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All the furor over the CIA's real and putative misdeeds has obscured its solid accomplishments over many years. Except for rare periods of war, the U.S. did not even have an overall intelligence service until the Office of Strategic Services was created in 1942; it provided Americans with a hazardous and exhilarating cram course in espionage. OSS members formed the nucleus of the CIA, which was started in 1947 in response to Soviet expansionism. The agency attracted talented recruits from campuses in the 1950s, and its activities spread adventurously, and occasionally recklessly.
Now, as the 1980s approach, what kind of CIA can—and should—the nation have? To hear Turner and other intelligence authorities, the agency will be smaller, with more sharply focused analysis, and with covert operations scaled down and sparingly used.
While the quality of CIA analysis in general is not what it used to be, the agency is still unsurpassed in interpreting technological data. The American public was exposed to the awesome possibilities of aerial espionage when a U-2 spy plane was brought down over the Soviet Union in 1960, and its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was put on trial and jailed for two years. Since then the U-2 has been supplemented by an ever expanding array of observation satellites and eavesdropping devices. As a senior member of the National Security Council puts it, "The agency is best when there's something very specific that you want to know, preferably a question that can be answered with numbers, or, if not with numbers, then at least with nouns. The fewer adverbs and adjectives in a CIA report, the better it tends to be." But since this is a world of adverbs and adjectives—that is, of emotions that cannot be measured scientifically —more subjective analysis is needed. "We're neglecting soft input, the human factor," says a top foreign policy adviser to the White House. "There is insufficient keen political analysis."
White House officials complain, perhaps excessively, that the agency has failed to give them advance warning of crucial developments. Why, they ask, was the CIA not better informed about the reaction Vance would receive when he took his SALT proposals to Moscow last March. Common sense, however, might have indicated that the Secretary would run into trouble because the proposals were too sweeping to be acceptable to the Soviets. The White House felt that the CIA should have had some inkling of Sadat's decision to go to Israel; yet U.S. intelligence had warned that Sadat was frustrated and looking for a bold step. The CIA had satellite photos of a secret South African nuclear facility in the Kalahari Desert, but had not interpreted them. The White House was considerably embarrassed when it learned that the Soviets had already discovered the installation.
Policymakers sometimes fail to use sound intelligence when it is offered. President Johnson disregarded the discouraging CIA reports on Viet Nam; they were not what he wanted to hear. The White House rejected CIA warnings of a Middle East war in 1973. Why would the Arabs want to start a war they could not win? reasoned the policymakers. It did not occur to them that the Arabs could win something just by fighting better than they had the last time.