Los Angeles Times INTERVIEW : James Woolsey : The Intelligence Director Seeking to Define a New Role for the CIA

With his bald head and thin glasses, R. James Woolsey Jr. might have been cast as an East German spymaster in some John Le Carre plot. In fact, Woolsey had had no first-hand experience with the world of spies until President Bill Clinton appointed him Director of Central Intelligence.

Yet Woolsey, 52, has spent much of his life involved in national security issues. A graduate of Stanford and Yale Law School (and, like Clinton, a Rhodes scholar), he began working for the Pentagon and the National Security Council after serving as an Army captain in 1970. In the two decades since, he has alternated between government and private law practice. During the Carter Administration, Woolsey served as under secretary of the Navy. Though a Democrat, he enjoyed unusually close ties with the Bush Administration, in part because of his friendship with Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft. From 1989 to 1991, Woolsey served as special ambassador to the conventional armed forces in Europe talks, and, in 1992, he headed a special task force on the use of satellites in intelligence.

As DCI, Woolsey not only heads the Central Intelligence Agency, but oversees the entire U.S. intelligence community--including the National Security Agency, which monitors overseas communications; the National Reconnaissance Organization, responsible for satellite imagery, and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

It is Woolsey’s task to help define the role of U.S. intelligence now that the Soviet Union has disintegrated and the CIA’s old adversary, the KGB, has been disbanded. But during his first year, Woolsey avoided bold new initiatives. Instead, he focused much of his time and effort on Capitol Hill, fighting drastic cutbacks in the intelligence community’s still-secret budget--estimated at $28 billion. In these budget battles, Woolsey sometimes ignored and overcame resistance of congressional Democrats by successfully courting GOP support.

Woolsey has hammered away at one basic theme: Though the Cold War has ended, the need for the CIA remains strong. “Yes, we have slain a large dragon,” he said at his confirmation hearings. “But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes.” At least once or twice each week, Woolsey makes the early-morning trip to the White House to give Clinton his intelligence briefing--an update on the snakes.

He is married to Suzanne Haley Woolsey, an executive for a nonprofit science organization. They have three teen-aged sons.

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Question: Let me start by asking you about the post-Cold War CIA. What are its two or three principal missions?

Answer: I think one is a complex of countries involved in both terrorism and proliferation--of which I’d say North Korea and Iran are front and center; because the combined problems of proliferation of nuclear, chemical, bacteriological weapons, and ballistic missiles to carry them, and terrorist orientations create a very difficult set of problems.

A second would be keeping close attention toward major countries which could be of concern to the United States if their politics and their economics turn negative: Russia, China, for example.

A third would be the whole field of trying to help the United States government ensure that American business gets to play on a level playing field abroad. We are not in the business of conducting industrial espionage--with the CIA against foreign companies to try to give information to American companies. But we are in the business of understanding when other countries and foreign companies--some of them countries quite friendly to the United States otherwise--are engaged in bribery in order to take contracts away from American corporations. We spend a good deal of time and effort trying to help the secretary of state and the secretary of commerce be able to level that playing field.

Q: At your confirmation hearings and since, you’ve used a metaphor about the end of the Cold War: “The dragon is slain, but there are a lot of snakes out there.” That raises the question of whether you need the same tools to fight the snakes as you did the Soviet dragon. Why do you need an intelligence community of the same size and budget and with the same structure?

A: It’s not the same size and focus nor budget. The budget has come down substantially in real terms since the beginning of the decade. The number of satellites, for example, is being substantially reduced and their orientation changed. The way in which we do espionage is being reoriented to focus very hard on targets such as terrorists and weapons proliferators. There are a lot of changes going on.

There’s a lot of slimming down that’s taking place. Civilians in the intelligence community will be reduced by between 20% and 25% from the beginning of the decade to the end, and the number of military will come down by a third.

Q: You say the way we are doing espionage is changing. What do you mean by that? Do you still have human assets in these countries?

A: It’s very hard to say a great deal about that in public. It’s just that when the United States and the Soviet Union were directing espionage against one another, it was a very important contest, but it was a contest that was played according to certain rules. If one or another case officer was arrested, they were normally traded, for example. They had diplomatic immunity because they were ostensibly officially from the embassies.

Terrorists and weapons proliferators don’t come to many embassy cocktail parties. One has to work very hard in a lot of very different ways. In some ways it’s analogous to what the FBI does in penetrating the Mafia. We have to work in very complex and subtle ways overseas to get a handle on what weapons proliferators and terrorists and people from states such as Iraq, Iran, North Korea are doing. I can’t really go beyond that.

Q: Can you give me an example of the sort of work the CIA does in the field of economic intelligence?

A: It’s awfully hard to be explicit in public, because what tends to happen is that we will learn that Company X or Country X is trying to bribe it’s way, let’s say, to a contract in the Mideast, and we will then make it possible for the secretary of state or secretary of commerce to go to his counterpart in that country, or to the ruler in that country, and say, “Your telecommunications minister is on the take, and the United States doesn’t favor business being done this way.” Quite frequently, this results in at least some part of the contract, or sometimes even all of it, being dealt with in a much fairer fashion for American corporations. We are doing that sort of thing all over.

Q: Let me ask about Haiti. There was an incident last fall in which the elected president of Haiti was characterized as mentally ill. And this was attributed to a CIA psychological profile. What happened, what went wrong there? And, if the agency wasn’t at fault, then specifically who was?

A: About a year ago, just before this Administration came in, the intelligence community did, collectively, all parts of it, a very thorough estimate on Haiti. I’m not going to say anything one way or the other about what was in it or whether any part of it dealt with President Aristide. I’ll simply say that I think, overall, it was a well-prepared estimate. And over the last year, it has been briefed--both in the executive branch and on the Hill--rather extensively. There’s nothing odd about the intelligence community briefing on the Hill. On any given day when Congress is in session, someone in intelligence, some team or group, is at some meeting on the Hill four or five times a day. I was up myself, better than once a day when Congress was in session.

We work for the Congress, too. We have vigorous oversight committees, and we brief on virtually everything that we do. Unfortunately, during some briefings this fall on the Hill, some portions of things that were in this Haitian estimate were, by some individuals in either the executive or the legislative branch--we’re not sure exactly whom--were taken out of context. Some things were distorted when they were reported publicly. There’s really not more that we can say on that.

We’ve been told by the President to call them like we see them, and I’ve told the agency and the intelligence community to call them like they see them. We are not going to be in the business of trying to twist or distort our analysis to fit policy. The President doesn’t want that, and neither do I. We do expect both the executive branch and legislative officials to maintain classified briefings as classified when we give them.

I think I’d say only one further thing on this, not as an analyst or as head of the intelligence community but just as a human being. Haiti is a country wherein there has been and continues to be a lot of violence. I think if you and I had sitting here before us all of the work that we had done on Haiti and on the individuals who are involved, potentially, in governing Haiti, and you look at some of the possible strong men down there, and some of their behavior and conduct in the past, both you and I would agree that, as individuals, a national policy for the United States of supporting President Aristide--who has been elected by two-thirds of the people of Haiti--was a reasonable policy.

Q: You said last year you wanted the agency to be more open, and yet you won’t make public even the overall annual budget figures for the intelligence community. Why not? (Former CIA Director Robert M.) Gates, I think, at his confirmation hearing said he had no problem with that.

A: There are a number of things I’m willing to be more open on and a couple I’m not. The things I’m willing to be more open on are history. We’ve taken the lead in declassifying the Kennedy files that we have inside the government; declassifying estimates about the Soviet Union up until the early ‘80s, and starting a somewhat detailed, but nonetheless thorough and eventually useful process of declassifying information about some of the covert actions back in the ‘40s and ‘50s.

I have spent a lot of time on the Hill with individual members going over the budget. Over 150 meetings last year. Most of that going around one on one to congressmen and senators, going through our budget totals, our budget figures, our programs--including a lot of members not on our oversight committees. I’ve had the “Today Show” out here. I’ve been on both Larry King and Diane Rehm call-in shows. I’ve given several public speeches about the future of intelligence. All of this is an effort to open up where we can.

But there are two things that I don’t think can be done in public. One is to debate effectively the numbers and scope of the intelligence programs. The other is to give current assessments in any degree of detail of our substantive views. The reason is that we cannot build electronic or print fences around the United States. When I am talking publicly to Congress about our budget, I’m also talking to Saddam Hussein and Mr. Rafsanjani and Kim Jong Il and so on. We don’t want to set out for them what we are emphasizing by way of funding for intelligence collection or analysis or anything else.

So I’m opposed to starting down what I fear would be a slippery slope of making one budget totally public, and then having people say, “Well, can’t you make an X% reduction?” Then I have to say, “Well, no, because that money is going for X.” Then I have to explain what X is.

Each step I take in that direction reveals something more about the way we do business in collecting against targets such as the weapons proliferators. I don’t think it’s a sound approach.

Q: There are some critics who say the CIA has become too cautious--that in places like Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia, there have not been as many initiatives as there might be to either amplify or substitute for military action.

A: Well, we can only conduct covert action pursuant to a formal presidential finding that is transmitted in proper fashion, in a timely way, to Capitol Hill. This whole business of taking action politically or economically or with propaganda or with supporting some group with arms transfers such as the moujahedeen in Afghanistan--that whole side of the agency, covert action, is way, way down compared to what it was back during the 1980s. There will not be any free-lancing during this Administration by anyone on that dimension. If the President signs a finding that instructs us to undertake some sort of covert action and it’s properly transmitted to the Hill, then we’ll do it. But over 99% of the intelligence community effort these days is in the business of intelligence collection and analysis and not in the business of covert action.