17 February 1998
Source:
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98feb/cia.htm
Thanks to DN
See recently declassified CIA self-assessment of Bay of Pigs operation
The Atlantic Monthly, February 1998
The sensational revelations of recent years about the Central Intelligence
Agency almost obscure a larger point: the Agency is just no good at what
it's supposed to be doing. So writes the author, a former CIA officer, who
describes a corrosive culture in which promotion-hungry operatives collect
pointless intelligence from worthless foreign agents. Reform, the author
warns, may be impossible
by Edward G. Shirley
THE arrest of Aldrich Hazen Ames, a CIA operative turned KGB mole, in February
of 1994, fundamentally changed the public perception of the clandestine service
of the Central Intelligence Agency. Before Ames only "case officers," operatives
who recruit and run foreign agents, knew how dysfunctional the service had
become. Since Ames the outside world has learned that much is rotten in the
Directorate of Operations -- the official name of the clandestine service,
known to insiders simply as the DO. Yet the senators and congressmen who
oversee the DO, the journalists who report on it, and the civilian directors
who run it have failed to understand and to confront the service's real problems.
Even among CIA analysts who work in the Directorate of Intelligence, the
overt, think-tank side of the house, few have grasped the extent of the DO's
decrepitude.
Politically charged, usually lurid stories of CIA misconduct have deflected
attention from telling questions about U.S. intelligence. Journalists level
charges of Agency involvement in Latino drug-smuggling rings. The American
wife of a Central American guerrilla accuses the DO of complicity in torture
and murder. Female case officers sue their male bosses for sexual discrimination.
All these affairs have blackened the Agency's
image. None advances the debate on whether the clandestine service actually
spies well. Protected by secrecy, by a disciplined and obedient bureaucracy,
and by the average outsider's basic ignorance of and fascination with espionage,
the leadership of the DO has pre-empted and stalled pressure for Agency
reform.
In 1985 I joined the Directorate of Operations. A devout cold warrior, I
had no qualms about espionage or covert action against the Soviet Union and
in defense of America's national interests. I was proud and eager when the
Near East Division chose me to join its ranks. I had dreamed for years of
applying my academic training in Islamic history to the DO's Middle Eastern
mission.
Twelve years later I retain an appreciation for espionage -- for those rare
moments when a case officer contributes to his nation's defense. But I have
long since lost my pride in the DO, which has evolved into a sorry blend
of Monty Python and Big Brother. I resigned in 1993.
When current and former case officers gather, their conversations inevitably
converge: they wonder whether the DO has irretrievably fallen apart. A few
years ago I asked a former colleague who had served in Moscow whether she
had ever successfully explained the DO's problems to an outsider. "No, never,"
she replied. "I've given up trying. You have to explain so much you get lost
in the details, or you just sound like a whiny, unpatriotic left-winger."
The CIA, with a certain fanfare, recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary.
The Agency wants the American public, and especially Congress, to believe
that its men and women won the Cold War, along the way had a few problems,
and yet are now rising to the challenges of the twenty-first century. In
front of the intelligence-oversight committees in Congress senior Agency
officials repeat the CIA's new mission statement about battling terrorism,
drugs, the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, and
rogue regimes in Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and North Korea. With the Ames
fiasco receding, some current and retired CIA officials are asserting that
if Congress and the press would only back off, the professionals would once
again get the job done.
One feature of a closed society is that it lies to itself as readily as it
lies to outsiders. Writing as "X" in his 1947 assessment of the Soviet Union,
the diplomat George F. Kennan borrowed from Gibbon's Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire; the passage applies equally to the CIA's present-day
Directorate of Operations.
From enthusiasm to imposture the step is perilous and slippery; the demon of Socrates affords a memorable instance of how a wise man may deceive himself, how a good man may deceive others, how the conscience may slumber in a mixed and middle state between self-illusion and voluntary fraud.
The sad truth about the CIA -- what the Ames debacle didn't reveal -- is
that the DO has for years been running an espionage charade in most countries,
deceiving itself and others about the value of its recruited agents and
intelligence production. The ugliest DO secret is how the clandestine service
encourages decent case officers, gradually and naturally, to evolve into
liars about their contribution to America's security. By 1985, the year Ames
volunteered to spy for the KGB, the vast majority of the CIA's foreign agents
were mediocre assets at best, put on the payroll because case officers needed
high recruitment numbers to get promoted. Long before the Soviet Union collapsed,
recruitment and intelligence fraud -- the natural product of an insular spy
world -- had stripped the DO of its integrity and its competence.
Younger operatives are resigning in droves, because they have given up hope
of reform. The attrition was sufficient to provoke an investigation by the
inspector general in 1996. Though the inspector general's office did a poor
job of questioning young case officers who had resigned, the final report
doesn't deny the increasing resignation rate among the best and the brightest
who entered the DO during the Reagan years. Nearly three quarters of the
case officers from my 1985 junior-officer class have quit the service. When
my class entered, we were told that the DO had the lowest attrition rate
-- under five percent -- in the U.S. government. Though this figure was no
doubt inaccurate -- a normal and healthy rate of attrition in any bureaucracy
should be higher -- it does reflect the DO's credo that officers don't quit
the clandestine service unless they are flawed. Within the DO and
in front of Congress senior officials downplay the rising resignation rate
and even deny that the directorate's younger officers -- let alone its best
ones -- are abandoning ship.
But the senior officers themselves know the truth. As early as 1988 a senior
CIA official responsible for the Directorate of Operations' budget and personnel
visited stations and bases worldwide, discreetly asking young case officers
why so many good young officers were quitting. The official wanted to know
whether junior officers would be willing to participate in a round-table
discussion with the deputy director of operations, the boss of the clandestine
service. The senior official, not a case officer herself, didn't realize
that she was asking case officers to commit professional suicide. The round-table
discussion never took place.
AMERICANS were shocked by the DO's nine-year failure to catch Ames, a
hard-drinking, free-spending KGB mole inside the Soviet-East Europe Division.
How could the DO have entrusted its premier agents -- probably the best Soviet
agents the CIA ever had -- to a counterintelligence case officer with such
evident flaws? Unlike the usual agent chaff that case officers recruit in
order to get promotions, these Soviet agents were the real thing. Treason
and his spending habits aside, the truth is that Ames was not much different
from many of his peers. He was disgruntled and he drank too much. He disliked
recruiting foreign agents and he did it poorly. He distrusted most of his
colleagues, particularly those more senior. He was stalled in his career
as a mid-level officer (a GS-14), slightly higher in grade than the average
retiring case officer.
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union moving in the cocktail-party circuit
was the primary, often the only, way a case officer could rub shoulders with
Communist "hard targets" -- foreigners who were extremely difficult to approach,
let alone develop and recruit. In seeking to press the flesh, many officers
drank too much. More important, many case officers -- and Ames was one of
them -- chafed at the recruitment game, the desperate socializing in search
of a foreigner who could be written up as a promising "developmental." Case
officers grow cynical in such a world -- and they've been living in one since
the 1960s. Before he volunteered his services to the Soviets, Ames amused
himself in Mexico City by privately critiquing the station's case officers
and their numerous recruited agents, who produced very little intelligence.
Contrary to the common, outsider view of him, Ames was attentive to both
operational details and intelligence reports. He discovered before most of
his peers did that one of the most renowned case officers working in the
Latin American division was a corrupt fraud, who inflated or invented most
of his agents and probably pocketed some agents' pay in diamonds. Though
dismissed from the service, the case officer was never jailed. On his spacious
balcony in a high-rise above Mexico City, Ames often passed evenings with
friends wryly belittling the DO's contributions to America's defense.
Deeply troubled and venal, Ames slipped across that space between dissent
and treason, believing it was all a charade. Given his free-spending ways,
the Agency should of course have found him sooner. But spotting Ames
psychologically, or by questioning his peers, would have been very difficult.
In the CIA family there are many dysfunctional members.
Peeling away the layers of the Agency's mystique -- by learning how to read
agents' files, acquiring familiarity with operational details, gaining access
to "restricted-handling" cases -- can take years. One thing, however, did
not take me long to learn: there was a severe discrepancy between the reputations
of most senior officers and their talents. Sterling exceptions aside, the
average senior officer rose through the hierarchy without ever learning much
about the language, culture, or politics of the countries in which he served.
The good case officers in my junior-officer class hunted vainly for mentors
like Richard Helms, Paul Henze, and Robert Ames -- renowned case officers
from the past who knew their languages and their countries well. Not a single
Iran-desk chief during the eight years that I worked on Iran could speak
or read Persian. Not a single Near East Division chief knew Arabic, Persian,
or Turkish, and only one could get along even in French. One Near East officer,
sent during the Iran-contra affair to assess and debrief Manucher Ghorbanifar,
the slick and savvy Iranian middleman between the Ayatollah Khomeini's regime
and the Americans and Israelis, spoke no Persian and had no background in
the Middle East. He repeatedly had to ask Ghorbanifar to spell the names
of well-known senior Iranian officials.
At the Agency's espionage-training school ("The Farm") at Camp Peary, near
Williamsburg, Virginia, instructors regularly told trainees that cultural
distinctions did not matter, that an operation was an operation regardless
of the target. Whether Arab, German, Turkish, Brazilian, Persian, Russian,
Pakistani, or French, targets were (as Duane Clarridge, a Europe Division
and counterterrorism-center chief, baldly put it) "all the same." "An op
is an op," a favorite mantra of English-only case officers, is one of the
DO's most self-defeating conceits.
Of all the clandestine service's Cold War missions, no task was more
mystique-building, but at the same time more illusory, than the recruiting
of Soviet agents. The No. 1 operational directive of every case officer was
to recruit KGB officials, Soviet military-intelligence officers, and Soviet
diplomats, but this essentially amounted to little more than paper-shuffling
between CIA headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, and case officers in the
field. Real recruitment was more often than not a sheer fluke. According
to Soviet-East Europe Division officers, the best agents Ames killed were
all "walk-ins," who had volunteered their services to the United States.
Handling walk-ins is no mean feat, and CIA case officers have often handled
sensitive walk-ins exceptionally well. But "recruiting" walk-ins has little
to do with the protracted "recruitment cycle" -- the spotting, assessing,
developing, and recruiting of foreigners worldwide -- on which the DO has
built its budget and esprit de corps.
During the Cold War, DO managers in the field wanted young case officers
to telephone, out of the blue, Soviet officials with whom they had no plausible
reason to be in touch. The lucky case officers who made it past the telephoning
and the awkward encounters were encouraged to socialize as intensely as possible.
They were to ignore the constant advice of KGB defectors who warned that
if a case officer met a Soviet citizen, he should simply say hello, offer
a business card with a home telephone number, and then say good-bye. If the
Soviet wanted to defect or to work in place against the Communist system,
he would send a message. KGB defectors argued that the active development
of Soviets would only draw the attention of Soviet counterintelligence, and
would amplify a Soviet embassy's or consulate's normal paranoia. Yet the
CIA persisted. The DO's mystique and pride, not to mention its jobs and budget,
were at stake.
Terrible DO failures occurred in the 1980s and 1990s in Latin America, Africa,
Europe, and the Middle East. Not just in the Soviet Union did the CIA lose
numerous agents. An organization whose motto is the verse from the Gospel
of John "And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" had
grown sloppy, developing a lackadaisical appreciation of the distinction
between fact and fiction. Some good agents, and many mediocre or worthless
ones, died for their case officers' mistakes; in an environment in which
poor-quality agents routinely got inflated into first-rate ones, case officers
frequently put agents who really didn't know much into harm's way.
FROM 1947 through the early 1960s it was good to be a case officer. Almost
everyone feared the Soviet Union; Communists in league with the USSR were
everywhere. Except for the United States, the world was poor. More important,
Washington knew very little about the postwar world for which it had reluctantly
become responsible. The communications and transportation revolutions had
not yet taken place. Relatively few Americans traveled abroad. Slow-moving
diplomatic pouches, not arduously encrypted and decrypted cables, were the
primary means of contact between Washington and the field. Diplomats and
spies were often at the forefront in obtaining and analyzing information.
A U.S. embassy official in Moscow could write a telegram about the Soviet
soul, as Kennan did, that would actually be passed around among White House
Cabinet members. What today might seem self-evident, or academic, was then
exotic and classified.
The CIA sent its case officers out to gather all the information they could,
and in most countries outside the Communist bloc they found the locals receptive.
Enlisting the support of the Germans, the French, or the Japanese in the
face of a common enemy was not Mission Impossible. An overwhelming mutual
interest, not money, brought American case officers and otherwise prickly
foreigners together. Many, if not most, of the Agency's finest
intelligence-producing sources were unpaid. In the first two decades of the
Agency's existence, when the DO evolved out of the covert-action-oriented
Office of Policy Coordination and the espionage-oriented Office of Special
Operations, recruiting spies was not a head-counting game. According to one
old Agency hand, "We would never have tolerated ... bragging about lining
up ducks [recruitments], as if clandestine intelligence were some kind of
assembly line."
The Directorate of Operations (or, as it was then euphemistically known,
the Directorate of Plans) was a clubbish group of men. Even after the huge
expansion of the clandestine service, during the early 1950s (more new employees
were hired then than during the Vietnam War), graduates of prestigious colleges
and universities predominated. Washington's Metropolitan and Alibi Clubs
perhaps had as many operational discussions within their walls as did Agency
headquarters. Senior officers ranked and promoted their juniors in a highly
subjective manner. This old-boy system had its problems. But racking up
recruitments, good or bad, did not necessarily get an officer promoted.
In the 1950s and early 1960s the CIA's top leaders -- men like Allen Dulles,
Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, Tracy Barnes, and Desmond Fitzgerald -- were
profoundly devoted to covert action. Covert action (orchestrating coups,
anti-Communist insurgencies, academic conferences, labor unions, political
parties, publishing houses, and shipping companies) required considerable
manpower, and it drew the intellectual crème de la crème. It
compelled a higher degree of intellectual curiosity, accomplishment, and
operational savoir faire than did espionage ("espionage" referring specifically
to the recruitment of foreign intelligence agents). With so many talented
officers working in covert action, and with most of the foreigners involved
being friendly collaborators and not "recruited" assets, the DO could scarcely
base promotions on the number of recruitments a case officer made each
year.
After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, covert action became politically riskier. More
important, press revelations during the 1960s and 1970s about various CIA
maneuvers of dubious legality and wisdom, followed by several bouts of
congressional investigation, helped to sully the Agency's covert-action
credentials. Though covert action continued worldwide in the 1970s, it employed
less manpower. Inside the CIA working on covert action no longer had the
same prestige, and was becoming a slower track for promotions.
By the time Stansfield Turner became Jimmy Carter's director of central
intelligence, in 1977, the decades-old tug-of-war inside the Agency between
covert action and espionage was over. Henceforth covert action would be only
an avocation. Espionage was the area in which case officers could better
manage their destinies.
Sometime in the late 1960s and early 1970s recruiting became the case officer's
categorical imperative. The Vietnam War helped to propel the change. Before
the war espionage was a cause; Vietnam turned it into a business. The CIA
was in competition and collusion with the Pentagon in the acquisition and
dissemination of intelligence about South Vietnam, North Vietnam, Cambodia,
and Laos. As the war intensified, CIA chiefs in Saigon demanded a minimum
of 300 intelligence reports a month from their station. Local agents of highly
dubious value were continually added to the roster and the payroll in order
to meet this unrealistic objective.
Confronted with an expanding war, Langley significantly enlarged the case-officer
corps. Now far fewer new officers came from the nation's elite schools. The
growing anti-war movement on eastern college campuses deprived the Agency
of the long-cherished "P" (professor) factor in its discreet, highly successful
university recruiting networks. Scandals involving domestic mail interception,
wiretaps, and surveillance activities by the CIA, reported by Seymour M.
Hersh in The New York Times in 1974, finished off CIA-university
relations.
The war combined and accelerated three factors highly corrosive of the
clandestine service: a surplus of easily recruited "sources"; poor quality
control on intelligence reports; and falling admission standards for case
officers. Though there were CIA operatives and analysts who realized (and
steadfastly advised Washington policy makers) in the late 1960s that America's
war in Vietnam was lost, Southeast Asia became, bureaucratically, a liars'
paradise, where aggressive, self-promoting case officers quickly got ahead.
AS the Soviets expanded the Cold War geographically in the 1960s and 1970s,
the CIA significantly increased the size and number of its stations and bases
throughout Africa and Latin America. In the Third World working for the CIA
was a rite of passage for many men (Third World agents were and are almost
all men). For Latin Americans, Arabs, and Africans, association with the
Agency could be highly respectable and reasonably well paid. The CIA was
the little guy's conduit to the cabal that ruled the world. Third World targets
were usually inexpensive and relatively easy for the DO to recruit and run,
and their "flap" potential was far less than that of agents operating against
our sensitive First World allies.
With most of the Third World seen as a legitimate Cold War arena, case officers
worldwide could go after local diplomatic or military representatives. Even
if the CIA was not in fact interested in recruiting a given official of a
given Third World country (admittedly, a rare circumstance during the Cold
War), a case officer could still chase the target and label him an "access
agent," who might conceivably lead to a more promising, usually Soviet, recruit.
With the entire Third World "on the screen," recruitment possibilities for
the average case officer increased enormously. One of my former chiefs of
station once remarked about a Soviet case, "Isn't it amusing to contemplate
the hundreds -- God knows -- of African access agents we've recruited over
the years when the Russians are among the world's worst racists?"All told,
the CIA recruited thousands of people from the Third World.
The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, with its enthusiasm for "objective
criteria" in "performance appraisal systems," further solidified the DO's
head-counting ethic. Though the act didn't technically apply to the Agency
(Langley is in theory exempt from civil-service regulations), in spirit it
did. The business-school philosophy of "management by objective" officially
became de rigueur throughout the DO. (The current harassment problems of
the IRS probably also stem from this quantitative philosophy run amok.)
As the CIA got larger, bureaucratic standards were formalized. The power
of DO promotion panels eclipsed the old patronage system. The organization
needed a common criterion for "objectively"judging the case-officer corps.
To a considerable extent the American ethic of judging all people equally
and the American fondness for translating merit into numbers gave rise to
the practice of agent head-counting on case-officer evaluations.
To most people at the time, the annual head count -- -how many agents have
you recruited? -- seemed an efficient, progressive idea. Quickly, however,
a rather raw reckoning of numbers took hold. By the early 1980s Africa, Near
East, and Latin America Division case officers dominated the DO because
recruitments in their regions were relatively easy. By the time I entered
the service, senior officers regularly counseled young Soviet and Europe
Division case officers to have at least one "recruitment tour"in Africa or
the Middle East early in their careers, in order to avoid being forgotten
by the promotion panels. At The Farm senior Africa Division officers tried
to enlist trainees by bragging that operatives in their division racked up
more recruitments, and thus were promoted more quickly, than those in any
other division. Not once did I meet a senior Africa Division officer who
extolled the quality of the intelligence reports produced by the division's
vast roster of agents.
Overseas in the 1980s and 1990s my junior-officer class encountered DO managers
offering $3,000 bonuses for "scalps" provided by Christmas or Easter. Bottles
of champagne were awarded to case officers who generated the most intelligence
reports. The winners usually scored twenty or thirty reports a month. In
1989 many of my colleagues were stunned to receive a cable from a division
chief who had spent his career chasing Soviets. He recommended one "high
quality" recruitment per year for each case officer in his division.
This cable came on the heels of a worldwide headquarters cable announcing
that all our Cuban agents had probably been double agents. The competition
realized long ago how desperate America's case officers are for scalps. They
have been happy to provide them.
In 1993 CIA director James Woolsey sent a cable to all stations and bases
encouraging case officers and their managers to push for quality, not quantity,
in their recruitments and intelligence production. To an extent Woolsey knew
that there was a recruitment problem in the DO. That same year, however,
the DO issued new performance-evaluation guidelines for young case officers,
who are responsible for the vast majority of all DO recruitments, re-emphasizing
the centrality of recruitments in the promotion process. Officers in the
field didn't have to read between the lines: the numbers game continued.
Woolsey never knew that the DO had betrayed his good intentions.
By the time I resigned, in 1993, the DO had introduced the "Asset Validation
System" for assessing foreign recruits. The DO billed the AVS as a means
to prevent the recruitment and running of double agents and tired Cold War
leftovers. The AVS did not officially attempt to root out "cheap recruitments."
However, in the early 1990s a number of scandals in which star case officers
were caught fabricating agents and intelligence reports gave reform-minded
case officers hope that the DO might finally rein in the promotion-by-recruitment
system. We all knew that these aggressive officers had merely pushed accepted
standards of exaggeration and deceit a little too far.
This hope has proved naive. Although some senior officers will now quietly
admit that there has been a numbers game, they usually complain that the
1980s generation of case officers gave rise to the problem, which they and
the AVS are now solving. However, the AVS -- dubbed "agent scrubbing" by
The Washington Post and often credited as a reform initiated by John
Deutch (in fact William Webster began the program; Robert Gates and James
Woolsey significantly expanded it) -- has not really affected the recruitment
game. Case officers must now write a few more cables for each recruitment
-- a little extra paperwork in order to gain a seal of approval. Officers
can even avoid doing the paperwork altogether: in the ever-growing paper
flow between headquarters and the field, AVS requirements can easily disappear
for years into a bureaucratic black hole. The recruitment of mediocre, if
not entirely worthless, access agents continues.
Case officers have learned that they can recruit a worthless agent and later
have the agent scrubbed without damage to their careers. Close questioning
of recruitments in the DO remains uncommon. A case officer can recruit eight
assets in Geneva, move on to his next tour in Paris, have all eight Geneva-based
agents scrubbed, and still receive glowing evaluations from the Paris chief
of station.
The AVS also does nothing to verify the value of information from the foreign
agents who produce clandestine intelligence and who are the raison
d'être of espionage. Standards for judging a source's intelligence
production are so low that a case officer can easily believe, or pretend
to believe, that the most routine contact is a first-rate
intel developmental. With "forward-leaning" (that
is, optimistic) cable traffic papering his way, an ambitious case officer
can turn a friendly low-level telephone-company official into a sensitive
penetration of a foreign nation's telecommunications industry. Once headquarters
certifies a developmental's intelligence reports, the case officer knows
that the developmental's recruitment will probably be approved. Clever case
officers can also easily "push" the facts and opinions available in open-source
news, or mirror classified State Department telegrams, to make a developmental
or an agent seem like an adequate intelligence producer. Pushing the news
and mirroring State have, regrettably, become second nature inside the DO,
particularly among aggressive officers who know the system. And once poor
intelligence becomes acceptable, the rule of the lowest common denominator
takes hold, and cheap intel and agents inevitably become the standard.
The Agency knows that DO soft reporting on State Department issues often
draws the ire of U.S. diplomats. Foreign Service officers who have access
to clandestine-intelligence reports have long known that the CIA is poaching
on their terrain. And as any Agency analyst will admit, the State Department
and overseas representatives of the U.S. Treasury have generally provided
the finest official commentary on politics and economics. Clandestine information
from paid agents is by no means inherently superior to information from unpaid
sources, as outsiders usually presume. Whether the subject is NATO expansion,
democracy in Russia, Toulouse's Airbus versus Seattle's Boeing, the U.S.
trade embargo against Iran, or the future course of South Africa, Kazakhstan,
or Croatia, it has been diplomats and their contacts -- not case officers
and their agents -- who have usually proved to be the U.S. government's most
knowledgeable sources. But State reporting is not, like Agency reporting,
appetizingly packaged in bite-size morsels. Diplomatic telegrams do not benefit
from the boldly printed, highly classified code words that adorn Agency products.
Bureaucratically inept, politically timid, and cash-starved, the State Department
has rarely tried to take on Langley -- a rich and tough bureaucratic power
-- for the DO's recruitment antics and shoddy reporting.
When I was in the service, I regularly encountered DO bosses who encouraged
their case officers to put information gained from State cover work into
CIA intelligence channels. When they couldn't duplicate State sources, case
officers tried to borrow or to steal them, thereby putting U.S. diplomats
in the awkward position of having to explain to their foreign counterparts
why the U.S. government sometimes sends two "diplomats" asking the same
questions.
Though case officers deserve most of the blame for debasing American espionage,
they could not have done it alone. Analysts in the CIA's Directorate of
Intelligence, who are the primary consumers and judges of foreign-intelligence
reporting, share the responsibility. Like case officers, the analysts generally
don't have the necessary languages, academic preparation, or in-country
experience in their areas of supposed expertise. Ever since Robert Gates,
as deputy director of intelligence, reorganized the Directorate of Intelligence
in the early 1980s, it has been rare for an analyst to spend more than a
few years working on one country. Promotions, especially promotions to managerial
grades, come more quickly to generalists who have covered several areas.
Sitting in six-by-six, usually windowless, cubicles, and confronted daily
with demands for short-order "finished" intelligence, analysts rarely have
the desire to sacrifice their careers by slowly building the skills that
give uncommon insight into foreign countries.
AGENT scrubbing has not yet advanced an answer to the question that has bedeviled
the Directorate of Operations: How do you rank and promote the entire cadre
of DO case officers when valuable recruitments are so few in number and so
difficult to obtain? The exact number of case officers is classified, but
U.S. press reports of approximately 2,000 are not far off the mark. In some
U.S. embassies and consulates CIA case officers outnumber diplomats who report
on political and economic affairs. The number of developmentals and agents
necessary to keep junior and mid-level case officers busy is large; demand
creates supply.
An honest discussion of recruitments, intelligence production, and promotions
would cast doubt on Agency operations and careers since at least the 1970s.
The DO's future, or at least its staffing levels and current management,
would also be called into question. And case officers would have to confess
to themselves and to Congress that the chances of success in agent recruitment
today are even worse than they were in the past.
The much trumpeted challenges of the twenty-first century, unlike those of
the Cold War era, are not worldwide struggles that define, galvanize, and
divide nations. The Chinese may well become a serious menace, but they are
not inspiring or funding radical anti-Western guerrilla movements and political
parties in the Third World. China and the rogue states -- Iran, Iraq, Libya,
Sudan, North Korea -- have embassies and consulates worldwide, offering the
DO, in theory, numerous targets, but the CIA has had little success in recruiting
these countries' diplomats and intelligence officers. With rare exceptions,
intelligence coups against rogue states, terrorists, and the Chinese come
from volunteers.
Only a handful of people in Paris, Bonn, or New Delhi have, for example,
exploitable access to resident Iranian officials and scientists; the odds
that a case officer could locate, let alone recruit, an Iranian source are
poor. Just meeting an interesting Iranian without the host country's assistance
or knowledge is extremely difficult. If the French, the Germans, or the Indians
were to become hostile to U.S. espionage operations, CIA case officers would
have only a remote chance of doing anything worthwhile. And with the Soviet
threat gone, Europeans have become noticeably more hostile to CIA officers
operating on European soil. The Western Europeans now regularly exchange
information among themselves about the CIA. The French, the Germans, and
the Austrians recently fired warning shots by seeking the removal of case
officers who failed to understand the new post-Cold War ground rules. National
pride and differing national interests (the European Union, for instance,
has consistently downplayed Iran's nefarious behavior in order to maintain
commercial ties with Iran) have severely restricted Agency operations in
Europe and elsewhere.
Current DO operations against America's toughest Middle Eastern foes -- Iran
and Iraq -- have essentially devolved into "cold pitches," in which case
officers with little biographical or psychological information on their targets,
whom in many cases they have never even met before, "pitch" a clandestine
relationship with the CIA in exchange for money. This approach can occasionally
work, but it is neither a particularly clever nor a thoughtful way to get
foreigners to risk their lives for the United States. When the approach does
work, however, such quick hits read well on case-officer performance
evaluations.
SPYING is the second-oldest profession. Irrespective of Langley's incompetence,
or American doubts about covert action, spying in some form will continue.
The intelligence debate is not about whether we should spy but about how
we can spy well. If Washington could find reliable sources of information
on Iran's Ministry of Intelligence, local Shi'ite opposition in the oil-rich
regions of Saudi Arabia, or Communist China's military general staff, America
would be safer for the effort. All these "human intelligence"targets are
extraordinarily difficult to reach, but if the DO were an organization with
long-range plans and talented personnel, it might have a chance.
The window of opportunity for reform that was inadvertently opened by the
Ames case is now closing. In Washington, where elected and appointed officials
remonstrate with the CIA's functionaries but rarely fire them, the DO's senior
officers suspect that if they take a few blows, make a few cosmetic reforms,
and hang tight, they will outlast their critics. Not a single senior officer
was fired for the Ames debacle. No one was fired for any of the strictly
operational flaps and fiascoes of the past ten years (case officers dismissed
because of the highly politicized Iran-contra and Guatemalan human-rights
affairs don't count). Some of the perpetrators have ended up with senior-service
promotions and distinguished-intelligence medals.
Reforming the CIA is a herculean task. The unforgiving law of bureaucratic
rot -- first-rate people usually associate with and advance other first-rate
people, but second choose third, and third choose fourth -- has come brutally
into play in the CIA's closed society. First-rate people are now few and
far between. How does one reform an institution in which the guiding 10 percent
are arguably the institution's most disingenuous, least qualified officials?
How does a director of central intelligence who comes from outside the CIA
look down from his seventh-floor perch and separate capable people from the
incompetent? No outsider, no matter how savvy, can navigate successfully
inside the DO without case officers to guide him.
Closed societies are by definition impervious to most forms of outside discipline
and oversight, and an espionage service must to a large and unhealthy extent
be a closed society. First-rate or third, case officers and agents must be
camouflaged and protected.
Outsiders cannot save the Directorate of Operations from itself unless they
hold it accountable for all its failures and deficiencies. The junior and
mid-level case officers who are considering leaving the organization need
to see some sign that outsiders will no longer tolerate sham or bungled
operations. At a minimum, the President, the CIA director, and Congress's
intelligence-oversight committees must ensure that the Agency's inspector
general and counterintelligence investigations are accurate and fair. The
inspector general's office has often oscillated between blatant collusion
with the DO and anti-DO grandstanding before Congress. And counterintelligence
reports by the DO's various staffs and divisions usually fall victim to back-room
machinations that keep even useless senior officers relatively unblemished
and consistently unpunished.
Though inspector general and counterintelligence reports have rarely been
tough on the DO, they have almost always been too tough for senior case officers
to swallow. When surprisingly scathing inspector general or counterintelligence
investigations do not lead to the dismissal of senior officers guilty of
gross incompetence, good officers resign or fall silent.
Firing the old guard will not by itself change the culture of the clandestine
service. As in any bureaucracy, senior functionaries have progeny. Even good
case officers inevitably make debilitating compromises if they are working
in a bad system. First-rate operatives who know they've collected little
truly meaningful intelligence over the years can nevertheless idealize the
Directorate of Operations, the myth and methods of clandestine intelligence
becoming inseparable from their identities, honor, and family life. Only
a complete overhaul of the service that would drastically reduce the number
of veteran case officers has a chance of saving the clandestine service.
In order to reform U.S. espionage, outsiders must use the only sure leverage
they have for safely prying open the clandestine service: DO intelligence
reports. The director and the intelligence-oversight committees, or the outside
experts they appoint, can review the intelligence production of selected
officers, operational desks, staffs, centers, and divisions. Though a case
officer may recruit a highly valuable agent who produces no intelligence
reporting (for example, a code clerk at a foreign embassy), all non-covert-action
recruitments are meant to lead, eventually, to intelligence production. If
outside experts compare open-source, classified non-Agency, and DO information
on a subject, they can find out whether the DO is lying to itself and others.
This will take time and energy, of course.
With a cadre of good case officers as his eyes, ears, and hands, the CIA
director might have a chance to overcome the DO's problems. He may discover,
however, that the bureaucracy has irretrievably broken down. In that case
he, or Congress, should consider what only a few years ago would have been
unthinkable: rebuilding the clandestine service from scratch. America's national
security would not be compromised by temporarily shutting down the DO. A
Directorate of Operations that produces mostly mediocre intelligence and
egregiously stupid coup d'état schemes against, for example, Saddam
Hussein harms the United States abroad.
If the Agency were truly intent on reform, the Directorate of Operations
would abolish most of its diplomat-spy positions and replace them with
"non-official cover" officers, who operate outside an embassy or consulate,
usually as businessmen or consultants. NOCs are far from the elite of the
clandestine service, and typical non-official covers are usually weak and
small-scale, given the growing and understandable reluctance of U.S. businesses
to provide Langley with any help in this regard. Nonetheless, only NOCs and
NOC-directed agent networks can plausibly penetrate terrorist groups,
arms-merchants' networks, and scientific associations, institutes, and
corporations potentially involved in nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons
production. Unlike inside case officers, with their flimsy diplomatic covers,
NOCs can quietly enter and exit countries, meet foreigners, and pass through
foreign internal-security checks without setting off alarms. Deploying mostly
NOCs overseas would also subvert the numbers game. NOCs work without diplomatic
immunity: contemplating jail or worse, they would more scrupulously evaluate
the intelligence benefits of a prospective espionage operation.
Senior inside officers, who have no intention of superannuating themselves
and their protégés, will disparage the value of non-official
cover in the DO's future, keeping NOCs an obedient sideshow. NOCs, who are
locked into the closed world of the clandestine service more tightly than
inside officers are, won't complain. The better NOCs, of course, have already
done what most of their better diplomat-spy colleagues have done: they've
resigned or retired.
If there were no entrenched bureaucracy tirelessly challenging reform, rebuilding
the clandestine service would be much easier. Bringing in graduates of America's
leading colleges and universities and multilingual Americans who have lived
abroad -- our finest pool of intelligence talent -- is not an impossible
task. More than any other country, the United States can draw on a multi-ethnic,
polyglot society for its intelligence service. Congress in particular bears
special responsibility for guaranteeing the reform of the clandestine service.
It alone has the financial authority to force changes inside the DO. After
the scandals of the 1970s Congress wisely chose to exercise its right under
the 1947 National Security Act to oversee the CIA more closely. Unfortunately,
the oversight committees have become more often Langley's sympathetic partners
than its demanding judges. Trafficking in executive-branch "secrets" is
habit-forming, and congressmen and their staffers aren't immune to the allure
and patriotism of being players in America's covert efforts. Especially
Republicans, who generally admire the Directorate of Operations for its stealthy,
anti-Communist, realpolitik image, should be more parsimonious with their
favor. Congress's recent decision to drop the "whistle blower" provision
from the 1998 intelligence authorization bill, which would have protected
Agency employees who notify Congress of CIA wrongdoing, was a serious mistake.
Capitol Hill needs more and sharper eyes inside the DO, not fewer.
Last July, George Tenet, the newly confirmed CIA director, appointed Jack
Downing to be the new head of the clandestine service. A good linguist, an
ex-Marine, and a member of the DO's old guard, Downing is described by a
case officer who worked with him as "a consensus candidate, entirely acceptable
to the DO dons" who run the DO in coordination with the deputy director of
operations. In his worldwide "hello" cable to the troops, Downing wrote that
the DO was still suffering from serious problems and required continuing
reform. His Marine Corps candor is certainly a step in the right direction,
but as every case officer who has developed a foreigner knows, words are
cheap -- particularly when coming from senior DO officers. But Downing deserves
the benefit of the doubt. Tenet and Congress's intelligence-oversight committees
should ensure, however, that the doubt is reasonable and fleeting.
It would be a shameful irony if America allowed the clandestine service,
which once tried so enthusiastically to fight the Cold War, to fall victim
to a closed society of its own making. Good case officers, who really have
been on the front lines of America's defense, deserve better: the right to
be proud, once again, of their dark profession.
"Special
Intelligence," by Robert D. Kaplan (February,
1998)
The author considers whether the Army should
take on covert action.
From the archives:
"Inside
the Department of Dirty Tricks," (August, 1979).
"The business of intelligence has its ugly side." Thomas Powers tells the
story of former CIA director Richard Helms.
From Atlantic
Unbound:
Books & Authors: "The Numbers Game," (February,
1997)
"CIA analyst Sam Adams fought the intelligence
establishment about its Vietnam policy like David fought Goliath."