WASHINGTON -- CIA Director R. James Woolsey, whose agency was battered by a major spy scandal as it struggled to justify its post-Cold War mission, has resigned, the White House announced yesterday.
Mr. Woolsey, in a statement, said his family figured prominently in his decision. "For their patience and understanding in the face of lost evenings, weekends and holidays, it is time for recompense," he said.
White House officials said Mr. Woolsey sent his letter of resignation to President Clinton on Monday, then followed it with a telephone call.
The president accepted the resignation "with regret" yesterday, officials said.
"Jim Woolsey has been a staunch advocate of maintaining an intelligence capability that is second to none," President Clinton said in a statement.
The only prospective replacement widely mentioned yesterday was Deputy Secretary of Defense John M. Deutch. A White House official said the search was just getting under way.
Mr. Woolsey, 53, whose resignation takes effect Dec. 31, said in his statement that he was willing to remain through January to ease the transition to a new director.
A lawyer who has served in important national security posts in both Republican and Democratic administrations, Mr. Woolsey never emerged as a key presidential adviser in a Clinton administration that seemed determined to separate intelligence gathering and analysis from policy-making.
It was unclear whether Mr. Clinton tried to dissuade Mr. Woolsey from quitting. But a White House official said, "We did not solicit his resignation. We did not ask for it."
Mr. Woolsey's two-year tenure did not include any obvious intelligence failures. But he drew harsh criticism from key Democrats in Congress for his handling of the case of Aldrich Ames, a CIA agent convicted of spying for the Soviet Union for more than eight years for money.
The devastating intelligence losses for which Ames was responsible occurred under previous CIA directors. But Mr. Woolsey was accused of being too lenient with the spy's CIA supervisors, who failed to uncover Ames' betrayal despite abundant evidence of his living beyond his means.
Mr. Woolsey refused to fire anyone. Instead, he reprimanded seven retired and four current CIA employees, arguing, "I could have made the situation . . . politically far easier by firing four of the individuals who were still active in the CIA, but I chose not to do this for one and only one reason: didn't think it was fair and I didn't think it was just."
The Senate intelligence committee said in a November report that Mr. Woolsey's disciplinary measures were "seriously inadequate and disproportionate to the problems."
The outgoing panel chairman, Dennis DeConcini, a persistent Woolsey critic, said in a Cable News Network interview after Mr. Woolsey's resignation was announced: "The culture at the CIA has to be changed, and it is very difficult to do so. Mr. Woolsey made an early effort to do so, but couldn't pull it off."
Within the administration, Mr. Woolsey drew grumbles from policy-makers after a Capitol Hill leak of a negative and, to some critics, flawed CIA assessment of the mental stability of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whom the administration was trying to restore to power.
Mr. Woolsey also had to fight to preserve the intelligence community's budget during a period when it had lost what had historically been its principal mission: tracking the threat posed by the Soviet Union.
During his period as director, at least one prominent senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., went so far as to suggest that the Central Intelligence Agency be abolished.
When Mr. Woolsey was named director, he said such complex post-Cold War challenges as nuclear proliferation, terrorism, the narcotics trade, and ethnic and national hatreds would require new approaches.
He set a high priority on learning as much as possible about the hermetic Stalinist regime in North Korea, a major security concern throughout the Clinton administration.
Another priority for the agency's attention during his tenure has been Algeria's civil war and the potentially destabilizing impact of Islamic radicals on the Middle East.
To a Congress and public eager to shrink the national security establishment, Mr. Woolsey argued repeatedly that the post-Cold War world presented major challenges requiring a formidable intelligence-gathering capability.
Under Mr. Woolsey, the CIA became more open than perhaps at any time in its history, with Mr.Woolsey discussing details of satellite intelligence-gathering, previously a taboo subject, in his speeches.
In addition, the agency -- traditionally proud and secretive -- acknowledged past failures in assessing the Soviet Union.
"Intelligence remains vital to our national security," Mr. Woolsey said in his statement yesterday.
"We have taken major steps in the last two years to reshape American intelligence and ensure that the CIA and the intelligence community can support the president, his policy-makers, military commanders and the Congress with intelligence of the highest quality well into the next century."
Aides noted that the director could have looked forward to improved relations with Capitol Hill as Republicans, traditionally more willing to spend heavily on national security programs, assumed control.
Mr. Woolsey drew warm praise the night before his resignation was announced from four of his predecessors in a CNN interview.
But another ex-CIA director, James R. Schlesinger, said in an interview with The Sun that Mr. Woolsey would have done better in a time of greater international tension.
He said Mr. Woolsey was "admirably suited intellectually to be the director, but served at the wrong time for his talents to be fully exploited."
A native Oklahoman, Mr. Woolsey graduated from Stanford University, was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and received a law degree from Yale, before entering government as a Pentagon analyst.
He has been deeply involved in arms control issues for decades, starting with his membership in the U.S. Strategic Arms Limitation Talks delegation under former President Richard M. Nixon.
In the administration of President George Bush, he helped negotiate deep cuts in conventional arms in Europe.