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CIA Seeks The Special Sauce
October 6, 2007: The CIA wants to make better use
of intel non-CIA U.S. government employees accidentally, or on purpose, pick up
overseas. After all CIA stands for CENTRAL Intelligence Agency, and the job is
supposed to consolidate all the intel, and analyze it. While this is sort-of
done (everyone at least goes through the motions), there is a lot of good intel
collected that never gets to the CIA. No, not the stuff that evil bureaucrats
keep from the CIA, in order to further another agenda. What is sought is
reports from those operatives, like USAID or other government employees who are
out in the field in foreign countries, doing non-intel work. These are
Americans getting a street level view of what's going on. They are not spying,
in the classic sense, they are just experiencing whatever the local vibe is.
The CIA, and especially the State Department, often miss this element. Time and
again, this results in the CIA being surprised by new developments. While
trolling the Internet (foreign language message boards and the like) will bring
in a lot of this stuff, why waste the fact that we have U.S. government people
there. All the CIA has to do is talk to them, or exchange email. But
bureaucracy being what it is, this is easier said than done. The struggle to
make this happen, has been going on for years. It's a low key thing, hardly
ever gets any publicity. But many intel analysts believe this kind of input is
the special sauce that will make CIA analysis quite a bit more accurate.
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