CIA houses several very different cultures under one roof:
The three main tribes are the analysts, the spies and the techies. For outsiders, the analysts are in-house academics and experts who brief and write papers for the President and policymakers. The spies are those officers of the Clandestine Service (now called the Directorate of Operations, or DO) who live overseas and manage human spy networks. They tend to be the cocky jet pilots of the CIA. The techies spend the money and manage huge, sophisticated, cutting edge programs. They are engineers, scientists and visionaries. Housing these three tribes under one roof has always been both CIA’s strength and weakness.
The man who was easily the most damaging individual to American intelligence was one of those techies who became Director of Central Intelligence, Stansfield Turner:
Turner was a techie, in Sipher’s trichotomy of CIA cultures; he had headed NSA and, when Jimmy Carter appointed him DCI, he concluded that he could get all the intel a nation needs from technical means (listening posts, satellites) and liaison with friendly services, and so he fired 800 case officers (causing lost contact with their foreign agents) — almost 1/4 of the clandestine service — literally overnight. Turner put out one eye and left the US nearly blind in places like Africa and the Levant. In Iran, the only eye left was through liaisons with the Shah’s intelligence agency SAVAK, which evaporated when the Shah fell and left the CIA completely blind and unable to operate in Iran at all.It was in this environment that the hostage rescue’s clandestine side wound up run by a US Army Special Forces element. Likewise, the US was blindsided by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in part because of the Turner bloodletting.
The same mentality reigns currently supreme, the idea that databases can replace good old fashioned case work.
Just Google it!
Turner and Carter evidently knew one another from their early naval days.
It was not only firing the clandestine service operatives but also those most experienced.
That also aspect of “traditional spying” was abhorrent to them.
The CIA got purged around 1979 or so.
That was the same time many Yanks were finding out about the rape and torture and mass murder that their tax dollars had paid for, under the name “Operation Condor.”
It’s reasonable to think that the CIA got purged because Operation Condor had caused the government to lose legitimacy in the eyes of the citizens.
LOL, according to Legacy of Ashes, p. 421:
Read two histories, get two different stories.
The Agency has been a failure for years. Recruiting human assets isn’t something Americans do well or ever have. They tend to fall in love with the latest Dr Frankenstein contraceptions resulting in increasing intelligence failures.
Worse is the focus of America’s operations. Our enemies seek to influence our institutions and infilitrate them. America simply doesn’t play this game well because Americans do not understand foreign cultures.
Its interesting to note how much better and focused the military is than the agency.