CIA Nominee Seen as Outsider Loyal to Clinton

President Clinton chose a retired military officer with no direct experience in the intelligence field to head the troubled CIA so that his chief loyalty and accountability would be to the President and not to entrenched interests in the intelligence community, officials said Wednesday.

Administration aides said that Clinton, who nominated retired Air Force Gen. Michael P.C. Carns for the job Wednesday, is determined to wrestle the CIA and the government’s other intelligence agencies into the post-Cold War world by remaking their missions and their cultures to better suit the intelligence challenges that have followed the collapse of the Soviet empire.

Carns is seen as an ideal candidate for the job because of his reputation as a creative thinker and tough manager during a 35-year Air Force career and because he is not a product of the far-flung, $28-billion-a-year government intelligence apparatus.

In his announcement, Clinton praised the former fighter pilot and Harvard Business School graduate as “a proven innovator open to new ways of doing business and skeptical of conventional wisdom.”

“Gen. Carns will face a challenge whose difficulty is matched only by its importance,” Clinton said in a brief ceremony in the White House Roosevelt Room. “He understands the critical importance of intelligence because he’s had to rely on it when the lives of Americans and the security of our country were on the line.”

Carns will be guided in part by a new, classified Presidential Decision Directive that Clinton is expected to sign in the next few days, which will lay out a dozen top intelligence priorities. The performance of the CIA and other intelligence agencies will be measured against those priorities.

Carns will be charged with matching intelligence resources to the priorities and doing away with units that do not further the nation’s core intelligence missions, a senior official said Wednesday.

While Carns, 57, spent the bulk of his career training to fight the Soviet Union and its allies, he said that the post-Cold War world presents different but no less difficult military and intelligence challenges.

“The Cold War may have passed into history, but regional instability, terrorism, drug trafficking, crime and the proliferation of nuclear weapons all loom large as threats to our interests and to our people,” Carns said.

He said that his priorities include trying to foster equal opportunity and reward merit--a barely disguised slap at the old-boy culture that has pervaded the CIA for decades.

Carns promised to recognize achievement while holding accountable those who fail, a marked contrast to a system that allowed Aldrich H. Ames, a former CIA official now imprisoned for espionage, to be promoted into increasingly sensitive posts even after he demonstrated incompetence and drunkenness repeatedly.

He also said that the intelligence community would be open to new approaches in how it collects and analyzes intelligence from around the globe.

“Reinvention and downsizing will be major factors, even as we continue to produce high-quality intelligence,” he said. “We will be leaner, but at the same time we will do more of the more important things.”

Carns also said that he plans to try to repair the CIA’s relations with Congress, which were badly strained under his predecessor, the prickly and distant R. James Woolsey, a lawyer who resigned abruptly in December. Woolsey was present at Wednesday’s ceremony and was praised briefly by the President but was not given an opportunity to speak.