Once and Future Spies

he furor over the presence or absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has further exposed the CIA's people problems. Staffing shortages have plagued the CIA since the early 1990s. Starved for skilled analysts and case officers-the specialists who recruit and manage spies-the CIA couldn't discern the secrets of many governments in open societies, let alone closed ones such as Iraq's. Maddeningly for politicians and gadflies of all stripes, neither calls for reform nor recommendations from seven investigative commissions likely will cure the agency's ills.

For years, the CIA has scratched by with an "unbelievably low" number of case officers, George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence, said in February at Georgetown University in Washington. The few case officers there were lacked fluency in Dari and Pashto, the tongues of Afghanistan. Former CIA director James Woolsey says post-Cold War budget cuts closed some intelligence posts in Africa and Central Asia, where terrorists now roam. To compensate for its human shortages, the CIA relied on technological intelligence collection.

Journalist Ted Gup, author of The Book of Honor (Anchor Books, 2000), a heralded history of the CIA, says the agency regularly blames its troubles on staffing. But Tenet insists the problem is real and that rebuilding the case officer corps will take at least five years.

But, he said, the agency has made a good start-last year's case officer graduating class was the biggest in CIA history. And three-quarters are fluent in foreign languages. The CIA refuses to say which ones, but it has aggressively recruited Arabic speakers during the past two years.

To augment its human capabilities, the CIA is employing new kinds of technology, Tenet said, acknowledging the agency depended too much on satellites and too little on spies on the ground in Iraq. The CIA now is buying language translation software and programs to help analysts in connecting disparate pieces of information about people and groups.

But experts say the agency also must rethink the way it develops sources. Since stateless terrorist networks are today's major threat, Woolsey cautions officers to keep their doors and ears open to everyone, even one-time or infrequent informants, who, he says, the CIA traditionally has eschewed.

Gregory Treverton, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, says one way to encourage case officers to welcome all comers is by finding a different way of measuring their success. Spymasters are judged largely on how many sources they develop, Treverton says, producing what critics call the "tyranny of scalps." But CIA officers aren't likely to recruit large numbers of spies from elusive terrorist cells.

Woolsey suggests that the CIA seek case officers from nontraditional sources such as recent immigrants. They're often fervently patriotic and they know the ropes in places the CIA has to penetrate. The CIA won't reveal the nationalities of its new recruits, but Woolsey says the agency's demographics, at least, already are changing. The 50-and-older set, those closest to retirement, are mostly male and white, he says. But the 30-and-under crowd on the agency's campus "looks like the United Nations."

Despite the focus on case officers, analysts won't be ignored in the CIA's reconstruction. Already in February, before any reform commissions had issued findings, the agency announced that it was giving analysts more access to information about the identities of intelligence sources. In the past, to protect sources' identities, the agency concealed from whom and where information originated. But officials decided this secrecy led analysts to rely too heavily on intelligence from single or less reliable sources.

Further reforms are likely before and after the seven investigative groups report. While much about the CIA's recent efforts remains murky, it's clear Tenet is in for an earful of management advice.