CIA And DNI in New Turf war…and logic goes right out the window

posted at 5:15 pm on May 28, 2009 by coldwarrior
[ National Defense ]   

Following the 9-11 Commission, as the politicians tried their hardest to make sure that nobody got the blame for 9-11, somebody came up with the wonderful idea of establishing the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, claiming that having a new super bureaucracy would somehow streamline the intelligence process and make things easier.   As everybody in Washington patted each other on the back for such a wonderful 9-11 Commission, and pushed to follow through on all the recommendations of that noble effort….well, it hasn’t worked out so well.

What happened first was that hundreds of experienced field operations officers were Shanghied from CIA to staff the new ODNI, and layer upon layer of coordination and management were placed in the way of CIA field operations officers with the overall effect of fewer operations officers being assigned to overseas stations and bases, fewer experienced hands actually being engaged in HUMINT and politics rather than the need to get out there and get one’s hands dirty trying to elicit, steal, or recruit others to steal essential items of foreign intellgience information, made CIA’s job far more difficult than ever.

Then, fewer CIA officers were assigned abroad, since there were so few around, once all the positions at the ODNI were filled.  Many things slipped through the cracks…North Korea attempt at exploding a nuke a while back, the expansion of the Taliban in Pakistan, the deeper entrenchment of Islamists within Pakistan’s ISI, international piracy, Russia expanding its overseas diplomatic efforts, China doing likewise, instability across South Asia, problems among the Euros, and on and on down the list.

Instead of focusing on future issues, CIA with an extremely limited personnel base was hard pressed to keep up with current intelligence…more the job of CNN or Sky News..current intelligence.  But, unable to press personnel and assets against future issues, CIA has, as it has been stripped of officers, professionals, expertise,  borne the brunt of criticism when something important slips through the cracks…like this week’s North Korean nuke test.

As  the ODNI began to involve itself in intelligence programs, setting boundaries, setting goals, and often controlling who was assigned where and how much funding or how little funding many programs were to receive, in essence making decisions that would best be made by the DCI, the process gets muddier and muddier and the results less and less successful.

Put the blame where it belongs.  And it is not out at the G.H.W. Bush Center for Intelligence in Northern Virginia.  It is downtown…at the ODNI, at the White House, and within the halls of Congress.

Now, we have the Director of National Intelligence coming to the conclusion that the ODNI should decide who will be or will not be CIA’s Chief’s of Station overseas.

For decades, the CIA Chief of Station in each country was directly answerable to the Director of CIA, the DCI.  Bill Donovan established this innovative management style with the OSS.  it worked.  After CIA was established in 1947, this process was maintained.  Thus, one step away from the President, each COS was tasked with enabling covert intelligence activities in each country under their watch.  Back home, in McLean, at the Agency’s campus, the desk officer, the branch cheif and area division chief provided support, sent out tasking, and managed the most sensitive clandestine operations, but the COS could, would, and most often did, maintain direct communications with the Director of CIA.

In the 1990′s the arrival of “centers” at CIA to look at proliferation, drugs, terrorism, and the like, often had a COS being operationally controlled by folks other than the designated Division Chief, and often had several layers of coordination blocking that traditional direct communication between a COS and the DCI…with predictable results.  Add to all of this, the ODNI…and area intelligence officers for various nations, regions and topics…far removed from the face-time on the street real life intelligence collection, and there is more potential for error, not less, as each upper level attempts to control events thousands of miles away having little knowledge or understanding of events on the ground.

Now, DNI Blair has made it known that he wishes to choose his own representatives abroad instead of relying only on CIA station chiefs.  Instead of coordinating clandestine intelligence operations the DNI now wants to run them. Another layer of coordination…

From a professional point of view, not a good idea, not a good idea at all.

Too many cooks…

This is not going to make foreign intelligence activities more streamlined.  It will make them more convoluted, more prone to error, and more far more politicized, and will send a strong message to CIA that CIA is just one of a dozen or so US government entities engaged in intelligence acvtivities overseas, nothing special, nor reason to hone tradecraft or enhance skill sets…somebody in washington has a better idea…or so they say.  What a wonderful way to engender professionalism in the field.

Our ability to spot, assess, develop, recruit and run foreign assets depends on experienced operations officers who are facile with foreign languages, exposed to many cultures and are comfortable operating within the same, and have a knack, acquired by experience of years, for getting inside the heads of foreign officials.  Political appointees are not the best candidates for this vital task.  One merely has to look at the use of Joe Wilson in the run up to the Iraq War to get an indication that political appointees cannot perform to the desired levels of expertise.

The COS in each overseas Embassy is sometimes operating alone, sometimes with a mere handful of officers, sometimes with a huge allotment of personnel…but the one thing each COS brings to the Country Team is that experience in intense, face to face, intimate HUMINT operations.  A novice, or a political appointee with an agenda, is more likely to produce fewer good results, perhaps a disaster or two, than an experienced fiend operations officer with skin in the game.   Looking back at the former DCI John Deutch’s effort to staff all overseas stations and bases according to a PC staffing chart…so many whites, so many minorities, so many women…a disaster, to say the least.  HUMINT is not the same as setting up a local school board, or establishing a committee to run the annual office picnic.  Once has the expertise or one does not.  Gender and ethnicity can enhance HUMINT operations, but gender and ethnicity are not the end all be all.  Experience counts.  Experience is acquired.  Experience cannot be dictated by a personnel officer sitting in a cubicle on the thrid floor back home.

There are no guarantees when it comes to the process…spotting, assessing, developing, recruiting and running foreign assets…no guarantees at all.  But make the COS a junior partner, and make CIA overall a junior partner, and we can look at all sorts of surprises coming our way…and soon.

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