The CIA Shakeup

In July, 2004 Marc Ruel Gerecht wrote a critique of the CIA in the Weekly
Standard accusing it of failing to develop the operational methods necessary
to penetrate its targets. Gerecht was a former CIA officer now with the American
Enterprise Institute. He believed the core problem facing the CIA was there was
"no way that case officers--who still today are overwhelmingly deployed
overseas under official cover or, worse, at home in ever-larger task forces--can
possibly meet, recruit, or neutralize the most dangerous targets in a sensible,
sustainable way." Most of America's agents were foreigners on the periphery
of enemy secrets handled by American bureaucrats unable or unwilling to make the
make the final run in.

When I entered the CIA in 1985, Aldrich Ames's treason and the Iran-contra
scandal were in gestation, yet headquarters in Langley, Virginia, seemed a
happy place. ... But in practice the good old days were mostly a myth. For the
Directorate of Operations, the 1980s were years of routine operational
dishonesty, whose principal source was a defective system for determining who
got promoted.

Under this system, thousands of agents were recruited abroad neither for
their intelligence-reporting potential nor their operational utility. They
were put on the books--case officers often referred to the sport as
"collecting scalps"--because that is how CIAoperatives earned
promotion. ... For most case officers, the Cold War was a backdrop for the
constant search for an easy "developmental," somebody who could be
quickly turned into a "recruitment" for the annual performance
report. ...

It is also absolutely true that George Tenet's CIA failed to penetrate
Saddam Hussein's inner circle. And only penetrations at the highest political
and scientific levels could have possibly given us evidence that Saddam
Hussein had decided to give up his billion-dollar, decades-long quest to
develop weapons of mass destruction. (And note the plural
"penetrations": Against such a proficient counterespionage regime,
there would have to be more than one penetration, assessed for protracted
periods of time, before it would be possible to believe that the information
from these assets was not disinformation.) But it is also true that the CIA
failed to penetrate Moscow's inner circle in the Cold War and that the great
agents we did have (the most valuable were probably scientists) were all
volunteers. The CIA was not similarly lucky with Saddam Hussein's regime,
whose Orwellian grip on Iraqi society was as savage as Joseph Stalin's on the
USSR. It's a very good bet that the CIA has not had a single penetration in
the inner circle of any of its totalitarian adversaries. The same is probably
true for the French, British, and Israeli foreign intelligence services. In
other words, one simply cannot judge the caliber of a Western espionage
service by its ability to penetrate the power circles of totalitarian regimes.
The difficulties are just overwhelming.

One can, however, grade intelligence services on whether they have
established operational methods that would maximize the chances of success
against less demanding targets--for example, against Osama bin Laden's al
Qaeda, which is by definition an ecumenical organization constantly searching
for holy-warrior recruits. It is by this standard that George Tenet failed and
the CIA will continue to fail, assuming it maintains its current practices.
But the odds are poor that the White House, Congress, and the press will
condemn the Agency for its failure to develop a workable strategy and tactics
against the Islamic terrorist target.

The question is whether Porter Goss, having confirmed Gerecht's critique will
prove his prediction of continued executive inaction wrong. Goss explained his
estimate of the CIA to Gordon
Corera of the BBC.

There is no doubt that Mr Goss is a man of strong views. When I interviewed
him earlier this year, before he was nominated to run the CIA, he made clear
that he thought the Agency had failed in its "core mission".

"The core business of intelligence is spying", he told me.
"That means close in access to the hard targets. That means a lot of
risk. ...  In his view, it needed "clandestine officers who know how
to run agents into hard target areas, all of the people skills, all of the
tradecraft skills that go into this. "Those are things we sort of let
go...we suddenly found ourselves disinvesting - not just not investing - but
actually disinvesting in our core collection business [in the 1990s]." He
warned that, as well as greater investment, a real shake-up was needed in the
clandestine service that recruits spies, and throughout the intelligence
community. As he put it, "This is not just [about] individuals or moving
chairs. Some really serious changes" were needed.

A PBS
interview with Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) and Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA)
seemed to confirm the general thrust of Goss's current shake up of the CIA with
varying emphasis.

SEN. SAXBY CHAMBLISS: Well, what Jane and I both know is that the No. 1
problem at the Central Intelligence Agency today is the fact that we're pretty
risk-averse out there. We're not doing a very good job of gathering
intelligence through human assets. Porter Goss has committed himself during
the hearing process to rebuild our human asset part of the Central
Intelligence Agency from an intelligence-gathering standpoint. I don't know
how he needs to do that. But I know this: I know what we've got out there in
the last several years is not working. We know that we've had massive
intelligence failures, and Jane and I both talked about this on TV, and
virtually every member of the oversight committees in the House and Senate
have talked about. So there are changes that must be made to correct the
problems out there.

Who should go and who should stay is up to the management, and I don't
think it's up to the oversight committee. So I'm fully supportive of Chairman
Goss and his capacity now as director of the CIA to make sure that we rebuild
that human -- our human intelligence aspect of the CIA, and to make what
changes are necessary to accomplish that.

REP. JANE HARMAN: And it isn't clear to me, by the way, exactly where he's
headed with these changes. I just want to say one thing about the human
service, the spy service. It is true that we had an inadequate human
intelligence capability in the '90s. I'm sure Saxby and I, we always have
agreed on this and we still agree. But it is also true that this is being
fixed since 9/11, and we're recruiting a lot more good people. I just saw
those people in the field in the Middle East, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi
Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and Israel last week. I saw the new recruits and I saw
the chiefs of station in these states, and what I'm saying to you, Margaret,
is they're doing a lot better.

But at the moment, what it looks like, sadly, Margaret, is that the
directorate of operations, which is a spy service which has begun to heal
itself since 9/11, is the target of this purge, and it doesn't make much sense
to me, given the fact that these are not the folks who brought us the faulty
intelligence reports that led up to 9/11, or led to the mistaken view that
they were stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in Iran... in Iraq.

Whether or not the CIA has in fact 'healed itself', both Chambliss and Harman
essentially seem to agree that the agency was in deep trouble in the 1990s,
specifically in the area of human intelligence gathering, that is, spying. The
debate between Chambliss and Harman centered on whether Goss was acting
inappropriately -- in a partisan manner for example -- but not over whether he
had a real job in front of him.