President Obama’s decision to create the High-Value Interrogation Group, headquartered at the FBI and controlled by the White House, is good news. The best path toward intelligence reform is to take away responsibilities from the CIA and assign them to other U.S. government entities that will do a better job. The CIA has now lost a significant element of its productivity and a big piece of its turf.
Terrorist interrogations provided valuable intelligence that saved the lives of many innocent people. At times, information obtained in these interrogations was even able to stop terrorist attacks that were already in motion. But the CIA undertook the interrogations grudgingly. Its Byzantine command structure was unable to supervise the interrogations properly, leading to torture allegations. Top CIA officials rebelled against the interrogations by assigning much of the work to contractors and by leaking information to journalists, which significantly weakened the Bush administration. Taking the interrogations away from the CIA will increase the quality of intelligence these interrogations produce.
The CIA erred in losing the interrogations program because a bureaucracy must always appear to be busy in order to avoid scrutiny. With the distraction of interrogations gone, the CIA’s traditional mission of human-source intelligence production will come into better focus. Its inactive rogue-state and nuclear-proliferation programs, its lax financial controls, and its decision to assign more than 90 percent of its officers to posts within the United States can be better examined and improved.
– “Ishmael Jones” is a former deep-cover officer with the Central Intelligence Agency. He is the author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture, published last year by Encounter Books.