Charles Faddis, co-author of Operation Hotel California, offers gritty, hair-raising stories about the CIA, which has devolved into a giant bureaucracy of ass-coverers and careerists – not the kind of people you want in charge of preventing another 9/11.
Defund The CIA! (But not quite the way you’re thinking…)
Decorated CIA veteran case officer and station chief Charles S. (Sam) Faddis makes a an articulate and well-reasoned case In BEYOND REPAIR: THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE CIA for what seasoned Directorate of Operations (DO) veterans have been saying for decades: the DO is broken and can’t be fixed. Raze it and start over. Former CIA Director of Operations Duane (Dewey) Clarridge said much the same a decade earlier in his memoir, A SPY FOR ALL SEASONS. And he is not alone.
Nor is Faddis likely to be the last notable CIA veteran to propose reinventing the CIA in the image of the old OSS, but he’s well worth listening to. In BEYOND REPAIR, the author recites in colorful prose all the broken features of the DO of the CIA as a whole. Faddis devotes a chapter of BEYOND REPAIR to each area of that institution’s failing: culture of timidity, leadership shortage, bureaucratic inertia, skills shortage, hyper-partisan Congressional oversight, White House abuse, duplication of collection efforts, and extravagant head count.
What makes BEYOND REPAIR such a satisfying read is Faddis’s rich supply of anecdotes from his long and successful experience with the CIA (though properly withholding classified details). These anecdotes are used to drive home relevant points, not to show what a skilled operator or virtuous person he is. Overall, the author comes across as a fair-minded commentator whose loyalty is to the country’s national interest, not the institution he served. This is a welcome contrast to the many “institutionalists” from the CIA, FBI, DOJ, DOD, and other governmental units seen so often on cable TV, whose primary interest seems to be to preserve the reputation of their respective former outfits, whether merited or not.
Faddis also deserves praise for laying out how he would reform the CIA and its human intelligence collection arm, the DO, roughly along the lines of the WWII Office of Strategic Services. The author’s 21st century OSS would rely heavily on non-official cover (rather than diplomatic over in overseas embassies); recruit officers with native language skills from among recent immigrants to the US; flatten the organization’s management structure; and employ rigorous entrance standards, exhaustive training, and enhanced pay and support to create a standard of excellence and a esprit de corps currently lacking in the DO.
While Faddis glosses over the daunting problem of transitioning from the current CIA to the new OSS, my personal suggestion would be to put in place an immediate hiring freeze at CIA, followed by deep and repeated reductions in force to reduce the CIA’s head count in stages until the new OSS gets on its feet. Then poach the best of the younger case officers and specialists from the legacy CIA (and DOD’s new Defense Clandestine Service), if necessary, to staff up until an entirely new cadre of fresh recruits can be vetted and trained.
In BEYOND REPAIR, Sam Faddis has written a book that cuts through the cant and pretense about America’s current human intelligence collection effort and shows why we can’t allow it to go on doing things just as before. Even better, with the benefit of Faddis’s deep on-the-ground experience, the book points the way toward a better way of human intelligence collection that is more capable of protecting our nation’s future in these dangerous times.