…may not be achieving too much, according to former CIA clandestine service officers:

Memoirs, mistakes converge as CIA promises reform
…
When CIA Director Leon Panetta gathered reporters recently to discuss mistakes that allowed a suicide bomber to kill seven personnel in Afghanistan, he didn’t mention a separate disclosure the agency made that day: that it had sued a retired officer who wrote an unapproved memoir…

…now, as it promises reforms in the wake of the bombing at an agency base in the eastern Khowst province [more here], he CIA is seeking to punish a former agent for violating his secrecy agreement, which he says he did to blow the whistle on waste and incompetence.

The author of the 2008 book “The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture” writes under the pseudonym Ishmael Jones. A former Marine who served 15 years spying overseas under non-official cover before resigning in 2006, Jones describes a diminished agency that, even after 9/11, is stymied by a culture of careerism and lethargy. He argues that experienced spies in the field are routinely undercut and second-guessed by agency bureaucrats.

Jones’ book has drawn relatively little attention. The same is true of two other books by former case officers, whose memoirs also portray the agency as inept and bureaucratic. The CIA’s acknowledgement of failures in Khowst lends currency to these accounts.

“Khowst is not an aberration. It is a symptom of what is wrong with the CIA today,” says Charles Faddis, a former Middle East station chief and author of “Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA,” published last year. Both Jones and Faddis spent time in Iraq during the war.

Faddis argues the Khowst tragedy was a result of the “deprofessionalization” of the National Clandestine Service, the CIA’s operations arm. The spy cadre is no longer comprised mostly of seasoned overseas operators as much as “new hires, former support personnel and headquarters-based desk officers,” Faddis says.

Jones concurs. Ninety percent of CIA employees are stationed in the U.S., he says, embedded in a “Soviet-style bureaucracy” that relies on contracts with private firms run by former CIA officials.

The agency is “stiff, risk-averse and increasingly filled with individuals who see the CIA as simply another federal job,” Faddis adds. His book mentions one support officer overseas who refused to work after 5 p.m…

I have little confidence that any newly-created Canadian foreign intelligence agency would be any different and I doubt the need for one.  From an earlier post:

…I do not think a separate Canadian foreign intelligence agency (i.e. HUMINT) should be formed; the Conservatives thankfully dropped their 2006 election promise to create one.  Early in the campaign they had pledged to “Expand the Canadian Foreign Intelligence Agency”–then they realized one didn’t exist (see “Securing our borders…The plan” at link).

More on US intelligence:

One way of looking at restructuring the UN Security Council

Mark
Ottawa