Further on intelligence
Pejman Yousefzadeh agrees with me, I think, regarding the separation of intelligence analysis from intelligence operations, in this TechCentralStation column.
He also brings up a valuable point I had missed in my own earlier post: one weakness in our intelligence services has to do with how they recruit people to serve in them, and the kinds of people the recruit. It has been said that our spooks consist almost entirely of Mormons and thugs; Mormons who live such a "clean" lifestyle that the people who assess applicants for their security risk are likely to give them a pass, and thugs who bring just enough of the "evil Kirk" with them to leaven the Mormons. Some thugs must be admitted just to get the job done. Other thugs simply slip through because they have so little remorse over the thuggish things they've done that they don't register on a polygraph.
This is a formula for disaster. We have to recruit people from other walks of life, and predicate hiring less on security risk and more on creativity, talent, breadth of experience. The builder of the OSS, precursor of the CIA, wanted Ivy Leaguers because in his words "they make the best second-story men." He knew he needed people who would take risks and not necessarily keep their noses clean.
Polygraph examinations and occasional drug abuse keep some very useful, talented people out of the running for our intelligence community. Polygraphs discourage people because there's no scientific basis for using them, so their only remaining purpose is to intimidate. Too bad they didn't intimidate that guy named Hanssen. Bright people tend not to want to work for organizations that predicate their hiring on a twentieth-century equivalent of phrenology.
Drug abuse, well, nobody wants to cop to that. Nor does anybody want to admit that the millions of people who have used recreational drugs do so only occasionally, leaving no lasting mark on their performance or reliability. By the way, I inhaled. I'm neither a Mormon nor a thug.
But let's get on with the real issue. We need good people working in the intelligence community, and apart from Mormons, thugs, and enemy spies trained to defeat polygraphs, we don't have enough diversity hiring into this community.
2 Comments:
You're right. It's the culture that's the problem. FBI culture and IRS culture are even worse. The only thing you can do is to start replacing large numbers of them with "normals". But even then, you would just start the Wars of the Cubicles between your normals, the Mormons, the thugs and the foreign agents. The American Way would be to just leave them all in place, and create an umbrella organization over them that just decided to keep them all on the payroll but just never consult them. This has been done so many times now that we have a really, really large payroll in intel, and not much intelligence showing in the product.
And we also now have layer upon layer of umbrella oversight organizations. Oversight of oversight, or, uhhhh, meta-oversight.
Where I come from that takes many names, like the Eskimos are rumored to have many names for snow.
Scab-picking, second-guessing, navel-gazing . . .
That's how we got where we are today.
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