WASHINGTON, 7 November — With America devoting much of its law enforcement and security agencies to the global war against terrorism, the US Central Intelligence Agency has also seen a significant shift in its global mission. Under the leadership of George Tenet, the CIA has shifted emphasis from the gathering and analysis of intelligence to paramilitary and “covert operations.”

A covert operation is CIA-speak for any surreptitious activity of American intelligence officers that lend — undeservedly, perhaps — a romantic cachet to the intelligence business. Covert operations can sometimes involve secret maneuvers intended to influence events overseas.

During Ronald Reagan’s presidency, covert operations found favor among the CIA leadership. But the excesses of the Iran-Contra affair and publicity surrounding several other failed covert operations saw the Agency shift its focus away from covert actions and toward more mundane — and less risky — intelligence activities.

All this may be changing.

In recent months, Tenet has quietly instructed that covert operations will once more take center stage at the CIA.

However, unlike his predecessors, Tenet does not define covert operations as activities that necessarily involve paramilitary troops or violence. Rather, he sees CIA covert operations as a means to counter drug dealers, international criminals and terrorists.

Tenet’s announcement was hardly a cause for celebration among some CIA officers who work for the entity within the CIA responsible for covert action, the Directorate of Operations.

While Tenet and his senior leadership at the Agency talk of placing greater emphasis on covert operations, old policies at the CIA make intelligence officers personally and legally accountable for their actions.

This accountability policy for covert operatives was defined in 1995 by the CIA general counsel’s office to offset a number of embarrassing scandals that rocked the Agency over the previous two decades, beginning with Iran-Contra, which saw the then-general counsel, Stanley Sporkin, candidly advising the CIA director serving at the time, William J. Casey, to “not brief the Congress” on the ill-fated deal.

In the mid-1990s, then-director John M. Deutch faced the first test of his new covert operations policy when details came to light surrounding CIA activities in Guatemala, where a Guatemalan military officer on the CIA’s payroll was allegedly involved in the 1990 murder of a US citizen and the killing of a Guatemalan guerilla married to an American lawyer.

Acknowledging that the CIA violated the law by “deliberately” keeping Congress in the dark about its ties to the Guatemalan military officer, Deutch fired two senior CIA officers and disciplined eight others for their involvement in the wrongdoing.

The punishment meted out by Deutch was swift and unprecedented: Terry Ward, the longest-serving of the fired operatives, had worked as chief of the Latin American Division of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations at the time when the Guatemalan officer was working as an agent for the CIA.

According to an intelligence source, Ward’s firing and the firing of Fredrick Brugger, the then-chief of station in Guatemala, came in the form of a memo that requested them to voluntarily retire.

Ward’s dismissal notice informed him that he was being “asked to retire” for failing to “properly manage the division,” and because he and Brugger “deliberately withheld” information that should have been brought to the attention of State Department officials and the US Congress.

The measures taken by Deutch were the first occasion where CIA covert operatives were punished for actions related to knowledge of human rights violations.

Many see the action taken against the CIA operatives as fulfillment of a promise Deutch made shortly after he took office: To ensure that American espionage is consistent with “American interests and American values....[The Directorate of Operations] knows that it’s necessary to change its attitudes, its practices and its habits. There’s a lot that has to be done....We’ll start in Guatemala and work our way north, east, south, and west.”

Many intelligence sources believe that the severity of the action taken against the CIA operatives once associated with the Guatemala operation is an attempt by Deutch to create contrast between his leadership and the style of leadership employed by his predecessor, R. James Woolsey.

Woolsey was harshly criticized for only handing out mild reprimands to 11 CIA officers found to have been negligent in the handling of the case of Alrich H. Ames, a former CIA officer whose espionage activities on behalf of the Soviet Union remained undetected for over eight years.

A retired CIA officer, who talked to Strategic Policy on condition of anonymity, believes that the Deutch policy on the accountability of operatives was “politically motivated.”

“We were being condemned under new laws that didn’t even exist when the offenses allegedly took place,” says the retired CIA operations officer. “Deutch was hoping (this move) would win him points with Congress.”

The growing intra-CIA tension associated with the new roles and responsibilities for covert operatives was but one component of the CIA’s ongoing effort to define itself in the 1990’s.

But today, with the US engaged in a global war on terror, the legal question still lingers.

But the covert action question brings into sharp focus an issue that has always loomed large over an agency of the US government that has always viewed itself as the first line of defense for “American interests and American values”: Are covert operations consistent with the principles of democracy?

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