Dianne Fienstein is still a twit

[pecunium]

But she reiterated her concerns that Mr. Panetta wouldn't come to the job with significant intelligence experience. While acknowledging the CIA Director's job requires an operational skill set, "it's also a clandestine and covert service agency for the country. And as such, I think on the ground experience as a station agent in various parts of the world is vital."

How to sum up.... ah!

Bullshit.

This is an area in which I have some experience. One in which, actually, I have more real world experience than she does. Being a station agent is nice. It teaches one some things. It teaches one how to run sources, control a network, collate information.

It doesn't teach one what things are needful for the big picture. It doesn't make one less likely to be played by the insiders in the community. It tends to make one, actually, easier to persuade that certain types of operations are not only useful, but needful.

It tends to make one less concerned with the potential for blowback. Agents on the ground live in a world of short term concerns. The one they care about most is keeping their sources from getging burned.

I want a CIA director (and whatever it is they are calling the new guy... the Überchief who's suppose to be managing all the intel agencies) to be someone who is used to seeing the big picture. I want that someone to know how beauracracies work. And I wan't him to be someone committed to

1: Honest product. The touchstone of a good intel collector is the truthfulness of the analysis. If the answers are contrary to expectations, she reports them. If they are consonant, swell, but the thing which matters is that what is reported is the truth as best it is known.

2: Scrupulously independant. If the President says, "give me something I can use to make "x" happen," and the information isn't there. The CIA director has to be able to stand up and say, "no sir, can't do it."

3: Inscrutably honest, and concerned with reputation. If he tells the president the data don't support the desired policy, and the president tells him to cook the books, he has to be willing to resign, there and then. If it were me, I'd have a letter of resignation under lock and key in a safe at my house... lacking all but the date and signature.

The head of the CIA doesn't need to be a spook. Decades of spooks running the place is how it came to be what it is now.

That's worked out so well.

Comments

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

There is only a slight parallel from a station agent/source manager to a police informant manager.

The latter are just trying to see to it the informant is, and remains, both credible and alive.

The former is often involved in secondary issues having to do with building netorks, running counter-spy operation and actual covert operations in a foreign country. They usually have more than one identity, are often operating somewhat undercover (or if known to be an agent, such openly on station in an embassy/consulate; have to take care to be managing cutouts to the actual sources or engaging in all sorts of, justifiably, paranoid behaviors.

I really don't want the head of PD's intel sections to be doing that. Because no small part of those sorts of operations are active disimulation/disinformation campaigns against the agencies playing in the sandbox the field agent is working in.

Which is why the things Feinstein is saying are such rubbish. It's the myth of "intel agent = James Bond" and it's bad for policy.

[zeeth_kyrah]

Exactly. Intel agents give Mr. Bond the details he needs to take action; he is an assassin and protector of witnesses, not a serious investigator.