Politics

CIA Director Announces Sweeping Reorganization of Spy Agency

Published

10 years ago

March 7, 2015

In this Dec. 11, 2014 file photo, CIA Director John Brennan speaks during a news conference at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. Brennan has ordered a sweeping reorganization of the spy agency, an overhaul designed to make its leaders more accountable, enhance the agencys cyber capabilities and shore up espionage gaps exacerbated by a decade of focus on counterterrorism. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)

KEN DILANIAN, AP Intelligence Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — 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.

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.

Briefing reporters with Cohen at CIA headquarters this week, 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.”

The changes come against a backdrop of evidence that the CIA’s focus on hunting and killing terrorists since the Sept. 11 attacks has led to an erosion of the espionage and analytic capabilities the agency built during the Cold War. The CIA, along with other U.S. intelligence agencies, wrongly assessed the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2002 and failed to anticipate the rapid collapse of Middle East governments during the Arab Spring in 2011, among other shortcomings.

The agency’s greatest public success of recent years — the 10-year effort to locate and kill Osama bin Laden in 2011 — may have taken longer than it should have, according to evidence made public in the recent Senate report on CIA interrogations. Internal CIA surveys have cited bad management and bureaucratic frustration as factors in driving talent away from the agency.

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 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, 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.

Critics of a blended approach have raised concerns that combining analysts with operators could compromise the objectivity of the analysts, who are tasked with coldly interpreting intelligence in which they have no stake. It may be harder for an analyst to cast doubt on a source recruited by a case officer he knows personally, the theory goes.

The head of the CIA’s operation arm retired abruptly in January after voicing concerns about the plan, say two former CIA officials who know him but spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss internal agency matters. Brennan said the undercover officer’s decision “was not a result of this,” but he did not dispute that the officer had opposed some of the changes.

“Any time we’ve put analysts and operators together, the result has been a more powerful product,” said John McLaughlin, a former CIA analyst who became acting director, and who advised Brennan on the restructuring.

Brennan is retaining the old structure of CIA directorates. But he is changing some names, including restoring the old moniker “Directorate of Operations,” to the spying arm, the name it had before being rebadged the National Clandestine Service in 2005. For analysts, what used to be called the Directorate of Intelligence will be renamed the Directorate of Analysis. Two others, the directorates of support and science and technology, remain.

The directorates will manage human resources and set tradecraft standards, Brennan said, while the centers carry out the intelligence missions.

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.

The reorganization is already drawing fire from some quarters. Paul Pillar, a former CIA analyst who famously dissented from the case for war in Iraq, expressed concern that the costs of the changes would outweigh the benefits.

“I worry that this plan may be another instance of the all-too-common pattern, among senior managers in both governmental and private sector organizations, to try to leave a personal mark by reorganizing the place,” he said in an email.

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Activism

‘Jim Crow Was and Remains Real in Alameda County (and) It Is What We Are Challenging and Trying to Fix Every Day,’ Says D.A. Pamela Price

“The legacy of Jim Crow is not just a legacy in Alameda County. It’s real. It is what is happening and how (the system is) operating, and that is what we are challenging and trying to fix every day,” said D.A. Price, speaking to the Oakland Post by telephone for over an hour last Saturday. “Racial disparities in this county have never been effectively eliminated, and we are applying and training our lawyers on the (state’s) Racial Justice Act, and we’re implementing it in Alameda County every day,” she said.

Published

3 hours ago

November 2, 2024

Oakland Post

Exclusive interview with County D.A. Price days before recall election. Photo by Ken Epstein.

By Ken Epstein

Part One

Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price gave an exclusive in-depth interview, speaking with the Oakland Post about the continuing legacy of Jim Crow injustice that she is working to overturn and her major achievements, including:

restoring and expanding services for victims of crime,
finding funding for an alternative to incarceration and/or prosecution for substance use and mental health-related misdemeanors and
aggressively prosecuting corporations for toxic pollution and consumer violations.

“Racial disparities in this county have never been effectively eliminated, and we are applying and training our lawyers on the (state’s) Racial Justice Act, and we’re implementing it in Alameda County every day,” she said.

Passed by the State Legislature, this law “is an extremely helpful tool for us to address the racial disparities that continue to exist in our system,” she said.

(The law addresses) “the racial disparities that we find in our juvenile justice system, where 86% of all felony juvenile arrests in the county are Black or Brown children.

“We trained the entire workforce on the Racial Justice Act. We are creating a data system that will allow us to look at the trends and to clearly identify where racism has infected the process. We know that where law enforcement is still engaging in racial profiling and unfair targeting and arresting, we’re trying to make sure we’re catching that.”

Many people do not know much about the magnitude of Alameda County District Attorney’s job. Her office is a sprawling organization with 10 offices serving 1.6 million people living in 14 cities and six unincorporated areas, with a budget this year of about $104 million.

Asked about her major achievements since she took office last year, she is especially proud of the expanded and renewed victims’ services division in the DA’s Office, she said.

“We have expanded and reorganized the entire claims division so that we are now expediting as much as possible the benefits that victims are entitled to. Under my predecessor, they were having to wait anywhere, sometimes as long as a year, to 400 days to get benefits.

“Claims had been denied that should not have been denied. So, we’re helping people file appeals on claims that were denied under her tenure,” D.A. Price said.

“Under my predecessor, (the victims’ service office) was staffed by people who were not trained to provide trauma-informed services to victims, and yet they were the only people that the victims were in contact with. We immediately stopped that practice,” she continued.

“We had to expand the advocate workforce to include people who speak Hmong, the indigenous language of so many people in this county who are victims of crime.”

More African Americans advocates were hired because they represent the largest percentage of crime victims and we hired a transgender advocate and advocates who speak Cantonese and Mandarin. “The predominantly Chinese American community in Oakland was not being served by advocates who speak the language,” said D Price

“We reduced the lag time from the delivery of benefits to victims from 300 to 400 days down to less than 60 days.”

She increased victim advocacy by 38%, providing critical support to over 22,500 victims, a key component of community safety.

Other major achievements:

She recently filed 12 felony charges against a man accused of multiple armed robberies, demonstrating her seriousness about prosecuting violent crimes
In October, a jury delivered a guilty verdict in the double murder trial of former Alameda County Sheriff’s Deputy Devin Williams, showing DA Price’s commitment to holding law enforcement accountable.
She recently charged a man and woman in unincorporated San Leandro with murder, felony unlawful firearm activity, and felony carrying a loaded firearm in public.
A. Price’s office was awarded a $6 million grant by the state for its CARES Navigation Center diversion program. In partnership with the UnCuffed Project at a Seventh Day Adventist Church in Oakland, the program provides resources and referrals for services to residents as an alternative to incarceration and/or prosecution for substance use and mental health-related misdemeanors.

“This is the largest grant investment in the history of the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office,” said D.A. Price.

She explained that the program now has a mobile unit. “We have washers and dryers. We have a living room. We have a television. It’s a place where people can decompress, get themselves stabilized,” she said.

The project has “the ability to refer people to housing, to more long-term mental health services, to social services, and to assist them in other ways.”

Her office joined in a $49 million statewide settlement with Kaiser Health Plan and Hospitals, resolving allegations that the healthcare provider unlawfully disposed of hazardous waste, medical waste, and protected health information. The settlement, which involved the state and a half dozen counties, resulted in Alameda County receiving $7 million for its residents.
DA Price charged a former trucking company employee for embezzling over $4.3 million, showing her commitment to tackling white-collar crime.
For the first time, Alameda County won a criminal grand jury indictment of a major corporation with two corporate officers that have been sources of pollution. “They had a record of settlements and pollution in this community, and they had a fire that constituted a grave danger,” she said.

Attorney Walter Riley contributed to this article.

See Part Two

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Activism

‘Criminal Justice Reform Is the Signature Civil Rights Issue of Our Time,’ says D.A. Pamela Price

Speaking about the destructive impact of mass incarceration, Price asked people to consider “how many children have incarcerated parents, where the practice has always been to isolate and eliminate connections between people who are incarcerated and their children and their families and the community. So, when we bring people home, they have no more connection.”

Published

4 hours ago

November 2, 2024

Oakland Post

“People have no idea what the vision is for the next district attorney, or where the office will go if I am, in fact, recalled, she continued. “I'm just running against a billionaire,” who does not show his face in public, she said. Courtesy photo.

“As long as our criminal justice system is stuck in the mentality and practices of the 1950s, our country is not going to move forward,” she said.

By Ken Epstein

Part Two

District Attorney Pamela Price, facing a recall that began before she took office in January 2023, explained in an exclusive interview with the Oakland Post how she came to dedicate her life to transforming a deeply flawed criminal justice system into one that provides equal justice and public safety for all and ends mass incarceration for African Americans and other working-class people.

She summarized her life experiences as someone who was “traumatized and radicalized” by Dr. King’s murder, joining the Civil Rights Movement full force, getting arrested when she was 13 years old in a civil rights demonstration, being tracked into the juvenile justice and the foster care systems, and making it as a foster kid from the streets of Cincinnati to Yale College.”

“I understand a lot of things about struggle, about sacrifice, about trauma and fortunately survived all of that, and as a survivor learned some important lessons, and I brought all of that with me into the law and have been able to become a civil rights attorney in Alameda County,” she said.

“That’s been the joy of my life; I’ve lived every lawyer’s dream,” she said.

“Years ago, when I first decided to run for district attorney, I realized that mass incarceration was so destabilizing to our communities,” she said.

She saw that the “criminal justice system has so many impacts on our community, the safety of our community, the stability of our community, the growth of our community, the direction of our community.”

“As long as our criminal justice system is stuck in the mentality and the practices of the 1950s … our society is going to be mired in discord, and we will not have social justice, racial justice, economic justice, none of the things that actually make our communities worth living in.”

It is crucial to address the needs of “young people in the juvenile justice system when they are more likely and able to be rehabilitated and redirected,” she said. Young people are much more able to be rehabilitated before the age of 18, really before the age of 26, and before they end up in an adult prison.

D.A. Price’s predecessor, Nancy O’ Malley, joined the D.A.’s office in 1984, where she remained for 39 years. She was promoted to a leadership position after just six years in the office during the era of mass incarceration when there was an explosion of prison construction in California.

“Prosecutors like my predecessor were the ones who filled (those prisons) up. She became a leader in the office around 1990. And what is very important for the public to know is that prior to becoming the district attorney in 2009, she was the chief assistant district attorney for 10 years under Tom Orloff.

“O’Malley worked very closely, hand-in-hand with him for the period of time that included the illegal conduct or the unconstitutional exclusion of Jewish people and Black people from death penalty juries.”

Commenting on the recall campaign against her, she said that had not a handful of multimillionaires and billionaires “put millions of dollars into this, we would not be having this recall. It is not a grassroots movement. It’s a platinum movement.”

“People have no idea what the vision is for the next district attorney, or where the office will go if I am, in fact, recalled, she continued. “I’m just running against a billionaire,” who does not show his face in public, she said.

If they successfully paint Oakland as a failed city, then hedge fund billionaires and real estate developers can come in and buy up the property cheap, she said.

Though D.A. Price has been bombarded by a massive tsunami of lies, slanders, and misrepresentation, she remains strong and positive because she is a woman of faith, she said.

“I’ve been saved and guided by (a) higher power since I was 13 years old. So, I’m not a new person to faith, and I’m grounded in that,” she said.