How The CIA Can Be Fixed

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But it's never happened in this country. This is a fundamental change. The old CIA is gone. The old CIA used to brief the President. That gave it its whole raison d'être. It formed the way the whole place operated. Everybody there wrote papers that actually passed, occasionally, in front of the eyes of the President. They can't count on that anymore. The CIA analyst who used to go to the White House all the time is never going to go to the White House again except to see a ceremony at the Rose Garden. It presents the new agency leadership with a profound challenge. But I think it's going to be confusion for a year or two.

Congress and the American people should insist that this organization work for them too. Congress should have the right to know what goes into intelligence evaluations. Right now they don't know, and it's not clear to me that even the President knows. I consider that to be a very dangerous situation.