Intelligence

The CIA

Economist.com

Mar 19th 2005
From Economist.com

Since its establishment in 1947, America's Central Intelligence Agency has been both the most visible and the murkiest of its agencies, its roost for spies and spymasters. In the Cold War, it earned its keep intercepting Eastern-bloc signals and drawing analyses from the diplomatic circuit. Since the end of the Soviet Union, the reputation of all America’s intelligence agencies has deteriorated to the point that they are now on the block for a major overhaul. The CIA’s failure to anticipate India’s and Pakistan’s nuclear detonations in 1998 and its role in the mistaken bombardment of Sudan were embarrassments, but no match for what was to follow.

After September 11th 2001, the CIA’s reputation fell to unprecedented depths. Its inability to “connect the dots” that might have prevented the attacks has been the subject of congressional inquiries, even as the agency scrambled to compile evidence that Iraq possessed banned weapons. When the weapons failed to materialise, George Tenet, the director who was reported to have told George Bush that the evidence for them was a “slam dunk”, resigned.

What went so wrong? Many of the agency’s long-standing problems are structural—eg, too few spooks on the ground, the absence of a domestic service—and the resistance to change is enormous. Other critics say the CIA has become too prone to politicking; a Senate inquiry concluded that it misrepresented its evidence on weapons-making to the public. (All of which makes George Bush’s nomination of Porter Goss, a former agent who is now fiercely allied to the president, questionable.) Following the advice of the investigative 9/11 commission, Mr Bush appointed an “intelligence tsar” to take the reins of the 15 intelligence agencies from the CIA's director and the cabinet secretaries. This is a good idea, but may not prove feasible.

March 19, 2005 at 08:45 AM in CIA | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home