The agency: the rise and decline of the CIA.

• Author: Wise, David

The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA.

The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA. John Ranelagh. Simon and Schuster, $22.95. In this oddly mistitled survey of that most controversial of all arms of the American government, the Central Intelligence Agency, William Colby is a "boy scout' because he told the truth to Congress when the CIA's malfeasances began to unravel in public, and Richard Helms is a hero because he did not. Moreover, Stansfield Turner and Jimmy Carter were naive, if not downright dangerous, because they sought to run an intelligence agency within the moral context of a democracy, and failed. William J. Casey, on the other hand, is "dynamic, risk-taking and successful.'

Just so we know where we are.

At the core of this study of the CIA by John Ranelagh, a British television producer, is the firmly-held belief that intelligence agencies should not be accountable. Thus, the problem is not the abuses committed by the CIA but the fact that they became public knowledge. It is a debate that is still going on, of course, and those who hold to the quaint, somewhat fusty belief that no agency should be above the law and the Constitution are probably losing in Ronald Reagan's Washington.

The Agency is an ambitious undertaking, nothing less than an attempt to capture the entire history of the CIA since its creation in 1947. The work is mistitled because the CIA, far from being in decline, has blossomed in the nurturing soil of the Reagan administration. Its budget has increased dramatically, its covert operations reach from Nicaragua to Afghanistan, and its contempt for Congress is scarcely concealed. William Casey is a tough customer, the first Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) to hold cabinet rank, and a man who enjoys instant access to the president. Casey got him elected, after all. No other DCI managed the political campaign of the president who appointed him.

The Agency, it should be said, is a serious, nonsensational work-- massive, bulging with footnotes and original interviews, falling somewhere into the maw between history and journalism.

The difficulty is that there are limits to what the CIA or any other secret agency will release under the Freedom of Information Act, which Ranelagh has plumbed. He was obliged, therefore, to rely heavily on interviews with former CIA officials. And there's the rub. Talk to the Old Boys and you get Old-Boy talk.

Defenders of the agency, stalwarts of the Clandestine Services...