SOUTH POMFRET, VT. — By now, almost everyone knows that the CIA is a mess. Almost everyone knows that what it needs is a top-to-bottom overhaul. Almost everyone is wrong.
What the CIA and the competing baronies that make up the rest of the intelligence community actually need is quite simple: They need to turn on the lights. And take a few names. Strange as it may sound, what's killing our secret intelligence services is secrecy. That and a lack of personal accountability. Even the most dedicated people can't do good work when they're sitting in the dark. And though we don't always like it, most of us work better if we get some outside input -- and if we know we'll be held accountable for our results.
Without question, the intelligence community needs fixing. It has produced fumbles so catastrophic that they might have been laughable if they hadn't cost so many lives. Just on the issue of Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction -- a major justification for the ill-starred U.S. invasion of Iraq -- the Senate Intelligence Committee last week issued a 511-page chronicle of such wrongheaded, slipshod, unprofessional work that the CIA has forfeited any claim to authority or competence. And the agency's defense of itself just compounded the embarrassment: It didn't get everything wrong, acting Director John McLaughlin said. And where it was wrong, he added, so was almost everybody else.
Unfortunately, the debate over reforming the CIA seems to be going off track. This being a presidential election year, Democrats and Republicans are of course blaming each other. The Bush administration pressured the intelligence community into providing a National Intelligence Estimate that validated its personal and ideological preconceptions, say the liberals. On the contrary, say the conservatives, the intelligence community is simply hogtied by outmoded rules and restrictions imposed by previous Democratic administrations. In the meantime, the policy professionals have plunged into a welter of complex proposals for restructuring the whole intelligence apparatus. Nothing makes Washington's policy wonks more comfortable than rearranging an organization chart.
