Reference: Jack Devine on Tomorrow’s Spygames

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cover devine — Jack Devine on Future of Spying

Jack Devine is the finest manager we have ever known, and the only one we know of who has never let a case officer miss a deadline without asking why. Former Acting Deputy Director of Operations while appointed as ADDO, former head of Latin America Division, he managed the Afghan Task Force whose outcomes are have been tactically and operationally successful and strategically painful. His signal idea in the above article is a Secretary of Intelligence. It's not a bad idea, if accompanied by legislation that gives the Secretary the powers that the Director of Naitonal Intelligence (DNI) does not have now, but a better idea would be a Secretary for Education, Intelligence, and Research, with CIA converted into Director of Classified Intelligence, a new Director of Open Source Intelligence, NSA becomes the all-souorce processing center, and the NRO gets folded into NGA at the same time that USGS is absorbed by NGA. The article also falls prey to the acceptance of glibness by others–cyberwar, for example, is not something we can just throw money at–there are not enough qualified cyber-warriors with US citizenship eligible for clearances to become competent in less than a decade–cyberwar is going to have to be a multinational endeavor, and the Chinese are twenty years ahead of us in both offense and defense. Reality can be such a pesky creature to deal with….

With a tip of the hat to the Association for Intelligence Officers (AFIO), which provided this in Intelligencer: Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies (Fall 2009), pages 49-55 (7 pages). Although AFIO has not opened its doors to all multinational multifunctional intelligence professionals across the eight tribes of intelligence as we expect it to one day, its web site and publications are openly available and we encourage one and all to subscribe.