Does the CIA Still Have a Role?

With the breakup of the Soviet Union, the cia began to search for new roles to justify its existence--and the money it requires, which totaled $3.1 billion in its request to Congress late last year.ffi

That spring, the cia had discovered that Aldrich Ames, a career cia officer and son of a career cia officer, had for several years been systematically betraying its agents in the Soviet Union, at least 12 of whom were executed for treason. The juxtaposition of the Soviet breakup and the revelations about Ames trigger inevitable questions: Does the cia have a meaningful role in the post--Cold War world? If so, what is it?

In its early days, the only spies serving the United States were brave amateurs, the most notable among them Nathan Hale. During the Civil War, the federal government hired the Pinkerton detective agency to do its spying, but the agency's success was modest. In World War I, the United States depended on the French and British secret services and made no attempt to launch its own. Only by the beginning of World War II did President Franklin D. Roosevelt ask William J. Donovan, a World War I hero, to set up an American intelligence organization, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

Donovan threw himself into the task with boundless energy and enthusiasm, and the result was a lighthearted hodgepodge. Among the earliest branches of the organization were those devoted to research and analysis, whose officers mostly focused on activities like poring over old French engineering magazines in the Library of Congress to winnow out details of the roads and bridges of North Africa. An espionage branch quickly followed, and another devoted to "black propaganda"--the publishing and broadcasting of news purporting to come from the enemy. Donovan then added branches concerned with sabotage, commando operations, guerrilla work with resistance movements, forging documents, and collecting snapshots taken by tourists before the war and analyzing them for military purposes.

After the war President Harry S Truman broke up the OSS. He transferred the research and analysis branch, which employed almost 1,000 people, to the Department of State, abolished most of the more esoteric branches, including the one dealing with guerrilla warfare, and parked the branches concerned with collecting intelligence by espionage and other covert means in the office of the assistant secretary of war to await a final decision.