Central Intelligence Agency

THE CENTRAL Intelligence Agency is desperately in search of a new role.By becoming peacekeeper between Israelis and Palestinians, the agency would go a long way toward mitigating its indecorous past. It is a good place to start for an outfit that has caused domestic headaches and foreign embarrassments.The Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, Richard C. Shelby Alabama, expressed concern about the designated role and said he will hold hearings. They should be substantive; neither the agency nor the White House should alone define the future of an agency that, at times, has seemed a government unto itself.

Investigative journalist Gary Webb has just published a boo quite likely to rekindle a national debate that appeared to be laid to rest a year ago. The book is "Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion" (Seven Stories Press, 548 pages, $24.95). The book ought to recall Webb from the journalistic netherworld to which he has been exiled. Whether it will remains to be seen.Two years ago, it looked as if Webb would be the next Bob Woodward, a hero because of the corruption he exposed.

John M. Deutch, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, appeared Nov. 15 at a town meeting in Watts to discuss allegations that CIA-backed contra rebels sold crack cocaine in Los Angeles' black neighborhoods to fund their covert war in Nicaragua. Here is his opening statement: Thank you, Congresswoman [Juanita] Millender-McDonald, for holding this public meeting, for giving me the opportunity to talk with members of this community about charges that the CIA introduced crack cocaine into South Central Los Angeles in the mid-1980s.

WASHINGTON -- Did the Central Intelligence Agency conspire in the 1980s to flood the streets of South-Central Los Angeles with crack cocaine? To make that accusation, with only the flimsiest of evidence supporting it, is to call up the specter of political paranoia. What could the nation's spy agency hope to gain from selling drugs to poor black Angelenos? The charge being hurled by such people as Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., and Louis Farrakhan seems a grand leap into unreason, an attempt to shift responsibility from individuals who harm themselves and their families to a shadowy power with global sway.

LOS ANGELES -- So the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Deutch, was shocked to discover that black Americans believe the U.S. government in general, and his agency in particular, are involved in the drug business.Where has he been? One can only hope that he knows more about the rest of the world than he does about his own country.Where to begin? The anger now is about crack cocaine in Los Angeles and charges by Rep. Maxine Waters, among others, that the CIA worked with drug lords and distributors to raise money and channel it to the contras fighting Marxists in Nicaragua.

Washington -- IN 1974, AT a lawn reception at the Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pa., a young colonel in dress uniform came up to me and introduced himself by saying elliptically, "I know you, but you don't know me."Then he told me one of the strangest, most ominous stories I had heard. "When you were with the guerrillas in Guatemala in the Sierra de las Minas in 1966," he related, "I was the Special Forces adviser to the Zacapa Regiment. We had been told by the CIA that you were there."

In today's Parade Magazine, George J. Tenet, the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is misidentified as David Cohen, the deputy director of operations, in a caption accompanying a photograph on the cover.The Sun regrets the errors.

The father of our country was also, it turns out, the father of its spooks."The necessity of pro-curing good intelligence is apparent & need not be further urged," General George Washington wrote to a military colleague in 1777. " All that remains for me to add is, that you keep the whole matter as secret as possible."More than two centuries later, in his January 1993 valedictory address as president to the Central Intelligence Agency he had once headed, George Bush pondered the end of the Cold War and declared, "We need more intelligence, not less."

YET ANOTHER SHOE, the heaviest so far, has been dropped by the many-footed super-spy Aldrich H. Ames -- this one in the form of a damaging admission by the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John M. Deutch, that, beginning in 1985, the agency, without warning of any kind, passed on information to the White House from Soviet ''spies'' known or suspected to be working for the other side. Aldrich Ames himself is in federal prison serving a life term for his treachery, which included the betrayal of at least 10 genuine spies later executed by the Soviets.

Lawrence R. Houston, a founding father of the Central Intelligence Agency, died of a heart attack Tuesday while vacationing at his summer home in Westport, Mass. He was 82.In the late 1940s, he helped draft legislation that created and shaped the CIA, then served as the spy agency's general counsel from its founding in 1947 until his retirement in 1973.Mr. Houston supervised the legal work for the exchange of Soviet intelligence officer Rudolph Abel for Francis Gary Powers, the U.S. pilot whose U-2 surveillance aircraft was shot down over the former Soviet Union in 1960.

President-elect Barack Obama has made an outstanding move in naming Leon E. Panetta to reform the beleaguered Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Panetta is a savvy and sophisticated political operative who was a consumer of intelligence as chief of staff in the Clinton White House in the 1990s. He is a former director of the Office of Management and Budget who understands the need for cost-cutting in the intelligence community. And as a former member of the Iraq Study Group, Mr. Panetta knows how the Bush administration and the CIA corrupted the intelligence process to take the country into an unnecessary war seven years ago. The argument against Mr. Panetta is that he is not an intelligence insider, but that is more virtue than vice.

WASHINGTON - With the expected selection of retired Adm. Dennis Blair to be the nation's senior intelligence officer, President-elect Barack Obama has put a spotlight on the Naval Academy's Class of 1968, which would fill three of the most influential national security positions. Blair would serve with 1968 classmate Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the president's top military adviser, and with Sen. Jim Webb, a Virginia Democrat who wields key influence on the Senate Foreign Relations, Armed Services and joint economic committees.

President-elect Barack Obama is sending conflicting signals on whether he intends to change the bankrupt culture of Washington's intelligence community and to introduce genuine reform to the Central Intelligence Agency. He appears to be ready to remove the top two intelligence officials, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and CIA Director Michael V. Hayden - both retired general officers - which suggests Mr. Obama recognizes the need to change the military culture of the intelligence community.

U.S. presidents have been reluctant to reform the Central Intelligence Agency. Often, their first decision, naming a CIA director, guarantees there will be no meaningful change. Presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush named CIA directors who either were unfit for the job or politicized intelligence - or both. Three decades of mediocre appointments have created huge bureaucratic woes at the CIA that will be difficult to fix. The next president needs to address three major problems that have weakened the intelligence community: militarization of intelligence; absence of oversight; and illegal activity by the CIA's National Clandestine Service.

With Congress on the verge of outlining new parameters for National Security Agency eavesdropping between suspicious foreigners and Americans, lawmakers are leaving largely untouched a host of government programs that critics say involves far more domestic surveillance than the wiretaps they sought to remedy. These programs - most of them highly classified - are run by an alphabet soup of federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies. They sift, store and analyze the communications, spending habits and travel patterns of U.S. citizens, searching for suspicious activity.

Waterboarding legal when CIA used it The Sun's editorial "Standing against torture" (Feb. 19) cites Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, as saying that he believes waterboarding is torture. First, the CIA neither conducts nor condones torture. Second, General Hayden did not make the statement attributed to him in the editorial. General Hayden did say in congressional testimony this month that waterboarding was used on three hardened terrorists in the CIA's detention and interrogation program.

Legacy of Ashes The History of the CIA By Tim Weiner Doubleday / 702 pages / $27.95 In 1952, amid a stalemate in the Korean War, the Central Intelligence Agency dropped more than 1,500 Korean secret agents behind enemy lines in North Korea. The operation was overseen by the station chief in Seoul, Albert R. Haney, "a garrulous and ambitious Army colonel who boasted openly that he had thousands of men working for him on guerrilla operations and intelligence missions," writes Tim Weiner.

WASHINGTON -- In a move to reduce secrecy around the nation's spy agencies, the Senate Intelligence Committee has approved a measure to make public the total amount spent on spying and to direct the Central Intelligence Agency to release an internal report examining its failure to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The bill, approved in a closed session Wednesday, also would require President Bush to provide Congress with all daily intelligence briefs concerning Iraq in the six years before the war began in March 2003.

WASHINGTON -- The crackdown on leaks at the Central Intelligence Agency that led to the dismissal of a veteran intelligence officer last week included a highly unusual polygraph examination for the agency's independent watchdog, CIA Inspector General John L. Helgerson, intelligence officials with knowledge of the investigation said yesterday. The polygraphs, which have been given to dozens of employees since January, are part of a broader effort by CIA Director Porter J. Goss to re-emphasize a culture of secrecy that has included a marked tightening of the review process for books and articles by former agency employees, according to a lawyer who represents many authors who once worked for the CIA. Authors say the agency's Publications Review Board has been removing material that would easily have been approved before.

IF YOU leave aside the war in Iraq and the spread of terrorism, this thing about leaks and presidential adviser Karl Rove is just another inside-the-beltway story. It's the usual slashing and burning told in the obscure language of Washington politics. Lives and limbs are hanging in the balance, along with the nation's good name, but that's just collateral damage. News stories about leaked information and reporters protecting sources and special prosecutors float out to the rest of the nation on a turbid sea fathomable only by the wily inside players.