A Spy for All Seasons: My Life in the CIA.

• Author: Pincus, Walter

WHETHER YOU LOVE OR HATE the CIA, Duane R. "Dewey" Clarridge's memoir, A Spy for All Seasons, subtitled "My Life in the CIA," is worth reading. Its freshness, openness, and plain arrogance make it by far a better starting point for discussing where the trouble-laden clandestine side of U.S. intelligence has been and should go than the myriad presidential, congressional and think-tank studies churned out in the post-Aldrich Ames era.

You wouldn't expect that from Clarridge, whose career is rooted in the now disparaged and deconstructed "old boy network" days, which he looks back on with fondness and describes from his particular point of view with authoritative detail. (Among other escapades, as one of the agency's more celebrated "cowboy" field operatives, Clarridge guided CIA development of the Nicaraguan contras, became involved in the Iran-contra scandal, and was indicted for lying to Congress, only to be pardoned by President Bush before his case came to trial.)

The arrogance is all Clarridge's; the freshness is probably equally traceable to his writing colleague, Digby Diehl. But the openness must be attributed to the CIA's Publications Review Board, which permitted description of past covert operations, use of the names of agency stations abroad, and even revelation of the identities of retired operatives. Just a half-dozen years ago, that type of information could not be cleared for public mention, even in Iran-contra criminal trials and congressional hearings.

Unlike first-generation CIA clandestine operatives, such as Frank Wisner, Desmond Fitzgerald, and Richard Helms, Clarridge did not serve in World War II. Along with the others who joined in the 1950s, his career was shaped from the beginning by the Cold War. As he puts it, "I was in the CIA ... to advance the interests of the U.S. government and the American people abroad. In real terms, this meant taking on the Soviet empire, communist China, and their satellites, and preventing their domination of the world with their grotesque, inhuman, and corrupt ideology." For Clarridge, this was a black-and-white battle between good and evil, which meant "an abhorrence of ... moral relativism" that included "America's liberal left "

At the time he retired in 1988, Clarridge believed a change had taken place in the quality of agency personnel, and that this was having an effect on operations. He traced it first to the drop-off in Ivy League recruitment in the 1960s, later to the fast expansion fostered by one of his heroes, the late CIA Director William J. Casey, and finally "to gender and ethnic quotas or diversity [that] are no substitutes for talent" By the late 1980s, Clarridge claimed, the ranks of younger...