Getting Smart: Three steps toward a more intelligent intelligence community

After spending three months loudly berating the intelligence community about 9/11, Congress has quietly decided to postpone any reforms until September. The most pressing and least settled issues on the national- security agenda will therefore be debated -- and perhaps decided -- on the eve of midterm elections. In that politically charged climate, the temptation for lawmakers to grandstand on intelligence will be great -- probably greater than at any time since the 1970s, when Democratic senator Frank Church of Idaho, looking toward a presidential bid, excoriated and eviscerated the CIA.

This time, however, the political dynamic may redound to the public good. The knock against our spies now is not that they're "rogue elephants," but rather that they're desk mice. Given this new atmosphere, it's expected that some of the worst of the Church restraints -- constitutionally needless limits on surveillance and covert action -- will be loosened.

Yet undoing Church will not, of itself, cure our intelligence dysfunction. Our spy system is, in fact, plagued by three longstanding problems, which the Church measures exacerbated but did not create. These interlocking disorders should be addressed, over the short, medium, and long term, by a three-step plan.

First, in the near term, the U.S. must rehabilitate its counterintelligence -- a vulnerability that has been virtually ignored during the reform debate. "CI," as it's known in the spy trade, disrupts the intelligence work of other nations and encourages allied spy agencies to share their secrets with us. Contrary to public perceptions, successful spying hinges less on Le Carre-esque betrayals than on cultivating international cooperation; during World War II, according to one government report, some 85 percent of our strategic intelligence came from the British. Yet liaison of this kind is always difficult work, the perennial cause -- as former CIA counterintelligence officer William R. Johnson has written -- of "peptic ulcers, high blood pressure, anxiety, depression, paranoid behavior, and bad dreams in CI executives."

Only a reputation for good CI on our end will make other services confident that they can share information with us without putting their sources at risk. During most of the Cold War, the CIA's foreign liaison was managed by the counterintelligence staff, under James Jesus Angleton; and though Angleton was later demonized for his relentless mole-hunts, friendly services liked the fact that he was always hunting. On his watch, liaison -- with the British and Israelis in particular -- was unprecedentedly close.

In 1973, alas, Angleton's suspicions about the sincerity of Soviet detente provoked the wrath of CIA director William Colby. In a power play designed to depose Angleton, Colby decentralized, and effectively destroyed, CI. The counterintelligence staff once vetted sources and controlled access to files; it was now to serve only an "advisory" function. Case officers would be allowed to assess the bona fides of their own agents; and to ensure that each case officer knew "enough" to assess his recruitments, the CIA's files would be decompartmentalized. For the past three decades, in other words, the spy world's equivalent of virus-protection software has been turned off.

The results have been catastrophic. Though no spies are known to have penetrated the CIA on Angleton's watch, our major spy agencies have since been riddled with moles: Hanssen, Montes, Ames. And as agencies rush to hire translators and analysts of foreign background, our vulnerability to espionage will only increase.

There are already signs of penetration among handlers of counterterrorist wiretaps. Sibel Edmonds, a former translator in the FBI's Washington field office, has raised suspicions about a coworker's connections to Middle Eastern persons whose intercepted conversations the Bureau was translating. "Investigations are being compromised," Edmonds wrote the FBI inspector general in March. The Bureau has confirmed to the Washington Post that Edmonds's coworker had "unreported contacts" with a foreign official targeted by the taps.

Clearly, until we fix our CI system, foreign spy services will have good reason to hold out on us. And that will have disastrous consequences, because we are relying increasingly on such liaison for access to cultures in which Americans can't discreetly operate. As former CIA director Robert Gates has put it: "You need a guy walking into Tripoli or Pyongyang who doesn't look like he just left Iowa."

Wholesale reform in CI must be undertaken now -- and it can be: Recentralization, a return to the Angleton model, could be mandated by an executive decision. The draft text of just such an order was prepared by Reagan staffers in March 1981; Bush staffers should use it as a model.

Such a measure would not bear full fruit, however, without broader bureaucratic reform. "Counterintelligence," Angleton himself once said, "is only as good as relations between the CIA and FBI." This is true of counterterrorism also, and it points to the next necessary reform: insisting on more effective teamwork between the CIA and the FBI.