Journal: CIA Spastic, Kill It or Fix It (Panetta Goes…)

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Marcus-Aurelius-150x150 — Marcus Aurelius Recommends

(1) Not sure there's anything new here; (2) not sure the establishment agrees. MA

Phi Beta Iota: If President Obama wishes to change the game, he needs to change his core staff including the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OPM), appoint the Coalition Cabinet he has been playing kitchen with, and slam Congress with the Electoral Reform Act (1 page, 9 points) in celebration of President's Day in February 2011. Anyone voting no in a roll call vote will be scheduled for a recall initiative in their home state or district. Similarly, if Director Clapper wishes to change the game to something that meets the needs of 100% of his legitimate clients 90% of the time (instead of just meeting the needs of the top tier 4% of the time), he needs to demand the right to appoint a new Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), someone who is a kick-ass Big Picture thinker with both service across CIA, across the military intelligence functions (rank is a disqualifier) and with outside the wire experiences ideally including direct exposure to 66 countries interested in learning about Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), with M4IS2 deeply embedded as the next big thing “central” to “intelligence,” and a deep commitment to doing the right thing, not doing the wrong thing righter. CIA could be the turning point for the Obama presidency. How CIA goes in the next 180 days could well determine whether there is or is not a second Obama Administration. The chances of anything good happening are under 30%.

Essay

C.I.A. Agents, Blowing Their Own Cover

By ALEX BERENSON

November 26, 2010

This summer, a former spy who calls himself Ishmael Jones got into trouble with his old bosses at the Central Intelligence Agency.

No, the agency didn’t put out a contract on his life or ship him to Guantánamo. Instead, in July, it sued Jones, the author of “The Human Factor: Inside the C.I.A.’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture,” accusing him of breaking his secrecy agreement and failing to get the required approval to publish. If the C.I.A. intended to make the book disappear, it failed. When the suit was reported last month, the book — a modest seller when first published in 2008 — shot up the Amazon rankings.

. . . . . .

Such cases [child wanna-bees that self-destruct] are common, Charles Faddis, a case officer for 20 years, argues in “Beyond Repair.” Faddis describes the agency as rife with incompetence at every level and compares its leadership training unfavorably with that of the military. “Sixty years after its founding,” he writes, the agency “has never developed any system for the selection, training and cultivation of leaders.” Even the Sept. 11 attacks did not produce meaningful change. Faddis argues that adding a director of national intelligence to oversee the agency simply imposed another layer of bureaucracy. Of the 4,000 new employees in the director’s office, “not a single one of them runs operations. Not a single one of them recruits assets or produces intelligence. What they do produce, however, is process, lots of it.”