Is there a need for the CIA? Does the CIA fulfill such a need? An absorbing

three-way debate among a left-wing journalist who answers "No" to both questions, and two right-wingers who answer "Yes" to the first, "Not entirely" to the second. CF: "I hold very little brief for the activities of the CIA in recent years. . . . But Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin's crimes was uncovered and got out of Russia by the CIA. And if the CIA had not had an agent working on this, it would have remained just another dirty little Russian secret in the Kremlin. As it was, it caused--and is still causing--severe trouble to our potential enemies. That is a positive triumph of American intelligence." SH: "Nothing's as clear-cut as all that, because it turns out that we paid an awful lot of money. We were offering money all over, through every agent we had. Admittedly, we had people we could go to. But I think Yankee dollars brought that as much as CIA ingenuity." WFB: "Ingenuity and Yankee dollars go hand in hand."