The company they keep.

• Author: Corn, David
• Position: CIA cover-ups for their own officers

A few years ago, several senior officials of the Central Intelligence Agency gathered in a conference room at Langley to ponder the worst situation an intelligence service can confront. One by one, the Company's agents in the Soviet bloc--spies code named Tickle, Blizzard, Gentile, and Pyrrhic--had been uncovered and apprehended by the Communists. Those picked up included the London station chief of the K.G.B., a Red Army general, and most of the C.I.A.'s top Soviet agents of the 1980s. HUMINT (spy talk for human intelligence) operations in Russia, the primary target of the C.I.A., were in ruins. And no one knew why. As the top intellicrats of the U.S. government scratched their heads, one jokingly remarked. "Well, someone in this room must be a mole." Everyone laughed at the preposterous notion--including a C.I.A. veteran named Aldrich Hazen Ames.

The arrest of Rick Ames, chief of the Soviet counterintelligence branch, provoked outrage from national security hawks and derision from C.I.A. critics. Both groups had the same question: How the hell could the Agency have not caught on to Ames' espionage when he was driving a Jaguar, buying a fancy house with $540,000 in cash, hacking into C.I.A. computers, lying to his superiors about his overseas travels, and having trouble passing lie detector tests? Part of the answer--one that nobody has paid attention to--is that the C.I.A. is far too much of a private club, one in which its members take care of each other and pledge allegiance to their own community. This clubbiness protected Ames who, as the son of a C.I.A. officer, was a legacy. In addition to posing a security problem, the clique mentality that protected Ames for so long also prevents the Agency and its outsider overseers from dealing with the shortcomings, large and small, of the C.I.A.

All government bureaucracies perpetuate a certain exclusivity. But shrouded in secrecy, the C.I.A.--like other spy services--is culturally more insular than most agencies. Such secrecy is bound to have an effect: It draws members of the club closer together and further distances them from the civilian, non-secret world. (In the Ames case, the outside world included the spy-hunters of the F.B.I., from whom the C.I.A. withheld information regarding Ames' worrisome encounters with a lie detector.) Two directors of Central Intelligence have noted (in their memoirs) the deleterious effect of such clandestine bonding. William Colby, director from 1973 to 1976, observed that many C.I.A. people dropped out of non-Agency society and immersed themselves exclusively in the cloak-and-dagger life." They formed "a real fraternity.... They increasingly separated themselves from the ordinary world and beveloped a rather skewed view of that world.... And out of that grew...an inbred, distorted, elitist view of intelligence that held it to be above the normal processes of society, with its own rationale and justification, beyond the restraints of the Constitution, which applied to everything and everyone else."

Stansfield Turner, President Carter's much maligned C.I.A. director, mused on the impact of a covert life: "Hiding your accomplishments, leading a double life, regularly facing moral issues...can all take their toll. In many ways, a clandestine career can be said to deform the person involved." And the institution itself.

In the course of writing a book on one longtime, highly decorated, and highly controversial C.I.A...