WASHINGTON -- The next director of the Central Intelligence Agency, expected to be nominated by President Clinton this week, will inherit command of an agency beleaguered by poor morale and hungry for a leader.
A retired Air Force general, Michael P. C. Carns, is "at the top" of Mr. Clinton's list to head the agency, the White House confirmed yesterday. But the new director, whoever he or she is, will have to help the organization redefine its mission.
Along with the country's other spy agencies, the CIA has been bruised by budget fights and is struggling to operate in a brighter public spotlight. But it is also trying to recover from the damage inflicted by Aldrich Ames, the CIA operative who for years traded intelligence to the Soviet Union for cash.
General Carns, vice chief of the Air Force from 1991 until his retirement last year, has been praised for his management skills. If nominated and then confirmed by the Senate, he would replace R. James Woolsey, who announced his resignation in December and left his post as director of central intelligence last month.
His replacement will have a daunting job. The director of central intelligence serves as chairman of the board of 13 agencies spread among five government departments, drawing information from $28 billion worth of satellites, aircraft, phone intercepts, covert agents and an army of sometimes competing analysts.
With the Soviet threat gone, analysts must study lesser threats, such as terrorism, and separate the dangerous from the merely worrisome.
The analysts' work is fed to battlefield commanders, U.S. ambassadors everywhere, Treasury officials eyeing the gyrations of foreign currencies, and policy-makers assessing the risk that one or another civil war will destabilize an entire region.
But the most important "consumer" is the commander in chief, whose relationship with the director guides the search for information. And ideally, the director provides the information a president needs to know -- not just what the president or his top advisers think he should know.
The most recent director, Mr. Woolsey, rarely saw President Clinton alone and failed to become part of the president's inner circle of advisers. But even directors with such access have found some presidents so preoccupied by one crisis that they resist hearing about other problems in other parts of the world.
Aides to presidents ask, "Aren't REUTERSCARNSyou on the team?" says Richard Helms, who was CIA director from 1966 to 1973.
Another challenge comes from TV coverage. With CNN broadcasting scenes of far-away events with greater immediacy than ever, public pressure builds on policy-makers to react to crises in areas where the United States has no apparent strategic interest and, thus, few spies and analysts.
"You're dealing with a world in which policy-makers need help in even finding these places on a map," former Defense Secretary Les Aspin said recently. "You'd have meetings where policy-makers knew nothing about Rwanda, and I mean nothing."
The former Soviet empire remains a high priority, particularly on the issue of compliance with arms-control agreements that require deep cuts in long-range missiles and the shrinking of armies.
In the past, intelligence resources could be concentrated on Moscow. Now that the empire has broken up into a number of potentially volatile republics, the agency has had to refocus its experts.
As U.S. economic interests expand with free trade, so does demand for information on everything from exchange rates to the security in remote regions that now draw U.S. exports or investment.
"There is a constant adding of targets" for intelligence collectors, Mr. Aspin said. "One day, we may wake up and find out that what we really need some information about, it isn't there, dTC because the corners have been cut and resources have been pulled out."
The new director will have to assign new priorities against a backdrop of demands for budget cuts, upheaval from scandal and dissatisfaction among some consumers of intelligence with the quality of the community's work.
"What's required, in my view, is a major rethinking of the mission and a recasting of the institutions that do that mission," says Marvin Ott, a professor of national security policy at the National War College.
Newt Gingrich, the speaker of the House, agrees.
"I believe we have to rethink the entire intelligence system, for a lot of reasons," Mr. Gingrich said in a recent interview with Sun reporters and editors. Among those reasons, he said, is a world with new power centers and the prospect that terrorists may gain weapons of mass destruction.
Frustrated by the slow pace of change, Congress last year created a commission, headed by Mr. Aspin, to conduct a yearlong review of intelligence needs and operations.
For Mr. Woolsey, the largest problems were congressional anger over his failure to punish any of Aldrich Ames' supervisors more severely, and anger over his resistance to cutting the agency's budget.
Some people familiar with the intelligence community's budget insist there is ample room to trim:
* Overhead collection systems, which include not just satellites but also reconnaissance aircraft and pilotless drones, may be duplicative.
* The National Security Agency, which intercepts and decodes communications, may be collecting more data than the government needs.
* Even though policy-makers may benefit from seeing competing analyses, some experts question whether the military services, CIA and State Department all need their own analysts.
But there's a danger in cutting too much, too fast, warns Bobby Ray Inman, the retired admiral and former deputy director of central intelligence. Because intelligence agencies reduced their scrutiny of certain parts of the globe during the 1970s, he said, "we ended up with a lot of surprises."
The intelligence community has long enjoyed built-in protection from reformers, because most of its employees and deeds were hidden from public view. The very craft of spying requires operating within small units bound by trust.
But the cloak of secrecy also means that the intelligence community can't tout its successes or gain public defenders if its failures are exposed, or when policy-makers ignore its timely warnings.
Without the Soviet threat, and with all the pressure to trim and reform, the agency could become reluctant to undertake the risky operations or long-term investments that in the past have produced big payoffs, says Mr. Helms, the former director.
"In the last analysis, the CIA has no constituency," Mr. Helsm says. "Who stands up for it if the president doesn't stand up for it? He's expected to know what they do."