Out of My Mind

What if the purpose of the CIA was to, you know, collect and analyze intelligence instead of creating fictions for a deranged administration?

Why, then, this piece would have some relevance in the real world. Meanwhile, this administration has clearly shown that it is a political tool. Of course, given that reality has no relevance for our leaders, who needs an intel gathering and analyzing agency anyway?

Have a chuckle -- if you can:

Kosher Cures for the CIA
May 9, 2006; Page A19

Morale at the agency is rock bottom, as is its reputation with the public. The director has been forced to resign. Relations with the politicos are under strain. There have been several high-profile operational fiascos, one of which nearly wrecked relations with a key Middle Eastern ally.

Porter Goss's CIA? Wrong. This was the Mossad, Israel's fabled spy agency, circa 1997. In September of that year, a botched Mossad attempt on the life of Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal in Amman, Jordan, forced an acute political crisis between the Jewish state and its Hashemite neighbor. Five months later, another Mossad agent was arrested while wiretapping a phone line in Bern. The agency's travails attracted wide notice: "Swiss Confirm New Fiasco by Agents for Israel," was how the New York Times covered the story.

Today, the Mossad is again at the top of its game. Among other coups, it is believed to have assassinated Hezbollah terror masters Ali Hussein Saleh in 2003 and Ghalib Awwali in 2004. So it's worth taking note of how the Mossad repaired its own house -- and of what two former Israeli spymasters have to say about how CIA Director nominee Michael Hayden might go about repairing his.

In a telephone interview, Efraim Halevy, Mossad chief from 1998 to 2002 and author of the memoir "Man in the Shadows," offers this advice. The new director "must first work quickly to repair the image of the organization by producing results. He must re-establish credibility at the political level, and this isn't going to be easy because political leaders will be wary of intelligence judgments. He must pass a message of confidence in and respect for the troops. He has to stand up for his people, and not take a back seat while someone else takes the rap. And he has to be creative and allow creativity and courage to show themselves."

Mr. Halevy knows whereof he speaks. "I entered my job in a crisis situation," he recalls. Not long into his tenure, a Turkish newspaper claimed -- falsely, according to Mr. Halevy -- that the Mossad had been involved in the capture of Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdish leader of the terrorist PKK. The report, which put Israelis at risk of PKK reprisals, had to be discredited in a way that would be believed. Rather than issue a public denial, Mr. Halevy circulated a memo within the Mossad disavowing any link to the Ocalan operation. The memo then "leaked," achieving the desired impression.

There are lessons here for Gen. Hayden, starting with the fact that it helps to run an organization where leaks, when they happen, are authorized and purposeful. In recent years, the CIA has lost that ability, in part because of a deep-seated ideological animus to the Bush administration (witness the careers of anti-Bush partisans Valerie Plame, Paul Pillar, Michael Scheuer and Mary McCarthy), but also, it seems, as payback from careerists who felt rudely handled by Mr. Goss. If you want to plug leaks -- and manage change -- try getting the troops on board.

On the whole, however, Mr. Halevy is fairly sanguine about CIA prospects. "I think the quality of the intelligence is very high," he says. Mr. Halevy has interacted with the CIA for nearly four decades, during which he "has not seen a decline" in the caliber of its work. It isn't clear if he's only being polite.

Less optimistic is Uzi Arad, a former head of the Mossad's intelligence division and now the director of the Institute for Policy and Strategy at Israel's Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. "My impression," he says, "is that rather than galloping ahead to compensate for years of absenteeism and lagging behind, you have a kind of vegetating system."

Mr. Arad compares this to what's happened to the U.S. military in recent years. "The field of intelligence has been going through a revolution analogous to the revolution in military affairs," he says. Yet while the Pentagon is devising new technologies and strategies to cope with a new geopolitical landscape, the CIA is adapting "retroactively, as one mishap follows another."

An instructive example: "In the past," Mr. Arad says, "secrecy and compartmentalization were considered to be virtues in the intelligence community, often at the expense of synergy. That made sense during the Cold War, when the U.S. was confronting an enemy capable of penetrating the system. But al Qaeda and Iran probably aren't capable of penetrating the system the way the KGB was. So perhaps we need to tilt away from the culture of secrecy and bring more jointness, more synchronization, more pooling of scarce resources."

Nor is this the only problem Mr. Arad sees. "Despite the current reforms," he says, "the American system is very big, very complex, with many redundancies to protect institutional interests rather than security interests." The Mossad employs an estimated 2,000 agents and officers. The CIA is perhaps 10 times that size, and it's just one of 16 American intelligence agencies. Yet the quantity of resources has done little to improve the quality of U.S. intelligence. On Iran's nuclear program, for instance, last year's Robb-Silberman Report suggests America knows frighteningly little.

The creation in 2004 of the office of Director of National Intelligence was supposed to have streamlined the system, bringing the kind of synergy that Mr. Arad calls for. Instead, under John Negroponte, the office has become yet another player in the broader intelligence bureaucracy, trying to impose its will on a recalcitrant (but weak) CIA and an even more recalcitrant (and strong) Defense Intelligence Agency. How a CIA director can find his way through this maze is anyone's guess; it certainly defeated Mr. Goss.

Still, the Israeli example should give the CIA reason to hope it can become effective again -- provided it has the right leadership. "All too often in the history of both the Israeli and the American systems," Mr. Arad says, "leaders have been parachuted into the intelligence services because they were great admirals or great generals or great managers. But intelligence remains a peculiar field. You've got to have the touch for it. The instincts for it. The love for it."

We'll find out, eventually, whether Gen. Hayden has got the love.