3 Ex-CIA Directors Blamed for Agency Role in Misdeeds : Intelligence: Inspector general says a total of 12 officials should be held accountable for disinformation being sent to President. Congress gets Ames damage report.

Sweeping up after one of the greatest intelligence failures in American history, the CIA’s inspector general has charged that three former agency directors and nine other former and current officials should be held accountable because some disinformation from Soviet double agents was knowingly passed to the President, the CIA reported to Congress on Tuesday.

CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz recommended that former CIA Directors R. James Woolsey, Robert M. Gates and William H. Webster be held accountable for the agency’s failure to notify the White House that much of the information the President and other senior U.S. policy-makers were reading in top-secret intelligence reports from inside Russia actually was “controlled” information being fed to the United States by Soviet double agents.

While Hitz said that the former directors should be held accountable, it was not clear what action he had recommended in response to what he called their management failures. CIA Director John M. Deutch disagreed with Hitz’s conclusion and said he does not believe they should be held accountable and does not plan to reprimand any of the three.

The inspector general’s charges against the three former CIA directors accompanied the agency’s long-awaited damage assessment of the Aldrich H. Ames spy scandal. The assessment was formally presented to Congress Tuesday by Deutch. The director reported that more than 100 CIA agents or potential agents inside the Soviet Union and later Russia, as well as other nations, were betrayed by Ames during the nine years that he spied for the KGB.

After the agents were fingered by Ames, some of those he betrayed--mostly Russians recruited by the CIA--were forced by the KGB to become double agents who fed disinformation back to Washington. Others were killed.

In the most explosive charge in the CIA’s damage assessment of the Ames case, the agency has determined that some mid-level CIA officers knew that their Russian agents had been compromised and “doubled”--and did not notify U.S. policy-makers.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that the CIA has found 16 instances in which one CIA officer filed reports from agents that he knew had been doubled but failed to disclose it. Specter said that others were knowingly feeding disinformation to policy-makers as well.

Deutch has referred the matter to the FBI for a possible criminal investigation.

Specter added that the Soviet disinformation campaign has important consequences, in some cases prompting Washington to make costly--and needless--purchases of military equipment.

“It’s just mind boggling, the scope of what went on here,” Specter told reporters after the Senate Intelligence Committee’s closed briefing by Deutch. “The CIA was passing on information to the President knowing that the information came from individuals who were controlled by the KGB.”

Specter could not say whether reports containing Soviet disinformation were still being sent to the White House after President Clinton took office. But it is clear that the disinformation went to the Ronald Reagan and George Bush White Houses.

Ames, a career CIA officer known in the agency’s ranks for ineptitude and excessive drinking, began spying for the Soviets in 1985 in return for money and was not arrested by the FBI until February, 1994. During those nine years, he had access to some of the CIA’s most sensitive secrets.

Ames worked in the agency’s Soviet division and in counterintelligence. And he continued to have access to highly sensitive intelligence information even after his name first surfaced as a possible suspect in the CIA’s internal hunt for a Soviet mole.

The damage assessment did not uncover any other CIA officers who were working for the Soviets with Ames. But the report detailed that Ames gave the KGB a veritable road map to the CIA’s Soviet espionage networks, allowing them to turn those networks back against the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Of the 12 current or former CIA officials cited in Hitz’s report as those who should be held accountable, Deutch said that only one is still working at the agency. The rest retired before he took over as director in May. Although Hitz said that the 12 should be held accountable, it was not clear what level of reprimands or censure he suggested for any of them.

The inspector general did not charge that Woolsey, Gates and Webster knew that disinformation was being passed on to policy-makers, however. Instead, he found that, as leaders, they should have maintained tighter management controls to prevent such a poisoning of the intelligence process. They should be responsible for guaranteeing the quality of what was the CIA’s most important product during the last decade of the Cold War--intelligence about the Soviet Union and Russia, he said.

But in a sign of the growing dissension and bitter finger-pointing within the U.S. intelligence community in the aftermath of the Ames scandal, all three former directors wrote a letter to Deutch--which was made made public Tuesday--disputing Hitz’s recommendation that they be held accountable. In their letter, they recommended that Hitz be investigated instead for his own failures to uncover the wrongdoing earlier.

“We would suggest that you consider establishing a special panel of some kind to examine thoroughly and assess the function of the inspector general’s office,” they wrote.

After briefing the congressional intelligence committees in separate closed sessions on the classified damage assessment and the inspector general’s report, Deutch told reporters that none of the three former directors would be reprimanded.

“On the criteria that I would use for taking action against individuals, I would not do so against any of the three prior directors of central intelligence, for whom I have the highest professional and personal regard,” Deutch said.

He added that, since so many of the CIA officers cited in the inspector general’s report have retired, his hands are tied when it comes to meting out punishment. Deutch said that he already has reprimanded the one culpable official still at the agency. And he said that, if the 11 others were still employed by the CIA, he would have fired two and taken no action against five others.

Deutch said that four other former officers have been given reprimands or warnings. The two former officers he said he would have fired are now banned from future employment at the CIA.

Specter and Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, were clearly appalled by the refusal of the three former CIA directors to take responsibility.

“For them to plead ignorance and then to write this remarkable letter . . . they are saying: ‘How did I know that the Soviet Union was going to try to provide us with bad intelligence, upon which we then would make policy decisions,’ ” Kerrey said. “Well, they should have known. All three of them should have known.”

Woolsey, Webster and Gates did not return telephone calls Tuesday.

Deutch acknowledged that the credibility of the CIA among senior U.S. policy-makers, who receive the agency’s intelligence reports each day, has now been badly damaged.

“The problem we face now is to reconstruct and put into place the changes necessary to make this an effective clandestine service again,” Deutch said. “High on the list of things that we must do is to rebuild confidence [among policy-makers] in the integrity of our human intelligence.”

But that won’t be easy. Rep. Larry Combest (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, observed that Ames had provided a “veritable library of highly classified intelligence estimates, giving the Soviets unique insight into U.S. intelligence capabilities and judgments.”

Yet Deutch stressed that the Ames damage assessment should not be used as an argument for abolishing the CIA’s espionage operations.

“The Ames damage assessment, in all its detail, does nothing to shake my conviction that we need a clandestine service,” Deutch said. “Of all the intelligence disciplines, human intelligence is the most subject to human frailty, but it also brings human intuition, ingenuity and courage into play.”

Until the damage assessment was sent to Congress this week, the public knew only the broad outlines of the cost of Ames’ betrayal. It was known, for example, that 10 Russians working as spies for the CIA and the FBI were betrayed by Ames--and then quickly executed.

But the damage assessment shows that those 10 were just the tip of the iceberg. Apparently, after the Soviets executed those 10, they realized that it would be much better to allow other agents compromised by Ames to stay in place--while controlling the information they sent back to the CIA.

Much of the information being fed to the CIA by double agents may have been accurate. The KGB may have given the double agents accurate information to establish their credibility with the CIA--or to dispel confusion in Washington about Soviet strategic intentions.

Even on Tuesday there remained confusion among lawmakers about how much of the information fed to the CIA by the double agents was genuine and how much was lies.

In spite of the muddle, Deutch said that “I am very secure that we have come to the end of our assessment of the damage that Ames caused.”

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BACKGROUND ON SPY SCANDAL

Aldrich H. Ames, a CIA counterintelligence officer, was sentenced to life in prison without parole in April, 1994, after he admitted selling secrets to the Soviets for eight years. The agency has said his treachery led to the deaths of 10 Western agents and compromised dozens of operations. In the wake of the Ames case, then-CIA Director R. James Woolsey sent letters of reprimand to 11 senior CIA officials who should have suspected that Ames, who had acquired sudden unexplained wealth, was betraying his country.