Two years ago, when Aldrich Ames was caught with both hands in the spooky cookie jar, there was much pious lamenting that he betrayed his country not for principle, but for money. Recently another in a long string of CIA scandals was rooted in the quest for cash. This fall, CIA Director John Deutch reported to Congress that over an eight-year period from 1986 to 1994, CIA officials from directors Webster, Gates, and Woolsey on down the ranks fed false information all the way up the food chain to the president and senior cabinet officials. The sources for the dozens of questionable reports on Soviet and Russian weapons development and arms control were double agents controlled by the KGB. Worse yet, as DCI John Deutch confessed to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the CIA officials who passed on the disinformation to Congress and three presidents knew the sources were tainted and the intelligence was garbage.

The current debacle may be a scandal that won't go away, and those pushing for change had better take what they can get, since the scandals that have gone away include murders, assassinations, wars, coups, and manipulations of the political and economic lives of dozens of countries and millions of people. But feeding disinformation to the president? the Cabinet? the Congress?

The word `outrageous' immediately leaps to mind .... Is that the proper word? news show host Jim Lehrer solemnly asked Senate Select Committee on Intelligence heads Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.) and Arlen Specter (R-Penna.), Well, it is a proper word, said Kerrey. American lives were at stake, and the security and safety of the United States of America hung in the balance. So, yet again, cries of shock and outrage ring through Washington. CIA officials, true to their nature, their mission, their training, lied not just to you and me, but and this is really the outrageous part to their putative masters. And after Congress and president protected and covered up for the agency all these years and suckled it at their fiscal bosom.

Why then did the CIA knowingly pass on to its consumers that's what the agency calls those who receive its information, which it calls its product (and those terms themselves tell a tale) information that, for example, exaggerated the military capability of the USSR?

CAQ, among others, has long charged and carefully documented that Star Wars, Stealth, and other high-ticket weapons systems had nothing to do with defense and everything to do with defense budgets. According to congressional reports, US buildups to counter the handcrafted myth of Soviet military prowess cost the taxpayers billions. What the reports were, was a happy coincidence of the Soviet desire to overrate its military capability and the CIA's need to justify its existence and budgets and to toss business to defense contractors. What they were not, was an aberration. For decades, the CIA and Pentagon consistently inflated the military and security threat posed by the USSR. For decades, the company of thieves cried national security to line its budgetary pockets and those of its buddies in the military-industrial complex.

The recent revelations follow a rash of CIA scandals and have provoked renewed cries for reform, demands for an another committee, another set of investigations, another round of flagellation with tear-dampened newspapers. The media will call for change, Congress will threaten oversight, perhaps even jail sentences if, as Specter said, someone can figure out if there's any statute which covers this specific kind of conduct. The CIA will bare its manly institutional buttocks for a ritual spank and then most likely, everybody except a few mid-level fall guys, will go home to Georgetown and Langley for a drink and a chuckle. But if you really want to know if anything is going to change, do like Aldrich Ames, who did like the agency that trained him: Follow the money; watch the budget.

At a time when Congress is slashing the social safety net, it has continued to approve obscene levels of military spending, even exceeding the amount the Pentagon requested by $7 billion. It also recently voted despite the Ames scandal, the Guatemalan and Honduran revelations, and Deutch's call for increased covert operations a 1.7 percent increase in the intelligence budget.

And so it goes. In the name of national security, the CIA lies and disinforms (that is, after all, part of its job); in the name of the people, Congress between disingenuous flareups of shock and outrage continues to cover up and pay the bills.

But after the smoke and mirrors clear, the way to tell if anything has changed is to look at the bottom line: Until the president and Congress pull the fiscal plug, the company will continue its nasty business as usual.

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