In From the Cold

R. James Woolsey is a good man who took over direction of the Central Intelligence Agency at what was perhaps the worst time in its history. During his short tenure he was severely criticized for failing to radically change an excessively self-protective bureaucracy that had developed over decades.

With a shrinking number of supporters on Capitol Hill and denied regular access to President Clinton--a huge mistake by the White House--Woolsey abruptly quit this week after less that two years in office, battered and, as he indicated in his resignation letter, burned out.

The problems he leaves behind are pretty much those he inherited. The Aldrich Ames spy scandal, which broke last February after festering eight years, both demoralized the CIA and deservedly exposed it to harsh criticism because of the almost unimaginable laxity it revealed in the agency’s internal security practices. The end of the Cold War left the nation’s huge intelligence apparatus--very much a creation and a reflection of that ideological conflict--uncertain and unclear about its needed roles and missions.

What has come to be called the intelligence community is, like the Agriculture Department or the Air Force, also a large employer, meaning that besides its assigned tasks it has a basic interest in protecting budgets and jobs. For two years Woolsey, with considerable success, fought budget cuts in intelligence operations. But there was a steady increase in skepticism about the need to go on spending $28 billion a year or so on intelligence (only about 10% of that for the CIA itself) and a rise in questions about duplication of efforts among the various intelligence agencies and the relevance of the information they produce.

A 17-member bipartisan presidential commission, chaired by former Defense Secretary Les Aspin, is scheduled in the coming year to review the structure and focus of all of the nation’s intelligence efforts and to propose changes for dealing with the post-Cold War world. It’s a formidable undertaking, and it’s likely to produce recommendations that will shape the nature and direction of intelligence operations well into the next century. Meanwhile, our current troubled century still has a time to run, and of a certainty there won’t be any shortage of global crises to disturb those remaining years. The President who didn’t have a lot of interest in seeing his departing director of Central Intelligence regularly would be well advised to make a lot more time on his schedule for his still-to-be-chosen successor.