The CIA struggles to make up for lost time
 
The CIA for most of its early years was a para-military intelligence organization with a highly developed special operations division which carried armed covert actions, supported coups or organized reasonably sized wars from Central America, Africa to South East Asia. The Carter-Stansfield Turner era saw the wholesale abandonment of much of this capability and over 800 seasoned officers were sacked. The carnage amongst 'agents' and short-term contract staff was even worse and the CIA struggled to maintain its combat ability until the arrival of the Reagan-Casey period when serious attempts were made to rebuild the Agency.
 
However, though some progress was undoubtedly made, Afghanistan was to highlight the paucity of suitably trained and experienced field officers either in the Near East Division or the Special Activities Division. The Agency has been quite unable to deal with the threat of international terrorism before or after 9-11, the appalling standard of information supplied to US forces in the Afghan campaign has already drawn a veiled, though public rebuke from the Pentagon. Privately US military staff have been glowing in rage at the inept, bungling intelligence service.
 
The litany of feeble excuses made by the DCI, George Tenet have drawn blistering rebukes from knowledgeable insiders and some of the CIA's recent pronouncements have done little to improve relations with China, Russia or a number of Middle Eastern regimes. Yet again the CIA has clearly highlighted an agency truism, they have the ability to collect vast amounts of raw intelligence, but have little sophisticated analytical ability and a virtual absence of intelligent, cosmopolitan and confident leadership.
 
CIA, risk-avoidance and buck-passing predominate
 
The atmosphere inside Langley is one of civil service carefulness, risk avoidance and buck passing. An agency that once found room for the odd, the eccentric, but often brilliant officers such as Wisner, Bissell, Angleton or Roosevelt has become a home for the second rate beaurocrat, afraid to make a decision and vastly reminiscent of the latter days of that moribund Soviet monolith, the KGB. Strong action needs to be taken to kick start the CIA, the recent recruiting campaigns are merely bringing in extra dross and further diluting the effect of the few remaining excellent CIA officers. Smooth skinned college kids don't make good field officers and the CIA will have to recruit more heavily from within the ranks of the special forces and the international underworld, being picky about keeping your distance from the 'nasty folks' won't win the United States any battles against an international terrorist threat now scattered across the globe by the Afghan war.
 
''We are doing things I never believed we would do and I mean killing people'' said one US intelligence official speaking off the record. However as recent reports have hinted, not always the enemy. Indeed, the gullible and inexperienced CIA field officers, and at times there have been upto 200 in Afghanistan, tried to rely on favours and endless cash to obtain information they were unable to find by clandestine methods. In consequence there have been many botched operations and considerable casualties amongst US allies often caused by the settling of old score amongst the anti-Taliban forces.
 
Poor leadership & restrictive management hamper operational efficiency
 
Robert Baer, who spent 21 years from 1976 onwards as a CIA officer operating against terrorists in the Middle East and South Asia, claims that the CIA's espionage service or Operations Directorate lacks good leadership and personnel with language skills who can recruit agents in foreign countries.  "A lot of people did some very good work and I'm sure they still do, but you've really got to revamp the system" Baer said "You have to have a strong director of operations who understands operations, who can separate good intelligence from bad intelligence, knows what a source is, knows how to vet a source and knows when someone is taking unnecessary risk and what's a necessary risk,"
 
He added that the CIA's foreign-agent recruitment system discourages field officers from hiring or running agents and the entire collection system relies too much on electronic intelligence and information provided by foreign intelligence services. Baer further highlighted the management practices that discourage risk-taking and focus on non-intelligence issues "You have too much of the CIA going after touchy-feely things"   There have been far too many instances where risk-averse CIA managers have refused to take action that could have stopped terrorist attacks. With a typical civil service bloody-mindedness case officers are often sent to staff colleges instead of foreign posts and those who have the vital agent recruiting skills of speaking a foreign language fluently and have developed a fundamental understanding of their target country have been sent to other areas simply because the desk-bound CIA management felt they had become too involved with a particular region.
 
The CIA is out of touch, hind-bound with red tape, led by career beaurocrats who are scared stiff of taking positive action and simply counting the days till they draw their agency pensions. The CIA does not need to 'modernize' or become politically correct or media friendly, it needs to return to being a genuinely clandestine intelligence organization backed up with a headquarters staff capable of quickly producing reasoned analysis and forecasting for the Government and Defence community. The CIA as it stands today is someway short of achieving that particular target.
 
Constructive criticism of the CIA is lacking, as so many of the 'think tanks' and private consulting and information research companies that have sprung up around the intelligence community are stuffed full of failed desk-bound talking heads who are trotted out to provide comment in Newspapers or on the TV News and of course, do not deviate from the agency line. This is not a healthy situation for an Intelligence Agency and a number of the more perceptive insiders are well aware that a more critical and less sycophantic atmosphere is urgently needed.
 
Richard M. Bennett
 

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