John Deutch is the eighteenth director of the CIA. In his additional role of director of Central Intelligence, he coordinates the work of the entire US intelligence community.

Mr. PIKE: I think it's very clear that with the end of the Cold War, American national interests and American security interests are very different from what they were during the Cold War. Unfortunately, everything has changed but the way the intelligence community is organized and operated to support our post-Cold War national interests.

NARRATOR: Any reevaluation of future intelligence needs must rest on the role of the US in the world at large. Will we support the UN and other multinational institutions? Will we be the "policeman" of the world? Will we become more isolationist?

The direction the US chooses will, in part, define the threats we might encounter, as well as how we respond in integrating our diplomatic, economic and military power to achieve our policy goals.

ADM STANSFIELD TURNER (USN, Ret.): The secret of really good intelligence analysis is to be able to meld the political, the economic and the military intelligence all together.

NARRATOR: Admiral Stansfield Turner was director of Central Intelligence from 1977 to 1981.

ADM TURNER: The mission is the same, the emphasis will vary. We will be less interested in the Russian military now than we were before and much more interested in economics in Southeast Asia or Japan or wherever.

Mr. COLBY: You still have the need to identify the secret proliferators of mass destruction weapons, the North Koreans, things like that. You use all the tools. You use the agents, you use the technology, all the ways you can find out about them.

NARRATOR: Others are more critical. Robert White, US ambassador to El Salvador in the Carter years, believes that reforming or restructuring US intelligence operations will not be easy.

AMB ROBERT WHITE: The CIA has a heavy investment in a world divided into friends and enemies, and we are now in a different world. We are in a world where we should be working to build a cooperative model of international relations instead of a confrontational model.

NARRATOR: Another flash point for reformers is the continued concentration of US intelligence-gathering activities on Russian military targets: nuclear-tipped intercontinental missiles, airplanes, tanks, submarines and other warships.

In a changed world, where military threats have less meaning than before, are there not better uses for our intelligence resources than looking for the military forces of other nations?

Mr. PIKE: I think the amount of money that we're spending on spy satellites is probably several times the amount that we need to be spending. Some of the aerial spy plane programs that we're working on are probably misguided. And there are a lot of areas in analysis and production that we're simply not spending enough money.

NARRATOR: High-tech satellites and planes were the favored programs for presidents and congresses because they produced photographs and other "hard copy" about enemy troop movements, new weapons, and factories whose structure suggested a potential for producing nuclear and chemical weapons. Such high-tech successes tended to overshadow the work of human spies, both those that are "legal" -- that is, military attaches -- and those working clandestinely for the CIA and other agencies.

Regardless of how they view any resource mismatch between high tech and human collectors, when the subject of "resource reform" comes up, most intelligence veterans would rather speak of the benefits of combining all the tools of intelligence to produce better reports.

Mr. COLBY: It's not a question of the spy or the satellite, it's the combination of both. And you can get more out of both of them than you could separately.

Mr. PIKE: During the Cold War, reconnaissance satellites were central for keeping track of Soviet military forces and for verifying arms control agreements. Unfortunately, they left the intelligence community a bit too focused on the most impressive parts of the "evil empire" and led us to overlook the societal and economic decay that were out of the field of view of those satellites.

NARRATOR: For intelligence analysts, reliability of sources and information is the goal, a goal achieved by integrating information from photos, conversations, the Internet, other non-classified sources such as newspapers and technical magazines, and the reports of overt and covert spies, so that intelligence users are given the best and most complete information possible.

LGEN CLAPPER: We need a mix that will include a robust capability to provide that strategic, long-term warning, as well as one that can be nimble and agile and support the variety and number of day to day crises that the intelligence community has to support.

Mr. PIKE: I think the scope of covert operation and human intelligence espionage that we're conducting today vastly exceeds any conceivable benefit that we're receiving from it and is poisoning political relations with a lot of countries we ought to be friends with.

ADM TURNER: The mission of intelligence is to keep our policymakers advised on happenings in foreign countries that could have an impact on the United States.

NARRATOR: Once American policymakers define the future world role of the US and, in turn, the probable security challenges that might arise from this role, the next step for the US intelligence community is to determine how best to collect information that will avoid policy surprises.

ADM TURNER: You have to look at the state of human intelligence in the CIA today, and it's in a chaotic state. These mistakes that they made with Ames, with Guatemala, with Iran-Contra, this total unwillingness on the part of the human intelligence people to understand that they have to conform with the laws of this country and have to be under somebody's direction who isn't a human intelligence specialist.

NARRATOR: Nor would Admiral Turner consider other changes until the CIA stops acting like it's outside the law.

ADM TURNER: This is not a good time, in my opinion, to expand human intelligence. Let's get what we have on a good, solid, under-control footing, and then decide whether it needs to go up or down, based in good measure on what it begins to demonstrate it can do.

NARRATOR: In his testimony before the House committee, Mr. Deutch gave his vision of the CIA's and the intelligence community's future mission.

Mr. DEUTCH: "The intelligence mission for the future is to provide our senior leaders the most objective and timely information gathered from all sources that will assist them in making their decisions."

NARRATOR: To many, this may sound like the old Cold War military mission and an invitation to maintain intelligence spending at current levels. But if the changing world has changed our intelligence priorities and needs, it should also require a reexamination of how the intelligence community spends its money collecting and processing information for our future policymakers.

Rep. COMBEST (at hearing):

"It is of critical importance that we rebuild a constituency for intelligence among the people, the administration and our fellow members of Congress."

NARRATOR: What Congressman Combest doesn't say is why the original constituency was lost. Some believe it was lost because the CIA forgot it was working for the public, not to build up its own bureaucracy.

AMB WHITE: When I first went out to the CIA to get briefed, oh, maybe 25 years ago, there was one large building. I went out recently to do a briefing on Central America, I was amazed. They must have 15 buildings out there now. So, what you have is a -- is a monster.

NARRATOR: Recent revelations have brought more information to the public about CIA activities and, not surprisingly, given the impression that the CIA is out of control and unfocussed. It's foreign activities and organizations were, according to some CIA agents, fatally compromised by Aldrich Ames.

Other questions involve the deaths of an American and the husband of an American, both killed in Guatemala by a Guatemalan military officer on the CIA's payroll. Equally serious is the allegation that General Noriega, who was deposed as president of Panama by the US in 1990, was known to be a major drug dealer at the same time the CIA was paying him money. More recently, five Americans were expelled from France for economic espionage against one of our historically close allies.

Some observers suggest that reforms within the intelligence community should include reassigning specific intelligence missions to the various agencies.

Mr. COLBY: On the operations side, I've always been of the feeling that the army -- the military should be allowed to do even clandestine operations for their tactical purposes, because the CIA won't do it. The CIA is so involved in trying to get the big strategic picture that they're really not going to pay much attention to the tactical problems that the commanders face.

LGEN CLAPPER: I think as a general rule, I would prefer to see military intelligence conducted within the Department of Defense, either DIA or, in toto, the DIA-led complex of the service intelligence centers and the joint intelligence centers which are posited with each of the war-fighting commands.

NARRATOR: As both a career military officer and a former director of Central Intelligence, ADM Turner has a different slant.

ADM TURNER: The secretary of defense and the director of Central Intelligence have recently signed an agreement which, in effect, gives the Pentagon total control of the photographic satellites. In my time, I had total control of the photographic satellites. That's a real and dangerous reversal. Because when the issue of priorities comes up, the secretary of defense cannot make the judgment that must be made; that is, what is in the national not the defense interest.

NARRATOR: Finally, there is the question of accountability to the president, to the Congress, to the American people. US law must be observed, intelligence reports must be as accurate as possible. These and other criteria have not always been observed.

AMB WHITE: It is, in my experience, frequent routine that the Central Intelligence Agency distorts -- gets distorted information because it's looking for a particular kind of information that will, in effect, justify the role of the CIA in that country.

ADM TURNER: The second thing that needs to get great attention is how to bring the clandestine arm of the CIA under control. And its culture is necessarily so different from that of the analytic organization of the CIA that I recommend splitting them into two separate organizations. Get more control over the clandestine part.

NARRATOR: The CIA, however, is not the only agency susceptible to manipulating information.

Mr. PIKE: I think that one of the essential functions that the Directorate of Intelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency performed throughout the Cold War was providing a counter-balancing or offsetting view of our security interests relative to that offered by the Defense Intelligence Agency, which was cooking the books to favor the Defense Department's agenda, or Air Force, Navy and Army Intelligence, who were always coming in with intelligence assessments saying that we needed more tanks, or planes, or boats.

NARRATOR: But the very way that intelligence agencies operate, with "secrecy," the "protecting" of sources and methods of information-gathering, and the concealment of operations runs counter to the fundamental tenets of Democratic society that all of government should be open to strict oversight, if not public scrutiny.

Mr. PIKE: We were told during the Cold War that we were faced by a totalitarian "evil empire" and that we had to make some compromises. But we won the Cold War, the "evil empire" is gone, and I think now we have to go back and see whether maybe we've gone too far in compromising democracy by letting these government agencies run wild without proper public oversight.

LGEN CLAPPER: We, I think, have a more sophisticated, a more developed congressional oversight mechanism than virtually any other country in the world. And that is the vehicle, the forum, the conduit by which American taxpayers oversee what the intelligence community does and the way taxpayer money is spent.

Mr. COLBY: The constitutional role of the committees is thoroughly accepted by the agency and its people. It's a bit of a nuisance, sure, but nonetheless it's just essential in the way we Americans run our government. It's part of the constitutional system.

NARRATOR: Nonetheless, Iran-contra, the Aldrich Ames betrayal, John Pollard's espionage for Israel, and questionable accounting practices of the National Reconnaissance Offices and other DoD intelligence agencies suggest, even to the new CIA director, that more must be done to keep US intelligence properly focused and under control.

Mr. DEUTCH (at hearing): "There are a set of important needs, some of which I've tried to sketch today, and that indeed the community is going after meeting those needs that the country has both effectively and responsibly in a way that the average American citizen, if they were granted full knowledge of the operations and the activities, would say, 'Yup, that's what you should be doing.'"

NARRATOR: For John Pike, however, someone still is needed to watch the watchers.

Mr. PIKE: Oversight can either mean to oversee or to overlook. And instead of overseeing the intelligence community, I'm afraid that the Congress has been overlooking a lot of stuff that would have been quite scandalous if done by any other part of the government.

ADM TURNER: One hoped that they had learned from the Iran-Contra mistakes, but no, they had not. We have Ames and Guatemala and so on. So, there is some new direction needed there.

NARRATOR: Even without a threat as formidable as that of the former Soviet Union, the US Government and military still requires intelligence-gathering.

Mr. DEUTCH (at hearing): "Our chief focus will still remain stealing secrets, relying on clandestine information, which is the principal business of the intelligence community."

NARRATOR: But serious questions remain about the size, shape and mission of the CIA and other US intelligence agencies.

ADM TURNER: I'd say get it under control, try it out, and then determine whether it's enough or not enough.

Mr. PIKE: I'm not sure how much additional centralized control and authority is needed, but we've clearly got to do better in the future than we've done in the past.

[End of broadcast.]

Produced by the Center for Defense Information