The GAO said: “We have not actively audited the CIA since the early 1960s, when we discontinued such work because the CIA was not providing us with sufficient access to information to perform our mission. . . . [W]e have made a conscious decision not to further pursue the issue.”
When the waste and stealing begin, effective clandestine operations end. The contracting game at the CIA has continued at full force and has even mutated into a faux industry that uses the jargon of real business. M&A, profit margins, and synergy are discussed as if this were a real American industry instead of a bunch of government contracting scams.
Working with human sources doesn’t take much money—just enough for agents’ pay, hotel rooms, airplane tickets. All the money forced into the system after the 9/11 terrorist attacks seemed to make it burst. Intelligence operations ran better before 9/11 simply because there was less money.
Citizens Against Government Waste published one of my articles, in which I suggested that CIA employees be given a whistleblower mechanism, the ability to contact cleared law enforcement officials when they see fraud and waste. The CIA currently has no whistleblower system.
Still, I’ve walked away after meetings with politicians in an optimistic mood. I’m using an alias and criticizing an intelligence service, yet I can meet some of the most influential people in America and discuss intelligence reform. In a country like ours, the lack of operational and financial accountability in the CIA cannot continue forever.
There’s a perception in Washington that the staffers on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees are former CIA employees who are beholden to the Agency. In fact, a minority of staffers are former CIA employees, and these people, having experienced the bureaucracy up close, are the ones most open to reform. The staffers on the Senate Intelligence Committee are more attuned to the democratic process because they work directly for individual senators. The staffers on the House Intelligence Committee, by contrast, are permanent employees of the committee and do not work directly for individual members of Congress. The reasoning seems to be that because a House member’s term is shorter, members’ personal staffs will have a harder time grasping complex intelligence issues and obtaining security clearances. The use of permanent employees without direct connection to elected politicians makes House staffers disconnected from the accountability that elections provide. They form a much more closed society, more closely linked to the CIA bureaucracy and resistant to intelligence reform.
Politicians can make a difference, although CIA dysfunction now thrives in the political conflict between left and right. Traditionally the CIA has been perceived as a gang of right-wingers seeking to topple leftist governments. Some regard it as the hand behind worldwide conspiracies and dirty tricks. The CIA actually encourages this viewpoint because underlying it is the assumption that the Agency is ruthlessly efficient. I wish it were efficient enough to aggressively confront leftist governments, but it’s not.
Many conservatives think the CIA just needs to be released from the confines of Democrat-imposed rules. In the last ten years, though, with its attacks on President Bush via the Plame incident, the Iraqi WMD, and leaks on interrogations/torture, the CIA seems to have become more a gang of left-wingers seeking to topple American conservatives. The torture issue is a good example of a left-versus-right conflict that prevents reform. When members of Congress attack each other over interrogation methods, they are unable to focus on reform of the main mission, which is to find spies who cooperate voluntarily. Politicians should come together and realize that CIA dysfunction means a failure to support presidents of either party.
Democrats tend to be less responsive to the need for intelligence reform because they have greater faith in the efficiency of government and are reluctant to believe that a top-down centralized bureaucracy can be dysfunctional. And for Democrats, the CIA has come to be a political ally and a lobbying group. Despite my efforts to make intelligence reform a bipartisan issue, nearly all of the articles I’ve written have been published in conservative media, and I have met mostly with conservatives politicians. Conservatives are quick to acknowledge dysfunction in government bureaucracy.
The difficulty in convincing people on the left of the importance of intelligence reform has been my biggest disappointment. It’s a shame because for President Obama, the uncertainties lie ahead. His success as a president, and whether he wins a second term or not, will depend, I believe, not on the economy or health care, but on the quality of human source intelligence he receives concerning threats to national security.
The second important group that can make a difference are journalists. Despite the growth of internet news and talk radio, the New York Times and the Washington Post retain enormous power. Their reporters have developed excellent sources among top CIA managers. These sources illegally provide classified information on such things as torture/interrogations and Iraq WMD intelligence failures, and the journalists in exchange will not attack the CIA bureaucracy because to do so would be to attack their sources. A member of the Senate Intelligence Committee told me that he met with CIA officials to propose improvements in clandestine operations, and the CIA fought back through a Washington Post column the very next day. By ignoring the issue of intelligence reform, journalists who cover the CIA build careers and win prizes, but the newspapers are failing their readers. The New York Times and the Washington Post are located in America’s two primary target cities for terrorism; they should help protect their readers by paying more attention to CIA dysfunction. The journalists who do write about the issue are nearly all political conservatives.
I’ve worked to bring recognition to the fact that the CIAʹs employees are good people, just poorly led. They are well-meaning, but they operate within a system that’s broken. A problem the CIA does not have is attracting talented, intelligent people; yet that is a problem the Agency claims to have. In response to criticism or to the latest intelligence failure, CIA management always says it just doesn’t have the talent it needs. DCI George Tenet said so repeatedly after 9/11. Leon Panetta said it shortly after his appointment as director, and then announced plans to recruit Arab Americans in Michigan.
But the CIA has always hired good people who want to do the best job they can. If the system were changed, they would get out and gather the intelligence we need, and they would start doing it overnight. Although few CIA officers actually speak foreign languages, most have a latent ability—some training, or a childhood language that hasn’t developed. It’s just that foreign languages aren’t necessary for advancement. Only English is needed at Headquarters and within American embassies.
With little operational or financial accountability, and little oversight from politicians or journalists, the CIA bureaucracy has evolved over the decades into a creature with its own priorities. Like any other life form, the CIA bureaucracy seeks first its own survival and growth. It’s a big, lazy creature, but it has the ability to leap up from its couch and viciously defend itself when it feels threatened. It doesn’t like to work hard, but knows that its survival and growth depend on creating the appearance of being busy. Any CIA operation that is revealed to the public shows the telltale signs: the Agency looks very active, a lot of people are involved, and large amounts of money are spent.
Often you’ll hear the CIA accused of being risk averse. I agree. Risk aversion is a complex concept, however. The Agency will sometimes conduct risky operations in order to achieve a more important goal: looking busy. An example of this type of operation is the Abu Omar operation, in which twenty-one CIA employees flew into Italy to abduct a single terrorist suspect who was already under surveillance by the Italian police. As an eminent scholar commented, it was “twenty-one people to get one fat Egyptian!” Those twenty-one people stayed in five-star hotels and chatted with Headquarters on open-line cell phones, all at great expense and with awful tradecraft. But it was a successful operation in that it spent a lot of money, made a lot of people look active, and suggested the CIAʹs willingness to take risk.
CIA officials are quick to deny that
