No man ever had a freer hand in running the Central Intelligence Agency than William J. Casey, who died in May just as the questions began to get really sticky, and none ever left the agency in worse shape. Lt. Col. Oliver L. North is even money to come out of the Iran- contra affair with halo tarnished but intact, and even President Reagan may squeak by with scout’s honor he didn’t know and won’t do it again–but the good soldiers who worked for Casey in the CIA have been surprised inside the chicken coop, trying to explain a mouthful of feathers, and fate has left them friendless to take the rap.

It’s pretty clear that somebody at the highest level of the U.S. government has been breaking the law by giving military aid to the contras over the last few years. The etiquette of public debate requires everyone to wonder aloud who it might possibly be.

This was an agency program from start to finish; its fingerprints are unmistakeable from choice of ally to the pilots of the planes. Some nostalgic, derring-do streak in Casey had resurrected the CIA of the glory days in the 1950s–when Allen Dulles seemingly had foreign governments changed between puffs on his pipe. It didn’t require North to point the finger at Casey, just a bare recital of the facts.

How Casey might have answered these questions is almost irrelevant. Only one question would have really mattered: Who authorized you to do these things, Mr. Casey?

Then, truly, the whole country–most particularly the President–would have held its breath for the answer. Not much room for waffling on that one. Casey might have shown himself a Roman: no apology, no explanation, no attempt to disown the blame. Or, of course, he might have said: Who do you think authorized it? Whose policy were we trying to carry out? Who runs the government? Who was the sun in the CIA’s universe?

Casey’s error was the standard one of covert warriors: a belief that determined secret action, amply watered with money, can achieve large political ends even when public support for those ends is tepid. In short, the CIA can do big things secretly–like overthrow the Sandinistas–that Congress just doesn’t care enough about to try openly. Americans have not been the only victims of this forlorn hope; the uglier episodes in recent French and British history all come from the attempt to hold on to colonies with secret means long after ordinary citizens were willing to let them go. Intelligence professionals mostly understand this clearly enough; it is politicians who insist the problem is a naive public, and the solution more money and more secrecy.

Congressional investigators would doubtless like to pin down the details of this matter, and they still may, but their real reason for hammering away at it, day after day and witness after witness, is to insure that the message sinks in: Executive privilege does not give Presidents the right to run a private foreign policy, with funds cajoled from aged millionaires of conservative bent, or extorted from foreign friends.

The inherent drama of the confrontation makes wonderful daytime TV, but tends to distract attention from just what a close-run thing it was. Casey and his colleagues, tired of fighting Congress for every dollar of contra money, came that close to corrupting the financing of foreign policy in the United States.

A little further down the slippery slope described with such enthusiasm by North, and every recipient of U.S. military and economic aid, from Israel to South Korea, would have faced the question that routinely used to accompany the letting of paving contracts in many U.S. cities: You get a billion dollars, we get 50 million back, what do you say? What could they say? They’d say what the king of Saudi Arabia and the Sultan of Brunei said: Of course. Who do we make the check out to?

The CIA didn’t dream any of this up, but the agency handled all the heavy lifting, and has been abandoned to take the rap. Nobody else is available. North has been forgiven by the television cameras, Casey is dead and President Reagan is still whistling in amazement at all the stuff that went on during his afternoon nap. Optimists may call this another squeaker for American democracy. Pessimists will have retired to the corner bar.