VOLATILE SPY CHIEF

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000404440043-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 29, 2010
• Sequence Number: 43
• Publication Date: January 11, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/12/29: CIA-RDP90-00552R000404440043-0
ARTICLE AFFEH.RED
ON PAU--/
Volatile Spy Chief
Casey Raises Morale
And Budget at CIA,
But Not Public Image
Stumbling on Covert Action
Obscures Higher Quality
Of Intelligence Analyses
The Nine Mexico Revisions
By DAVID IGNATIUS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
WASHINGTON-Some years ago, Wil-
liam Casey wanted to buy a fancy house
here that had already been promised to the
Japanese embassy. The owner, a genteel
society woman, worried about what she
would say to the Japanese.
"Tell them," Mr. Casey replied, "Re-
member Pearl Harbor." The brash Mr.
Casey didn't get the house.
That anecdote, told by one of Mr.
Casey's close friends, illustrates the vola-
tile personality of the current director of
central intelligence. He is quick-witted and
aggressive, but he is also impulsive, with
an arrogant streak that often gets him in
trouble.
As CIA director, Mr. Casey has demon-
strated that same mix of good and bad
traits, of smart deci-
sions and dumb
ones. He arrived
four years ago hop-
ing to restore the
agency's morale,
budget and public
image after a da-
maging decade. He
has done well on the
first two goals, re-
viving enthusiasm at
the CIA and giving
it probably the larg-
est proportionate
William Casey
budget growth of any agency. But he has
failed to improve the CIA's image with
Congress and the public-and may even
have made it worse-largely because of his
own mistakes.
Mr. Casey slipped on the banana peel of
"covert action" -specifically the CIA's
"covert" war against the government of
Nicaragua. He plunged ahead, despite
warnings from his own aides that the pro-
gram couldn't be kept secret and would
blow up in the CIA's face. When those pre-
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11 January 1985
dictions came true, Mr. Casey made things
worse by mishandling his already strained
relationship with Congress.
. "What Bill did wrong was to let the
agency get back into large-scale covert ac-
tion, which isn't covert action at all, but an
unofficial form of warfare," argues Sen.
Daniel P. Moynihan, a former member of
the Senate Intelligence Committee and one
of Mr. Casey's sharpest critics.
A leading member of the House Intelli-
gence Committee sums up the balance
sheet this way: "Mr. Casey deserves
credit for improving morale at the agency.
But he has focused the agency on the
wrong thing-covert action. And I don't
have any doubt that the image of the CIA
today is as bad as it's been in recent years
in Congress, and probably the country."
Irreverent New Yorker
Mr. Casey, a New Yorker who is irrev-
erent toward official Washington, isn't wild
about Congress, either. Exasperated by
what he viewed as unfair congressional
criticism, he joked to a friend recently:
"The best thing about Washington is that
it's only an hour from New York." Though
he remains wary of Congress, aides say he
now is trying hard to improve relations.
For all his failings, the cantankerous
Mr. Casey is a colorful personality in a
generally gray administration. He is a
compulsive reader who races through sev-
eral books in an evening. He has an Irish-
man's temper, with strong loyalties to his
friends and long grudges against his ene-
mies. And he is a notorious mumbler, who
talks in gruff fragments of sentences that
are often unintelligible.
"Casey gives the impression, because
he mumbles, that he has a messy mind,"
says former CIA director Richard Helms.
"But he doesn't have a messy mind at all.
He has a tidy mind. And he has the street
smarts of a lot of New Yorkers."
OSS and SEC
A CIA colleague once described Mr.
Casey, only half in jest, as "an American
colossus." He is certainly an American
success story, a self-made millionaire who
got where he is by hustling, playing poli-
tics and taking risks. As a young lawyer,
he joined the wartime Office of Strategic
Services and ran spies into Europe. Later,
he made a fortune as a tax lawyer by pub-
lishing books about tax laws. Still later, he
was chairman of the Nixon-era Securities
and Exchange Commission. Finally, he
managed President Reagan's 1980 presi-
dential campaign.
Mr. Casey brought the same hard-
charging, risk-taking style to the CIA, and
it caused him problems. The agency, still
struggling to recover from the traumas of
the 1970s, was in many ways a frightened
and self-protective institution when he ar-
rived. It wanted public and congressional
support, and that meant avoiding contro-
versies. Mr. Casey, in contrast, wanted to
mobilize the agency and test the limits of
its congressional mandate.
The new director plunged into his job
with boyish enthusiasm-zapping off daily
suggestions to CIA analysts, touring CIA
stations overseas, and taking a personal
hand in planning covert-action programs.
In his eagerness to revive the agency, re-
marked one colleague, Mr. Casey some- I
times acted "like a first-year case offi-
cer."
His greatest successes at the CIA have
probably been in improving the analytical
side of the agency, known as the director-
ate of intelligence. He told one friend in
1981 that he knew how to produce good in-
telligence estimates because he had
earned a fortune doing the same thing in
his tax guides-taking complex data and
putting it into concise and readable
form.
Mr. Casey started by reorganizing the
intelligence directorate along mainly geo-
graphical lines, so that analysts studying
the Soviet economy and the Soviet leader-
ship worked in the same section rather
than different ones. He increased the quan.
tity and, by most accounts, the quality of
CIA reports. And he installed Robert
Gates, a widely respected young CIA offi-
cer, as deputy director for intelligence.
Some of the analytical reforms ?.vere
simple. The CIA had never bothered. for
example, to keep files of each analyst's
work, so it was impossible to assess
whether an analyst's predictions tended.
over time, to be accurate. Mr. Casey and
Mr. Gates started keeping files.
The CIA still makes too many mistakes.
It correctly forecast some major events in
Lebanon, from the Israeli invasion in i952
to Syria's later intransigence, but it failed
to provide specific warnings about the
bombs that destroyed the American Em-
bassy and Marine headquarters in Beirut
in 1983. It correctly forecast that Yuri An-
iropov would succeed Leonid Brezhnp': as
Soviet leader, but it failed to predict the
later succession of Konstantin Chernenko.
Trying Harder
Under Mr. Casey and Mr. Gates, ana-
lysts are at least trying harder. The intelli-
gence community produced 75 interagency
estimates in 1983, compared with about 12
in 1980, and the agency embarked on abou:
800 long-term research projects, studying
everything from likely Soviet weapons in
the year 2001' to the history of Shiite Islam
i in the 12th century.
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/12/29: CIA-RDP90-00552R000404440043-0