A New World for Spies

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Most remarkable about the scene were not the security man and woman from the CIA standing outside the Senator's office on Capitol Hill last month. Dennis DeConcini is, after all, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a frequent host to high-level visitors from the agency. What was unusual was the cast of characters they were there to protect. When DeConcini's heavy wooden office door opened, out stepped CIA Director R. James Woolsey -- accompanied by none other than Yevgeni Primakov, head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, successor organization to the KGB. Picking up their guards, the chiefs of the world's two largest intelligence agencies, once mortal enemies, bustled down the corridor to another meeting.

Virtually unnoticed, Primakov spent four days in Washington in mid-June, meeting with Woolsey and the House and Senate intelligence committees. In several lengthy talks, Primakov and Woolsey discussed how their organizations can cooperate and share information on worldwide threats such as terrorism, the spread of weapons of mass destruction and drug trafficking. The Russian's visit was in return for one paid to Moscow last October by Robert Gates, Woolsey's predecessor as Director of Central Intelligence, who also dropped by the Russian embassy for a drink and a chat during Primakov's stay.

Were he still alive, James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's consummate cold war spook, would have launched a full-scale internal investigation, condemning a conversation of any substance between Primakov, a longtime Kremlin Middle East expert, and Woolsey, a specialist on nuclear and conventional arms control, as treasonous. During most of their careers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union struggled for every square foot of terrain anywhere on earth that one might win from the other. With nuclear war in the balance, Moscow and Washington focused most of their spies' efforts, and spent most of their intelligence budgets, on each other.

The cold war competition has evaporated, but the world has not necessarily grown safer. While the West no longer lives in fear of a surprise attack from the Soviet Union, it worries very seriously when and where some of the 27,000 nuclear warheads on former Soviet soil might slip into the hands of irresponsible governments or terrorists elsewhere on the planet. More than 25 countries are on the road to building weapons of mass destruction -- or buying them from those who have too many arms and too little money. Every industrial state is trying to steal another's high-tech secrets and protect its own. Terrorism is a multifaceted worry, emerging from religious and ethnic conflicts around the globe. Governments -- whole countries -- are being subverted by billionaire drug traffickers.