The aging CIA is badly in need of streamlining and reforms, according to more than a half-dozen former and current agency officials interviewed by United Press International.
"You want some really good changes made, not just a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the Titanic," said former State Department and CIA counter-terrorism official Larry Johnson.
The sharpest criticisms center on faulty analysis, too many layers of bureaucracy, too much movement between "accounts" or assignments and too many managers.
The criticisms come as the Senate and House intelligence committees gear up for a single joint review of U.S. intelligence operations-focused on the U.S. response to terror over the last 16 years, and in particular on the Sept. 11 attacks and other Osama bin Laden operations.
As UPI recently reported, some in the intelligence community are skeptical about what the inquiry will achieve.
One longtime former agency official said the CIA has already undergone several facelifts: "We were reorganized along regional lines, then we were reorganized under functional lines. The point is that any new reorganization has got to result in a better product."
No matter what happens on Capitol Hill, reforms are badly needed, according to several current and former CIA officials who agreed to speak to UPI on condition of anonymity.
One very senior former CIA official said that prior to Sept. 11, the CIA had received "a strategic warning" of the attacks, which the CIA was unable to translate "to a tactical warning" which would have readied the nation for war.
He faulted the agency's analytical system, which he called "cumbersome," adding, "We collect a mountain of data every day, but we've lost the ability to connect the dots."
He commented that CIA Director George Tenet "goes around boasting that the analysts send to the White House a daily threat matrix of 50-100 targets. That's laughable. That's like saying in physics that there are 100 elemental particles. It shows you don't know physics."
But one senior CIA analyst, still active, said analysis is being undercut in the organization because it isn't on the fast track to promotion.
"For one thing, CIA bureau chiefs, who are really just editors, are paid more than analysts and have much more chance for promotion. They're management and analysts aren't."
Another agency analyst agreed that the career track made the job unattractive. "For analysts there is no way to go up." This inequity occurs in spite of the fact that the analyst's job "is key to processing on-ground information in key target areas." Determining the nature and degree of threats -- like that posed by al Qaida -- is "one of the first and foremost tasks of analysis," he said.
He also criticized the analytical process: "The bureau chief gets a paper, say on the economy of Egypt. He then edits and rewrites and returns the report to an analyst who incorporates corrections." But the report can ping-pong back and forth "three or four, even five times before the bureau chief sends it to the division chief who heads a geographical area such as the Near East, Russia, Central Asia, or South Asia," he said.
From the division chief the report goes to the CIA's Publication Board, and after approval there, gets forwarded to the CIA director and who then sends it to the White House, the analyst said.
"It's a ridiculous system," he said.
In addition, agency analysts need to write more, one serving CIA officer said. Since internal CIA magazines were abolished, "there are not that many outlets for analysts to publish in," he said.
Writing is important in honing analytical skills because "writing shows you the gaps in your knowledge and allows you to judge of the consistency of your sources," he said.
Vagueness was another "disease" of a lot of agency analysis, he said. "Analysis that is going to be used by decision-makers has to have a definite point of view. It has to commit itself and say, if this happens, then these three other things will happen," he said.
Others also identified the lack of "direct customers" for the CIA's product as a problem.
One current agency official said the Department of Defense has the Defense Intelligence Agency, which writes directly for DOD policy-makers, just as the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in the State Department writes directly for the Secretary of State.
But the CIA "does not have intelligence bodies that interact directly with policy people," he said, adding that the agency "doesn't support the National Security Council directly. They don't even keep the same hours."
He said the NSC needs its own intelligence group: "direct staff in support of policy-makers."
Another factor that makes for a "bad product" is too many layers between supervisors and employees. A current serving official said: "An office director, who is management, often has two or three layers of administration between himself or herself and chief analysts. There is too little communication."
He said the State Department had been successful in eliminating many of those layers, while the agency has not. "The CIA is vast and corporate. When you get to the deputy director level, you have below you a huge edifice. I'm talking about thousands and thousands of people as opposed to about 300 at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research."
According to the very former senior agency official, the chief defect of the CIA at present is that its senior people are inexperienced and were not shaped by confronting a major intelligence challenge like the Cold War.
"People handling only peripheral accounts (minor geographic areas) have been moved to senior positions," he said.
George Tenet, the agency's director is case in point, he said, describing the former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer as having "only limited experience."
But another former senior official strongly disagreed: "Tenet is an intelligence pro. He's got brilliant analytical ability." Almost every source interviewed by UPI agreed on one thing -- there is much too much shuffling of personnel between assignments or "accounts."
A former longtime CIA operative in Asia said a glaring defect of current agency structure is that new recruits, many of them very bright, with masters degrees, spend too little time at one assignment and have too little exposure to the culture, language and political leadership of the target country they're covering.
"As it stands now, people from the (Directorate of Operations) switch accounts too often," he said.
"You spend six months mastering Arabic, and because you're good at what you do, you're moved to Venezuela, and your knowledge of Arabic is wasted," he said.
A currently serving official said that the average assignment on an account is "about two years, average." This should be increased to between five or even 10 years, he said.
Former State Department and CIA counter-terrorism official Larry Johnson agreed:
"I think we rush things. I think the best way to go is to use more business cover. Have an agent open in business in Panama, for example, then stay on the account for 10 years. That way you'll get somewhere."
As it stands now, everyone just wants to advance up the corporate ladder, he said.
Johnson and others cited the lack of ability of the current agency to hire foreign nationalities. "We need to be like Russia, hire the nationalities that can blend in and don't worry about getting soiled by hiring thugs if that's what it takes," he said.
"Certain agency people turn up your noses if you try and hire a drug smuggler," said a former high-level operative.
"But the fact is that drugs and terrorism almost always occur together.
"Either you are willing to soil your hands a bit for the sake of the information, or you're going to think well of yourself and get blind-sided the way we did on Sept. 11."
He added that in hiring people he described as "thugs" the important thing is control, "by getting something on them. In the old days we'd make them sign receipts for the money they got, and if they thought of straying off the reservation, they knew we'd mail those receipts to quarters where they would count."
Johnson said that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) "is absolutely the best U.S. intelligence agency. They deal with scum bags all the time, but they get great info."
But CIA spokeswoman Anya Guilsher said the agency's past restrictions on hiring "controlled assets" have been exaggerated by the press.
In the wake of the murder in Guatemala of Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, a Mayan resistance leader, by a former paid CIA informant, then CIA Director John Deutch issued 1996 guidelines that required CIA field officers to obtain prior headquarters approval before "establishing a relationship with an individual who had committed serious crimes or human rights abuses or other repugnant acts," as a CIA statement put it.
But even with those guidelines in place the CIA "never turned down a field request to recruit an asset in a terrorist organization," said Guilsher. "We don't avoid contact with individuals regardless of their past who may have information about terrorist activities," she added.
The only change since Sept. 11 is that the matter of signing off on recruitment "was pushed down to a field management level," Guilsher said.
But another former very senior agency official said the old Deutch rules had created the wrong kind of atmosphere in the agency.
"It wasn't what they said. It was the message they sent -- that hiring the wrong asset could backfire and jeopardize your career."
Hopefully that is over, he said.
