Signs Point to Business as Usual at the New CIA : Intelligence: Director Woolsey refuses to guarantee lawmakers prompt notification of covert actions, funding.

Six years ago, in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal, congressional Democrats and Democratic Party leaders heaped criticism on the way President Ronald Reagan and his CIA director, William J. Casey, had carried out covert intelligence operations.

One of the abuses they cited was the Reagan Administration’s failure to inform Congress about covert operations for as much as a year after they were carried out. Another was the practice of raising money from foreign governments, such as Saudi Arabia, to finance American intelligence operations.

So how much change will there be at the CIA now that President Clinton has taken office and the Democrats are once again in charge of the U.S. intelligence community?

Not very much, if earliest indications are any guide.

At his confirmation hearing Tuesday, R. James Woolsey, Clinton’s new CIA director, repeatedly refused to make any commitment to notify Congress before or within 48 hours after any covert operation--even though the Democratic Congress last year passed legislation, finally vetoed by President Bush, that would have required such notice.

Woolsey also carefully left the door open for the CIA to finance its operations with money raised abroad. The most he would promise was that if the Clinton Administration should ever pass the hat overseas for secret intelligence operations, he would inform congressional committees about the effort.

As it was with covert operations, so it went with other suggestions for change in intelligence policy.

Woolsey, who was formally confirmed Wednesday as CIA director, also resisted suggestions that the CIA should make public its overall budget figures. And, more fundamentally, he rejected suggestions that the end of the Cold War should open the way for major reductions in the intelligence community’s budget or far-reaching changes in the way it operates.

“Although the risk of a single cataclysmic threat to the United States is substantially lower than it was during the Cold War, the number and complexity of very serious threats to major aspects of our nation’s security and interests have grown, not shrunk,” Woolsey testified.

The early signals are disappointing to those who had hoped for quick and dramatic shifts in direction from the Clinton Administration.

“The broad question is whether this new Administration sees foreign policy, as it does domestic policy, as a place for dramatic change,” said Bob Borosage of the Campaign for New Priorities, a group that favors substantial cutbacks in defense spending.

“So far, all the signals from the Clinton Administration have been continuity in foreign policy,” Borosage declared. “Their descriptions of the world are very Bushian, all this nonsense about the threats to the United States being more numerous. And the Woolsey hearing seemed to be very much in that framework.”

“The old enemy is gone, and so are the old budgets of the 1980s,” said Sen. Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio), who supported Woolsey’s nomination but also served notice that he favors deeper cutbacks in the budgets for the intelligence community.

Woolsey’s background and experience suggest that he is more likely to preserve the existing order and traditions of the CIA than to try to shake things up.

For instance, the list of references he submitted to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was headed by Richard M. Helms, who was CIA director from 1966 to 1973 and whom Woolsey said he has known for 20 years.

Also, in 1989, Woolsey, then a private lawyer, represented a veteran intelligence official in a successful appeal of then-CIA Director William H. Webster’s efforts to reprimand the official for failing to cooperate with an internal investigation of the agency’s role in the Iran-Contra affair--in which the United States sold arms to Iran and used the proceeds to finance the Contras in El Salvador.

And Woolsey is an old associate of former President George Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, with whom he worked on arms control issues. Woolsey was also strongly endorsed for the job by outgoing CIA Director Robert M. Gates. In September, 1991, when Gates’ own nomination for CIA director seemed in jeopardy, Woolsey wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal headlined, “Save the CIA, Confirm Robert Gates.”

Woolsey’s beliefs and instincts will be particularly important because, to a surprising extent, the CIA director sets the tone and direction for the agency and the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus.

“The intelligence community, more than any other agency, is personality-driven,” said Rep. Dave McCurdy (D-Okla.), who headed the House Intelligence Committee for the last two years. “We’re talking about a community which is, to a large extent, a culture.”

McCurdy pointed out that in little more than a year as CIA director, Gates launched a series of changes that succeeded in “turning the bow of the ship.” These included both reforms in the organizational structure and plans for a gradual, smooth reduction over the next five years in the intelligence community’s budgets and personnel.

As a result, even if Woolsey and Clinton launch no new initiatives at the CIA, there will continue to be modest changes and cutbacks over the next few years in U.S. intelligence operations and spending.

In seeking to avoid commitments to change at his confirmation hearing, Woolsey may have been seeking to win some time to decide what he and other Administration officials want to do.

He insisted that a requirement for Congress to be notified within 48 hours of any CIA covert operations raises some constitutional questions--the same argument Bush made in opposing legislation on this subject. “With respect to constitutional matters, I would prefer to wait and let the President, with the advice of an attorney general once appointed, make a determination on that,” Woolsey explained.