Reinvent the CIA.

• Author: Ignatius, David

The Central Intelligence Agency's current cryptonym for itself in classified message traffic is PNINFINITE. The name is suggestive of the expansive world view that created the agency and sustained it through the Cold War years, but is now chronically out of date.

The CIA of the 1990s is a vast, global bureaucracy in search of a mission. The Company, as it was known in the old days, is now in liquidation. The end of the Cold War has rendered the massive technical programs developed to monitor the Soviet military largely irrelevant. So too the great covert action programs that were established in the 1950s to battle communism around the globe. The problem now is finding a graceful way to pension off the old networks of agents across Europe. And for all the anguish over the recent arrest of alleged Russian "mole" Aldrich Hazen Ames, the old counter-espionage ballet with the KGB is mostly history, too. Russia and America will continue to spy on each other until the end of time, but the stakes aren't the same now. We give Moscow billions of dollars in aid. At least until the Ames case broke, we were also sharing information with the Russians about common problems.

Yet despite all these changes, the old CIA structure largely remains intact. The agency in 1994 still has stations or bases in nearly every nation on the globe. But to what end? In the old days, the CIA case officers could say they were tracking their Soviet counterparts in the great game of counter-espionage. One former CIA officer explained to me once that he had spent much of a tour in Katmandu, Nepal, trying to recruit the local KGB resident there until he realized that the KGB man, all the while, had been trying to recruit him. This sort of shadowboxing kept several generations of CIA officers employed, but it's largely over.

The CIA, probably more than any other agency in the U.S. government, needs to reinvent itself for the post-Cold War world. It doesn't just need tinkering--retargeting its collection programs, smoothing its relations with Congress, looking for new enemies like drug traffickers or economic espionage that will give it a mission for the 1990s. It needs something more fundamental. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan has argued that the agency should blow itself up, figuratively speaking, and start over. That may be extreme. But here are a few thoughts about what a reinvented CIA might look like, drawn from conversations with current and former intelligence officials:

* Less Is More. The overriding requirement for a new CIA is that it needs to be smaller--and yes, more elite. There are too many case officers chasing the limited number of real spies the United States should be trying to recruit to our side. Does the agency really need stations in places like Dares Salaam and Kuala Lumpur and Caracas? Certainly the U.S. government will continue to need information from these capitals that will guide policymakers, but that's what the State Department is for. We have...