No Place Left to Hide?

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

In rebuilding the CIA, Casey has made missteps and infuriated Congress

By most of the usual tests, William J. Casey has amply fulfilled his 1981 pledge to lead the Central Intelligence Agency to "good new days." The decimated spy agency he took over as director at the start of Reagan's term has been fattened by budget increases that not even the Pentagon can match in percentage terms. Staff has multiplied, intelligence collection and analysis have vastly speeded up. Morale has soared as public animosity engendered by the assassination plots and other "dirty tricks" of the 1960s and '70s has faded. The agency is again recruiting on college campuses, where its initials were once regarded as an anagram of evil.

But by another test the agency at times seems to be heading straight back to the bad old days. Once more, relations between the CIA and Congress are being envenomed by mutual distrust and anger. Prominent members of both parties charge that Casey not only broke international law by having the CIA mine three Nicaraguan harbors, but flouted the agency's obligation to keep the intelligence committees of Congress "fully and currently" informed of what it was doing. For his part, Casey, in the words of one of his Administration colleagues, "views Congress as a bunch of meddlers, messing around in his business."

Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, warns that support for the CIA is eroding because "many Republicans and Democrats in Congress are saying that they consider Mr. Casey's credibility to be at an alltime low." Storms Minnesota Republican Senator David Durenberger: "There is no use in our meeting with Bill Casey. None of us believe him. The cavalier, almost arrogant fashion in which he has treated us as individuals has turned the whole committee against him." To dramatize his protest that Casey kept the group in the dark about the Nicaragua mining, New York Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan vows to resign as vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Some Administration officials are concerned that Casey will never be able to restore enough trust in Congress to win continued funding for the covert operations that are the CIA director's special pride. Indeed, there are whispers around the White House from pragmatists as well as a few hard-liners that the best service Casey could now perform for the CIA would be to quit.

There is little chance that Casey or his boss, Ronald Reagan, will heed or even hear such advice. Casey, who managed Reagan's 1980 campaign, is closer to Reagan than perhaps any previous CIA director has been to his President.

He has become one of the driving forces in setting--as well as carrying out--U.S. policy toward Nicaragua. The Administration asserts that its aim is to harass the Sandinista government until it stops trying to foment Communist revolution throughout Central America. The main instrument for achieving this is CIA training, arming and financing of the contra guerrillas who are waging war against the Sandinistas.

Many lawmakers have long been afraid that the CIA backing of the contras would drag the U.S. into a war against Nicaragua, and Casey's briefings did not always reassure them. One Senator told TIME last week that the CIA director once went so far as to present a plan for a possible eventual partition of Nicaragua be tween a Sandinista regime in the west and a contra-ruled state in the east. Though the congressional committees cannot veto any CIA activities outright, they can, in Moynihan's words, "push and pull" the agency away from dubious schemes (as happened with the proposal to partition Nicaragua). Should that fail, the committees can secretly write into appropriations bills provisions for denying funds.

Until the mining episode, most legislators felt, Casey had been keeping the committees adequately informed. Nor is the CIA director solely to blame for the gaps that have since appeared in the legislators' knowledge. Several Senators on the Intelligence Committee confess they were remiss in not insisting on a briefing on CIA activities in Nicaragua early this year, and for failing to question Casey on references he made to the mining when he did meet with them twice in March. (The House Intelligence Committee was briefed on Jan. 31.) Still, Moynihan and others contend that Casey, at minimum, did not fulfill the command of the 1980 law that he apprise the committees of even "any significant anticipated intelligence activity." The mining had begun about a month before the House Intelligence Committee briefing. Indeed, raids on Puerto Sandino last Sept. 8 and on the oil-storage tanks at Corinto on Oct. 10 were carried out, as was the later mining of the same ports, by Latin American commandos recruited and trained by the CIA and dispatched aboard speedboats from a CIA mother ship cruising off Nicaragua's Pacific coast. Not until March 30, in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee staff that congressional sources disclosed last week, did the CIA confirm, in its inimitable bureaucratic jargon, that the raids were carried out by "unilaterally controlled latino assets."

The Senate Intelligence Committee has called a meeting for Thursday at which, Moynihan pledges, Casey will be asked "tough questions" about whatever operations the CIA may be conducting or planning in Nicaragua. One idea being floated by some Senate Intelligence Committee staffers is to require the CIA to certify weekly that it is not supporting any contra activities that have not been disclosed to Congress.

Any new restrictions would break a string of successes in expanding and revitalizing the CIA that Casey's bitterest critics admit has been highly impressive. During the 1970s, revulsion over some of the agency's early operations prompted cuts of 40% in the agency's budget and 50% in its staff. At the end of the Carter Administration, policymakers were receiving intelligence estimates at the lethargic rate of one a month.

Casey came to the agency with top credentials. He learned intelligence by directing operations in Nazi-occupied Europe for the wartime Office of Strategic Services. During the Nixon and Ford Administrations, he served in a variety of economic posts. In his first three years as CIA director, he wangled budget increases of 20% or more out of Congress each year. (The agency's figures are secret, but a reliable estimate of its expenditures is $1.5 billion for the current fiscal year.) That has made possible a substantial increase in the number of CIA employees, to a current total of 18,000. One sign of the CIA's increased prestige: 250,000 Americans answered help-wanted ads the agency ran last year. The CIA selected 10,000 for serious screening and eventually hired 1,400. Production of national intelligence estimates quintupled to 60 last year, and by common consent Casey has improved their quality too. Among other things, he has reorganized the agency's intelligence analysts, once grouped by specialty, along regional lines. Economists and political specialists, for example, now collaborate in a single report on a specific area. Casey's policy views are vehemently antiCommunist, a factor that insiders say has also raised agency morale. But by all accounts Casey has kept his advocacy separate from the scrupulously straight analyses he presents to his Administration colleagues.

There are some flaws in this record. What the CIA calls "human intelligence" has not yet recovered from the savage staff cuts carried out during the Carter Administration by Casey's predecessor, Stansfield Turner, who preferred to collect intelligence by electronic means. Casey did not have a single agent on Grenada until a few days before the American invasion last October, and could not provide an accurate estimate of the number of Cubans on the island. Casey takes special joy in having revived covert operations. He is said to have made several trips in unmarked planes to Honduras to check on the progress of contras training there. Says one associate: "He's happy as a clam when it comes to covert operations."

When it comes to dealing with Congress, however, he would prefer to be just a clam. Right at the start, the Senate Intelligence Committee censured Casey, a lawyer and venture capitalist in private life, for failing to disclose during his confirmation hearings more than $250,000 in investment assets and nearly $500,000 in personal liabilities. Questions about his finances persist to this day: the Internal Revenue Service is scrutinizing his involvement in a tax-shelter scheme.

The Senate investigation left a permanent legacy of bitterness. Some Senators felt that Casey had misled them about his finances, and looked with increased suspicion on his running of covert operations. Casey felt that some lawmakers were conducting a vendetta against him and was strengthened in his natural tendency to tell them no more than the law requires. Says one official who worked closely with Casey during that period: "Casey gets mad, and he also tries to get even. The attacks from the Hill just compounded an existing disdain for the legislative branch of Government."

Casey's counterparts in other democracies have little need to deal with their legislatures at all. The heads of the British agencies, M15 and M16, report to an executive committee chaired by the Prime Minister, who does not officially tell Parliament so much as their names.

French law gives the National Assembly the right to ask questions about the operations of the intelligence services, but the government's usual, and accepted, answer is a blank "secret de la defense. The West German Bundestag does have a watchdog committee for that nation's equivalent of the CIA. But the committee's eight members are sworn to deepest secrecy The Bundestag has declared members of the antinuclear Green Party ineligible to serve on the committee because they would not take the pledge.

Under the American system of legislative oversight, there is a built-in conflict between the lawmakers' need to assure themselves that the agency is responsive to democratic control and the CIA director's necessity to keep delicate operations secret as long as possible. Intelligence Committee members argue, with justification, that they can keep a secret when performing their legitimate oversight functions: because of the very nature of such "covert" activities as mining Nicaraguan harbors and blowing up oil tanks, knowledge about the CIA's role in these operations is likely to become public, but generally not through Intelligence Committee leaks. But in turn, the CIA is justified in resisting congressional temptation to oversupervise the agency's programs by becoming involved in the logistical details of specific operations.

Part of the problem, some legislators concede, is that the Intelligence Committees are too large, and their members (16 House, 17 Senate) too busy with other assignments, to handle their important oversight role in a judicious manner. Says Senator Leahy: "We have got to find a way for Senators to be far better briefed on covert activity. It may require a couple of Democrats and a couple of Republicans who will meet several hours each week and then give a broad report to the full committee."

This alone, however, will not be enough to handle the far more serious underlying problem. No oversight arrangement will work, nor will any program to rebuild America's covert capabilities work, until a way can be found to dissipate the corrosive mistrust and suspicion that has built up between Casey's CIA and Congress.

--By George J. Church.

Reported by Ross H. Munro and Christopher Redman/Washington, with other bureaus

With reporting by Ross H. Munro, Christopher Redman, other bureaus