Having emerged from the Cold War only to face corruption from within, harsh criticism from Congress and a difficult quest for new leadership, the hardest times for the Central Intelligence Agency are yet to come, the spy agency's Inspector General said in a speech last night at Harvard Law School.

Although the talk was billed as a discussion of "the CIA after Ames," Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz primarily examined the investigation he led to unmask Aldrich Ames, the CIA officer turned Soviet mole who was arrested in February 1994.

"The damage assessment [on Ames] will be coming out in five to six months and I guarantee it will make you sick to your stomach," Hitz told an audience of 70 in Austin Hall. "This dog, sloppy spy though he was, earned his money."

That damage report, along with a government commission's survey of the CIA's future which is due out next March, are sure to present blunt directions for an Agency whose morale is at an all-time low.

Hitz declared that the effort underway to cut the CIA's resources by 27 percent by 1999 is still "not enough," and called for a remodeling of the Agency along the lines of standards set when it was founded nearly 50 years ago.

"This is the [CIA's] most important time since it was founded. It must serve the centralizing function it was founded for in the first place," Hitz said.

Hitz's image of a smaller CIA, more devoted to centralizing the information amassed by the government's various intelligence agencies, is sure to be the vision of John M. Deutsch, the Deputy Defense Secretary who was named Director of Central Intelligence less than two weeks ago.

Hitz, a 1964 graduate of Harvard Law School, emphasized the "increasing relation between intelligence officials and U.S. law enforcement agencies" in addressing the crowd of law school students, faculty and others.

"There are still some nations that don't play by the rules," Hitz said, listing the government of North Korea, Iran and Iraq as concerns that will continue to occupy the CIA in an era after the Soviet threat.

He also described nuclear and biological weapon proliferation, narcotics trafficking and international economic relations as policy areas that continue to rely heavily upon the operations of the CIA, both its analysis and its covert operations.

Hitz, who assumed his role as the first presidentially-appointed Inspector General in 1990, said the chief regulating concern of his department in this new era will be to limit secrecy in an organization that thrives on it.

"Secrecy corrupts," Hitz said. "And absolute secrecy corrupts absolutely."