When It's in the News, It's in Trouble

THE C.I.A.

Nestled in the hills near Langley, Va., is an eight-story building on a site that covers 140 acres. This, next jail, will be the new headquarters of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, and will house more than 10,000 of its employees. With thousands of others posted around the world, they comprise a unique arm of the U.S. Government. CIA's duties are prescribed by Congress, but in the most guarded terms. It is CIA's business to stay out of the news--yet sometimes it fails in that aim with spectacular results. Last week, with CIA bearing heavy responsibility for the Cuban fiasco, was one of those times. What is CIA? What does it do? And how well?

Established in 1947, CIA was assigned by Congress to correlate and evaluate raw intelligence data gathered by various military intelligence departments and to advise the National Security Council on such matters. It was also given the responsibility of engaging in and performing such "additional services"--e.g., espionage, sabotage--as the NSC might require. Its budget has never been published, though respectable estimates run it into the hundreds of millions of dollars. CIA Director Allen Dulles, who succeeded General Walter Bedell Smith in the job, is the only U.S. agency head who may sign a personal voucher for any part of his organization's budget with no public questions asked.

Much of Dulles' operation is routine and even tedious. A large part of intelligence gathering consists of reading technical publications, monitoring radar and radio, interviewing travelers and refugees. With this material, and from military intelligence as well as from CIA's own cloak-and-dagger specialists, the agency works up its evaluations, on which the National Security Council bases its decisions.

In many ways Allen Dulles, 68, is an unlikely sort of man to head CIA. The amiable, scholarly younger brother of John Foster Dulles, Allen got his Phi Beta Kappa key at Princeton, taught for a year in India, joined the Foreign Service in 1916. He was in Switzerland when the U.S. entered World War I, leaped straight into intelligence work. In 1926 he took a law degree at George Washington University, joined his brother Foster in law work in New York.

During World War II, he joined the OSS, helped nail the famous Nazi spy, "Cicero" (who was memorialized in the movie Five Fingers). In 1950 "Beedle" Smith called Dulles to Washington for what was supposed to be a six-months' tour of duty. He never left.

Though Dulles, more than his predecessors, has allowed himself to become a public figure, most of the agency's exploits are actually a matter of hearsay. Despite expected denials, CIA was chiefly responsible for toppling Jacobo Arbenz' Red regime in Guatemala in 1954, and privately takes credit for it. It claims to have had advance dope on the British-French-Israeli Suez invasion. It correctly predicted the Hungarian uprising in 1956, directed the U-2 flights over Russia that provided the U.S. with some of its best intelligence on Russia--until they were called off after Pilot Powers' crash.

Last week CIA was back in the news in a big way--and will probably stay there for some time while a basic question that has been long and heatedly debated is argued out. Should any intelligence-gathering organization also have an operations responsibility? The British have long said no, arguing that a combination of the functions gives such an organization a vested operational interest in proving its intelligence correct. That dual function seems to have been one of the causes of the Cuban tragedy.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.