NATIONAL INSECURITY: U.S. Intelligence After the Cold War.

NATIONAL INSECURITY: U.S. Intelligence After the Cold War by Craig Eisendrath Temple University Press, $34.50

READING THROUGH NATIONAL Insecurity: U.S. Intelligence After the Cold War I was Drought back to a seminar I tried to teach at Yale more than two decades ago to students who insisted that I could either teach them how to argue for the end of the CIA or nothing.

The Center for International Policy, which sponsored this volume, was initiated in the midst of those post-Watergate CIA exposures. It was, as Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), one of the cofounders of the Center, explains in his foreword to the book, a time when "our nation's support for dictators and our questionable tactics abroad had earned us a dubious reputation around the world as hostile to human rights." And Harkin sets out what must have been the starting point for each of the essayists: "Intelligence is still required (in the post-Cold War world), but it should be refocused. Its tactics should be circumscribed by the need to build a safer world, based on law and cooperation. Its operations should be less secret and more integrated with the needs of an open and dynamic foreign policy. It is time to forge a new path."

Few would argue with Harkin's words if he were talking about diplomacy and the State Department, But intelligence activities in the real world cannot be based on "law and cooperation." And as far as I can tell, being "less secret" means not being secret at all, particularly if it is tied to "the needs of an open and dynamic foreign policy."

There are a great many historic CIA failures in this book that are worth bringing together and which my 1976 Yale students could have used to write one hell of a manifesto. The first essayist, Roger Hilsman, who last served in government in the 1960s at the State Department during the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, writes: "Covert political action is not only something the United States can do without after the Cold War, it's something the United States could have done without during the Cold War" In a swift tour d'horizon of the Cold War intelligence effort, Hilsman summons up failed assassination attempts, the Bay of Pigs, and covert actions in Iran, Nicaragua, and elsewhere. That leads him to call the record of US. intelligence "mixed," giving more credit to satellite intercepts and imagery coverage, much as he found U-2 photos more important in the Cuban crisis than human intelligence. For Hilsman, the time has come to shut down "all the CIA stations in American embassies abroad, except for those engaged in liaison with allies." He regards satellite imagery, monitoring foreign broadcasts, and code-breaking as the basic intelligence activities that should remain. Hilsman also recognizes that there are still threats to the United States for which intelligence is required, but he never explains how the few tools he offers can meet these new, smaller, but still venal, enemies.

In a more current and thoughtful vein, Melvin M. Goodman, who left a senior analytical position at the CIA in the Reagan years and has continued to follow intelligence as Chairman of the International Relations Department at the National War College, gets in his requisite licks on a wide variety of agency foul-ups--from politicizing analysis to creating paramilitary groups that now oppose us. Goodman suggests some restructuring along the lines of the British intelligence system, a route worth pursuing. There, the espionage and clandestine collection take place under MI6 and report to the top of the British Foreign Office. Research and analysis, on the other hand, are conducted by an independent organization that is totally separate from both the Foreign Office and the military.

Richard A. Stubbing, who handled funding of the intelligence community at the Office of Management and Budget for 20 years, reminds us that far more intelligence money goes to Pentagon-run agencies than to the CIA, and he suggests major cuts in that part of the Pentagon's budget. Significantly, he also calls for "greater emphasis on non-military reporting" and for a $200 million increase in the State Department's diplomatic service budget. "The Foreign Service is not officially part of the intelligence budget," he notes, "but it should be a prime source for satisfying the higher priority assigned to political and economic reporting." It has been a long time since anyone has had the nerve to say that.

Several of the authors focus on congressional oversight, making it stronger or even making it an active partner in developing clandestine programs. That view fails to take into consideration the ever-changing political nature of Congress. If you think the politicization of intelligence analysis by agencies is bad, what kind of intelligence activities can you expect from highly partisan politicians?

When Rep. Dan Glickman (D-Kan.) chaired the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the panel carefully and quietly pursued its oversight function. When Rep. Larry Combest (R-Texas) took over, the committee began taking a pro-activist position on the increasingly expensive satellite collection program. Now, Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), the first former CIA case officer to hold the chairmanship in either the House or Senate, has turned oversight into a more sophisticated operation, but with less publicity. Goss' additional positions within the House leadership, as a member of the Rules Committee and a deputy whip, give him an authority in that body that no previous chairman has ever had.

Over on the Senate side, the ups and downs have been more public. White chairman, Sen. Dennis DiConcini (D-Ariz.) got into a feud with R. James Woolsey, President Clinton's first CIA director and the disagreements over budget between the two eventually played a role in Woolsey's early departure. More recently, the current chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), has been a sharp thorn in the side of the agency. Shelby, who was once accused by his then vice chairman, Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), of politicizing the panel, held extended hearings into the choice of Anthony Lake that led to Lake's withdrawal as nominee for director. More recently, his investigation into the handling of former CIA Director John M. Deutch's misuse of his home computer has played a role in the Justice Department's re-examination of that case.

U.S. intelligence agencies have traditionally been moving targets, not just for the press and the public, but for Congress and the White House. They have proved both valuable and dangerous, calling up the old adage that you can't live with them and you can't live without them. National Insecurity is only the latest in a long line of volumes that make you think about the good and the bad all over again.

WALTER PINCUS is a national security reporter at The Washington Post.