The no-good, down-home spookhouse blues
By the time George Tenet was sworn in as CIA director in 1997, America's pre-eminent intelligence agency was on the ropes. Tenet was the agency's fifth boss in six years. CIA veterans complained of low morale, risk aversion, and suffocating bureaucracy. Recruitment had come to a virtual halt. Fed up, many of the CIA's most experienced officers headed for the door. "The biggest mistake was the loss of our veterans," says Milt Bearden, who helped run CIA covert operations for 30 years. "There was no transference to a new generation."
It is the CIA's Directorate of Operations--its clandestine side--that garners the most public attention, running espionage and covert operations around the world. But times have changed for the spooks. The agency's longstanding MO--operating from embassies under diplomatic cover--is less effective in an age of terrorists and nuclear black marketeers. Indeed, the CIA never tried to penetrate al Qaeda with its own officers before 9/11. Nor did the agency have a single significant agent inside Saddam Hussein's Iraq after 1998.
CIA officials insist they're on the rebound, that new funding and talent are revitalizing the agency. They cite major successes, such as the prevention of terrorist attacks and the breakup of Pakistan's nuclear black market. At "the Farm," the legendary training center in Virginia, the CIA recently graduated its largest ever class of operatives.
But the agency's many critics say the clandestine service has yet to change with the times. In June, the House Intelligence Committee issued a blistering assessment of the DO, citing misallocation of resources, poor prioritization, micromanagement, and "aversion to operational risk." One key problem: The agency may simply not have the troops to do the job. Despite its popular image, the CIA has never had a large presence overseas. DO chief James Pavitt said in April that he had fewer officers abroad than the FBI had agents in its New York field office--and that number is only 1,100.
Since 9/11, the worldwide war on terrorism has stretched those officers thin, but the Iraq war is now putting them at a breaking point, say insiders. "Iraq has been a great drain on the intelligence world," says Jack Devine, a 32-year CIA veteran who ran the DO from 1993 to 1995. "The notion that you could support a military initiative in Iraq, combat worldwide terrorism, and cover other critical issues was wrong." The CIA has cycled into Iraq over 300 case officers--more than a quarter of its overseas staff, say other sources. Hit hardest, complains a veteran case officer, are the CIA's stations abroad. "They're standing empty all over the world where there's stuff to do," he says. "You're either in Iraq, going to Iraq, or just back." To help out, the agency has turned to contractors, who have long worked as key support staff in CIA operations, such as Air America pilots in the Vietnam War. Since the late 1990s, the agency has increasingly used them in operational work, including not only interrogations but surveillance of suspected terrorist hideouts and assessments of security at foreign airports, sources say.
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
This story appears in the August 2, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.