CIA Nominee Vows to Clean House at Agency

President Clinton’s nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency proposed a housecleaning of the troubled spy agency Wednesday, vowing to replace the aging management of the CIA’s covert operations division with a younger generation better prepared for the post-Cold War era.

John M. Deutch, currently deputy defense secretary, also pledged at his confirmation hearings before the Senate Intelligence Committee that he would update the CIA’s policies of hiring informants in Third World nations. The purpose, he said, is to avoid a repeat of the latest scandal to rock the agency’s Langley, Va., headquarters--the CIA’s links to a Guatemalan army officer apparently connected to two killings in Guatemala.

Deutch warned that the Aldrich H. Ames spy case and other recent controversies that rocked the agency have devastated morale and confidence within the CIA. Indeed, it seemed clear from his testimony that Deutch sees the agency as lost and confused in the post-Cold War world.

“There is an enormous morale problem,” Deutch conceded. “I have never in my whole career seen people so disheartened as I have seen at the CIA.”

He said “they feel abused” by the controversy that has engulfed the agency in recent years.

To bolster spirits of the younger agents and managers, Deutch said, he plans to move quickly to restructure the agency’s operations division, which handles covert espionage activities, so that it can better focus on new threats to the United States from terrorism, nuclear proliferation and regional conflicts with North Korea, Iraq or Iran. Deutch suggested that the current management of the agency’s covert operations remains stuck in a Cold War time warp.

“There has to be a change in the generation of managers in the directorate of operations, so that we can have people with a new attitude about the dangers the country faces.”

Both Democrats and Republicans praised Deutch and promised quick confirmation, yet many also warned him that he would have to move swiftly.

“We have to have someone who can bring confidence back to this agency,” said Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.). “You’re going to have to redefine things in Langley. The very existence of the CIA may depend on it, because there are a lot of questions being raised about the CIA, not just in the Senate but throughout America.”

Indeed, Deutch, 56, is seeking to step into perhaps the most troubled job in official Washington--one that he initially rejected. His predecessor, R. James Woolsey, resigned in early January under mounting pressure from Capitol Hill and the White House as the perception grew that he had lost his authority over the institution he was supposed to reform and had lost Clinton’s trust.

Since Woolsey’s resignation, Deputy CIA Director William O. Studeman has been acting director, but he has been unable to help the agency or the Clinton Administration stem a tide of negative publicity, especially in the wake of revelations about the CIA’s role in Guatemala.

Charges that a Guatemalan colonel on the CIA payroll was involved in the 1990 murder of an American citizen and the 1992 torture-slaying of a Mayan rebel married to an American woman have rocked the agency in recent weeks, just as the CIA was hoping to put the controversy over the Ames case behind it.

The Guatemalan case is being investigated by Congress as well as several federal agencies, including CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz. More broadly, the future role of the spy agency is under intensive review by its two congressional oversight committees and by a presidential commission.

Deutch reluctantly accepted Clinton’s offer of the job only after an earlier candidate--retired Air Force Gen. Michael Carns--withdrew his nomination in March after controversy erupted over his bringing a Filipino house servant to the United States.

Deutch’s promise to clean house will be aided by a series of high-level retirements scheduled this year. Douglas MacEachin, head of the agency’s directorate of intelligence, and James Hirsch, head of the division handling satellite and technical surveillance, are planning to retire. The head of the operations directorate that oversees covert operations, Hugh Price, also is expected to leave after Deutch arrives.

Deutch ultimately agreed to the move after Clinton decided to seek Cabinet status for the agency. But senators from both parties made it clear that proposal will die quickly in Congress, where lawmakers are fearful of giving the CIA director conflicting roles of policy-making and intelligence analysis.

Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) noted that the last CIA director to have Cabinet status was William J. Casey, who helped lead the Ronald Reagan Administration into the morass of the Iran-Contra scandal. The line between objective analysis and politics was badly blurred under Casey, and Specter and other lawmakers said that they want to avoid repeating the mistakes that were made then.

Deutch insisted, however, that no matter what meetings he attends as an adviser to the President, he will not allow the agency to slip back into the politics that marked the Casey era. And he vowed to resign before obeying a presidential order to hold information back from Congress.