THE SUBSTANCE AND THE RULES
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CIA-RDP85M00364R002204280035-9
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Document Creation Date:
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Publication Date:
June 1, 1983
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'At?TI E APPEARED
OF FADE ' SU' 1983
Angel: Cedevilic is a professional staff
member with the Striate intelligence
Commiree. Previously, he was o foreign
seniee olicer and a fellow at the Hoover
lnstiauion, Stanford Univeuin?. Dr.
Codn?illa has wrinen widely on European
politics and in the field of intelligence and
military policy.
RM
j4rxgeIo Codevifla
By focusing so exclusively on
rules and standards of
operations, the intelligence
debate of the mid-1970s did not
answer the fundamental
question of what the United
States expects of its intelligence
services or what they are to
accomplish in order to meet the
challenges of the 1980s.
The Substance and
the Rules
Since the Carly 1970s, this country's intel-
ligence agencies have been asking, "What
does the country expect of us?" That ques.
on had not arisen in the postwar period be-
cause the American political system had left
the agencies to the total discretion of those
appointed to lead them. In the early 197Us,
factional conflict among those leaders spilled
over into a national debate about what
America's practitioners of intelligence ought
to have foremost in, mind. That debate con-
tinues.
Recently, Admiral Stansfield Turner,
President Ca ter's Director of Central Intelli-
gence, and his former special assistant,
George Thibault, published an anempt both
to answer that question and to indict the Rea-
gan administration's handling of intelli-
gence. The author's answer seems to be that
WASEr cToN QUARTERLY
the American people expect their intelligence
agencies to be as innocuous as possible.
T ey charge that the Reagan administration
is undermining the agencies by loosening too
many restrictions. The authors thus contend
that for our civil liberties' sake, and for tlr,
sake of the agencies' own standing in the
country, the agencies ought to concentrate on
formulating for themselves the right kinds of
rules and restrictions. However? Dne would
not suspect from Turner and Th;bault's arti-
clesthat the rules by which intelligence offi-
cers live ought to flow from the intelligence
profession's substantive requirements.
Nevertheless, in intelligence as in other
areas of government, the American people
rightly want their employees to accomplish
the functions for which they are paid. This
author will argue that Stansfield Turner is
CON'1"IM~~'
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wrong to assume that the key factor affecting
the quality of intelligence is the quantity of
intrusion into the lives of innocent people,
that better intelligence -neans less civil lib.
erty, and vice versa. This article will then
address the real tasks which American intel-
li gence must accomplish in peace and war,
and the difficulties it now faces in doing so.
A revolution took place in American in-
telligence during the mid-1970s. That revo-
lution was thorough: by the end of the Carter
administration, only a minuscule percentage
of the CIA's supergrade officials had held
such rank in 1975. Those who became
prominent in American intelligence during
that period were generally not known either
for achievement or technical insight in the
special fields they took over. Some, e.g., the
teen who took over the counterintelligence
staff at CIA, were known as non-believers in
the very activity for which they became responsible. These men, however, were well
ammed to the priorities of the administration
they would serve, and to those of the factions
which had recently won out in the intelli-
gcnc a community's long, intramural strug:
gles: to lower America's profile abroad; to
reduce the importance of clandestine ac-
tivities at home and abroad; to assert the
CIA's claim to primacy among providers of
analytical products. They were also intent on
making sure that the recent revolution in the
field of intelligence would not be reversed.
As a result of all this, the leading men of
President Carter's intelligence community,
led by Admirals Stansfield Turner and
Bobby Ray Inman, argued with great M.
sonal vigor for the enactment of legislative
charre.rs for the intelligence co=unity.
These charters would have codified and ap.
proved in law, the changes in orientation
which had occurred in the mid-1970s. Of
course the proposed charters' chief feature
was an absorbing concentration on rules and
restrictions. It is essential to understand
whence came this concentration on rules.
The debate of the mid-1970s had concen-
trated so exclusively on rules and restrictions
because it had begun with public accusations
that some intelligence officers had transgres.
sed the bounds of propriety and legality.
These accusations against the CIA's di-
rectorate of operations in general and par-
ticularly against counterintelligence special-
ists in the CIA and the FBI had come from
other intelligence officers.
There had always been controversies
among intelligence officers about what
American intelligence should and should not
be. The best outline of the views held by the
CIA officials who had long fouk?bt to reduce
the role of the clandestine services and of
counterintelligence is an article, "Ethics and
Intelligence" by E. Drexel Godfrey? in the
January 1978 Foreign Affairs. William
Colby's memoirs, as well as the published
writings of lesser officials, e.g., Herbert
Scoville, plus the reporting of books Ice
Edward Epstein's Legend and Henry Hurt's
Shadrin, flesh out that outline with examples
of *how profoundly this intramural attack af-
fected the daily workings of the intelligence
system. -
In sum, clandestine and eountezintelIi-
gence activities were charged with being
immoral and developing in theirpaactitioners
devious thoughts and ways which would
prove dangerous to' American civil liberties.
The allegations claimed that these activities
present the rest of the world with an unfavor-
able picture of the United States and that they
turn the intelligence community's thoughts
and energies toward combat with the Soviets
rather than toward accurate assessments of
reality. Beginning in 1974, some intelligence
officers who had been mmHg such charges
gave to their allies in Congress and the press
items of information embarrassing to some
of the leading men in the directorate of oper-
ations and in the counterintelligence ser-
vices.
In 1975-1976 the select committees on
intelligence led by Senator Church and Rep-
resentative Pike laid out these embarrassing
items, along with a coherent critique of
American intelligence. Understandably, the
intelligence officers whose critiques of their
bureaucratic adversaries were now being es-
poused by congressional committees were
hardly reluctant witnesses. Director Colby,
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for example, did not have to wave the fam.
ous poison dart gun in the air before the
cameras. When he did, the stock of some at
the CIA fell, and the stock of others rose. As
late as 1978, a senior CIA official, John
Hart, spoke on the CIA's behalf to the House
Select Comminee regarding the investigation
of President Kennedy's assassination and,
despite the committee's efforts to stop him,
delivered a passionate indictment of a former
colleague, once head of the Soviet division
of the directorate of operations, for allegedly
violating the rights of a Soviet defector
whose bona fides was in doubt. In sum, a
long-festering intramural bathe was decided
when one side went outside the walls and
linked up with superior political forces
which, for their own reasons, were willing to
help.
The Church and Pike Committees had
been organized as a result of years of effort
by the American Civil Liberties Union and
likeminded groups, e.g., the institute for
Policy Studies. These organizations sup-
ported able individuals like William Miller
and Morton Halperin. These efforts were
based on the contention that intelligence in.
vestigations are inherently dangerous to civil
liberties. Thus, these efforts were aimed at
restricting the scope of such investigations.
The proximate goal was to force the agencies
henceforth to apply the standards of criminal
law to intelligence investigations. These in-
dividuals' work on intelligence was part of
their broader campaigns for a re-direction of
U.S. foreign policy toward reduced Ameri-
can self-assertions, greater friendliness with
revolutionary forces in the Third World, and
reduce d hostility vis-i-vis the Soviet Union.
The reaction of many intelligence officers,
active and retired, against the Church and
Pike Committees was to uphold the intelli-
gence profession's good name against what
they perceived as the fa- left's almost unpat-
riotic attacks. They proceeded by arguing
that American society must be willing to bear
the burden of the agencies' intrusive exis-
tence if it is to live in a dangerous world.
They therefore continued to work in public
and in private against every restrictive rule
that was proposed. In their single-minded
effort to stand up for the notion that the in-
telligence agencies' role ought not to be re.
duced, they put themselves in the tmenviable
position of seeming to argue for the right of
U.S. intelligence agencies to invade the pri-
vacy of innocent Americans. The American
Civil Liberties Union, Morton Halperin's
Center for National Security Studies? and the
Institute for Policy Studies understandably
did not protest having the intelligence offi.
cers' view of the world id'ernified with
breaches of Americans' civil Liberties. Nor
did they protest having their own preferences
for American foreign policy identified with
the protection of individuals' rights by impli.
cation.
The debate of the mid- 1970s did not touch
on the quality of American intelligence, on
what ought to be accomplished in each of the
intelligence community's functional arras,
and on precisely how well each of these
areas was functioning. The anti-intelligence
lobby's fundamental message was that the
United States was suffering from an excess
of intelligence capability, that we had mote
intelligence than we needed. The agencies'
defenders did not challenge the impr=sion
that though the American intelligence pro-
fession might have Transgressed here and
there, at least it had been doing its job. So,
each for their own reasons, all side of the
debate agreed on the most important conclu.
sions: by and large the quality of intelligence
had been either acceptable or more than ac-
ceptable; that the quality of intelligence de.
pends on the degree of intrusion into inno-
cent lives; that the only questions about in.
telligence worth discussing concern what
rules and restrictions shall be imposed on the
agencies; and that the essential is what bal.
ance should be struck between good iintelfi.
gence and civil liberties.
Hence, the debate which fu-st Vim.
panied the Church Committee's proposed
charters for intelligence was over minutiae.
The public position of the Association of
Former Intelligence Officers (AFIC-) was
that there should be no charters and that the
intelligence agencies should be allowed to do
3,
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what they thought is necessary to accomplish
their job. But the written critique of the
charters which AF]O submitted to the Senate
consisted exclusively of minute changes in
the details of the proposed rules. By not ex-
pounding a full-fledged, intellectually ap.
pealing contrast to the set of arguments
which underlay the charters, and by disput.
ing the details of individual restrictions,
AFIO and its supporters confirmed those ar-
guments' legitimacy, and accepted the bulk
of those restrictions. Moreover, by basing
their arguments on the politically unappeal-
ing notions that good intelligence means in-
trusion into the lives of innocent people, and
that the extent of that intrusion into civil lib-
erties is strictly the concern of the intelli-
gence agencies, they virtually guaranteed
their opponents' popularity.
fact, it had undertaken. In short, the es-
timators had missed a hu?e, ominous devel-
opment unfolding before their very eyes.
In the fall of 1978 the country learned that,
even as the shah of Iran was being toppled
from his throne by a movement openly or-
ganized in Paris, Washington, Beirut, Teh-
ran, as well as in Baku, U.S.S.R., the CIA
was estimating that Iran was not in. a revolu-
tionary or even in a prerevolutionary situa-
tion and that the shah would be an important
part of Iranian politics into the foreseeable
future.
That year, the public also learned about a
nasty quarrel within the CIA over the
trustworthiness of a Soviet defector, Yuri
Nosenko, who had come to the United States
to assure the CIA that the Soviet Union had
had no involvement with President Ken-
"The prevalent attitude in American
counterintelligence today seems to be to sit
and wait for indications and then check them
out."
By 1978, however, events had led a
wholly different set of people to shift the
ground of the debate and to point out that, in
intelligence as in anything else, the priority
of rules over substance makes no sense. Here
is a sample of those events.
In 1977 the country first learned that the
Soviet Union's buildup of strategic weapons
was rapidly achieving its objective: to pro-
vide the Soviet Union with the equipment to
survive, fight, and win a nuclear war. It also
learned that this equipment would be largely
in place by about 1980, that the Soviets had
been pursuing this capability since at least
the mid-1960s, and that the United States'
intelligence agencies had had enough data to
sound the warning. Instead, however, the
National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) had
been telling policymakers that the Soviet
Union would not undertake efforts that, in
nedy's assassin. According to public ac-
counts, even though everyone agreed there.
was undeniable proof that key elements of
Nosenko's story were lies, he had been offi-
cially believed for administrative reasons.
Moreover, those intelligence officers who
had resisted believing him had been de-
moted. Then the public learned frotu
Reader's Digest that the FBI and the CIA had
had a curious reversal on another key agent,
code named Fedora, who had corroborated
Nosenko's Lies. First the CIA had officially
deemed Fedora bad and the FBI deemed him
good. Then, after a changing of the guard at
the CIA, Fedora was deemed good? while at
the FB4 he had become bad. This hardly had
the hallmark of competence. The public also
learned that the CIA had asked an American
citizen, Nicholas Shadrin, to play a danger-
ous double agent's game with the Soviet
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KGB, and that Shadrin had vanished without
a trace while meeting the Soviets under sup.
poscdlvv competent CIA control.
Finally, as struggles for power in Africa,
Asia, and even in nearby Nicaragua resulted
in victory after victory for the Soviet Union,
Americans began to ask, "Where is the
CIA?" They learned that the CIA had never
even suggested plans for thwarting these So.
viet drives.
Thus from 1977 to 1980, as Senators con.
sidered passing the proposed restrictive
charters, the arguments of both proponents
and opponents began to sound hollow.
Clearly, none of the shortcomings of Ameri.
can intelligence of which the nation was
painfully learning was rooted either in too
much or too little intrusion. Hence, though
the debate about proper safeguards against
intrusion remains interesting, since the late
1970s, there has been no excuse for confus.
ing that debate with discussions of what the
country needs by way of intelligence.
But what are those needs? What is the job
to be done in the 1980s and in what areas
should the professionals' habits be changed
in order to ensue that the job is done? in
what ways would the charters' proposed
rules, or any other possible set of rules, affect
the ability and motivation of intelligence
operatives to do their jobs? What happens
when one tries to remove chance and risk
from an inherently risk., profession?
No one familiar with U.S. intelligence
suggests that the United States receives any
thing like the kind of intelligence it needs.
The public record of the few human sources
the United States has enjoyed in the com-
munist world strongly suggests that we do
not recruit agents, so much as accept and use
those who approach us. This should hardly
be surprising given that the United States
does . not have a really clandestine service.
Al] but a handful of our clandestine officers
are under rather thin official cover, that is,
they are known to be employees of the U.S.
government. A high percentage do not speak
the language of the country they work- in.
They can hardly approach someone who is
required to repon his contacts with Ameri-
cans and unobtrusively suborn treason or
conduct false flag recruitment. Since our
agents live as official representatives of the
United States, it is not surprising that most of,
their reports read like diplomatic dispatches.
Of course, nothing prevents the United
States from acquiring the service of people
who can credibly pass themzselvts off as
something other than Americans. But many
professionals oppose this, claiming that sut:h
people would be unwieldy for the prim m
personnel and promotion system to handle.
Thus the professionals at the CIA resisted
William Casey's early efforts to change the
character of the clandestine service. The op-
position to the nomination of Max Hugel to
the post of director of operations was due to
this. Nevertheless, Casey's early efforts were
on the right track.
No one familiar with the subject dour
the sophistication of our means of technical
collection. Yet no one would conarnd that
these means were conceived as an intexre_
Wed system to collect a set of data. Each of
the present systems. is a technical extrapola_
tion of previous systems, and exists in ntmm-
bers dictated more by the budget than by any
notion of operational need. The process by
which these systems have been acquired has
been irrational. We have not decided what
information is required and then allocated re-
sources among technologies, but the oppo.
site-with one significant exception, arms
control. For fifteen years, much of the im-
petus for buying technical intelligence de-
vices has come from those who wished to
monitor certain kinds of arms-control treaties
with the Soviet Union. As a result, ourcurreat
technical architecture is fit only for operation
in peacetime and is focused to a large extent
on the rather narrow parameters of past
arms-control agreements. Of course, this
could be changed. But that would require im-
posing upon the several agencies some sort of
strategic vision and a consequent coherent set
of requirements.
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Collection without good operational secu-
rity can be worse than' useless because it can
provide channels for disinformation by hos-
tile intelligence services. Today there is no
reason to be complacent about the opera-
tional security of American intelligence.
Although nowadays the bulk of collection is
through technical means, technical opera.
tional security is barely in the conceptual
stage. Indeed, some professionals are unwil-
ling to conceive that technical means
routinely might be subjected to the same
kinds of checks for reliability that human
agents must undergo before the information
they generate is accepted.
This is not to suggest that the operational
security of our human collection system is
sound- Traditionally, challenging and testing
the aedibiliry of human sources has been the
least popular and least career-enhancing job
in the clandestine service, because whoever
does it must question the. good judgment of
higher-ranking people. In the late 1960s and
early 1970s internal criticism of the CIA's
cotmterintelligence staff mounted, because
that staff had questioned the bona fides of too
many agents, and had become bureeaucrat.
icaIly too powerful to suit the strong geog-
raphic divisions of the directorate of opera.
tions. Beginning in 1975, the staff was dis-
mantled and replaced with non-specialists
from the geographic divisions who are tem-
porarily assigned to counterintelligence.
Thus, those responsible for catching the col-
lectors' embarrassing mistakes are them-
selves responsible to those very collectors for
their careers. Clearly, operational security is
a tltankless job which, if it is to be done well,
must be done by people who are not totally
dependent on those whose work they check.
The division of responsibility in counter-
intelligence between the FBI and the CIA is
understood perhaps least of all by the two
agencies themselves. Of course, each knows
perfectly what it thinks it should do, and
even better what the other ought not to at-
tempt in its field! Both cooperate more or
less satisfactorily in pursuit of known cases.
But neither has the responsibility, the data,
or the inclination to conceive of the overall
problem of counterintelligence:. Conse-
quently, not knowing the whole, their con-
ception of their own parts is necessarily a
hit-or-miss proposition. This is true for indi-
vidual cases, but is quite undeniable as re-
gards the comprehensive counterintelligence
picture. Anyone who knows counttrint lli-
gence realizes that gaining awareness that a
case might exist is the hardest part of any
case. The prevalent attitude in American
counterintelligence today serzas to be to sit
and wait for indications and then check them
out. Awareness of possible cases sometimes
comes through allegations or because the in-
dividual sees before him the disastrous ef-
fects of enemy intelligence- At present, that
is how most of our cases begin. But there is a
preferable way, countering analysis.
Yet, counterintelligence analysis of serionk, -
sophisticated or known intc:ULecnee threats is
not possible on the basis of data as limited as
the CIA and FBI separately possess. Surely
we can expect a serious move by a hostile
intelligence service to encompass elements
both foreign and American, both human and
technical. Yet the FBI does not routinely
examine the take from the CIA and the Na-
tional Security Agency for its countcrintelli-
Bence implications, and vice versa. Without
analysis of all intelligence data from a coun-
terintelligence perspective, no agency can
hope to do anything but stumble onto cases.
The overall picture built up by this sort of
fragmented, reactive counterintelligence is
also quite unsatisfactory. One is limited to
listing cases. But one cannot begin to esti-
mate the scope of a problem-say the trans-
fer of technology or the potential for agent-
of-influence operations in Sector X until
one takes the problem itself as a point of de-
parture, and brings to bear upon it all the
available data. In the case of technology
transfer, we are just beginning to learn how
dearly the United States has had to pay for a
counterintelligence system whose structure
precluded asking substantive questions and
kept data in tight bureaucratic compartments.
If the press is to be believed, President
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Reagan and his National Security Council
have noticed these shortcomings in the an-
alysis of counterintelligence. It remains to be
seen whether they will have the moral and
intellectual wherewithal to translate their in-
tuition and their legal authority into changed
behavior on the part of a recalcitrant bureau.
cracy.
There is no denying the low quality of all
too many NIRs, nor the serious effects which
some of these have had upon the nation's se-
curity. The axle fact that, in the late 197&s,
the public and the president, who had been
reassured for fifteen years that the Soviets
were not even trying to gain strategic
superiority, woke up to find that the Soviets
had in fact achieved it is a sufficient indict-
ment of the NIEs. The American people pay
billions for an intelligence community to
avoid precisely this kind of surprise. More
galling is the knowledge that the data for a
correct assessment was not lacking and that
in fact quite a few analysts in the Pentagon
had pretty well figured out the nature and
size of the forces the Soviets were building.
But the process by which the NIEs are writ-
ten smothered the correct analyses with the
incorrect ones. The president and other re-
sponsible officials did not have the chance to
exercise their responsible judgment on the
evidence. They had no idea that a view other
than, the official one existed, much less a
chance to decide which was correct.
How does one to about improving an-
alysis? Better analysts would do a better
job. That is not just a truism. All too often
analysts in our intelligence agencies are
promoted not for being good interpreters of
the real world but rather for being good sol-
diers in the intelligence community's in-
tramural battles. If they stoutly uphold the
office view, they are often preferred to those
who prefer reality. It is often better to be
wrong for bureaucratically acceptable rea-
sons than to be right about the facts and gal-
ling to one's superiors. Strict accountability
and quality control would help. But who is to
control the controllers? After all, the office
view of things comes from precisely those
longtime officials responsible for qualify
control. The insertion at high levels of
numerous outsiders who are not eongeaial to
the senior analysts would really help. But
unless these outsiders were exceptionally
honest, new office views would start forming
around them.
There is another way of keeping analysts
honest, and of ensuring that those responsi.
ble people who read intelligeisce estimatcs
get to exercise their responsibility; allow
both the CIA and the DIA to produce esti-
mates on important subjects, each using all
sources but neither coordinating with one
another. The products would contain less of
the bureaucratic prose which long cor-
dinating sessions substitute for data- They
would also be more closely argued than is
now the case; they would have to be, becann
they would be wTinen with the sure kx owl-
edge that they would have to confront coun-
terarguments. Unfortunately, that is rmenow
the case. Finally, they would be complied
not to try to fill with the putty of judgm,entS
the gaping holes we have in our knowiiedge_
The words competitive analysis have been
widely accepted. But, in the view of pio?es-
sionals at the CIA; competitive analysis
neatly describes the system by which Its
have been produced for the past quart= c=_
tury. Again, it remains to be seen -whether the Reagan administration, having publicly
accepted the concept will prove to have
enough understanding of it and coat
to it to make it happen.
COVERT ACTION
The Church Committee, echoing many
professionals, characterized covert action-
that is, secret activities to influence the out-
come of foreign situations-as exceptio
means to be undertaken when all othc s had
failed or no others could be employe- The
Church -Comminee maintained that the
United States had resorted to covcat~ action
too often. The debate within the government
has been . between those who rant more
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C.
coven actions and those who want fewer. I
believe that history shows both sides have
missed the point.
The point is to achieve the ends of foreign
policy. Is ally X in trouble in Country A, and
has the president decided that the aim of
U.S. policy is to save his office? Is move-
ment Y in Country Z so menacing that the
president has made it U.S. policy to reduce
its influence? Affirmative answers to such
questions imply nothing about the means to
be employed except one thing: when all is
said and done, ally X should be in office and
movement Y should no longer be in a posi-
tion to do harm. These objectives could be
achieved by various combinations of means,
overt and covert. The particular combination
matters much less than the result.
Today all too many people tend to ask
about any given situation, "Is there anything
that the CIA could do here?" In many cases,
there is or could be. Nonetheless, that is the
wrong question. Coven actions decided upon
in answer to that question may be well-in-
tensioned, but they will not be part of a co-,'
herent, success-oriented plan. Rather, one
should ask, "What combination of actions
by various agencies can actually bring about
the desired objective?" If that overall plan
calls for secret acts, then there is a place for
them, if not, there is not. Today, covert ac-
tion is touted as one more thing going for us,
or something else to push the situation in the
right direction. Such categorizations are not
helpful. In the international area, there are no
rewards for good intentions or for pushing in
the right direction or for sending signals.
Policy fails if it does not succeed. The press
has recently carried allegations that the
United States has a covert action going
against Nicaragua. The New York Times
quoted a U.S. official as admitting it but jus-
tifying it on the ground that it was not suffi.
ciently large to topple the Nicaraguan re-
gime. That official's understanding of pol-
icy, if the Times reported it correctly. is pu-
erile. To conduct militar ' or paramilitary op-
erations against a regime by any means,
oven or covert, without a plan for toppling it
is against one of the most elementary norms
of politics: never do your enemy a small
hurt.
The problem of covert action is funda-
mentally that of the conception and execu-
tion of foreign policy. It is impossible either
to rationally discuss or to successfully use
any tool of foreign policy unless the ends of
policy are spelled out specifically and a seri-
ous commitment is made to achieving them.
Clearly, the question of what the United
States expects of its intelligence services has
not been answered with intellectual authority
by those who have had the political authority
to do so. We have made the case here that in
order for the United States to meet the chal-
lenges of the 1980s, American intelligence is
going to have to perform quite differently
from - the, way it has been performing.
Bureaucracies being what they are, change is
unlikely to take place-without some powerful
external stimulus-such as an act of Con-
gress.
The intelligence agencies urgently need
clear statements of what they are to ac-
complish. The executive orders and ;Presi-
dent Carter's proposed charters consisted of
authorizations for investigations under
highly specific circumstances. They did not
begin to tell the agencies what kind of infor-
mation they were to collect, what kinds of
analysis they were to provide, what sort of
security against hostile intelligence services
and terrorists they were to ensure, and what
son of influence they should be prepared to
exercise abroad. Perhaps a legislative state-
ment of these missions could begin to answer
the question, "What does the U.S. expect of
its intelligence services?" TWO
Approved For Release 2008/01/31: CIA-RDP85M00364R002204280035-9