How Brennan’s Proposed Reforms Will Cripple the CIA

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director John Brennan’s plan to reshape his organization into a series of mission centers, largely scrapping the traditional boundaries between the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) and the National Clandestine Service (NCS), was met with applause from top intelligence community (IC) officials. However, since the Church Commission, never has a single action so threatened the mission of the CIA. Consolidation of collectors and analysts into clusters modeled on the problematic Counterterrorism Center will taint intelligence through the introduction of greater analytic bias, erode crucial checks and balances relying on the DI’s strategic focus, and duplicate efforts already present elsewhere in the IC alone. Each of the aforementioned issues would be reason enough to reconsider the shift. Together, the changes promise disaster for an agency and IC struggling to keep pace with myriad global threats.Through most of its history, the CIA preached the necessity of a division between collection and analysis by arguing that the DI’s access to the identities and positions of NCS sources could color analyst judgments about the veracity and consequence of the intelligence gathered. Knowledge of a particular source’s occupation access to potential intelligence could lead analysts to lend the source’s statements undue credibility, as occurred with discredited Iraqi asset Curveball’s claiming to be a chemical engineer with experience in Saddam Hussein’s WMD program. The erosion of barriers between the DI and NCS will exacerbate this issue in sensitive instances in which a source’s background is difficult to verify due to a restrictive operational environment. This will culminate in an introduction of unacceptable bias on high-priority issues and decrease the quality of finished intelligence products.Mission centers such as the Counterterrorism Center (CTC) inevitably reflect the CIA’s pervasive bias towards operations and collection, ensuring that the focus remains fixed on the tactical level rather than the DI’s strategic focus. Reports from the New York Times and Pro Publica illustrate how effective CTC is in its tactical roles of running down a kill list and employing its drones. However, despite a name that suggests otherwise, CTC’s strategic impact on the counterterrorism mission is largely a negative one: interviews with Yemeni tribal leaders in The Week reveal how its efforts added fuel to popular discontent that sparked President Saleh’s downfall. Had the analytical and operational components remained separate, as they should, it is possible that the DI would not have raised objections to the possibility of severe political blowback resulting from such operations.Brennan’s argument for the consolidation, though citing broad inefficiencies, hinges on the cyber realm, and he presents a valid point about the singular nature of such a mission. Intelligence gathering and analysis in cyberspace requires individuals with unique skills in driving collection of intelligence and later synthesizing highly technical information into layman’s terms to create a usable product. Such a talent pool is understandably shallow, and segmenting highly versatile and capable computer scientists and engineers into traditional roles makes little sense, especially given that the separation’s sole intent is to protect the integrity of human intelligence products. Yet restructuring the entire CIA to solve an issue easily addressed by creating just one mission center is a bit like tearing down a house for the purpose of remodeling one room.Unique cyber fusion efforts incorporating strengths of several IC members have met with great success. Wired’s report on joint efforts to hack into Apple devices and the New York Times’ allegations of CIA involvement in the creation of Stuxnet credibly indicate collaboration between the National Security Agency and the CIA on thorny technical issues. This existing partnership presents a natural solution. With ongoing scrutiny over the Snowden documents’ revelation of far-reaching abuses of power at Fort Meade, the NSA should be absorbed into the CIA, where full advantage can be taken of both agencies’ capabilities while placing the NSA under the harsh, Church Committee-imposed restrictions on domestic collection. If a wholesale reshaping of the IC to deal with future threats is what Brennan wants, this is the best way to deal with it. His decision to limit the restructuring to his own agency rather than lobbying the Director of National Intelligence for sweeping change is an indicator that Brennan covets more the carte blanche afforded him by creating aggressive and operationally cavalier mission centers.This decision will have consequences beyond the CIA’s strategic capabilities and it also threatens to create a dangerous brain-drain at Langley. The head of the National Clandestine Service resigned in objection to the proposed changes, and “friction and discontent” reported within the directorate’s ranks is a sure signal that more senior-level resignations are to follow. This means decades of area and tradecraft knowledge leaving at once, and such experience is not easily replaceable, no matter how much efficiency it might create. In that way, Brennan’s reforms echo the characteristics of the Counterterrorism Center he so cherishes in that they threaten to discard hard-won experience for singular, tactical gains, strategically imperiling the nation in the long term.