CIA changes must reflect reality, not Hollywood fiction 

The next few months will be critical to the future of the CIA and other organizations within the intelligence community. Changes are necessary. But whatever changes are made should reflect an understanding of the intelligence profession and the culture of the clandestine service.

 Much recent criticism has been directed at the agency by people who claim that its effectiveness, particularly regarding Middle Eastern terrorist targets, is hamstrung by the paucity of case officers with the requisite foreign-language fluency, cultural knowledge and physical characteristics to blend into a foreign operational environment with the ease of a native. It calls for a recruitment drive to attract such souls, and that call has been fueled by the press and others. 

This reflects a complete misunderstanding of how the intelligence-collection process works -- a misunderstanding shared by a number of journalists and legislators who are calling for fundamental changes in the CIA's operations directorate. 

In the extreme, these people call for the recruitment of case officers with the ability to infiltrate Muslim terrorist cells. Let me dispel that myth once and for all: It's never going to happen. Never. And furthermore, it never should happen.

No matter how much money and personnel are thrown at the CIA to help it defeat the terrorists and assure that another 9/11 never happens again, the CIA would never risk one of its case officers (even if they had one with the qualifications to do the deed -- which they don't) to personally infiltrate al Qaeda or any other Muslim terrorist organization.

This is not a question of personal courage or institutional commitment; it's a matter of common sense.

 This is not how the real world of intelligence works; it's the stuff of Hollywood fiction.

 It is true that there are few CIA case officers who are able to pass themselves off as natives of any non-English speaking country. In this the CIA detractors are correct. My point is simply that the CIA's case officer corps does not need to have that degree of language and cultural and ethnic authenticity to be effective, and moving too far in that direction would also endanger the integrity and cohesiveness of the clandestine service. 

If you were to poll those case officers with native fluency in a foreign language, you would find that all of them were born into families with deep linguistic and cultural ties to their country of origin. Most were born abroad and grew up in that foreign environment before immigrating to the United States. Indeed, there are few of these kinds of ''special'' case officers in the CIA.

 Why is that? The security issue is what keeps most foreign-born applicants out of the CIA's operations directorate. Few foreign-born and -raised individuals are able to pass the stringent clearance process. The main reason they can't pass is due precisely to their strong ties to their former countries. It's a double-edged sword.

 But the crux of this conundrum is that most people simply don't understand the intelligence business; in particular the difference between case officers and agents. They don't know that the CIA employs thousands of people in virtually every country who are indeed natives and who can blend into the societal woodwork because they actually are a part of it. They are called agents. And if the agent is savvy enough, he or she can be trained in the arcane art of clandestine tradecraft, put through a rigorous vetting process, including a polygraph, to become what is known in the trade as a ``principal agent.'' 

These principal agents are recruited and handled by case officers who, for the most part, work out of U.S. official installations abroad and who blend perfectly into that diplomatic culture. They're supposed to; that's their cover. Case officers must look and sound just like other American diplomats in the mission, and indeed would be terribly out of place if they tried to join a bunch of turbaned natives squatting on the sidewalk in their dishdashah robes chewing khat or puffing on a water pipe. That's not their job.

 So on the one hand we have the case officer who must fit into the U.S. diplomatic environment at home and abroad and who has total loyalty to the United Sttes, and on the other hand we have the principal agent who is a trusted native of a particular foreign country who can be trained and vetted to the extent that he can be given the responsibility to perform specific compartmented tasks within an operational and cultural environment totally familiar to him. Apples and oranges. Each has separate and very different functions. But together they are the best of both possible worlds.

The call for turning our CIA case officers into principal agents has been accepted as gospel by many senior government officials and members of intelligence committees. They have been led to believe that these cries for change are justified, and they are now trying to move the CIA's operations directorate in a dangerous and ill-advised direction.