The CIA Is D飬ass逸ͳw
CIA officials used to have
all sorts of irritating habits. If offered a perfectly good
Châteauneuf-du-Pape at a Georgetown dinner party, they would praise
it--by stressing their dissent from the "universal opinion" that unblended reds
are better. If told of an especially good trattoria in Rome, they might
express much gratitude for the information--and deplore their own laziness in
always going to the same old Sabatini they had first encountered while
vacationing in Italy with their parents. Even more irritating was the
propensity of first-generation CIA officials for interjecting into any remotely
relevant conversation memories of Groton, Yale, or skiing holidays in St.
Moritz.
There is
none of that sort of thing anymore. Today's CIA people are not wine snobs--in
fact, many of them prefer beer, while others refrain from even coffee, as
befits good Mormons. Nor are they partial to foreign foods in funky
trattorias --cheeseburgers are more their style. Instead of being Ivy
League showoffs, they are quietly proud of their state colleges, however
obscure these might be.
Unfortunately, much good has also been lost along the way,
including that easy familiarity that comes from an early acquaintance with
foreign ways. It is one thing to read up on, say, current French policy for the
airliner industry, and to start from scratch. It is quite another if the new
information is layered over personal experiences with things French going back
to teen-age visits, junior-year-abroad touring, or even years of residence with
expatriate parents.
This
deficiency might be what Tony Lake had in mind when, in the course of his
abortive confirmation hearings, he remarked that the CIA's "pool of talent,
particularly in languages and cultural knowledge, is getting very thin." The
Clinton administration had little difficulty in replacing Lake as its candidate
to head the CIA. The CIA is much less likely to overcome its personnel problem,
which affects its quality as an intelligence organization far more than the
choice of the next director ever could.
When it comes to the operational side of the
CIA's work--mostly the recruitment of agents in place--it is certainly more
difficult to strike just the right tone with a foreign diplomat or functionary
without a broader background than can be gained in Salt Lake City or Dayton. Of
course, most of the people whom CIA officials must strive to understand--or
recruit--are not suave Europeans but rather Middle Eastern thugs, Russian
weapons traffickers, Chinese bureaucrats, Latin American officers, and the
like. But even with these folks, the challenge is to interpret and manipulate
motivations, urges, obsessions, and priorities that drastically diverge from
those prevalent among the middle classes of middle America, the source of most
CIA recruits today.
To be
sure, there is plenty of talent all over the United States and in every level
of society. Yet, a narrow provincialism seems to be the hallmark of younger CIA
officials. One reason is simply that applicants are much more likely to be
approved by the CIA's security investigators if they have lived in one place
all their lives, with no prior foreign travel or foreign contacts (each of
which must be reported in detail, no matter how routine the travel or how
casual the contact). Moreover, there seems to be a distinct preference for
applicants who resemble the security investigators themselves--exceptionally
sober people who have never danced in a London disco, never had a Japanese
girlfriend or a Brazilian boyfriend, and never tried smoking pot while in
college.
In other words, the CIA is now screening out exactly the
sort of people it used to actively recruit: venturesome young Americans with as
much foreign experience as possible.
Because
espionage is such a small part of the business of intelligence--as compared
with the purely intellectual work of analysis--none of the above would matter
very much if the CIA could still attract the smartest graduates from the best
universities. But those days are long past. The Ivy League graduates who used
to fill its ranks now mostly want to become investment bankers: It is there
that the adventure lies--as well as the money, of course. Nothing can be done
about that. But the CIA could do much better if it pursued diversity in its
recruiting, not the by-the-numbers diversity of so many women or Hispanics or
African-Americans but, rather, a diversity of experience.
Plenty of young Americans have lived abroad
from childhood with their corporate-executive parents, and many others have
done so as post-college volunteers for Third World relief and developmental
outfits. Many thousands of young Americans currently live in Moscow, Prague,
and other Eastern European capitals, enjoying the excitements of their
post-Communist transition, excitements that include the abundance of attractive
sexual partners eager to connect with Westerners. At present, most such
applicants are rejected if they seek to join the CIA, as are nontypical
applicants in general--security investigators find that their background is
just too complicated.
One
reject was asked earnestly why on earth he had gone to live in Prague after
graduation, surviving on odd jobs instead of starting a career back home. When
he jokingly responded with "girls," the investigators did not conceal their
shocked disapproval. When he dropped the ill-received jocularity to say that he
had wanted, having grown up in the Midwest, to live awhile in one of the
world's most beautiful cities, they were openly disbelieving--they had never
been to Prague of course, and apparently, they did not know of its
architectural splendors, either.
Amore egregious case is that of an adventurous and quite
brilliant young woman. She had worked for a refugee-relief project in the most
lawless region of South Asia before finding her way into an even more dangerous
part of the world--one of great importance for U.S. foreign policy. She became
so interested in the area's ongoing struggle and the local culture that she
decided to study it systematically, exiting from her marriage to return there.
She made a great number of friends, from village women to guerrilla leaders,
multiplying the number of "foreign contacts" she faithfully reported on the
security form required of all CIA applicants. That in the process she had
learned what makes the locals tick--as well as a language known to few, if any,
CIA officials--was of no account: Her chances of being hired would have been
much better if she had remained celibate in Salt Lake City.
The nondrinking, nonsmoking,
noncarousing, and mostly monolingual CIA officials of today do not have the
vices of either their more adventurous contemporaries or their flamboyant Ivy
League predecessors, but it is really unfair to expect them to cope with all
those foreigners out there.
