TO: Porter Goss, U.S. Director of Central Intelligence

FROM: Robert Baer

RE: Getting the CIA Back in the Game

It’s been a rough three years, Mr. Director. The agency missed the boat on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD), it miscalculated the armed resistance inside the country, and some say it bears primary responsibility for leading the United States into an unnecessary and costly war. Much of the criticism is overblown, and much overlooks the equally grave failures of other sectors of the government. Still, the CIA is clearly broken, and you have a chance to fix it.

Avoid two traps at the outset: Don’t waste your time thinking that the recent, and much ballyhooed, intelligence reform bill is going to put things right. As you must know already, a top-level reshuffling of the intelligence community won’t do anything to improve the CIA’s performance. And don’t spend too much time fighting battles over your new management team. Most of them will have moved to other jobs before they learn the nuts and bolts of intelligence gathering.

Reform is needed across the board, but the Directorate of Operations (DO) should be your first target. Its mission—recruiting and running foreign spies—should be the agency’s core function. Give the DO the tools it needs, and intelligence analysis will take care of itself. Not to be too blunt about it, but if the DO had a source close to Osama bin Laden, 9/11 would not have happened. Here are my suggestions:

Reform the Promotion System: The old DO rule was that the only way an officer could be promoted was by recruiting sources, and the higher up, the better. Bring a Soviet official into the fold, and you could count on ...