640 FOREIGN AFFAIRS can be inferred from the hero's welcome given to Richard Helms when he appeared at a reception of recently retired covert officers fresh from his conviction in federal court. The old methods of compartmentalization and tightly controlled operations have become a way of life not easily shaken in the insular bureaucracy of an intelligence service. Radical rearrangements of traditional procedures must be considered. At the least the Inspector General's function should be strengthened, as the Church Committee has recommended. Specifically, this officer's role should be expanded beyond its traditional one of internal control and response to employee complaints. One ex-Agency official who is a careful student of its recent history has suggested the creation of an ombudsman accessible to employees who felt they were being used in improper activities. This would be a helpful addition to the Inspector General's staff, freeing him for the vital task of constructively intervening in questionable plans and programs throughout the Agency. Similarly, the Legal Counsel must be given more steel to put under his velvet glove, particularly when his rulings are ignored or overturned by the Director. Traditionally matters of legal propriety have been referred to the Legal Counsel by other senior officers when and if they chose to do so; in effect his role has been passive. It should be a relatively simple internal matter to reverse this pattern. President Ford followed up one Church Committee recommendation by giving the Legal Counsel access to the Executive Oversight Board in the event that one of his rulings was ignored by the Director. This is a significant step in strengthening the legal review function in the Agency. VI A more sweeping structural change for the Agency has been suggested from time to time. This would entail a complete divorce of overt and covert intelligence activities. Overt functions (analysis, reporting, estimates, etc.) would be aggregated under one organizational roof and covert functions (collection, operations, counterintelligence, technical development of human control devices, etc.) under another. The objective behind such proposals has usually been to remove from the intelligence end product the taint of the methods used to obtain the raw data, in other words to strengthen the dignity and credibility of the Agency's truth-telling function. 'See Harry Rositzke, CIA's Secret Operations, New York: Reader's Digest Press, 1977, Chapter 13. 27-462 0-78 - 47 ETHICS AND INTELLIGENCE 641 There are merits to these suggestions, but perhaps the optimum time for divorce has passed. Indeed, if political operations were now eliminated and clandestine collection minimized, the temptation to breach ethical standards by the clandestine services would be reduced significantly. Moreover, cutting the clandestine services adrift would result in the concentration in one organization of most of those officers - now at high positions – who have been exposed to the highest ethical risks. Backsliding would be a great temptation, managerial control an administrator's nightmare. But the measures discussed above will amount to little more than tinkering if not buttressed by a radical new personnel policy that places a premium on ethical values. Beyond native intelligence, recruitment criteria have in the past emphasized such psychological factors as stability, intellectual curiosity and phlegm. Once selected on the basis of favorable readings on these counts, the candidate had, of course, to survive the polygraph test-a final screening against the possibility of penetration by a foreign agent or a duplicitous adventurer. To this battery a test of ethical values should be added. Law enforcement agencies in a few communities have provided something of a model in an area almost as contentious. A handful of larger police departments have been including in their selection. procedures a "violence test" for rookie candidates. The tests are basically psychological, designed to determine which applicants, in the normal course of their duties, would resort too readily to heavy-handed or bullying tactics. The results are not yet wholly clear-in part, one suspects, because there is little or no reinforcement of the desired value level as the new patrolmen become acculturated by their older colleagues, who possessed badges years before consideration of behavior patterns became a professional concern. An ethics test could be constructed from an array of situational choice problems inserted into the Agency's selection instruments. Such problems would present difficult ethical decision choices for the test-taker in a variety of interpersonal and organizational settings. To prevent the job applicant from tilting his answers toward problem solutions he presumes the testers are seeking, the questions would have to be scattered throughout the various portions of the questionnaires used-psychological, intelligence, The "Machover DAP test is one frequently used to detect overly aggressive personalities. Sophisticated screening instruments are described in the publication Police Selection and Career Assessment, issued by the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, U.S. Dept of Justice, 1976. etc. All ethics questions could then be selected out of the various test parts and reviewed separately. One hopes that a rough profile of the applicant's personal ethical standards could be obtained by this device, but at best it would probably do no more than single out applicants with unacceptably low or hopelessly confused ethical standards. Follow-up tests for those who enter the Agency and have served for several years would be considerably more difficult to design, but they are not beyond the skills of Agency psychologists. Surely this is slippery ground. One man's ethical floor may be another's ethical ceiling. Who is to define what the acceptable level of ethical beliefs should be? How would Agency management keep its ethical sights straight in a period of rapidly changing moral values? The issues raised are immensely difficult, but dismissing the concept will not solve the problem of the current low estate of the Agency in the public mind. Tackling the problem head on would, if nothing else, constitute a clear signal of top Agency management's concern to current employees, prospective recruits and the general public. VII Finally, the real purpose of intelligence-truth telling - must be placed at the center of Agency concerns. This is a harsh prescription; it is certainly the most difficult objective of the lot. But it must be the principal purpose of Agency leadership to establish beyond question the capacity of its experts and its facilities to seek out and find the truth, or the nearest approximation of the truth possible. Public cynicism will have to be dispelled before this is possible; it will take time. There are no easy paths to this objective. Indeed, the present mood of the public toward the Agency militates against its succeeding. The best graduate students do not gravitate to the Agency; its name is suspect in much of academia; business and professional groups are fearful of association. Where such circumstances exist they must be met with new and probably at first none too credible approaches. Insistence on being primarily in the business of truth telling will not automatically convince the skeptic that it is so. But CIA leadership that condones no other competing role and that demands that ethical questions be asked before internal Agency policies are decided upon will have made a beginning in the long journey back to public accountability. None of these steps, of course, would avert the damage that an unscrupulous President, intent on misusing intelligence talents, could produce. Only loud, angry public resignations by intelligence leaders could in such a case underscore a professional's ethical commitment to truth. |