The spies who came in from the cold war. The world changed. Can the CIA?

• Author: Braden, Thomas

Nearing the end of his life, the founder of the Central Intelligence Agency lay in bed in his New York City apartment and looked out the window at the line of traffic entering Manhattan from the Queensborough Bridge.

General William J. Donovan's mind had been clouded by a series of strokes. "You see that, my boy," he said to his visitor as he waved his arm at the taxicabs, trucks, and passenger cars streaming over the bridge. "I warned them about this. You know I did. Those are Russian tanks."

For the last 19 years of his life, Bill Donovan was obsessed with the communist menace. He preached it, fought it, worried it. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that he, and the subalterns whom he trained in his wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and who inherited his CIA, lived it. As these men retired or died, their successors, a somewhat less dashing breed, have been also obsessed by the menace. By the thousands each weekday morning, they've passed the old man's statue in the entrance of the headquarters building in Langley, Virginia, and gone to work: analyzing the menace, tracking the agents of the menace, measuring the menace's assets, trying to ferret out the intentions of the menace--"confounding," as the British say in their national anthem, the menace's "knavish tricks."

For 45 years, nothing has mattered as much--an obsession with consquences great and small. Consider the CIA employee who has risen to the rank of station chief in Ecuador. Over time he has learned that CIA headquarters will file without comment his report on Ecuador's ancient territorial quarrel with Peru. But he'll get immediate attention when he reports what the menace is doing in Ecuador. So does he employ someone to count the visitors to the Soviet Embassy, noting the times of entry and the length of stay? Of course he does, knowing that headquarters is more interested in this subject than in any other.

I wish Donovan had been around to see the disappearance of the menace. Like his successors at Langley and in Angola, India, and France, he would have been gleeful, but he also would have been dumbfounded, for the disappearance of the menace leaves the CIA without a cause.

Bill Donovan and Harry Truman, who didn't much like each other, were in total agreement on the CIA's purpose. Truman defined it one morning in 1947 during an Oval Office chat with his aide, Clark Clifford. The president had been reading the cables of the last pre-war ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, and he recommended that Clifford read them too. "After that," said Harry Truman, "you come in here and tell me how anybody could have read those cables and not known there was an attack coming." The reason the U.S. was caught by surprise at Pearl Harbor, according to Truman, was that nobody had drawn President Franklin Roosevelt's attention to the cables or to the enourmous quantities of scrap iron that the Japanese were buying. "If we had had some central repository for information," he concluded, "somebody to look at it, fit all the pieces together, and report it, there never would have been a Pearl Harbor."

So the purpose of a Central Intelligence Agency was clear. But a purpose flies no banners and inspires no slogans. The early history of the CIA makes it clear that without The Cause--fighting the communist menace--the formation of the CIA would never have been approved by Congress. The Army's G-2 was against it. The Office of Naval Intelligence was against it. Hoover's FBI was against it. The first secretary of defense, James Forrestal, was against it. But Joseph Stalin outweighed them all. By erecting the Iron Curtain, threatening Turkey and the Balkans, and fighting the Marshall Plan, Stalin in effect founded the CIA. He gave it a cause. And now that cause is gone. As Lt. General Samuel Wilson, retired chief of one of the CIA's partners, the Defense Intelligence Agency, put it recently, "All my pillars of intellectual support are pretty well gone, because the Soviet Union forces as I knew them have ceased to exist."

Then why not abolish the CIA? Without the cause, do we need an intelligence community that costs nearly $30 billion a year and a CIA that employs tens of thousands of people and risks us deep embarrassment every four or five years? Here I must confess to an old boy's sentimental attachment to the place where I once worked. If the CIA were abolished, I would feel as though the house into which I was born had been demolished--not sad, but wistful. Yet at times even I have considered parricide, especially on those occasions when the CIA has shamed its country, its allies, even its own employees. There were incidents like the Bay of Pigs--illogical in attempt, atrocious in execution, and tragic in result. There was the opening of letters addressed to American citizens violation of the CIA's charter and therefore illegal. Or Operation Chaos, an attempt to spy on and embarrass American citizens opposed to the war in Vietnam, again a violation of the CIA charter and the law. Or the CIA attempt to assit Gerald Ford, then a congressman, in his campaign to impeach Justice William O. Douglas--yet another violation of both charter and law.

And then there were bungled attempts to assassinate foreign leaders...