GOOD-BYE, JAMES BOND

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00498R000100130038-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 13, 2007
• Sequence Number: 38
• Publication Date: February 13, 1978
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

G
Approved For Release 2007/06/14: CIA-RDP99-00498R000100130038-9 STAT
NEW YORK
13 February 1978
ist rivals as "comrades" in mid-January,
or what Iraqi leaders had in mind
when they strangely decided last week
to boycott a summit meeting of hard-
line Arabs. And it is vital to know for
what long-range purpose the Soviets
flew 2,000 Cuban troops to Ethiopia in
recent months and whether Japan is
likely to stop buying beef from the
United States.
And Carter is not the first to view
the CIA with great skepticism. So lit-
In From the Cold War
Admiral Stansfield Turner's dis-
missal of hundreds of clandestine
operatives in the CIA Directorate of
Operations has made him-without
question-one of the most controver-
sial directors in the agency's history.
Late last year, Turner summarily re-
moved 820 officers of the clandestine
services (some 400 more are to go next
month) including the deputy director
of operations, William Wells. This 8
percent reduction in the CIA's 15,000
employees shattered CIA morale even
more than the Senate investigation by
the Church committee two years ago.
The resentment of the victims and
the fears of those who may go next
should not be surprising. CIA officers
are the only U.S. government em-
ployees who have neither job tenure
nor the right to appeal dismissal-no
matter how many years they have
worked for the agency.
But all the bloody screams from the
CIA's decimated undercover rank and
file have obscured the real news be-
hind the Turner slaughter: The intel-
ligence community is making a major
shift in policy.
Among the hundreds of purged
agents are many Ivy League veterans
from the elitist Office of Strategic
Services and the CIA's cold-war
years. These are the folks who spent
far too much time and monev fieur-
Approved
ing out elaborate espionage games,
like how to deprive Fidel Castro of
his beard, running weird behavior-
modification experiments with LSD,
or conducting subversive activities
against unfriendly governments.
In their stead, there is a new breed
of superspook who is rated more for
his ability to understand and inter-
pret-rather than manipulate-world
events.
What is emerging, finally, under
Carter and Turner is the age of the
analyst of intelligence-something sad-
ly neglected in the past in favor of
clandestine political and paramilitary
operations.
When Jimmy Carter took office thir-
teen months ago, he discovered he had
the worst of both worlds: The Central
Intelligence Agency, the National Se-
curity Agency, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, and their fellow sleuths
had been cavalierly violating Ameri-
can rights as well as interfering
thoughtlessly in the affairs of other
countries (assassination plots, "de-
stabilization" of governments, and so
on) and only rarely coming up with a
decent intelligence product.
To present the president with a ra-
tional foreign policy today, national-
security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski
and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance must
know, for example, why French Com-
munist-party boss Georges Marchais
suddenly started referring to his secial-
tle did Nixon think of intelligence
analysts that the invasions of Cambodia
and Laos in 1970 and 1971 were or-
dered without a systematic study--
what's called a Special National Intel-
ligence Estimate (SNIE)-and no atten-
tion was paid by the CIA command to
the assessments on Chile by in-house
analysts (who themselves were never
told that the covert side was busily un-
dermining the Allende regime).
The U.S. intelligence community not
only failed to predict the energy crisis
triggered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo
but was unable to provide the Nixon
administration with a clear picture of
available world energy resources. So
contemptuous were Nixon and Kissin-
ger of our spy network, they even
failed to believe the one good piece of
information passed forward to them
that year-that the Arabs were plan-
ning a massive attack on Israel. Espi-
onage credibility had been seriously
damaged the previous year when it
turned out U.S. intelligence officers had
no idea that the 1972 Soviet grain bar-' vest was a disaster. Nixon, accordingly,
had no timely warning that the Rus-
sians were about to engage in massive
purchases in the United States, badly
damaging our own markets. But if he
had wanted to, Nixon could have read,'
the less-than-world-shaking study of
how the Peruvian fish-meal industry
was being affected in 1972 by Pacific
Ocean currents that had removed
schools of anchovies far away from tra-
ditional fish-breeding grounds.
Why is our political-military estima-
tive capability so poor? Surprisingly, it
suffers less from lack of information
than it does from the disagreement
among agencies about what the infor-
mation ?`
means. Studies the agencies
provide are so riddled with dissent-
ing opinions that they are reduced to !
gibberish. Quite early on, Henry Kis-
cinrer decided to disregard the political
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