How The CIA Can Be Fixed

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I don't think the CIA has to be fixed. It has to be calmed down. During the 1990s, the intelligence community lost the equivalent of 23,000 positions in budget cuts and lost opportunities to hire people. The reason it is hiring now is to make up for this gap--this death valley that it had. But 50% of the analysts across the intelligence sector have five years of experience or less. That causes a certain amount of tumult. These young people have to be trained better, they have to be mentored better, they have to have better career planning so that the workforce stays. Otherwise you're going to have a lot of these people leaving, and your experience level is never going to go back up again. The same thing is the case in the clandestine service. Porter Goss was told by the President to increase the clandestine service by 50%. That's a lot of people, and it takes five to seven years for someone to be really effective as a clandestine officer. Another thing that needs to happen is a public discussion about what is a reasonable level of expectation from intelligence. My concern is that the expectation is for intelligence that's more black and white, right or wrong, than is usually possible. And if that's the standard, we might as well stop because I can assure you that failure will be the default setting.

GARY BERNTSEN

Decorated CIA officer of 23 years; field commander for CIA operations during the 2001 campaign in Afghanistan; co-author of Jawbreaker

The CIA's most important mission at the moment is supporting our troops in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan with timely intelligence to allow for victory and combatting a worldwide jihadist movement that has declared war on the U.S. The conduct of human-intelligence operations is the CIA's single most critical contribution to these parallel missions.

The CIA is looking at a tsunami of upcoming retirements at a time when it needs an expansion of personnel and skills. The ongoing growth in the clandestine service to meet current needs will require senior officers to mentor and lead a disproportionately large number of junior officers. Fortunately, many men and women with combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan are stepping forward to join the CIA on their return home and are bringing impressive levels of leadership, maturity and skill.

THOMAS POWERS

Author of Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda

In the wake of the reorganization of intelligence after 9/11 and the WMD fiasco, the agency has been fundamentally changed--and diminished. The organization has been hit, psychologically, with the knowledge that it's being blamed for those failures when in fact these were not its failures; they were White House failures. In the past the agency has been blamed for mistakes. That is not unusual in the history of intelligence organizations. During the Soviet period, the Soviet leader actually executed three heads of intelligence at various times. So it's not uncommon to get rid of your intelligence service.