R.I.P. for the CIA?

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Despite being thoroughly disgraced and discredited, the CIA probably has little to fear from its fiercest foes. The Company has too many powerful friends intent on ensuring that it remains open for business.

The focus thus falls on reform proposals being brought before a presidential commission charged with charting the agency's future. A moderate set of recommendations, involving appointment of an 'intelligence czar,' is championed by a pair of Republicans who oversee the $28 billion budget for the dozen different spook shops within the U.S. government.

Former CIA director Robert Gates, a certified hard-liner, is the unlikely author of a comparatively radical revision that calls for cuts in the CIA's 19,000-person payroll, consolidation of various functions, and, most significantly, an end to the agency's covert-action operations. Breaking the CIA's habit of 'overthrowing heads of state and stealing elections' is, according to Alterman, 'an absolute prerequisite to the reassertion of democratic control over U.S. foreign policy.'

But that may also be too much to expect from President Clinton, his commission, and the Gingrich-Dole Congress. In Alterman's view, a move to open the entire U.S. spy budget to public scrutiny would serve as the real litmus test of the reformers' seriousness.

As the debate develops, the CIA is trying hard to make itself useful.

With the active assistance of dozens of U.S. corporations, the agency has begun intensifying its economic espionage activities. In Mother Jones (Jan./Feb. 1995), freelancer Robert Dreyfuss identifies Procter & Gamble, IBM, Campbell Soup, and Sears Roebuck as some of the companies that supply the CIA with cover in their overseas offices. These agents seek to steal secrets from foreign firms while others try to thwart similar pilfering from U.S. businesses.

It all amounts to a 'new Cold War,' as Dreyfuss puts it in In These Times (March 20, 1995). Today's CIA targets, he observes, 'are more likely to be in Tokyo, Frankfurt, and Mexico City than in Moscow and Havana.'

The incompetence factor is once again germane, however. Dreyfuss quotes inside sources who say the CIA doesn't yet know how to collect and collate truly useful economic and technical data.

The increasing emphasis on 'spying for dollars' can be seen as another government handout to U.S. corporations. But as an In These Times editorial notes (April 17, 1995), the CIA has always been in the business of disbursing corporate welfare. All the agency's murderous misdeeds in Guatemala and many other countries were performed with the aim of making the world safe for U.S.-based transnational corporations.

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