The Trouble Within

As director of the CIA, R. James Woolsey must deal with a daunting array of sworn enemies: Russian spies, Libyan operatives, North Korean agents, Dennis DeConcini . . . Wait, Dennis DeConcini, the Democratic Senator from Arizona? Listen to what he says and judge for yourself. “We have had a very obstinate director of the CIA who has hurt the agency,” says DeConcini, who is the chairman of the Senate’s Intelligence Committee. “He is not doing the Administration any good whatsoever and to me is a disaster.”

After 18 months in the job, Woolsey increasingly finds himself fighting a surprising new band of domestic foes: lawmakers and other espionage experts who feel that the nation’s spymaster has yet to prove he can retool U.S. intelligence for the post-cold war world. Woolsey is coming under growing attack for being too reluctant to cut his share of America’s $28 billion annual intelligence budget and too slow to bring diversity to the spy ranks. The spotlight on the agency increased last week after TIME reported that more than 100 of the CIA’s female case officers have collectively accused the agency, under Woolsey and his predecessors, of denying them promotions and choice assignments.

In an interview with TIME last week, Woolsey vowed to shrink intelligence spending “prudently,” but complained that Congress has doubled the Administration’s proposed cuts, from $7 billion to $14 billion, through 1997. During the 1990s, the cuts will slice 1 of every 4 positions from the U.S. intelligence payroll. “The intelligence community and the CIA will be — by the end of the decade — down to about the size it was in the Carter Administration,” Woolsey says. The man who ran the agency back then, however, doesn’t see that as a problem. “I don’t think we were shorthanded in my day,’ says Stansfield Turner, CIA chief under President Carter. “I think ((President)) Reagan and ((his CIA chief William)) Casey bloated it.”

Even so, both the White House and Congress may soon appoint panels to look deep into the workings of the intelligence community. “This could lead to dramatic changes,” says a member of the President’s foreign intelligence advisory board, a group of White House appointees chaired by former Defense Secretary Les Aspin. President Clinton is expected to assign the 12-member panel in early August to evaluate the spy process from top to bottom. Yet that plan doesn’t please John Warner of Virginia, the senior G.O.P. member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who wants an outside group for the task.

Key members of Congress feel that Woolsey is reluctant to embrace a changed world. DeConcini is angry at Woolsey for refusing, with White House backing, to accept the Senator’s legislation giving the FBI earlier access to possible security leaks. The measure comes in response to the case of CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames, in which the agency for two years neglected to inform the FBI of its suspicions after Ames gave deceptive answers in a 1991 polygraph exam. Ames, a 31-year CIA veteran, was sentenced last April to life in prison for pocketing up to $2 million from Moscow for his spying.

Woolsey responds that he is making big changes in the focus and direction of the CIA. And in fact the agency is winning high marks from policymakers for advances in economic intelligence. The CIA, for example, has provided U.S. offiCIAls with verbatim transcripts of private talks between Japanese Cabinet ministers and among Germany’s central bankers.

The agency, says Woolsey, must shuck its image as a Waspish sanctuary where a traitor like Ames can go undetected for years despite his profligate ways. “As far as the culture goes, I think some substantial changes are needed,” Woolsey said in his birch-paneled CIA office. He readily conceded that his work force needs more diversity. “We are running intelligence collection against a very diverse world — a world in which there are two genders and lots of people of different kinds of backgrounds and races and cultures,” he said. “The CIA will do a better job if it’s not a white male fraternity.”

Yet there are some experts who think the CIA is beyond repair. “The CIA should be shut down because its banner has too many cold war stains,” says William Odom, a retired three-star Army general who ran the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic eavesdropping arm, during the Reagan Administration. The Pentagon and State Department could perform most of its tasks, he says, and a new, truly secret unit could handle spy missions.

Although Woolsey applauded last week’s decision by the House to keep the annual intelligence bill formally secret, the 27-vote margin of victory was far less than last year’s 95-vote edge. “In the modern world,” says Kansas Democrat Dan Glickman, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, “they have to prove and justify their budget much more than in the past.” Neither Glickman nor Representative Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, a senior Democrat on the intelligence panel, knows what to make of Woolsey’s new, accommodating tone. “When I said those same things to him a few months ago, he flew into a rage,” Torricelli says. Woolsey now seems to accept the fact that to confront America’s new adversaries abroad successfully, he needs more allies at home.