The spy game has changed radically since the end of the cold war. In a gesture of professional courtesy that would have been unthinkable to James Bond, the CIA station chief in Moscow now presents his credentials to the Russian intelligence service, just as Moscow’s man in Washing-ton identifies himself to the CIA. Just a few years ago the agency employed more than 100 analysts to count Soviet military hardware; now it needs only nine for the job.
Congress now questions why the intelligence establishment needs a lavish budget. The Clinton administration will trim intelligence spending (about $28 billion a year) by $7 billion over the next five years. Critics want to slice deeper. The agency was good at counting the Soviet Army’s tanks, they concede. But now that the former Soviet Union’s hardware is rusting, why bother? The world may still be chaotic, but the agency’s record at predicting social upheaval is notoriously poor. The CIA was slow to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet economy, or the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. During the gulf war Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf complained that much of what intelligence analysts fed him was “mush.” Former Senate intelligence committee vice chairman Daniel Patrick Moynihan even suggests abolishing the CIA. Most of what the agency does is duplicated by others. CIA military intelligence is so shallow “it is almost never used by the military services,” says former National Security Agency director William Odom.
Out at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va., spooks scoff at the notion of their obsolescence. The budget cutters “have yet to identify what they don’t want to know about the world,” says Robert Gates, Director of Central Intelligence under George Bush. Congress and the White House still deluge the agency with requests for intelligence on the former Soviet Union, where CIA case officers have secretly fanned out to the warring republics. Soldiers and diplomats can’t handle those clandestine operations. CIA officers still have to elude Russian agents who trail them as closely as the old KGB did.
In the rest of the world, spying has become harder and more hazardous. Washington now wants more detailed HUMINT, or information from human sources. To target the Pentagon’s smart bombs, the CIA must provide coordinates not just for a building but for the ventilation duct through which the missile must pass. CIA operatives who prowled the diplomatic circuit for tidbits on Yugoslavia now collect intelligence on the position of mortar batteries around Sarajevo in case U.S. troops intervene. NEWSWEEK has learned that special CIA pathfinder teams dodged land mines in Somalia to scout out towns ahead of advancing U.S. forces. “We have slain a large dragon,” says R. James Woolsey, the new Director of Central Intelligence. “But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes.”
Some may have slithered into the United States. The World Trade Center bombing brought home the need to have good intelligence on terrorists. CIA officers in Europe and the Middle East are trying to trace foreign links to the bombers, using computer programs to track leads that may take them to Iran. Terror struck the CIA itself last January. A gunman killed two agency officials and wounded three others as they drove into Langley. The shooting appeared random-but the agency has at least one report that Hizbullah, the fundamentalist terror group, had been casing the traffic patterns of U.S. officials abroad. The CIA also is investigating whether the prime suspect in the case, Mir Aimal Kansi, a Pakistani national, may have fled to Iran.
The CIA has already changed to battle many post-cold-war threats. With communications intercepts and well-placed agents in Baghdad, the agency rolled up some 30 Iraqi terror teams sent out during the gulf war. Tracking phony passports, CIA officials foiled an attempt by one Iraqi team to blow up a bomb in a planter box at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia. One of Saddam Hussein’s hit teams getting off an airliner at an overseas airport was met by local police tipped off by the CIA. Before the terrorists could retrieve their bags, the police put them on a plane for another country. At the next airport, CIA officers appeared with local authorities and the hit men were packed off to another country. The airport hopping continued round the world until the frustrated team finally surrendered-and revealed Saddam’s attack plans for his network.
One of the agency’s most important missions today is to track the spread of nuclear and chemical weapons. The CIA was able to prove that Muammar Kaddafi’s “pharmaceutical” facility at Rabta was really making chemical weapons. When Kaddafi later claimed that a fire had mysteriously destroyed the plant, the CIA was able to prove that the Libyan strongman had set tires on fire to fake the blaze. CIA satellites have caught Saddam’s agents trying to slip nuclear equipment out the back door of facilities while U.N. inspectors knocked on the front. Woolsey warned in February that North Korea may have secretly stockpiled enough plutonium “for at least one nuclear weapon.” The agency finds that proliferators can be thwarted with exposure. But if that doesn’t work, it can launch covert operations. Agents can tamper with computer hardware exported by supplier countries (“bugger up the machinery,” as one official puts it) so the customer at the other end can’t use it to build bombs.
Five years ago CIA officials refused to dirty their hands by joining the drug war. Today they have enlisted, developing agents in the Cali and Medellin cartels, NEWSWEEK has learned. CIA officers train South American police to collect intelligence. In February, according to secret documents obtained by NEWSWEEK, the CIA began flying two of its own small surveillance planes to spy on the cartels. In its most successful bust, the CIA helped organize the 1989 ambush of drug kingpin Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, who was killed in a fire fight with Colombian police.
Spying against drug kingpins and terrorists is a high-stress business, even more difficult, say agency officials, than fencing with the KGB. CIA psychiatrists hold weekly “vespers,” as they have been nicknamed, to assess how undercover operatives hold up under the strain. Movies notwithstanding, cold-war spying was generally slow-paced, even genteel. The rule: “spies don’t shoot spies,” and a good deal of intelligence gathering happened at embassy cocktail parties. Case officers didn’t even bother to get weapons training.
Today they do. Drug cartels do not swap spies the way Soviets and Americans used to. NEWSWEEK has learned that the CIA suffered casualties in Somalia that have never been publicly acknowledged. When the enemy was Moscow, the CIA had many foreign intelligence services “in our back pockets,” says an intelligence official. “Now these countries are saying the Soviets aren’t a threat anymore, so what are you guys doing here? That’s made the operating environment more difficult. The friendly country is more likely to tail you and tap your phone.” Increasingly CIA spies operate under deep cover (which often means no diplomatic immunity).
And increasingly, the spies are women. At “the Farm,” the agency training ground at Camp Peary near Williamsburg, Va., 40 percent of the recruits are now female. More husband-wife teams are in the field. Women often make better agent handlers, the male spies admit. But there’s still a glass ceiling back at Langley. Though women now serve as station chiefs overseas, only one has reached the rank of division chief in the agency’s clandestine arm, the Directorate of Operations.
In the corridors of Langley, there’s nervous chatter as bureaucrats accustomed to rising budgets contemplate leaner times and a less certain mission. Director Woolsey, a former Pentagon official and armscontrol negotiator in the Carter, Reagan and Bush administrations, is a skilled bureaucratic gamesman and Washington insider who will resist deeper cuts. It won’t hurt that he’s close friends with Vice President Al Gore and a tennis partner of Defense Secretary Les Aspin. But Woolsey knows the agency will have to spend less and more wisely.
Where to cut? Spy satellites are the most expensive items, costing at least $1 billion apiece. The new chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, complains that as much as $100 million was wasted on upgrading a cold-war satellite that now “provides almost no benefit.” Congressional critics believe that the dozen or so spy satellites orbiting the earth can be scaled back. The CIA itself accounts for only about 15 percent of the intelligence budget-the rest goes to the Pentagon spy services-but there, too, savings could be made. The bloated agency bureaucracy may need to diet; it has one of the highest percentages of “supergrade” salaried employees in the government. “It’s like an aircraft carrier with 80 admirals,” complains a Senate staffer. According to a new book by former CIA analyst John Gentry, agency reports can wade through as many as seven layers of review before reaching the White House-guaranteeing that many of them end up late or “notably poor” after having to please so many editors.
There is also a risk that the CIA will be asked to do too much. Director Woolsey has hinted that the agency may become more involved in economic spying. But when CIA operatives recently sounded out private security firms on what else agency spies might usefully do, the answer was: not much. Most of the intelligence American businesses need can be collected out in the open, says Florida security consultant Henry Clements. “Then you can pretty much guess the other 10 percent that your competitor keeps secret. You don’t need a spy to break into his office.”
At the height of the cold war, the CIA got itself into trouble with dirty tricks. Some worry that the demand for more HUMINT will lead the agency back onto shadowy ethical ground. HUMINT is often a euphemism for bribing foreign officials or breaking foreign laws. “It’s a risky business, and every now and then one of those operations is going to blow up in your face,” says former director Gates. “But if you want to know more about proliferation and terrorism, you have to take risks. Congress and the executive branch have accepted that. But when one of those operations blows up, they also have to remember it.”
They probably won’t. Just off the entrance to the CIA’s new headquarters building sits a section of the Berlin wall, brought to Langley last January. The ugly chunk of concrete, covered with graffiti (CIA hands suspect that the agency spraypainted it for effect), runs between east and west, just as it did in Germany. CIA employees coming from Langley’s main parking lot must walk past the grim monument-a purposeful reminder of the dragon once slain, and the snakes yet to come.
