CIA director orders sweeping reorganization

PanARMENIAN.Net - Director John Brennan has ordered a sweeping reorganization of the CIA, an overhaul designed to make its leaders more accountable and close espionage gaps amid widespread concerns about the spy agency's limited insights into a series of major global developments, the Associated Press reports.

Brennan announced the restructuring to the CIA workforce on Friday, including a new directorate devoted to boosting the CIA's computer hacking skills. He said the move comes after nine agency officers spent three months analyzing its management structure, including what deputy CIA director David Cohen called "pain points," organizational areas where the CIA's bureaucracy does not work efficiently.

Brennan said the changes are necessary to address intelligence gaps that the CIA is not covering. He lamented that there is often no single person he can hold accountable for the spying mission in any given part of the world.

"There are a lot of areas that I would like to have better insight to, better information about, better access to," Brennan said. "Safe havens, denied areas. Whether because we don't even have a diplomatic presence in a country, or because there are parts of countries that have been overrun and taken over by terrorist groups and others."

Under Brennan's reorganization, the CIA would break down the wall between the operations and analytical arms, a system that typically has required the case officers who recruit spies and run covert operations to work for different bosses, in different offices, than analysts who interpret the intelligence and write briefing papers for the president and other policymakers, the AP says.

The new plan would blend practitioners of those separate disciplines into 10 centers devoted to various subjects or areas of the world. There are a handful of such centers at the moment, including the Counter Terrorism Center, where analysts and operators have worked side by side for the last decade targeting al-Qaida with espionage and drone strikes.

Under the new plan, according to the AP, each center would be run by an assistant director who would be responsible for the entire intelligence mission within that jurisdiction, including covert operations, spying, analysis, liaison with foreign partners and logistics.

The system of CIA stations, headed by a CIA station chief, will remain in place, Brennan said. Most stations are in U.S. embassies, and various CIA case officers in embassies may be working on different missions for different centers.

The changes do not require congressional approval and will be undertaken within the CIA's current budget, CIA officials said.

In another evolution, Brennan is creating a fifth directorate, the Directorate of Digital Innovation, which will focus on the new world of computer networks that has changed the way espionage is conducted. Brennan avoided the term "cyber," a word used by the National Security Agency, the country's premier digital spying service. The CIA's mission of human spying now almost always has a digital component —even something so simple as backgrounding a potential asset by hacking into databases — and Brennan said the agency needs to intensify its focus on it.

The CIA will also significantly boost its leadership training and talent development efforts, which have been compared unfavorably to the military, Brennan said.