The fact that Casey finally had to cut Mr. Hugel loose in the face of allegations of impropriety in his prior business dealings did not in the least diminish the director's appetite for turning the status quo on its head. The CIA was not set up to jump ahead on a fast-moving situation, and the analysts had become enmeshed in the daily production line . . . There were few outside catalysts to jar the thinking of the analysts . . . Mr. Woodward writes, ''the document put the intelligence agencies in the bureaucratically secure position of being able, no matter what happened, to dust off the estimate and say, 'See, we told you. Casey was not the first and certainly not the last director to be dissatisfied with the quality of intelligence estimates.
Ambiguity is endemic to the business.
No wonder that in 1975 a Presidential commission concluded that National Intelligence Estimates ''appeared to have little impact on policy makers.'' IF any one man could bring the C.I.A. to life, it was Casey. He had everything -physical energy, intellectual horsepower, old boy credentials, access to the President. He was vastly more impressive than the wobbly, inarticulate old man the public saw going in and out of closed-door hearings on Capitol Hill. When he prowled the corridors, ''people . . . He wanted his field stations to stop living off host-country intelligence services and start recruiting spies of their own.