Prospect of a Major Shake-Up : Up for the CIA’s top job, Deutch talks tough in Senate hearings

It assuredly will not be business as usual at the CIA after John M. Deutch moves into the agency’s top job sometime in the next few weeks.

President Clinton’s nominee for director of Central Intelligence, whose early confirmation by the Senate seems virtually certain, Wednesday told the Senate Intelligence Committee what many in Congress and the Administration have been waiting to hear. There will be swift changes in the top management of the agency, with special attention to the directorate of operations, which plans and carries out covert actions.

Other key facets of the nation’s multi-part, $28-billion-a-year intelligence industry, which the CIA director supervises, face closer scrutiny and in at least some cases restructuring. “I would anticipate taking significant action immediately upon confirmation,” Deutch told the committee. Bluntly, Deutch is talking major shake-up. The need for one is apparent. Partly through inertia and partly through lack of direction both internally and from the White House, the nation’s intelligence agencies seem to have been woefully slow to reorient their missions and priorities since the end of the Cold War.

The CIA leadership especially has come under strong criticism, first because of the laxity in internal security and the “old boy” self-protectiveness that the Aldrich Ames spy scandal revealed and more recently when it became known that a high Guatemalan army officer on the CIA’s payroll was implicated in murders, information about which was withheld from Congress.

Deutch, the widely respected deputy secretary of defense, agreed to take the intelligence job only after Clinton promised him Cabinet-level status, meaning direct presidential access of a kind that Clinton’s first CIA head, R. James Woolsey, was denied. That’s important because when the commander in chief bureaucratically insulates himself from the top intelligence officer, it hurts the President and could affect the nation’s security. Deutch will have access. He also has a mandate to shake things up. From every sign he intends to do so.