John Ratcliffe, Trump’s appointee as CIA director, says that he wants officers who are “willing to go to places no one else can go and do things that no one else can do”. This, one might have thought, is a straightforward enough description of any intelligence operative worth his keep, just as country analysts in Langley must be really fluent in foreign languages to do their jobs effectively. Certainly, Ratcliffe seems keen to employ only the best at the CIA, and has offered eight months of pay and benefits to those who prefer to leave.

Yet barely had Ratcliffe opened his mouth than he faced furious attack. The CIA’s carefully cultivated friends in the press — media relations, Hollywood included, are the agency’s outstanding skill — assailed the director and the White House for a dangerous misstep. “He might be right that a leaner CIA could be meaner,” proclaimed David Ignatius in The Washington Post. “But how can he be sure the buyouts aren’t paring more muscle than fat?” Actually one must hope that many, very many, will take their chance to leave. The sad truth, confirmed by my extended work for one CIA director and many encounters in the field, is that it lost its way years ago — and now increasingly relies on secrecy to conceal its decay.

The CIA does have plenty of people who serve in “stations” overseas. That is a dramatic term, for those places are actually humdrum offices in US diplomatic offices in foreign countries. That is where CIA officers work when they serve abroad, in full view of their host country’s intelligence services, which can keep them under constant observation if they so wish. That happens in China and Russia, of course, but also in places like Athens. Because Greece is a country where CIA employees have been attacked even after the Cold War, officers stationed there are still monitored for their own good.

It is therefore obvious that officers working out of embassies find it impossible to “do things that no one else can do” — or indeed very much at all. In allied countries, CIA officers need not be detected, let alone followed, because they are “declared” to their host country. Not that this really matters: everyone knows who they are anyway.