On July 8, 2004, seven years after he took office, George Tenet resigned. In his farewell at CIA headquarters, he summoned up the words of Teddy Roosevelt: It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood. Richard Nixon had quoted the same speech the day before he left the White House in disgrace.
Tenet retreated to write a painful personal memoir of his time at the CIA. It was a prideful, bitter book. He justly boasted of the CIA's success--with invaluable help from British intelligence--at dismantling secret weapons programs in Pakistan and Libya. He maintained that he had transformed the agency from a shambles into a dynamo. But the machine had broken down under intolerable pressure. Tenet could not strike at al Qaeda before 9/11: "In the absence of hard intelligence," he wrote, "covert action is a fool's game." And ever since the attacks, he had been swamped by tidal waves of threats that never materialized. Every day he conveyed the newest fears to the White House, and "you could drive yourself crazy believing all or even half" of what he reported. He nearly had. Gripped by uncertainty, he and the CIA had convinced themselves that Iraq's arsenal existed. "We were prisoners of our own history," he wrote, for the only hard facts they had were four years old. He confessed error, but it was a condemned man's plea for absolution. Tenet came to believe that the White House wanted to blame the decision to go to war on him. It was too great a weight to bear.
And now the critic took his turn as the man in the arena.
Porter Goss had never been a great success at the CIA. Recruited in his junior year at Yale in 1959, he joined the clandestine service and served under Allen Dulles, John McCone, and Richard Helms. He had worked in the Latin American division for a decade, focused on Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico. The highlight of his time in the Miami station was running Cuban agents on and off the island in small boats under the cover of the night in the fall of 1962.
Nine years later, Goss was serving at the London station when a bacterial infection seized his heart and lungs and nearly killed him. He retired, recovered, bought a small newspaper in Florida, and parlayed the paper into a seat in Congress in 1988. He had a net worth of $14 million, a gentleman's farm in Virginia, an estate on Long Island Sound, and a viceroy's dominion over the CIA as chairman of the House intelligence committee.
He was modest about his accomplishments at the agency. "I couldn't get a job with CIA today," he said in 2003. "I am not qualified." He was right about that. But he had decided that he and he alone should be the next director of central intelligence. He had taken aim at Tenet with a vicious fusillade. His weapons were the words of the intelligence committee's annual report on the agency.
"IT WILL TAKE US ANOTHER FIVE YEARS"
Published on June 21, 2004, three weeks before Tenet stepped down, the Goss report warned that the clandestine service was becoming "a stilted bureaucracy incapable of even the slightest bit of success." Though 138,000 Americans had applied to work at the CIA in the previous year, few made the grade as spies. Tenet had just testified that "it will take us another five years of work to have the kind of clandestine service our country needs."
Goss seized on that sad truth: "We are now in the eighth year of rebuild, and still we are more than five years away from being healthy. This is tragic."
Goss then turned his fire on the CIA's intelligence directorate for producing spot news of scant value instead of the long-range strategic intelligence that had been the initial reason for creating the agency. Goss was right about that, too--and everyone in the intelligence world knew it. "We haven't done strategic intelligence for so long that most of our analysts don't know how to do it anymore," said Carl W. Ford, Jr., the assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research from May 2001 to October 2003, and a former CIA officer.
"As long as we rate intelligence more for its volume than its quality, we will continue to turn out the $40 billion pile of crap we have become famous for," Ford said. He was incensed that the agency, while transfixed by the chimerical arsenal of Saddam Hussein, had learned nothing about the nuclear weapons programs of the rest of the president's axis of evil. "We probably knew a hundred times more about Iraq's nuclear program than Iran's and a thousand times more than Korea's," Ford said. North Korea was a blank, as it had always been. The CIA had tried to rebuild a network of agents in Iran but failed. Now Iran was a blank, too; the agency actually knew less about those nuclear programs than it had known five or ten years before.
The CIA was in ruins, Ford said: "It's broken. It's so broken that nobody wants to believe it." The Goss report made that clear. "There is a dysfunctional denial of any need for corrective action," it said. "CIA continues down a road leading over a proverbial cliff."
Goss was sure he had the answers. He knew that the CIA had been fooling itself and others about the quality of its work. He knew that most of the clandestine service had spent four decades of the cold war waiting and hoping for Soviets to volunteer their services as spies. He knew that its overseas officers in the war on terror spent days and nights waiting and hoping for their counterparts in Pakistan and Jordan and Indonesia and the Philippines to sell them information. He knew that the solution was to overhaul the agency.
The 9/11 Commission created by Congress was about to issue its final report. The commission did a splendid job reconstructing the events leading up to the attacks. It did not chart a clear path forward. Nor had Congress done much to fix the agency since 9/11, other than giving it billions of dollars and plenty of free advice. The commission correctly described congressional oversight of intelligence as "dysfunctional"--the same epithet Goss hurled at the agency. For years, there had been next to no engagement on the life-and-death issues that confronted the CIA by the House and Senate intelligence committees. The House committee under Goss had produced its last substantive report on the conduct of the CIA in 1998. A quarter of a century of congressional oversight of the agency had produced little of lasting value. The intelligence committees and their staffs had applied an occasional public whipping and a patchwork of quick fixes for ever-present problems.
It was known that the 9/11 Commission would recommend the creation of a new national intelligence director. The idea had been kicked around since Allen Dulles's heyday. It offered no real solution to the crisis at the CIA. Rearranging the boxes on the flowchart of the government would not make it easier to run the CIA.
"It is an organization that thrives through deception," said John Hamre, a former deputy secretary of defense and the president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "How do you manage an organization like that?"
It was one of many questions the CIA and Congress never had answered. How do you run a secret intelligence service in an open democracy? How do you serve the truth by lying? How do you spread democracy by deceit?
"IN THE END, THEY WON'T STAY"
The myth about the CIA dated back to the Bay of Pigs: that all its successes were secret, that only its failures were trumpeted. The truth was that the CIA could not succeed without recruiting and sustaining skilled and daring officers and foreign agents. The agency failed daily at that mission, and to pretend otherwise was a delusion.
To succeed, the CIA needed to find men and women with the discipline and self-sacrifice of the nation's best military officers, the cultural awareness and historical knowledge of the nation's best diplomats, and the sense of curiosity and adventure possessed by the nation's best foreign correspondents. It would help if those recruits were able to pass for Palestinians, Pakistanis, or Pathans. Americans like that were hard to find.
"Can CIA meet the ongoing threat? The answer at this moment is no--absolutely not," said Howard Hart, who had put his life on the line to run agents in Iran, smuggled guns to the Afghan rebels, and led the agency's paramilitary officers. Hart said he took offense when Goss called the CIA "a bunch of dysfunctional jerks" and "a pack of idiots." But he conceded that "CIA's clandestine service can be criticized for not having done as well as it should have. That is a fair statement. Because we have people who just don't pull their weight. And the reason that most of them are there is that we have no way to replace them."
President Bush pledged to increase the agency's ranks by 50 percent. But quality, not quantity, was the crisis at hand. "What we don't need is more money and people, at least not for now," Carl Ford said. "Fifty percent more operators and fifty percent more analysts equals fifty percent more hot air." The personnel problem was the same one Walter Bedell Smith had faced as director of central intelligence while the Korean War was raging: "We can't get qualified people. They just simply don't exist."
The CIA could not find enough talented Americans to serve as spies on a government salary. Hundreds had resigned at headquarters and in the field during 2004, infuriated and humiliated at the collapse of credibility and authority at the agency. Recruiting, hiring, training, and retaining young officers still remained the most difficult task at the agency.
Goss vowed to find them. He went to his Senate confirmation hearings with a swagger on September 14, 2004, saying he could fix the CIA once and for all. "I don't want to give aid and comfort to the enemy by telling you how bad I think the problem is," he said before the cameras, but the problem would be solved. Upon his confirmation by a 77-to-17 vote from the full Senate, Goss went straight to CIA headquarters in a state of exhilaration.
"I never in my wildest dreams expected I'd be back here," he told the men and women he had roundly condemned three months before. "But here I am." He proclaimed that his powers would be "enhanced by executive orders" from the president: he would be Bush's intelligence briefer, the head of the CIA, director of central intelligence, national intelligence director, and chief of a new national counterterrorism center. He would not wear two hats, like his predecessors. He would wear five.
On his first day of work, Goss began a purge more swift and sweeping than any in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency. He forced almost every one of the CIA's most senior officers out the door. He created a bitterness that had not been seen at headquarters in nearly thirty years. The resentment over the expulsion of Stephen Kappes as chief of the clandestine service was ferocious. Kappes, an ex-marine and former station chief in Moscow, represented the very best of the CIA. In partnership with the British intelligence service, he had only recently played a leading role in a triumph of intelligence and diplomacy by persuading Libya to abandon its long-running program to develop weapons of mass destruction. When he questioned Goss's judgment, he was shown the door.
The new director surrounded himself with a team of political hacks he had imported from Capitol Hill. They believed they were on a mission from the White House--or some higher power--to rid the CIA of left-wing subversives. It was the perception at headquarters that Goss and his staff, the "Gosslings," prized loyalty to the president and his policies above all, that they did not want the agency athwart of the White House, and that those who challenged them would pay the price. The scourging of the CIA was rightly a question of competence. It wrongly became a question of ideology.
The director issued orders against dissent from the president's policies. His message was clear: get with the program or get out. The latter choice looked more and more attractive for the talented tenth of the CIA's personnel. A huge homeland security industry was growing at the outer edge of the beltway, selling its services to a government outsourcing expertise. The best of the agency's people sold out. The CIA had been top-heavy with aging cold warriors fifteen years before. Now it was bottom-heavy with beginners. By 2005, half of the CIA's workforce--operators and analysts alike--had five years' experience or less.
The president's offhand proclamation that the agency was "just guessing" about Iraq ignited a smoldering anger that burned throughout the ranks of those professionals who remained. The CIA's officers in Baghdad and in Washington tried to warn that the path the president was pursuing in Iraq was disastrous. They said the United States could not run a country it did not understand. Their words carried no weight at the White House. They were heresy in an administration whose policies were based on faith.
Four former chiefs of the clandestine service tried to contact Goss to advise him to go slow, lest he destroy what remained of the CIA. He would not take their calls. One of them went public: "Goss and his minions can do a great deal of damage in short order," Tom Twetten wrote in an opinion piece published in the Los Angeles Times on November 23,2004. "If the professional employees in the agency don't believe the agency's leadership is on their side, they won't take risks for it and, in the end, they won't stay." The next day, John McLaughlin, who had held the agency together as acting director after Tenet's resignation, delivered another riposte. The CIA was not "a 'dysfunctional' and 'rogue' agency," he wrote in The Washington Post. "The CIA was not institutionally plotting against the president." Haviland Smith, who had retired as chief of the counterterrorism staff, weighed in. "Porter Goss and his troops from the Hill are wreaking havoc," he wrote. "Purging the CIA at this unfortunate moment, when we need to be dealing with real issues of terrorism, is cutting off our nose to spite our face." In all the years that the agency had been battered in the press, never had the director been attacked in print, on the record, by the most senior veterans of American intelligence.
The facade was falling. The CIA was tearing itself apart.
"Here is one of the most peculiar types of operation any government can have," President Eisenhower had said fifty years before. "It probably takes a strange kind of genius to run it." Nineteen men had served as director of central intelligence. Not one met the high standard Eisenhower had set. The agency's founders had been defeated by their ignorance in Korea and Vietnam and undone by their arrogance in Washington. Their successors were set adrift when the Soviet Union died and caught unaware when terror struck at the heart of American power. Their attempts to make sense of the world had generated heat but little light. As it was in the beginning, the warriors of the Pentagon and the diplomats of State held them in disdain. For more than half a century, presidents had been frustrated or furious when they turned to the directors for insight and for knowledge.
The job, having proved impossible to fill, now would be abolished.
In December 2004, with the upheaval at the agency in full force, Congress passed and the president signed a new law establishing the director of national intelligence, as the 9/11 Commission had urged. Hastily drafted, hurriedly debated, the law did nothing to ease the chronic and congenital problems that had plagued the agency since birth. It was continuity masquerading as change.
Goss thought the president would choose him. The call never came. On Feburary 17, 2005, Bush announced that he was nominating the American ambassador to Iraq, John D. Negroponte. A diplomat of rigorously conservative stripe, suave, subtle, a skilled infighter, he had never worked a day in the world of intelligence, and he would not long serve in it.
As in 1947, the new czar was given responsibility without commensurate authority. The Pentagon still controlled the great bulk of the na tional security budget, now approaching $500 billion a year, of which the CIA's share was roughly 1 percent. The new order served only as a formal recognition that the old order had failed.
"FAILURE CANNOT BE EXPLAINED"
The CIA was gravely wounded. In accordance with the laws of the jungle and the ways of Washington, stronger beasts fed upon it. The president gave great power over espionage, covert action, eavesdropping, and reconnaissance to the Pentagon's undersecretary for intelligence, and elevated that job to the number-three position at the Department of Defense. "That sent seismic shudders through the intelligence community," said Joan Dempsey, who was a deputy director of central intelligence and executive director of the foreign intelligence advisory board under Bush. "That's much more of a Kremlin approach."
The Pentagon moved stealthily and steadily into the fields of overseas covert operations, usurping the traditional roles, responsibilities, authorities, and missions of the clandestine service. It recruited the most promising young paramilitary officers and retained the most experienced ones. The militarization of intelligence accelerated as the nation's civilian intelligence service eroded.
Negroponte's new chief analyst, Thomas Fingar, had run the State Department's small but first-rate office of intelligence and research. He surveyed the state of the agency's directorate of intelligence and quickly determined that "nobody had any idea of who was doing what where." He moved to pull the functioning remains of the CIA's analytic machinery under his aegis. The best and the brightest thinkers left at the agency signed on with him.
The agency as constituted was vanishing. The building was still there, and there would always be an institution in it. But on March 30, 2005, a wrecking ball struck what remained of the spirit of the CIA. It came in the form of the six-hundred-page report of Judge Silberman's presidential commission. The judge was as rigorous a thinker as could be found in the capital. His intellectual badge was as strong as his intensely conservative credentials. He had twice come close to being named director of central intelligence. In fifteen years as a federal appeals court judge in Washington, he had consistently supported the means and ends of national security, even when they encroached on the ideals of liberty. His staff, unlike the 9/11 Commission's, was deeply experienced in intelligence operations and analysis.
Their judgment was brutal and final. The realm of the director of central intelligence was "a closed world" with "an almost perfect record" of resisting change. The director had presided over a "fragmented, loosely managed, and poorly coordinated" patchwork of intelligence collection and analysis. The agency was "often unable to gather intelligence on the very things we care the most about" and its analysts "do not always tell decision-makers just how limited their knowledge really is." The CIA was "increasingly irrelevant to the new challenges presented by weapons of mass destruction." Its overriding flaw was "poor human intelligence"--an inability to conduct espionage.
"We recognize that espionage is always chancy at best; fifty years of pounding away at the Soviet Union resulted in only a handful of truly important human sources," the commission said. "Still, we have no choice but to do better." The CIA "needs fundamental change if it is to successfully confront the threats of the 21st century." That was "a goal that would be difficult to meet even in the best of all possible worlds. And we do not live in the best of worlds."
On April 21, 2005, the office of director of central intelligence disappeared into history. Goss called Negroponte's swearing-in "the burial ceremony" for the agency of old. On that day, the new boss received an odd blessing: "I hope the spirit of Wild Bill Donovan guides and inspires his efforts," said Senator John Warner of Virginia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee.
A bronze statue of Donovan stands guard at the entrance to CIA headquarters, where every living former director of central intelligence gathered at Goss's invitation on August 21, 2005, to receive medallions commemorating their service and to mark the end of their long line. George H. W. Bush was there, at the center that bore his name. So were Jim Schlesinger and Stan Turner, so bitterly resented as outsiders; Bill Webster and Bob Gates, failed reformers and restorers; Jim Woolsey, John Deutch, and George Tenet, who had fought to right a ship that had lost its bearings. Some of these men cheerfully despised one another; others shared deep bonds of trust. It was a pleasant enough wake, with a touch of pomp. There was a luncheon and a lecture on the vanished office from the CIA's chief historian, David S. Robarge. Goss sat in the front row, writhing inside. He had spent weeks agonizing over an inspector general's report he himself had demanded while still chairman of the House intelligence committee. It was a scathing look at the flaws that contributed to the 9/11 attacks, a knife in the agency's heart, a surgical examination of its inability to wage anything resembling a war against the nation's enemies. In the tradition of Allen Dulles, Goss had decided to bury it. The agency would never account for its failure to protect the United States. But in truth the reckoning had come to pass.
The CIA's historian recalled President Eisenhower's words when he came to lay the cornerstone for the agency's headquarters on November 3, 1959:
America's fundamental aspiration is the preservation of peace. To this end we seek to develop policies and arrangements to make the peace both permanent and just. This can be done only on the basis of comprehensive and appropriate information.
In war nothing is more important to a commander than the facts concerning the strength, dispositions, and intentions of his opponent, and the proper interpretation of those facts. In peacetime the necessary facts...and their correct interpretation are essential to the development of policy to further our long-term national security and best interests.... No task couldbe more important. Upon the quality of your work depends in large measure the success of our effort to further the nation's position in the international scene.... This agency demands of its members the highest order of dedication, ability, trustworthiness, and selflessness--to say nothing of the finest type of courage, whenever needed. Success cannot be advertised: failure cannot be explained. In the work of intelligence, heroes are undecorated and unsung.
"On this spot will rise a beautiful and useful structure," the president had concluded. "May it long endure, to serve the cause of America and of peace."
As Americans died in battle for want of the facts, the directors of central intelligence arose, shook hands, walked out into the heat of the summer afternoon, and went on with their lives. As the old soldier feared long ago, they had left a legacy of ashes.
"ADMIT NOTHING, DENY EVERYTHING"
On May 5, 2006, President Bush fired Porter Goss after nineteen months of ceaseless backstabbing at the CIA. The fall of the last director of central intelligence was swift and inglorious, and the bequest he left was bitter.
The next day, Goss got on a plane and delivered the commencement address at Tiffin University, ninety miles west of Cleveland, Ohio. "If this were a graduating class of CIA case officers, my advice would be short and to the point," he said. "Admit nothing, deny everything, and make counteraccusations." With those words, he disappeared from view, leaving behind the weakest cadre of spies and analysts in the history of the CIA.
One week after Goss resigned, a team of FBI agents raided CIA headquarters. They seized control of the office of Dusty Foggo, who had just stepped down as executive director, the third-highest job at the agency. This was the man whom Goss had inexplicably put in charge of running the CIA from day to day. In his previous post, Foggo had been quartermaster for the clandestine service. Based in Frankfurt, he kept CIA officers from Amman to Afghanistan supplied with everything from bottled water to body armor. Among his tasks was ensuring that his own accountants and cargo-kickers complied with the CIA's rules and regulations. "Having been the 'Ethic's Guy,'" he wrote to a fellow officer, "I wish you the best with this annual exercise." Foggo evidently had trouble with the word ethics.
The indictment in United States of America v. Kyle Dustin Foggo was painfully specific in its particulars. Unsealed on February 13, 2007, it charged Foggo with fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering. It said Foggo had fixed million-dollar contracts for a close friend who had wined and dined him in high style, treated him to extravagant trips to Scotland and Hawaii, and promised him a lucrative job--old-fashioned palm greasing. There had never been a case remotely like it in the history of the CIA. At this writing, Foggo has entered a plea of not guilty. He faces twenty years in prison if convicted.
On the same day that Foggo was indicted, a federal judge in North Carolina sentenced a CIA contract worker named David Passaro to eight years and four months in prison for beating a man to death in Afghanistan. Passaro served with a CIA paramilitary team based in Asadabad, the capital of Kunar Province, a few miles west of the border with Pakistan. The agency had hired Passaro despite his history of criminal violence; he had been fired from the police force in Hartford, Connecticut, after he was arrested for beating a man in a brawl.
The man who died at his hands was Abdul Wali, a well-known local farmer who had fought the Soviets in the 1980s. Wali had heard that he was wanted for questioning after a series of rocket attacks near the American base. He came to the Americans of his own free will, and he said he was innocent. Passaro doubted his word and threw him in a cell. He beat Wali so badly that the prisoner pleaded to be shot to end his pain; he died of his injuries two days later. Passaro was indicted and convicted under a provision of the Patriot Act allowing American citizens to be tried for crimes committed on territory claimed by the United States overseas. The judge noted that the absence of an autopsy had shielded him from a charge of murder.
The court received a letter from the former governor of Kunar, who said that Wali's death had done grievous damage to the American cause in Afghanistan and served as powerful propaganda for the resurgent forces of al Qaeda and the Taliban. "The distrust of the Americans increased, the security and reconstruction efforts of Afghanistan were dealt a blow, and the only people to gain from Dave Passaro's actions were al Qaeda and their partners," the governor wrote.
Three days after Passaro was sentenced, a judge in Italy ordered the indictment of the CIA's Rome station chief, the Milan base chief, and two dozen more officers in the abduction of a radical cleric who spent years under brutal interrogation in Egypt. A court in Germany charged thirteen CIA officers for the wrongful kidnapping and imprisonment of a Lebanese-born German citizen. The government of Canada formally apologized and paid a $10 million settlement to one of its citizens, Maher Arar, who had been seized by the CIA while changing planes in New York after a family vacation, transported to Syria, and subjected to the cruelest interrogation for ten months.
By then, the CIA's prison system had been condemned. It could not long survive when it was no longer secret. Americans were asked to take it on faith that the kidnapping, imprisonment, and torture of innocent people had been part of a program essential to preventing another attack on the United States. It may be so, but the evidence is scant. It is unlikely that we will ever know.
Porter Goss was succeeded at the CIA by General Michael Hayden, the deputy director of national intelligence, the former chief of the National Security Agency, the executor of President Bush's orders to train electronic eavesdropping on American targets, the first man to hold the diminished title of director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the first active-duty military officer to run the CIA since Walter Bedell Smith left in 1953. General Hayden declared at his Senate confirmation that "amateur hour" was over at the CIA. But it was not.
By the CIA's own standards, roughly half its work force were still trainees. Few were ready and able to produce results. But there was nothing to be done about it; the CIA had no choice but to promote them beyond their levels of ability. As youngsters in their twenties replaced people in their forties and fifties, the result was an abridgment of intelligence. The clandestine service began to abandon the techniques of the past--political warfare, propaganda, and covert action--because it lacked the skills to conduct them. The agency remained a place where few people spoke Arabic or Persian, Korean or Chinese. It still denied employment to patriotic Arab Americans on security grounds if they had relatives living in the Middle East--as most did. The information revolution had left officers and analysts no more capable of comprehending the terrorist threat than they had understood the Soviet Union. And as the agency's reporting was overtaken by catastrophe in Iraq, the fifth Baghdad station chief in less than four years packed his bags for the closed world of the Green Zone.
The CIA was at a nadir. It no longer had the president's ear, and American leaders were looking elsewhere for intelligence--to the Pentagon and private industry.
"THE DISASTROUS RISE OF MISPLACED POWER"
Bob Gates took over the Pentagon on December 18, 2006--the only entry-level analyst ever to run the CIA and the only director ever to become secretary of defense. Two weeks later, John Negroponte, the new national intelligence czar, resigned after nineteen months to become the number-two man at the State Department. He was replaced by a retired admiral, Mike McConnell, who had run the National Security Agency during its first great collapse at the dawn of the digital age and who had spent the past decade making money as a military contractor at Booz Allen Hamilton.
When Gates settled in at the Pentagon, he looked around at the American intelligence establishment and he saw stars: a general was running the CIA, a general was the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, a general was in charge of State Department's counterterrorism programs, a lieutenant general was the Pentagon's deputy undersecretary for intelligence, and a major general was running spies at the CIA. Every one of these jobs had been held by civilians, going back many years. Gates saw a world in which the Pentagon had crushed the CIA, just as it had vowed to do sixty years before. He wanted to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, bring the suspected terrorists from Cuba to the United States, and either convict them or recruit them. He wanted to contain the Defense Department's dominance over intelligence. He longed to reverse the decline in the CIA's central role in American government. But there was very little he could do.
The decline was part of a slow rot undermining the pillars of American national security. After four years of war in Iraq, the military was exhausted, bled by leaders who had invested far more in futuristic weapons than in uniformed soldiers. After five years of defending a foreign policy based on born-again faith, the State Department was adrift, unable to give voice to the values of democracy. And after six years of willful ignorance imposed by know-nothing politicians, congressional oversight of the agency had collapsed. The 9/11 Commission had said that of all the tasks facing American intelligence, strengthening congressional oversight might be the most difficult, and the most important. In 2005 and 2006, Congress responded by failing to pass the annual authorization bill for the CIA, the basic law governing the agency, its policies, and its spending. The roadblock was a single Republican senator who obstructed the bill because it ordered the White House to file a classified report on the CIA's secret prisons.
The failure of authority made the congressional intelligence committees irrelevant. Not since the 1960s had there been so little congressional control over the agency. Now a far different force gained great influence over intelligence: corporate America.
At the end of Dwight Eisenhower's years as president, a few days after he lamented the legacy of intelligence failures he would pass on to his successors, he gave his farewell address to the nation and famously warned: "We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." Little more than half a century later, the surge of secret spending on national security after 9/11 had created a booming intelligence-industrial complex.
Corporate clones of the CIA started sprouting all over the suburbs of Washington and beyond. Patriotism for profit became a $50-billion-a-year business, by some estimates--a sum about the size of the American intelligence budget itself. This phenomenon traced back fifteen years. After the cold war, the agency began contracting out thousands of jobs to fill the perceived void created by the budget cuts that began in 1992. A CIA officer could file his retirement papers, turn in his blue identification badge, go to work for a much better salary at a military contractor such as Lockheed Martin or Booz Allen Hamilton, then return to the CIA the next day, wearing a green badge. After September 2001, the outsourcing went out of control. Green-badge bosses started openly recruiting in the CIA's cafeteria.
Great chunks of the clandestine service became wholly dependent on contractors who looked like they were in the CIA's chain of command, but who worked for their corporate masters. In effect, the agency had two workforces--and the private one was paid far better. By 2006 something on the order of half the officers at the Baghdad station and the new National Counterterrorism Center were contract employees, and Lockheed Martin, the nation's biggest military contractor, was posting help-wanted ads for "counterterrorism analysts" to interrogate suspected terrorists at the Guantanamo prison.
Fortunes could be made in the intelligence industry. The money was a powerful attractor, and the result was an ever-accelerating brain drain--the last thing the CIA could afford--and the creation of companies like Total Intelligence Solutions. Founded in February 2007, Total Intel was run by Cofer Black--the chief of the CIA's counterterrorist center on 9/11. His partners were Robert Richer, who had been the number-two man at the clandestine service, and Enrique Prado, Black's chief of counterterror operations. All three had decamped from the Bush administration's war on terror in 2005 to join Blackwater USA, the politically wired private security company that served, among many other things, as the Praetorian Guard for Americans in Baghdad. They learned the tricks of the government-contracting trade at Blackwater, and within little more than a year Black and company were running Total Intel. These were among the best of the CIA's officers. But the spectacle of jumping ship in the middle of a war to make a killing was unremarkable in twenty-first-century Washington. Legions of CIA veterans quit their posts to sell their services to the agency by writing analyses, creating cover for overseas officers, setting up communications networks, and running clandestine operations. Following their example, new CIA hires adopted their own five-year plan: get in, get out, and get paid. A top secret security clearance and a green badge were golden tickets for a new breed of Beltway bandits. The outsourcing of intelligence was a clear sign that the CIA could not perform many of its basic missions unaided after 9/11.
Above all, it could not help the army impose democracy at gunpoint in Iraq. Action without knowledge was a dangerous business, as Americans found to their sorrow.
"TO ORGANIZE AND RUN AN ESPIONAGE SERVICE"
In the cold war, the CIA was condemned by the American left for what it did. In the war on terror, the CIA was attacked by the American right for what it could not do. The charge was incompetence, leveled by such men as Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. Say what one may about their leadership, they knew from long experience what the reader now knows: the CIA was unable to fulfill its role as America's intelligence service.
The fictional CIA, the one that lives in novels and movies, is omnipotent. The myth of a golden age was of the CIA's own making, the product of the publicity and the political propaganda Allen Dulles manufactured in the 1950s. It held that the agency could change the world, and it helps explain why the CIA is so impervious to change. The legend was perpetuated in the 1980s by Bill Casey, who tried to revive the devil-may-care spirits of Dulles and Wild Bill Donovan. Now the agency has revived the fable that it is America's best defense. With orders to train and retain thousands of new officers, it needs to project an image of success to survive.
In truth, there haven't been many halcyon days. But there have been a few. When Richard Helms was in charge, the agency spoke the truth to Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara about the war in Vietnam, and they listened. There was another such fleeting moment when Bob Gates ran the CIA; he kept calm and carried on as the Soviet Union crumbled. But fifteen years have passed since then, and the glory is gone. The CIA found itself unable to see the way forward in a battle where information and ideas were the most powerful weapons.
For sixty years tens of thousands of clandestine service officers have gathered only the barest threads of truly important intelligence--and that is the CIA's deepest secret. Their mission is extraordinarily hard. But we Americans still do not understand the people and the political forces we seek to contain and control. The CIA has yet to become what its creators hoped it would be.
"The only remaining superpower doesn't have enough interest in what's going on in the world to organize and run an espionage service," Richard Helms said a decade ago. Perhaps a decade from now the agency will rise from the ashes, infused with many billions of dollars, inspired by new leadership, invigorated by a new generation. Analysts may see the world clearly. American spies may become capable of espionage against America's enemies. The CIA someday may serve as its founders intended. We must depend on it. For the war in which we are now engaged may last as long as the cold war, and we will win or lose by virtue of our intelligence.