Washington has begun to change the way it spies. Last week, the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees, Sen. David Boren and Rep. Dave McCurdy, proposed a sweeping reorganization of the American intelligence community that would reduce its $30 billion-a-year budget. Next month CIA Director Robert Gates will report to the White House on the agency’s vision of spying in the 21st century. The agency has made no secret of the fact that it is devoting more attention to drug trafficking, nuclear proliferation, terrorism and economic intelligence. But what is less well known is that for the past three years the agency has been increasing its roster of spies with more specialized skills. Since 1989, Congress has secretly added several hundred million dollars to the CIA’s Operations Directorate, which runs the agency’s covert operators. “Gates intends to push as many people out into the streets as he can,” says one U.S. intelligence official.
During much of the cold war, the agency relied heavily on satellites and electronic eavesdropping rather than human spies. High tech worked better to penetrate the Soviet monolith and gauge its war-making potential. But today’s threats are more varied and require more eyes on the ground. CIA satellites can photograph the outside of a Third World nuclear facility. But to confirm that uranium is enriched inside, it helps to have an agent who can scoop up earth samples around the building to be examined for traces of uranium hexafluoride. A well-placed agent can be critical in gathering economic intelligence, tipping off Washington to a government’s position in trade talks or warning when American businessmen are being victimized by foreign spies. The CIA does draw the line at industrial espionage, however. Gates says his agents are willing to give their lives for their country “but not for a company.”
To meet the new demands, the agency is hiring more physicists who understand nuclear technology and business grads who can read a spreadsheet. New officers still learn how to recruit agents and use “dead drops” for messages during trade-craft training at the agency’s “farm,” located at Camp Peary near Williamsburg, Va. But after that, many are packed off to language schools. Officers already in the field are rotated into academia to hone technical skills. “We still want a spy like the one you read about in a John le Carre novel,” said an intelligence source. “But now George Smiley will have to speak Japanese.”
The funding increase the Operations Directorate has received-less than the cost of orbiting one spy satellite-goes a long way in gathering human intelligence, or HUMINT. Third World agents work surprisingly cheap. Even in his heyday, Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega received only $1,500 a month from his U.S. intelligence handlers. The biggest expense has been in building new covers for the spies. The traditional cover - a U.S. Embassy job - has become increasingly transparent: a foreign government can spot many spooks simply by cross-checking State Department directories. But nonofficial covers (“NOCs,” as the agency calls them) have become more difficult to establish in an age of instant communications and computer credit checks. It now takes the CIA at least two years to build an officer’s cover. NEWSWEEK has learned that Gates plans to expand NOCs into the international business community. The agency is hiring midlevel business managers and placing them undercover in multinational corporations around the world-with the corporate chiefs’ private consent. “These are guys who will never set foot in Langley,” said one U.S. source. “They’re trained remotely and buried in the multinationals.”
The expanding spy network has had its growing pains. The agency’s capabilities in the Mideast are still weak. Before Iraq invaded Kuwait, the CIA had satellites to track Saddam Hussein’s forces but no agents in Baghdad to let Washington know what he intended to do with them. Law officers still complain that Langley is stingy with its intelligence on drug traffickers. CIA officers, who once ignored criminal activity around them, will now get legal training to spot and report it. Intelligence officials also worry about keeping highly skilled recruits from jumping to better-paying jobs in business once they realize that spying can be dull. “Without the glamour of the cold war, it may be difficult to retain these people,” says McCurdy, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Agency insiders say it may take five years before the CIA sees the fruits Of “HUMINT in the ’90s,” as the program is privately called. But once in place, the agency hopes it will offer a better view of the world beyond the cold war.
