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How Dumb is the CIA? With the hydrogen bomb test by North Korea, it should be recalled the CIA was dumb enough to be responsible for North Korea acquiring nukes.
Reorganized Murder Incorporated
According to a Washington Post article, John Brennan has set out to restructure the CIA’s longstanding model:
“At issue is a basic structure that has been in place since the agency’s inception, with employees divided by function among four major directorates. The best known are the National Clandestine Service, which sends case officers overseas on spying missions and carries out covert operations, and the Directorate of Intelligence, which employs thousands of analysts whose main job is to provide insight on global developments to President Obama and other policymakers. Others include a directorate focused on science and technology, and a fourth handles logistics for operations abroad”
The article has some disingenuous elements indicating this is a deliberate disinformation provided to the Washington Post as to the ‘why’…
“Former officials said Brennan’s interest in organizational change is driven in part by frustration with the struggle to strengthen U.S. intelligence on the crisis in Syria, which has morphed from a civil war to an incubator for terrorist groups”
…because the Syria circumstance is not a failure of intelligence but quite clearly a failure of policy.
Brennan’s goal…
“But the idea being explored by Brennan would go beyond such changes, rebuilding its sprawling bureaucracy around a model that relies on “centers” that combine analysts, operators, scientists and support staff. The agency has for years employed that approach on its most daunting assignments, including efforts to slow the spread of narcotics, illicit weapons and nuclear arms”
…is cover story, pure and simple. In fact the CIA is a major global player, not in slowing the spread of illicit weapons and narcotics, because actually the CIA is up to its neck in international narcotics and weapons trafficking. Nuclear weapons is a legitimate concern, considering it was the CIA had let a nuclear genie out of the bottle (more on that later) or, rather let’s hope not a subliminal psychological preparation of the public for a looming false-flag attack.
Now, there are some real management pros and cons, mostly cons in this proposal, unless you happen to favor the most criminalized divisions of the CIA, that is the National Clandestine Service and the Science & Technology directorates.
When the new hybridized ‘centers’ are created, there is a typical trade-off and a second, very real, Faustian trade-off. You increase security based on the ‘cellular’ principle by isolating the proposed different regional centers from each other. This can be justified from a point of counter-espionage, if one center is penetrated, the other centers are isolated from the penetration. The typical trade-off is, shared expertise and genius is isolated from one center to the next and overall quality is consequently eroded. Let’s say John, in the Eastern Europe department, has a nagging feeling about the information he’s developing and he can’t walk down the hall to ask Jane in the South Asia department to look for some anomaly he is missing and the result is, John is sucked into a false-flag information operation that Jane would have spotted. Another problem can be separate cells at cross purposes, unknowingly getting in each others way, where the various proposed regions will inevitably overlap in a globalized world. This almost certainly will require another layer of bureaucracy, resulting in increased inefficiency from a practical standpoint and less efficient oversight in an ever growing, already gargantuan, intelligence apparatus.
The Faustian trade-off is, the proposed ‘cellularizing’ increases the security of any criminal elements operating within the CIA (there are plenty of those) and enhances the criminal elements operational capabilities.
Where in the existing model, any dubious requests that might raise red flags within the agency, for instance a clandestine operations directorate (hypothetical) request for a nuclear ‘trigger’ mechanism from the science and technology directorate, any such request would have a much better chance of going unnoticed in the proposed cellularized regional model.
At the more mundane level of criminal narcotics trafficking, gun-running, and kidnap, torture & murder programs we already know go on, breaking the directorates down into regional cells makes a lot of sense and here is why:
Within each region, there will be ‘teams’ where operations are underway. These teams will be sub-cells of regional cells. Now, when you can assign mad scientist ‘Dexter’ to a team that includes intelligence analyst ‘Ray’, gun-running, narcotics trafficking & renditions pilot ‘Joseph’, and kidnap coordinator ‘Sabrina’, you’ve created a mini CIA within the CIA, with all the bases covered; science & technology, intelligence, logistics and operatives. Give opportunity to cook these ideas up to personalities l