The CIA Is Broken – It Will Take More Than A New Director To Fix It

This article is intended as a response to the recent article by Dan Hoffman in the Washington Times entitled “Some Leadership Lessons for New CIA Chief Ratcliffe to Ponder”.

The premise of that article appears to be that a change of leadership at the top of CIA will be sufficient to put it on the right track. With all due respect for Mr. Hoffman, who I know personally, he is wrong. CIA needs major reform from top to bottom. The twin cancers of politicization and bureaucratization have rendered it effectively incapable of doing its job.

Politicization:

This is more than just DEI, although the impact of that insidious ideology has been catastrophic. Long ago senior leaders at CIA began to involve themselves inappropriately in American domestic politics. The aftermath of the attack on our facilities in Benghazi in 2012 provides a graphic example.

The CIA base in Benghazi was attacked by a radical Islamic militia. Our consulate in that same city was overrun and our ambassador was killed. Only by the heroic efforts of the men on the ground did we avoid an even worse result. Every report by everyone on the ground told the same story.

None of this should have been a surprise to anyone. The security situation in Benghazi had been deteriorating for a long time. Most foreign missions had pulled out. Numerous reports had been sent to Washington about the growing power of Ansar al-Sharia the group that staged the attacks on our facilities.

Despite this, after the attack, the Obama administration began to peddle the ludicrous story that there had been no premeditated assault by Islamic radicals. A demonstration had simply gotten out of control. It was a bald-faced lie, and the story began to fall apart almost as soon as it was trotted out.

Enter Michael Morrell, the Acting Director of CIA who stepped into the breach and covered for the administration by claiming, falsely, that CIA had provided bad intel. The White House was simply repeating what it had been told. It was all CIA’s fault.

That was not true. No such analysis had ever been prepared. Morrell injected CIA into domestic American politics for partisan purposes, and most ominously, even though a vast number of senior offices at CIA knew Morrell was lying and why he was doing so, they all closed ranks behind him. Not a single person came forward to tell Congress the truth. Not a single person resigned in protest.

Bureaucratization:

The CIA’s job is to do what everyone else considers impossible. Everything it does should be characterized by creativity, imagination, daring, and audacity. It is supposed to move quickly, change direction on a dime, and constantly reinvent itself as world events dictate.

Instead, what we have today is an organization run on standard federal bureaucratic lines. It is stiff, slow, and risk-averse. Increasingly, its senior officers demonstrate little or no aptitude for core functions.

Witness what happened at Khost base in Afghanistan in 2009. Virtually the entire base complement was killed or wounded by a suicide bomber working for Al-Qaida. The after-action review showed tradecraft so shockingly bad that it was almost impossible to comprehend. Given the high profile of the asset being met, the disaster also demonstrated in the most horrifying way imaginable that none of the senior officers involved, from the Chief of Base to the head of the Counterterrorism Center had any idea how to conduct a high-risk meeting on the ground in Afghanistan.

No one resigned. No one was fired.

If you want CIA to regain its edge and be able to perform its mission, at least four things need to happen, and they all need to happen simultaneously.

Fix Recruiting:

Recruitment is broken. Long ago the bureaucrats decided that there was nothing particularly special about the business of espionage. We were all fungible. Anybody could be taught the trade. They were wrong.

We have filled the organization with people who have no business being anywhere near an op. They never should have been hired. CIA knows what makes a good ops officer. They perfected the art of psychological profiling long ago. We need to go back to recruiting the people with the skills and natural ability to succeed or nothing else really matters.

Fix Training:

Training has been watered down to what amounts to a giant “Outward Bound” type experience. We are sending woefully unprepared individuals out into an increasingly dangerous and technologically sophisticated world. They have no hope of success. Every training course we run for operational personnel needs to be rebuilt from the ground up with a sense of urgency.

Conduct An Operational Review:

We need to walk through every component and evaluate its performance against its key targets. That can’t be a 30,000-foot overview. That needs to be a “down in the weeds” discussion that involves the specifics of our operations, our sources and our methods. How many assets do we have inside Al-Qaida? Who are they? Where are they? What is their level of access? What intelligence are they providing? That same kind of inquiry needs to apply across the board from the Iranian nuclear program to Chinese intelligence operations worldwide.

This can’t be an academic discussion. It can’t end with a vague agreement that we should strive to do better. In a shocking number of cases, we are going to find that we have no assets worth meeting and we are producing no human intelligence of value on the most pressing issues. We must then proceed to ask the most critical questions – why? And – how are we going to change that? And when the discussion ends everyone that walks out of the room needs to have their marching orders and be already moving on filling the gaps and getting the intel we need.

Conduct a Leadership Review:

Every individual in a command position at CIA needs to be reviewed. That means for the Directorate of Operations every Chief of Station, every Chief of Base, every Division Chief, every Center Chief, etc. That review needs to involve a hard look at how that person was chosen and an examination of their performance since they took the job.

As with the operational review, this cannot be a pro forma exercise. When the answer is that COS Islamabad was sent out to punch a ticket so he or she could get promoted in the next cycle and hasn’t done a damn thing since landing in country last year – then that person has to be pulled out of country and replaced with someone who plans on working for a living. Now. Then that exercise needs to be repeated as many times as is required to get our operations to where they need to be and produce the intelligence the President requires.

CIA is broken. A new Director working for a new President provides the opportunity to fix it, but it is going to take a lot more than a new guy in the big office on the 7^th floor to put CIA back in fighting shape.