‘SAY IT AIN’T SO, JIM’: IMPENDING REORGANIZATION OF CIA LOOKS LIKE SUPPRESSION, POLITICIZING OF INTELLIGENCE

(Washington, D.C.) Senior managers of
the Central Intelligence Agency’s
Directorate of Intelligence (DI) — the
arm of the Agency responsible for
analysis — held an unusual emergency
meeting with their analysts on the
afternoon of 1 July, just before the
start of a long holiday weekend. The
purpose of the meeting was to announce
plans for a complete reorganization of
the Central Intelligence Agency.

Analysts were told that these changes
were necessary for two reasons: First, to
head off Congress, which is considering
several drastic restructuring schemes of
its own to punish CIA for the Aldrich
Ames disaster. And second, to
“serve” U.S. policy-makers
better in the New World Order.

Director of Central Intelligence James
Woolsey is expected to announce this
reorganization — the biggest at CIA
since the early 1980s — during testimony
to Congress on 18 July. This announcement
will draw upon the work of a special
Directorate of Intelligence task force
that was set up for the express purpose
of overhauling the Directorate of
Intelligence. Curiously, the DI managers
said that the Directorate of Operations
(where Ames worked) is preparing its own
reorganization plan — one that will be
less drastic and will, in any event, not
be announced until the fall.

What’s Going On?

It is an open secret that the Clinton
Administration is extremely displeased
with the CIA Directorate of Intelligence.
This animosity toward the Agency’s
analysts stems in part from briefings
supplied to Congress last fall by the
National Intelligence Officer for Latin
America, Brian Latel, which raised
serious questions about the mental
stability, behavior and policy
predilections of ousted Haitian President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The analysis and
judgments — and leaks to the press about
them — briefed by Mr. Latel greatly
sharpened congressional opposition to the
Clinton policy aimed at restoring
Aristide to power, no matter what. The
White House and much of the foreign
policy establishment⁽¹⁾
will never forgive CIA for thus
complicating its unquestioning embrace of
Aristide.

By April 1994, Administration
displeasure with CIA had turned into
indignation. Faced with a growing number
of foreign policy debacles, Clinton
officials — notably several on the staff
of the White House and National Security
Council — grew increasingly furious at
CIA intelligence assessments which
suggested that Administration policy in
North Korea, Somalia, Bosnia, China, and
Russia was in trouble. Administration
officials started to argue that CIA was
not providing them with “the
proper support.” Some
officials implied that if CIA had done a
better job analyzing the world, Mr.
Clinton’s foreign policy would not be in
trouble.

The Damage Already Done

The Deputy Director for Intelligence
(DDI), Douglas MacEachin, began to make
changes in early 1994 to accommodate
Administration concerns. These changes
accelerated as the summer approached.
They included:

• The style of Directorate
  of Intelligence papers was
  altered in such a way as to alter
  the content, as well.
  Starting in late 1993, MacEachin
  decreed that future DI papers
  would rely on a strictly-enforced
  “evidentiary base.”
  What this meant was that DI
  analyses would henceforth be
  strictly limited to factual
  statements bereft of forecasts —
  dismissed as “crystal
  ball-gazing” — and very
  short on informed, if necessarily
  somewhat subjective, judgments.
  Starting in April 1994, most DI
  analytical papers were limited to
  3 to 7 pages, including
  graphics and illustrations.
• A special staff was
  created — the Presidential
  Support Staff — to see
  personally to the daily briefing
  needs of senior policy-makers.
  This new organization replaced
  the President’s Daily Brief Staff
  which performed this task
  effectively for at least the past
  20 years. The reason for the
  change appears to be an
  unwillingness to receive
  information from other than
  briefers who are sufficiently
  attuned to the briefees’
  sensibilities as to avoid
  bringing up unwelcome issues or
  information.
• “Sore spot”
  items — involving, for example,
  politically sensitive issues like
  China’s MFN status — have
  disappeared from the National
  Intelligence Daily and the
  President’s Daily Brief,
  according to a Washington
  Times‘ “Inside the
  Beltway” item which ran on 7
  June 1994.
• A number of analysts who
  have challenged or refused to
  conform to these new policies
  were demoted, reassigned or sent
  abroad.

What’s in Store?

In private meetings with other senior
DI officials, MacEachin — who is said to
have claimed that he is acting on behalf
of Director Woolsey — laid down the real
objectives of his reorganization plan:

1. Consolidating and
   institutionalizing changes
   already made.
2. This would involve, among other
   things, “purging the
   culture of the 1980s”
   at the CIA. No one knows exactly
   what this means. It could be
   interpreted as a sign that the
   Administration wants to purge a
   so-called “Cold War
   mindset” from DI products.
   (Indeed, MacEachin, as an analyst
   in the Agency’s Soviet Affairs
   Bureau and former head of the CIA
   Arms Control Intelligence Staff,
   has long been susceptible to the
   moral equivalency and
   multilateralist notions that
   underpin much of the
   New-World-Order-think.)

On the other hand, the
“1980s culture” that
the DDI wants to purge may be
that instituted under former CIA
Directors William Casey and
Robert Gates designed to maximize
the quality and utility of
intelligence analysis by
encouraging competition in
analysis, incorporating
alternative scenarios and
publishing dissenting points of
view.

3. Assuring that CIA
   briefings coincide with
   Administration policy and cannot
   lead policy makers to accuse the
   Agency of “disloyalty.”
   MacEachin was quoted as having
   actually said in a recent meeting
   with senior CIA officials:
   “Analysts must recognize
   that if they give a briefing
   which deviates too much from
   official policy, they may be
   accused by Clinton Administration
   officials of being
   disloyal.”

In pursuit of these objectives, three
draft plans were unveiled on 14 July,
featuring — among other things — a
number of troublesome bureaucratic
changes, including the following:

• Most if not all DI
  regional offices will be merged.
  A single DI career service will
  be created. This new system will
  stress “well-rounded”
  analysts over experts. MacEachin
  appears to have a low regard for
  expert analysts; he does not like
  analysts to stay in any given job
  for more than two-to-three years
  and thereby develop such
  expertise.

Some in the DI believe that
Clinton foreign policy officials
who seem to share this attitude
are simply intimidated by
experienced hands at State and
CIA whose corporate memories may
prove inconvenient. By doing away
with longtime experts, CIA would
avoid this problem and allow
relatively inexperienced
policy-makers to see themselves
as unrivaled authorities on the
subject at hand.

• The CIA Office of
  Leadership Analysis (LDA), which
  produced the controversial
  Aristide psychological profile
  and biography, will be abolished.
• The CIA Office of
  Training and Education course on
  intelligence writing will be
  completely redesigned to teach
  rookie and veteran analysts how
  to write fact-based,
  “judgment-free”
  analytical papers.

Regrettably, many veteran CIA analysts
and managers support MacEachin’s efforts.
They see a Central Intelligence Agency in
serious political trouble as a result of
congressional micromanagement and the
hostility of the Clinton team. Some
appear preoccupied with concerns about
job security arising from the Ames
affair, recent ambitious bids by the FBI
to steal CIA turf, and Senator Daniel
Patrick Moynihan’s perennial effort to
abolish the Agency outright. Simply put,
a number of senior CIA employees and
analysts believe that to survive, CIA
needs to give the Administration whatever
political correctness it wants.

What Will Result?

The MacEachin strategy appears aimed
at using the cover of the Ames affair to
blow through a major reorganization of
the CIA that will have long-term
consequences for U.S. intelligence and
for American security policy. The
incipient invasion of Haiti is a case in
point: Accommodating the Clinton
Administration’s adamant opposition to
the unvarnished truth about the nature of
the actors and the complexion of the
problem in Haiti appears likely to result
in dead American troops and the
assumption of an onerous new U.S.
responsibility for the turbulent domestic
situation there.

In short, this reorganization
of the Directorate of Intelligence will
not provide the hard-headed, critical
intelligence support President Clinton
and his team so desperately need.
Instead, it will institutionalize pandering
to policy officials who become spiteful
when confronted with bad news concerning
their assumptions and decisions. For
example, the kind of rigorous analysis
which U.S. policy-makers and commanders
will have to have if they are actually
directed to invade Haiti will not be
produced under this plan. Similarly, CIA
analyses of many other issues this
Administration finds politically
neuralgic — for example, North Korea’s
ongoing nuclear weapons program; the
resurgent anti-Western forces in the
former Soviet Union; the potential for
further, strategically significant
conflict in the Persian Gulf; the
long-range problems for American
interests in East Asia and beyond arising
from China’s economic growth and military
build-up; and the need for effective
missile defenses — are also likely to
suffer as a result of this scheme.

The Bottom Line

Clearly, there are areas of the CIA’s
performance — both on the operational
side (involving everything from
counterintelligence to the running of
secret agents) and on the analytical side
(from assessing potential adversaries’
actual capabilities to divining their
intentions) — that warrant reform and
refocussing. Such improvements should
reflect the continuing importance of
having intelligence serve
policy-making and policy execution in a
proper way, i.e., by being timely,
accurate and relevant.

But this reorganization and
reinvigoration must be done with
toughness, thoughtfulness and with a
vision for future needs. It must not
proceed as the product of the political
displeasure of the current administration
with the intelligence judgments being
produced. While the intelligence
community must always be professionally
responsible to the true needs of the
President and his policy officials in
formulating and executing U.S. policy, it
must never “cook the books” —
either by direction, out of fear, in
order to protect its “rice
bowls” or to curry favor.

CIA officials may think that the
current reorganization plan will spare
them the budget cutter’s ax by winning
kudos from the Administration and
congressional critics. In the
long-run, however, by creating conditions
under which the Agency becomes, at best,
irrelevant and, at worst, a contributor
to ill-considered policy decisions, they
may instead be writing the CIA’s
epitaph.

– 30 –

1. In this regard,
see “Psychology and the CIA: Leaders
on the Couch,” by Thomas Omerstad,
in Foreign Policy, Summer 1994,
pp. 105-122.