With no obvious enemies, a once-feared spy agency seems to have gone soft, writes ROGER FRANKLIN
NEW YORK - When Robert Kennedy heard the news that his brother had been shot dead in Dallas, one of the first things he did was call then-CIA chief John McCone and ask if it had been an agency operation. He must have known he would never be fully able to trust the immediate denial he received, not when it came from an arm of government specifically chartered to deal in lies and deceptions - even assassinations if they seemed necessary or, sometimes, merely expedient.
The innocence of the query, which is recounted in author Evan Thomas' terrific new biography, Robert Kennedy: A Life, testifies to both the depth of Kennedy's disorienting grief - and just how much things have changed for the once-supreme spy agency.
The US public is being asked to believe that the CIA has transformed itself from the gang whose word could not be trusted (not even by a Kennedy who also happened to be the US Attorney-General at the time) into an ambassador for peace, truth and unquestioned sincerity.
At least, that is the Clinton Administration's line now that the CIA and its director, George Tenet, have become public players in US efforts to stop Israelis and Palestinians going at each other with even more gusto than normal.
Peacemaking is but the first of the CIA's unaccustomed new roles. The second is that of public penitent apologising for past misdeeds - something that became clear over the past few weeks as Tenet put up only a token resistance when the White House forced the release of a sheaf of documents detailing further examples of the agency's involvement in the bloody coup that toppled Chile's Salvador Allende in 1973.
Critics, including a good many former CIA men, have been claiming for years that the once-feared and revered spy agency has lost both its way and its sense of mission.
It is an appraisal that's hard to fault. With no Soviet Union to battle, no Cold War to fight, there have been plenty of times when it seemed the agency's sole goal has been to generate embarrassing revelations about its own incompetence.
A succession of agency turncoats and moles have been paraded in handcuffs across America's front pages.
As for providing informed appraisals of future trends in world affairs, its analysts have come up short time and time again.
There was no warning from CIA headquarters at Langley about the recent crisis that brought India and Pakistan within a stone's throw of nuclear war, nor was Serbia's occupation of Kosovo predicted, or Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, or the terror bombings that destroyed two US embassies in Africa. And when the US retaliated by flinging a brace of cruise missiles at Sudan, it was more of the agency's same faulty intelligence that portrayed a humble aspirin factory on the outskirts of Khartoum as a secret laboratory for manufacturing biological weapons.
Even more embarrassing has been the revelation that Osama bin Laden, the man blamed for those embassy bombings, was himself a creation of the CIA, which originally set him up in business to harass the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan.
Perhaps the CIA should just shut up shop and go home, Senator Pat Moynihan noted last year, adding that US taxpayers were getting precious little for the $US30 billion ($75 billion) they spend every year on spies and spying. As a source of reliable information, we might do better to watch CNN, Moynihan joked.
Tenet's role in the addled Middle East peace process came to light almost by accident when it emerged that he was scheduled to have been inside the Palestinian Authority's headquarters on the morning that Israeli helicopter gunships blasted it with rockets. Since the Israelis issued a warning before pounding the building to rubble, Tenet stayed away. But, by that stage, his curious role as a shuttle diplomat had become the subject of considerable debate in Washington.
According to the White House, Tenet is one of the few US officials both sides trust. In the 1980s, at least according to one popular explanation, the CIA earned the PLO's enduring respect by warning Arafat to evacuate his Lebanese headquarters just hours before Israeli warplanes flattened it. Intelligence-sharing with Israel's Shin Beth spy agency is said to have put the CIA in similar good standing in Jerusalem.
If the CIA can be used as a tool to advance the peace process, well use it, an unnamed Administration official explained.
However noble that may sound, it is a sentiment that infuriates veterans of the agency's old days.
Melvin Goodman, a former CIA Soviet specialist who now teaches at Washington's War College, described Tenet's emergence as a political player as a travesty of the agency's role, which he said should be to provide informed, incisive, non-partisan analysis - and nothing but.
The CIA was at risk of being turned into a political tool for whichever party was in power, which made the agency worthless as a source of objectivity, Goodman said.
He added that Tenet's lockstep support for the Clinton Administration's plans to launch a $US1.3 billion war on Columbia's drug lords, as well as the CIA chief's support for the dubious notion that North Korea was a nuclear threat to the US, indicated that the agency's politicisation may already have gone too far to stop.
Another ominous sign of the agency's politicisation is the sudden decision to release those ancient documents detailing covert US assistance to Chile's General Augusto Pinochet. Whatever the reason, the timing alone is curious: Just when George W. Bush appears to have gained an edge on Vice-President Al Gore, the Administration unveils a dossier of CIA crimes committed when the Republican contender's father was running the spy agency.
William G. Shirley, a former Middle East analyst at Langley, recent penned a blistering critique of his former employer in Atlantic magazine that painted it as a rest home for bureaucratic bunglers. Promotion through the ranks, he revealed, was determined not by the quality of intelligence an agent obtained, but by its volume.
Even worse, he lamented, was the fact that the agency did not even require its people to speak the language of the countries to which they were assigned.
Bobby Kennedy never received a satisfactory answer to his questions about the agency's possible involvement in his brother's death. But as someone who knew how to play political hardball, he could have appreciated just how handy it would have been to control a spy agency that did as it was told.
Peacenik CIA on mission implausible
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