The Intel Shakeup

MSN is carrying a Washington Post article about DCI Porter Goss and the various difficulties he's having with reforming the Central Intelligence Agency. It's worth reading, though you have to read through the lines.

For example, compare these two passages. First:

"The CIA is like a lot of other bureaucracies," said former Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), a friend of Goss. "They don't like change and are somewhere between resistant and noncooperative."

And second:

Hoping to quell fears that the posts would be filled with political allies, Goss quickly promoted from within. But he has had difficulty retaining senior leaders. Most of those departing are doing so on their own initiative, not Goss's.

In the clandestine service alone, known as the "Directorate of Operations," Goss has lost one director, two deputy directors, and at least a dozen department heads, station chiefs and division directors -- many with the key language skills and experience he has said the agency needs.

Now, let's think about this. Who's going to be the most accustomed to business as usual? Is it going to be the junior guys, or the senior leaders? Who's more likely to quit over changes in operational and strategic policy, a junior case officer/analyst, or a station chief? If DCI Goss is shaking up the "business as usual" crowd at the CIA, I'm not surprised at all that the "business as usual" crowd is bailing out.

I've done a couple of posts lately (link, link) about the various bittersweet dividends of the end of the Cold War. In that first post, I talked about the mixed results of American military entities adjusting from a Cold War inventory to a World War IV inventory. Well, the intelligence community is no different. Let's look at a couple of recent examples of a Cold War strategy failing us in the War on Terror.

In September of 2001, the CIA failed to stop a massive al Qaeda attack against New York and Washington, D.C. This was a failure on the part of the CIA.

In 2002, Colin Powell went to the U.N. Security Council and made a strong case regarding Iraq's WMD programs. I personally believe, like everyone did prior to the invasion of Iraq, that the weapons existed then, and probably still exist somewhere; unfortunately, the intel community, led by the CIA, lost track of what Iraq did and didn't have, and where it all went. This was a failure on the part of the CIA.

Now, is this a blanket denunciation of the CIA? Of course not. The CIA is still the gold standard, the leader in American intelligence gathering; and along with Mossad and MI6, it's one of the finest intelligence organizations in the world. Even so, there's obviously a deficiency in the American intelligence community, part of which is apparently due to the obsolete configuration, structure, and culture of an intelligence agency built around countering communism.

The CIA does great work, and they're responsible for more of our security in this nation than most of us could possibly fathom; even so, it's time for some changes, and anyone who's not willing to sign on for those changes should either quit, or prepare to be relieved of their duties.

Thus saith the Fly.