INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES URGED TO TRIM BLOAT.

Byline: Michael E. Ruane Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

The nation's intelligence agencies are bloated with people, lack the latest technologies, and are chaotically organized, the authors of a congressional study reported Friday.

While the CIA and the other top spy agencies have partly recovered from past scandals and failures, they still need "new blood" to restructure themselves amid the rapid changes of the post-Cold War world, the panel said.

The Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the U.S. Intelligence Community rejected, however, proposals for truly radical changes such as the creation of a national spy czar or the elimination of the CIA.

A panel from the intelligence agencies will review the 151-page report and submit an implementation plan to President Clinton within a few weeks, CIA chief John Deutch said in a statement. But even the commission's leaders conceded that substantial changes will not come quickly to these agencies.

One of the report's most striking revelations is the way the hidebound personnel practices clog the agencies with employees that may not be needed or qualified.

Managers, for example, often are not qualified to manage, the report found. And poorly performing workers often are not dismissed for fear they might become a security risk.

As a result, despite a period of downsizing, payrolls remain so swollen that they hamper the acquisition of crucial modern technologies, commissioners said.

Roughly 50,000 to 60,000 civilians work at the nation's top three spy agencies - the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the National Security Agency (NSA), Brown said. Personnel costs there have recently risen from 50 percent to 65 percent.

"Although there have been substantial personnel reductions in virtually every intelligence agency since the end of the Cold War," the report states, "personnel costs continue to crowd out investments in new technologies and operational initiatives. In some agencies, this phenomenon is beginning to reach crisis proportions."

At the NSA, the vast, super-secret electronic eavesdropping agency at Fort Meade, Md., "the problem is acute," the report said.

It said the agencies could save $2 billion to $3 billion over 10 years, and recommended that Congress give them the authority to offer substantial buyouts to "right-size" their organizations. Former Defense Secretary Harold Brown, the commission chairman, said at a news conference that the agencies might shed 5,000 or 6,000 workers in the process.