The no-good, down-home spookhouse blues
CIA culture has long been split by its DO and its Directorate of Intelligence, where the agency's analysts work. Almost like jocks and nerds facing off in a high school, case officers have dominated the agency's culture. But now the analysts, too, are under fire. It is the job of these scholar-spies some 2,000 strong--to make sense of all the stolen secrets and satellite imagery and to weld them into reports and warnings for policymakers. After failing to get right almost every key aspect of prewar intelligence on Iraq, the DI's analysts are being put through what one staffer dubbed "Maoist re-education camp." "We get it," acting director John McLaughlin told his staff July 16. "We know where the problems were, and we know what the remedies are."
The Sisterhood. CIA analysts blame their own spies for passing along bogus intelligence from Iraq and for giving only the barest descriptions of their sources. At the heart of the problem, say agency veterans, is a group dubbed the Sisterhood, a largely female cadre of DO reports officers who decide what will be passed on. The positions were long the only path of promotion for women on the covert side. But the Sisterhood is only one of the DI's problems. For two years, anthropologist Rob Johnston has conducted an unprecedented study of nearly 500 analysts in a half-dozen intelligence agencies, drawing heavily from the CIA. U.S. News has gained access to his findings, which will be published later this year by the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence. Johnston concludes that, as a group, the analysts are isolated, lack overseas experience, and get little training in research techniques. "I know it sounds silly, but I had this image of James Bond before I started working here," one analyst told him. "The truth is I just sit in a cubicle and I write reports." Most analysts have scant time for in-depth research, Johnston found. "It took me a while to figure out that this place runs more like a newspaper than a university," one told him. Indeed, critics complain that today's CIA has become "CNN with secrets."
The heavy deadlines have combined with staff shortages to push many analysts into areas where they have little expertise. One leading scholar told U.S. News of his dismay after meeting with top Southeast Asia analysts at the CIA's Counterterrorist Center recently. Half had no experience in the region at all, he said. One was a Japan specialist, another a China expert, while a third was fresh out of school. None were linguists.
Some leading reformers argue that the intelligence community needs to be dynamited open, with much greater interaction with the private sector and much broader use of public sources. A closed system made sense during the Cold War, but not in the age of computers and networks, argue reformers like CIA veteran Robert Steele. But opening things up will not be easy. Fear of questionable polygraph tests and losing their jobs has kept most analysts in their cubicles. Legitimate security concerns have been "inflated by an almost cultlike behavior," says Fritz Ermarth, a 25-year CIA veteran and former head of the National Intelligence Council. "It's absurd." -David E. Kaplan
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