‘Beyond Repair’ a call to scrap the CIA and start over

Fire the spies. That’s what one of them, now retired, is urging. If we don’t, he says, America is in even bigger trouble than we thought.

Do you think of the Central Intelligence Agency as brave and daring young patriots parachuting behind enemy lines, facing the real possibility of torture and death if captured. Or perhaps you picture debonair types in trench coats gliding through the dark streets of a foreign capital to ferret out our enemies’ secrets?

If only, says former counterterrorism operative Charles S. Faddis. There is no doubt that unbelievably brave men and women quietly risk their lives all over the world today, anonymously, in the shadows, separated from their families for long periods of time, so we can live out our lives in this beautiful, stable, democratic America. But all too often they serve alongside an overweight, out-of-shape, medically unfit bureaucrat in a 9-to-5 job, flipping the calendar pages toward retirement, who is a greater danger to his colleagues, in the event he gets sent on assignment, than to any al-Qaida types he might trip over in the field.

And the guy’s boss? A battle expert, Faddis says — that is, an expert in political trench warfare in Washington, who hopes his greatest feat of derring-do will be to claw as far as possible up the managerial ladder at headquarters and retire with full pension while avoiding rocking the boat — hence someone who vetoes risky operations in the field that might attract political heat and attention back home.

Faddis lays out his case in "Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA." He describes his former employer as a calcified, risk-averse bureaucracy, a cumbersome monolith grossly unsuited for the volatile, constantly shifting battlefield of the war on terror — a war that involves Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, South America, and, as we painfully know, the United States.

The catastrophic failure of America’s leading spy agency to unmask the 9/11 attacks was alone enough to justify disbanding the agency and starting over. Instead, as Faddis points out, the U.S. government’s response was to trowel on more bureaucracy, on top of and around and inside the CIA, making America’s intelligence-gathering capacity and reactive ability infinitely less flexible and responsive than before — in dealing with a vicious, mobile, adaptable and technically skilled enemy whose field of battle is wherever on the globe it decides to strike.

Faddis proposes a return to an intelligence agency modeled on the old Office of Strategic Services, the little (by today’s standards) spy agency that took on the Axis Powers in World War II. Its officers were the best and brightest, but also unconventional, creative, unquestionably brave, and willing, yes, eager, to risk their lives for America. Bureaucrats they were not — but they also didn’t fear that they would be second-guessed back home, called back for congressional hearings or used in the competing political causes of successive administrations.

Warning: If in some dark little recess of your mind you wonder whether something like 9/11 — or worse — could happen again, Faddis’ book will disturb your sleep. Iran toils away on underground nuclear facilities while its wild-eyed leader spews threats to Israel and beyond. Vast stretches of our borders, north and south, remain unguarded. If undocumented workers can slip into the country with relative ease, who is to say someone with more deadly intent couldn’t — or hasn’t? What danger could come from an ordinary looking ship a few miles offshore from a major U.S. city? What’s to prevent the introduction of a poison into a big city’s water supply, or a cyber attack that wrecks the nation’s vulnerable electrical grid, or the unleashing of a biological horror on a crowded airliner or subway?

Can we be sure that the intelligence service that couldn’t see 9/11 coming can see what’s coming next? What does this nation need to do to make sure none of that ever happens? That is Faddis’ question — and it ought to be ours as well.