Thanks to Southern Appeal.
ROBERT BAER–Former CIA field officer and author of the spy thriller Blow the House Down
The CIA has been under political assault since the early 1970s. It was also badly managed, and the agency became an ungainly bureaucracy. It didn’t just happen under George W.; it’s been going on for decades. It got to the point where you could be an officer on the front between Afghanistan and Pakistan, living in a tent for three years, hunting down bin Laden, and there could be a logistics guy back at headquarters who takes his kids to soccer practice on Saturday mornings and gets promoted faster.
What is needed is to put back in place a professional cadre. The CIA may say they are bringing in great people. That may be true. But do these people know anything about intelligence? No. It’s not something you learn with a master’s in international relations. It takes years and years of assessing sources. Intelligence collection is a profession.
To rebuild the agency, you need to take an insider like Stephen Kappes [former deputy CIA director of operations] and put him in charge of management decisions. He’s going to know, very simply, who the frauds are, who the good people are. He may have to bring in people who have retired and tell them, “I need you. Come back for three years.” And you need to make sure that the good people are going to the hot spots. You have to stop sending everyone to Baghdad. After that? You have to have somebody implement a long-term program to take account of the way the world is changing–weapons proliferation, what kind of cover you need and what sort of security clearance you really need to work at the CIA. How do you hire a Pakistani Urdu speaker who immigrated here when he was 6 years old and get him through a security exam? Under the old rules, he’s got too much baggage.
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