How The CIA Can Be Fixed

By David Bjerklie, Coco Masters

ROBERT BAER

Former CIA field officer and author of the spy thriller Blow the House Down

The CIA has been under political assault since the early 1970s. It was also badly managed, and the agency became an ungainly bureaucracy. It didn't just happen under George W.; it's been going on for decades. It got to the point where you could be an officer on the front between Afghanistan and Pakistan, living in a tent for three years, hunting down bin Laden, and there could be a logistics guy back at headquarters who takes his kids to soccer practice on Saturday mornings and gets promoted faster.

What is needed is to put back in place a professional cadre. The CIA may say they are bringing in great people. That may be true. But do these people know anything about intelligence? No. It's not something you learn with a master's in international relations. It takes years and years of assessing sources. Intelligence collection is a profession.

To rebuild the agency, you need to take an insider like Stephen Kappes [former deputy CIA director of operations] and put him in charge of management decisions. He's going to know, very simply, who the frauds are, who the good people are. He may have to bring in people who have retired and tell them, "I need you. Come back for three years." And you need to make sure that the good people are going to the hot spots. You have to stop sending everyone to Baghdad. After that? You have to have somebody implement a long-term program to take account of the way the world is changing--weapons proliferation, what kind of cover you need and what sort of security clearance you really need to work at the CIA. How do you hire a Pakistani Urdu speaker who immigrated here when he was 6 years old and get him through a security exam? Under the old rules, he's got too much baggage.

JOHN BRENNAN

Former chief of staff to CIA Director George Tenet and former director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center; president and CEO of the Analysis Corp.

There's a piece of legislation--the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004--that was passed in December of 2004 and set up the office of the DNI [director of national intelligence] and Ambassador [John] Negroponte. In my mind it's a flawed piece of legislation. There is no strategic blueprint for the intelligence community. And therefore there's confusion over roles and responsibilities. The CIA is caught up in that confusion.

So Mike Hayden's responsibility is to be very candid with the workforce, let them know that there will be some changes. The CIA is part of a larger intelligence community, and it needs to be prepared for the change. Its strongest capability is in its human-intelligence side, in its collections, covert collections and operations, and covert action. But it also needs to take a look at the other capabilities that the agency has, like its analytic responsibilities and whether those should, in fact, be allocated to other places within the community. Hayden and Kappes need to take a look at all the senior people in the agency and decide who should stay and who should go.

MARK LOWENTHAL

Former assistant director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production and author of Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy

I don't think the CIA has to be fixed. It has to be calmed down. During the 1990s, the intelligence community lost the equivalent of 23,000 positions in budget cuts and lost opportunities to hire people. The reason it is hiring now is to make up for this gap--this death valley that it had. But 50% of the analysts across the intelligence sector have five years of experience or less. That causes a certain amount of tumult. These young people have to be trained better, they have to be mentored better, they have to have better career planning so that the workforce stays. Otherwise you're going to have a lot of these people leaving, and your experience level is never going to go back up again. The same thing is the case in the clandestine service. Porter Goss was told by the President to increase the clandestine service by 50%. That's a lot of people, and it takes five to seven years for someone to be really effective as a clandestine officer. Another thing that needs to happen is a public discussion about what is a reasonable level of expectation from intelligence. My concern is that the expectation is for intelligence that's more black and white, right or wrong, than is usually possible. And if that's the standard, we might as well stop because I can assure you that failure will be the default setting.

GARY BERNTSEN

Decorated CIA officer of 23 years; field commander for CIA operations during the 2001 campaign in Afghanistan; co-author of Jawbreaker

The CIA's most important mission at the moment is supporting our troops in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan with timely intelligence to allow for victory and combatting a worldwide jihadist movement that has declared war on the U.S. The conduct of human-intelligence operations is the CIA's single most critical contribution to these parallel missions.

The CIA is looking at a tsunami of upcoming retirements at a time when it needs an expansion of personnel and skills. The ongoing growth in the clandestine service to meet current needs will require senior officers to mentor and lead a disproportionately large number of junior officers. Fortunately, many men and women with combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan are stepping forward to join the CIA on their return home and are bringing impressive levels of leadership, maturity and skill.

THOMAS POWERS

Author of Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda

In the wake of the reorganization of intelligence after 9/11 and the WMD fiasco, the agency has been fundamentally changed--and diminished. The organization has been hit, psychologically, with the knowledge that it's being blamed for those failures when in fact these were not its failures; they were White House failures. In the past the agency has been blamed for mistakes. That is not unusual in the history of intelligence organizations. During the Soviet period, the Soviet leader actually executed three heads of intelligence at various times. So it's not uncommon to get rid of your intelligence service.

But it's never happened in this country. This is a fundamental change. The old CIA is gone. The old CIA used to brief the President. That gave it its whole raison d'etre. It formed the way the whole place operated. Everybody there wrote papers that actually passed, occasionally, in front of the eyes of the President. They can't count on that anymore. The CIA analyst who used to go to the White House all the time is never going to go to the White House again except to see a ceremony at the Rose Garden. It presents the new agency leadership with a profound challenge. But I think it's going to be confusion for a year or two.

Congress and the American people should insist that this organization work for them too. Congress should have the right to know what goes into intelligence evaluations. Right now they don't know, and it's not clear to me that even the President knows. I consider that to be a very dangerous situation.