These are hard times for the CIA. On the face of it, the collapse of the Soviet military threat should be reason for self-congratulation at an agency whose primary mission, through more than 40 years of U.S.-Soviet confrontation, has been to warn American presidents whether the cold war was likely to turn hot. But World War III never happened-and the war that did, in the Persian Gulf, has given the agency’s critics one more reason to question its readiness for the “new world order.” Although CIA analysts did in fact detect Saddam Hussein’s preparations to invade Kuwait, the consensus in Washington is that their warnings were too cautious and too late. And of the agency’s overall performance in recent years, a former director gloomily muses that no one seems inclined to give his old shop an “A.” The debate, he says, is whether the CIA has earned a “B” or even a “D.”
Americans will probably never know which grade is fair-for in the spy business, as old hands like to say, those who know do not talk, and those who talk usually do not know. But there is no question that the winds of global change are gusting through Langley-or that the CIA, having recovered under William Webster from its involvement in the Iran-contra scandal, is now entering a critical period of transition under director-designate Robert Gates. Some insiders believe the agency even faces a battle for supremacy within the U.S. intelligence community, and that its role, methods and capabilities are being questioned as rarely before. Pending budget cuts have already set off a competition for scarce dollars between the agency and its rivals, and there is much talk that the military spy shops, newly consolidated under the Defense Intelligence Agency, are pushing for some relaxation of the CIA’s traditional primacy in intelligence matters. “What’s happening now is that the CIA is seen as relatively weak,” says one congressional expert. “The military is trying to take advantage of that. Flushed with success after Desert Storm, they’ve started to muscle in on what little turf the civilian agency has.”
Beyond all that lie mammoth questions about the goals and missions of the major U.S. intelligence agencies: the CIA and the DIA; the four intelligence branches of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines; the National Security Agency, which specializes in electronic reconnaissance and code breaking, and the supersecret National Reconnaissance Office, which runs the U.S. satellite surveillance program. Together or separately, as is now often the case, these agencies and their masters must decide how much intelligence emphasis to give to the Soviet Union, the Middle East, to Asia and to all the rest of the world. They must also decide whether, as Webster himself believes, the United States has come to rely too heavily on satellite and electronic surveillance at the expense of “humint” collected by agents in the field. Technology has its place. But few insiders are satisfied with the quality of U.S. intelligence on political and economic developments, and that information can only come from shrewd, well-connected spies.
Most of all, it can be argued, policymakers up to and including George Bush must sooner or later decide whether the 40-year-old command structure of the U.S. intelligence community is adequate to its changing task. There is ample reason to believe that it is not - and that the root problem is the perennial failure to establish what the military calls unity of command. On paper, at least, the CIA director oversees the assembly of the entire U.S. intelligence “product.” But he does not control the budgets of military intelligence agencies or the careers of those who run them. The secretary of defense does that, and some insiders view the SecDef as the real heavyweight in U.S. intelligence policy. Personality plays a role: currently, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney is solidly emplaced among the president’s closest advisers, while Webster, though accorded high marks for his squeaky-clean leadership of the agency, has never been part of the administration’s inner loop.
In practice this perennial split between the military and civilian agencies has created a division between means and ends: those charged with defining the outputs of U.S. intelligence-gathering activities do not control the inputs. Coordination is provided, up to a point, by a littleknown group called the National Foreign Intelligence Council, which is chaired by the CIA director in his role as director of central intelligence. But the agencies, particularly those organized under the Department of Defense, are free to compete for budget allocations and free, up to a point, to determine their own intelligence priorities. “It just doesn’t work,” says Vincent Cannistraro, a veteran CIA official who retired last September. “And that is the crux of the real problem facing the U.S. intelligence community.” The secretary of defense has “all the money [and] he has his own, clandestine humint collection capability,” the congressional expert says. As a result, he says, “there’s no coordination of requirements, no real vetting mechanism for programs, and no discipline.”
These problems are monumentally compounded by the budget wars that are already underway. The Bush administration hopes to cut U.S. defense spending ($298.9 billion in 1991) by about 20 percent over the next five years. But concealed within the Pentagon total are the budgets for the big U.S. intelligence agencies-about $30 billion, or 10 percent of the total. They are likely to be cut by a similar percentage. Now, Cannistraro and others argue, the attempt to downsize the intelligence budget is all but guaranteed to exacerbate the rivalries and tensions over the agencies’ goals and missions. “The issue of who gets what, and who does what, goes to the heart of the charter of every agency,” the congressional expert says. “Of course they’ll fight. And under the present system, nobody has the authority to make the big judgments-how much should we spend, what should we buy, what level of effort we should make against which targets, and who does which missions. Nobody.”
The Pentagon, driven by Cheney, has already begun to streamline its intelligence activities. Last week, in what officials say is the most sweeping reform of the past 40 years, the intelligence arms of the four service branches were combined in so-called Joint Intelligence Centers under each theater commander. The combined operation reports at the Pentagon level through the DIA. The goal, of course, is to save taxpayer dollars-but an important side effect, assuming the reorganization proceeds as planned, will be to elevate the DIA into something like the equivalent of the CIA. The turf battles have already begun. Pentagon officials now hope to expand the military’s global spy network–agents-in-place who would, under the reorganization plan, have the new task of reporting back political as well as military intelligence. Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is said to be pushing hard to get the military the freedom to conduct its own covert operations, despite the CIA director’s authority, under the law, to veto all such activities.
The Pentagon’s new assertiveness in intelligence matters is, of course, a threat to the CIA-and it is likely to create big problems for Gates as DCI. The agency’s performance has been under fire for years, and it no longer enjoys the aura of Ivy League sang-froid. Critics-even agency veterans like Cannistraro–say Langley has become just another bureaucracy, much like the Department of Agriculture. Its political analysis has been compared unfavorably with that of major newspapers, and its failure to provide early intelligence from the Persian Gulf has made the agency’s failure to recruit qualified Arabists dismally obvious. The CIA needs “a different breed of agents,” says Rep. Dave McCurdy, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “Not junior James Bonds with M.B.A.s.”
Webster has been somewhat successful in prodding the CIA toward a new role for the new era. But the agency now needs a bureaucratic protector-someone who can restore the agency’s confidence and sense of purpose, and who can pound the redundant sprawl of competing spook shops into some semblance of a rational structure. Indeed, the intelligence community is currently abuzz with talk of somehow strengthening the CIA director’s hand so that he can be a true national intelligence czar." That may be the only way the civilian side will ultimately withstand the Pentagon’s intelligence offensive, and Gates, a skilled bureaucratic infighter who has George Bush’s backing, may be the only man to do it. But if he isn’t, the CIA is unlikely to survive in its present form.
The cold war was a victory for the West, but the CIA failed to anticipate how quickly the East bloc would break apart.
After focusing on military might, the CIA faces the more difficult job of gauging political ferment in the Soviet republics.
Failure to predict Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait showed how hard it is to read the minds of Third World dictators.
