AHC: Disband the CIA

True, but every intelligence agency in the world gets bad intel. That is the nature of reality. Sometimes you get it wrong.

Again, yes. But doing the job you were supposed to be doing rather than playing OSS makes it less likely that you'll be making the numerous easily avoidable, elementary errors that have plagued the CIA.
 
Easier said then done, what seems easily avoidable, elementary errors looks different when you are the one to make the call dealing with feet thick stacks of documents, hundreds of hours of tape, and the human element of having bad days, personal bias and emotional responses. What you are requiring is that the CIA is being run by superhumans.
 
Easier said then done, what seems easily avoidable, elementary errors looks different when you are the one to make the call dealing with feet thick stacks of documents, hundreds of hours of tape, and the human element of having bad days, personal bias and emotional responses. What you are requiring is that the CIA is being run by superhumans.

No. :idontcare:

What I'm saying is disbanding the CIA and replacing it with an agency that actually does what it's supposed to do - analyze and assess intelligence - instead trying to relive Wild Bill Donovan's OSS days - would serve the national interests far better.
 
No. :idontcare:

What I'm saying is disbanding the CIA and replacing it with an agency that actually does what it's supposed to do - analyze and assess intelligence - instead trying to relive Wild Bill Donovan's OSS days - would serve the national interests far better.
Then some other agency does covert ops and has the same problems. Covert ops are among the things Great Powers do. Everybody else does them and screw up more or less as often but they don't get the attention because they aren't the biggest power on the planet.
 
Then some other agency does covert ops and has the same problems. Covert ops are among the things Great Powers do. Everybody else does them and screw up more or less as often but they don't get the attention because they aren't the biggest power on the planet.
Wrong. If you collect good intel, analyze it properly, and then let the proper people act on it, you'll do much better.
 
*puts on tinfoil hat*

JFK tried and that's why they teamed up with Cuban nationalists and Texan oligarchs to shoot him!

*takes off tinfoil hat*
 
Honestly, this is very hard to do in practice. Even a new agency would wind up with a lot of the same people, who were disproportionately from the WASP/Ivy League establishment, which tends to take care of its own. It's not a coincidence that George H.W. Bush (Yale '48) came in after the Church Committee. The best you are likely to get is reform and a reining in, which is certainly plausible. If the job isn't getting done, you layer in new agencies like NSA to take over part of CIA's mission.

Complicating all of this is how hard this work actually is on a technical level and how important it is. The anti-Castro plots were a joke, but the analysis during the Cuban Missile Crisis was spot on. And the work was a lot harder 40 years ago; it was still an age of typewriters and carbon paper. People take satellite photography for granted today, but it was a closely held secret 40 years ago. And even with satellites, the fall of the Warsaw Pact was completely missed. It's easy to criticize in hindsight, but it was a lot easier to close a nation off from the world 30 years ago.
 

Japhy

Banned
No. :idontcare:

What I'm saying is disbanding the CIA and replacing it with an agency that actually does what it's supposed to do - analyze and assess intelligence - instead trying to relive Wild Bill Donovan's OSS days - would serve the national interests far better.

The CIA is far more like you want to believe it should be then you believe it to be. There's a massive gap between the Hollywood version and the real thing.
 
Wrong. If you collect good intel, analyze it properly, and then let the proper people act on it, you'll do much better.
And you'll still occasionally screw up, because that's the nature of the job. Doctors screw up, engineers screw up, accountants screw up - everybody screws up eventually. Intelligence work, because it inherently involves limited information, time pressure, and secrecy, is more prone to screwing up than most professions.

For various reasons, mostly relating to the US being global hegemon, CIA screwups are more visible than those of the SIS, DGSE, MVD and MSS. Reorganising might reduce the frequency of screwups, or they might become more common. They might become more or less obvious. Abolishing the CIA on those grounds is only going to make sense if there's a monumentally disastrous intelligence failure that can only be resolved by firing everybody senior enough to have an office with a door. And even then you'll need a new intelligence service.
 
The CIA is far more like you want to believe it should be then you believe it to be. There's a massive gap between the Hollywood version and the real thing.

I'm not talking about Hollywood. I'm talking about what was covered in my college history coursework, including a history of the CIA.
 
And you'll still occasionally screw up, because that's the nature of the job. Doctors screw up, engineers screw up, accountants screw up - everybody screws up eventually. Intelligence work, because it inherently involves limited information, time pressure, and secrecy, is more prone to screwing up than most professions.

For various reasons, mostly relating to the US being global hegemon, CIA screwups are more visible than those of the SIS, DGSE, MVD and MSS. Reorganising might reduce the frequency of screwups, or they might become more common. They might become more or less obvious. Abolishing the CIA on those grounds is only going to make sense if there's a monumentally disastrous intelligence failure that can only be resolved by firing everybody senior enough to have an office with a door. And even then you'll need a new intelligence service.
If an engineer tries to practice medicine, we don't excuse it as a mistake that happens in the normal course of affairs. And the CIA is full of disasters of that caliber, from the orchestration of multiple coups that have blown up in our faces to the failures associated with the most disasterous foreign policy blunder this country has ever committed, the GWOT.
 

Japhy

Banned
I'm not talking about Hollywood. I'm talking about what was covered in my college history coursework, including a history of the CIA.
And thats missing the vast majority of what they do. The CIA has for a very long time been pretty damned good, as good as you can be with the quiet stuff of running assets, picking though trash, and running their Intelligence Section as a well oiled machine.

Their operations section on the other hand have a much worse history, in a large part because of guys like JFK assuming that James Bond was real and that they could murder anyone at the drop of a hat. And of course they make it into more books on that end because if they screw up that way its much more obvious than if they screw up trying to figure out when the next generation Soviet guidance system for ICBMs comes online or what the crop yeild in the DPRK is going to look like this year. I mean a look at CIA history pretty much shows that well into the Vietnam War era they had to outsource their shooting work to allied intelligence agencies, Cuban Exiles, Congo Crisis Mercanaries, etc the reason for that is very simple: That sort of work wasn't and isn't their job.

And considering what we've heard over the years about their "Special Operations" forces in places like 2001 Afghanistan, its still not something they have down pat or effectively, because they continue to be more of the agency you want them to be then the Special Forces Fetishizing talking heads of Washington want them to be.

Watch this space, I'll dig up a book or two I have at home when I get there this afternoon.
 
Here's a reading list for you:

Secret Warriors: Inside the Covert Military Operations of the Reagan Era
, by Steven Emerson

Shadow Warrior, by Felix Rodriguez

Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA, by Mark Riebling

The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks

Presidents' Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations from World War II Through the Persian Gulf, by John Prados

And of course, my particular favorite:
Inside the Company: CIA Diary, by Philip Agee

As for the laughable idea that the CIA outsources it's paramilitary work, that's easily dismissed with a review of the sizes and budgets of the various directorates. And it's not going in the right direction, either.
 
If an engineer tries to practice medicine, we don't excuse it as a mistake that happens in the normal course of affairs. And the CIA is full of disasters of that caliber, from the orchestration of multiple coups that have blown up in our faces to the failures associated with the most disasterous foreign policy blunder this country has ever committed, the GWOT.
Stretching the analogy still further.... we're not talking engineers practicing medicine. We're talking about the on-call surgeon at a major hospital. Most patients have routine problems and are operated on without difficulty. Occasionally you'll have a case which turns out to be much more complex than anticipated, and you don't find the underlying problems until the patient is bleeding out on the operating table. That doesn't mean you shut down the hospital.
As for the laughable idea that the CIA outsources it's paramilitary work, that's easily dismissed with a review of the sizes and budgets of the various directorates. And it's not going in the right direction, either.
Did you actually read his comment? They used to outsource paramilitary work. Now they've brought it in-house and expanded it because of politicians watching too many James Bond films.
 
If an engineer tries to practice medicine, we don't excuse it as a mistake that happens in the normal course of affairs. And the CIA is full of disasters of that caliber, from the orchestration of multiple coups that have blown up in our faces to the failures associated with the most disasterous foreign policy blunder this country has ever committed, the GWOT.

The political leadership above the CIA ultimately bears/bore responsibility for that. To blame them alone is like saying "Well, after Vietnam/Iraq, we're going to formally disband the US military and rebuild it from a clean slate. Clearly it's their fault".
 
Stretching the analogy still further.... we're not talking engineers practicing medicine. We're talking about the on-call surgeon at a major hospital. Most patients have routine problems and are operated on without difficulty. Occasionally you'll have a case which turns out to be much more complex than anticipated, and you don't find the underlying problems until the patient is bleeding out on the operating table. That doesn't mean you shut down the hospital.

Did you actually read his comment? They used to outsource paramilitary work. Now they've brought it in-house and expanded it because of politicians watching too many James Bond films.

Have you bothered to read anything I've written here? Go back and reread.
 
The political leadership above the CIA ultimately bears/bore responsibility for that. To blame them alone is like saying "Well, after Vietnam/Iraq, we're going to formally disband the US military and rebuild it from a clean slate. Clearly it's their fault".

If the failures in Vietnam/Iraq were due to the military being overly oriented towards intelligence, with more of the budget and personnel going to intel ops rather than combat ops, which would correctly mirror the problems at the CIA that started with Donovan and have continued right through, then yes, I'd say we need to start over.
 
Top