Eavesdroppings: from the Bay of Pigs to Iran-contra, the CIA has a sorry legacy. But we need it all the same.

• Author: Wines, Michael

Imagine having at your disposal, to spend as you please, the rough equivalent of the book value of the General Motors Corporation. Imagine having sufficient pocket change to pay most of the nation's uninsured hospital bills. Or an annual income equal to the state budgets of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming-combined.

Give or take a few dollars, that's what the United States spends each year to spy on the affairs of the rest of the world and to convert this information into data the White House and the rest of the government can use. Thirty billion dollars is an astonishing amount of money, but surely, in an era when we and the Soviets pushed and shoved at the edge of history's abyss, it was worth it.

Wasn't it?

Most experts would say yes, but with the end of the Cold War, the hindsight view is coming into vogue. James Rusbridger epitomizes it. His lengthy essay* on the uses and abuses of espionage asserts that for four decades, the spy business has been little more than a huge pigeon drop perpetrated year after year by the military and internal security types on gullible politicians. Give us some earnest money, the spymasters say, and we'll return your investment fourfold in hot tips, international gossip, and enemy secrets. The rubes fork over the money every time, Rusbridger says, and every time, the spies and counter-spies hand back colossal bagsful of sawdust: Kim Philby, the Bay of Pigs, Geoffrey Prime, Irancontra, John A. Walker--the list is sordid and almost endless.

In Rusbridger's world, most spies are bumblers who rarely discover much of importance to the naMichael Wines is a reporter for The New York Times. tional security and more often undermine it by supporting illegal and anti-democratic schemes, such as Oilie North's adventures in Nicaragua or domestic surveillance of political activists. Clear as this is, he says, we continue to be seduced by the lure of espionage as a romantic, mysterious quick fix for global problems.

Consider the case of Klaus Fuchs, a member of the British mission to the Manhattan Project, whose conviction as a Soviet spy later led to the indictment of Julius Rosenberg: "Fuchs and other atom spies are credited with allowing the Russians to build the atom bomb and later their nuclear bomb earlier than would have been the case," Rusbridger writes. "Even if this were true, and there is no good reason to believe that it is not, what difference did it really make? No nuclear weapon has been...