Congressional Quarterly notes that the pool of candidates for the "Director of National Intelligence" position is drying up fast.
Meanwhile, the article calls to mind the writings of a former CIA vet. His article is right and wrong. Right:
"Congress easily passed the measure, which afforded the DNI only limited authority over the 16 agencies in the intelligence community. The legislation simply didn't give the DNI the budgetary muscle needed to lead the intelligence community, and it created a troublesome confusion here and abroad regarding precisely who is in charge. Today, the DNI has become what intelligence professionals feared it would: an unnecessary bureaucratic contraption with an amazingly large staff. It certainly had to be taken as a lack of confidence in the DNI's viability when its first occupant, John Negroponte, stepped down to become second in command at the State Department."
Wrong, and failing to recognize the CIA's deep and long-standing shortcomings makes Devine more a part of the problem than part of a solution:
"Admittedly, the CIA has suffered greatly in recent years primarily because of policy shortfalls and leadership issues. But no one should underestimate the quality of its staff, its foreign ties and its unique capabilities, which are the cornerstone of the intelligence community. These strengths remain the base for building a robust intelligence agency."
"Admittedly, the CIA has suffered greatly in recent years primarily because of policy shortfalls and leadership issues."
If recent years means 'since its inception 60 years ago', that is factual.
"But no one should underestimate the quality of its staff, its foreign ties and its unique capabilities, which are the cornerstone of the intelligence community. These strengths remain the base for building a robust intelligence agency."
No, the cornerstone of a robust intelligence agency is its assets, particularly human. We come to find that the CIA has virtually none in any of the places we need intelligence desperately. If the CIA's history is any judge, human intelligence is still taking a back seat to fancy technology and (disastrously) the cultural belief that active operations are the CIA's primary role, instead of intelligence gathering.
Mark Buehner and I agree here. And most of the special operations have been long-run failures. (But they were so exciting to plan at Langley!)
The CIA seems to me such a strange combination of patriotism, protectiveness towards the country - in a good way, shrewdness, bureaucracy and the power games associated, paranoia (part of the job description, for good and ill), intelligence, bungling, a sense of invulnerability, and a sense of arrogance.
Such a...strange?...position for a person to be in.
1. You have "carte blanche" to do what you need to do for the country.
2. You have a bureaucratic organization - everyone has their own personal "office space". A lot of the people in the CIA simply have intelligence gathering jobs, or menial office type things they do. And like all such bureaucracies, people are fiercely protective of their turf.
3. Like the military, you "do what your superior tells you".
4. At the same time, you are supposed to be thinking "outside the box", to prevent threats to the country.
5. You have to be ruthless, and yet play by the "ruleset" in the bureaucratic game.
6. "Accountability" such as it is, can be so easily bureaucratically manipulated, or simply hidden, given the black hole of the activity domain.
7. You have access - to the field agents at least - to a type of get out of jail free card, enabling you to really do what you want - for good or ill - for the good of the country - except of course for the bureaucratic games you have to play with your superiors.
It's a very schizophrenic set of priorities, which makes it a difficult thing to manage, both on a human level, and on an organizational level.
I often wonder, just on an organizational level, whether some of the "flat" organizational structure - such as are found in Google, or those that manifested themselves in Obama's political organization, which are less hierarchical, yet still supremely effective in delivering results, and maintaining accountability, can find their ways into places such as the CIA.
I think it would be possible, except a large reason why Google works, is the immediately transparent feedback loop - which is a large part of accountability. Reality gives you that feedback loop - the software you are building either works, or it doesn't.
And you can't really get a transparent feedback loop when dealing in the domains the CIA deals in. And if you are effective, if you "win" by preventing a threat - who will know?
It actually goes even farther than that. Truman and Eisenhower were never in love with the idea of the CIA and at varying times considered (even attempted) smothering the idea in the cradle. The early CIA insiders developed an adversarial relationship with the office of the president in a lot of ways. That's quite aside from the somewhat logical tension that existed with The Pentagon. From the start the entrenched bureaucracy often worked to deceive the departments early directors (who were military), until one of their own (Allen Dulles) got the big seat.
By the time Dulles's mountain of ineptitude caught up with him (Bay of Pigs, etc, the list is astonishing) the culture of the CIA was firmly entrenched. The CIA was more important than the government essentially, and whatever it deemed necessary in the defense of the nation was acceptable no matter what the President (or the CIA director) said.
There has always been a tension between those that wanted intelligence out of the CIA (the military mainly), and those that wished to conduct covert operations to affect the world directly (the old guard that came out of Strategic Services conducting commando operations in WW2 started it, fierce anti-communists impatient with the military joined them). No president or congress has successfully wrangled the CIA into anything other than this contradictory mess, even until this day. Dropping an additional layer of bureaucracy on top has surely been pointless if not counterproductive to actually relaying what intelligence the CIA does manage to ferret out.
The CIA must be allocating billions of dollars of it's "black" budget to PR efforts-- I cannot otherwise understand how the drumbeat of historical CIA failures has not led to its complete dismantlement.
On the grounds of wasting money, if nothing else.
The principle of failing upwards. The more dangerous the world becomes because of CIA blunders, the more proof there is that the CIA needs a bigger budget to confront the danger.