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 CIA Finds That End of Cold War Means Doing More With Less
 Agency copes with hefty budget cuts, new demands for economic
 espionage
 05/18/93
 CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
 THE Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) gets blamed for lots of
 things. Many people think it controls their minds. Others are sure
 the agency murdered Elvis. Still others are certain that it knows
 all about those UFOs they saw at Mt. Rushmore last year - and just
 isn't telling.
 These people write in, demanding documents under the Freedom of
 Information Act. The law says the CIA must treat them just like
 working historians or journalists. Problem is, they're clogging the
 system. "The UFO requester is the most tenacious kind we have to
 deal with," sighs Jack Wright, CIA information and privacy
 coordinator.
 Conspiracy theorists are only one part of the CIA's problems
 these days. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the object of
 greatest attention for US spies has disappeared. The new
 administration has ordered that hefty cuts be made in the
 intelligence budget. Yet there's lots for the watchers to watch:
 Geopolitical events, if anything, are growing more unpredictable.
 The demise of the Soviet regime "has revealed a world in some
 ways more dangerous, more perplexing, more uncertain, and more
 challenging than it was before," said Director of Central
 Intelligence James Woolsey in rare open testimony to Congress
 earlier this spring.
 Not everyone in Washington thinks the CIA, with its
 cloak-and-Uzi image, is now the right part of government to handle
 US intelligence-gathering tasks. Sources of information are more
 open today, this theory goes, making the CIA's special talents
 unneeded.
 Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D) of New York, for one, has
 proposed breaking up the CIA and handing most of its job to the
 State Department. Other lawmakers are pushing for deeper cuts in
 intelligence spending than the $7 billion reduction over the next
 five years that the White House has planned. Though the figure is
 officially secret, total spending on the US intelligence community
 (which includes military intelligence organizations) is currently
 estimated to be about $28 billion.
 Intelligence officials do not deny that the agency needs to be
 reshaped. They claim they have made a start. Among other things,
 the number of CIA analysts looking at the former Soviet Union has
 been cut in half. Overall plans call for a reduction in the number
 of US intelligence employees of around 18 percent by 1997.
 The CIA is even shifting some resources from looking at the
 possibility of global war to studying global warming. An
 intelligence officer in charge of the environment, democracy, and
 other global issues has been added to the National Intelligence
 Council, the high-level panel that oversees CIA estimates.
 Still, it is the large geopolitical problems that dominate the
 US intelligence agenda. Tracking the command and control of the
 nuclear weapons of the former Soviet Union is the top priority.
 Potential nuclear powers remain important intelligence problems,
 among them them North Korea and Iran. US policymakers are also
 intensely interested in the political faceoff between India and
 Pakistan, as both nations already have atomic arsenals.
 One top agency official says he looks at the world today as a
 3-D chessboard. On one level are traditional military problems; on
 another is economic competition. A third level represents
 transnational problems such as the environment and refugee flows.
 "Politics in this world will be much more surprising," says
 Joseph Nye Jr., chairman of the National Intelligence Council.
 IT is the economic part of the equation that presents the CIA
 with perhaps its most acute challenge. Clinton officials say over
 and over again that national prosperity is the foundation of
 security. If that's the case, why not use the CIA in the aid of
 American business, and use it to gather economic intelligence?
 Our allies do it, after all - though many of them had signed
 bilateral agreements that they wouldn't. The French government's
 apparent recent attempt to penetrate US aerospace corporations is
 but the latest example of something that has gone on for years.
 Throughout the cold war the US took a low-key attitude when it
 identified such actions. Now it's every spook for himself.
 "No more Mr. Nice Guy," said a senior intelligence official in a
 recent meeting with reporters.
 Some high Clinton administration officials, as well as senior
 members of House and Senate intelligence oversight committees, want
 the US to respond in kind. The intelligence community itself is
 leery. Gathering economic intelligence, broadly defined, is already
 a CIA task. But industrial espionage is something the CIA doesn't
 want to do, though the agency is studying the issue.
 Of course the conceit that all intelligence work requires the
 wearing of a trench coat is somewhat misleading. Much of what the
 CIA does is analysis - the gathering and sifting of both
 open-source and clandestine information. And fully two-thirds of
 CIA analysis is relatively mundane "tactical" intelligence -
 background on Somali clans, for instance, or biographies of
 important foreign officials.
 Improved dissemination of such information is an important
 intelligence issue. One proposal the CIA is studying involves an
 interactive computer screen on policymakers' desks connected by
 fiber-optic cable to Langley. Government officials could then pull
 what they wanted to see from intelligence data bases, rather than
 having it pushed upon them in the form of daily printed classified
 pages.
 
 
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