How The CIA Can Be Fixed

ROBERT BAER

Former CIA field officer and author of the spy thriller Blow the House Down

The CIA has been under political assault since the early 1970s. It was also badly managed, and the agency became an ungainly bureaucracy. It didn't just happen under George W.; it's been going on for decades. It got to the point where you could be an officer on the front between Afghanistan and Pakistan, living in a tent for three years, hunting down bin Laden, and there could be a logistics guy back at headquarters who takes his kids to soccer practice on Saturday mornings and gets promoted faster.

What is needed is to put back in place a professional cadre. The CIA may say they are bringing in great people. That may be true. But do these people know anything about intelligence? No. It's not something you learn with a master's in international relations. It takes years and years of assessing sources. Intelligence collection is a profession.

To rebuild the agency, you need to take an insider like Stephen Kappes [former deputy CIA director of operations] and put him in charge of management decisions. He's going to know, very simply, who the frauds are, who the good people are. He may have to bring in people who have retired and tell them, "I need you. Come back for three years." And you need to make sure that the good people are going to the hot spots. You have to stop sending everyone to Baghdad. After that? You have to have somebody implement a long-term program to take account of the way the world is changing--weapons proliferation, what kind of cover you need and what sort of security clearance you really need to work at the CIA. How do you hire a Pakistani Urdu speaker who immigrated here when he was 6 years old and get him through a security exam? Under the old rules, he's got too much baggage.

JOHN BRENNAN

Former chief of staff to CIA Director George Tenet and former director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center; president and CEO of the Analysis Corp.

There's a piece of legislation--the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004--that was passed in December of 2004 and set up the office of the DNI [director of national intelligence] and Ambassador [John] Negroponte. In my mind it's a flawed piece of legislation. There is no strategic blueprint for the intelligence community. And therefore there's confusion over roles and responsibilities. The CIA is caught up in that confusion.

So Mike Hayden's responsibility is to be very candid with the workforce, let them know that there will be some changes. The CIA is part of a larger intelligence community, and it needs to be prepared for the change. Its strongest capability is in its human-intelligence side, in its collections, covert collections and operations, and covert action. But it also needs to take a look at the other capabilities that the agency has, like its analytic responsibilities and whether those should, in fact, be allocated to other places within the community. Hayden and Kappes need to take a look at all the senior people in the agency and decide who should stay and who should go.

MARK LOWENTHAL

Former assistant director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production and author of Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy