CIA - The Reshuffle

"Will reshuffling the CIA help the agency meet 21st century challenges?" PBS NewsHour 3/8/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  The director of the CIA is ordering sweeping reforms designed to dramatically change the agency starting at the top.  Associated Press reporter Ken Dilanian joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss what is changing and why.

HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  CIA Director John Brennan announced Friday that he is ordering sweeping reforms designed to dramatically change the agency, starting at the top.

But exactly what is changing and why?

Yesterday, I spoke with Associated Press intelligence reporter Ken Dilanian.

Why did the CIA director feel these changes were necessary in the first place?

KEN DILANIAN, Associated Press:  Well, I’m not sure he’s going to be completely leveling with us about that.

But I can say that it comes amid the backdrop of a series of intelligence failures, where the CIA has not — has not predicted major global developments, whether you want to talk about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the movement of Russian troops in the Ukraine or the rapid rise of the Islamic State.

So, there is a feeling out there that, while the CIA has done some things incredibly well since 9/11, there are also some gaffes.  And the world is changing a lot.  So — so, Director Brennan assembled a group of experts and internal people and looked for three months intensively at the agency’s functions and came up with this plan.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  So, one of the suggestions was to break down the wall that exists between the analysts and the operators.  And to most of us, we — I didn’t realize that there was that wall in the first place.

KEN DILANIAN:  Right.  And that is fundamental.  That is the biggest change Brennan is implementing here.  And that is fundamental to the agency’s character since it was created in 1947.

You know, the operators are people who recruit spies, who run covert operations.  And they have their own bosses.  They work in their own offices for the most part.  And the analysts are different.  They’re more like college professors.  They take the intelligence collected by the operators, and they interpret it, and they write papers that are presented to the President.

Now, there are parts of the CIA where those two are connected now, including the Counterterrorism Center that has been pursuing al-Qaida since 9/11, but, for the most part, they don’t work together.  And under this change, they would begin working together in 10 so-called centers, which would sort of either be geographic areas of the world or in some cases subject areas, like counterproliferation.