Joseph Weisberg, a former CIA employee who worked in the Directorate of Operations, writes an op ed in the Washington Post that destroys the myth of the valuable human intelligence asset. To put it bluntly, most spies are not trusted at all and many, if not the vast majority, are very likely double agents, fully controlled by the intelligence service of the country they are supposedly spying on.
The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran appears to rely heavily on notes from a discussion between Iranian military officials involved in that country's nuclear weapons development program. What if, instead of such easily manipulated documentary evidence, the CIA's National Clandestine Service had been able to recruit a spy at the highest reaches of the Iranian government, someone who could just tell us what the country's nuclear capabilities and plans were?
It wouldn't have made any difference.
Ever since the inception of the CIA, the operational side of the agency has both believed in and spread the fantasy that foreign agents can provide vital secret intelligence that will clear up great mysteries, change the outcome of wars or prevent terrorist attacks. But this view of intelligence is a myth. To understand why, it's useful to look at what happened the last time the United States desperately needed a spy to get to the bottom of a covert weapons program and what happened when we actually got one…..
….Intelligence from almost all CIA assets is unreliable for the simple reason that so many of them are double agents, meaning that the CIA recruited them but that they are being controlled by their own countries' intelligence services. When I worked at CIA headquarters in the early 1990s, I once suggested to a friend who worked in counterintelligence that up to a third of all CIA agents could be doubles. He said the number was probably much higher.
Therein lies the problem. The CIA knows that most spies are either plants or are working in their own interests – not for the good of the US. The world of spying is not as it is portrayed in a Tom Clancy novel. There is a simple, undeniable fact here: it is incredibly difficult to recruit an agent at a high enough position in a foreign government to gather the kind of information needed.
This shouldn't be a surprise. Although we dedicate enormous resources to recruiting "human sources," there just aren't many good ones available. The central problem is that the people who actually know the secrets we'd be interested in aren't recruitable. Officials at the highest reaches of foreign governments have wealth and power and usually no compelling reason to put those at risk. The most knowledgeable members of terrorist groups are ideologically committed and aren't going to work for the CIA or anyone else.
It may not be impossible, but it certainly is highly unlikely. So we are left with a paradox. If the intelligence gathered by the CIA fails to detect vital information, the routine scapegoat of "human intelligence failures" is trotted out. If the human intelligence gets it wrong, the same scapegoat is again trotted out. If the CIA gets suckered by a human intelligence asset, whether that asset is a double or merely acting in their own interests, same result. Weisberg suggests one possible fix that might improve the outlook or will at least cut the number of bad assets, I'll let you read it for yourself. I don't know if it will work or not or if there really is any way out of this particular conundrum.
So, Val Plame/Wilson was a CIA spy …
A double agent for the US and for the DNC.
Reducing CIA human intelligence activities is advisable. It is estimated that nearly all valuable information comes from some form of eavesdropping.
Joseph Weisberg suggest smaller “cells” of 10 people ( like a terrorist cell ), that target specific problems. This is a reasonable plan, as an example, smaller groups of computer programmers produce better code than the Microsoft legions of coders continuously pumping out code.
But Weisberg’s solution might not work in the intelligence community because of the inherent propriety of the team’s data. They might not share it.
Do away with the CIA so we can at least stop some of the leakage of intelligence data. It has become a bureaucracy, and adding to it would be futile.
Weeeellll,
I hate to say it, but it’s a little more nuanced than that. You got your paid Joes, your ideological Joes and your freelancers. Paid and freelance are, naturally, viewed with great suspicion. Ideological turns are somewhat more trusted, especially if the product has proven reliable in the past and they have good relationships with their handler. While the possibility of the poison pill is ever present and confirmation (or supporting evidence) from at least one other source is necessary, the info is beneficial in mapping out potential strategies but must be marked “unconfirmed” until confirmation comes in.
It was so much easier when it was us v. filthy Russkies. Far more ideological turns.