Bring Back the OSS?
04.02.2008 - 9:30 AMWe’ve frequently criticized the performance of the intelligence community in this space. Criticism is easy, especially when things as bad they are. But criticism of something so vital to our security can only take one so far. At some point, one has to turn and look for solutions. That’s where I run into trouble.
When thinking about institutions so complicated, so secretive, so self-protective, so entangled with Congress, so impervious to genuine reform, it becomes difficult to conceive of a plan that would be radical enough and also politically feasible.
Presumably, one approach would be build some new and highly functional institutions from scratch to accomplish narrowly tailored purposes — like fighting terrorists.
My friend Max Boot has been giving the matter some serious thought and that is the direction he has proposed. In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, he presented the bold idea of resurrecting the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) ”that was created in 1942 to gather and analyze intelligence as well as to conduct low-intensity warfare behind enemy lines in occupied Europe and Asia.”
OSS was disbanded after World War II; both the Green Berets and the CIA trace their lineage to this august ancestor. My proposal is to re-create OSS by bringing together under one roof not only Army Special Forces, civil-affairs, and psy-ops but also the CIA’s paramilitary Special Activities Division, which has always been a bit of a bureaucratic orphan at Langley (and which is staffed largely by Special Operations veterans). This could be a joint civil-military agency under the combined oversight of the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence, like the Defense Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency. It would bring together in one place all of the key skill sets needed to wage the softer side of the war on terror. Like SOCOM [U.S. Special Operations Command], it would have access to military personnel and assets; but like the CIA’s Special Activities Division, its operations would contain a higher degree of “covertness,” flexibility, and “deniability” than those carried out by the uniformed military.
Max is not only a super-smart guy, he’s also an influential one: lately, he’s been whispering into the ear of one of the candidates for the presidency of the United States.
This if from a speech by that candidate:
I would also set up a new civil-military agency patterned after the Office of Strategic Services in World War II. A modern-day OSS could draw together unconventional warfare, civil-affairs, paramilitary and psychological-warfare specialists from the military together with covert-action operators from our intelligence agencies and experts in anthropology, advertising, foreign cultures, and numerous other disciplines from inside and outside government. In the spirit of the original OSS, this would be a small, nimble, can-do organization that would fight terrorist subversion across the world and in cyberspace. It could take risks that our bureaucracies today are afraid to take – risks such as infiltrating agents who lack diplomatic cover into terrorist organizations. It could even lead in the front-line efforts to rebuild failed states. A cadre of such undercover operatives would allow us to gain the intelligence on terrorist activities that we don’t get today from our high-tech surveillance systems and from a CIA clandestine service that works almost entirely out of our embassies abroad.
Does this sound familiar?
The question of the day is: which candidate has embraced Max Boot’s proposal: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or John McCain?
The second question of the day: will meaningful intelligence reform ever come about or will it take a second September 11 to get rid of the clowns?
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April 2nd, 2008 at 12:30 PM
A new OSS looks like what we (the non-intelligence community) thought the CIA was already doing. So, can a new add-on or work-around that would be an improvement be legislated? Is there a workable process that can get from here and now to there? It will take broad based support for a very detailed plan.
Civil Service procedures would call for staffing from ranked lists of qualified applicants, so after a while, all the senior positions will be filled by ex CIA or other Intelligence Agency officials. The most critical part is the initial leadership of the agency. If they have even a slightly different view of what the mission of agency should be it could be changed just enough to wind up different than what’s intended.
Perhaps the new OSS could be contracted out. Some services by a U.S. private security agency, others, well, what about the Mossad?
April 2nd, 2008 at 6:06 PM
I always thought the Soviet Union’s old system had something to say for it - they had two competing intelligence agencies, the KGB and the GRU.
If a revived OSS were organized, I would suggest moving the CIA into the State Department. Then have the agencies bid to perform specific intelligence tasks.
Of course, given the record of the past few years, the two agencies would probably have to be prevented from sabotaging each others’ operations.
April 2nd, 2008 at 6:53 PM
You suggest moving the CIA into the State Department? Wouldn’t that be a 100% redundancy?
Talk about two agencies of one mind.
Get Bush.
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:34 AM
Can’t move it into State: those guys still think gentlemen don’t read other gentleman’s mail.
The real question is how effective will a new OSS be if the same mindset still applies throughout the IC? In some ways consolidation of all covert assets makes a lot of sense, but to me the analogy is like the surge: more troops alone will have meant very little had there not been a change in strategy as well. If a new setup can kill the super-cautious, CYA bureaucratic attitude now abroad throughout all elements of the CIA, then I’d be all for it. But does anyone see any indications that this will happen?
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:41 AM
I don’t understand how an agency could be “small”, “nimble” and “can-do” while evidently pursuing a virtually unlimited international agenda and employing about half the post-graduate level population. Ah, of course, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Why didn’t you say so in the first place?
April 3rd, 2008 at 11:55 AM
Seems like a good idea; but the root problem is one Mr. Schoenfeld has identified in so many of the other blog posts. What happens when the predominant talent pool in universities, business, et al; are actually rooting against your country’s interests. The universities, have at the very least an Arab nationalist if not Wahhabi bias, business wants to accomodate those
forces for financial reasons, etc. Charles McCarry suggested as much in his novels, the Better Angels and Shelley’s Heart; where a corporatized post CIA successor Agency would actually
strive to undermine a political election, in order to further it’s own priorities. The examples of
Scheuer, Drumheller, Sulick, et al all lean that way.
April 3rd, 2008 at 4:11 PM
I admire Max Boot’s work and scholarship very much; I think he’s really on to something, especially in regard to the model which to follow: adopting the ethos and operations of the British foreign service circa the late 19th century. Recruits and agents would necessarily live, breathe, speak, and imbibe the cultures, languages, and peoples of the nations in which they were stationed. And perhaps after serving in the field (and for much more than just a short rotation), they could come back to the States and help instruct new recruits, while also being the competent intelligence analysts that we so desperately need. (”Clientitis” would, of course, be a concern for some, but no more than what we see widespread at State and beyond.)
Above all, what Austin Bay calls a “revolution in diplomatic affairs” should be extended–if not forced–upon the intelligence agencies. Intelligence and foreign policy are dirty businesses. Our military is so (thankfully!) impressive and so competent; it’s time that the CIA step up to the task at hand. Almost any attempt to make our intelligence services more efficient and effective would be a vast improvement over today’s dreadfully inept CIA. It’s just a question of political will, actually asking hard questions of the CIA for once (maybe even imposing massive budget cuts on a bipartisan basis, focusing on HUMINT and developing HUMINT sources and eliminating the Directorate of Science and Technology (leave that to the NSA, the military, and the private sector), and adapting our intelligence agencies to the needs of national security, not to bureaucratic and partisan agendas. (Check out “The Future of American Intelligence,” edited by Peter Berkowitz, for some great work on intelligence reform, especially Reuel Marc Gerecht’s essay.)
April 4th, 2008 at 3:48 PM
Two distinct issues: bringing back an “OSS” and reforming national intelligence.
Max Boot has some good points about the organizational advantages in running intelligence against a wartime target more like the OSS than today’s CIA. He may not be aware that CIA and the military intelligence agencies promptly task-organize to support individual campaigns and conflicts (as well as provide task groups aligned with the inevitable interagency task forces) whenever there is such a need. Some of what he is looking for already gets done, out of the public eye.
The advantages to be produced by an OSS-like organization, as proposed by Boot, are as vulnerable to senior personnel assignment as the success of the DNI reorganization has been. Simple reorganization is not a cure-all.
The key point here, however, is that recreating the OSS will have zero effect on the quality of NIEs. The reason for that is that the “NIE” is a function of the CIA – but was never a function of the OSS. What Boot would effectively like to go back to is a time when US intelligence primarily served a lower level of decisionmaking: the conduct of military operations.
Intelligence IS much easier to declare “right” or “wrong” when it is used to support military decisions. It’s when it is used to support national policy – political, moral, expressive of our intentions and interests as a people – that the ambiguity of imperfect knowledge can be exploited to suggest AMBIVALENCE about enemy intentions, and a justification for indecision or bet-hedging in our own courses of action.
Basing political decisions on intelligence is a new problem for us. We didn’t do that during the Cold War: we reacted to invasions and coups that were a matter of public knowledge – indeed, of forthright rhetoric on the part of the former USSR and others – rather than reacting to “intelligence.” Our posture in that war was set early on, due to the public actions of the Soviet Union. Intelligence was merely a tool in prosecuting the conflict, not a factor in deciding whether to enter it, what our interests were, or what our strategy should be. Every aspect of our Cold War strategy was determined BEFORE intelligence was set on to monitor and analyze the factors pertaining to it: from defending a line of confrontation in Central Europe to operating, at the nuclear level, on the principles of MAD, prevention of first strikes, and comparative throw-weights.
The root of the problem with national intelligence today is that it is being used as a pretext for preemptive action. This is neither good or bad as an inherent proposition, but what it does is make it inevitable that the intelligence producer will know that the value judgments of the policymaker are being addressed by whatever he puts out, whether he has the intention of spinning it or not. It can’t be otherwise.
What the last few years have proven is how immediately a president’s policy opponents will latch onto intelligence as a means of influencing his decisions about preemption. It really won’t matter how we organize national intelligence, as long as it is chartered to produce “NIEs.” A New OSS organized precisely as Max Boot envisions would perform with simply professionalism in pursuing Osama bin Laden, or countering Moqtada al-Sadr in Basrah – any tactical effort in the GWOT — but when it comes to producing NIEs, its performance would depend entirely on the biases of its senior leadership. You can’t organize bias away: you can only recognize it, set your priorities, and if you deem it necessary, dismiss the bias-carrier.
April 6th, 2008 at 11:04 AM
My impression is that in the heyday of the OSS, we were pretty much all on the same “side.” Disputes over policy were rare, and in no case were they used as the pretext for partisan conflict.
Those days are gone. A reconstituted OSS would be successful at most one time. Then the leaks to the NY Times would start, the Congressional subpoenas would be issued, the hearings would be held, and the wounded would be shot.