From: Ralph McGehee <rmcgehee@igc.apc.org>
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 1998 06:21:38 -0800 (PST)
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         Administration Says DCI Tenet Doing a Good Job
                                                                           
   DCI Tenet is a respected voice inside the foreign policy team. He has 
brought relative calm to CIA after a decade of scandal-fed turmoil and a 
leadership crisis caused by the turnover within five years of three directors 
and two failed nominations to fill the top job. Tenet has played a central 
role in discussions of Iraq, Iran and proliferation of weapons technology. He 
has a talent to "speak truth to power." 

   DCI Tenet, 45, is presiding over a change in espionage priorities and the 
recruitment of analysts and case officers in counterproliferation, 
counternarcotics and counterterrorism. "We are getting back to basic 
espionage." Tenet's eight years on the Senate Select Committee on Intel, 
handling intel for the Clinton transition after the 1992 election, and two 
years on the NSC staff gave him a [good] foundation. Tenet joined the CIA in 
early 1995, as deputy director. He has concentrated on designing new 
promotion systems that reduce layers of management and reward individuals who 
become experts in difficult countries or counterterrorism and anti-narcotics 
work. Tenet feels CIA's principal need is stability. Washington Post
1/13/98 A13.

   From the above it appears that the new DCI is on the right track.
Areas of concern remain.  He focuses on....the recruitment of analysts and 
case officers in counterproliferation, counternarcotics and 
counterterrorism." Question -- has he changed the psychological
testing requirements to hire those whose profiles do not dictate their 
following the paths of the past?  

   One of the major problems with the CIA is the top levels of leadership
of the Directorate of Operations (DO) and the Directorate of Intelligence (DI).
How does Tenet, or will Tenet, remove those that have proven their 
incompetence?  Per former top CIA Officer Shirley and others -- The DO 
is a wasteland of know-nothing men.  "The DI is in horrible shape."

   Recruiting good entry-level analysts and case officers into a system 
controlled by the dishonorable and incompetent, who fight any change, and 
challenges to their past -- is to doom new recruits and any reform to 
failure. I cannot imagine anything worse than recruiting honor and talent 
into the "rotting" DO/DI.  How soon will the new talent succumb to apathy, 
accommodation, or decide to quit? These are hard decisions but they have
to be made if the CIA is not to repeat its 50-history of intelligence
failure. 

   One easy and fast fix -- put those analysts (about two dozen)
who protested the elevation to the DCI of Robert Gates -- a known politicizer
of intelligence -- into top level positions. Most probably killed their
career chances by being honorable. Here you have honor and integrity and 
probably talent. Instead now we have in the leadership of the DI by "Gates' 
Clones."

   "We are getting back to basic intelligence," why?  What is needed
for the challenges of the 21st Century are new approaches not a return
to the past. What is required is innovative, testing procedures, not
the failed basics of the past fifty years.  Here I recommend as part of
a new approach, as many others have done, the use of open source material 
which the CIA now rejects because it cannot be doctored to fit the 
requirements of whatever policy it implements.  The DO/DI exists in an 
impenetrable bubble of fantasy fed by intelligence and policy permeated 
by reports of those making and implementing policy. Break this bubble!

   Just a few open sources avoided in the past -- writings on
revolution by MAO Tse-tung, Ho Chih Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap.
Captured communist documents in Vietnam describing their revolutionary
organizations different from the descriptions of our intelligence. 
Ayotallah Khomeni's book and audio cassettes outlining his plans to 
takeover in Iran. Open-source material of foreign newspapers, radios
and television -- sometimes captured by FBIS but ignored in intelligence
reporting.  The writings of foreign leaders and scholars. The list of 
available and open sources is endless but ignored by CIA.

   Tenet's eight years on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
staff, gives him no on-the-point experience -- experience now denied
him by his elevated status. This lack of experience shows in his
call to a return to the past.  I believe he is dedicated to improving the
CIA but is he ruthless enough, does he possess enough experience, can
he challenge the fiefdom's, Dons, and the know-nothings of the DO?  
To me this is a very open question.

Ralph McGehee
CIABASE

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