Never before has a secret agency received such public scrutiny. It is indeed a unique event that a modern nation is exhaustively examining one of its chief weapons of defense for all the world to see—including its adversaries. Yet this unprecedented exposure of the Central Intelligence Agency is perhaps the inevitable result of attacks on a vast bureaucracy that operated too long out of the public eye. America's premier defense agency has been under intense fire both at home and abroad for violating what many critics felt were proper standards of international conduct.
Once a proud company of proud men acting with the confidence that not only would their accomplishments serve their country but that their fellow citizens would support them, the agency has found its very functions and rationale severely questioned. It has had five directors in five stormy years. Its chiefs seem to spend more time before congressional committees than in planning and administering. Its agents, never public heroes because of the secrecy of their work, are now portrayed in the harshest of press accounts as conspiratorial villains. Somehow the rules of the spy game changed and, as the CIA men keep telling themselves, changed in the middle of the game.
The result has been inevitable—sagging morale, deteriorating ability to collect intelligence, and declining quality of analysis. Increasingly, this has worried Government policy framers, who are all too well aware of the need for prime intelligence sources and evaluation.
It has also, not incidentally, comforted those who work against the CIA. A Soviet KGB agent told a TIME correspondent in Cairo last week: "Of all the operations that the Soviet Union and the U.S. have conducted against each other, none have benefited the KGB as much as the campaign in the U.S. to discredit the CIA. In our wildest scenarios, we could never have anticipated such a plus for our side. It's the kind of gift all espionage men dream about. Today our boys have it a lot easier, and we didn't have to lift a finger. You did all our work for us."
In an effort to restore the CIA'S esteem, reorganize the U.S. intelligence community, and deflect further criticism from the agency, President Carter last week signed an Executive order that places all nine U.S. intelligence agencies under the direct budget control and loose coordination of one man: CIA Director Stansfield Turner, 54. Incorporated in the order were sharp curbs on the kinds of clandestine practices that brought the CIA much of its criticism.
The new appointment and the new directives were received with mixed emotions in the U.S. intelligent community. There was skepticism that the overall problems of intelligence, coordination and direction could be cured either soon or simply. In addition, since taking over the CIA last March, Admiral Turner has become one of the most controversial men in Washington. His unpopularity in his own agency stems in part from the brusque way in which he eliminated 212 jobs in the Directorate of Operations, the arm that deals with covert activities and intelligence gathering (the other arm handles analysis). The sackings reflected a longstanding desire to reduce the size of the CIA and scale down its covert operations.