Herbert E. Meyer, who served as special assistant to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency and as vice chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council during the Reagan administration, considers why the CIA is having trouble with its intelligence work. Meyer's short answer: the agency no longer attracts the best minds.
The problem with the CIA lies within its structure and culture. It doesn’t match the task, because the analytic side of intelligence is unlike any other function of government. It is unlike budget-making, diplomacy, or the setting of policy for trade or agriculture. Intelligence is like science, which means that success depends utterly on having the most brilliant people studying a problem. Only they will know how to go about finding the right answer – and how to communicate it clearly and early enough to make a difference.Posted by Alan at October 20, 2003 12:18 PMAs geniuses like Albert Einstein and Jonas Salk remind us, in science there is no substitute for sheer intellectual firepower – in other words, for brains. This is why scientific research institutes hire the smartest people they can find, and why they place scientists at the top who are even more brilliant to manage the team and, when necessary, to decide which of their proposed experiments to back and which to stop. That’s why so many leading research institutes are headed by Nobel laureates. And it’s why the big breakthroughs in science come from research institutes rather than government-operated labs.
The most striking feature of the CIA’s analytic culture was its blandness. The secrets were fascinating, of course, but intellectually it was a boring place to work. Most of the analysts simply weren’t as well read as they should have been. For instance, they seemed not to have read much more in history than most college graduates. That may be acceptable for people elsewhere in the government, but not for people on whom the president relies to know what is really going on in the world and to predict the future soon enough so that he can change that future before it happens. They read the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time or Newsweek, perhaps U.S. News & World Report, and occasionally the Economist. I rarely met anyone who read Commentary, National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, or any other cutting-edge publication where the world’s leading thinkers expound their ideas and perceptions about the world. The CIA’s analysts thought that the secret information to which they alone had access made all of that “open-source” insight unimportant.
via Hillsdale College's Imprimis