THE END OF THE JOHN BRENNAN ERA AT CIA – THANK GOD!
Only time will tell whether some actions by the upcoming Trump Administration turn out to be good or bad, but one action is guaranteed to be a good one – the resignation of John Brennan as Director of the CIA. The position of D/CIA is not a set term, as it is for the Director of the FBI. The D/CIA “serves at the pleasure of the President” and most directors go soon after the president who appointed them leaves office. President-elect Trump has spoken of several things he plans on doing his first day in office. Hopefully, one of them will be asking for the immediate resignation of Mr. Brennan, before he has any more time to ruin the Central Intelligence Agency with all of his “stylish” reorganizations.
My negative view of Director Brennan’s massive “overhaul” of the CIA is shared by many former and current Agency people, but I shall speak only for myself about his efforts, particularly of combining of DI and DO personnel into a multitude of “centers.” And I shall only speak of them in vague, general terms, so as not to incur the wrath of the Agency’s Publication Review Board – despite the fact that many of the details have been all over the press. During my thirty years at the CIA, a fundamental rule was to keep the analysts separate from operations. Reason one for this was to help keep to a minimum the number of people who knew identifying details about foreign assets who had been recruited by the Directorate of Operations – compartmentation. But equally important was the second reason – to keep the product of the analysts unbiased, by their only seeing the reports from assets and enough of a source description and statement of track record to date, so that the analyst could put a report in perspective. In the DO, there was always the phrase of “falling in love with an agent”, meaning that an operations officer’s view of the value of an agent’s reporting might be biased because he knew the agent, or knew many personal details of him. The separation of analysts from operations was to keep their assessments of the reporting untainted by knowledge of the person who had provided it.
Aside from the above two problems with all the Brennan centers, there is potentially a third. After some analyst works in one of these centers for several years, perhaps she or he comes to feel that they know as much as their DO colleague sitting nearby about what’s going on in Country X and wants to go be COS in that country. Who’s going to dare say NO? The 2009 bombing at FOB Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan that killed seven CIA personnel and wounded many more, caused by having a female analyst with no field operational experience in charge and making poor security/operational decisions is the most dramatic example of why that’s not a good idea. There have also been other, fortunately less impactful, examples of bad decisions by analysts pretending to be operations officers.
Director Brennan’s radical plans for change at the Agency are the classic steps of a leader who doesn’t really know what he’s doing because he doesn’t really understand the work of an organization, but who wants to have a big impact, so as to leave his mark and to stroke his ego. Brennan confuses motion with progress. Brennan has a reputation with many of being one of the great sycophants of all time at the CIA. He was always been known for firmly holding his opinion – just as soon as he found out what his superior’s opinion was on a topic. That is an excellent strategy for rising through the bureaucratic ranks. The problem is when such a person actually gets in charge and has to have their own intelligent thoughts.
Director Brennan has also committed the cardinal sin of getting involved in politics. Not that the rule has always been followed, but in principle, the CIA and its Director are to be above politics. In keeping with his methodology that got him to the directorship, and his desire to stay on in a new presidential administration, Brennan made it publicly clear that he was a supporter of candidate Hillary Clinton – hoping that he would then be rewarded with being kept on in her Administration. Nice strategy, except that in this situation, he sucked up to the wrong horse. He will now pay the price and can get on with writing his memoires or sitting on various boards of directors. Hopefully, President-elect Trump will choose as a replacement, someone who actually understands how the CIA functions and who will restore sanity to its organizational structure. There are many aspects of what that structure should be, but I shall only mention one of them here – restore the traditional country desk officer. There is the need in operational work to have continuity of knowledge on operations in important countries and possibly of relations with the governments of some countries. The Agency was full of legends of men and women, who possibly never rose very high in paygrade, but who everyone knew that was who you turned to if you wanted to know what was going on in Country A or Country B – and what had been going on there for the past decade or more. Director Brennan, and some of the other sycophants he has surrounded himself with, should have considered that the reason certain things were done in a certain ways for decades was because they worked quite well!