The Perils of Covert Policy: Snares and Seductions : CIA: Out of the chaos of Panama, William H. Webster and the White House offer assassination as a potential tool for conducting U.S. foreign policy.

Two public statements--deliberate but hardly considered--have given official notice that the United States is taking off the velvet gloves and restoring assassination to its toolbox for the exercise of foreign policy. William H. Webster, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the White House may protest this isn’t what they meant at all, at all, but the damage has been done. Only one meaning can be attached to talk of “loosening” the rules against assassination, and the rest of the world will not require it to be spelled out.

The chief mystery of the new policy is who came up with it--the White House or Webster? True, it first emerged from Webster, who told an interviewer on Oct. 16 that the CIA couldn’t do much to help Panamanians plotting the overthrow of Gen. Manuel A. Noriega as long as the anti-assassination orders of Presidents Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan--a consensus if there ever was one--barred assistance to foreigners whose plans might include the death of the principal target.

Webster’s point did not come veiled in ambiguity. Loosening rules “could very well make a difference in the next (coup attempt),” he said, “because the likelihood of the next plotter planning that he may probably have to take Noriega out is real.” As threats go, this was pretty naked, but Webster dotted the “i”s anyway with “Noriega’s days are numbered.”

Some CIA officials and hard-line members of the intelligence oversight committees have been muttering unhappily for years about the Boy Scout rules binding them since the 1970s, but even they were startled by Webster’s breathtaking candor. Before his appointment as director of Central Intelligence (DCI) two years ago, Judge Webster--the title he prefers--spent his entire career as a lawyer, as a federal judge in Missouri and as director of the FBI for nine years. It was Webster’s reputation for caution that led Reagan to choose him as William J. Casey’s successor, and caution was again the reason President Bush passed up his own favorite to reappoint Webster a year ago.

But caution is not what Presidents really want running the CIA. Webster has been much criticized in Washington for his policeman’s approach to the art of secret intelligence, for the agency’s failures to predict the course of glasnost in the Soviet Union or the tenacity of the government the Soviets left in Afghanistan and, most recently, for the CIA’s role in Panama. Such charges come with the territory: “An unhappy White House,” said one retired CIA officer, “is part of the DCI’s job description.”

But Webster clearly felt he’d been marked to take the fall as official scapegoat for the failure of Panamanian junior officers to oust Noriega while U.S. forces scuffed toes in the dirt nearby. Thus trapped, Webster abandoned his usual caution in dramatic fashion and insisted it wasn’t him, honest fellas, his hands had been tied. After two years at the CIA, has the judge concluded that the law stops at the water’s edge, that the United States can convict foreign leaders in private council and then encourage, aid and abet their execution without respect for what the rest of the world may think? There is a time-honored phrase for this sort of judge--a hanging judge.

Webster may have been first to go on the record blaming the rules of the game, but the White House backed him the next day in a statement that broke no new ground in the art of qualification: “We certainly are in agreement with everything Judge Webster said.” This is not a guileless remark. Indeed, the Administration confirmed it has been circulating drafts of new language to replace Reagan’s executive order of Dec. 4, 1981, that “No person employed by or acting on the behalf of the United States government shall engage, or conspire to engage, in assassination.” Webster may have been fighting to save his job and reputation, but we are still forced to conclude the whole exercise is Bush’s way of proving his campaign claim that he is “a combat kind of guy.”

A sort of silence has now settled on this extraordinary affair--the sort that invites second thoughts. It gives the White House and the congressional oversight committees time to consider what was forgotten in the heat of political infighting over Panama--not only the melancholy history of U.S. efforts to kill foreign leaders, but the awful trauma of assassination if we are the victim. When John F. Kennedy was shot in November, 1963, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, for a time believed the murder had been engineered by South Vietnamese seeking revenge for the deep U.S. involvement in the brutal killing of our own avowed allies in Saigon, Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu, only two weeks earlier. Later Johnson told a journalist the United States had been running a “damned Murder Inc.” in the Caribbean. Other officials, including Kennedy’s brother Robert, wondered if the hand behind the gun was Fidel Castro’s, responding in kind to the Kennedys’ attempt to kill him. All these plots and suspicions were held in deepest secrecy. They shocked the country when partially unravelled by a Senate investigation in 1976, and continue to exact their price in the agony of doubt and denial.

Running a “Murder Inc.” was far from the U.S. government’s mind when it established the CIA to analyze intelligence information back in 1947. For the first year the agency did not even have spies. But in 1948, the White House asked the CIA to prevent a Communist victory in an Italian election, and with one brief exception--the four years under Jimmy Carter’s DCI, Stansfield Turner--it has been the covert action capabilities of the CIA that tempted U.S. Presidents, not its unparalleled ability to collect information. Analysts in the CIA have often felt like poor cousins, complaining of the difficulty in getting officials to read their paper and warning that covert action rarely achieves anything useful. But the truth is Presidents hate to read all the time, they take things personally and the CIA is often the only tool around to make international opponents feel the heat. For the White House, covert action is like an addiction to alcohol--periodic binges with heartfelt promises of reform the morning after.

For the moment Noriega is Public Enemy No. 1 in Washington--a year or two ago it was Moammar Kadafi of Libya. Noriega has been accused of murdering a political opponent, giving intelligence secrets to Castro and providing services to Colombian drug gangs supplying the U.S. cocaine market. The public record indeed suggests Noriega is a wicked man, but probably the real reason he has become top enemy is the angry embarrassment of U.S. officials who trained Noriega, greased his rise and forgave the many sins revealed by communications intercepts in return for his help in channeling aid to the Contras. If we are defending a principle here, it is only Mr. Dooley’s, that an “honest” politician once bought, stays bought.

But consider the implications of Webster policy. The White House endorsement has, in effect, rescinded the old rules pending final language for the new ones. In the meantime, the White House, the agency and the intelligence committees have all made it clear they want success the next time, and are willing to talk to killers to get it.

If Noriega is, in the judge’s phrase, “taken out” will anyone believe-- should anyone believe--our protests that we aided the coup, not the murder? Where coups are concerned, aid from the United States comes in two forms--moral support promising early recognition of success and intelligence information specifying where, when, how the target will be vulnerable. If we are to tell the plotters when Noriega retires for the night, it will take more than public relations to feign surprise on discovery of the body the next morning.

Before the judge made his proposal, the United States, like every other country, had a public policy opposing assassination of foreign leaders. We suffered the embarrassment of making our policy explicit because we had been caught lurking on the premises of actual murders and planning others. In a pinch, real or fancied, almost any nation will contemplate and even commit an assassination, but no nation can announce a policy of “support,” however clouded by sophistry. For those who plan to kill political enemies invite the same in return. Public murder is a contagious disease.

But for the moment, second thoughts about the post-finicky CIA are all private. Almost as surprising as Webster’s call for new rules has been the invitation of Sen. David Boren (D-Okla.) for Bush to propose some, thereby abandoning a decade of unbroken support for a strict no-assassination policy by the Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee which Boren heads. The once-vulnerable Webster appears to have saved his job for at least a few more months. But many old intelligence hands say they have been here before, and killing enemies doesn’t work. Allies will never support it, they say, intended victims will draw strength from playing David to the U.S. Goliath, and ordinary Americans will flinch at the first body.