On our need for spies

Writing in (of all places!) GQ magazine, former CIA agent Robert Baer argues that the agency is broken, and that the kindest thing to do would be to put it out of its misery, or at least to rebuild it entirely. The December massacre of a station chief and seven of her staff, he argues, was not just a personal failure but an institutional one. He calls the station chief "Kathy," in deference to her covert status, but he spares her nothing: "She'd spent the vast majority of her career at a desk in Northern Virginia, where she studied Al Qaeda for more than a decade ... she was always slotted to be a reports officer, someone who edits reports coming in from the field. She was never intended to meet and debrief informants." She'd never managed a covert operation, and she didn't speak the language. But there she was in Kost, Afghanistan, greeting a suicide bomber with what amounted to her entire staff plus a few drop-in visitors. The assignment, Mr. Baer argues, betrays the death of the CIA's spy culture and the ascendancy of the computer-savvy analyst. Kathy was an analyst.

Boom. "The fact is that Kathy, no matter how courageous and determined, was in over her head.... She was set up to fail. The battlefield was tilted in Al Qaeda's favor long ago--by John Deutch and his [Clinton-era] reforms, by the directors who followed him, by the decision to drop the paramilitary course from the mandatory curriculum (which would have made Kathy a lot more wary of explosives), and by two endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have worn the CIA down to a nub." Blue skies! -- Dan Ford