Westhawk has an interesting thesis re: the CIA (Hat Tip to reader Jim Rockford), whose effectiveness as an intelligence agency hasn't been much to write home about for a few decades now:
"We have asserted that the Bush administration, at first reluctant about the ODNI concept, later embraced it strongly. Administration officials have concluded that the CIA's cultural and personnel flaws are beyond repair. The solution was to create a new replacement intelligence agency, staffed by the best personnel from the CIA and elsewhere, and organized to solve the flaws made apparent by the CIA."
Very interesting bit, too, re: the smart politics around the selection of Gen. Hayden. Looks like the Democratic Party base is falling for it, too. Westhawk adds:
"Over time, the new agency - the ODNI and its affiliates elsewhere in the government - would cause the CIA to fade away, staffed only by its remaining underperforming (and newspaper reading) employees."
That last bit strikes me as over the top. In fairness to Westhawk, more than one frustrated President has made invidious comparisons between CIA reports and available public news sources. On the other hand, see Dan Darling's coverage of the CIA's 2004/2005 assessments for some examples of what an unclassified CIA high-level briefing/report to Congress includes.
Now, some of this stuff just goes with the territory. Everyone wants intelligence to be highly reliable, if not infallible, on a wide variety of subjects. And that just isn't how it works 99% of the time. Some of the negative perceptions, on othe other hand, can fairly be laid at the feet of The Agency's reputation for being "preppies with clearances," stressing analysis and reliance on foreign intelligence agencies over long-term, get-you-hands-dirty, on the ground capabilities and counterintelligence quality control.
Can the CIA conduct tomorrow's espionage? The CIA has been on the receiving end of effectiveness complaints for some time (flaws that owe a great deal to Congressional decisions and foolishness, not just CIA decisions). Despite extensive efforts, some of those issues remain - and it did not improve its position by turning some of the tools of its trade on an American administration. From certified liar Joe Wilson to Mary McCarthy's leaks to the antics of Paul Pillar, a great deal of damage has been done - and that must ultimately come home to roost.
More to the point, in an intelligence war the structure and performance of one's intelligence agencies is a central and urgent question - one that can be expected to get a lot of attention in public and behind the scenes. The key question is, what kind of attention?
Which brings us to the question: is Westhawk right about the plans for the CIA? We don't and can't know until the drama has fully played out, and the verdict is obvious. This may or may not be the strategy W. is pursuing, and the people who know the answer won't/can't be talking about it.
As I noted in a recent post re: the FBI, however, organizational change is very difficult. If a public service organizational culture is in fact considered to be pervasively flawed, a "bureaucratic euthanization" strategy for key areas or even the entity as a whole is usually the most sensible way forward.
One wonders when, and if, the penny may drop on the FBI as well.
That said, I retain some misgivings. However unimpressed I have been with the CIA, I haven't been deeply impressed with the DNI to date either. We'll have to see what happens.
This very good idea IMHO :)
This is traditional. The feds always create new bureaucracies to do things that existing ones can't do, or can no longer do.
After Pearl Harbor, the founder of the Hertz rent-a-car company served briefly as a lieutenant general surveying the Army's transportation needs. He reported that the war would be over before the Quartermaster Corps could be reorganized to serve the Army's transportation needs for a global war, and recommended creation of a new Army service branch called the Transportation Corps.
So the Army did. And its WWII Transporation Corps operated more ships than the U.S. Navy.
There is a must-read book on this point - Amy Zegart's Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC
I guess I see this as part of a longer trend that began in the eighties, accelerated under Clinton, of moving intelligence functions and budget to the Department of Defense. Bringing the General over would appear to facilitate further coordination and absorption. They're currently studying moving CIA paramilitary operations to DoD as recommended by the 9/11 commission.
OTOH, Negroponte has said that he wants to increase the number of CIA spies and analysts by 50%. Would these new agents be actively involved in finding and killing non-State enemies or in more traditional economic and political espionage?
The CIA is fatally rotten in its bureaucracy. Im not an anti-Clinton crusader, but it seems pretty clear he managed to stock the upper levels with his idealogical loyalists. Plamegate and the recent prison leaks aside, books by CIA field agents like this have shown that the upper levels of the CIA are staffed with the worst kind of bureaucrats- those that combine CYA priorities with a distinct political agenda. It has served Bush very poorly, though to his shame he hasnt taken the initiative heretofore to really shake it out. The John Bolton solution of lopping off the top few floors is applicable here, but unfortunately Bush decided to add more layers. Thats just crazy.
Ideally in our current circumstance the CIA would have an agressive and independent middle management of active agents answering directly to the head of the CIA, who answers only to one individual. Either the president, VP, a cabinet member, or (at this point since we are stuck with it) the director of intelligence, take your pick.
Right now there are just way to many stops on the elevator to the top, and many of those stops demonstrably have their own agenda. This is one of those situations where firing 100 bureaucrats is as useful as training 100 new field agents. We should do both.
Lets face it, it's the DMV with a security clearance. Why people insist that the CIA is this all powerful spook house chock full of the "greatest minds", when the reality is they are government employees who work in full knowledge that they will almost never be held accountable for their actions at nearly any level. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there are plenty of stellar agents who put the nations security above all else, sadly those are not the people in charge.
Honestly, I bet the Vatican has a better sense of what’s occurring in the world than the modern CIA does. What we truly need is an organization that is truly clandestine, as in, only a few members know of its existence and operations. The ability to act without being hobbled by “congressional oversight” or the myriad of hoops and piles of red-tape that seems to hamper operations, to me seems to be in desperate need of being implemented. One need only look at the flawed FISA “domestic spying” debacle of recent times to see the new levels of inefficiency added with each subsequent “oversight” provided by Congress. I’d be far more comfortable with Congress having ZERO oversight over national security issues, mainly due the corrupt nature of Congress and politics in general. It’s readily apparent that we no longer can operate as if this was 1950 and the cold war was in full bloom, that level of maturity is long past.
Our own congress has tied our clandestine operations hands for decades, so how can we complain now that we have come to realize the full effect of the political correctness brigades that came down with Carter, Clinton, etc? Personally I see the downfall of the CIA as long overdue, too bad the State Department can't follow suit.
>>What we truly need is an organization that is truly clandestine, as in, only a few members know of its existence and operations.
Yes, yes, what we need now are institutions with EVEN LESS ACCOUNTABLILITY. That will help matters.
Kill them all. Let God sort it out.
T. J. Madison --
Anyone who's worked in both Fortune 500 and startups can attest to their different strengths and weaknesses. The CIA and oversight means zero risk taking and spread responsibility, "consensus" views and basically not doing much of anything.
Less oversight and accountability up to only one chain (the President) means more risk taking and imagination.
Jim, I believe T.J. would see that as a bug, not a feature, and for once I would concur.
What to do about our Intelligence Disability is one of those gnarly problems with no easy answer.
My personal prescription would be to send anyone caught leaking anything to solitary confinement for 20 years. Starting with Sandy Berger. The root problem seems to be the folks who don't have any fear of consequences.
Time to instill some fear, I think.
Sometimes a village needs to be burned to be saved.
If we actually know enough about the CIA to tell whether it's effective or not, that's strong evidence that it isn't effective. An adequate intelligence service is utterly and completely incompatible with democracy.
To have any reasonable idea whether the CIA is doing its job, to know what to tell your representatives should be done about it, wouldn't you want to know something about it? Like, what is the CIA budget. What has the CIA done recently. What secret intelligence reports have they gotten right, and what have they gotten wrong?
But you don't know any of that. The CIA budget is classified, you have no way to tell how much of your money they're spending. The secret reports are classified. Did they know the USSR was collapsing? You don't know. The official story is that some of them claimed it was, and some of them claimed it wasn't. But maybe they provided our top decision-makers with the truth, and they spread the lies because we'd vote wrong if we knew. Similarly with every other bit of data we think we know about the CIA.
If you can believe the stories written by ex-CIA agents, CIA morale has been low for decades. There was a story told by an ex-CIA guy a long time ago, about the agent who figured out the russians weresending nuclear missiles to cuba. He presented his evidence to his superior. Somewhere along the chain of command somebody sat on it. He kept presenting more evidence, and they kept sitting on it. This went on for months. Then all of a sudden we were in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy frantically called for data. The head of the CIA called for data. All this guy's data was suddenly in great demand and the CIA got a lot of praise for providing it in a crisis. The analyst's boss's boss's boss's boss got a medal. The analysts's boss's boss's boss got a promotion. The analyst's boss's boss got a raise. The analyst's boss got a bonus. The analyst went out and got drunk. If they'd given it to Kennedy when it was first available there might not have been any Cuban Missile Crisis and they wouldn't have gotten nearly so much credit.
But can you really believe those stories? I don't know what's going on and you don't either. If you did they'd have to shoot you.