Secrecy and democracy: the CIA in transition.

INTELLIGENCE has always been considered the orphan child of the military, the place where one's career stagnates, and when President Carter appointed Admiral Stansfield Turner Director of Central Intelligence in 1977, it was widely rumored that Turner believed his career had been short-circuited. Turner confirms his disappointment in the opening chapter of Secrecy and Democracy and, perhaps unconsciously, leads the reader to believe that he never got over it.

Whether his reluctance to take the job affected his performance throughout the four years he held it remains a moot point. It probably did not. Turner is an honest man, and the changes he instituted were constructive and, for the most part, necessary.

Still, one cannot help wondering what it says about Turner that he could find so little to be satisfied with either in the intelligence community as a whole, over which as DCI he had limited budget authority, or in the CIA, over which he had line authority. In his first few months as director, he brought in outsiders to serve as his deputy and his chief staff aides, to reorganize and "clean out" the agency's operational arm and to head its analytical arm. If anyone had any doubts that these moves indicated an almost total lack of faith in the agency's own personnel, this book removes those doubts. Turner's criticisms of the agency's clandestine services and its analysis are overdrawn and unnecessarily snide.

Although Turner magnifies the problems he confronted, he did take over the CIA at a critical, and critically low, point in its existence. The agency had recently undergone heavy investigation for abuses by the clandestine services, and operations had been curtailed as a result, to the detriment of legitimate intelligence collection. The agency's analysis had come under criticism for a few much-heralded miscalls, and morale was low, not least because Turner was the fourth new director in as many years. The CIA was in a kind of limbo, pulled between a tradition of secrecy and independence on the one hand and new requirements for restraint and congressional oversight on the other.

One of the most important issues that Turner confronted--important especially now in the light of the Reagan Administration's policies--was the problem of maintaining a balance between clandestine operations, particularly covert action, and the need to justify those operations to an increasingly critical Congress. Turner handled the problem astutely.

The CIA, he believes, must "accept the idea that covert action not only can operate under congressional oversight but is the better for such oversight." Covert action is necessary in selected instances ("once or twice during an Administration"), but the emphasis must be on "selected." Too often in the past--and Turner believes under the Reagan Administration as well--the definition of what is "important to the national security" has been stretched to permit high-risk, low-return covert operations that have ended unhappily.

The DCI has a duty, Turner says, to strike a balance in his roles as chief intelligence officer and chief of covert operations. The roles are basically contradictory, the one involving the provision of good, unbiased intelligence, the other involving, of necessity, at least some policy advocacy. Turner believes that the director who puts primary emphasis on the provision of intelligence better serves the President, because the DCI alone of all presidential advisors is not part of the policymaking process and therefore, at least in theory, has no axe to grind.

Turner had difficulties with the other intelligence agencies as well as with the CIA--largely because the anomalous role of the DCI as head both of the entire intelligence community and of one of its agencies community and of one of its agencies leaves him unable to perform either function adequately. Turner would split the two functions, giving the DCI a "substantial" analytical staff, as well as a deputy for collection, and merging the analytical and the espionage functions of the CIA under a separate Central Intelligence Agency director (who would, of course, no longer be central--a problem that Turner does not address).

The reorganization has considerable appeal, but Turner's formula seems calculated merely to add another bureaucratic element without significantly enhancing the DCI's control over the separate intelligence agencies. Merely transferring the central analytical function to a different building and calling it the DCI's analysis instead of the CIA's analysis will not correct whatever analytical deficiencies exist. Moving the DCI himself from Langley to an office in downtown Washington will not make him better able to control what he regards as the clandestine services' independence. Agencies such as the National Security Agency will not respond to the DCI's directives any better unless they are put under his specific line authority, something even Turner does not envision.

It probably can't be done. It is probably impossible to organize the intelligence community so that one official has total control. Nor perhaps should it be tried. The intelligence function is a community function, not a single entity--above all, not a military command of the sort Turner was used to--and, for all its faults, it should probably be allowed to remain a community, with all the checks and balances that this provides. American intelligence as it functions today is like democracy: It's the worst system there is--except for all the others that might replace it.