The complete chapter is available here as an Adobe Acrobat PDF.

Let us start with an assertion with which all members of Congress and the Bush administration, including the current director of the Central Intelligence Agency, would agree: The Clandestine Service hasn’t performed well against the Islamic extremist target. Now let us make another assertion that is harder to prove (few outsiders have had the opportunity to peruse pre-9/11 operational and intelligence-production files at Langley): The Directorate of Operations (DO)--responsible within the CIA for covert operations-- performed poorly against all “hard targets” throughout the entire Cold War, if we measure performance by the CIA’s ability to recruit or place intelligence-producing agents inside the critical organizations of hard-target countries or groups. In “spookese,” these assets are called foreign-intelligence, or FI, agents. The DO had some luck and accomplishment in handling hard-target “walkins,” foreigners volunteering information to the United States. According to former Soviet–East Europe (SE) division case officers, all of the important Soviet assets we had during the Cold War were walk-ins. They came to us. We didn’t recruit them, though occasionally CIA case officers turned would-be defectors into agents willing to commit espionage inside their homelands. The CIA didn’t, of course, admit this datum to the Clandestine Service’s junior-officer classes--or to anyone else--during the Cold War. It preferred to maintain the fiction that SE case officers, and operatives from other geographical divisions who prowled the diplomatic cocktail circuit, could find and recruit KGB or other Soviet officials willing to provide critical intelligence. But a former chief of the Soviet–East Europe division, Burton Gerber, once confessed that the few Soviets ever actually recruited--and Africa, where race-conscious Russians could feel very lonely, was probably the best hunting ground--had never been valuable.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at AEI. This chapter appears in The Future of American Intelligence (Hoover Institution, 2005), edited by Peter Berkowitz.