Wet Behind the CIA’s Ears
05.12.2008 - 10:21 AMI noted recently in the Wall Street Journal that a striking 55 percent of all intelligence community analysts were hired after September 11, 2001. On balance, I argued, this is a positive development: “Whatever the cost in lack of experience, the creation of a youthful and highly responsive workforce, motivated by a desire to get into the fight against America’s enemies, has to be counted as all for the good.”
The CIA seems to have taken my comments to heart. On its website, it is now boasting about the inexperience of its intelligence analysts. It features a self-portrait of one of them — “Scott” — who hails from Michigan and has been with the agency for less than a year.
What are Scott’s credentials?
“[M]any people think that CIA employees spend their entire lives preparing to work at the Agency. Not me!”
Scott had a different plan: “I focused my studies on domestic politics and planned to work as a U.S. policymaker, not as a foreign-intelligence analyst.” But this lack of preparation was no barrier to entry for him or anyone else: “I’m not alone. I’ve been surprised to find how many officers did not expect to end up in the CIA.”
What is the CIA like these days? It certainly confounded Scott’s expectations. “Officers didn’t walk around in black suits; they dressed somewhat casual, many even wearing jeans on casual Fridays.” Even more significantly: “Headquarters didn’t feel like an intelligence agency; it felt like a college campus.”
Maybe it didn’t feel like an intelligence agency to Scott because it is not an intelligence agency at all, just a large government bureaucracy pretending to be one. As Scott puts it, it is a “great” place “for somebody like me who studied domestic politics and never expected to work with foreign intelligence.”
Here is another page from the CIA website addressed to another set of inexperienced recruits: K-through-5 elementary school students:
You may have heard about the Central Intelligence Agency. But, do you know what we really do and how we do it? The people of the CIA do very important work. They help keep our country safe. They give our leaders information so they can make good decisions. And they take pride in their important jobs.
We have a lot of different jobs here. We have analysts, doctors, lawyers, scientists, geographers, and librarians, to name just a few.
Look through our pages and you will learn all about us. If you read carefully, you can become a CIA expert. We also have some fun stories and games for you.
Okay, let’s take a short time out from sharing fun stories and play a little game: where in the world is Osama bin Laden and can Scott help us find him? Run Scott run.
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May 12th, 2008 at 12:29 PM
Gabe, Gabe. Don’t you know DISinformation when you see it?
With CIA being a government organization as well as an intelligence agency, we have to expect that there is an office of paid employees there thinking up things like this “featured story.” CIA, after all, doesn’t get to have recruiting commercials with inspiring music, like the armed forces.
Having a lot of inexperienced analysts is actually pretty normal across the intelligence agencies, and is especially common in DOD. The more experienced analysts are the pillars of the community, and closely supervise analysis of the higher-priority “problems” (e.g., Iran, Iraq, China, Russia). Where things are more likely to fall through the cracks is with “economy of effort” problems, where less experienced analysts are less supervised. India’s nuclear detonation surprise in 1998 may be considered an example of that hazard.
But the relative inexperience of many CIA analysts today has a particular import for the political intelligence that is CIA’s purview. It renders them more vulnerable to the politicized analytical framework of the senior officials. This problem is much less pronounced in DOD, where the whole analytical focus is on preventing the surprise of American forces. National policy is a given for analysts in the military agencies; their job is not to influence it, but to ensure the armed forces are prepared for everything they will encounter in executing it.
The whole problem with CIA is that its mission IS to influence national policy. There are superb analysts in the ranks of experience at CIA, many of whom are entirely trustworthy. They are sandwiched, however, between often-politicized senior officials, and junior analysts who can frequently be star-struck kids with clearances.
May 12th, 2008 at 12:30 PM
I used to follow Spy vs. Spy in Mad magazine. Maybe this was the CIA’s first opening to young Americans.
May 12th, 2008 at 2:44 PM
What is the CIA doing in K thru 5? Do they have programs for 6 - 14?
These programs started as part of the diversity programs for the Civil Service. If the CIA programs are like those in other agencies somewhere in the hierarchy there is a top level political appointee whose goal is to make the employees look like America –racewise that is. Since most agencies that employ a majority of professionally qualified personnel are far below their diversity quota, these school programs are considered to be recruiting. This way the senior executive in charge of diversity as well as subordinates can get merit pay bonuses, even though numerical progress seems unattainable. By the way, the merit pay system was implemented by Jimmy Carter. Affirmative Action started earlier.
May 12th, 2008 at 5:45 PM
If you pay attention to baseball, you’ll notice that the front office model that seems to be working these days is a multi-disciplinary approach pioneered by John Hart. All four of the teams to make it to the Championship series - Boston, Cleveland, Colorado and Arizona have used this model.
These front offices weren’t built primarily with baseball or even business guys. They were build with individuals who were trained or educated in a variety of different fields.
Perhaps to some degree that’s what the CIA is trying.
May 12th, 2008 at 6:40 PM
So they hire wide eyed off-balance rookies and mold them into the ‘correct’ political forms?
Kind of like MTV’s Rock the Vote.
May 12th, 2008 at 6:40 PM
Or Puff Duddy’s “Vote or Die”.
May 12th, 2008 at 7:39 PM
“…the front office model that seems to be working these days is a multi-disciplinary approach…”
Somebody tell the Mets, please!
May 12th, 2008 at 8:21 PM
You say that the CIA is now “boasting” on its website about the inexperience of its intelligence analysts. Isn’t this sort of an implausible and unnatural reading of the text? Not only does it impute to the CIA an odd motive–Why would anyone in their right mind boast about having an inexperienced staff?–but it kind of sort of misses what I take to be the point, which is that you don’t need to follow a set program of study for the CIA to hire you as an intelligence analyst.
Indeed, there is some reason to think [http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7959.html] that “foxes” might be a wee bit better at making predictions than “hedgehogs,” which is nice segue back to Gabe’s previous blog post because this research indicates that pundits like Gabe are not particularly good at prognostication. Or as Yogi Berra said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future”