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From bad to worse
Some CIA case officers overseas recall the period between Clinton's November 1992 election and the January 1993 inauguration as the "winter of despair". It was known in the agency that Clinton was not interested in intelligence and would demand budget cuts and set new priorities. After all, the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union were gone, Russia was in political turmoil and economically finished; even China, North Korea, Iran and a few other isolated places were no match, it was believed, for the one remaining superpower. It was the economy, stupid! And what had been expected soon came to pass. Budgets for intelligence collection were pared down to the quick. Programs were slashed even in advance of an in-depth Clinton team assessment under the theory that executive pencil-pushers in the agency could identify and cut fat, more effectively and with less long-term pain, well before the definition of and fights about new objectives.

Clinton named James Woolsey to head the CIA. Not a bad choice, perhaps; but within a short period of time Woolsey was facing a nightmarish crisis. Career operations officer Aldrich Ames was arrested and discovered to have been spying for the Soviet Union and, after the USSR's demise, Russia. The Ames affair was compounded by the investigation and later arrest of Jim Nicholson on similar charges. The counterintelligence repercussions over the next several years were pervasive and for several years would limit both the effectiveness of the agency and its credibility among policymakers. Morale was plummeting and ever-tighter budgets made the traditional recruitment of highly placed informants with access to significant information ever more challenging and difficult. Intelligence-collection priorities would be sent to the field only to be amended or questioned later. Agents would be signed up and terminated when the wind changed. Old-fashioned country-specific collection and analysis were out the window. Major blind spots began to appear despite the remaining large program initiatives in non-proliferation and counter-terrorism.

An additional factor impacting on performance and perceptions was Woolsey's inability to establish a good working relationship with the House and Senate Intelligence committees he was called in to brief. With the CIA's every move scrutinized and questioned by oversight, even senior CIA management looked to cover their collective behind to protect career and pension rather than engage in high-risk operations or stand up for the integrity of their analysis and conclusions. Where once it had been accepted as an axiom that, because field case officers had to use deception and misdirection as part of their toolkit to collect intelligence from foreign sources, honesty and integrity among case officers, analysts, and chiefs in headquarters were essential, such unquestioned codes of conduct began to fray at the edges and deception and mistrust crept into interaction at all levels. You cannot have a bunch of professional liars lying to each other at the office and assume the system will continue to function. It didn't, and more and more experienced operations officers and analysts began to look outside the agency for work.

When John Deutch, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology chemistry professor and defense-science specialist, but hardly a man with deep understanding of the intelligence business, succeeded Woolsey in May 1995 as CIA director, things went from bad to worse. He stated his intention of "cleaning up" the agency, in particular, moving away from the nasty and sordid business of having its case officers recruit spies who were not on their way to sainthood. Nothing of substance got done - except for the fact that the DO lost an additional large number of humint (human intelligence) resources across the board.

By December 1996, Deutch was out and the Tenet tenure (initially as acting director) was under way. Morale continued to flag, mission orientation was fuzzy, and with that, intelligence miscues began to multiply. We won't review details. But by 1998, the CIA had failed to anticipate Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests, was blissfully oblivious to the dealings of the Abdul Qadeer Khan nuclear proliferation network with countries ranging from Libya to Iran and North Korea, and had begun to miss opportunities (how many ultimately?) of taking bin Laden out of circulation. But Tenet readily survived all of that - and at the same time started to build new political connections as the Clinton era waned. In 1998, he acted to name CIA Langley headquarters after former US president and CIA director George H W Bush. As the 2000 election campaign rolled around, he took to personally briefing then Texas governor George W Bush on US intelligence operations and assessments. Against all odds - new presidents usually choose new CIA directors - Tenet managed to stay on as Bush's DCI, for four more years.

By early 2001, the agency and most notably the DO were mere shadows of their former selves as the events of September 11 that year would fatefully attest. Enter Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. The US was now at war and the secretary of defense and the vice president, both former chief executive officers of major corporations and used to throwing their weight around and getting straight answers to tough questions, wanted actionable intelligence - and didn't get it. Investigative journalist Robert Dreyfuss penned an article in The American Prospect (The Pentagon muzzles the CIA) in December 2002, in which he details how the Department of Defense created its own small intelligence outfit to "develop" the intelligence and analyses required in the run-up to the Iraq war. The upshot was that the CIA was increasingly sidelined and marginalized in national-security decision-making processes in advance of the Iraq invasion.