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The San Diego Union-Tribune Last week, a House committee chaired by Rep. Peter Goss, a former CIA officer and possible successor to the current director, issued a report on the agency's Clandestine Service. If even half of the report is true, our nation is in trouble. Goss heads the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The report is about the CIA's Directorate of Operations, called DO or the Clandestine Service. This branch of the CIA goes abroad, penetrates foreign organizations (like governments or terrorist groups), and steals their secrets. This branch of the CIA is absolutely vital to U.S. national security but, according to the House committee report, today is practically a train wreck. According to the committee, the damage to the human intelligence "mission through misallocation and redirection of resources, poor prioritization of objectives, micro-management of field operations, and a continued political aversion to operational risk is, in the committee's judgment, significant and could likely be long lasting." The Clandestine Service, the report states, is in danger of becoming "nothing more than a stilted bureaucracy, incapable of even the slightest bit of success. The nimble, flexible, core-mission oriented enterprise the DO once was is becoming just a fleeting memory. With each passing day, it becomes harder to resurrect." The CIA is in its eighth year of rebuilding since its devastating down-sizing in the mid-1990s, but "still we are more than five years away from being healthy. This is tragic," the report states. If Goss' charges are in the ball park - it must be noted that the current director George Tenet has publicly called them "absurd" - then the situation is even worse than it appears. Real intelligence collection doesn't happen the way it is portrayed in spy novels or on television. The CIA doesn't send someone to break into a safe and abscond with the secret rocket fuel formula, and the next day the world is safe. Real intelligence collection takes time. Lots of time. A CIA officer posted covertly overseas must identify potential sources - i.e., people in positions of trust in the target organization. The CIA officer then evaluates their motivations and vulnerabilities, and builds strong personal relationships with them. If all goes well, the officer will recruit the potential source, who then becomes a paid clandestine agent of the CIA. The agent is trained, usually at some secret location outside his home country, and given elaborate (and secure) contact and meeting plans. Only then is the new agent ready to begin providing useful intelligence to the U.S. government. And this recruitment process needs to happen constantly, again and again, if the CIA is to build a large enough network of spies to provide a full, well-rounded picture of the secret workings of the target organization. The variables are myriad and generalities difficult to make, but basically it takes at least a couple of years to build an adequate spy network to report on sophisticated, hardened targets, like the ones the agency is attacking today. In other words, if the Clandestine Service were operating at peak form right now, we would still be several years away from getting the steady stream of reliable human intelligence our nation's policy-makers need to fight al-Qaeda and other militant Islamist groups. So what do we do? The CIA is a creature of the Executive Branch. Presidents can damage it through neglect or bad policy, as Carter and Clinton did. Or they can build it up, as Reagan did. President Bush needs to strengthen the agency. The agency needs a new director - today. And it needs a director who will make the hard choices, not worry about building consensus. The Clandestine Service is a small organization. Young officers learn from older ones. Officers are mentored, formally and informally, for a long time before they master the craft. Working under an excellent chief of station on your first overseas tour is a boon, while getting a bad one can sour an entire career. We cannot wait for more top-notch officers to retire, or resign in frustration. Once that living tradition is gone, reconstituting the Clandestine Service will be far more difficult. Mr. Carroll is a former officer in the Clandestine Service of the CIA. |
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