Printable Version
Intelligence Reform And Recruitment
By Jonathan Mann, David Ensor and Kelli Arena, CNN International's Insight
June 21, 2006
JONATHAN MANN, CNN HOST: Fresh intelligence. With many U.S. agents stepping out of the shadows and into civilian life, the CIA and FBI look for new recruits.
Hello and welcome.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, a former foe of the United States became an uneasy friend. And many of the Cold War spies who based their careers on the cloak and dagger dance between the two countries were left out in the cold. The U.S. intelligence community was left looking for a new mission. September 11 brought that a decade later. But years of budget cuts at the CIA left it largely unprepared and untrained for a new enemy with new tactics. In 2004, President Bush declared that the United States needed more spies and told the CIA to boost the number of its case officers and intelligence analysts by 50 percent.
At the same time, the agency lost many of its most experienced operatives because of internal struggles. Those came to a head last month with the resignation of former CIA Director Porter Goss after only 19 months of service, and the appointment of a new chief, General Michael Hayden.
On our program today, refilling the ranks. The U.S. intelligence community's not so covert mission.
We begin with CNN's David Ensor.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT (voice over): It looks like a sedate college campus in springtime, complete with a commencement speaker and a graduating class. But the students are joining not the big world, but a shadowy, secret one.
CARMEN MEDINA, CIA DEPUTY DIR. FOR INTELLIGENCE: Your success is our future. Thank you.
ENSOR: Since that future may include undercover work overseas, this graduate, who speaks two other languages, did not want to show her face or reveal her name.
(on camera): Do your family all know about your choice to work at the CIA?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I have a pretty large family. So, no, not all of my family knows. But my close and immediate family does.
ENSOR: And do you tell friends that you work at the CIA?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I tell some of my close friends, but I choose who I tell.
ENSOR (voice over): With orders from the White House to increase staff by 50 percent, the CIA's director of intelligence, whose number two is Carmen Medina, is churning out new analysts at a record pace.
(on camera): Job applications to the CIA have more than doubled since 9/11 to over 140,000 a year. And officials say that the college grade point average of those accepted as new analysts last year was 3.7.
MEDINA: We're not really looking for know-it-alls, you know. We're looking for people that understand, sort of like Socrates, that the wisest person is the person who realizes that they don't know everything.
ENSOR (voice over): Humility, openness to dissenting views is lesson one nowadays as the CIA school for analysts, after U.S. intelligence got it so wrong on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Peter is a senior analyst.
PETER, CIA ANALYST: We were not clear about the nature of the evidence, our confidence level in the evidence. And that's the part -- if I could do it over again, I would do that over again, which I think would have conveyed, you know, there's a certain degree of uncertainty here, folks, that we just can't give you a definitive, absolute answer.
ENSOR: Carmen Medina says the old image of the pipe-smoking CIA analyst is out of date. They are tech-savvy globetrotters now, often working right alongside the operations officers, the spies.
MEDINA: You know, analysts don't work here in headquarters hermetically sealed. They sometimes go out into the field and get their boots dirty.
ENSOR (on camera): Do you think you ever might go in harm's way for work?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I don't know. I hope not, for a mother's sake.
ENSOR (voice over): In an office cluttered with toys and souvenirs from visiting foreign officials, the CIA's number two intelligence analyst works on her blog, reaching out to the new young analysts.
(on camera): Now, this is classified blog, right?
MEDINA: Yes, this is our agency system.
ENSOR: I can't get into this?
MEDINA: No, you can't.
ENSOR: What brought you to the CIA? Why'd you come here?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I was looking for something that I could believe in, and a mission that I could believe in, where I felt like I would be making a difference.
ENSOR: What is the mission?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Keeping America safe.
ENSOR (voice over): Hoping to make a difference in the shadows.
David Ensor, CNN, Langley, Virginia.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
MANN: The CIA isn't the only part of the intelligence community to see a steady stream of new faces. The FBI has also seen the continuing departure of some of its top officials because of retirement or lucrative job offers from the private sector.
Kelli Arena has a look at the results.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
KELLI ARENA, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): An FBI agent for 31 years, Ronald Nesbitt has decided to call it quits.
RONALD NESBITT, FMR. FBI OFFICIAL: I knew that I had to make a decision while I was still relatively young, while I was attractive to the private sector and not much later in my career.
ARENA: Nesbitt, who is 52, ran the counterintelligence unit for the FBI's Washington field office. He says he was happy at work and wasn't job hunting, but got offers anyway. In the end, he says he did what was best for his family and accepted a security job with a large corporation.
NESBITT: I have two daughters that are adults and one is graduating, one is still a sophomore in college. I have a young daughter still, so I was really looking at expenses.
ARENA: Nesbitt is just one of several top officials giving in to the lure of the private sector. Gary Ball, the top counterterrorism chief, also left recently to work in security for a cruise line. In fact, since the attacks on September 11, at least six top counterterrorism officials have left, alarming some members of Congress.
ROBERT MUELLER, FBI DIRECTOR: He does...
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: These are critical jobs at a critical time.
MUELLER: I understand what you're saying and it is an issue we're wresting with.
ARENA: The FBI points out the officials who left spent decades working at the FBI and says it's well prepared to replace them.
MIKE MASON, FBI EXECUTIVE ASST. DIRECTOR: We know what the dynamic is in terms of the average retirement age of senior bureau employees. And as a result, are working hard to develop the bench we need to develop.
ARENA: But according to a study requested by Congress, the high turnover at the top makes it harder for the FBI to make necessary changes.
Tim Roemer was a member of the 9/11 Commission.
TIM ROEMER, FMR. 9/11 COMMISSIONER: When you have six managers in the counterterrorism area in five years and you don't have that experience and that leadership at the top, even when you're bringing in creative new people, you are going to have significant morale and transfer and turnover problems at the bottom.
ARENA: Nesbitt says in his case there wasn't much the FBI could do. It came down to needing the money.
(on camera): The salary for his government position tops out at $165,000, but in the private sector his expertise commands a whole lot more.
Kelli Arena, CNN, Washington.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
MANN: We take a break. When we come back, new people and the push for new and better intelligence. Is the United States getting what it wants and what it needs?
A look when we come back.
MANN: The 9/11 Commission report was critical of U.S. intelligence. As a result, the cadre of spies, analysts and agents working for different intelligence agencies of the U.S. government got a new boss, former ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte was named director of National Intelligence in 2005. All U.S. intelligence agencies now report to him.
Welcome back.
A new boss, and the United States is trying to beef up its boots on the ground, both at home and abroad. The CIA is actively recruiting and rebuilding its infrastructure overseas. In recent years it's opened or reactivated more than 20 stations and bases and FBI officials say they are trying to fill hundreds of top jobs as well.
Joining us now to talk more about the changes underway is Tim Sample of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, an organization of intelligence specialists in government and private industry.
Thanks so much for being with us.
It has been almost exactly a year to the day since President Bush announced the latest major shakeup of intelligence and security thinking in the United States. How shaken are the major organizations that do it?
TIM SAMPLE, INTELLIGENCE-NATIONAL SECURITY ALLIANCE: Well, I think they're very shaken, Jonathan.
But, that said, I think this is something that had been started, although gradually, for a number of years. I want to -- the first part of your reporting mentioned the devastating budget cuts in the early 1990s, right after the Cold War. And this is something that the intelligence community unfortunately has had to recover from and is still recovering.
So there was a sense already of rebuilding, and I think it's a good news story that the president put a push behind it to tell the troops that, yeah, we believe in what you're doing, it's important work, it protects our security, and I don't think there's any intelligence agency, certainly that I'm aware of, that isn't behind rebuilding its capabilities to protect the nation.
MANN: Now, we heard a startling figure, 50 percent rise in the number of CIA operatives. How great, how dramatic is the growth? And to use a slightly different way of looking at it, how great, how enormous, is the turnover? How many people are leaving when you look at the CIA, the FBI and the other security organizations that matter?
SAMPLE: In terms of the growth, I think the growth -- on the one hand, when you use a 50 percent mark, it sounds dramatic, and I think though that here again you have to start, and unfortunately you can't talk about the actual numbers, but you have to start from where they were after all the budget cuts.
I think a 50 percent growth is going to get us to a point where, over time, you will have the type of intelligence capabilities that we need.
In terms of turnover, though, there is an issue of both senior people leaving, in part from decisions, as some of the individuals you interviewed, and also just because it's time to go. It's normal attrition, and my guess is, though I don't have the figures, my guess is, though, that you're probably looking, in terms of turnover, at pretty much the normal standard curve of people coming and going.
The difference is that the people who are leaving, who are due to retire, are senior level people, and you now have a gap in what I would call mentoring capability, and I think that's one of the most critical areas in every agency.
To give you an example, for let's take analysts. For every analyst, if I have one analyst that has 10 to 14 years worth of experience, which is not the most senior, by the way, I have 10 analysts that have less than five. So there is a gap there. It's a gap that goes to retention, because you need to have the mentors and you need to keep the young troops that are coming in active and engaged in order to retain them and make them viable intelligence assets.
One other thing I would add is, and people often forget this, we focus on the number of people coming in and how quickly they come in. What we often forget is that the time it takes to develop a seasoned case officer or a seasoned analyst is a significant amount of years, and they need to have a lot of experience before they can really contribute as experts, that's not to say they don't contribute.
MANN: So the United States is hurting because of all of this.
SAMPLE: I'm sorry?
MANN: U.S. security would be hurting then.
SAMPLE: Well, I don't know if you can say hurting. Certainly it's a worry. And it's a worry that I know that ambassador Negroponte and General Mike Hayden and Director Mueller all have at the top of their lists, and I know it is something that they're working on very hard. And in that case, there are other avenues and other capabilities that we use as we train that new workforce.
And so I think what you'll find is that the workforce and the folks in the field are stretched, but they're doing an excellent job, and I think the issue now is being able to rebuild the cadre that will take us into the next 10, 15, 20 years.
MANN: Now, once again, not to get hung up on numbers, some of the numbers are impressive, though they're unreliable, let's put it that way.
The "Los Angeles Times" is reporting, and they're not saying where they get this number, but there may be 1,500 top jobs in counterintelligence, in Internet crime, in antiterrorism positions, in the FBI, which has a total staff of more than 30,000; 1,500 top jobs. It says that as many as 1/5 of them may be empty, that 300 or so, maybe 500 depending on how you do the math, are empty.
How hard is it to fill people into the right jobs in work this specialized?
SAMPLE: Well, I think it is a challenge, but it's a good challenge. Certainly the numbers sound alarming. I think you also have to realize, and I can't speak to the specific jobs and numbers, but my guess is that many of those jobs are new positions after 9/11, where the FBI in particular is recalibrating its intelligence capabilities in order to protect the nation. Same goes for CIA.
But it is difficult and there is a lot of reasons. One is the competition of the private sector, which I don't think is necessarily a bad thing but a fact of life. In this case, since 9/11, the private sector is as worried about security of companies and their people around the world as the U.S. government is about the overall nation. So there is somewhat of a competition there.
But I also think especially in terms of some of the IT related jobs and some of the other jobs like that that you've pointed out, there is a lack of individuals coming out of school, and I think the president and several people in Congress and others have recognized this and have tried to place an emphasis on the education programs that start coming out with folks that are trained in the sciences and trained in war and technology than what we have today.
MANN: I don't want to be flip, but we have time for just one last question, so let me put this in terms that many of our viewers are going to understand. The World Cup is going on right now. It takes years, maybe even decades, to build a really championship football team. How many years, how many decades does it take to build the kind of intelligence organization or renew the kind of intelligence organizations that the U.S. wants to have?
SAMPLE: Well, I think -- let me break that down in two parts, if I could.
The first part is I think that the intelligence community itself at large is doing an excellent job and, although stretched thin, I think that they are preserving our security fairly well at the moment. The issue is the long term, as you point out. And, again, it takes, for example, a case officer or an analyst, in my view, takes a minimum of five years to really get them trained.
But don't focus on just the ones coming in. There are still many in the community who are hanging on because they really believe in the mission and they are trying to make sure that we're safe until these new troops get up to speed.
MANN: Timothy Sample, of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, thanks so much for talking with us.
SAMPLE: Thank you.
MANN: We take a break. When we come back, who else is giving intelligence efforts a second look?
Stay with us.
MANN: After U.S. forces took control of Iraq, former U.S. administrator Paul Bremmer ordered the establishment of a new Iraqi intelligence service to replace the old one that was run by Saddam Hussein. The new agency only has a brief track record. There are reports it aided in the hug for al Qaeda's front man in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi. But critics say Iraqi intelligence just doesn't measure up to the insurgents.
Welcome back.
It's not just Iraq. From Scotland Yard to the German intelligence service, major police and security organizations are being second guessed for what they've done or what they haven't. Are they changing as well?
Joining us now to talk about that is intelligence analyst Nigel West.
Thanks so much for being with us.
Let me ask you first of all, if we look around the world, are other intelligence organizations trying to change and rebuild with the same vigor that the CIA and FBI seem to feel?
NIGEL WEST, INTELLIGENCE ANALYST: Well, I think the trauma has been far greater in the United States and we've had very considerable difficulties in the United Kingdom, partly because of the change of the nature of the target. We switched very neatly from the Cold War to counterterrorism and did a very good job against the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland.
But I guess that everything that took place on tye 7th of July last year changed the intelligence world in Britain forever to the extent that it was believed that the relationship with the Islamic community and the United Kingdom was a good one, had them on site, plying information, not necessarily penetrated but a degree of trust. And then all of that changed with four suicide bombers coming down to London and killing another 50 other people on London transport.
MANN: To stay in London, one innocent man was shot and killed in the course of the investigation thereafter, and another man was shot and wounded just a few days ago in another police action aimed at terror. Are people looking at the intelligence and security operations in the United Kingdom as ripe for change?
WEST: No. I think you've got to divide this into two areas. First of all, the level, the quality, the scale of the intelligence that's coming in, whether or not that information is being supplied.
And then secondly, on the executive side, what is done about it. And for the police they undoubtedly have plundered, but they've been handicapped. It's very simple. Radios don't work in the London underground system. So that is a real problem, and part of the difficulty about the innocent man who was shot last year was the failure of radios to work underground. And that happened all over the world, except curiously enough in Moscow, where the KGB for three decades made sure that their radios did work in the underground system.
MANN: Hardly the scale of the intelligence lapse that led to 9/11.
Let me ask you about Germany, because there again the BND has come in for some criticism. I don't know how serious you regard these lapses as, but the idea that they would be spying on German journalists or they would be withholding information from their own government about the kidnapping of a German national.
WEST: Well, the Germans certainly do have a difficulty, but on the other hand, they have been under the direct control of politicians for very many years, and both organizations have a greater degree of accountability over many years than most other countries in the world.
So, to that extent, they're not undergoing the kind of trauma that was seen in the United States with the appointment of John Negroponte, and they whole invention of a director of National Intelligence, and that they haven't had the kind of terrible embarrassments that there have been in the United Kingdom over the past nine months.
MANN: How much of an embarrassment is the case of the secret prisons? The secret renditions, the idea that there are things that are happening in Europe and perhaps even in Western Europe that civilian governments don't know about and having been successful in learning about.
WEST: Well, I wouldn't be so sure about the governments don't know about rendition. I mean, the fact is that we are fighting a war and you have to decide where these detainees are going to go. And if they're not going to go Cuba in effect, where are they going to be detained? And so rendition has been one particular very effective instrument.
And the second has been these secret detention centers, and please don't underestimate the quality of intelligence that has come from these detainees. After the 7th of July, it's clear that one detainee provided very good information about one of the suicide bombers. Certainly it was retrospective, but nevertheless, from an intelligence perspective, that was very useful.
MANN: So, do Europeans still trust their intelligence organizations more profoundly than they trust, or that Americans trust the CIA, at this point?
WEST: Well, I think that Europeans are bemused by looking at the American system and wondering why it is that the United States feels obliged to have their politicians rip the innards out of the intelligence community at the very moment when the whole structure is at its most vulnerable. It's baffling to see the baby being thrown out with the bathwater after the 9/11 Commission. It's puzzling for us to understand how these so-called warrantless wiretaps can become a major political controversial issue. We're puzzled by all of that. We understand, because in Britain we've been involved with combating the Provisional IRA for 32 years. We know the damage of international terrorism. And the response of Congress, in our opinion, really is one of surprise and puzzlement, that why on earth does Congress feel obliged to do something every time there is an incident. Why can't they leave it to the professionals to get on with the job.
MANN: And so let me ask you, there is obviously going to be some opposition to whatever the United States does in whatever quarter, but among the opinion leaders of Europe, among the security communities of Europe, do they want to see stronger, renewed CIA and FBI agencies?
WEST: Oh, most certainly. One of the -- two of the real concerns over the past 10 years, first of all, the budget cuts. Secondly, this crazy system of source auditing, so that if a source hasn't been supplying good information for a month or two, he's fired. Well, a good way of investing in a source is to allow him to remain fallow for five or six years in the hope that he will come on stream in the future.
All of these are great concerns, and if you're going to suddenly double the size of your intelligence capability by recruiting what is euphemistically known as people with language skills, does that mean reducing the background screening? Does that mean reducing the kind of checks that are undertaken on people who have these particular skills? And incidentally in the United States there have been more than 40 cases of people being recruited or attempted to be recruited into the security intelligence apparatus who have turned out not to be what they claimed to be.
So there is a huge counterintelligence challenge here. Indeed, somebody in the secret intelligence service recently joked that the counterintelligence challenge is the greatest in this country since the reformation.
MANN: On that note, Nigel West, thanks very much.
And that is INSIGHT. I'm Jonathan Mann. The news continues.