INTELLIGENCE: The CIA: Time to Come In From the Cold

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reputation. To woo support, he has made a point of being more open and candid than his predecessors. He has in effect undertaken a task that to many seems self-contradictory: to be open about operations that by definition must be secret. Who ever heard of an espionage chief being publicly accountable? So far this year, Colby and other CIA officials have testified before 18 congressional committees on 30 occasions. Colby estimates that he has talked with 132 reporters in the last year, though rarely for quotation.

He has also made more public speeches than any previous CIA director. Recently, for example, he agreed to speak at a conference on the CIA and covert actions, which was sponsored in Washington, D.C., by the Center for National Security Studies. When associates warned that he would be up against a stacked deck, Colby shrugged: "There's nothing wrong with accountability." The conference was dominated by critics like Ellsberg, who harangued Colby for 20 minutes, and Fred Branfman of the Indochina Resource Center, who accused the director of telling "outrageous lies." Colby kept his temper.

With Colby's encouragement, eleven agency analysts, wearing lapel tags labeled CIA, attended the recent Chicago convention of the American Political Science Association. Explains Gary Foster, the agency's coordinator for academic relations: "We wanted to demonstrate that we are a functioning, bona fide research organization." In addition, Colby has permitted the agency's analysts to publish articles in scholarly and popular journals under their own names and CIA titles. At the same time, however, Colby has lobbied in Congress for a bill that would make unauthorized disclosures of CIA activities by past and present employees a criminal offense. The bill is now bottled up in committee. If it is enacted, ex-CIA employees like Marchetti and Agee would risk jail for exposing the agency's secrets.

An Appendage. Above all, Colby has taken steps to reduce covert actions and direct more of the CIA'S energies back to its original mission of intelligence gathering. Spies still have a role in the modern CIA, but the U.S. now depends less on men and more on satellites, high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft like the SR-71, and equipment that intercepts rival nations' secret communications. Such technical advances make the CIA highly successful in collecting military and other strategic information.

Even so, Kissinger complained throughout Nixon's first term that CIA assessments of the state of the world, which were prepared by the agency's Board of National Estimates, were unfocused and useless for policymaking. Last year Colby abolished the twelve-member board and replaced it with experts assigned to a country or region. Now they periodically make concrete recommendations through Colby to the National Security Council. The result has been to make the CIA in its intelligence work less of a semiautonomous think tank and more of an appendage of the NSC and the White House.

Many skeptics view Colby's greening of the CIA, his assurances of reform and restraint (see interview page 18) as deceptive. They think these steps are designed merely to enable "the firm" (as it is sometimes known) to carry on business as usual. But Colby clearly realizes that he faces a serious questioning of the agency's