Word: woolsey
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...timing could hardly have been worse for Director of Central Intelligence R. James Woolsey. With the embarrassing Aldrich Ames spy case spread across the nation's front pages last week, Woolsey had to go up to Capitol Hill for one of his public sessions before the House Select Committee on Intelligence. The small hearing room in the Rayburn Building was jammed, and Woolsey's bald head reflected the glare of television lights as he announced he would have nothing to say in open session about the details of the Ames case. The committee chairman, Democrat Dan Glickman of Kansas, accepted...
Even before the FBI closed in on Ames and his wife, Woolsey faced a full plate of policy and management problems. Now that the cold war is over and the threat of thermonuclear war is dramatically reduced, the three major intelligence organizations -- his own CIA, the code-breaking National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency -- are under orders from Congress to reduce their staffs at least 17.5% by October 1996. And in the midst of the shrinkage, the agencies are being redirected and remodeled in ways that have been unthinkable since World War II, when the national-security establishment...
...Woolsey is in charge of something close to its reinvention. The communist menace has been replaced by more amorphous ones from terrorists and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. The Warsaw Pact has gone, but the U.S. is still the declared enemy of hostile rogue states from northern Asia to the Middle East. Woolsey must try to bring the familiar intelligence tools, from satellites to spies, into this world of new threats. "There are ways," he said in an interview with TIME, "in which the Soviet Union was easier to keep track of than Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya...
Last week Woolsey was on the Hill to defend the budget for the intelligence community he oversees and to complain about spending cuts. He did not mention the current budget figure of $28.5 billion -- which is supposed to be secret -- but argued that it should not be cut again. Though the U.S. has the best intelligence organizations in the world, he said, their real spending had been reduced 14% since 1990. Their capabilities, he warned, are now at a level "where we are skating on thin ice on a warm...
WASHINGTON -- Eyebrows went skyward in Washington last week when CIA Director James Woolsey, testifying before an open session of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, raised no objection to suggestions that private firms be allowed to collect and sell satellite-observation photos that can distinguish objects 1 m in size from about 300 km up. Reason: 1-m resolution, which used to be the supreme achievement of sky spies, is passe. Air Force General Frank Horton, also testifying at the hearings, quietly dismissed that as only "medium" capability. In fact, the American intelligence community within the past two years...