REUEL MARC GERECHT
Whenever the United States gets traumatized by the unexpected abroad, discussion inevit ably start about the inadequacy of American intelligence collection and analysis.There is truth behind this reflex response: US intelligence organizations, particularly the two largest and most consequential, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA), the latter of which is responsible for the bulk of America’s intercept of foreign communications and other digital treasure troves, often don’t perform as envisioned. Criticisms of the NSA usually revolve around timeliness—seeing and analyzing the intercepts soon enough—and the unavoidable mathematical problems that give encryption an advantage over decryption. AndLangley has a way of confidently repackaging establishment biases, in both analysis and operations, which makes it comfortable speaking “truth” to power except when conventional wisdom fails. Weapons of mass destruction—seeing them when they’re not there, not seeing them when they are—revolutionary movements, and religious terrorism have been challenging subjects for Langley to get ahead of. And the Directorate of Operations, the outfit that makes the CIA special among America’s intelligence services, has long-standing problems with agent recruitment—a chronic inability to put the right operatives on difficult targets long enough to develop creative approaches and a promotions system that rewards case officers who recruit by volume not quality—that may well have given us, among other things, nearly useless agents against the Taliban and Al-Qa’ida.
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