The Central Intelligence Agency has been in the news quite a bit
lately. CIA loves good press, in fact it works rather hard at getting it for an
ostensibly top secret agency, but little of this news is edifying. Ten days ago
we had the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on post-9/11
torture, which led to global gnashing of teeth and serious stains on the
Agency’s reputation, as I explained previously.
Now we have Wikileaks, whose international connections merit
more attention than the mainstream media allows, dropping a bombshell leak,
namely a 2009 classified report with the mouthful title “Best Practices in
Counterinsurgency: Making High Value Targeting Operations an Effective
Counterinsurgency Tool” — which, critics inform us, is kind-of evil, because it
discusses the efficacy of killing versus capturing bad guys, and apparently
nice intelligence agencies aren’t supposed to discuss such things internally.
Or something. The Usual Suspects are gleefully telling the world that this is
more evidence of CIA’s nefarious nature.
The timing of this leak could not be worse for CIA, politically
speaking, coming on the heels of the scathing SSCI torture report, and should
not be considered accidental. This will only lead to more anti-CIA venom while
hardening the political battle lines in the United States about intelligence
matters. Thanks to the Snowden Operation, intelligence matters are much more in
the media now than is customary, and there are two basic schools of American
opinion on intelligence, CIA very much included, since it gets the most
attention from reporters and screenwriters.
There is the view, largely but not exclusively on the Left, that
CIA is a nefarious, and perhaps wholly malignant agency whose essential mission
is at odds with American values. Its officers are morally dubious on a good
day. Worse, they are complete bunglers who cannot be trusted. Tim Weiner’s
screed pretending to be a book on CIA history is the more erudite version of
this cartoonish view.
There is the other view, largely but not exclusively on the
Right, that CIA is a hyper-efficient organization, comprised of pure-hearted
American patriots, men (and some women) who are willing to kill and be killed
in defense of Americans and their values. Mistakes, when they occur, are
primarily due to a lack of toughness when soft-hearted fools inhibit CIA in
whatever it does. That this too is a cartoonish view should be obvious.
In contrast to those viewpoints, I’m here to offer a
reality-based view of CIA, one that may not be edifying to either Left or
Right, but which needs an airing in the public discussion about the Agency and
the Intelligence Community generally. As I’ve previously explained, in my
intelligence career with NSA I spent time in joint assignments with CIA, and I
got to see several parts of it at work, close-up. I have good friends at CIA
yet I nevertheless think the Agency needs some serious, perhaps even
root-and-branch, reform to meet the challenges of the 21st century. I am of
course hardly anti-intelligence, secret services exist for valid reasons even
in liberal democracies, yet I believe Americans ought to reject self-pleasing
myths about CIA and examine what’s really going on out at Langley.
In the first place, CIA is composed of normal Americans — of all
races, backgrounds, beliefs, genders, and sexual orientations — who happen to
work for a top secret part of the government. The vast majority of them signed
on for the Agency, including its excruciating recruitment process, which
includes much unpleasantness with security and polygraphs, out of motives that
can be fairly assessed as patriotic. Every day, CIA officers work long hours,
at salaries that would not impress Silicon Valley, and some put their lives in
real danger to protect this country and its interests. That deserves respect from
all of us.
Here we need a brief history lesson, since CIA did not fall from
the sky, perfectly preformed, when it was birthed by the National Security Act
of 1947, which also gave us the U.S. Air Force as well as a unified Department
of Defense plus the National Security Council. Upon its establishment, CIA
inherited much of what had been the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the
wartime intelligence agency led by the charismatic Great War hero William
Donovan. “Wild Bill” compensated for his lack of experience with espionage — it
was zero — with adventurous zeal and the ear of the president. Unlike
Churchill, who took personal interest in real intelligence, dutifully reading
every morning’s top ULTRA intercepts, FDR was a dilettante who liked spy stories.
Those Donovan gleefully provided, which was just as well as
tales of cloak and dagger derring-do were what the OSS, derided by its many
critics as standing for “Oh So Social,” was best at. Serious intelligence work
was largely beyond the OSS, since it was created out of whole cloth after Pearl
Harbor by people who knew little if anything about espionage. Its operatives,
easily stereotyped as Ivy League adventurers long on zeal and short on skills,
did little to further the actual war effort — Army intelligence (G-2), which
had real work to do, considered the OSS a presidential annoyance to be
indulged, at best — but they told great stories.
Then there was the matter of security. OSS was swiss-cheesed top
to bottom with foreign agents, mostly Soviet, since Donovan considered
counterintelligence to be an unnecessary distraction. Not coincidentally, the
only part of OSS that was a clear success was X-2, its small, select,
operational counterintelligence shop, which was closely mentored and vetted by
the British, who knew how to play the spy game; X-2 was also the only part of
OSS cleared for the ULTRA secret (FDR liked Donovan but he was too clever to
let his motley band in on many real secrets).
With FDR’s death in April 1945, OSS’s days were numbered, and as
soon as World War II ended, Harry Truman, who had a healthy American skepticism
regarding secret cowboys like Donovan’s crew, whom the new president derided as
a kind of “Gestapo,” killed off OSS. In late 1945. the Army and the State
Department absorbed several pieces off the carcass, including the espionage,
covert action, and intelligence analysis missions.
These, however, were reassembled in 1947 with the birth of CIA.
The nascent Cold War persuaded the skeptical Truman that a genuine peacetime
central intelligence function was needed, and CIA was the result. Its express
intent was the prevention of another Pearl Harbor. One of the clear lessons
learned from that disaster was that some sort of unified intelligence analysis
function was needed, since in the months before the Japanese attack on Hawaii,
Army and Navy intelligence had various indications of mounting aggression from
Tokyo, mainly from signals intelligence, but literally no one was looking at
the whole intelligence picture. That CIA would do.
The Agency’s essential structure has changed little over the
decades, some alterations to nomenclature notwithstanding, and there are
currently four directorates. In reverse order of importance there is the
Directorate of Support (DS), which handles logistics and things like finance,
human resources, health, and security. While CIA could not function for a
minute without the DS, most of its staff are normal government employees who
happen to work for a top secret agency.
The Directorate of Science and Technology (DS&T) gets a bit
closer to espionage, and its staff includes lots of smart scientists and
engineers who build interesting things and support various forms of technical
collection. They are not exactly James Bond, but they provide vital support to
the Bonds and much of what they do is justifiably highly classified.
The Bonds, such as they are, belong to the National Clandestine
Service (NCS), which was previously called the Directorate of Operations (DO, a
term still used by many old hands), while until the early 1970’s it was called
the even more euphemistic Directorate of Plans (DP). These are the spies that
people make movies about. Colloquially known as case officers — those in the
business more accurately term them operations officers — the core of the NCS/DO
workforce consists of people whose job it is to collect human intelligence,
often by getting foreigners to betray their own countries. NCS/DO staff spend
much of their careers abroad and their lives under various forms of cover. In
recent years, the operators’ paramilitary Special Activities Division (SAD) has
been very busy all over the globe, blurring the line between CIA and the
military, especially the Pentagon’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command
(JSOC), but the real James Bonds look upon SAD “cowboys” — most of whom
previously served with military special units — with a degree of disdain,
viewing them as peripheral to the Agency’s core espionage mission.
Even inside NCS/DO there are culture differences that matter.
Most case officers work under official cover, posing as diplomats and whatnot,
while a select cadre spend their espionage careers under non-official cover —
NOCs as they are termed in the trade. These are an elite who do not enjoy the
protection of official cover. However, they are expensive compared to official
cover officers, and for most of the Agency’s history NOCs have been peripheral,
career-wise. The NCS/DO model has its flaws, not least that it is tied closely
to the State Department for much of its operations, due to cover issues, while
its NOCs are simply not in the same class of professionalism and expertise as
what Russians term Illegals, who are true deep-cover operatives. That said,
what CIA case officers do they do decently, on the whole, persistent counterintelligence
problems notwithstanding. During the Cold War, the better East Bloc security
services had a healthy respect for the DO, viewing it as slightly seedy in its
frequently ham-handed efforts to use cash to buy treason, but nevertheless a
worthy adversary. That remains true today.
The last remaining component of CIA, the Directorate of
Intelligence (DI), is something very different and bears no resemblance to
James Bond. These are the analysts, the desk-bound types charged with looking
at all-source intelligence to provide what CIA terms “finished analysis” to
assist national-level decision-making. Their output is methodical, owing much
to cliched social science thinking of the 1950’s, while their assessments are
famous for their caveated hedging. The newly leaked CIA 2009 study on
counterinsurgency, care of Wikileaks, is a very typical DI product: not highly
classified — mostly analyst opinion with a bit of actual espionage reporting to
back it up — and intended to inform debates rather than decide them. It is
important to note that this DI assessment, like all of them, is not guidance of
any sort, much less a manual, rather an extended opinion piece, based on
supposedly thorough analysis of the problem.
It bears noting that DI analysis is taken more seriously by the
DI than anyone else. NCS/DO types rarely read DI product closely, while it
often gets more attention from the media, when leaked, than by anyone in the
upper echelons of the U.S. Government. To cite a typical case, when I had the
job of briefing all-source intelligence to top D.C. decision-makers, most of
them liked to get “hot” SIGINT and HUMINT reports, real espionage stuff, but
they seldom had time for wordy DI analysis. Being very busy people, they lacked
time to read long analysis pieces by DI types who may not actually know what
they are talking about. I once had the terrible experience of bringing two “top
DI experts” in to brief a cabinet-level official on a certain problem. The CIA
“experts” were in their late twenties and had never spent real time in the
country they were briefing about, and could not order a beer in the language,
while their customer was a man in late middle age who had lived in the country
and spoke the language passably well. Within three minutes, it was obvious that
the customer knew considerably more about the country in question than the
analysts did, and he politely threw them out of his office, with the warning
never to return.
There are cultural chasms inside CIA. DI analysts are enamored
of things like “analytic tradecraft,” a phrase they use frequently, yet seldom
do they speak languages other than English or get outside the Beltway. They
also have generated a voluminous scholarly literature about, well, themselves.
NCS/DO spooks consider such talk pompous and they usually speak a foreign
language or two passably, the by-product of a career spent abroad more often
than not (the true DO “field rat” is tough to even get back to Langley for a
necessary ticket-punching headquarters tour). For DI types cover is a formality
— some analysts attend DC think-tank events under the barest of covers — while
for case officers it can be a life-or-death concern. When it comes to politics,
most DI analysts are conventional liberals, while NCS/DO types are often
hard-boiled cynics who find any ideology silly.
Perspectives differ too. DI analysts, sitting in Langley for the
most part, often see a wide range of intelligence but rarely have access to
really compartmented programs, while case officers know lots of “good stuff”
but seldom see beyond their immediate problems: the NCS/DO by need-to-know
design sees the world through a soda straw. Case officers are risk-takers not
prone to excessive introspection, while intelligence analysts are very much
like graduate students: smart and introspective yet deeply prone to
group-think. A friend of long tenure in the DI once explained to me that,
despite his lack of management experience, he had prospered as a DI manager
because being the boss was “just like running a graduate seminar.” CIA analysts,
he explained, are eager for approval and are smart but not wise, and need
hand-holding.
Mutual bad feelings proliferate at Langley. DI analysts see case
officers as cowboys, if not Neanderthals, while NCS/DO officers often resent
what they see as faster promotion for analysts who never leave headquarters (in
similar fashion, DI officers resent the perks enjoyed by case officers abroad,
such as free housing: a GS-13 posted overseas, de facto, makes much more than a
GS-13 in Northern Virginia). A perennial sore point is that DI analysts get
face time with senior DC functionaries, and thus do careers get made, while a
DO “field rat” out saving the world is invisible inside the Beltway.
Nevertheless, adventure-seeking DI analysts on occasion transition to being DO
case officers, while the opposite seldom happens, unless you’re a hopeless
washout in operations.
There is no doubt that CIA history is largely written by the
analysts, whose stories may be boring but they know how to get things on paper
effectively. (Old spooks who can write well, like DO legend Bob Baer, are the
exception that proves the rule.) The frequent NCS/DO denunciation of DI “dorks”
is based in resentment, not least because top Agency and IC jobs go more often
to analysts than to “real” spooks. The career of John Brennan, the current
Agency director, is instructive. A DI analyst by background, he played the
Langley, then Beltway, game effectively, securing plum staff jobs along the way
up, including Chief of Station Riyadh (a rare job for an analyst), then riding
to the very top by ingratiating himself with President Bush, then with
President Obama.
Brennan recently proposed the most dramatic CIA reorganization
ever, suggesting the melding of the DI and NCS/DO, to overcome the Agency’s persistent
internal problems. The model would be CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, which
since the 1980’s has brought analysts and case officers together against a
particularly knotty problem, overcoming bureaucratic obstacles to improve
effectiveness. This sounds nice — insert requisite cliches about “building
synergies” and “leveraging skill-sets” — but how this may apply Agency-wide is
an open question, not least because the DI-DO divide, which is anything but
new, reflects the essential difference in personality between analysts and
spooks, as much as it does anything in organizational charts. Simply put, DI
analysts and DO case officers are like dogs and cats, breeds apart in their
DNA, and forcing them to lie down may cause as much friction as knocking down
the wall between canine and feline kennels.
That said, the need for CIA reform is pressing. The
well-intentioned but not always very effective performance that the Agency put
in during the Cold War may not be adequate to the security challenges America faces
in this century. Instead of forever melding the DI and NCS/DO into one perhaps
very unhappy family, why not remove the analysts altogether and let the Agency
focus on actual espionage, its core mission?
The placement of the finished intelligence mission inside CIA
was an accident of history, stemming from the OSS’s tweedy Research and
Analysis (R&A) shop during World War II. During that war, R&A was
staffed by actual Ivy League professors called to serve the war effort; since
then, the DI has attempted the same, with wannabe Ivy League professors, with
decidedly mixed results.
Most countries to not try to make rough spooks and bookish
analysts live in the same agency. Our closest intelligence partners, in the
Anglosphere, do it differently, and this merits attention. In Britain, the DI
equivalent is the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which produces finished
intelligence with analysts on assignment from all the intelligence agencies. In
Australia, that mission is undertaken by the free-standing Office of National
Assessments (ONA), which is independent of other secret agencies and reports
directly to the prime minister. Having a cadre of genuinely elite analysts —
quality here being much more important than quantity — made up of bona fide
experts, offers a far better model than what CIA, as is, can deliver. Rather
than remake CIA, it would be a much better idea to reinvent the DI, elsewhere,
with more talented, and smaller, staff.
Of course, nobody in Washington, DC, ever won out with a
proposal calling for less people and money for their organization, so I don’t
expect this to happen anytime soon. But it should, since our national security
is at stake. CIA is made up of neither evil-doers nor supermen, rather
Americans just like you, dear reader, who do their best for the country, in a
top secret fashion, while worrying about all the normal things like their kids,
their aging parents, and their waistlines. We expect a lot from them, and they
should give a lot in return. Happily, most of them do.