It’s been revealed via the congressional report and other sources that the CIA had virtually no one on the ground in Iraq serving us any useful intelligence predicate to the invasion. Almost all the intelligence info generated and relied on was second, third and 4th hand from other intellgence agencies or from highly questionable defectors in our own country.
I’ve heard some claim the CIA has gone into a risk averse crouch, and has essentially given up on a difficult task, as placing trusted resources in Islamic countries is very difficult given the quasi-tribal level of affiliations that are near impossible to penetrate, and the extreme level of hazard if detected.
Another partial reason given by some older (possibly bitter) intellgence officers off the record, is that part of the problem is that a “Mormon Mafia” culture has arisen in the convert intelligence ranks where the risk averse CIA has relied heavily on Mormon recruits for some time now, because of their generally spotless backgrounds, foreign language skills, and familarity with different cultures via their missionary activities.
As the Mormon recruits have risen through the ranks over the past few decades to administrative positions, some claim this has led to a bureaucratic culture where it is very difficult to earnestly recruit and retain resources that aren’t politically conservative and squeaky clean lifestyle wise, and can pass the Mormon adminstrator’s seal of approval for hiring. Whether this is true or false I have no idea, but some older officers stand by this assertion as to why recruiting officers that could plausibly blend in is very diffcult, as many potential recruits are turned away at the door of the screening process if their backgrounds. social mores and lifestyle preferences aren’t in line with “Reagan country” conservatism, and one of the few groups that can meet these criteria are Moron Missionaries.
Is this an absurd, bigoted, assertion or does it contain any truth?
I know that while I was serving my mission (in South America) one friend was saying he was aiming at the CIA later and felt his langugae skills + mission background would be a plus. That’s my entire first-hand knowledge of anything like this.
But I thought it was an official years ago that prevented the CIA from recruiting human intelligence with a shady past. While that makes a lot of sense for US recruits, it makes less sense for contacts in (say) Iraq and Afghanistan. Then again, I’m having trouble finding a link for that too.
This is not news story. This griping was personally heard and witnessed by me and involved an informal gathering of a few older, moderately high level retired intelligence officers discussing the agency, and trading some war stories. The tone of the concern was not anti-Mormon as such, but was more a serious concern/gripe that the attitudinal wordview of that background was very pervasive at fairly high levels in the intelligence services, and made it difficult to recruit more offbeat, but potentially effectively agents.
There was also a mention made of this happening in an (IIRC) Atlantic article from a few years ago, about the difficulty of recuiting spies, and there were examples cited of some potentially excellent and very well educated US citizen grad student recruits with mutliple foreign language skills , foreign living experience and multi-ethnic heritage, being bounced from applying as agents because they had lived together with another person before marriage (or similar stuff) , brought their background and moral character into question. The author did not name Mormons specifically, but dropped enough hints in the article about the “group” he was referring to, that it was clear who he was talking about.
In looking at how I’ve framed this GD question it occurs to me it really is too hearsayish to be a competent GD. I’m going to ask a mod to close this thread down. There’s not really enough “there” to be worthy of debating or inquiring into.