CIA Must Be Rebuilt From the Top Down : National security: U.S. intelligence has been corrupted at the core and must be purged to deal with new global threats.

For an organization cloaked in secrecy, the CIA attracts attention like a magnet. Unfortunately, for the agency and for the country, what the klieg lights have revealed has been far from pretty.

Just in the last few months, the press has reported that CIA employees covered up their connections with thugs and killers in Central America; that the Soviet Union had a spy at the heart of the CIA who reportedly betrayed more than 100 agents or potential agents inside the Soviet Bloc; that the National Reconnaissance Office squirreled away billions of dollars, and ran up colossal overruns on a palatial new headquarters without full White House or congressional knowledge. Now, the current director of Central Intelligence, John Deutch, says that the CIA has for years provided to senior policy-makers, including the President, intelligence that it knew or suspected was manipulated or even fabricated by the KGB.

Heroes are hard to come by in this debacle, but one has to be Fred Hitz, the first congressionally confirmed inspector general of the CIA. Unlike other federal agencies, the CIA selected, appointed and supervised its own inspector general. When Congress compelled the agency to accept an independent inspector general a few years ago, it did so over the strenuous objections of then-director William Webster. The spooks could monitor themselves just fine, Webster said.

Hitz was given what, by all odds, appeared to be an impossible job. He had to simultaneously gain the confidence of the deeply inbred and clannish intelligence professionals while maintaining sufficient distance to be able to judge them. He has succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. As one disaster follows upon another, he calls them as he sees them, without fear or favor--or mercy.

This has earned Hitz plenty of enemies. The latest additions are the last three CIA directors, who Hitz, recommended be held personally accountable in the tainted intelligence matter. The directors--Webster, Robert Gates and James Woolsey--responded with “dismay,” and in a joint letter to Deutch, sought to discredit Hitz, calling for an investigation of his office.

The directors base their innocence on the claim that they did not know that some of the intelligence going to the President under their signatures was probably bogus. Did not know? It was their job to know. If they did not, they utterly failed in their primary responsibility: to manage the CIA.

In the case of Gates, the implications go further. Gates was the self-proclaimed top Soviet expert at the CIA. As director of CIA analysis in the mid-1980s, he put his personal stamp on all assessments of the Soviet Union. Now Gates claims that, incredibly, that he never knew or suspected that the White House--where he had served as deputy national security adviser--was being given a falsified picture of America’s strategic adversary.

Some who have watched Gates over time lean toward a more cynical explanation. During the Senate confirmation hearings on his nomination to be director, a number of allegations surfaced from CIA personnel that Gates had occasionally distorted intelligence on the Soviet Union to fit what he knew to be the policy predilections of the Reagan White House. In short, he was accused of “politicizing” intelligence--a charge he strenuously denied. Was Gates blinded by his eagerness to provide intelligence that fit the prevailing policy mind-set, even if that intelligence had dubious origins? There is insufficient public evidence to render a judgment.

What is clear is that U.S. intelligence has been corrupted at the core. At the end of the day, this is a tragedy for two reasons. Major components of the intelligence community and legions of professional employees are very good at what they do and conduct themselves according to the highest standards of integrity. Second, the work is too important to write off.

America won the Cold War despite the apparent collapse of its key counterintelligence and spy programs. But it is far from certain that this country can prevail in the emerging conflict against international terrorism and organized crime--potentially in possession of weapons of mass destruction--without a very effective human intelligence capability. The new national security threats, including the leaking of nuclear weapons and technology to “rogue states” are, in the first instance, an intelligence challenge.

So, the new director has his hands full. The CIA must be shaken to its foundations, but it must also be rebuilt. The new CIA must be highly capable, but it must have bred into its bones the sure knowledge that secrecy, like power, corrupts. In the spy business, integrity is not optional; it is a life and death requirement.