New Chief Is Critical Of Barriers Within CIA by Walter Pincus

The CIA's new director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, told agency employees yesterday that their intelligence activities are too segmented, saying that operations officers who collect intelligence need to work more closely with the analysts who interpret what it means.

Four months after taking over, Hayden presented his strategic vision to a CIA workforce that has been battered by years of investigations into the failures of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and prewar intelligence about Iraq's weapons programs, as well as a reorganization that lowered the agency's status with the creation of a director of national intelligence.

"The collectors are over here and the analysts over there. We are too segmented, and thinking has been driven by focusing on their own piece of the action," Hayden said in an interview, in which he expanded on the remarks to his staff.

He said he has created a new "board of directors" inside the agency that will begin breaking down walls that have separated the Directorate of Operations, which is the clandestine service, and the Directorate of Intelligence, which is the analytic arm, and even the science and technology group, which comes up with new ideas. One result will be to limit much of the independence each directorate had in the past and centralize more authority with Hayden.

In the past, the CIA director was partially diverted from details of agency operations because, as director of central intelligence, he had to spend time as leader of the 16 agencies that make up the intelligence community. John D. Negroponte, as national intelligence director, now plays that role.

As part of his integration planning, Hayden wants to have new employees, no matter which career path they follow, spend more than the current day-and-a-half orientation period together learning about the agency.

"There could be a basic training period of up to two weeks," he said, before those destined for clandestine service head down to "the Farm" for six months' training at Camp Peary near Williamsburg, while analysts remain in the Washington area for courses in analytic tradecraft termed in the past "CIA 101" and "CIA 201."

Human intelligence expansion is another goal of Hayden's, as it has been for his two predecessors since the Sept. 11 attacks showed a lack of on-the-ground intelligence sources in the world of terrorism.

One facet of intelligence reorganization that works in the CIA's favor is that the agency now oversees the National Clandestine Service, coordinating all overseas spying activities whether carried on by the CIA, the Pentagon or the FBI.

Hayden said Clandestine Service leadership has begun setting uniform standards for human intelligence training so that case officers for all U.S. overseas spying efforts follow the same standards for vetting potential agents, writing reports and sharing information when appropriate.

For the analysts, Hayden said he plans to put more emphasis on "expertise and time on target and experience," along with "pushing analysts overseas." This continues efforts to reform past practices, in which promotions went to analysts who had served in different types of jobs instead of to those who developed deep expertise in one area. "That reward now could go to someone who has been looking at Iran for 14 years," Hayden said.

He also promised there will be a study of the trend of contracting out intelligence jobs with private firms. "We don't want to be a farm system for these new firms," Hayden said, noting that private companies sometimes lure away young officers and analysts once they have their security clearances and have completed a few years with the agency.