Goss Incompetence

The Bush Administration brought Porter Goss, a former Republican congressman and chair of the House Intelligence Committee, into the CIA to “clean up” the ideologically suspect agency. The CIA’s staff, in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, had the audacity to tell some people that the Bush administration was picking and choosing their intelligence and squashing dissent on the Sacred Goal.

The guy publicly got up and said he was surprised at how much work it took to be the Director of the CIA. Oh, man, for one well-placed punch in the mouth. Are you kidding? Even if you think it, you don’t SAY it! The administration called him a “transition” figure and nobody expected him to be around for too long, but he let relations with foreign intelligence agencies atrophy because he didn’t like traveling and didn’t feel like entertaining their staff when they visited.

The guy was a stooge. When former CIA leaders tried to give him advice, he refused to meet with them. Staffers who sent in assessments on the Iraq situation that didn’t match the Defense Department’s were asked about party affiliations. This is coming pretty close to enforcing Soviet-style ideological unity.

In keeping with the Soviet comparison, Russian military units would have a commanding officer, and then a second-in-command, the “political officer,” whose job was to maintain loyalty to Moscow and to the communist ideal. Basically, Goss was a political officer who got put in charge of the whole show. He sucked and it’s probably good that he’s gone.

What worries me is his replacement, who will probably be General Michael Hayden. He’s clearly competent, smart, and has had a lot of intelligence experience. The problem is the kind of intelligence experience he’s had. He worked at the NSA for a long time, and is an avowed expert on technical intelligence- the kind that lets us read Ahmadinejad’s license plate or see how many people are working in a nuclear weapons facility at midnight.

The problem is that we already do such things very well. We have the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency, and the vast (and totally secret) resources of No Such Agency...erm, the NSA. What those advanced satellites and eavesdropping technologies cannot do, however, is give us the kind of intelligence that we need to penetrate terrorist networks, locate radical leaders, or prevent an attack.

There are two basic types of intelligence. One is called TECHINT, and the other is called HUMINT, out of the intelligence community’s love for acronyms. TECHINT, or technical intelligence is what we’re so good at. Listening to people’s phone calls. Mapping terrain changes that could indicate buried hideouts. Spotting some terrorist in his car in the Yemen desert and blowing him up with a Predator drone (which, let’s be fair, was awesome.)

HUMINT, surprisingly enough, is human intelligence. This is occasionally the cloak-and-dagger stuff, but it’s more about cultivating relationships. You need officers on the ground in a lot of different places to make connections with locals, develop leads, and generally get your ear to the ground. And if you’re capable of pulling that off, you might even be able to develop a source within a terrorist organization, and all the technical intelligence in the world can’t provide that kind of data.

The CIA used to do an amazing job with this, especially against the Russians. But since the inception of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA has seen its analysts transferred to DNI, its funding cut, and its direct line to the President (the CIA directors of old would always deliver the Presidential intelligence briefing) eliminated. Staffers report a morale problem, and the Washington Post quoted one as saying the CIA was “hemorrhaging officers.”

Enter General Hayden, a guy whose Trailblazer modernization program at the NSA was a dismal failure and whose career specialty has been technical intelligence. Do we really think that he’ll go around improving our ability to collect human intelligence? If the CIA was adrift beforehand, I could see this guy providing a steady hand to guide it in exactly the wrong direction.