THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 24, 1994 TAG: 9407230013
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 55 lines
Aldrich Ames, imprisoned for life for betraying his country to the Soviet Union while in counterintelligence for the CIA, is certainly the ``warped, murdering traitor'' CIA Director R. James Woolsey calls him. Although useful, the reforms Woolsey announced last week - internal security changes designed to deter future agents from betraying their colleagues for a big house and a Jaguar - aim at the lesser of the CIA's problems.
Its larger difficulty is providing quality intelligence and analysis of it, a CIA shortcoming far more pervasive and debilitating than traitors. Despite devoting the bulk of its budget to the Soviet bloc, for instance, the agency not only failed to foresee the communists' political and economic collapse but overstated their strengths.
CIA failures can be laid in large part to what Woolsey termed an attitude of ``fraternity'' within the agency that traces in part to its elitist origins. But it traces more recently to the beating counterintelligence took in the mid-'70s from Congress. That feeling of fraternity amid siege helped to discourage the investigation of Ames, son of a well-respected ``Company'' man, even as alarms about him sounded within the agency.
And, like other counterintelligence officers, Ames was evaluated primarily on his ``scalp count,'' says Angelo Codevilla, former senior staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and now a senior resident fellow at the Hoover Institution. The number of agents recruited abroad was far more important than the quality of the information they contributed.
The difficulty the CIA has had in controlling the quality of both its agents' performance and the analysis of the intelligence they provide leads Codevilla to conclude that the CIA should be abolished and its functions dispersed among the government agencies and departments that make use of the intelligence - and therefore have more stake in assuring its accuracy.
More practicable is a suggestion from Melvin A. Goodman, a former CIA analysts, that the agency completely separate intelligence-gathering, which requires a degree of secrecy, from analysis, which requires ``a free exchange of information'' within the agency.
The need to gather and assess intelligence from abroad, in part through counterintelligence, hardly ended with the Cold War. The instability since - from Kuwait to the Koreas, from Haiti to Somalia - has in fact increased both the need and the difficulty.
And that only makes more imperative a Central Intelligence Agency that bores beyond Woolsey's reforms. Congress will have to bcome involved in rebuilding the agency on a foundation of programs and personnel that registers the tremors of quaking change in communist giants and recognizes the signals of treachery a new Jaguar may send. And it must judge its programs and personnel according to the quality of what they produce. by CNB