The CIA Drifts Between Fear and Loathing : U.S. intelligence is hung up on Americans’ insistence that spying be morally correct.

During his stint as the No. 2 official at the Pentagon, John Deutch established a reputation as an able and forceful manager. As CIA director, however, his formidable talents have been less in evidence. The CIA’s core division, the Directorate of Operations, is still without a permanent head, the task of root-and-branch reform has been avoided and little progress has been made in gaining public support for a post-Cold War mission.

One of the main reasons for the CIA’s continuing travails is that Deutch--much like his predecessor, James Woolsey--is spending too much time fighting yesterday’s battles. As a consequence, the CIA’s future viability is being jeopardized.

This is not always his fault. He cannot, for example, avoid addressing the ramifications of the terrible damage wreaked on the CIA’s credibility by the Aldrich Ames fiasco. Critics have had a field day over this issue, and, unless the CIA demonstrates that it is has learned the “lessons” of the Ames case, its support in the Administration and on Capitol Hill will crumble.

But, even as the earnest committees root about in the CIA’s files, it would be as well to remember that the world in which Ames went about his evil business has disappeared. The KGB is no more. Whatever lessons are to be learned about botched procedures and careless judgments will, at the end of the day, be about as relevant for tomorrow’s CIA as trench warfare is for the modern infantry.

In other words, the Ames case--fascinating though it may be--represents a sideshow. It has little to do with the CIA’s future, and top management cannot let itself become obsessed with it.

Less excusable than the time spent on the Ames case is the recently announced decision that the CIA will review the background of all its recruited foreign agents for possible human rights violations. Those with tarnished records will be thrown off the payroll.

Springing from the revelation that some of the CIA’s contacts among the Guatemalan security forces were egregious villains, this decision at first seems reasonable and in accordance with the best traditions of American idealism. In reality, however, it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of why countries maintain intelligence services.

In essence, the ethos of intelligence officers would bring a blush to Machiavelli’s cheek. Their job in life is to spot useful foreigners and then do what it takes--money, flattery, green cards and so on--to turn them into traitors.

In moral terms, intelligence is a zero-sum game. For the United States, Ames is a traitor, to be locked up and the key thrown away. In Soviet eyes, by contrast, he was a hero. For the West, Oleg Gordievsky makes the reciprocal point. The Soviets condemned the KGB defector to death; in Washington he was feted by presidents.

Intelligence work is all about Realpolitik. Countries do it not because they want to or because they are proud of it, but because they need to. The idea that an intelligence organization can recruit its agents exclusively from the realms of the morally unblemished and remain effective is fantasy.

Only slightly less fantastic is the notion that a moral checklist can be drawn up for CIA operatives. If human rights abusers are out, what about pedophiles? Embezzlers? Wife beaters? Delinquent dads? Do they also get held up at the CIA’s “Checkpoint Morality”?

It is of course all too easy to make cheap jibes at those who have to make difficult moral choices in the harsh glare of public opinion. But there is a serious point here on which it is reasonable to fault the CIA leadership: They are playing a game of make-believe with the American public. They are pretending that intelligence can be had on the moral cheap--that is, that it can be obtained without offense to the sensibilities of Rotarians and Sunday school teachers.

A much better approach would be to say forcibly in public that intelligence is a dirty business and, while all CIA employees will be held to the highest standards of moral conduct, the same cannot be expected of the CIA’s contacts and agents. All of them will be lawbreakers (in the eyes of their own governments) and many will be thoroughly unsavory. But the CIA will operate according to one ironclad rule: A relationship will continue as long as there is a net benefit to U.S. interests; when it is not, it will be cut loose.

It is possible that many, perhaps even a majority of Americans will feel that this is too brutal an approach and too compromising of American values. If so, this is where the debate should be joined. Without a tough-minded public consensus for the CIA’s activities, the organization might just as well close up shop and retire.