The Senators Vs. the Spooks

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The 40-page document, personally delivered to a handful of Senators by CIA Director William Casey last week, is stamped TOP SECRET on every page--twice. It outlines nothing less than the spy agency's proposed strategy and priorities for the next ten years. Top priority, not surprisingly, is given to assessing Soviet capabilities. Great importance is placed as well on counterterrorist and counterintelligence activities and on attempts to figure out trends in the Third World. Otherwise, no one who saw a copy of the plan, including the 15 members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and key staffers, would say anything about the contents. So it is not easy to gauge whether Bernard McMahon, staff director of the committee, was accurate when he called the drafting of the plan "the most significant event for intelligence in the postwar era."

But in one respect the document is indeed of unquestioned importance. It is the first master plan Congress has ever managed to prod the CIA into ; writing. Accordingly, its presentation to the key Senators marks a potential turning point in Congress's unceasing battle to pry more information out of the secretive Casey--or, as Casey and many of his subordinates see it, in the legislators' efforts to run the CIA from Capitol Hill and spill its secrets.

The committee was careful not to crow. McMahon portrayed the master plan as "very much a Bill Casey effort." But the CIA director had ridiculed the idea of drafting one in a letter to Committee Chairman David Durenberger last November. He had already given the committee as much information as it needed, he wrote then, but "maybe there is not a full understanding of it."

Those grumpy words indicated the rising tension between the CIA and Capitol Hill. It is both historic and inevitable; there is a built-in conflict between the legislators' desire for enough information to assure themselves that the CIA is operating in the public interest, and the agency's equally pressing need to keep details of complex and delicate operations secret. What has kept the tension high through much of the Reagan Administration, however, is the resumption of large-scale, supposedly covert operations, above all in Nicaragua, that many legislators oppose but feel unable to control.

Personalities have played a growing role too. Casey has never concealed his determination to tell the congressional oversight committees no more than the law requires, and some legislators suspect he does not even do that. "Week after week, we pick up the paper and read intelligence information we have never known before," charges Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy, vice chairman of the Senate watchdog committee. Casey argues that too often, "congressional oversight of the intelligence community is conducted off the cuff through the news media and involves the repeated compromise of sensitive intelligence sources and methods."