It’s a Yawner, Life Without the Old CIA : Covert action: The 40-year contest to outdo the KGB would be laughable but for the impact it left all around the globe.

I’m going to miss the CIA.

It hardly seems fair to be talking now about abolishing the agency just because it was a tool for KGB disinformation and knowingly lied to two U.S. presidents. I feel for those former directors of the CIA who protested that they couldn’t be expected to know what was going on in their own building because they were so busy monitoring the world.

As long as I can remember, you could count on the agency to get it wrong, and this consistency, remarkable in a chaotic world, has been a mainstay of my entire journalistic life. Whenever times got tough, some timely CIA expos would come along to pay the rent. The use of Michigan State “professors” to train Ngo Dinh Diem’s secret police in torture remains a personal favorite. That and the attempt to restore democracy to Cuba by hiring the Mafia to rub out Castro with poisoned cigars. They had to do something after the failure of the Bay of Pigs.

Remember the 1954 coup against Jacobo Arbenz, the elected leader of Guatemala, which saved Central America for the free world and United Fruit? And the more recent revelation that the Guatemalan military officer who allegedly killed a U.S. citizen was on the CIA’s payroll? Talk about being there for the long haul.

That’s certainly been the case with Iran, going back 40 years when the CIA overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, that country’s last secular democratic leader. He was replaced with the shah, whom the CIA took at his word when he promised to rule for 10,000 years. It’s not their fault that they never heard of that Ayatollah Khomeini fellow who came out of nowhere to ruin everything. But wasn’t it convenient that the ayatollah was in power when the CIA needed to bypass Congress and get some money for the Contras? Mining the harbors of Nicaragua wasn’t enough.

The CIA didn’t know about the ayatollah or, more recently, about the Japanese religious cult that terrorized Tokyo with nerve gas. Out of sight, out of mind. As Gordon Oehler, a top CIA official, said last week, “I really don’t see any inclination, here or abroad, to have the CIA running around peering into religious groups around the world to see who’s naughty and nice.” Such distinctions might have gotten in the way of distributing weapons to Muslim fanatics in Afghanistan who are now suppliers to terrorists around the world, including the folks who bombed the World Trade Center in New York.

Space doesn’t permit a detailed examination of all the bloody escapades like the assassinations of Patrice Lumumba in the Belgian Congo and Salvador Allende in Chile, the endless war in Angola, the massacre of a million people in Indonesia and the undermining of Prince Sihanouk in Cambodia, which paved the way for a genocidal sideshow. Everyone makes mistakes.

The CIA is just better at it. Real whoppers like engineering the war in Vietnam in the early 1960s, which fueled a massive spurt in the arms race. The second bankrupting round in military expenditures came with the “winnable nuclear war” scare of the 1980s and the stories that the Soviets were prepared to evacuate Moscow in 15 minutes and could survive a retaliatory U.S. nuclear attack. Candidate George Bush told me in 1980 that he knew that one was true because he had been the director of the CIA--or head spook, as he called himself.

Tourists to Russia kept reporting that the system was so inefficient that it took two days to get lunch at your hotel, but they were just being taken in. The appearance that nothing worked in the Soviet Union was a dangerous ruse to undermine support for Ronald Reagan’s acceleration of the arms race.

So what if the only way you could prove Soviet superiority was by getting your data from KGB agents who had infiltrated the CIA’s Russian spy network. The KGB needed the arms race as much as the CIA did, so why not pass on their information like it’s your own? There must have been some wild double-dipping on the expense accounts.

The KGB and the CIA had a mutual interest in exaggerating the enemy danger; insiders called it “threat inflation,” as a justification of their own importance. The result was to waste tens of billions of dollars on unneccesary weapons systems like the new F-22 fighter, the B-2 bomber and “Star Wars.” But that’s nothing new. One thing spooks all over the world have in common is that they like the action and want to keep hostilities going, even if it means bankrupting their own country. By that standard, in the war between the KGB and the CIA, both sides won.