COLUMN ONE : The Battle to Build a New CIA : Critics say the agency has failed to keep up with threats such as the Soviet Union’s disintegration and the lethal arsenals of small nations. Its mission, tactics and leadership have all come under scrutiny.

Last February, just as the ground assault of Operation Desert Storm was about to begin, U.S. commanders received news so alarming that they halted the countdown to war. Out ahead of one of the massive tank columns poised for the first thrust against Iraqi military positions, ominous metal devices had been spotted peeking up through the sifting sands of what was supposed to be empty desert.

Back to headquarters went a none-too-polite message: Those SOBs in intelligence didn’t tell us about the minefield.

The message touched off a frantic search for an explanation. And when the answer came, it came from the Central Intelligence Agency: Delving into a trove of maps and satellite photographs of the Arabian Peninsula accumulated over the past decade, a CIA specialist determined that the deadly looking devices were not mines but the caps on long-abandoned oil exploration sites.

The countdown could resume.

The incident, while lacking the drama of cloak-and-dagger lore and legend, reflects a new reality for the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community. Created after World War II primarily to meet the threat of the Soviet Union, the CIA has had to begin adapting--and rather rapidly--to a far different and more diffuse array of challenges.

Little states with big weapons of mass destruction, virulent local conflicts over ethnic and nationalist rivalries, drug trafficking and terrorism, even economic competition from longstanding allies are among the new threats the agency must track.

Even the Soviet threat has shifted. For four decades, U.S. spycraft was obsessed with events in the tiny space within the Kremlin’s walls. Today, the greater political threat is a long way from Moscow, as Soviet republics demanding independence undermine the stability of a still-deadly nuclear power. As one of the world’s last empires disintegrates, monitoring the economic productivity of Soviet wheat fields has become as important as satellite surveillance of its missile silos.

And that sea change in the nature of the task facing the U.S. intelligence community comes at a time when, over the next 18 months, the CIA and its sister agencies are expected to face demands for the biggest overhaul in mission, funding and structure since they were founded.

Already, a potentially far-reaching debate is under way in Congress and in the Administration about how the agency--long the central pillar of U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts--should redirect its efforts and reorder its priorities in a transformed but no less dangerous world.

“The cataclysm of change which has taken place obviously requires a total reassessment of the intelligence function to face the new world,” said William E. Colby, a former World War II intelligence operative who served as director of Central Intelligence from 1973 to 1976.

The reappraisal comes at a time when the agency faces a barrage of conflicting pressures.

Critics in Congress and elsewhere say the CIA and its sister intelligence-gathering agencies are bloated, rife with overlap and too strangled by layers of bureaucratic reviews to do their jobs efficiently. The old debate about whether the CIA relies too heavily on satellite and electronic gadgetry at the expense of human spies has flared anew. And, in light of mandated cutbacks in its $30-billion annual budget, both critics and supporters agree that the entire intelligence apparatus needs to be streamlined and made more timely.

In the boldest of many proposals, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) has even introduced a bill proposing that the CIA be eliminated altogether and its functions absorbed by the State Department.

Another dramatic change being considered by both the Senate and House oversight committees is to strip the CIA chief of his mandate to direct the entire intelligence community and give that responsibility to a new intelligence czar.

The turmoil is intensifying just as the agency is about to get a new director. President Bush has nominated Robert M. Gates, a former senior CIA officer and now deputy director of the National Security Council, to replace retiring Director of Central Intelligence William H. Webster.

Although Gates is no newcomer to intelligence gathering, critics say unresolved questions about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal--and what some outsiders find to be a sometimes off-putting personal manner--could put him at a disadvantage just as lawmakers have opened debate on the agency’s future.

A lifelong Soviet specialist, Gates is also criticized by some as being too preoccupied with the old Soviet threat.

Gates aside, an acrimonious debate has broken out over the question of just how much change is actually needed and what the role of Congress should be.

“The last thing the U.S. government can afford at this juncture in world affairs is the trauma and disruption of a root-and-branch intelligence reorganization,” said George Carver, a former CIA official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Others say President Bush, not Congress, should orchestrate changes according to the Administration’s needs. “I am very dubious that change can be legislated,” said Gen. William E. Odom, former director of the super-secret National Security Agency, at a hearing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in March.

Whoever handles the reappraisal, experts both inside and outside the CIA are urging that U.S. intelligence agencies worry less about gathering secrets and more about figuring out the meaning of the avalanche of data to which they already have access--especially now that the end of the Cold War has stripped the cloak of secrecy from so much information about the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

So prolific is the intelligence community’s outpouring of data that the average day’s output comes up to a tall man’s waist, according to specialists.

“The major change in intelligence as a result of the new age of glasnost will be a final shift of the primary concentration of intelligence from collection to analysis,” Colby predicted.

Added Carver: “No satellite can sense the mood and pulse of a bazaar, a foreign capital, a restless province or of disaffected dissidents.” That, he suggests, takes human analysts.

Others say the CIA should get out of the prediction business altogether. “The intelligence community has set for itself an impossible task of primarily being a predictor and explainer of events. Nobody can predict the future,” said a private U.S. intelligence specialist.

On that score, the CIA’s track record is indeed mixed. Gates predicted in early 1989 that Afghanistan’s leader Najibullah would not last six months after Soviet troops withdrew; he is still in power today.

Critics also complained that the CIA was slow to realize the scope of Saddam Hussein’s intentions in Kuwait last year. This year, they charge, the agency anticipated neither the scale of the postwar uprisings or the Iraqi dictator’s durability after defeat.

“These are things that plague the agency and the U.S. government the most,” said former senior CIA official Graham Fuller. “The agency is superb in giving you the order of battle and help in tactical intelligence,” he said, but less good at answering questions about the future actions of political leaders and masses of people.

“Would Saddam withdraw from Kuwait? Not a single source could have told us even if we had a fly on the wall of Saddam’s office. Or would he stay in power after? It’s essentially unknowable,” he said.

Instead, some argue, the CIA mission should be oriented toward more “policy-relevant” actions, specifically showing the White House ways to influence the course of foreign events.

Criticism and reshuffling are not new to the CIA. Throughout its 44-year history, the agency has recurrently been castigated by one group or another--and repeatedly reformed and reoriented in recent years. During the late 1970s, for example, then-Director Stansfield Turner, appointed by President Jimmy Carter, drastically cut back on covert action and fired many seasoned field operatives, accelerating the shift to spy satellites and electronic eavesdropping. Morale in the operations side of the CIA plummeted.

President Ronald Reagan’s CIA director, former campaign manager William J. Casey, began rebuilding the so-called “human” intelligence network, but the process is slow and far from complete. Intelligence analysts say it takes years for agents to rise up the ranks sufficiently to be able to know what is happening within the inner circle of a foreign government.

Moreover, Casey’s penchant for secret operations--sometimes so secret that only he knew the full scope of what the CIA was doing--plunged the entire agency into disrepute, particularly after the Iran-Contra debacle. Casey’s successor, former FBI Director Webster, put the CIA back on its feet, patching up relations with Congress and restoring the agency’s battered public image.

And, in their own defense, CIA officials contend that they have already taken substantial steps to keep up with the times. “In 1981, we moved Eastern Europe away from the Soviet account because we thought that’s how it was going to go,” said Gary Foster, deputy director for CIA planning and coordination.

Since 1947, more than half the U.S. intelligence budget has been devoted to equipment and analysts to spy on the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies, but in 1984, the agency began shifting analysts from Soviet military intelligence to look at the very ethnic and nationality disputes that today threaten the Soviet Union with disintegration.

By 1987, the CIA sent the Reagan White House a classified report predicting that Gorbachev’s reforms would unleash a political and economic upheaval throughout the East Bloc.

A decade ago, the agency also restructured itself--from political, economic, military and other subject divisions to analytic components based on regions.

“We’re further along on issues that people think we haven’t gotten into,” Foster asserted. His own so-called “fifth directorate” was established in 1989 in response to dramatic world changes to look at changes for the year 2000 and beyond.

In 1989, the CIA started a new group working on the political, economic and technical impact of environmental issues.

“The great strength of the agency is that it is not just Soviet-focused,” Foster contended. During Operation Desert Storm, the CIA tripled its manpower capability in the Persian Gulf, and satellites tracking the Soviet Union were diverted to the Gulf region.

Working closely with coalition intelligence services, the CIA was also able to uncover Baghdad’s hit teams in Europe, Asia and Africa before they could launch mass terrorist attacks. All of the 170 Gulf-related terrorist incidents during the 42-day war were small; only six people were killed.

“In the Gulf, the real issue was not if we had the intelligence,” Foster added, “but whether we had the capacity to use it all.”

Even so, the agency and its supporters appear to be in for trying times as Congress and the Administration debate how to revamp its role and restructure its responsibilities. No one knows yet how the CIA and its new director will fare during the coming onslaught, but one thing does seem clear: The need for intelligence is not likely to recede.

There is no “ glasnost dividend” for intelligence, warns former CIA official Carver. “As America’s current defense capabilities decrease, more, not less, intelligence will be needed.”