1998.02 中情局特工骗局

shiyi18

这里没有人可以玩这个游戏吗？
近年来关于中央情报局的耸人听闻的披露几乎掩盖了一个更大的问题。中情局根本不擅长它应该做的事情。作者是一名前中央情报局官员，他描述了一种腐蚀性的文化，在这种文化中，渴望晋升的特工人员从毫无价值的外国特工那里收集毫无意义的情报。作者警告说，改革可能是不可能的。

作者：爱德华-G-雪莉

贝特曼/盖蒂
1998年2月号



1994年2月，中情局特工阿尔德里奇-哈森-艾姆斯（Aldrich Hazen Ames）被捕，从根本上改变了公众对中央情报局秘密部门的看法。在艾姆斯之前，只有 "办案人员"，即招募和管理外国特工的人员，知道该部门已经变得多么不正常。自从艾姆斯之后，外部世界了解到行动局有很多腐败的地方--行动局的正式名称，内部人士简称为DO。然而，监督行动处的参议员和国会议员、报道行动处的记者以及管理行动处的文职主管都未能理解和正视行动处的真正问题。即使是在情报局工作的中情局分析员，即情报局的公开智囊团，也很少有人能掌握情报局的衰败程度。

带有政治色彩的、通常是肮脏的中情局不当行为的故事，转移了人们对美国情报工作的关注。记者们指控中情局参与了拉丁裔的毒品走私团伙。一个中美洲游击队的美国妻子指责中情局是酷刑和谋杀的同谋。女性办案人员控告他们的男性上司有性歧视。

所有这些事件都使该机构的形象受损。但是，关于这个秘密机构是否真的能做好间谍工作的讨论却没有任何进展。在保密、纪律严明和顺从的官僚机构的保护下，以及普通外人对间谍活动的基本无知和迷恋，情报局的领导层已经预先阻止并拖延了对情报局改革的压力。

1985年，我加入了行动局。作为一名虔诚的冷战者，我对针对苏联和捍卫美国国家利益的间谍活动或秘密行动毫无顾虑。当近东司选择我加入其行列时，我感到自豪和渴望。多年来，我一直梦想着将我在伊斯兰历史方面的学术训练应用于DO的中东任务。

12年后，我仍然对间谍工作心存感激--感激那些难得的时刻，一个办案人员为国家的防务做出了贡献。但我早已失去了对情报局的自豪感，它已经演变成一个令人遗憾的 "巨蟒 "和 "老大哥 "的混合物。我在1993年辞职了。

当现任和前任办案人员聚集在一起时，他们的谈话不可避免地趋于一致：他们想知道司法部是否已经无可挽回地崩溃了。几年前，我问一位曾在莫斯科工作过的前同事，她是否曾成功地向外人解释过毒品部的问题。"没有，从来没有，"她回答。"我已经放弃了尝试。你必须解释这么多，你会迷失在细节中，否则你听起来就像一个抱怨的、不爱国的左翼分子。"


罗斯-麦克唐纳
中情局最近大张旗鼓地庆祝其成立五十周年。中情局希望美国公众，特别是国会相信，它的男男女女赢得了冷战，一路上遇到了一些问题，但现在正在迎接二十一世纪的挑战。在国会的情报监督委员会面前，中情局的高级官员重复着中情局的新任务声明，即打击恐怖主义、毒品、核生化武器的扩散以及伊朗、伊拉克、利比亚、苏丹和朝鲜的无赖政权。随着艾姆斯事件的消退，一些现任和退休的中情局官员断言，如果国会和媒体只需退让，专业人士将再次完成工作。


封闭社会的一个特点是，它对自己撒谎和对外人撒谎一样容易。外交家乔治-F-肯南（George F. Kennan）在1947年对苏联的评估中以 "X "的名义写道，他借用了吉本的《罗马帝国的衰落与灭亡》；这段话同样适用于中情局今天的行动处。

从热情到欺骗，这一步是危险的、滑溜的；苏格拉底的恶魔提供了一个令人难忘的例子，说明一个智者如何欺骗自己，一个好人如何欺骗他人，良心如何在自我幻想和自愿欺诈之间的混合和中间状态下沉睡。
中情局的可悲真相--艾姆斯事件没有揭示的是，多年来，情报局一直在大多数国家进行间谍活动，在其招募的特工和情报生产的价值上欺骗自己和他人。秘密行动处最丑陋的秘密是，这个秘密行动处如何鼓励正派的办案人员，逐渐地、自然地演变成关于他们对美国安全的贡献的骗子。到1985年，也就是艾姆斯自愿为克格勃做间谍的那一年，中情局的绝大多数外国特工充其量是平庸的资产，因为办案人员需要高的招募人数来获得晋升而被列入工资单。早在苏联解体之前，招募和情报欺诈--一个封闭的间谍世界的自然产物--已经剥夺了情报局的诚信和能力。

年轻的特工人员成群结队地辞职，因为他们已经放弃了改革的希望。这种减员足以引起监察长在1996年进行调查。尽管监察长办公室在询问已辞职的年轻办案人员方面做得不好，但最后的报告并没有否认在里根时期进入司法部的最优秀和最聪明的人的辞职率不断上升。我所在的1985年初级官员班中有近四分之三的办案人员已经辞职。当我的班级进入时，我们被告知，在美国政府中，司法部的减员率最低，低于5%。尽管这个数字无疑是不准确的--在任何官僚机构中，正常和健康的减员率应该更高--但它确实反映了情报局的信条：除非有缺陷，否则官员不会退出秘密服务。在情报局内部以及在国会面前，高级官员对不断上升的辞职率轻描淡写，甚至否认情报局的年轻官员--更不用说其最好的官员--正在放弃工作。

但高级官员们自己知道真相。早在1988年，一位负责行动局预算和人事的中情局高级官员就访问了世界各地的情报站和基地，谨慎地询问年轻的办案人员为什么有这么多优秀的年轻官员辞职。该官员想知道初级官员是否愿意参加与行动局副局长，即秘密部门的老板的圆桌讨论。这位高级官员自己并不是一名办案人员，她没有意识到她在要求办案人员进行职业自杀。圆桌讨论从未进行过。


一个功能紊乱的家庭
美国人对情报局九年来未能抓到阿米斯感到震惊，阿米斯是克格勃在苏联东欧司内的一个酗酒、挥霍无度的内鬼。情报处怎么能把它的首要特工--可能是中情局有史以来最好的苏联特工--交给一个有如此明显缺陷的反间谍办案人员？与办案人员为获得晋升而招募的通常的特工垃圾不同，这些苏联特工是真正的东西。撇开叛国罪和他的消费习惯不谈，事实是，艾姆斯与他的许多同龄人没有什么不同。他心怀不满，喝多了酒。他不喜欢招募外国特工，而且他做得很差。他不信任他的大多数同事，特别是那些更高级的同事。他作为一名中级官员（GS-14），在职业生涯中停滞不前，比一般退休的办案人员的级别略高。

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在苏联解体之前，在鸡尾酒会上活动是办案人员与共产党的 "硬目标"--那些极难接近的外国人--打交道的主要方式，往往也是唯一的方式，更不用说发展和招募了。为了追求肉体上的刺激，许多官员喝得太多了。更重要的是，许多办案人员--埃姆斯就是其中之一--在招募游戏中大吃大喝，不顾一切地应酬，寻找可以被写成有前途的 "发展对象 "的外国人。办案人员在这样的世界里变得愤世嫉俗--他们从1960年代起就一直生活在这样的世界里。在他自愿向苏联人提供服务之前，艾姆斯在墨西哥城通过私下里批评该局的办案人员和他们招募的众多特工来自娱自乐，这些人产生的情报很少。与外界对他的普遍看法相反，艾姆斯对行动细节和情报报告都很关注。他在大多数同行之前就发现，在拉丁美洲分部工作的最著名的办案人员之一是一个腐败的骗子，他夸大或捏造了他的大多数特工，并可能将一些特工的钻石工资收入囊中。虽然被开除了，但这位办案人员从未入狱。在他位于墨西哥城的一座高层建筑的宽敞阳台上，埃姆斯经常和朋友们一起打发晚上的时间，诙谐地贬低DO对美国国防的贡献。

深受困扰的艾姆斯，在异议和叛国之间的空间溜走，相信这一切都是一场戏。鉴于他挥霍无度，中情局当然应该更早发现他。但是，从心理上发现埃姆斯，或者通过询问他的同僚，都会非常困难。在中情局这个大家庭中，有许多功能失调的成员。

揭开中情局的神秘面纱--通过学习如何阅读特工的档案、熟悉行动细节、接触 "限制处理 "的案件--需要多年时间。然而，有一件事我没有花很长时间就学会了：大多数高级官员的声誉和他们的才能之间存在着严重的差异。撇开斯特林的例外情况，一般高级官员都是在等级制度中晋升的，而没有对他所服务的国家的语言、文化或政治有多少了解。我的初级官员班上的优秀办案人员徒劳地寻找像理查德-赫尔姆斯（Richard Helms）、保罗-亨茨（Paul Henze）和罗伯特-艾姆斯（Robert Ames）这样的导师--过去著名的办案人员，他们对自己的语言和国家非常了解。在我为伊朗工作的八年中，没有一个伊朗处的处长会说或读波斯语。没有一个近东处处长懂阿拉伯语、波斯语或土耳其语，只有一个人甚至能用法语交谈。一位近东官员在伊朗-康特拉事件中被派去评估和汇报马努切-戈尔巴尼法尔（Manucher Ghorbanifar），他是阿亚图拉-霍梅尼政权与美国和以色列之间狡猾而精明的伊朗中间人，他不会说波斯语，也没有中东背景。他不得不多次要求戈尔巴尼法尔拼出知名伊朗高级官员的名字。

在中情局位于弗吉尼亚州威廉斯堡附近的皮里营的间谍培训学校（"农场"），教官经常告诉受训者，文化差异并不重要，无论目标是什么，行动就是行动。无论是阿拉伯人、德国人、土耳其人、巴西人、波斯人、俄罗斯人、巴基斯坦人还是法国人，目标（正如欧洲司和反恐中心负责人杜安-克拉里奇（Duane Clarridge）直言不讳地说）"都是一样的。" "行动就是行动"，这是只使用英语的办案人员最喜欢的一句口头禅，是秘密行动处最自欺欺人的自负之一。

在秘密部门的所有冷战任务中，没有一项任务比招募苏联特工更具有神秘性，但同时也更虚幻。每位办案人员的首要行动指令是招募克格勃官员、苏联军事情报官员和苏联外交官，但这基本上只是在弗吉尼亚州兰利的中央情报局总部和外地的办案人员之间进行纸上谈兵。真正的招募往往是一种纯粹的侥幸。据苏联东欧分部的官员说，阿米斯杀死的最好的特工都是 "现成的"，他们自愿为美国服务。处理 "走读生 "并非易事，中情局的办案人员往往对敏感的 "走读生 "处理得特别好。但是，"招募 "无预约人员与漫长的 "招募周期"--发现、评估、发展和招募世界各地的外国人--没有什么关系，而这正是情报局建立其预算和团队精神的基础。

在冷战期间，DO的经理们希望年轻的个案官员能够突然打电话给他们没有合理理由接触的苏联官员。那些幸运的办案人员通过电话和尴尬的接触后，被鼓励尽可能密集地进行社交活动。他们不理会克格勃叛逃者的不断建议，他们警告说，如果办案人员遇到苏联公民，他应该简单地打招呼，提供一张带有家庭电话号码的名片，然后说再见。如果苏联人想叛变或在原地反对共产主义制度，他就会发出一个信息。克格勃叛逃者认为，积极发展苏联人只会引起苏联反间谍部门的注意，并会放大苏联大使馆或领事馆的正常妄想。然而，中情局坚持了下来。DO的神秘感和自豪感，更不用说它的工作和预算，都处于危险之中。

20世纪80年代和90年代，在拉丁美洲、非洲、欧洲和中东地区发生了可怕的情报局失败。不仅仅是在苏联，中情局还失去了许多特工。这个组织的座右铭是《约翰福音》中的一句话："你们要知道真理，真理会使你们自由。"这个组织已经变得草率，对事实和虚构之间的区别发展出一种不严肃的认识。一些优秀的特工，以及许多平庸或无用的特工，因其办案人员的错误而死亡；在一个劣质特工经常被夸大为一流特工的环境中，办案人员经常将那些真正不懂的特工置于危险境地。

数字游戏
20世纪60年代和70年代，随着苏联在地理上扩大冷战，中情局大大增加了其在非洲和拉丁美洲的站点和基地的规模和数量。在第三世界，为中情局工作是许多男人的一种仪式（第三世界的特工过去和现在几乎都是男人）。对于拉丁美洲人、阿拉伯人和非洲人来说，与中情局的关系可能是非常值得尊敬的，而且报酬也相当高。中情局是小人物通往统治世界的阴谋集团的渠道。第三世界的目标通常价格低廉，对中情局来说也比较容易招募和管理，而且他们的 "翻牌 "潜力远远低于针对我们敏感的第一世界盟友的特工。

由于第三世界的大部分地区被视为合法的冷战舞台，世界各地的办案人员可以对当地的外交或军事代表采取行动。即使中情局事实上对招募某个第三世界国家的特定官员不感兴趣（诚然，这种情况在冷战期间很少见），办案人员仍然可以追逐目标，并给他贴上 "准入特工 "的标签，可以想象他可能会导致一个更有前途的，通常是苏联的新兵。由于整个第三世界都在 "屏幕上"，普通办案人员的招募可能性大大增加。我的一位前站长曾对一个苏联案件说："想想这些年来我们招募的数百名--天知道--非洲访问员，而俄罗斯人是世界上最糟糕的种族主义者之一，这不是很有趣吗？"总之，中情局从第三世界招募了成千上万的人。

1978年的《公务员制度改革法》热衷于 "绩效评估系统 "中的 "客观标准"，进一步巩固了司法部的人头计算道德。尽管该法案在技术上并不适用于该机构（理论上兰利不受公务员条例约束），但在精神上却适用。商学院的 "目标管理 "理念正式成为整个部门的惯例。（目前国税局的骚扰问题可能也是源于这种量化理念的失控）。

随着中央情报局的规模越来越大，官僚主义的标准也被正式化。官员晋升小组的权力使旧的赞助制度黯然失色。该组织需要一个共同的标准来 "客观地 "评判办案人员队伍。在相当大的程度上，美国人对所有人都一视同仁的道德观和美国人喜欢将功绩转化为数字的特点，导致了在办案人员评估中计算特工人数的做法。

对当时的大多数人来说，每年清点人数--你招募了多少名特工--似乎是一个高效、进步的想法。然而，很快，一种相当原始的数字计算就占据了上风。到20世纪80年代初，非洲、近东和拉丁美洲司的办案人员占了主导地位，因为这些地区的招聘工作相对容易。在我入职时，高级官员经常劝告年轻的苏联和欧洲司的办案人员在其职业生涯早期至少到非洲或中东地区进行一次 "招聘之旅"，以避免被晋升小组遗忘。在农场，非洲部的高级官员试图通过吹嘘他们部门的特工人员比其他部门的特工人员招募得更多，因此晋升得更快，来吸引受训人员。我没有遇到过一个非洲司的高级官员对该司庞大的特工名册所产生的情报报告的质量表示赞赏。

在20世纪80年代和90年代的海外，我所在的初级军官班遇到了为圣诞节或复活节前提供的 "头皮 "提供3000美元奖金的DO经理。一瓶香槟酒被奖励给产生最多情报报告的办案人员。获胜者通常每月能得到20或30份报告。1989年，我的许多同事在收到一位师长的电报时感到震惊，这位师长的职业生涯一直在追捕苏联人。他建议每年为他所在部门的每个办案人员招募一次 "高质量 "的人员。这份电报是在全球总部宣布我们所有的古巴特工可能都是双重间谍之后发出的。竞争对手早就意识到美国的办案人员对头皮的渴望程度。他们一直乐于提供这些人。

1993年，中情局局长詹姆斯-伍尔西（James Woolsey）向所有情报站和基地发出电报，鼓励办案人员和他们的经理在招募和制作情报时要追求质量而不是数量。在某种程度上，伍尔西知道情报部存在招聘问题。然而，同年，国防部为年轻的个案官员发布了新的绩效评估准则，他们负责国防部绝大部分的招聘工作，再次强调了招聘工作在晋升过程中的核心地位。外地官员不必看字里行间的意思：数字游戏继续进行。伍尔西从来不知道国防部已经背叛了他的良好意图。

到我1993年辞职时，国防部已经推出了评估外国新兵的 "资产验证系统"。官员们把AVS说成是防止招募和经营双重间谍和疲惫的冷战遗留问题的一种手段。AVS并没有正式尝试根除 "廉价招募"。然而，在20世纪90年代初，一些明星办案人员被抓到捏造特工和情报报告的丑闻，这让有改革意识的办案人员看到了希望，即国防部最终可能会控制通过招募获得晋升的制度。我们都知道，这些咄咄逼人的官员只是把公认的夸张和欺骗的标准推得太远了些。

这种希望被证明是天真的。尽管一些高级官员现在会悄悄承认存在数字游戏，但他们通常会抱怨说，1980年代的那一代办案人员造成了这个问题，他们和AVS现在正在解决这个问题。然而，被《华盛顿邮报》称为 "特工洗牌 "的AVS，常常被认为是约翰-德奇发起的改革（事实上，威廉-韦伯斯特开始了这项计划；罗伯特-盖茨和詹姆斯-伍尔西大大扩展了这项计划）--并没有真正影响招聘游戏。办案人员现在必须为每次招募多写几份电报--为了获得批准的印章而多写一点文书工作。官员们甚至可以完全避免做文书工作：在总部和外地之间不断增长的文件流中，AVS的要求很容易消失在官僚主义的黑洞中多年。招聘平庸的，甚至是完全没有价值的访问代理人的工作仍在继续。

办案人员已经了解到，他们可以招募到一个没有价值的特工，然后让该特工被刷掉，而不会对他们的职业生涯造成损害。在指定地点对招募人员进行仔细询问的情况仍然不多。一名办案人员可以在日内瓦招募8名资产，然后前往巴黎进行下一次考察，让所有8名驻日内瓦的特工被清除，并且仍然得到巴黎站长的好评。

AVS也没有对产生秘密情报的外国特工的信息价值进行核实，他们是间谍活动存在的理由。判断一个消息来源的情报生产的标准是如此之低，以至于办案人员可以轻易地相信，或者假装相信，最普通的接触是一个一流的情报开发者。有了 "向前看"（即乐观）的电报流量为他铺路，一个雄心勃勃的办案人员可以把一个友好的低级电话公司官员变成对一个外国电信业的敏感渗透。一旦总部认证了一个发展人员的情报报告，办案人员就知道这个发展人员的招募可能会被批准。聪明的办案人员还可以轻易地 "推送 "公开来源的新闻中的事实和观点，或镜像国务院的机密电报，使发展人员或特工看起来像一个适当的情报生产者。令人遗憾的是，推送新闻和照搬国务院的做法已经成为指定机构内部的第二天性，特别是在熟悉该系统的积极官员中。一旦糟糕的情报成为可接受的，最低标准的规则就会生效，廉价情报和特工不可避免地成为标准。

中情局知道，外交部对国务院问题的软性报道往往会招致美国外交官的愤怒。能够接触到秘密情报报告的外交部官员早就知道，中情局在他们的地盘上挖角。任何机构的分析家都会承认，国务院和美国财政部的海外代表通常提供关于政治和经济的最佳官方评论。来自有偿特工的秘密信息决不是像外人通常认为的那样，在本质上优于来自无偿来源的信息。无论是北约的扩张、俄罗斯的民主、图卢兹的空客与西雅图的波音、美国对伊朗的贸易禁运，还是南非、哈萨克斯坦或克罗地亚的未来走向，事实证明，通常是外交官和他们的联系人，而不是办案人员和他们的特工，才是美国政府最了解情况的来源。但是，国家报告并不像中情局的报告那样，被包装成一口大小的小块，令人胃口大开。外交电报并没有像中情局的产品那样，以大胆的印刷和高度机密的暗语来装饰。国务院在官僚上无能，在政治上胆怯，在资金上匮乏，很少试图对兰利--一个富有而强硬的官僚势力--进行追究，因为该组织的招募行为和低劣的报告。

当我还在服役时，我经常遇到DO的老板，他们鼓励他们的办案人员将从国家掩护工作中获得的信息输入CIA的情报渠道。当他们无法复制国家情报来源时，办案人员就试图借用或窃取它们，从而使美国外交官处于尴尬的境地，不得不向他们的外国同行解释为什么美国政府有时会派两个 "外交官 "问同样的问题。

尽管办案人员应该为贬低美国的间谍活动承担大部分责任，但他们不可能单独做到这一点。中情局情报局的分析员是外国情报报告的主要消费者和判断者，他们也有责任。与办案人员一样，分析员通常不具备必要的语言、学术准备，或在其所谓的专业领域的国内经验。自从罗伯特-盖茨作为情报局副局长在20世纪80年代初重组情报局以来，很少有分析员在一个国家工作超过几年的时间。晋升，尤其是管理级别的晋升，对那些涉及多个领域的通才来说，来得更快。分析员们坐在六乘六的、通常没有窗户的小房间里，每天都要面对对短期 "成品 "情报的要求，他们很少愿意牺牲自己的职业生涯，慢慢培养出能对外国有不寻常见解的技能。

太多的间谍-太少的间谍
对于困扰行动局的问题，特工洗牌还没有推进的答案。在有价值的招聘数量如此之少且难以获得的情况下，你如何对整个行动局的办案人员进行排名和晋升？办案人员的确切人数是保密的，但美国媒体报道的大约2000人的数字并不遥远。在一些美国大使馆和领事馆，中情局办案人员的数量超过了报告政治和经济事务的外交官。让初级和中级办案人员忙于工作所需的发展人员和特工的数量很大；需求创造了供应。

对招聘、情报生产和晋升的诚实讨论将使人们对至少自20世纪70年代以来的机构运作和职业产生怀疑。情报处的未来，或者至少是其人员配置水平和目前的管理，也将受到质疑。而办案人员将不得不向自己和国会承认，今天招募特工的成功机会甚至比过去更差。

与冷战时期的挑战不同，21世纪被大肆宣扬的挑战不是界定、激发和分裂国家的世界性斗争。中国很可能成为一个严重的威胁，但他们并没有在第三世界激发或资助激进的反西方游击队运动和政党。中国和无赖国家--伊朗、伊拉克、利比亚、苏丹、朝鲜--在世界各地都有大使馆和领事馆，理论上为情报局提供了许多目标，但中情局在招募这些国家的外交官和情报人员方面鲜有成功。除了极少数例外，针对流氓国家、恐怖分子和中国人的情报政变都来自志愿者。

例如，在巴黎、波恩或新德里，只有少数人有可利用的机会接触到常驻的伊朗官员和科学家；办案人员能够找到，更不用说招募到伊朗的消息来源的几率很低。在没有东道国的协助或了解的情况下，仅仅见到一个有趣的伊朗人是非常困难的。如果法国人、德国人或印度人对美国的间谍行动产生敌意，中央情报局的办案人员做任何有价值的事情的机会都微乎其微。而随着苏联威胁的消失，欧洲人对在欧洲土地上行动的中情局官员明显变得更加敌视。西欧人现在经常在他们之间交换关于中情局的信息。法国人、德国人和奥地利人最近发出警告，要求撤换那些不理解冷战后新的基本规则的案例官员。民族自豪感和不同的国家利益（例如，欧盟一直淡化伊朗的邪恶行为，以保持与伊朗的商业关系）严重限制了中情局在欧洲和其他地区的行动。

目前DO对美国最强硬的中东敌人--伊朗和伊拉克的行动基本上演变成了 "冷处理"，在这种情况下，办案人员在对目标人物几乎没有任何履历或心理信息的情况下（在许多情况下他们甚至从未见过这些人），"推销 "与CIA的秘密关系以换取金钱。这种方法偶尔会奏效，但它既不是一种特别聪明的方法，也不是一种让外国人为美国冒生命危险的周到的方法。然而，当这种方法确实奏效时，这种快速打击在办案人员的业绩评估中是很好的。


全球化？
间谍活动是第二古老的职业。不管兰利公司是否无能，也不管美国人对秘密行动的怀疑，某种形式的间谍活动将继续下去。情报方面的辩论不是关于我们是否应该进行间谍活动，而是关于我们如何能够做好间谍活动。如果华盛顿能找到关于伊朗情报部、沙特阿拉伯石油资源丰富地区的当地什叶派反对派或共产主义中国的军事总参谋部的可靠信息来源，那么美国将因努力而更加安全。所有这些 "人类情报 "目标都非常难以触及，但如果情报局是一个拥有长期计划和人才的组织，它可能有机会。

由艾姆斯案无意中打开的改革机会之窗现在正在关闭。在华盛顿，当选和任命的官员对中央情报局的职能部门提出批评，但很少解雇他们，情报局的高级官员怀疑，如果他们受到一些打击，进行一些表面上的改革，并坚持下去，他们就会比批评者更持久。没有一个高级官员因为艾姆斯事件被解雇。在过去的十年中，没有人因为任何严格意义上的行动失误和惨败而被解雇（因高度政治化的伊朗-康特拉事件和危地马拉人权事务而被解雇的官员不算在内）。一些肇事者最终获得了高级职位的晋升和杰出情报人员奖章。

改革中情局是一项艰巨的任务。官僚腐朽的无情法则--第一流的人通常与其他第一流的人交往并获得晋升，但第二流的人选择第三流的人，第三流的人选择第四流的人--已经在中情局的封闭社会中残酷地发挥作用了。第一流的人现在很少了。在一个机构中，10%的指导者可以说是该机构最虚伪、最不合格的官员，那么如何改革这个机构呢？一个来自中情局外部的中央情报局局长如何从他的七楼高处往下看，将有能力的人与无能力的人分开？没有外人，无论多么精明，在没有办案人员指导的情况下，都无法成功地在DO内部航行。

从定义上讲，封闭的社会不受大多数形式的外部纪律和监督的影响，而一个间谍部门在很大程度上必须是一个封闭的社会，而且是不健康的。不管是第一流的还是第三流的，办案人员和特工都必须进行伪装和保护。

外人无法拯救行动局，除非他们让它对其所有的失败和缺陷负责。正在考虑离开该组织的初级和中级办案人员需要看到一些迹象，表明外人不会再容忍虚假的或搞砸的行动。至少，总统、中情局局长和国会的情报监督委员会必须确保该机构的监察长和反情报调查是准确和公正的。监察长办公室经常在公然与情报局勾结和在国会面前反情报局大放厥词之间摇摆不定。而司法部的各个工作人员和部门的反情报报告通常会成为幕后阴谋的受害者，即使是无用的高级官员也相对不受影响，并且一直没有受到惩罚。

尽管监察长和反间谍报告很少对司法部进行严厉批评，但它们几乎总是让高级办案人员难以接受。当令人惊讶的监察长或反间谍调查没有导致解雇犯有严重无能的高级官员时，优秀的官员就会辞职或保持沉默。

解雇守旧者本身并不能改变秘密部门的文化。与任何官僚机构一样，高级官员都有后代。即使是优秀的办案人员，如果他们在一个糟糕的系统中工作，也不可避免地会做出削弱的妥协。一流的特工人员知道他们多年来没有收集到什么真正有意义的情报，但还是会将行动局理想化，秘密情报的神话和方法与他们的身份、荣誉和家庭生活密不可分。只有对该部门进行彻底的改革，大幅减少老牌办案人员的数量，才有机会拯救秘密部门。为了改革美国的间谍活动，外人必须使用他们拥有的唯一可靠的杠杆来安全地撬开秘密服务。DO情报报告。局长和情报监督委员会，或他们任命的外部专家，可以审查选定的官员、业务台、工作人员、中心和部门的情报制作。尽管办案人员可能会招募一个非常有价值的特工，但却不产生任何情报报告（例如，一个外国使馆的密码员），所有非秘密行动的招募都是为了最终导致情报生产。如果外部专家对某一主题的公开来源、非机构的机密信息和指定机构的信息进行比较，他们可以发现指定机构是否在对自己和他人说谎。当然，这将需要时间和精力。

如果有一批优秀的办案人员作为他的眼睛、耳朵和手，中央情报局局长可能有机会克服DO的问题。然而，他可能会发现，官僚机构已经无可挽回地崩溃了。在这种情况下，他或国会应该考虑仅在几年前还不可想象的事情：从头开始重建这个秘密机构。美国的国家安全不会因为暂时关闭情报局而受到影响。一个主要提供平庸的情报和针对萨达姆-侯赛因等人的令人震惊的愚蠢政变计划的行动局，会在国外伤害美国。

如果中情局真的打算改革，行动局将取消其大部分外交官间谍职位，并以 "非官方掩护 "官员取而代之，这些官员在大使馆或领事馆之外活动，通常是作为商人或顾问。NOCs远远不是秘密服务的精英，而且典型的非官方掩护通常是弱小的和小规模的，因为美国企业越来越不愿意在这方面向兰利提供任何帮助，这是可以理解的。尽管如此，只有NOC和NOC指导的特工网络才能合理地渗透到恐怖组织、军火商网络以及可能涉及核、化学和生物武器生产的科学协会、研究所和公司。与内部办案人员不同的是，NOC拥有脆弱的外交掩护，他们可以悄悄地进出国家，会见外国人，并通过外国内部安全检查而不引起警报。将大部分NOCs部署到海外也会颠覆数字游戏。NOC的工作没有外交豁免权：考虑到监狱或更糟的情况，他们会更严格地评估潜在的间谍行动的情报利益。

高级内部官员无意让自己和自己的门徒退休，他们会贬低非官方掩护在指定机构未来的价值，使国家石油公司成为一个顺从的配角。NOCs被锁在秘密服务的封闭世界里，比内部官员更严密，他们不会抱怨。当然，更好的NOCs已经做了他们大多数更好的外交官-间谍同事所做的事情：他们已经辞职或退休。

如果没有根深蒂固的官僚机构孜孜不倦地挑战改革，重建秘密服务就会容易得多。引进美国一流学院和大学的毕业生以及在国外生活过的多语种美国人--我们最好的情报人才库--并不是一项不可能完成的任务。美国比任何其他国家都更能从一个多民族、多语言的社会中汲取情报服务。国会尤其对保证秘密服务的改革负有特殊责任。只有国会才有财政权力来迫使情报局内部进行改革。在20世纪70年代的丑闻之后，国会明智地选择行使其在1947年《国家安全法》下的权利，对中央情报局进行更密切的监督。不幸的是，监督委员会往往成为兰利的同情伙伴，而不是其苛刻的法官。贩卖行政部门的 "机密 "是会形成习惯的，国会议员和他们的工作人员也不能免于成为美国秘密工作的参与者的诱惑和爱国主义。特别是共和党人，他们普遍钦佩行动局的隐秘、反共、现实政治的形象，应该对他们的宠爱更加吝啬。国会最近决定放弃1998年情报授权法案中的 "吹哨人 "条款，该条款将保护向国会通报中情局错误行为的中情局雇员，这是一个严重的错误。国会山需要更多和更敏锐的眼睛在情报局内部，而不是更少。


去年7月，新确认的中情局局长乔治-特尼特（George Tenet）任命杰克-唐宁（Jack Downing）为这个秘密机构的新负责人。唐宁是一位优秀的语言学家，前海军陆战队员，也是秘密行动处的守旧派成员，一位曾与他共事的办案人员称他是 "一个协商一致的候选人，完全可以被秘密行动处的负责人接受"，他们与负责行动的副主任协调管理秘密行动处。在他发给部队的全球 "你好 "电报中，唐宁写道，DO仍然存在严重问题，需要继续改革。他的海军陆战队的坦率当然是朝着正确的方向迈出的一步，但正如每个发展过外国人的案例官员所知道的那样，话语是廉价的--特别是当来自DO高级官员时。但唐宁应该得到怀疑的好处。然而，特尼特和国会的情报监督委员会应确保这种怀疑是合理和短暂的。

如果美国允许曾经如此热情地试图与冷战作斗争的秘密部门沦为自己制造的封闭社会的受害者，那将是一种可耻的讽刺。真正站在美国国防前线的优秀办案人员应该得到更好的待遇：有权再次为他们的黑暗职业感到自豪。



Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?
The sensational revelations of recent years about the Central Intelligence Agency almost obscure a larger point: The Agency is just no good at what it's supposed to be doing. So writes the author, a former CIA officer, who describes a corrosive culture in which promotion-hungry operatives collect pointless intelligence from worthless foreign agents. Reform, the author warns, may be impossible.

By Edward G. Shirley

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FEBRUARY 1998 ISSUE
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The arrest of Aldrich Hazen Ames, a CIA operative turned KGB mole, in February of 1994, fundamentally changed the public perception of the clandestine service of the Central Intelligence Agency. Before Ames only "case officers," operatives who recruit and run foreign agents, knew how dysfunctional the service had become. Since Ames the outside world has learned that much is rotten in the Directorate of Operations—the official name of the clandestine service, known to insiders simply as the DO. Yet the senators and congressmen who oversee the DO, the journalists who report on it, and the civilian directors who run it have failed to understand and to confront the service's real problems. Even among CIA analysts who work in the Directorate of Intelligence, the overt, think-tank side of the house, few have grasped the extent of the DO's decrepitude.

Politically charged, usually lurid stories of CIA misconduct have deflected attention from telling questions about U.S. intelligence. Journalists level charges of Agency involvement in Latino drug-smuggling rings. The American wife of a Central American guerrilla accuses the DO of complicity in torture and murder. Female case officers sue their male bosses for sexual discrimination.

All these affairs have blackened the Agency's image. None advances the debate on whether the clandestine service actually spies well. Protected by secrecy, by a disciplined and obedient bureaucracy, and by the average outsider's basic ignorance of and fascination with espionage, the leadership of the DO has pre-empted and stalled pressure for Agency reform.

In 1985 I joined the Directorate of Operations. A devout cold warrior, I had no qualms about espionage or covert action against the Soviet Union and in defense of America's national interests. I was proud and eager when the Near East Division chose me to join its ranks. I had dreamed for years of applying my academic training in Islamic history to the DO's Middle Eastern mission.

Twelve years later I retain an appreciation for espionage—for those rare moments when a case officer contributes to his nation's defense. But I have long since lost my pride in the DO, which has evolved into a sorry blend of Monty Python and Big Brother. I resigned in 1993.

When current and former case officers gather, their conversations inevitably converge: they wonder whether the DO has irretrievably fallen apart. A few years ago I asked a former colleague who had served in Moscow whether she had ever successfully explained the DO's problems to an outsider. "No, never," she replied. "I've given up trying. You have to explain so much you get lost in the details, or you just sound like a whiny, unpatriotic left-winger."


Ross MacDonald
The CIA, with a certain fanfare, recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. The Agency wants the American public, and especially Congress, to believe that its men and women won the Cold War, along the way had a few problems, and yet are now rising to the challenges of the twenty-first century. In front of the intelligence-oversight committees in Congress senior Agency officials repeat the CIA's new mission statement about battling terrorism, drugs, the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, and rogue regimes in Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and North Korea. With the Ames fiasco receding, some current and retired CIA officials are asserting that if Congress and the press would only back off, the professionals would once again get the job done.


One feature of a closed society is that it lies to itself as readily as it lies to outsiders. Writing as "X" in his 1947 assessment of the Soviet Union, the diplomat George F. Kennan borrowed from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; the passage applies equally to the CIA's present-day Directorate of Operations.

From enthusiasm to imposture the step is perilous and slippery; the demon of Socrates affords a memorable instance of how a wise man may deceive himself, how a good man may deceive others, how the conscience may slumber in a mixed and middle state between self-illusion and voluntary fraud.
The sad truth about the CIA—what the Ames debacle didn't reveal—is that the DO has for years been running an espionage charade in most countries, deceiving itself and others about the value of its recruited agents and intelligence production. The ugliest DO secret is how the clandestine service encourages decent case officers, gradually and naturally, to evolve into liars about their contribution to America's security. By 1985, the year Ames volunteered to spy for the KGB, the vast majority of the CIA's foreign agents were mediocre assets at best, put on the payroll because case officers needed high recruitment numbers to get promoted. Long before the Soviet Union collapsed, recruitment and intelligence fraud—the natural product of an insular spy world—had stripped the DO of its integrity and its competence.

Younger operatives are resigning in droves, because they have given up hope of reform. The attrition was sufficient to provoke an investigation by the inspector general in 1996. Though the inspector general's office did a poor job of questioning young case officers who had resigned, the final report doesn't deny the increasing resignation rate among the best and the brightest who entered the DO during the Reagan years. Nearly three quarters of the case officers from my 1985 junior-officer class have quit the service. When my class entered, we were told that the DO had the lowest attrition rate—under five percent—in the U.S. government. Though this figure was no doubt inaccurate—a normal and healthy rate of attrition in any bureaucracy should be higher—it does reflect the DO's credo that officers don't quit the clandestine service unless they are flawed. Within the DO and in front of Congress senior officials downplay the rising resignation rate and even deny that the directorate's younger officers—let alone its best ones—are abandoning ship.

But the senior officers themselves know the truth. As early as 1988 a senior CIA official responsible for the Directorate of Operations' budget and personnel visited stations and bases worldwide, discreetly asking young case officers why so many good young officers were quitting. The official wanted to know whether junior officers would be willing to participate in a round-table discussion with the deputy director of operations, the boss of the clandestine service. The senior official, not a case officer herself, didn't realize that she was asking case officers to commit professional suicide. The round-table discussion never took place.


A Dysfunctional Family
Americans were shocked by the DO's nine-year failure to catch Ames, a hard-drinking, free-spending KGB mole inside the Soviet-East Europe Division. How could the DO have entrusted its premier agents—probably the best Soviet agents the CIA ever had—to a counterintelligence case officer with such evident flaws? Unlike the usual agent chaff that case officers recruit in order to get promotions, these Soviet agents were the real thing. Treason and his spending habits aside, the truth is that Ames was not much different from many of his peers. He was disgruntled and he drank too much. He disliked recruiting foreign agents and he did it poorly. He distrusted most of his colleagues, particularly those more senior. He was stalled in his career as a mid-level officer (a GS-14), slightly higher in grade than the average retiring case officer.

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Before the collapse of the Soviet Union moving in the cocktail-party circuit was the primary, often the only, way a case officer could rub shoulders with Communist "hard targets"—foreigners who were extremely difficult to approach, let alone develop and recruit. In seeking to press the flesh, many officers drank too much. More important, many case officers—and Ames was one of them—chafed at the recruitment game, the desperate socializing in search of a foreigner who could be written up as a promising "developmental." Case officers grow cynical in such a world—and they've been living in one since the 1960s. Before he volunteered his services to the Soviets, Ames amused himself in Mexico City by privately critiquing the station's case officers and their numerous recruited agents, who produced very little intelligence. Contrary to the common, outsider view of him, Ames was attentive to both operational details and intelligence reports. He discovered before most of his peers did that one of the most renowned case officers working in the Latin American division was a corrupt fraud, who inflated or invented most of his agents and probably pocketed some agents' pay in diamonds. Though dismissed from the service, the case officer was never jailed. On his spacious balcony in a high-rise above Mexico City, Ames often passed evenings with friends wryly belittling the DO's contributions to America's defense.

Deeply troubled and venal, Ames slipped across that space between dissent and treason, believing it was all a charade. Given his free-spending ways, the Agency should of course have found him sooner. But spotting Ames psychologically, or by questioning his peers, would have been very difficult. In the CIA family there are many dysfunctional members.

Peeling away the layers of the Agency's mystique—by learning how to read agents' files, acquiring familiarity with operational details, gaining access to "restricted-handling" cases—can take years. One thing, however, did not take me long to learn: there was a severe discrepancy between the reputations of most senior officers and their talents. Sterling exceptions aside, the average senior officer rose through the hierarchy without ever learning much about the language, culture, or politics of the countries in which he served. The good case officers in my junior-officer class hunted vainly for mentors like Richard Helms, Paul Henze, and Robert Ames—renowned case officers from the past who knew their languages and their countries well. Not a single Iran-desk chief during the eight years that I worked on Iran could speak or read Persian. Not a single Near East Division chief knew Arabic, Persian, or Turkish, and only one could get along even in French. One Near East officer, sent during the Iran-contra affair to assess and debrief Manucher Ghorbanifar, the slick and savvy Iranian middleman between the Ayatollah Khomeini's regime and the Americans and Israelis, spoke no Persian and had no background in the Middle East. He repeatedly had to ask Ghorbanifar to spell the names of well-known senior Iranian officials.

At the Agency's espionage-training school ("The Farm") at Camp Peary, near Williamsburg, Virginia, instructors regularly told trainees that cultural distinctions did not matter, that an operation was an operation regardless of the target. Whether Arab, German, Turkish, Brazilian, Persian, Russian, Pakistani, or French, targets were (as Duane Clarridge, a Europe Division and counterterrorism-center chief, baldly put it) "all the same." "An op is an op," a favorite mantra of English-only case officers, is one of the DO's most self-defeating conceits.

Of all the clandestine service's Cold War missions, no task was more mystique-building, but at the same time more illusory, than the recruiting of Soviet agents. The No. 1 operational directive of every case officer was to recruit KGB officials, Soviet military-intelligence officers, and Soviet diplomats, but this essentially amounted to little more than paper-shuffling between CIA headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, and case officers in the field. Real recruitment was more often than not a sheer fluke. According to Soviet-East Europe Division officers, the best agents Ames killed were all "walk-ins," who had volunteered their services to the United States. Handling walk-ins is no mean feat, and CIA case officers have often handled sensitive walk-ins exceptionally well. But "recruiting" walk-ins has little to do with the protracted "recruitment cycle"—the spotting, assessing, developing, and recruiting of foreigners worldwide—on which the DO has built its budget and esprit de corps.

During the Cold War, DO managers in the field wanted young case officers to telephone, out of the blue, Soviet officials with whom they had no plausible reason to be in touch. The lucky case officers who made it past the telephoning and the awkward encounters were encouraged to socialize as intensely as possible. They were to ignore the constant advice of KGB defectors who warned that if a case officer met a Soviet citizen, he should simply say hello, offer a business card with a home telephone number, and then say good-bye. If the Soviet wanted to defect or to work in place against the Communist system, he would send a message. KGB defectors argued that the active development of Soviets would only draw the attention of Soviet counterintelligence, and would amplify a Soviet embassy's or consulate's normal paranoia. Yet the CIA persisted. The DO's mystique and pride, not to mention its jobs and budget, were at stake.

Terrible DO failures occurred in the 1980s and 1990s in Latin America, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Not just in the Soviet Union did the CIA lose numerous agents. An organization whose motto is the verse from the Gospel of John "And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" had grown sloppy, developing a lackadaisical appreciation of the distinction between fact and fiction. Some good agents, and many mediocre or worthless ones, died for their case officers' mistakes; in an environment in which poor-quality agents routinely got inflated into first-rate ones, case officers frequently put agents who really didn't know much into harm's way.

The Numbers Racket
As the Soviets expanded the Cold War geographically in the 1960s and 1970s, the CIA significantly increased the size and number of its stations and bases throughout Africa and Latin America. In the Third World working for the CIA was a rite of passage for many men (Third World agents were and are almost all men). For Latin Americans, Arabs, and Africans, association with the Agency could be highly respectable and reasonably well paid. The CIA was the little guy's conduit to the cabal that ruled the world. Third World targets were usually inexpensive and relatively easy for the DO to recruit and run, and their "flap" potential was far less than that of agents operating against our sensitive First World allies.

With most of the Third World seen as a legitimate Cold War arena, case officers worldwide could go after local diplomatic or military representatives. Even if the CIA was not in fact interested in recruiting a given official of a given Third World country (admittedly, a rare circumstance during the Cold War), a case officer could still chase the target and label him an "access agent," who might conceivably lead to a more promising, usually Soviet, recruit. With the entire Third World "on the screen," recruitment possibilities for the average case officer increased enormously. One of my former chiefs of station once remarked about a Soviet case, "Isn't it amusing to contemplate the hundreds—God knows—of African access agents we've recruited over the years when the Russians are among the world's worst racists?"All told, the CIA recruited thousands of people from the Third World.

The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, with its enthusiasm for "objective criteria" in "performance appraisal systems," further solidified the DO's head-counting ethic. Though the act didn't technically apply to the Agency (Langley is in theory exempt from civil-service regulations), in spirit it did. The business-school philosophy of "management by objective" officially became de rigueur throughout the DO. (The current harassment problems of the IRS probably also stem from this quantitative philosophy run amok.)

As the CIA got larger, bureaucratic standards were formalized. The power of DO promotion panels eclipsed the old patronage system. The organization needed a common criterion for "objectively"judging the case-officer corps. To a considerable extent the American ethic of judging all people equally and the American fondness for translating merit into numbers gave rise to the practice of agent head-counting on case-officer evaluations.

To most people at the time, the annual head count—how many agents have you recruited?—seemed an efficient, progressive idea. Quickly, however, a rather raw reckoning of numbers took hold. By the early 1980s Africa, Near East, and Latin America Division case officers dominated the DO because recruitments in their regions were relatively easy. By the time I entered the service, senior officers regularly counseled young Soviet and Europe Division case officers to have at least one "recruitment tour"in Africa or the Middle East early in their careers, in order to avoid being forgotten by the promotion panels. At The Farm senior Africa Division officers tried to enlist trainees by bragging that operatives in their division racked up more recruitments, and thus were promoted more quickly, than those in any other division. Not once did I meet a senior Africa Division officer who extolled the quality of the intelligence reports produced by the division's vast roster of agents.

Overseas in the 1980s and 1990s my junior-officer class encountered DO managers offering $3,000 bonuses for "scalps" provided by Christmas or Easter. Bottles of champagne were awarded to case officers who generated the most intelligence reports. The winners usually scored twenty or thirty reports a month. In 1989 many of my colleagues were stunned to receive a cable from a division chief who had spent his career chasing Soviets. He recommended one "high quality" recruitment per year for each case officer in his division. This cable came on the heels of a worldwide headquarters cable announcing that all our Cuban agents had probably been double agents. The competition realized long ago how desperate America's case officers are for scalps. They have been happy to provide them.

In 1993 CIA director James Woolsey sent a cable to all stations and bases encouraging case officers and their managers to push for quality, not quantity, in their recruitments and intelligence production. To an extent Woolsey knew that there was a recruitment problem in the DO. That same year, however, the DO issued new performance-evaluation guidelines for young case officers, who are responsible for the vast majority of all DO recruitments, re-emphasizing the centrality of recruitments in the promotion process. Officers in the field didn't have to read between the lines: the numbers game continued. Woolsey never knew that the DO had betrayed his good intentions.

By the time I resigned, in 1993, the DO had introduced the "Asset Validation System" for assessing foreign recruits. The DO billed the AVS as a means to prevent the recruitment and running of double agents and tired Cold War leftovers. The AVS did not officially attempt to root out "cheap recruitments." However, in the early 1990s a number of scandals in which star case officers were caught fabricating agents and intelligence reports gave reform-minded case officers hope that the DO might finally rein in the promotion-by-recruitment system. We all knew that these aggressive officers had merely pushed accepted standards of exaggeration and deceit a little too far.

This hope has proved naive. Although some senior officers will now quietly admit that there has been a numbers game, they usually complain that the 1980s generation of case officers gave rise to the problem, which they and the AVS are now solving. However, the AVS—dubbed "agent scrubbing" by The Washington Post and often credited as a reform initiated by John Deutch (in fact William Webster began the program; Robert Gates and James Woolsey significantly expanded it)—has not really affected the recruitment game. Case officers must now write a few more cables for each recruitment—a little extra paperwork in order to gain a seal of approval. Officers can even avoid doing the paperwork altogether: in the ever-growing paper flow between headquarters and the field, AVS requirements can easily disappear for years into a bureaucratic black hole. The recruitment of mediocre, if not entirely worthless, access agents continues.

Case officers have learned that they can recruit a worthless agent and later have the agent scrubbed without damage to their careers. Close questioning of recruitments in the DO remains uncommon. A case officer can recruit eight assets in Geneva, move on to his next tour in Paris, have all eight Geneva-based agents scrubbed, and still receive glowing evaluations from the Paris chief of station.

The AVS also does nothing to verify the value of information from the foreign agents who produce clandestine intelligence and who are the raison d'être of espionage. Standards for judging a source's intelligence production are so low that a case officer can easily believe, or pretend to believe, that the most routine contact is a first-rate intel developmental. With "forward-leaning" (that is, optimistic) cable traffic papering his way, an ambitious case officer can turn a friendly low-level telephone-company official into a sensitive penetration of a foreign nation's telecommunications industry. Once headquarters certifies a developmental's intelligence reports, the case officer knows that the developmental's recruitment will probably be approved. Clever case officers can also easily "push" the facts and opinions available in open-source news, or mirror classified State Department telegrams, to make a developmental or an agent seem like an adequate intelligence producer. Pushing the news and mirroring State have, regrettably, become second nature inside the DO, particularly among aggressive officers who know the system. And once poor intelligence becomes acceptable, the rule of the lowest common denominator takes hold, and cheap intel and agents inevitably become the standard.

The Agency knows that DO soft reporting on State Department issues often draws the ire of U.S. diplomats. Foreign Service officers who have access to clandestine-intelligence reports have long known that the CIA is poaching on their terrain. And as any Agency analyst will admit, the State Department and overseas representatives of the U.S. Treasury have generally provided the finest official commentary on politics and economics. Clandestine information from paid agents is by no means inherently superior to information from unpaid sources, as outsiders usually presume. Whether the subject is NATO expansion, democracy in Russia, Toulouse's Airbus versus Seattle's Boeing, the U.S. trade embargo against Iran, or the future course of South Africa, Kazakhstan, or Croatia, it has been diplomats and their contacts—not case officers and their agents—who have usually proved to be the U.S. government's most knowledgeable sources. But State reporting is not, like Agency reporting, appetizingly packaged in bite-size morsels. Diplomatic telegrams do not benefit from the boldly printed, highly classified code words that adorn Agency products. Bureaucratically inept, politically timid, and cash-starved, the State Department has rarely tried to take on Langley—a rich and tough bureaucratic power—for the DO's recruitment antics and shoddy reporting.

When I was in the service, I regularly encountered DO bosses who encouraged their case officers to put information gained from State cover work into CIA intelligence channels. When they couldn't duplicate State sources, case officers tried to borrow or to steal them, thereby putting U.S. diplomats in the awkward position of having to explain to their foreign counterparts why the U.S. government sometimes sends two "diplomats" asking the same questions.

Though case officers deserve most of the blame for debasing American espionage, they could not have done it alone. Analysts in the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, who are the primary consumers and judges of foreign-intelligence reporting, share the responsibility. Like case officers, the analysts generally don't have the necessary languages, academic preparation, or in-country experience in their areas of supposed expertise. Ever since Robert Gates, as deputy director of intelligence, reorganized the Directorate of Intelligence in the early 1980s, it has been rare for an analyst to spend more than a few years working on one country. Promotions, especially promotions to managerial grades, come more quickly to generalists who have covered several areas. Sitting in six-by-six, usually windowless, cubicles, and confronted daily with demands for short-order "finished" intelligence, analysts rarely have the desire to sacrifice their careers by slowly building the skills that give uncommon insight into foreign countries.

Too Many Spooks—Too Few Spies
Agent scrubbing has not yet advanced an answer to the question that has bedeviled the Directorate of Operations: How do you rank and promote the entire cadre of DO case officers when valuable recruitments are so few in number and so difficult to obtain? The exact number of case officers is classified, but U.S. press reports of approximately 2,000 are not far off the mark. In some U.S. embassies and consulates CIA case officers outnumber diplomats who report on political and economic affairs. The number of developmentals and agents necessary to keep junior and mid-level case officers busy is large; demand creates supply.

An honest discussion of recruitments, intelligence production, and promotions would cast doubt on Agency operations and careers since at least the 1970s. The DO's future, or at least its staffing levels and current management, would also be called into question. And case officers would have to confess to themselves and to Congress that the chances of success in agent recruitment today are even worse than they were in the past.

The much trumpeted challenges of the twenty-first century, unlike those of the Cold War era, are not worldwide struggles that define, galvanize, and divide nations. The Chinese may well become a serious menace, but they are not inspiring or funding radical anti-Western guerrilla movements and political parties in the Third World. China and the rogue states—Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, North Korea—have embassies and consulates worldwide, offering the DO, in theory, numerous targets, but the CIA has had little success in recruiting these countries' diplomats and intelligence officers. With rare exceptions, intelligence coups against rogue states, terrorists, and the Chinese come from volunteers.

Only a handful of people in Paris, Bonn, or New Delhi have, for example, exploitable access to resident Iranian officials and scientists; the odds that a case officer could locate, let alone recruit, an Iranian source are poor. Just meeting an interesting Iranian without the host country's assistance or knowledge is extremely difficult. If the French, the Germans, or the Indians were to become hostile to U.S. espionage operations, CIA case officers would have only a remote chance of doing anything worthwhile. And with the Soviet threat gone, Europeans have become noticeably more hostile to CIA officers operating on European soil. The Western Europeans now regularly exchange information among themselves about the CIA. The French, the Germans, and the Austrians recently fired warning shots by seeking the removal of case officers who failed to understand the new post-Cold War ground rules. National pride and differing national interests (the European Union, for instance, has consistently downplayed Iran's nefarious behavior in order to maintain commercial ties with Iran) have severely restricted Agency operations in Europe and elsewhere.

Current DO operations against America's toughest Middle Eastern foes—Iran and Iraq—have essentially devolved into "cold pitches," in which case officers with little biographical or psychological information on their targets, whom in many cases they have never even met before, "pitch" a clandestine relationship with the CIA in exchange for money. This approach can occasionally work, but it is neither a particularly clever nor a thoughtful way to get foreigners to risk their lives for the United States. When the approach does work, however, such quick hits read well on case-officer performance evaluations.


Glasnost?
Spying is the second-oldest profession. Irrespective of Langley's incompetence, or American doubts about covert action, spying in some form will continue. The intelligence debate is not about whether we should spy but about how we can spy well. If Washington could find reliable sources of information on Iran's Ministry of Intelligence, local Shi'ite opposition in the oil-rich regions of Saudi Arabia, or Communist China's military general staff, America would be safer for the effort. All these "human intelligence"targets are extraordinarily difficult to reach, but if the DO were an organization with long-range plans and talented personnel, it might have a chance.

The window of opportunity for reform that was inadvertently opened by the Ames case is now closing. In Washington, where elected and appointed officials remonstrate with the CIA's functionaries but rarely fire them, the DO's senior officers suspect that if they take a few blows, make a few cosmetic reforms, and hang tight, they will outlast their critics. Not a single senior officer was fired for the Ames debacle. No one was fired for any of the strictly operational flaps and fiascoes of the past ten years (case officers dismissed because of the highly politicized Iran-contra and Guatemalan human-rights affairs don't count). Some of the perpetrators have ended up with senior-service promotions and distinguished-intelligence medals.

Reforming the CIA is a herculean task. The unforgiving law of bureaucratic rot—first-rate people usually associate with and advance other first-rate people, but second choose third, and third choose fourth—has come brutally into play in the CIA's closed society. First-rate people are now few and far between. How does one reform an institution in which the guiding 10 percent are arguably the institution's most disingenuous, least qualified officials? How does a director of central intelligence who comes from outside the CIA look down from his seventh-floor perch and separate capable people from the incompetent? No outsider, no matter how savvy, can navigate successfully inside the DO without case officers to guide him.

Closed societies are by definition impervious to most forms of outside discipline and oversight, and an espionage service must to a large and unhealthy extent be a closed society. First-rate or third, case officers and agents must be camouflaged and protected.

Outsiders cannot save the Directorate of Operations from itself unless they hold it accountable for all its failures and deficiencies. The junior and mid-level case officers who are considering leaving the organization need to see some sign that outsiders will no longer tolerate sham or bungled operations. At a minimum, the President, the CIA director, and Congress's intelligence-oversight committees must ensure that the Agency's inspector general and counterintelligence investigations are accurate and fair. The inspector general's office has often oscillated between blatant collusion with the DO and anti-DO grandstanding before Congress. And counterintelligence reports by the DO's various staffs and divisions usually fall victim to back-room machinations that keep even useless senior officers relatively unblemished and consistently unpunished.

Though inspector general and counterintelligence reports have rarely been tough on the DO, they have almost always been too tough for senior case officers to swallow. When surprisingly scathing inspector general or counterintelligence investigations do not lead to the dismissal of senior officers guilty of gross incompetence, good officers resign or fall silent.

Firing the old guard will not by itself change the culture of the clandestine service. As in any bureaucracy, senior functionaries have progeny. Even good case officers inevitably make debilitating compromises if they are working in a bad system. First-rate operatives who know they've collected little truly meaningful intelligence over the years can nevertheless idealize the Directorate of Operations, the myth and methods of clandestine intelligence becoming inseparable from their identities, honor, and family life. Only a complete overhaul of the service that would drastically reduce the number of veteran case officers has a chance of saving the clandestine service. In order to reform U.S. espionage, outsiders must use the only sure leverage they have for safely prying open the clandestine service: DO intelligence reports. The director and the intelligence-oversight committees, or the outside experts they appoint, can review the intelligence production of selected officers, operational desks, staffs, centers, and divisions. Though a case officer may recruit a highly valuable agent who produces no intelligence reporting (for example, a code clerk at a foreign embassy), all non-covert-action recruitments are meant to lead, eventually, to intelligence production. If outside experts compare open-source, classified non-Agency, and DO information on a subject, they can find out whether the DO is lying to itself and others. This will take time and energy, of course.

With a cadre of good case officers as his eyes, ears, and hands, the CIA director might have a chance to overcome the DO's problems. He may discover, however, that the bureaucracy has irretrievably broken down. In that case he, or Congress, should consider what only a few years ago would have been unthinkable: rebuilding the clandestine service from scratch. America's national security would not be compromised by temporarily shutting down the DO. A Directorate of Operations that produces mostly mediocre intelligence and egregiously stupid coup d'état schemes against, for example, Saddam Hussein harms the United States abroad.

If the Agency were truly intent on reform, the Directorate of Operations would abolish most of its diplomat-spy positions and replace them with "non-official cover" officers, who operate outside an embassy or consulate, usually as businessmen or consultants. NOCs are far from the elite of the clandestine service, and typical non-official covers are usually weak and small-scale, given the growing and understandable reluctance of U.S. businesses to provide Langley with any help in this regard. Nonetheless, only NOCs and NOC-directed agent networks can plausibly penetrate terrorist groups, arms-merchants' networks, and scientific associations, institutes, and corporations potentially involved in nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons production. Unlike inside case officers, with their flimsy diplomatic covers, NOCs can quietly enter and exit countries, meet foreigners, and pass through foreign internal-security checks without setting off alarms. Deploying mostly NOCs overseas would also subvert the numbers game. NOCs work without diplomatic immunity: contemplating jail or worse, they would more scrupulously evaluate the intelligence benefits of a prospective espionage operation.

Senior inside officers, who have no intention of superannuating themselves and their protégés, will disparage the value of non-official cover in the DO's future, keeping NOCs an obedient sideshow. NOCs, who are locked into the closed world of the clandestine service more tightly than inside officers are, won't complain. The better NOCs, of course, have already done what most of their better diplomat-spy colleagues have done: they've resigned or retired.

If there were no entrenched bureaucracy tirelessly challenging reform, rebuilding the clandestine service would be much easier. Bringing in graduates of America's leading colleges and universities and multilingual Americans who have lived abroad—our finest pool of intelligence talent—is not an impossible task. More than any other country, the United States can draw on a multi-ethnic, polyglot society for its intelligence service. Congress in particular bears special responsibility for guaranteeing the reform of the clandestine service. It alone has the financial authority to force changes inside the DO. After the scandals of the 1970s Congress wisely chose to exercise its right under the 1947 National Security Act to oversee the CIA more closely. Unfortunately, the oversight committees have become more often Langley's sympathetic partners than its demanding judges. Trafficking in executive-branch "secrets" is habit-forming, and congressmen and their staffers aren't immune to the allure and patriotism of being players in America's covert efforts. Especially Republicans, who generally admire the Directorate of Operations for its stealthy, anti-Communist, realpolitik image, should be more parsimonious with their favor. Congress's recent decision to drop the "whistle blower" provision from the 1998 intelligence authorization bill, which would have protected Agency employees who notify Congress of CIA wrongdoing, was a serious mistake. Capitol Hill needs more and sharper eyes inside the DO, not fewer.


Last July, George Tenet, the newly confirmed CIA director, appointed Jack Downing to be the new head of the clandestine service. A good linguist, an ex-Marine, and a member of the DO's old guard, Downing is described by a case officer who worked with him as "a consensus candidate, entirely acceptable to the DO dons" who run the DO in coordination with the deputy director of operations. In his worldwide "hello" cable to the troops, Downing wrote that the DO was still suffering from serious problems and required continuing reform. His Marine Corps candor is certainly a step in the right direction, but as every case officer who has developed a foreigner knows, words are cheap—particularly when coming from senior DO officers. But Downing deserves the benefit of the doubt. Tenet and Congress's intelligence-oversight committees should ensure, however, that the doubt is reasonable and fleeting.

It would be a shameful irony if America allowed the clandestine service, which once tried so enthusiastically to fight the Cold War, to fall victim to a closed society of its own making. Good case officers, who really have been on the front lines of America's defense, deserve better: the right to be proud, once again, of their dark profession.