Post by Moses on Apr 12, 2005 7:25:39 GMT -5
April 12, 2005
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
More Spies, Worse Intelligence?
By LINDSAY MORAN
Washington — AS the Senate begins confirmation hearings today for John D. Negroponte as director of national intelligence, it would do well to ask his opinion of President Bush's decision in November to have Porter Goss, the director of central intelligence, increase by 50 percent the number of clandestine officers at the C.I.A. Certainly, we need more and better spies. But as a former operations officer at the agency, I would argue that a mandate to beef up the clandestine service - also known as the directorate of operations - by a rather arbitrary percentage within a short time is a potentially insurmountable task and could well result in hiring practices that hurt the agency rather than help it.
It's not that the agency is having trouble finding recruits. A C.I.A. spokeswoman, Anya Guilsher, said that last year the agency handled 138,000 applicants, "allowing us to be very selective." The problem is that, more often than not, the agency uses precisely the wrong criteria in choosing whom to hire.
For example, a second-generation-American applicant of Middle Eastern descent, someone who might possess the needed language skills and ability to assimilate into societies to which the agency desperately needs access, is inevitably viewed less favorably than a white male candidate from the Midwest who lacks language skills or the personality traits to fit into a foreign culture. The stereotypical "full-fledged Americans" still appeal more to the agency, because of their perceived innate sense of patriotism and a strong willingness to serve.
But the C.I.A. is not the military. Clandestine officers achieve their means through manipulation, not might. And while a love of America is all well and good, it's generally not going to help an officer persuade a foreigner to betray his own country.
In my training class in 1999, there was not a single person of Middle Eastern descent, nor was there anyone fluent in Arabic, let alone Pashto or Urdu. One fellow trainee of Indian descent was constantly criticized for maintaining contacts with her "foreign" relatives, including her parents, who had retained dual citizenship. She understandably became fed up with the distrust, and resigned after a few years. Thus the C.I.A. lost one of its most qualified young officers.
Some will point out that my training pre-dated Sept. 11, 2001. But it was precisely the agency's culture of distrust of anyone with a foreign background (compounded by an astounding lack of foresight as to the nature of our enemies) that contributed to the colossal intelligence failure of 9/11.
In 1998, when I started with the C.I.A., the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, and his underlings knew that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda were primary threats to America. Yet only a couple of officers from my class were sent to the agency's counterterrorist center. The rest of us felt sorry for these newly minted spies, as we knew that the center was considered a dumping ground for second-rate officers who were viewed as undesirable by the more traditional geographic-area divisions.
So, of those 100,000-plus applicants last year, how many are truly suited to be C.I.A. operations officers? Beyond patriotism, language skills and an ability to assimilate into a foreign country, a good officer relies on a particular set of personality traits: he must be smart and able to think quickly on his feet; he must possess uncommon intuition and unflappable common sense; he must be outgoing, likable yet firm; he must have integrity, but also be willing to blur his moral and ethical parameters such that he doesn't mind preying upon people, asking them to commit treason and then ending the relationship once they have outlived their usefulness.
Therein lies another danger of rapidly beefing up the clandestine service in quantity while potentially turning a blind eye to quality. Since 9/11, the C.I.A. has embarked on an unprecedented recruiting and training campaign. Yet how many of those young officers will stay the course?
After all, in my training class, more than 10 percent left within five years - most of them after 9/11. We used to joke about people on what we called the "five-year plan": recruits who would join the agency, go through two years of costly training, serve one overseas tour and then promptly quit. Some left the agency for personal reasons, but more often they resigned because of a disheartening realization that the directorate of operations was poorly managed to the point of near dysfunction.
I never thought I would become one of those people on the five-year plan. But I did. After one overseas tour I resigned, almost exactly five years after I'd joined. An inside look at the clandestine service had me convinced that this was no place to make a meaningful career, or any significant contribution to my country. I was not the only one who felt this way. As one former officer tells me: "It was the less accomplished that stayed behind. Most of us saw the writing on the wall and found the work uninspiring and unchallenging. The careerists we met were cynical, bored and negative."
Simply put, the directorate of operations needs to clean up its own act before it can recruit and, more important, retain quality employees.
Part of the problem is that the agency's culture rewards quantity over quality. Career advancement depends on the number of foreigners an officer is able to recruit, rather than the quality of information derived from them.
What if an operations officer made only one recruitment during the course of his career - but that foreign agent were, say, part of Osama bin Laden's inner circle? That would be an enormous benefit to the nation. But the years required to make such a plum recruitment would render this officer's career stagnant. Conversely, a clandestine officer who recruits a dozen potentially useless foreign assets like truck drivers and falafel-stand owners with no real information but a lot of opinions is likely to have a successful career. The recent revelations about the faulty information passed along by an Iraqi scientist known as "Curveball" should warn us what can happen when cultivating an apparently productive source takes priority over looking at his information with proper skepticism.
Since taking office last September, Mr. Goss has made good on his promise to enact sweeping changes in the way the C.I.A. does business (though perhaps not in the most diplomatic of manners). To his credit, during his confirmation hearings, he rated the agency at a 3 on a scale of 1 to 10. He was also forthright in saying that the prediction by his predecessor, Mr. Tenet, that it would take five years to build back the clandestine service was a gross underestimate.
Mr. Goss should again be forthright with the president and the public by stating that a blanket mandate to enlarge the clandestine service quickly could have disastrous consequences. If confirmed as intelligence czar, Mr. Negroponte should support him. Before the agency begins hiring willy-nilly, it needs to pay more attention to quality in all the ways in which it conducts business, including the ways it recruits and rewards new spies.
Lindsay Moran is the author of "Blowing My Cover: My Life as a C.I.A. Spy."