Shivering from Overexposure

There are those who fear that continuing controversy, of which Project Jennifer is only the latest fuel, may irreparably damage the CIA. The dissension has contributed to an exodus of veteran employees, among them David Phillips, 52, former chief of CIA operations in Latin America, who resigned last week and advised CIA Director William Colby that he planned to organize an association of retired intelligence officers to defend the agency. But younger employees have also been affected. In Washington, for example, some young analysts had joined the CIA only after assurances from recruiters that the cloak-and-dagger exploits of the cold war were a thing of the past. Now some of these idealistic employees are disillusioned. At the same time, CIA agents in Western Europe are worried that they can no longer count on headquarters to protect them. As a result, they are reluctant to mount any risky or out-of-the-ordinary operations and mutter darkly that the CIA debate only encourages the Soviet Union's KGB to step up efforts to penetrate Western defenses.

Colby's more pressing concern, however, is the controversy's effect on the agents operating under deep cover in Communist and other potential enemy countries and on allied and other friendly intelligence organizations. He told TIME Correspondent Strobe Talbott: "A lot of them are in a state of shock. They cannot put into their own framework this idea of going on television, going to Capitol Hill, going into these secrets. They ask, 'Are we going to get in the middle of this? Is it going to come out that we have this secret relationship?' "

Buttoned Up. Colby believes that he can allay such fears, if the members and staffers of the House and Senate investigating committees now being set up to look into the intelligence community exercise restraint in their requests for access to secrets and prevent what they receive from being leaked.

The committees share Colby's concern about leaks. House Committee Chairman Lucien Nedzi plans to hire a director who can keep his staff buttoned up, much as John Doar did for the House Judiciary Committee's inquiry into the impeachment of Richard Nixon. At the request of the Senate committee, the FBI and CIA installed electronic devices to secure the committee's workroom from bugging and illegal entry. Staffers will be required to go through FBI and CIA security checks, and have been told that they will be fired if they discuss their work with outsiders. Further, the staff members will be prohibited from removing any materials from the room.

Colby told Talbott that in principle he welcomed the investigations. He said: "There has been much exaggeration and misunderstanding. I both hope and sincerely believe that after reviewing the whole matter, it will come out that these were minor problems rather than major issues." The director predicted that the hearings will result in closer congressional scrutiny of the CIA, though he added: "This confronts us with a problem. How do you resolve the need for secrecy with the desire of a substantial number of Congressmen to have significant knowledge?"

In Secret. Colby argued against some suggested reforms of CIA operations. He opposed restricting the agency's clandestine activities to those first approved by a congressional watchdog committee because it would "interrupt the constitutional process of the Executive executing and the Legislative legislating. If you put the Congressmen in the chain of operations, I think you have a very complicated problem of who is really responsible." As for the proposal that Congress set specific guidelines for CIA activities, Colby said: "It would be very hard to set any that wouldn't come back and bite us some day." Instead, he urged that the agency be required only to report on its activities after the fact to a congressional committee.

Congress may not be in the mood to accept this, and no doubt stronger supervision is needed to guard against illegal CIA activities. But in the real world, in which other nations engage in espionage and "dirty tricks," the U.S. cannot do without an agency more or less like the CIA, and such an agency must, up to a considerable point, function in secret.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.