Central Intelligence Agency (cia)

The CIA is a foreign intelligence collection service tasked with collecting human intelligence (HUMINT), providing all-source intelligence analysis and reporting, and conducting covert action when required to do so by the President.

The CIA has its roots in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which the United States established during World War II as a paramilitary and intelligence collection orga- nization. After World War II, President Harry Truman disbanded the OSS, and the CIA was established in law by the National Security Act of 1947.

As with every agency in government, the President’s election sets a new agenda for the country. Public servants must be mindful that they are required to help the President implement that agenda while remaining apolitical, upholding the Constitution and laws of the United States, and earning the public trust. The Pres- ident requires a CIA that provides unbiased and apolitical foreign intelligence information and, when necessary, can act capably and effectively on any covert action findings.

Executing the Mission. The CIA’s success depends on firm direction from the President and solid internal CIA Director–appointed leadership. Decisive senior leaders must commit to carrying out the President’s agenda and be willing to take calculated risks. Therefore:

The next President-Elect and incoming Presidential Personnel Office should identify a Director nominee who can foster a mission-driven culture by making necessary personnel and structural changes. The President-Elect should choose a Deputy Director who, without needing Senate confirmation, can immediately begin to implement the President’s agenda. This includes halting all current hiring to prevent the “burrowing in” of outgoing political personnel. Additional appointees should be placed within the agency as needed to assist the Director in supervising its functioning.

The Director and Deputy Director should request briefings on all CIA activities and presence overseas, as well as any CIA-controlled access programs and existing covert action findings, without exception. The Director and Deputy Director should meet with all directorates and mission centers, prioritizing those that are aligned most closely with the President’s priorities and calibrating collection and operations based on the President’s intelligence requirements. This includes any areas where the CIA might be conducting its own diplomacy parallel to official State Department policy. It must be clear that the CIA’s liaison relationships overseas must follow and not contradict those set at the policy level by the President through the State Department.

The other principal offices responsible for executing the CIA’s mission include the Directorate of Operations, Directorate of Analysis, Directorate of Science and Technology, Directorate of Support, and Directorate of Digital Innovation. If senior leadership finds any program or operation to be inconsistent with the President’s agenda, the Director should immediately halt that program or operation. Reining in Bureaucracy. The CIA’s bureaucracy continues to grow. Because mid-level managers lack accountability, there are areas in which personnel are not responsive to any authority, including the President. The President should instruct the Director to hire or promote new individuals to lead the various directorates and mission centers. This new crop of mid-level leaders should carry out clear directives from senior CIA leadership, which means more accountability and new ways of thinking to benefit the mission.

In addition, the President should task the Director with significantly broadening recruitment, expediting onboarding practices, and shifting resources away from headquarters, including terminal generalist GS-15s when OPM buyouts, forced rotations, or up-and-out personnel policies are set for particular positions. The CIA must find creative ways to align mission requirements with hiring needs, recruit diverse sets of individuals with unique backgrounds, and become more open to hiring private-sector experts directly into senior positions. In addition, the Director should break the cabal of bureaucrats in D.C. by permanently moving various directorates, such as Support and Science and Technology, out of Virginia and possibly open campuses outside of D.C. where analysts and other experts could contribute virtually.

Redirecting Resources. Certain CIA employees and offices have focused on promoting divisive ideological or cultural agendas and fostering a damaging cul- ture of risk aversion and complacency. As soon as possible, the Director should divert resources from any activities that promote unnecessary and distracting social engineering. The Director should implement changes in promotion criteria that reward individuals for creative thinking and quality of recruitments and prod- ucts rather than numeric metrics or the achievement of benchmarks that are not essential to the mission.

Not all careers in espionage are created equal, and the Director should incentiv- ize and reward applicants who are willing to accept high risks over those who are climbing the ranks simply by doing business as usual. The Director should refocus the CIA to an OSS-like culture and mandate that all CIA employees acquire, as a condition of securing senior (GS-14+) rank, additional or enhanced language skills, technical or cyber expertise, or field training or serve in overseas assignments.

COVERT ACTION

Covert action can be a valuable tool in helping further the President’s foreign policy agenda if implemented in concert with other forms of government power. As codified in the U.S. Code, “the term ‘covert action’ means an activity or activities of the United States Government to influence political, economic, or military con- ditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly….”16

The President initiates a covert action with a written finding that explains why “such an action is necessary to support identifiable foreign policy objectives of the United States and is important to the national security of the United States.”17 The statute assumes the President will use the CIA as the principal action element to achieve the objectives of covert action findings; however, the President need not feel constrained to utilize only the CIA: “[E]ach finding shall specify each depart- ment, agency, or entity of the United States Government authorized to fund or otherwise participate in any significant way in such action.”18

For example, the Department of Defense maintains certain clandestine capa- bilities under Title 10 authorities that may resemble but far exceed in scale similar capabilities outside of DOD. Generally, such DOD capabilities can be employed outside a combat theater only if they are determined to be traditional military activities. In practical terms, this means that many DOD capabilities, including those in the space and cyber domains, can be employed only after the initiation of armed conflict.19 Given the range of global threats the United States faces today, the President should consider whether DOD’s complete set of capabilities should be used to support potential covert actions.

The problem, unfortunately, is that certain elements in the State Department, IC, and DOD trade on risk aversion or political bureaucracy to delay execution of the President’s foreign policy goals. A future conservative President should therefore identify individuals on the transition team who are familiar with the implementation of covert action with a view to placing them in key NSC, CIA, ODNI, and DOD positions. These knowledgeable teams can assist in any review of current covert actions and, potentially, planning for new actions.

Immediately after the inauguration, the President should task the NSC’s Senior Director for Intelligence Programs with conducting a 60-day review of any current covert action findings, including their effectiveness; evaluating new covert actions that might be needed to implement the President’s foreign policy goals; and report- ing back to the President. Such an assessment should be conducted independently of the agencies responsible for the actions under review. As part of the review, the Senior Director for Intelligence Programs should identify which departments or agencies, such as the CIA or DOD, are best equipped to achieve the objectives set out in new and existing findings.

After the 60-day review, the President should demand creative thinking and a clear strategy as to how covert action fits within the President’s broader foreign policy strategy, to include possibly modifying or rescinding any current findings, drafting new findings, and streamlining or eliminating needless bureaucracy, par- ticularly at State, to facilitate more expeditious decisions on tactical covert action. Careful thought should be given to the metrics by which the effectiveness of covert action programs will be measured to ensure the appropriate use of government resources and to guard against the possibility of covert action’s being used with little scrutiny in ways that are inconsistent with overt foreign policy goals.

ODNI AND CIA ORGANIZATIONAL RECOMMENDATIONS

The ODNI and CIA operate under authority provided by the Central Intelli- gence Agency Act of 1949,20 which means they have greater latitude than the rest of the federal government with respect to the hiring and firing of personnel. Both organizations and other areas of the IC have struggled from a human resources and talent management standpoint to recruit, onboard, and maintain personnel in a timely fashion to fill the IC’s ever-changing needs. At a time when the Intelli- gence Community needs significantly more personnel with the proper technical, language-capable, and diverse backgrounds, including applicants from elements of the business community, the incoming Directors of both agencies need to make this effort a top priority.

Past DNIs’ Chiefs of Staff and additional front-office staff historically have come from outside the IC, commonly under a misconstrued “staff-reserve” structure that is intended to avoid a Schedule C designation within the IC. The Director should handpick qualified, properly cleared personnel for front-office and mana- gerial leadership positions, such as the DNI’s Chief of Staff and heads of Legislative Affairs and Strategic Communications, to oversee those divisions with career IC staff reporting to them.

The incoming DNI and CIA Director should also consider changes in the Senior National Intelligence Service (SNIS)/Senior Intelligence Services (SIS). Senior officers should be required to sign mobility agreements that allow ODNI and CIA leadership to move them within the IC every two years if necessary. Many qualified and distinguished senior officers serve throughout the IC, but some long-serving generalist officers no longer perform at a high capacity, are management-driven, do not serve the IC’s changing needs, and limit junior officers’ prospects for growth and advancement. An incoming Administration should consider studying and implementing additional requirements as a condition for promotion to GS-15/ SNIS/SIS and explore concepts such as “Up and Out” beginning at the GS-14/15 levels and above for some fields.

The IC should evaluate areas of bloat and underperforming cadre and work with OPM on authority for voluntary separation buyouts. Allowing ODNI and CIA leadership to shrink size and reduce duplication of effort while promoting healthy turnover within their senior ranks would encourage new ideas and perspectives from mid-career officers and, potentially, from employees hired from outside their agencies. The ODNI and CIA should maximize their direct-hire and incen- tive-building authorities to bring in talented and properly cleared individuals to serve in positions requiring technical, language, and cyber expertise.

Finally, the human resources and talent management systems for onboarding purposes at the ODNI, CIA, and some other elements of the IC are fundamentally broken. For example, according to current CIA Director William Burns, it recently took more than 600 days, on average, for a CIA applicant to receive his or her necessary security clearance.21 Although security clearance procedures have been somewhat improved in recent years and Burns has committed CIA to reducing that to no more than 180 days, degradation in other areas of the process has limited the IC’s capacity to attract qualified and needed expertise.

PREVENTING THE ABUSE OF INTELLIGENCE FOR PARTISAN PURPOSES

The intelligence function must be protected from bottom-up and top-down politicization if it is to play its proper role in our national security decision-mak- ing process. Unfortunately, both types of politicization have occurred recently to the detriment of the Intelligence Community’s reputation and credibility. More important, the politicization of intelligence risks contributing to policy fail- ures (as we saw with the Iraq War) or even undermining our democratic system here at home.

In particular, the IC must restore confidence in its political neutrality to rectify the damage done by the actions of former IC leaders and personnel regarding the claims of Trump–Russia collusion following the 2016 election and the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop investigation and media revelations of its existence during the 2020 election. But the problem is not confined to the executive branch struggle between the IC and policymakers; it also relates to the IC’s relationship with Congress as evinced by DNI James Clapper’s failure to answer honestly in response to congressional questions about government surveillance programs.

The ODNI and CIA are undergoing a crisis of confidence based on several factors. First, President Barack Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan, gravely damaged the CIA by minimizing the Directorate of Operations and exploiting intelligence analy- sis as a political weapon after he left office. Brennan’s role in the letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials before the 2020 election is unclear, but in dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop as “Russian disinformation,” the CIA was discredited, and the shocking extent of politicization among some former IC officials was revealed.

Restoring respect for the IC as an independent provider of information and analysis while also ensuring that it is responsive to the legitimate needs of poli- cymakers will require reinforcing essential norms and institutions. However, we should also recognize that achieving the perfect balance that avoids the pathologies of too much distance or too much closeness and responsiveness to policymakers is not only difficult, but probably impossible.22 Thus, given the very nature of the business and the political process, much will depend on the promotion of certain norms or virtues on both sides of the principal–agent relationship. Specifically:

The President should direct the DNI and the Attorney General, by direction of the respective Inspectors General and IC Analytic Ombudsman, to conduct a further audit of all IC equities of past politicization and abuses of intelligence information. For example, a recent IC ombudsman analysis during the 2020 election cycle noted, “If our political leaders in the White House and Congress believe we are withholding intelligence because of organizational turf wars or political considerations, the legitimacy of the Intelligence Community’s work is lost.”23

The President should immediately revoke the security clearances of any former Directors, Deputy Directors, or other senior intelligence officials who discuss their work in the press or on social media without prior clearance from the current Director. IC agencies, including the CIA, should minimize their public presence and vigorously investigate any and all leaks

The DNI and CIA Director should use their authority under the National Security Act of 1947 to expedite the clearance of personnel to meet mission needs and remove IC employees who have abused their positions of trust. An area of particular concern is that personnel under investigation for improprieties have been allowed to retire before internal investigations have been completed. Directors of both agencies must instill further confidence in their workforces, Congress, and the American people that they can and will deal effectively with personnel that fail to live up to their oath to the Constitution, adhere to ethical and moral standards as expected by America’s taxpayers, and faithfully execute the law.

of information, classified or otherwise. The ODNI and CIA should fire or refer for prosecution any employee who is suspected of leaking information, and penalties should include the removal of pension benefits for those who are found guilty. Additional tools are needed to prevent leaked intelligence from being used as a weapon in policy debates by IC leaders or decision- makers in the executive branch or Congress.

Military and civilian IC training should include stronger emphasis on the norm of political neutrality, including a mandatory course on professionalism and repercussions for abuse in the execution of duties in all degree programs at the National Intelligence University.

In addition, the Department of Justice should use all of the tools at its disposal to investigate leaks and should rescind damaging guidance by Attorney General Merrick Garland that limits investigators’ ability to identify records of unauthorized disclosures of classified information to the media. Personnel have sufficient access to legitimate whistleblower claims under protections provided by Inspectors General and Congress. The Director and IC must prioritize hiring additional counterintelligence and security personnel to assist in this effort.

Intelligence leaders need to model norms of neutrality and respect for the decision-making authority of the President, appointed officials, and Congress. This includes building trust with key decision-makers by not using their positions and privileged access to information to influence policymaking indirectly or directly in an inappropriate fashion (especially by engaging in threat inflation). IC leaders should practice extreme restraint in engaging with the public and the media. They should seek to work in the shadows rather than in the limelight. Potential restrictions on such appearances could supplement this norm, preventing political leaders from using IC officials to support an Administration position as they do with military leaders. Retired IC leaders should similarly support the neutrality norm by not becoming public figures.

Congress should not use IC leaders as pawns in policy struggles with the President or the other party during their appearances before committees of the House and Senate. While Congress has a proper oversight role, it should distinguish between information that needs to be public and information that should be discussed in private with members of the IC. A DNI should call “balls and strikes” to those on both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill who attempt to weaponize the use of selective intelligence to feed political narratives.

Political leaders should avoid “manipulation-by-appointment,” a practice by which intelligence leaders are selected for their policy views or political loyalties instead of their skilled expertise.24 Presidents should also avoid public rebukes and pressure from the intelligence profession, which can include intimidation and bullying, to shape IC analysis. This will be easier if IC leaders live by the norms of neutrality and thus are not seen as political actors, for whom political responses are deemed necessary.

Intelligence leaders and professionals should never “cook the books” for Presidents or change or shape their analysis to preserve access or status.25