The Discreet Charms of CIA Morale
Opponents of accountability for intelligence excesses, such as former officials and media commentators, speaking out against Attorney General Eric Holder’s recently announced inquiry into CIA’s torture and detention program, complain that scrutiny hurts CIA morale. Such a stance betrays a simplistic, overgeneralized, and idealized view of CIA culture, and the most recent appearance of the CIA morale canard is political cherry-picking: before Holder announced his preliminary probe, even before Obama promised an end to torture and detention, morale at CIA was sagging.
For anyone who’s ever worked at CIA, or even paid attention to the news about CIA, that morale problem thing has been around a long, long time, which kind of takes the punch out of the claim that more investigation leads inexorably to less effective, lower quality intelligence and frowny-faced spies.
The latest sky-is-falling assessment of CIA morale appeared a few Sundays ago in the Washington Post, in an article that extensively quoted Buzzy Krongard, a bigwig at CIA sweetheart contractor Blackwater/Xe and former CIA executive director. Krongard was a curious source for the Post article, and reporters Walter Pincus and Joby Warrick irresponsibly chose not to disclose a couple of glaring facts about Krongard, such as his cronyistic association with Blackwater/Xe, and that he hardly can be characterized as a CIA insider.
Melvin Goodman, former senior CIA analyst, helpfully points out in the Public Record that Krongard’s short, detached tenure at CIA amounted to ‘stunt casting.’ Krongard was a banker who parachuted into CIA at the most senior level, where he became known as an aloof and detached executive director, rarely seen by actual CIA employees.
As executive director, his focus was on support activities like security and contract management, not on core CIA missions of intelligence collection and analysis. Indeed, if he can be credited with any one lasting achievement at CIA, it would be CIA’s outsourcing boom, a trend kicked off by Krongard’s privatization of intelligence support. Small wonder that Krongard ended up with a sinecure at leading CIA contractor Blackwater/Xe.
The out-of-touch Krongard and his Washington Post stenographers would have the world believe that morale at CIA was excellent until Holder announced his inquiry, or maybe until Obama announced that Leon Panetta would be the next CIA Director.
The Post doesn't mention that happy warriors don't really fit in at CIA, where long faces are a way of life.
When I reported for duty as lowly CIA intelligence analyst in the final months of the first Bush administration in 1992, retirement buyouts and a ‘share the pain’ approach to post-Cold War, post-Gulf War, peace dividend downsizing were crushing spirits in CIA hallways. My senior analyst mentors and managers mourned their glory days, when Bush and Reagan administration lapped up their intelligence papers and reports.
The rest of the nineties weren't much better. CIA Directors Jim Woolsey and John Deutch continued to do a number on CIA morale by allowing the agency to recede to the very margins of Clinton policy making, and letting Congress micromanage responses to various CIA screwups. Deutch's nod to CIA's then-widely acknowledged morale problem was his former DoD aide Nora Slatkin, who focused morale-fixing efforts on remodeling CIA’s cafeteria and gyms, but who is now remembered by veteran CIAers for her Diana Ross-like penchant for dressing down junior CIA employees and demanding VIP treatment while traveling overseas, even when visiting primitive, hush-hush locations in the deepest third world.
The well-liked George Tenet buoyed CIA morale for a time, but ended his tenure with CIA's spirit all but broken: 9/11 was viewed as an intelligence failure, as was CIA's misunderestimation of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction capabilities, and the advent of the Office of the Director on National Intelligence effectively demoted CIA from its former perch at the top of the US intelligence community. Tenet's successor, Porter Goss, implemented an aggressive agenda of alienating top CIA career officers and a politicized new order via the 'Gosslings,' haughty aides brought with him from his Congressional staff. Goss left CIA under a cloud as well, with his hand-picked executive director, Dusty Foggo snared by the FBI for contract fraud.
Michael Hayden succeeded Goss and fared somewhat better in cultivating better morale, but he faced some tough sledding, the result of nearly two decades of bad morale. One disturbing artifact of the bad morale legacy: CIA's current work force is probably its youngest and least experienced in its history.
One sure sign that morale problems continued through Hayden's tenure: sharply worded statements from CIA spokespeople denying that there's a morale problem
This recap of two decades of bad morale at CIA offers two insights into the current fretting over how awful for national security an inquiry into torture-related crimes would be.
First, CIA employees are a whiny, dramatic lot, prone to bemoaning their leaders and policymakers, and expecting to get a hearing for their grievances that the cultures at other Federal agencies could only dream of. Ever heard of widespread, decades-old morale problems over at the Centers for Disease Control or the Social Security Administration threatening to disrupt national life, or even getting major play in the New York Times or Washington Post?
Second, the much ballyhooed current morale crisis at CIA is actually a couple of different morale crises.
Sure, there are a few CIA officers and managers who participated in detainee mistreatment, and they are afraid of prosecution for what they believe were their authorized official actions.
Then there's the morale problem that senior CIA managers have inflicted on the agency. Many CIA officers -- including almost all that I know -- are disgusted and disappointed that their agency engaged in torture and extrajudicial detention in the first place. They are disgusted and disappointed that senior Agency officers didn't refuse or protest the orders to torture and imprison possibly innocent men. They are disgusted and disappointed at how senior agency managers and policy makers didn't do a better job of ensuring that CIA operations were backstopped by robust legal authorizations, while these same leaders bemoan investigations and shun responsibility and accountability for their decisions. And they are especially disgusted and disappointed that their fellow CIA employees who actually messed up renditions and detentions, such as the officer who presided over the altogether erroneous rendition and five month imprisonment of German national Khaled el-Masri, have actually been promoted, despite such naked incompetence.
CIA morale had already been damaged, long before Obama, Holder, or the current inquiry over torture and detention. It was damaged when CIA turned its back on ideals that it teaches in its own classrooms and new employee orientation sessions. And morale won't improve by hoping the torture and detention issue just goes away. It must be put cleanly and completely in CIA's past, and only a full accounting will keep tomorrow's agency from being plagued by more doubt -- and more bad morale.
Follow Frank Naif on Twitter: www.twitter.com/frank_naif
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So what you are saying, Mr. Naif, is that some people went to the CIA hoping to do good things, and that by coddling the torturers and murderers and promoting them over the people who follow the rules and the laws, we are not improving morale???
The question is, do we really want people who respect the rule of law and who want what is best for the United states in an organization like the CIA? Or should it be the playground of political appointees and sadists?
If the latter, I can understand why the President doesn't pay attention the the intel output of the CIA...
First, A central issue at the CIA is the conflation of intelligence and black operations.
Mixing the Dusty Foggo's with the Kent Sherman's is a fundamental mistake and a recipe for disaster. The analytical wing suffers from the actions taken by the black operations wing.
The two functions should be separate.
Second, as a nation we need to "get real" about black operations.
By their nature many of these will be conducted outside the law and in ways abhorrent to our imagined national values.
That means very simply, that if we choose to conduct these operations, we need to drop the pretended moral superiority.
We can if we want make a moral argument that the difference between "us" and "them" is one of degree rather than a fundamental difference of kind. We're not as bad as the (fill in the blank). Not we are good and (blank) is bad.
Good points.... we can't be both. Either we are an upstanding nation with a functioning sense of Justice or we are a bunch of thugs with goon squads. Bush tried to do both and the hypocrisy is as palpable as a brick...
Obama needs to shut down renditions and black prisons or stop pretending that we are the good guys who just were steered wrong by an aberrant President... Frankly, I think he, and Clinton and Bush should be hauled up on charges for authorizing these programs, as should those who suggested and enabled their implementation and lets not forget the guys on the ground who should have known better.
I think the GOP rank and file would rather we abandon our pretense of principles given their support of these egregious activities. As Peggy Noonan infamously said of CIA accountability "We should just keep walking... some things should remain mysterious"... Obviously Cheney and co didn't care about law or human rights or American principles, they chucked them at the first opportunity and did it while cynically praising those same values...
If you're referring to practices like torture, suggest you look at "Legacy of Ashes" and "A Question of Torture".
The project began right after the Second World War with extensive R&D funded by our tax dollars and various concrete applications by our own agents as well as an educational and outreach program. The latter like the old parable - give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish (or torture) and he eats (or tortures) for the rest of his life.
Based on the "morale logic", we shouldn't arrest crooked police because it would hurt the morale of the rest of the force.
"And morale won't improve by hoping the torture and detention issue just goes away. It must be put cleanly and completely in CIA's past, and only a full accounting will keep tomorrow's agency from being plagued by more doubt -- and more bad morale."
I completely agree. Nobody is above the law and until we actually live that way, be prepared for more bad morale and it will continue to include a lot more folks than just CIA...
After engaging in kidnapping, torture and murder as well as participating in the most nefarious and least defensible acts of GWB and co there should be a full accounting. Destroyed interrogation tapes, etc... It all shows how bad this has become.
Further, the entire Rendition program, beginning to end should be publicly reviewed and ended. Clinton, Bush, and Obama all need to face a full legal accounting for keeping those programs functioning and the officers who administrated them need to face hard time, as does the Presidents and their OLC and others who made this possible...
A full housecleaning, complete with public trials and prison time and a complete mission reset.... the best thing, IMO.
Morale is low? What are they, pouty 10 yr. olds. Take them to the Zoo and buy them a snow cone and things will be fine? They have jobs to do like all of us lucky enough to have a job. If the gravity of their missions is dictated by how they feel about the way they're perceived, their missions are compromised. C'mon, they have to be the most grown up of grown ups. As far as torture investigations, I think only those who pushed or participated in torture would lose morale while those who opposed it would be elated.
"I think only those who pushed or participated in torture would lose morale while those who opposed it would be elated"
Well, yes, if investigations actually occur.
But until they occur, every CIA employee is tarred with the taint of the guilty.
Imagine if you worked for a company where a high level manager encouraged his employees to rape a woman at a conference, and the rape was reported to the local news along with the company name, but there was no investigation so no one knew which employees were involved. Would your wife believe you that you were not involved? Would your friends? Probably.
Would you get a job at another company? Would people end conversations with you when they figured out what company you worked for, probably.
Would that affect your morale?
Thank you for the analysis, Mr. Naif.
Sounds like the greatest risk to CIA morale is simply living with the reputation that they have now. Without some credible investigation, and some tangible changes, the public is going to have a hard believing that those bad ole days are behind us.
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