In order to prevent this being a problem, United States policy since 1948 has been that all state secrets will be changed whenever a new director of the CIA is inducted into the position.
^
Yeah I think the poster meant, “national policy” not internal administrative measures.:rolleyes:
One of the defining
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Let’s look at it from a different angle: Bradley Manning was a lowly Army private, just barely out of boot camp, who had access to Millions of classified documents at his fingertips.
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Low level staff who handle communications and the like often have access to huge amounts of stuff. One of Tom Clancy’s novels deals directly with that.
One of the primary skills a leader must have, or at least an effective leader is the ability to delegate, supervise, control and trust his subordinates to do his job. Trying to know everything is counter productive to that. What a good DCI would do is ensure that he knows or is told all matters that he really needs to know. A DCI does not need to know (usually) when and where a certain dead drop is going to be made. If the CIA decides to pop the leader of of say, Slovakia, then he better damn well have given his clearance.
Also, remember that the CIA doesn’t know everything. Aside from not predicting things like the fall of the USSR or the invasion of Kuwait, Robert Baer states that the CIA doesn’t follow up on all kinds of things if they don’t think they are important, contrary to the notion that they are omniscient.
Keep in mind that the DCI is a presidential appointee, and usually not career CIA. The Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (DDCI) is really the top spook - well, in the CIA, anyway - and the one who ultimately makes sure the power bill gets paid and the ink in the poison gas pens refilled.
President Kennedy was supposed to have said something like, “What do I do now?”, or something similar when he first sat in the Oval Office. (It was a light-hearted joke.)
As the new CIA Director, I’d say, “Where are the aliens kept?”, laugh, and get down to business.
Need to know - is the big kicker and strictly observed with professionals. I’ve maintained a Top Secret clearance for many years plus SCI (special compartmented information) in very specific areas. My access to “stuff” is really limited.
The most recent CIA director didn’t even know how to keep his e-mails to his mistress private, so I’d say No.
I had a clearance for some work I did. The information I saw was directly limited to what I needed to know to do my job.
I imagine as boss, he could ask for whatever he wanted. If the underlings did not want him to know, for valid reasons or because they suspected the information would be misused or put lives in danger, they could go over his head, say to the senate intelligence committee. If they had no valid reason to not tell him… well either way, they should also polish their resumees.
The problem is - if the top boss is briefed on everything, in detail, then there’sa heckuva lot of crap floating around all the way up the ladder that people really don’t need to and should need to know. I suspect the more detailed and specific the information on any project the fewer people know about it. I.e. if there is a project going on and they guy running it needs to know the legal boundaries, they will assign a lawyer from staff that will be briefed and decide what’s legal. He won’t tell his boss the details unless there’s a really good reason to. And so on… Compartmentalization.
Of course, if you are on the senate committee, someone has to give enough details to explain what the billion dollars is for = “something that makes a really big bang” or “something that can deliver a small weapon anywhere in the world undetected”.
Also, the CIA director is rather like the President–or like the CEO of a a large company. Any one of the three could most likely demand to know anything about anything within the organization, but the job is too big to get into details. Not to say the CIA director doesn’t satisfy his curiosity once in a while by asking for the Lee Harvey Oswald file, but spending a lot of time trolling through the byways of the intelligence system isn’t an effective way to do the job.
The CIA Director is a bureaucrat, an administrator. For those of you who have experience working within large corporations or government organizations, you must realise that the director probably doesn’t know shit about daily operations.
He reads reports, priorities are made by the people under him who may know a bit more about the issue. These managers are expected to solve the minor problems themselves. Problems that reach the Director are problems you didn’t solve, and that is a bad thing.
The director must also maintain ‘plausible deniability’. Meaning that if he doesn’t know about it, he can’t testifiy about it. It leaves open the room to fire those that do know, without culpability.
To see the CIA director as an all-knowing, super spy is laughable. This is a Hollywood invention. The Director of the CIA could just as easily be the Director of the Dept of the Interior, or Labor.
/me falls off chair laughing
So it’s basically a political position, plus making general policy decisions and fixing major snafus, and little else?
What are the chances of a low-level clerk, who processes tons of info each day (and therefore in the know about nearly everything) actually rising to the level of DCIA? Believe it or not, I’m considering submitting a genuine application (if only for the lulz) since I do need to find a real job soon.
I think the problem with Assange/Manning is they did not bother redacting the names, details, and locations of actual active field agents, which is the material which is REALLY sensitive.
You would almost certainly have to first get a college degree. Then you apply for a job there. An entry-level job for a college graduate could very well lead to a high-level job, including that of the head of the C.I.A. or even becoming the DNI. But this is like saying that getting a job at a very large corporation after getting your M.B.A. could eventually lead to your being the CEO of that corporation.
Jami Miscik started as an analyst and became a Deputy Director. She would be a pretty plausible DCIA.
Exactly. The guys that run big organizations are good at - running big organizations. They probably have a bit of grounding in the business, but generally, if you look at major companies, they are run by their accounts, or their sales group. Rarely are they run by the engineers or other techies. It’s a different mindset.
Petraeus distinguished himself by keeping several different forces running efficiently, enuring the supply team did their job, the patrol teams and campaign forces followed their objectives, etc.
From what I’ve seen, the good ones have a technique - “as an underling, you’ve come to me with an issue. What are the choices for solutions, what are the ramifications of each choice?” That requires input up the line from the techs.
Or the managing committee determines a project or initiative, guided by him; then the appropriate underlings head off to do what is needed, organizing their own groups to do their part. “We need to find ways to increase on-the-ground intelligence in Iran”, or “We need to see how the drones can be used by the COlumbians”.
He certainly does not need to know the details of who is infiltrating the Kremlin or the Beijing government and how…
Ironically, as least as far as the OP goes, I think Queen Elizabeth knows, or was told about, more than any of the DCIs the post cites.
She’s been getting full classified briefings from the British PM or a designate pretty much weekly since she became Queen. That’s all the secrets the Brits knew, for the last 60 years. I can’t think of anyone else with such a history. At least that’s true if she’s at all curious and serious. My sense is she’s probably both.
I seriously doubt that MI5 would disclose matters of utmost security to the freaking Queen, even if asked. She has no true political power, does she? Why would she need to know? That’s the job of the Prime Minister and Parliament, no?
Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that the Queen gets, what the hell, a DAILY intelligence briefing as comprehensive as the one the President of the U.S. gets. That still isn’t “all the secrets the Brits know/knew.” It’s a daily assessment of what’s going on in the world and how that affects Britain. It’s not a NOC list, the codes to the nukes, a list of covert operations, or anything like that. And a lot of times what’s in the daily briefing turns out not to be true, or incomplete, or consists of possible threats that later go away on their own.
As the saying goes, intelligence is for when you don’t have facts.
I don’t know about “matters of utmost security,” but from all I’ve read, she is very well-informed and has been known to ask for additional info if she’s not satisfied by what she’s gotten in her typical briefing. Peter Hennessey in The Secret State, a very interesting book about British planning for World War III, found since-declassified memos showing she had been briefed on nuclear weapons policy from the beginning of her reign. She is the head of state and is commander-in-chief of the armed forces; many Prime Ministers have said they value her advice, given how long she’s held the job. So she knows what’s going on.
Knowing that she got a weekly briefing, and you are an historian, what would you like, 60 years of her, or one or terms of an American president?