hello central
Last week I saw an article which indicated that the CIA is interested in recruiting a more diversified work force
Intelligence Agencies Urged to Hire Minorities - washingtonpost.com. This was Jose Rodriguez, director of the National Clandestine Service at a border security conference in Texas. I imagine part of this was using a good platform to make a statement that would get some public resonance. Part of it was earnest pragmatism. The CIA simply does not have enough people of different language and cultural backgrounds. As Mr. Rodriguez said (making a quote of the Post's paraphrase) "diversity...[is] an important means of protecting against group-think." At this point I drew a mental line through the last couple of articles I've read on the CIA and intelligence work (other than the wiretapping story more an NSA matter.) There was an article on contractor intelligence work being done in Iraq and Afghanistan, by a British company
In Iraq, a Private Realm Of Intelligence-Gathering - washingtonpost.com"
The obvious problem with this is while this company's expertise may have made them integral to the counter-insurgency effort, it is not organic and probably cannot be immediately reproduced by the US Military if the theater becomes inhospitable to civilians. Still this is operational, tactical intelligence work, and responds to procedure and technology. More surprising is the degree to which overall community, the CIA, relies on contractors in general. Something which seems to have even surprised them
Who Runs the CIA? Outsiders for Hire. - washingtonpost.com. Arguing for: most of these contractors are from within the intelligence community. They came up and learned the trade (trade craft) through the institutions of U S intelligence community. This allows an expansion and flexibility to professional intelligence. Arguing against: while the founding workforce will have come from within the community and will have the culture of being a government servant dedicated to disinterested public service. Those who come after increasing will not. They will have the interested mindset of a supplier focused on the buyer with particular service in mind
Analyst counters Bush on Al Qaeda - The Boston Globe. Back in April some people from the Office of Naval Intelligence gave a talk at the University. I went after I heard of it because, well, what could be better than an evening with ONI. It was, for the duration of the event, the whitest room in College Park; filled with the usual upper middle class conservative suspects. This was in itself ironic. It had been a special micro job-fair talk. They came around looking specifically for people with engineering and/or language skills they would take on in an accelerated hiring process (GSA lite). "Does anyone here know Chinese", they asked. "Ever thought about learning Chinese? Do you like to just sit back with a good avionics techincal manual?" Still they devoted most of the talk to an overview of the ONI and what it does. Having worked with the ONI many years ago as enlisted person (intelligence rating) I had the strong feeling I was following their talk better then most in the room. It was a curious feeling of dislocation; the feeling of being an outsider mingled with familiarity. They weren't looking for people like me, though. The end point of the reverie the article on the CIA's minority outreach put me to were the book reviews
Covert Action - washingtonpost.com and
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA - Tim Weiner - Books - Review - New York Times I read for Tim Weiner's book. Which details that the CIA has gotten much wrong in its half century of existence. Notably the collapse of the Soviet system, and the attacks on 11 September 2001. This last is just part of the Middle East extremist movement which has existed for more than a generation now. Being roughly the same age as the current geopolitical order regiment for the middle east, and for all that time being just below the critical level of interest, comprehension or funding. As the reviews indicate the CIA's misjudgments were not just limited to those incidents, but have been continual through its existence. Though they make claims for it happening, its hard to tell what they may have gotten right. They don't feel they should say. Which is convenient for them. The real question is whether the reconfiguration of the intelligence community represents a genuine move to reform
US Intelligence: Are the Reforms Working? Or whether it represents policy makers essentially giving up on any program of predictive intelligence analysis, and making it into something that could at least be politically useful.
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