CIA ASLEEP AT ANOTHER SWITCH

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80M01009A000100050024-8
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 23, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 29, 2013
• Sequence Number: 24
• Publication Date: January 17, 1964
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified and Approved For Release 2013/16/29
CIA-RDP80M01009A000100050024-8
CIA Asleep at Anther Switch
The sick elephant known as
our Central Intelligence Agen-
cy has been surprised again.
This time it's the events in
Panama.
The glutton has been feeding
on the same hay that knocked
the incredible overkill nuclear
materials stockpiling program
completely off its rocker: Se-
cret billions, bad judgment and
bureaucracy.
Our spy-shop has blown its top.
It should quit stalking through foreign po-
litical backrooms and committing our country,
building its own empire. The CIA is now
1 larger and far more costly than the entire State
Department. And it's playing an immense and
dreary part in our failures to win friends for
the United States and our success in managing
to lose those we had. The CIA should return to
its limited spy function, and stay there, and
also tend to its intelligence evaluation.
If Gen. William J. Donovan's Office of Stra-
tegic Services could conduct our total World
War II global espionage throughout four.years
for $135 million, what is today's muddled crowd
doing with an estimated El.5.(2 million a year?
Quality? Not a single alien agent employed by
OSS betrayed the trust. Today's outfit is turn-
ing in no such record as that.
* * ?
A vast deterioration occurred after the Bay
of Pigs debacle.
In Cuba, for example, as this column de-
tailed in a series before the Oct. 22, 1962, "con-
frontation" with Khrushchev, the CIA became
so infiltrated by Castro secret police that the
' ghastly betrayals anti-Red sources suffered
forced them to shun the American intelligence
service like a plague.
CIA operations there became, and remain,
a recipe for distrust, if not panic. Meanwhile,
1 as in Panama, the Berlin Wall took the-CIA by
' surprise. So did Nehru's invasion of Goa, the
Dominican revolution, the Cambodian backlash,
etc.
A Congressional investigating commission
defined intelligence as "all the things which
should be known in advance of initiating a
course of action." The acquisition of intelli-
gence is one thing; the interpretation of it is
to the first two. And the agency has had some
splendid successes under able station chiefs
abroad. I could name many.
These unsung heroes compete against totali-
tarian (closed society) obstacles and four types
of Sino-Soviet spies?the ideological fanatic, the
conspiratorial spy, the venal tool and the en-
trapped traitor to America.
Its good men are too valuable and the CIA's
true function is too important to be self-
defeated by lush billions, petty ambitions and
bureaucracy.
An American ambassador abroad is the com-
manding officer and everyone stationed under
him is responsible to him. This includes the
CIA. Where the CIA station chief is experi-
enced and competent and not an empire builder
or solo flyer there's so trouble. But the CIA has
its own clandestine communications with Wash-
ington and the world.
It has incredibly vast, unaudited funds fre-
quently used to erect mountains of research
available elsewhere.'
The CIA can duplicate anything, and do
nearly anything, behind the secrecy cloak that
protects it from timid Congressignal commit-
tees and the public alike. This helps breed the
too many free-wheeling Machiavellis whooping
it up overseas like Tarzan, the Titan of the
Treetops.
* * *
The really effective agents abroad widely
agree among themselves that the Washington
supervision is now a spaghetti-like maze of arm-
chair bureaucrats.
These operate as something of a third force
between the State Department and Pentagon.
Thus when a CIA station chief in a country also
stages end runs around the ambassador or goes
off with his own venal collection of local ban-
dits dripping with cartridge belts and guile, our
national policy becomes uncontrollable.
Yet in creating this vital agency President
Truman made it directly responsible to the
President. The key to correction remains in
White House hands. And this writer has a
hunch President Johnson will use it.
As in the case of the overkill nuclear mate-
rials stockpiling binge, if Johnson turns hard
on this sick elephant he can achieve another
fine saving of perhaps half a billion dollars a
year and put the out-of-hand agency back in the
correct harness President Truman intended for
Declassified and Approved For Release 2013/10/29 : which Truman recently warned
CIA-RDP80M01009A000100050024-8 " ?IL 110.0 Jt/ uangerously been pushed or strayed.