Natalie Gonnella
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As General David Petraeus prepares to take the reins at the Central Intelligence Agency, in a post via ForeignPolicy.com's Shadow Government blog, Paul Miller this week outlined four key tasks for the new Director's attention.
Having worked for the CIA for seven years himself, here's a quick look at Miller's views on what requires immediate adjustment:
1. Get the analysts out of the shadows:
The Directorate of Intelligence (DI) has the capability of being a leading foreign affairs think tank in the world. Instead, it has largely limited itself to being a massive, overpriced, secretive magazine staff for a readership of one, pouring most of its resources in to the President's Daily Brief (PDB)...Analysts can and should be open and regular participants in the world of academia, think tanks, and conferences, encouraged to publish and speak on their areas of expertise.
2. Get the National Clandestine Service (NCS, or, to any self-respecting intelligence professional, the DO) to report gray information:
The operations officers of the clandestine service are an invaluable tool of national security by collecting human intelligence. In non-spy lingo, that means they persuade foreigners to sell secrets. However, they focus exclusively on secrets. The service vets its reports to ensure that it is only reporting information that is sufficiently "clandestine"...There is also gray information, stuff that is important, not strictly a secret, but also very hard to get... In war zones and failed states, NCS officers are often the only people well-placed to observe and report this kind of information. They should be encouraged to do so, but that would require a profound cultural and institutional shift in what the NCS understands its mission to be.
3. Draw down the counterterrorism surge:
A huge proportion of the intelligence community's assets were rightly diverted to tracking terrorists after 2001. But terrorism is unlikely to be the U.S.'s principle foreign policy challenge in coming decades. The principle challenges probably will include, at one pole, China and Russia, and, at the other pole, widespread state failure and anarchy in much of the world. Islamism, of the political, radical, extremist, or violent variety (pick your modifier), may also be a long-term challenge...Our heavy focus on counterterrorism is too narrow.
4. Tackle clientitis:
Analysts and operatives can, on occasion, go native. They start to see the world through the perspective of the foreign country (Pakistan, to take a completely random example) on which they spend their careers. This destroys their objectivity and undermines their usefulness to U.S. policymakers...We need to encourage depth without sacrificing perspective. Petraeus should form a cross-directorate task force to study the problem, develop ways to identify and track clientitis, and find ways to prevent or cure it.
Miller's full post is available to view here.
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