Is It Curtains for the CIA? : The agency is in for a bloodletting. It’s more than the Ames case or the string of bad intelligence estimates. Or even dislike of the director. Cold War misdeeds are coming back to haunt it.

The hour of truth has arrived for the Central Intelligence Agency. Three years after the Soviet Union dissolved while the stunned CIA was in mid-sentence, Congress is preparing for a long second look at the intelligence charter it approved in a climate of crisis in 1947. The first step is creation of a 17-member commission, already approved by the Senate and pending in the House, to study U.S. intelligence needs and how they ought to be met.

No one at the CIA is in any doubt about what this means: The agency in its current form is no longer sacred. What it will look like at the end of the commission’s reassessment, the size of its budget, even the name over the door--all are in question. Intelligence professionals fear the worst. There is an appetite for bloodletting in Washington, fueled by the embarrassment of the Ames case; a sex-bias suit by female employees; a string of bad intelligence estimates; the agency’s die-hard resistance to cutting its $3-billion budget; plain dislike of the agency’s director, R. James Woolsey, by many legislators, and a growing belief that without the Soviet Union, the CIA has nothing to do.

Nor is there any lack of bright ideas circulating in Washington for a new and improved intelligence service, and perhaps two. For years, critics have proposed breaking the CIA in half. Some favor one organization to engage in secret intelligence activities, while a second writes up intelligence estimates using information from all sources. Other tinkerers would divide the existing agency differently--between a secret collecting-and-analyzing arm and a separate body to conduct covert operations.

A few extremists, led by the sharp-tongued Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), suggest dismantling the CIA altogether and going back to the simpler, pre-World War II days, when the State Department collected political intelligence, mainly at diplomatic cocktail parties, and the military kept track of foreign enemies, if any.

No consensus for reform yet exists, but discontent is high with Woolsey’s pugnacious defense of the CIA. A widespread sense that something is badly wrong centers on the agency’s numerous, in retrospect, flagrant, failures in handling the case of Aldrich H. Ames--who has admitted spying for Moscow between 1986 and his arrest earlier this year. At least 10 highly placed agents working for the CIA disappeared in the mid-1980s, but the CIA’s internal investigators failed to read the implications of conspicuous spending by Ames, or to note many other clues. The Soviets penetrated every other major Western intelligence service during the Cold War, but it is doubtful that any other Soviet spy did as much damage, over so long a period, with the arguable exception of Kim Philby.

After the CIA’s inspector general completed a 400-page report on the Ames case, which sharply criticized a dozen agency officials, Woolsey issued official reprimands criticizing their performance, but otherwise declined to punish the worst offenders.

The Ames case is one of those highly visible gaffes no official agency could survive unscathed--but even without it, the CIA would have been facing hard times. Despite huge growth during the Reagan years, to a peak of more than 20,000 employees, the CIA failed to grasp what was happening to the Soviet Union under Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

By the time the Soviet Union broke up, it was apparent that the old Soviet Union was literally bankrupt, that the CIA had for years been overestimating the size of its economy and underestimating the crushing burden of military spending and that the agency did not know what to do with the thousands of analysts and covert operators focused on Moscow once the Soviet threat had disappeared. Almost until the Soviet Union’s final moments, the CIA, under Robert M. Gates, had been darkly wondering if it all wasn’t some elaborate trick.

When Woolsey took over in 1993, he inherited an old agency, huge and set in its ways, with which to monitor a new world. He argued that the United States confronted a host of new dangers--each far less threatening than the old Soviet Union, perhaps, but harder to watch in the aggregate. The implication, which he defended with a lawyer’s tenacity in budget hearings, was that the CIA couldn’t function with less money and, in fact, needed more.

The lawmakers were put out. They had been cutting Pentagon dollars--spent in their home districts--and they were impatient with Woolsey’s claim that the CIA alone should prosper in the post-Cold War world. It is probably the CIA’s resistance to change that is most directly responsible for Sen. John W. Warner’s plan to rethink U.S. intelligence with the help of a commission armed with a broad mandate to put everything on the table.

But the real source of this animosity is not bad public relations, intelligence estimates that miss the point or the failure to catch Ames in a timely manner. It is the Cold War itself--the accumulated resentments of a long, expensive, frightening and sometimes ugly struggle.

For decades, the Soviet Union was singled out as the greatest threat facing America, but the bear turned out to be toothless, no threat at all. Far from being grateful for this happy outcome, many Americans, including longtime critics of the CIA in the Congress, began to ask if this trip had been necessary.

Perhaps the Cold War could have ended long ago, if only the military-industrial complex, with the CIA at its heart, had quit sounding the alarm. The secret Soviet side of the Cold War is only beginning to emerge, while the CIA’s role has been spilling out for decades. Beginning in the 1940s, the CIA intervened in foreign elections, backed anti-communist unions, secretly funded student groups and cultural organizations, planted news stories and published magazines.

After the principal arena of the Cold War shifted from Europe to the Third World, the CIA overthrew governments friendly to the Soviets, armed and directed secret armies in Southeast Asia, Africa, Central America. It trained foreign police forces that were sometimes used to crush local democratic forces. It provided foreign heads of state with secret slush funds, looked the other way when “friends” went into the drug smuggling business, energetically tried to murder the popular leaders of unfriendly countries and political movements.

The list of four decades worth of troubling headlines is long. In every case the CIA can fairly plead guilty with an explanation--but democracies have short memories; they tend to forget the explanations.

Presidents and secretaries of state occupied the high ground of the Cold War, while the CIA did the dirty jobs intended to be kept secret forever. If the secrets got out anyway, the CIA was expected to protect the President by taking the blame, thus shrouding the true authors of U.S. policy in a blanket of “plausible deniability.”

The truth of the matter is that the CIA never undertook a single major effort without the full and express authority of the President, but much that is known to have been done is still officially denied by Presidents and their defenders. Like an army demobilized after a war, the CIA has lost the mission that made it useful to policy-makers and finds itself alone. Friends in Congress no longer wield the clout they once did, and President Bill Clinton has his attention elsewhere. The stage is thus set, politically and emotionally, for major change.

Still, is it possible that the new commission on U.S. intelligence will dismember or abolish the CIA? This has routinely been the fate of intelligence organizations in the past. The CIA’s World War II predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, was shut down and its functions scattered by President Harry S. Truman only two months after the surrender of Japan. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the intelligence service was reorganized and renamed nine times before it resurfaced in its current form, as the Russian Intelligence Service.

Many Soviet intelligence chiefs were not only removed from office, but shot. Woolsey need not fear a firing squad but his job is certainly in jeopardy; and it is hard to imagine how Les Aspin, the former secretary of defense who is expected to head the commission, would be content to spend 18 months simply redrawing the arrows on organizational charts of the U.S. intelligence community. It is probably safe to predict that from Aspin’s efforts there will emerge something different, something smaller and something with a new name.

But it remains to be seen whether these changes will be cosmetic or real. U.S. Presidents have grown accustomed to instant information, not just satellite photos but the most intimate communications of foreign leaders. In crises, they want someone on the ground, as in Haiti. When a new face emerges in an important foreign government, they want some background history, and they want it yesterday. When they want to send a genuinely secret message, they want somebody at hand who knows where the back doors are. U.S. Presidents will not want to surrender any of these capabilities, and congressional leaders will not force them to do it. What Congress wants is to pay less for them.

The best way to predict what the intelligence commission is likely to do in the end is to consider who will be the tenant of the CIA’s huge headquarters in Langley, Va., with its vast files and technical capabilities. The CIA’s campus is not going to be returned to woodland, the building is not going to have a second life as a GSA furniture warehouse and the desks are not going to be vacant. Sitting at every one of them, in fact, and answering every phone, will be someone in the intelligence business, whatever the name on the door.*