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The Central Intelligence Agency celebrates its 50th anniversary next year, but there are doubts over its future following the end of its chief raison d'etre - the cold war.

Among the doubters is Frank Sorrentino of St Francis College, New York. "We have to ask whether a body of this nature is still necessary under present conditions?" He added that "intelligence" - data collection, counter-intelligence and political activity - and the CIA are not coterminous within the American system: "There is no shortage of alternatives, there are seven intelligence agencies in all."

The peculiarity of the CIA is that two-thirds of its budget goes on covert operations, which were seen as essential to fighting the cold war. Professor Sorrentino questioned whether such operations had ever been of any real benefit to the United States.

"One of the earliest covert operations was the campaign to keep the Communists out in the 1948 Italian election. Information damaging to Communist candidates was fed to the Christian Democrats, who also received a lot of money. To start with these were activities - interfering in the internal affairs of another democracy - that most Americans would find objectionable. And how effective were they? Everybody in Italy knew it was happening, it exaggerated the importance of the Communists and may not have done the Christian Democrats any good."

Similarly, he argued, the CIA's role in the overthrow of the democratic Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954 was "a great propaganda coup for the left, justifying much of the anti-American propaganda of the next 30 years". The CIA's similar connivance in the destruction of the democratic Mussadeq regime in Iran helped create the conditions for the violent anti-Americanism of the current Iranian regime.

The CIA's role had been considerably reduced in the 1970s - covert operations were cut by two thirds. The attack on it was helped by revelations of its Operation Chaos against antiwar protesters, a blatant breach of the rule that it stay out of US domestic affairs.

But the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran hostage crisis persuaded President Carter to reverse the cuts, and the Reagan administration greatly increased the CIA budget and rehired most of its covert operations people.

Professor Sorrentino argued that aside from considerations of effectiveness, a serious objection to the CIA was its direct contradiction of the constitutional limits on executive power in the US system. He said it would be almost impossible to create effective levels of accountability and Congressional overview, both fundamental elements in the US constitution.