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Agency officials at first were leery of the Cabinet status Deutch had wrung from Clinton. The CIA prides itself on independent analysis. A director must often walk into the Oval Office with intelligence contradicting a President's foreign policy. In his first 72 hours at Langley, Deutch demanded to see the CIA's evidence that China was shipping missiles and nuclear material to Pakistan. Analysts suspected Deutch had been put up to it by the White House, which had been pressuring the agency to tone down its pessimistic reports because they undercut the Administration's case for awarding China most-favored-nation trade status. But after hearing the reports, Deutch agreed the intelligence was solid and said as much to the White House.
Will Deutch's rise counteract the decline of the CIA? The agency was shaken by the Aldrich Ames scandal in 1994, by revelations last year of cozy ties in the early 1990s with Guatemalan army torturers and by lawsuits exposing rampant sexism within its ranks. Deutch's predecessor, R. James Woolsey, who had been widely criticized for his light punishments in the Ames case, had frosty relations with the White House and an operating style with Congress so combative he once threatened to have the FBI investigate former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Dennis DeConcini for leaking information. (DeConcini denied it, and the White House squelched the move.)
Even worse, the agency's intelligence was often ignored by the White House. Preoccupied with the economy, Clinton would often cancel his daily CIA briefing.Woolsey complained of having little access. Even National Security Adviser Anthony Lake began skipping his agency briefing. The Administration soon learned the CIA had a role to play. On Oct. 3, 1993, 18 U.S. Army soldiers died in an ambush in Somalia. Six days before the fire fight, the CIA had sent the White House a top-secret memo titled "Looming Disaster," which predicted that warlord Muhammad Farrah Aidid would stage such an ambush to embarrass the U.S. But the White House ignored the warning. Deutch still has problems with Clinton's keeping his briefing appointments, but he has better access to Lake, Christopher and Perry. "The word has got out that Deutch has clout, and the product is getting downtown," says a CIA analyst.
A whole array of other problems remains at the CIA. Sex-discrimination complaints have risen in the past three years despite promises to open senior ranks to more women. Treasury Department officials grouse that the economic intelligence the agency provides is little better than Wall Street gossip. The operations directorate still has too many idle holdovers from cold war days, says Milton Bearden, a former senior Soviet-division officer and Bonn station chief. Meanwhile, CIA officials think there is another Russian mole in Langley. And last year French intelligence exposed the CIA's operation in Paris (as a result, Deutch last week decided to reprimand about half a dozen agency officers there for sloppy tradecraft in attempting to steal economic secrets). A report by an agency task force investigating CIA ties to Honduran military officers accused of killing and torturing citizens in the early 1980s is expected to be more damaging than revelations last year in the Guatemala scandal.