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Schlesinger has ordered the firing or forced retirement of 600 of the CIA'S 18,000 worldwide employees; 400 more are expected to go by year's end. His aim is to cut costs, eliminate marginal performers, and change the leadership of the agency. Among those who have gone are several of the long-entrenched top deputies of former CIA Director Richard Helms, who tended to favor the "operational men," or spies in the field, over the cerebral analysts, who ponder the intelligence and make policy recommendations. These two sides of the agency, traditionally separated, have orders to cooperate more.
Paramilitary operations are being scaled down. In South Viet Nam, the CIA's role in the "Phoenix"—or counterterror—program has already been phased out. The program used CIA agents to advise the South Vietnamese in the "neutralization," or killing, of Viet Cong officials. Such covert activities are under the CIA'S deputy director of operations, currently William Colby, 53, a former ambassador who was in charge of pacification in Viet Nam from 1969 to mid-1971.
Often called the agency's "dirty tricks department," Colby's section controls field agents who are involved in clandestine activities, including keeping a watch on the KGB (Soviet intelligence) and working with intelligence organizations in Western countries. But Colby's group is now placing new emphasis on such activities as getting early warnings of—and curbing—international terrorist operations and narcotics traffic. Through intercepts of communications, the CIA has discovered who ordered the killing of the U.S. and Belgian diplomats in Khartoum two months ago. It also knows the financial sources of the Black Septembrists, who carried out those assassinations, as well as the murders of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.
Rivalry. With the downgrading of cloak-and-dagger operations, one of Schlesinger's tasks will be the strengthening of the "leadership for the [intelligence] community as a whole," a recommendation that he himself urged on the President in 1971, when he was an assistant director of the Office of Management and Budget. Now, Schlesinger not only heads the CIA but also has ultimate responsibility for the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, which provides intelligence for the armed forces, and the National Security Agency, which directs spy planes, satellites and a vast communications-monitoring apparatus that cracks codes and gathers data from other countries.
Schlesinger, as chairman of the Intelligence Resources Advisory Committee, will be taking a hard look at the combined $6.2 billion (some estimates put it as high as $8 billion) spent by the three agencies. Nearly half of the money goes for satellite reconnaissance and spy planes; about $750 million is budgeted to the CIA.