10-15-95. NYPaper, longish Page One semi-rehash, semi- disinfo of LATimes of July 23: "Emerging Role For the C.I.A.: Economic Spy." During the Clinton Administration's tense negotiations with Japan last spring Mickey Kantor received inside information gathered by the C.I.A.'s Tokyo station and the electronic eavesdropping equipment of the N.S.A. "But in the end, did it help much? Beyond some valuable detail we could not have gotten elsewhere, did it tell us much about which way Hashimoto would go? It would be hard to make that case." Many Administration officials suggest that the agency simply does not have the talent for such analysis. "The best graduate students don't go there and who can blame them?" said one of the Administration's top economic officials. "And yet, when you sit in a meeting, the views of the C.I.A. are often given more weight than the Council of Economic Advisors. Go figure." Allan E. Goodman, a former C.I.A. official and academic dean of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, said "We don't have the sources, we don't have the expertise. To develop an understanding of the people who trade currencies, their motivations, their lifestyles, you'd have to send your people to Harvard, Stanford and Wharton for years. Currency traders keep secrets very, very well, and to penetrate that would be the equivalent of cracking all the Japanese codes in World War II." DUM_not (14 kb)