WASHINGTON--WHETHER WILLIAM WEBSTER ACTUALLY RETIRED AS DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE OR WAS GENTLY THROWN OVERBOARD IN A QUIET WASHINGTON COUP IS NOT ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT.

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-01448R000401660072-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 22, 2012
• Sequence Number: 72
• Publication Date: May 10, 1991
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

S1, Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000401660072-3
The Washington Post W (mS &(C
The New York Times
The Washington Times
The Wall Street Journal
The Christian Science Monitor
New York Daily News
USA Today
The Chicago Tribune
By EDWIN M. YODER, JR.
WASHINGPON--Whether William Webster actually "retired'' as director of
Central Intelligence or was gently thrown overboard in a quiet Washington
coup is not especially important. What is important is Webster's sterling
performance in two sensitive administrative posts, at the FBI and the CIA.
The record speaks for itself, though whether the message will be correctly
decoded is another question.
The message was scrupulous legality. Webster, a U.S. district judge, was
plucked from relative obscurity in 1978 by Griffin Bell, President Carter's
attorney general. The FBI had been headed before Webster by two dim directors
who had done little for its standing. J. Edgar Hoover's earlier, all but
absolute, reign had left the agency vaguely shadowed by a reputation for
subtle blackmail, of which the Martin Luther King wiretapping affair was the
most notorious example.
As acting director after Hoover's departure, L. Patrick Gray managed to
entangle himself and the FBI in the.Watergate affair. Indeed it was Gray who
was, in the farces phrase, left to 'twist slowly, slowly in the wind'' after
he burned telltale documents at John Dean's bidding. His successor Clarence
Kelly, a Midwestern lawman, busied FBI personnel in the decoration of his
hone and did not improve the bureau's reputation--or his own. Enter Webster;
and it is enough to say that when he left the FBI nearly a decade later, the
taint of indiscretion and of the shadowy and unaccountable power accumulated
by J. Edgar Hoover had utterly vanished.
In 1987, Webster undertook a similar cleanup job at the CIA. William
Casey, the previous director, had never recovered from the romance of the
Office of Strategic Services and operated as a law unto himself. Casey's
swashbuckling style featured the deception not only of enemies, real and
imagined, but of powerful U.S. senators and even (if you believe the
Iran-contra testimony) of the president himself.
So the common theme of Webster's stewardship was a determination to
restore legality and professionalism and, at the CIA, to separate
intelligence gathering and analysis from the contamination of policy
preferences. This separation had been critically needed since the Vietnam
period, when Richard Helms and other agency professionals battled against
heavy pressure to tailor estimates on the war to the Johnson administration's
disastrous impulse to put the best face on everything. Webster leaves a CIA
as clear as such an agency can be of the suspicion of being out of control.
With Webster's departure, George Bush has an excellent chance to take a
fresh look at the role of the CIA, including the fundamental question of
whether the time has cane to decentralize intelligence functions.
The idea of consolidating those functions--the essence of the CIA when it
was created in 1947--was the product of a novel national security threat. In
that pivotal year of early Cold war hostilities, the United States was forced
to acknowledge, reluctantly, that the peace-keeping plans of the war years
weren't working. The nation found itself thrust into a climate of rivalry
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with the Soviet Union--including political subversion and black
propaganda--alien to democratic traditions.
Alongside, or behind, the traditional world of statecraft there was
developing a back alley of dirty deeds which the United States had to cope
with; and sometimes coping meant emulating them, tit for tat. There, laws and
decencies were often ignored. And while the Cold War remained the
fact of international life, a lesser-evil ar commanding
tolerating this insidious realm of extra-legality could be secretiveness.
That case has been severely eroded today. But even if there is a case for
keeping intelligence centralized, the future of intelligence gathering and
analysis in a world of economic competition and small.-state terrorism needs
careful review, as does the often-remarked failures of "human intelligence''
as against intelligence gathered by high-tech methods.
By the appointment he makes, George Bush will indicate whether he thinks
nostalgia or fresh thinking should rule the future of national intelligence.
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Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000401660072-3