The Perception

I spent a long career at the CIA but I rarely write about it. The myth is too pervasive and exciting, so that anything I said on the subject would sound like mere prose. In Latin America – during my time at least — not a sparrow fell, but the CIA was responsible for its cruel untimely death. Here in the United States, many people think of the Agency as a shadowy prime mover, hiding behind the façade of our democratic government and “terminating with extreme prejudice” anyone who gets in the way. No doubt the grandees on the seventh floor at Langley wield the image to their advantage, but these fantasies are entirely self-induced. There’s something about turning secrets into a multi-billion-dollar business that makes people crazy.

In everyday life, keeping secrets is associated with a guilty conscience. Something bad has been done that must be concealed. People who cheat on their spouses go to great lengths to conceal their actions, for example. By extension, a secret organization like the CIA takes on an almost orgiastic aspect, staffed by tens of thousands of spouse-cheaters enjoying a lavish lifestyle while literally getting away with murder. At that point, a predictable moral inversion occurs. Cheating and lying under an official seal of approval becomes, to the public mind, irresistibly alluring. One may condemn what seems like the institutional immorality of the CIA, but one can’t help but look. One can’t help but dream, either. It’s espionage porn.

Enter James Bond. And Jason Bourne. And George Smiley. I should say, enter Hollywood, which long ago discovered that the myth of the spy, with all its moral unsavoriness, could be commodified for big bucks. According to the AI platform Claude, Hollywood has produced approximately 1,500 movies about spies and their dark secrets, including 27 from the inexhaustible Bond franchise (which is about 20 too many), 5 centered on Bourne and his kind, 9 directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and 10 — some of the best – based on the novels of John Le Carré. Only the Western and the detective story genres surpass the spy flick in sheer volume, yet the spy film, let me suggest, stands apart, because it tramples on the sacred formulas of American cinema. From Stagecoach (1939) all the way to Unforgiven (1992), Westerns delivered heroic cowboys and outlaws who stood and fought for their honor. Movie detectives like Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Jake Gittes in Chinatown (1974) skirted the law and ticked off the cops, in a quest to satisfy a personal moral code. 

But Bond was just a cad. He slept around, drank too much, and told little jokes when he killed an opponent. He didn’t appear to care about the British Empire, winning the Cold War, or anything much. That was what we loved about the guy. He moved through a secret dimension in which the moral polarities had flipped, and his immense cool left him immune to commitment.

The public has received a profound and detailed knowledge of the spy business from Hollywood. It’s useless to argue. Every denial just proves the point. Working for the CIA, everyone knows, must entail an amazing amount of superficial razzle-dazzle: driving an Aston Martin with rotator machine guns in the headlights, making love to beautiful women in exotic locales, fighting off evil masterminds on top of Mt. Rushmore or the Statue of Liberty, having your body chemically altered so you can become…well, Matt Damon. And if that job description sounds blatantly insane, the tendency is to believe that some downscaled version of it is real — maybe it’s a RAV4 instead of an Aston Martin, and those machine guns don’t really rotate.

The film-makers’ true obsession, however, is with the inner rot of the spying life — the constant betrayals, the cheating and lying, the death of trust. Probably, it reminds them of working in Hollywood, only with a noble motive, patriotism, and an actual license to kill. A spy is trained to betray, but what’s the stopping-point? In The Good Shepherd (2006), the protagonist betrays his mentor not once but twice, supposedly for the greater good: the latter “knew too much.” But what does that mean — and who decides? 

A person who lies to family and friends no less than to hostile operatives, who often conducts business under an assumed name and fake identity, must suffer the dueling temptations either to climb out of the lies for a gulp of fresh air or to drown in an ocean of self-deception. All this is a golden gift to the scriptwriter, who can attain what in the film world passes for moral complexity without having to create believable characters.

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The alert reader will have figured out by now that I’m not a fan of the spy genre, but there are exceptions. A personal favorite is Three Days of the Condor (1975), in part because it has a true hero, played by Robert Redford, who survives by his wits rather than his lethal toys, but also because Redford is shown working in a fictionalized version of my old CIA unit. He isn’t a spy, any more than I was. He reads books, looking for unusual patterns. We monitored the world’s news media, looking for interesting developments. 

Three Days of the Condor delivers the full package — mind-boggling conspiracies, endless betrayals, heaps of dead bodies, and a 24-hour love affair. None of those things happened to me. I just drove to work in the morning and drove back to my family in the evening; if there was a crisis, I worked overtime. The distance between Redford, with his chiseled features and magnificent hair, and the rest of us schmucks who worked in my outfit, can stand as the ultimate symbol of the difference between Hollywood’s red-carpet ideal of espionage and the suburbanites who in fact toil at the Agency.

Condor begins with a massacre and ends with an assassination. In between, lots of people die, casually and wantonly. That never happened to me either. I never killed anyone and here I am, mostly alive in my decrepitude. And think about it: even the mafia doesn’t kill unless it has to. It’s bad for business. If your profession is to lead a secret life, leaving a trail of corpses is a sure way to get pushed out of the closet. The carnage, however, is cinematically necessary to display the moral stain that sticks to working for the CIA. 

The most sympathetic character in Condor, other than Redford’s, is the assassin, Joubert, played with sinister aplomb by Max von Sydow. Joubert is a dispassionate professional, willing to kill for whatever side pays best, amused by the observation that, in this game of lies, the players must lie first of all to themselves and believe in a noble cause. “There is no cause,” he tells Redford. That’s the pervasive mood of the movie. There is no cause. The enemy is us. Inscrutable kingpins manipulate the public like puppets. With notable exceptions like Argo (2012), that, too, has been the theme pushed by spy films in recent decades. Plots demonstrate that idealism is childish if not dangerous. Serving Uncle Sam is dirty business.

Was I lying to myself when I worked at the Agency? By definition, I can’t tell. But I was naïve enough to believe in the cause of freedom. And when I think of an institution that sells itself for money, promotes delusion and pretense, and is wholly lacking in principles and morals, the CIA isn’t the first name that comes to mind. The glamorous but amoral movie spy never existed in history. The whole genre is a mirror to its makers — it’s Hollywood, projecting.

The Reality

I am often asked how the CIA managed to “recruit” me. The question evokes whispers in foggy street-corners with faceless strangers wearing trench coats. In reality, I answered an ad in the newspaper. I took a few tests, endured a long and rigorous vetting process, including the damn polygraph, then I was in.

So I come to you from the inside bearing startling news: the CIA isn’t really about spying. It isn’t about covert action or terminating anybody. The mission is to get the best information in front of the right official — usually the president — in time to make the smartest decisions on behalf of the United States. 

Now, I say “information” but insiders prefer “intelligence.” For example, the National Security Act of 1947, the Big Bang to a large chunk of our government, assigns to the CIA the duty “to correlate and evaluate intelligence relating to national security.” Yet the distinction is meaningless. It sounds like a joke, and maybe it is, but nobody inside the Intelligence Community has ever come up with a satisfactory definition of “intelligence.” Ask an intelligence collector or an intelligence analyst what intelligence means, and you’ll get a shrug and some version of “Well, you know, it’s our stuff.”

When I signed on, the Agency was set up in three directorates: for operations, technology, and analysis. To confuse the enemy, the names have since bounced around, but the business areas never changed.

Operations housed the spies. A spy is a collector of a special kind of information — secrets. But it should be obvious that it’s the content of the information that matters; secrecy just means it’s harder to get. Unfortunately, this truism was often lost on CIA management. One of my directors, George Tenet, once told the troops, “Our business is stealing secrets.” Besides being bizarrely misguided — the Agency’s business is to understand the world — the statement told us Tenet had watched too many Bond flicks. (He also said that finding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction would be a “slam dunk.”) If secrecy is the standard of value, then all self-respecting intelligence officers will engage in an arms race of classification, until even the janitor will label the broom closet Top Secret. Since operations is the gravitational center of the CIA, and since spies deal in secrets, that is precisely what happened.

In my limited experience, most Ops people were courageous and highly skilled. A few were arrogant and ignorant of foreign cultures. All served a valuable purpose. Nations keep secrets other nations desperately wish to learn: the Chinese plan for the invasion of Taiwan, for example. In the struggle for survival, virtually all nations run spies to try to get at that. The derring-do of the movies can happen, but rarely. Some environments are tough to crack, and an occasional Top Secret Ops cable will curiously recall what one just read in the New York Times. Otherwise, keepers of secrets in foreign places can be bought with money or women. The United States always enjoyed an unfair advantage over other nations, because many foreigners with access to secrets considered us a bastion of freedom and were willing to risk, and sometimes give, their lives to help our cause.

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Technology, Marshall McLuhan wrote, is an extension of the human sensory apparatus. Spy technology enables the collector to see, hear, remember, conceal, and reveal beyond what’s humanly possible. The CIA’s relationship with technology has followed an interesting trajectory. In my early years, it was cutting edge, having engineered marvels of overhead photography and miniaturization. Then, led by Silicon Valley, the private sector left the Agency in the dust. There was no way for the government to compete. It was reduced, for example, to mandating the maximum resolution allowed to corporate satellite photography — but that could be enforced only on American companies. If you were Japanese, you could pick out a grain of sand on the beach. The attempt to suppress competitive technology collapsed from sheer inadequacy — and thus Google Earth was born.

The internet, too, posed a fundamental challenge. The cult of secrecy presumed a tiny amount of extremely valuable information. The internet flooded the system with near-infinite volumes of variably useful stuff. If practically every intelligence question had an answer online, who needed secrets? The CIA was wholly unprepared for, and culturally traumatized by, the internet. The infrastructure, built for secure communications, got in the way. For some time, I had to do my searches at home. That improved later, but there was always the unspoken dread that we had stepped on black ice and were about to fall on our hind parts. The spirit was willing. We were urged by our managers to embrace the web, but we always ended up embracing our preconceptions. Attempts to build an “intelligence search engine” were baffled by the basic problem of not knowing what intelligence was.

Yet I sense that spy tech is on the upswing. In Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril, the intelligence and defense communities have acquired their own slice of entrepreneurial genius. Luckey’s obsession is autonomous drones — and the flock of drones that descended on Nicolás Maduro’s defenders in Venezuela was positively cinematic. The “sonic weapon” deployed in that confrontation, too, seemed straight out of science fiction. It remains to be seen whether Luckey or anyone else can get the culture past the digital age and into the wild frontier of AI — but it appears, at least, that the CIA is approaching its 80th birthday having rediscovered the cool gadgets of its youth.

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Sherman Kent, who in the 1950s gave form and substance to the analysis wing of the CIA, was a disciple of Walter Lippmann’s. Like Lippmann, Kent believed in Platonic truth. Every intelligence question was like a jigsaw puzzle, with one and only one right answer. Kent also agreed with Lippmann’s insistence that “the power of the expert depends on separating himself from those who make the decisions.” In the world according to Kent, the analyst arrived at truth by rising above passion and policy. To his political masters, he delivered an “estimate” of reality and issued “warnings” of the future.

I want to separate the people who perform analysis at the CIA from the method they are stuck with — the burden of Kent’s legacy. Almost without exception, the Agency analysts I encountered were smart, knowledgeable, and articulate. They did amazing work under stressful conditions, some of which saved lives and promoted our country’s interest. Could they predict the future? Of course not — nobody can. Could they cobble a single interpretation out of branching and disputed facts? Only through a deeply bureaucratic process not unlike what Communists went through when they arrived at the “party line.” Could they tell the president, who cared only about how to implement successful policies, that their analytic remit was limited to the pursuit of pure truth? There began a trail of tears that typically concluded with the president feeling betrayed by the Agency and the Agency whining about “politicization.”

The CIA was shocked to the core by the fall of the Soviet Union. I was there. Our biggest strategic antagonist for 45 years seized up and died, and we had no idea it was happening. The CIA missed the initial test of the Soviet atom bomb — and India’s bomb, and Pakistan’s as well. 9/11, the sort of disaster the Agency was erected to prevent, came as a complete surprise. In hindsight these episodes appear inevitable and thus predictable, but in fact most historic discontinuities are extreme low-probability events. Place the filter of Platonic truth over them, and they disappear from sight. It would have been career suicide for an analyst to brief, “Mr. President, we estimate there’s a 1 in 1,200 chance that terrorists will crash airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.” Money and glory attend to the immediate and obvious.

Trapped in an impossible situation, analysts developed survival mechanisms. For one, they wrote too much. A blizzard of classified material blew out not just from the CIA but the entire Intelligence Community. Nobody read the stuff, but if something unforeseen occurred, we could be sure that at least one document had mentioned the possibility. The analytic style was also a hedge against failure. Robert Gates, then head of the directorate of analysis and later director of CIA and secretary of defense, commissioned a logician to scrutinize the language of the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB. The logician discovered a large measure of unclarity in the PDB. The same words had different meanings across time. It was frequently hard to tell whether a prediction was being made or not. The analysts who did the writing tended to be brilliant wielders of the English language. It was the blessed Sherman Kent who contorted their work.

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I want to register one final observation about CIA personnel. When they go out into the world, they wear a bull’s-eye on their backs. I don’t know if the Agency hires real-life versions of the assassin Joubert to kill its enemies, but I do know its officers get killed in the line of duty. Many died during my tenure. The stars covering the wall in the lobby of Headquarters Building, each symbolic of a nameless death, more than doubled in that time. A special quality is needed to know the risk, as everyone does on the inside, and still get on that airplane to Abidjan. The CIA, without question, is a Washington bureaucracy — but it’s not the Department of Transportation.

The Potential

The superhero edition of the CIA would provide the exact information needed for the president to triumph in the world, everywhere and all the time. But that’s a Hollywood fantasy. The real world is full of ugly choices, and failure is built into the human condition. The goal is to maximize advantage and preclude catastrophe, and for that, a firm grasp of our government’s strategic priorities — the “requirements process” in intelligence jargon — is a precondition. Since the end of the Cold War, the Agency hasn’t prioritized particularly well — but let’s pretend otherwise. Let’s imagine an organization willing to roll with the 21st century.

What would change?

The most meaningful improvement at scale for the Agency would be to kill the cult of secrecy and redirect resources towards the dominant information structures of our century: the web and AI. The government will never lose its appetite for secrets. While technology can satisfy much of this hunger, we aren’t about to pension off our spies. It’s a question of perspective. “Stealing secrets” is expensive and carries great human and diplomatic risk. Covert sources can play us false — that’s what happened in Iraq. The culture must be liberated from an addictive dependence on classification; Top Secret should never correlate to great authority. This is particularly true in the age of sexting and performative elites, when enough secrets get spilled online to make a grown spy cry.

As Robert Redford’s character in Three Days of the Condor would remind us, even before the internet the immense majority of intelligence material was collected from “open sources” — news media, books, government and corporate publications, etc. After the arrival of the web, the disproportion ballooned exponentially. Open information is faster, nimbler, cheaper, and much less dangerous to obtain. The Agency knows this, and occasionally will acknowledge it with a wave of the hand. But it has never acted on it, never put its money there. Although criticism after 9/11 and Iraq forced the establishment of an Open Source Center — my home turf — the unit was ridiculously underfunded and subservient to operations. 

If the CIA’s business is to understand the world, then a major part of that mission should be to understand the web at great depth. For every digital utterance, the analyst must be able to penetrate beyond author and site to provider, location, funding, ideology, past history, connection to similar posts elsewhere, affiliation with state and non-state actors. Analyzing video should have primacy over text — this is alien to government thinking but it’s the way of the web. The digital universe is a huge and shifting target. Powerful AI applications will keep track of billions of moving parts, constructing a dynamic map of digital space in the manner of the 16th century explorers, placing the warning when appropriate, “Here be monsters.” 

Skeptics will argue that all online material is horribly tainted — that the internet is the mother of lies. That would be accurate and all to the good. To the propaganda analyst, disinformation is a moveable feast. Among many benefits, it can provide an answer to the most difficult intelligence question to ascertain: intent. The point, after all, isn’t to strive after Platonic truth but to extract knowledge about how the world works.

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In another systemic change, the Agency will tear down the Berlin Wall between intelligence and policy. This can’t be accomplished universally — one can’t ask the crusty analyst who’s been counting beans for 30 years to brief about how best to overthrow the government of Cuba. A new class of hybrid specialists must be brought into being whose careers will be threaded through both intelligence and executive assignments. Organizationally, they will be housed in a single CIA unit — call it the Policy Intelligence Team, or PIT for short. Physically, they will reside in the White House, where they can be consulted by the president at will. The latter will indeed ask, “So how do I overthrow that wretched regime in Cuba?” The answer will be, “Here are the possibilities and our assessment of their merits.” 

PIT members will be free to brief on high-impact but low-probability events like 9/11, so that the president can take whatever preventive measures he sees fit. In the White House, they will be looked on as helpful advisers rather than sporadic visitors who mainly talk mush. Members of the team will rotate in and out according to the president’s interests. When needed, subject area experts — the bean counters — will be brought in to brief the president on an ad hoc basis.

It will be noticed that PIT will make the traditional early-morning PDB briefing redundant. That’s okay. Let the president sleep late. The PDB long ago ceased to be a means of information exchange and became, on both sides, a status symbol. It’s been called “the president’s newspaper” — and the daily newspaper is going extinct.

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One last suggestion about “finished” intelligence: there should be a lot less of it. Mass production, self-evidently, is a dumb model for our nation’s secrets, since the more there is, the more that will be buried, leaked, or lost. Analysts shouldn’t be rewarded for how much they publish but for how useful they have shown their knowledge to be: in the Intelligence Community as in academia, publish or perish has resulted in vast masses of published trivia. (There should probably be fewer analysts too, but I’m not going to say that out of loyalty to the tribe.) This applies with particular force to Top Secret material. The label should be applied sparingly, to protect sensitive content and not to promote its importance.

On every topic of interest, at every level of classification, items will be linked and synthesized by AI. Rather than a scattershot of data and analysis, the Agency will have a running story on, say, Russian war-making capability or Iran’s efforts to resurrect the bomb. A constant criticism of the CIA is failure to “connect the dots.” The accusation is vague and probably unfair, but it should never again be heard in the era of the thinking machine.