What's the actual competence level of CIA or other agencies’ clandestine officers?

Great Debates
1

In the popular media and popular opinion, the CIA and its various services including its clandestine service are typically portrayed in an almost mythically capable and competent fashion replete with lots of gee-whiz technological gadgetry, etc. Presumably the CIA has its choice of the top candidates from all fields and provides these uniquely capable and intelligent people with exceptional training and leadership to carry out their intelligence missions. See The Good Shepard, The Bourne Identity, The 007 Films, (I know, that’s MI-5, but you catch my drift) etc. for examples.

However, recent events have made me wonder. A 2006 memoir, The Interrogators from an Army reserve officer in military intelligence that spent a significant amount of time in Afghanistan interrogating captives was openly derisive of the, “clowns,” working for the, “Other Governmental Organization.” (CIA) He described how their rank-and-file clandestine officers operated in an amateurish and lackadaisical manner. Their interrogators routinely had no idea what was going on during the interrogation process with specific detainees, were generally ignorant of the relevance of various ethnic or racial backgrounds of detainees, interrogated detainees in a single unsophisticated fashion, and were constantly rotating staff between cushier assignments and the relative depravation of the conditions in Afghanistan.

In addition to being wrong about Iraq’s WMD status prior to the Iraq war, the CIA and the United States other intelligence organizations have reversed themselves on the history and present status of Iran’s nuclear program. Additionally, there is the episode regarding the destroyed videotapes showing, “severe interrogation techniques.” Not only are the tapes no longer secret, the path the CIA took to destroying them seems muddled.

Why would an organization like the CIA go out of its way to solicit opinions on the tapes (and reveal their existence at all) and then proceed to ignore the consensus of opinion regarding destroying those tapes? Furthermore, why wouldn’t it also maintain the secrecy of the destruction of the tapes? In short, the portrait painted by recent news coverage doesn’t seem to suggest an organization possessed by confident leadership or to overflowing with people capable of making good decisions and executing good plans.

Finally, why is the CIA putting up recruiting ads in airports and Life magazine?

https://www.cia.gov/careers/life-at-cia/view-our-advertising.html

I understand that every organization needs to invest something into recruitment and HR, but it doesn’t strike me that the agency is so overrun with well qualified applicants that they’re barricading the doors.

In short, what is a likely accurate view of the overall competence and capability of officers in the CIA or comparable United States intelligence agencies? Is my viewpoint biased towards the agency’s (public) failures against a larger body of more successful work? How selective is the CIA’s clandestine service? What are the factors that have contributed to the recent failures of our intelligence agencies?

2

It’s not your Daddy’s CIA that for certain.

Though, there is an important word you need to learn for when you read anything about covert ops. It’s called ‘Disinformation’.

3

I am sure the CIA is as competent and professionally diligent as every other government agency.

Tris

4

The moments when they’re bang-on in the zone and all that, we never hear about it.

5

And there in lie its strengths and weaknesses. An organizational maxim is that you can’t manage what you can’t measure. A major achievement of the 20th century was the development of meaningful measurements and statistics so that we could have equally meaningful management. When it comes to the gathering of data and the compilation of statistics, the federal government does an excellent job. There are still weaknesses in that gathering and compilation, but it should not overshadow the successes that the feds have made. And I think that the CIA does a very good job in this regard.

The problems of the CIA are more in the realm how do we use this information. And that will always be subject to political debate outside of the control of the CIA. The best that they can do is deliver as objective as possible assessments based on the data they have, which may or may not be sufficient depending on the problem at hand. And the level of objectivity is also subject to political considerations and strength of leadership.

A corollary to the above maxim is that some things must be managed that are difficult if not impossible to measure. But that management responsibility is more for those to whom the CIA reports.

Whenever I hear someone blather on about how the CIA is behind this or that conspiracy (which is not what this thread is about, I hear this more often off the boards), it is worth remembering that they just another government bureaucracy like all others. They have infinite demands, but limited resources. Not every budget request is approved, not every bureaucrat is competent and more than a few can be petty. And while the CIA may be behind a few conspiracies, that doesnt mean they still achieve the goals of that conspiracy.

In regards to the OP and clandestine officers, I think they will reflect their leadership. Leaders with an agenda will hire employees with the same agenda, for good or ill. The leadership under this administration has been slightly schizo to say the least, and I see that in their officers also. They have competing and contradictory agendas between finding out relevant facts and finding out facts that bolster their bosses’ agendas regardless of agreement with the first set. And that can overshadow competence and allow incompetence to rise. The latest NIE on Iran is a win of the former (i.e. relevant facts) over the latter, the previous estimate appears to have been the reverse.

In other words, the deputies are only as good as the sheriff.

6

And, of course, the CIA often gets blamed for what other agencies do, much as the FBI takes credit for what other law enforcement agencies do. The WMD status prior to the war was the microoffice of neocons, rather than the CIA as a whole.

7

I think the CIA is a bloated, usless organization, which is more interested in perpetuating itself than anything else. it (the CIA) has been responsible for misinforming the government, involving us in wars, and misinterpreting information. I am not at all impressed with this agencie’s record-it has very few agents that can speak the languages of the countries it attaempts to “analyze”; indeed, we were largely hoodwinked by Ahchmed Chalabi, because so few CIA agents knew anything at all about Iraq.
In sum, its an agency that has outlived its usefulness, and yet continues to suck resources from the taxpayers-in true Washington fashion. We will never be able to get rid of it. :eek:

8

As I understand things, the Neocon think tank… I keep thinking OSD, what was their name again? were the ones in love with Chalabi.

9

The question is about the clandestine officers, not the organization as a whole. And the answer, of course, is we don’t know. And if we did, we couldn’t tell you.

But here’s my WAG: it’s a decent job out of college. The pay isn’t great, but it’s OK. You need to be pretty squeaky clean to get it–especially with regard to drugs and foreign contacts. Ideally, you speak a second language fluently, but you have no particular affiliation to another country (a somewhat unusual combination). You’ve got to be willing to give up a lot of personal freedoms, like the ability to join political groups, etc. You need to have a pretty significant amount of faith in America and be willing to follow the orders of whichever party is in power. In particular, you need to be pretty peachy with American foreign policy. So you’re probably conservative or not particularly political. The ideal candidate is a middle-class mormon who’s been on his mission.

The people that fit this profile are probably quite good at making certain kinds of contacts, and really poor at others. When your opponent is Soviet Russia, a white middle-class conservative can recruit agents from the opponent’s diplomatic corp or military. When your opponent is a terrorist group, that same white middle-class conservative has much greater challenges.

10

You’re thinking of the OSP (Office of Special Plans), although Chalabi was more popular in the Pentagon and with some select neo-cons (Wolfowitz in particular). But he had many allies in the U.S. government in the beginning, before he was publicly discredited.

It just kills me when people blame the Iraq WMD debacle on the CIA. Talk about getting the situation ass backwards. Even if you believe the U.S. government is some sort of retarded but well meaning giant who can be tricked into going to war on vague intelligence reports which wouldn’t fool a ten year old who bothered to check his sources, you wouldn’t be blaming the CIA in this situation anyway. You’d be praising them, if anything. In the end they relented publicly due to outside pressure (e.g. the embarrassing NIE) but behind closed doors they were fighting the good fight.

The CIA is worth every penny and more if you wish to continue U.S. foreign policy as it has been operating since WWII. If we killed it something else would have to take its place.

11

Thank you, OSP. Right. The CIA was actually, from my reading, mostly correct on this issue. Not that they’re tiny gods, just that, in this case, from what I could read as things happened, they were correct.

And if we killed the CIA, something worse would take its place. It all sucks at some point.

12

When Porter Goss was mentioned for CIA director, he stated that he was not qualified and should not be considered. Then he was named by Bush for the job. Most of what I read was he cleaned house of anyone without a fundamental agreement with neocon policy . I have read morale is very low . Many pros have been fired or forced to resign. That might be part of the problem.

13

This administration likes to blame the CIA for its blunders.

Frontline has a revealing documentary about the intelligence scandal and vice president Cheney’s role in restructuring the agency into an ineffective organization. CIA officers have come forward to explain the failed intelligence on Iraq. The agency was pressured to support the political objectives of the current administration. The NIE report on Iraq’s WMD program was full of bogus information because there was essentially no intelligence coming out of Iraq, but the agency was coerced to find any information, regardless of its validity, to support a decision on war.
The CIA’s task to independently gather and analyze information is seriously compromised when the agency is used as a political tool or marginalized for not supporting a political decision.

There are qualified and professional people working for the CIA. I am sure there are people within the agency that are not professional or ethical. Clearly, there was a complete breakdown of the U.S. intelligence community under Bush/Cheney.

Many of our agencies have been under funded and weakened. The CIA is one agency that is vital to our national interest.

14

According to the lae E.H.Hunt, the CIA is a major consumer of paper-it files away TONS of useless intelligence reports every year. How about the record of this organization:
-it totally mislead the Eisenhower and Kennedy administartion about the planned Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba-it told JFK that the Cuabn people would rise up and overthrow castro-didn’t happen!
-It’s near insane director (JJ Angleton) was convinced that Russian defector Yuri Nosenko was a double agent (he was legit), and preferred to trust MI6 turncoat Kim Philbey (who turned out to be the worst intelligence leak to date.
-It allowed alcoholic Nelson Aldrich Ames (who was selling US defence secrets to the KGB) to operate for years, even though nobody could understand where he was getting all the money.
-The CIA absolutely dropped the ball on 9/11-despite repeated warnings from Egyptian, French and other intelligence services, had no clue about the 9/11 attacks.
-The CIA continues to involve itself in foreign affairs, which embarrasses the US state Dept. Take the GUantanamo Debacle-we have no credibility left, and these “assests” are worthless now. We can’t even get counties like Bosnia, Yemen, etc. to take these people back!
So, yeah, Im dubious about the value of the CIA. Plus, we have an agency of the US government which has its own agenda. I don’t trust them, and Their record is not impressive.

15

Most of what Ralph says is accurate, up till 1970 or so.

16

Not that I disagree with any one point that has been made so far but theres a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking going on here. Like Bryan Ekers said, you’ve never seen the good grades.