SUPPOSE YOU WERE GIVEN the dark mission of spending $50 billion a year to create a global intelligence organization that would be minimally effective. You would want to keep 90 percent of the employees in their home country and incentivize senior staff to stay "close to the flagpole" to enhance their promotion prospects. Training costs should be high--$500,000 per recruit--and bureaucracy so stifling that a third of incoming officers will swiftly wash out. To keep morale low, surround those who remain with contractors--about half of the workforce--and pay the hired guns twice as much as the staff. Add a high level of corruption, routine cover-ups of malfeasance and incompetence, and you would have today's CIA. It is, as one critic noted, "a sorry blend of Monty Python and Big Brother." The Sept. 11 attacks caught the Agency off guard. After the devastating budget cuts of the Clinton years, the CIA was desperately trying to rebuild its capabilities, yet it was still gripped by a Cold War mindset. The over-the-horizon threat from China figured far more prominently than terrorism or nuclear proliferation. But overnight that orientation shifted, and this sclerotic bureaucracy was tasked with becoming the leading edge in the Bush administration's war on terror. Its budget exploded.
