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As the CIA has grown bigger, it has become more bureaucratic. Too much superfluous paper is circulated. Analysts are more conscious of job and status, and less daring and imaginative than they were in the '50s and '60s. Says an Administration official: "There's a lot of bureaucratic ass-covering that goes on when guys write long-range stuff. They don't want to be wrong, so they tend to be glib and platitudinous."
Though covert operations involving intervention in the internal affairs of other countries are being reduced, some have been successful. The CIA-backed overthrow of Iran's Premier Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and of Guatemala's President Jacobo Arbenz the following year headed off threats of Communist takeovers and stabilized conditions to the benefit of the Western world. Other operations were more dubious. In the Dominican Republic, Dictator Rafael Trujillo was assassinated in 1961 by rebels supplied with guns by CIA agents. The ensuing chaos forced President Johnson to send in the Marines four years later. Notes New York University Law Professor Thomas Franck: "By using dirty tricks that backfired, we set ourselves up as the universal scapegoat for every disaster caused by either God or incompetent governments."
But not all covert CIA operations can —or should—be ruled out. "There is a mean, dirty, back-alley struggle going on in which many other governments are participating," says former Secretary of State Dean Rusk. "If we withdraw unilaterally, they aren't going to stop. We must maintain a first-rate covert capability."
Potential dangers exist in many parts of the world, especially where the ever expanding KGB is active. What if a revolutionary group with Soviet ties were plotting a coup against the government of Saudi Arabia, thereby threatening the world's oil supply? Surely the U.S. would need a clandestine force to support the legally constituted government and oppose such a disruptive act. Says former CIA Director Colby: "There really has to be something between a diplomatic protest and sending in the Marines."
It is difficult to prescribe exact behavior for a covert undertaking. Strict rules of conduct could be damaging in certain situations. Suppose terrorists manage to obtain and hide an atomic weapon, then threaten to blow up a city—a not inconceivable happening in the decades ahead.
Says Telford Taylor, a law professor who served in intelligence during World War II: "If the safety of a city were at stake, I'd say go ahead and burn up their toenails. Absolute morality is a little hard to swallow in this kind of thing."
But all agree that proper authority must be exercised over covert operations. It is much debated whether—and how much—successive Presidents knew about the various CIA projects; practically everyone else was kept in the dark. "I didn't learn about the Castro assassination plots until two years ago," admits Rusk. "That is intolerable. The Secretary of State must know what is going on. There has to be an inventory of ongoing things."