the Reagan years. After the President himself, the two most important jobholders in any Administration are the secretary of defense, because he is going to spend all the money, and the director of the CIA, because he can wreck the place through a moment’s inattention.

A string of intelligence disasters in the last 25 years have left Americans thinking trouble goes with the territory. In a testy mood, intelligence professionals suggest it is all the fault of the press, for being so “negative,” or of the laws, for not including an official secrets act, or of “liberals,” for being soft on Communists. This won’t wash. Intelligence disasters aren’t the result of the public blundering in, but of Presidents and their advisers insisting on big results in a hurry.

As long as the media aren’t listening, the harshest critics of intelligence disasters are the professionals, who can forgive the accidents of unkind fate but not the flouting of accepted rules of good trade craft in the field. It was the professionals who said the addition of a tank or two could never turn the tide at the Bay of Pigs; that no coup mounted at the 11th hour could ensure democracy in Chile; that sleight-of-hand financing of the Contras might rescue the Sandinistas in the end; that “cooking the books” to come up with politically convenient intelligence estimates in Vietnam, Iran, Nicaragua and Mexico would not change the facts. Choosing the CIA director doesn’t offer a guarantee against disaster.

But try selling this common-sense view in Washington. There a backstage struggle over choosing the next director is already drawing blood. An unidentified cabal of CIA officials has been tugging reporters’ coattails with word that Webster, a former director of the FBI, is on the way out; or deserves to be because he is too cautious; or has to be because he is ruining agency morale by disciplining officers implicated in the Iran-Contra scam, or can safely be because the debris from the Casey years has been swept up.

These mutterings of discontent are not hard to figure. In the first place, the CIA would rather be run by a Cub Scout den mother than a former head of the FBI. In the second place, the departure of a director can always be expected to open up other jobs as well. But if the charges aimed at Webster have the weight of marshmallow fluff, they are wounding all the same. If Webster is really a friend of Bush, then Bush will need a reason to replace him, and an agency revolt (however self-serving) could be enough.

Battling over control of the CIA is now an accepted part of politics in Washington because the agency has become a principal instrument for carrying out presidential policy in foreign affairs. The old cover story about timely information for wise decision-making is no longer plausible; the CIA is the closest thing any President has to a blunt instrument. When Reagan wanted to make life tough for the Sandinistas he didn’t send in the Marines, because Congress wouldn’t let him; and he didn’t rest content with shaking his finger in State Department white papers, because the Sandinistas would have laughed at him. He sent in the CIA, and while the Sandinistas remain in power, their anguished cries suggest the agency drew blood.

If Bush intends his own presidency to be more of the same, he is going to want a CIA willing to run risks for him, just as Casey’s CIA did for Reagan. The question remains whether the challenges facing Bush will be the sort the CIA can help to meet. Shipping Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to Afghan rebels is right up the agency’s alley. So is funding the democratic opposition in Chile or Peru, or bugging the phones of the Palestine Liberation Organization, or encouraging Cuban defectors, or making sure Solidarity printers in Poland have a supply of paper, or balancing Jonas Savimbi’s checkbook in Namibia--or simply reading other people’s mail.

But something has happened to the world since Reagan and Bush first went to Washington together: The carefully drawn lines of the Cold War have turned watery, and the old rhetoric of East-West struggle seems to miss the point. Reagan says it is his tough stance that has done the job, and pushed the Soviets into retreat, and it may be so. During the election, Bush insisted more of the same will wrap it up, and that could be true too. But the conviction that the Soviets are the principal U.S. challenge is increasingly hard to sustain, and Mikhail S. Gorbachev seems to have been quicker to catch the drift than Reagan or Bush.

The U.S. military was the blunt instrument for the first 25 years of the Cold War, until the boys came home from Vietnam and Congress made it clear they wouldn’t be sent off again anytime soon. The CIA was asked to take up the slack in the 15 years since, thereby breaking one of the oldest rules of the intelligence business--never ask the spooks to attempt secretly what you can’t muster political support to do openly.

But for the moment the old “expansionist” Soviet Union has turned inward to deal with problems that look--albeit on a different scale--not so different from our own. Before picking his director, Bush ought to ask himself what an aggressive CIA can do to deal with problems like tariff walls around the Common Market, Japanese success in developing superconductors, a collapse of Third World debt service, the U.S. trade deficit, drought-induced crop failures or world ozone depletion.

Since the end of World War II, the biggest job of U.S. Presidents has traditionally been foreign policy, and the biggest problem in foreign policy has traditionally been threats to the balance of power. It may be so again. But can there be any doubt that the biggest problems now facing the United States are economic and environmental, not cockamamie worries that Red hordes are on the march?

The CIA has plenty to offer a President determined to deal with real problems facing the country, but success will require a different sort of direction. Where is Bush to find the man or woman for the job? Old warhorses like Casey are not available; the last survivors of World War II are too decrepit. Agency professionals come burdened with a history of in-house quarrels, and many public figures are only running for President.

If it should occur to Bush that this time around it is intelligence that the President needs, he might look among the people whose combat training was acquired while running big universities or international banks. This might make for an interesting change. But of one thing at least we can be sure: When Bush’s choice goes before the Senate to swear most solemnly that he shares the senators’ suspicion of clandestine enterprise, he will be telling what I believe Huck Finn called a stretcher.