FIXING THE SPY MACHINE Preparing American Intelligence for the Twenty-First Century.

• Author: Goodman, Melvin
• Position: Review

FIXING THE SPY MACHINE Preparing American Intelligence for the Twenty-First Century by Arthur S. Hulnick and Richard R. Valcourt Praeger, $19.95

THERE USED TO BE AN EXPRESSION about the CIA: "Once in the company, always in the company" Arthur Hulnick, the author of Fixing the Spy Machine, spent 28 years in the CIA and his new book reads very much like he's still in it.

To Hulnick, "things are not as bad as they seem" and, with a "good tune-up," the agency will be well-prepared to handle threats to American national security in the next century. This is a bit odd. In view of the operational breakdowns that led to the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, the intelligence-collection problems that led to the failure to anticipate Indian nuclear testing, the counter-intelligence errors that surrounded the Aldrich Ames scandal, and the intelligence-analysis failure that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union, it would appear that the CIA needs far more than a "good tune-up." But Hulnick is obviously more concerned with establishing a "new legitimacy" for the CIA than reforming an institution that is out of touch with the realities of the post-Cold War world.

Hulnick devotes very little attention in his book to "fixing the spy machine." Instead, the reader confronts a generally out-of-date review of the various functions of the CIA and the intelligence community in America. For example, the author describes a "merger" or "partnership" between the directorate of intelligence and the directorate of operations which no longer exists. The brainchild of former director James Woolsey, the merger did not solve the problem of intelligence analysis politically slanted to conform to the goals of CIA clan-destine operations and covert actions. Woolsey's successor, John Deutch, ended the merger in 1995.

Hulnick clearly favors the clan-destine collection efforts of the CIA over the technical collection of the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office. He praises the CIA's focus on "strategic issues" and criticizes the intelligence gathering of NSA and NRO as "fragmentary and of little value" in the case of the former and as collecting "far more information than we can process" in the case of the latter. This will come as a shock to both the disarmament community and war-planners at the Pentagon who rely on NRO imagery and NSA communications and signal interceptions for monitoring weapons...