Curtains For The CIA?

John Prados

May 10, 2006

John Prados is a senior fellow of the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., and author of Hoodwinked: The Documents that Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (The New Press).

The auguries are dark for the people who do the hard work of intelligence at Langley, headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency. Don’t be fooled by the spin that the appointment of General Michael V. Hayden in place of suddenly-resigned agency director Porter Goss is a simple personnel replacement. Hayden, currently the Deputy Director of National Intelligence, represents far more than a new man at the helm, and more too than the other line prevalent in the media—that the switch is merely a move in the subterranean war over control between Hayden’s boss, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Rather, a Hayden stewardship will accelerate disintegrative processes already underway at Langley. We may be witnessing the end of the CIA as we know it.

Why is this so? For starters the agency is under attack from at least four directions. The Bush White House, politically vulnerable for its manipulation of the Iraq prewar intelligence, has sought to shift the blame onto the CIA, and uses “intelligence reform” as a cloak for disciplining what this president misperceives as a rogue agency. Porter Goss was Bush’s loyal agent, but his slash-and-burn style at Langley cut hard at core CIA values and established a climate of fear. Even so, Goss could not prevent the revelation of yet more heavy-handed security programs—the secret prisons and the Bush domestic wiretap program—further infuriating the White House and a president with whom the CIA director never had much rapport. The Hayden appointment is a new effort to put a loyal agent in place, and though this Air Force general is an intelligence professional, he has compromised this status by going political to defend the Bush wiretap program.

Second, the CIA is under attack from Rumsfeld and the Pentagon. When the creation of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) was debated in Congress, Rummy was careful to demand exemptions from true controls—under the guise of protecting the intelligence flow to warfighters. He then used the inevitable hiatus as Negroponte built an organization to rush into areas where CIA has always held responsibility. Under the rubric of breaking down walls, Porter Goss did little to protect CIA equities. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon has now replicated CIA structures from quasi-“stations” to espionage capabilities, to mandates for a covert action role. The secretary has also issued regulations asserting a right to approve transfers of personnel to Negroponte’s new organizations, decisions that the law reserved to the DNI alone. The Pentagon is currently demanding access to the flow of raw clandestine reporting, almost the last remnant of CIA exclusivity.

Nor is this all. A third source of struggle was inherent in the law that established the DNI, instructed to set up centers for several kinds of intelligence analysis, and fusions of analysis and operational control. DNI Negroponte was virtually ordered to compete with CIA analytical capabilities and invited to draft officers for that purpose. This creates a tension between the “national” office and the agency in which every shortcoming or perceived intelligence failure at Langley tempts Negroponte to duplicate another CIA analytical arm. The end state is likely to be a twin agency, the DNI as another CIA, all the more so since the key weakness of the DNI is that he is a manager with no “troops” under his direct command. When the chips are down Negroponte will likely support the agency against the Pentagon, both because Hayden is his man and because the DNI cannot permit concentration of all the intelligence power under Rumsfeld, but there Rummy’s much closer ties to George W. Bush will play against CIA. 

Finally, Langley is under attack by the American people. The CIA’s failure to detect the 9/11 plot drained much of the public support the agency had tried to build during the 1990s. Growing awareness of the agency’s intelligence failures and buckling before the Bush manipulations over Iraq angered Americans. Unease over Langley’s role in “renditions,” its denied-but-obvious use of torture, and the secret CIA prisons, have further stoked anger and diminished whatever support remained. Today the agency has no safety net.

Only a few times during its history has the CIA come under serious threat as an institution. John Kennedy famously ruminated about breaking the agency into a thousand pieces after its Bay of Pigs failure. Congressional investigations of CIA abuses in the 1970s again raised the abolition question, as did briefly the end of the Cold War, which seemed to take away the agency’s reason for being. The crisis for the CIA today may be worse than any of the earlier ones precisely because there is no safety net.

Why should we care about any of this? So many times Americans have been embarrassed or even threatened by their security services. From callous covert operations to the domestic spying of the Vietnam era, there were numerous occasions when the CIA’s existence seemed more blight than benefit to Americans. Why should it not disappear? Because the alternative is worse. The military’s actions in Iraq, Guantanamo, in its domestic spying programs, and to a degree in Afghanistan, plus the Pentagon’s evasion of responsibility when abuses were revealed, demonstrates that this is the wrong course today. The administration’s complete refusal to confront public concerns over its domestic wiretapping illustrates the danger. Under a system of Pentagon dominance a similar cloak would extend to every aspect of intelligence activity. The CIA and DNI are subject to oversight from the congressional intelligence committees, the military agencies less so, and the special operations forces—under which the bulk of the new action functions are being grouped—not at all. The military report to armed services committees which are not equipped to monitor intelligence, and to whom the Pentagon has been minimally responsive in these matters. This will make a hash of monitoring arrangements. It has long been accepted that the Central Intelligence Agency was created in part to provide a check against military domination of the U.S. intelligence system. The Bush administration’s intelligence reforms have now recreated the danger of that very possibility.