ASKING THE UNSPEAKABLE?:

...They did not foresee that the U.S...

...I inferred correctly enough that the journalist whom I was asked (by an agency employee in the U.S...

...The senators will conclude as much, I suspect, if they try to see for themselves...

...The young Czech had candidly replied that he had accepted an invitation to dinner at an American diplomat's house in West Berlin and there he met an American correspondent who made him an offer to work for the American intelligence service...

...We would still listen to (and if we are clever enough, even read) other people's radio traffic...

...I have firsthand knowledge of one such agency effort...

...They might try to balance the agency's inflated and thus far undocumented claims to occasional modest successes against its all too painful failures...

...They have been as often surprised by startling developments in East Europe as the rest of us...

...It is much less likely that any substantial changes will have been imposed on the agency's activities overseas...

...Moreover, we would still have in an aboveboard way, our batteries of intelligence analysts making their customarily careful analyses...

...My young Czech diplomat had been assigned to escort him about Prague...

...Whole professions have been tainted by reasonable doubts as to their bona fides...

...We would still have our observation satellites overhead...

...The Senate investigators should ask, at long last, whether the national interest is really served by having this unworthy and ultimately useless activity continue to be carried on by career civil servants of the U.S...

...Certainly the record does not suggest that Russia's immense investment of men and money in clandestine intelligence collection has been all that useful...

...Too many senators have explained that the investigation is not a threat to the agency's continuing ability to carry out its "basic mission" for us to expect from the Congress any real change in CIA's mandate for clandestine intelligence collection beyond our borders...

...I had never heard of the news agency listed on his calling card...

...The Soviets have been taken by surprise quite as often as, perhaps oftener than their Western rivals...

...Mission) to invite to my house was not, in fact, a legitimate American correspondent...

...But now it is no longer just the diplomats who come under a cloud from this sort of thing...

...An unimportant enough affair in the end, no doubt...

...government...

...My role in the matter seemed harmless...

...He turned down the offer and informed his superiors...

...It seems likely, when the Senate's investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency is finally behind us, that new and stronger barriers to agency involvement in domestic affairs will have been erected...

...My own experience, as an information collector and intelligence processor of sorts in the Foreign Service and the State Department, is that we could get along nicely without blackmail, bribery and burglary...

...As for agency officers at CIA stations in embassies and consulates through the world, we could keep them on the job, going to cocktail parties and circulating as conventional diplomats do...

...THOMAS A. DONOVAN (Thomas A. Donovan was a Foreign Service officer in several European countries and Iran...

...This is a pity, for there is need for a careful look at this "basic mission...

...Several years later in Washington, a professor friend from MIT just back from a trip to Prague, told me he had met somebody I knew...

...Though I knew, therefore, that I was being used by the agency to help bring these two men together (this is why I took up the agency man on his offer to pick up the tab on the cost of the dinner)- I rather simple-mindedly supposed that this was an inconsequential favor on my part...

...No amount of fussing with the intelligence agency's operating instructions-no new ordinances specifying, say, what kinds of newspapermen may or may not be used in what kinds of operations-nothing of this kind will set things right...

...For this is what we are really talking about in our sanitized langugage about the agency's "basic mission" to collect clandestine intelligence...

...Certainly, in my own tours of duty in Eastern Europe I have appreciated the legitimate anxiety of casual foreign acquaintances as to whether I was other than I seemed to be...

...The committee should satisfy itself, for example, as to whether the agency has needed its license to practice blackmail, bribery and burglary beyond our borders in its much vaunted performance in gaining possession of the text of Khrushchev's secret speech of 1956 on the crimes of Stalin...

...newsmen...

...At any rate, my own exposure-in a Foreign Service career of 25 years-to a representative cross section of the Top Secret output of the collectors of clandestine political intelligence convinced me that the game of authorized blackmail, bribery and burglary has been worth as little abroad as at home...

...We have been told by CIA spokesmen that the overwhelming bulk of the information worked over by agency analysts emanates from more or less open sources, and only a tiny percentage comes from the products of traditional spy work...

...We should ask: Should we not, while retaining within the agency's sphere of operations all of its present open intelligence-collection activities, put an end to its present excessive preoccupation with the collection of information by the traditional methods of espionage...

...would take pictures of the missiles in Cuba, or react to them as it did...

...They did not expect that Nkrumah would be overthrown in Ghana or that Sukarno would fall in Indonesia...

...Can one wonder, from the above instance, that suspicious security services in even the backwaters of the world now feel they cannot afford to be indifferent to the comings and goings of U.S...

...The senators must go beyond a limited effort to satisfy themselves that the clandestine arm of the agency henceforth operates more clearly within the agency's charter...

...They must redraw the agency's "basic mission" to exclude the kind of reliance on blackmail, bribery and burglary that has become such a characteristic feature of clandestine intelligence collection...

...But they, in the way of intelligence organizations-and maybe this what the agency had had in mind all along-called him home and cashiered him...

...In fact, several copies of the speech were simply passed to U.S...

...After all, if the Americans could have had reason to suppose he might be a weak link in Czechoslovak security, then better to play it safe and put him on the shelf in Prague...

...The unconventional but sophisticated political reporting talents of agency personnel abroad already largely focused on and concerned with open available information, are an asset that would not be diminished by depriving them of their authorization to act, for a few hours each week, like characters in a spy novel...

...Was I, under diplomatic cover, someone whose organizational imperatives made it routine for him to be ready to ruin the lives of his foreign contacts-in the presumed "national interest" of the United States, but in practice mostly to win points for himself in his home organization...

...Why was he no longer in the diplomatic service?, the professor had asked...

...We would continue, as in the past, to learn what we could from knowledgeable defectors and other walk-in document-deliverers, such as Oleg Penkovsky...

...Diplomats have to live with such hazards...

...officials abroad by foreign Communists who were anxious to get it into general circulation quickly and who were indifferent to the fact that a decision would be taken in Washington to treat the windfall as a coup of CIA's clandestine intelligence collectors...

...Yet in all of these countries the Soviets have long possessed large clandestine intelligence-collection programs, and in some of them they have even controlled the local intelligence apparatuses...

...The Czech would be too wily to bite, I assumed, and if I didn't make the the meeting possible someone else would...

...Is it, then, worthwhile for us as a nation to have on the payroll at Langley a set of specialized civil servants to collect information for us by burglary, bribery and blackmail...

...We would still take normal counter-intelligence precautions...

...The victim was a young member of the Czechoslovak Mission in West Berlin who had the misfortune to meet, and subsequently to be propositioned by, a free-lance American journalist whose acquaintance he made at a dinner in my home in West Berlin...

...No one who has not gone abroad on a diplomatic assignment can appreciate how much our representatives overseas are handicapped by the reasonable suspicion that they have been sent to bribe or blackmail their way into possession of the classified internal trivia of another country's bureaucratic machinery of government...

...All in all, then, an abrupt end to the shabby expedients now indulged in by our collectors of (or rather, lookers for) clandestine political intelligence would be a long way indeed from total intelligence disarmament...

...The senators have, anyway, a unique opportunity to seek an answer to the question of whether our own record over the last 25 years shows clearly and decisively that slavish imitation of the Soviet KGB has promoted our real national interests in any significant way...

...His writings have appeared in the Washington Post...