Regarding “Is the sun finally setting on the CIA?” (Op-Ed, Aug. 6), Clarence Page needs to reread his history books. I especially recommend the works of Gordon Prange on this subject, as well as “The Puzzle Palace,” by James Bamford, a short history of the National Security Agency.
The reason the CIA was formed had less to do with the Cold War than with intelligence blunders just before Pearl Harbor. Enough information was available for policymakers to take steps that could have averted the attack or made it a victory instead of the defeat it was.
Instead, due to duplicated responsibilities, fights over who had access to what information and other clashes too numerous to list, the information was not properly analyzed until after the fact. (The persistent goofy conspiracy theories that President Franklin D. Roosevelt deliberately allowed the destruction at Pearl Harbor have been kept alive for years because this information was around–that it wasn’t collated never figures in these yarns, of course.)
The CIA was founded more as a means of avoiding this kind of disaster in the future by providing a central depository for intelligence information, analysis and dissemination to the U.S. government. The CIA does need reform, but if, as Mr. Page seems to favor, we disband the CIA, we are leaving ourselves open for another tragedy caused, like Pearl Harbor, by lack of proper intelligence service.
If anything about the CIA needs to be disbanded, it is the part of the agency devoted to covert operations–which is what most people complain about–not the whole agency. It is not worth it to destroy one of the main defenses against a repeat of Dec 7, 1941, simply to end problems in one part of the agency.
