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| Home Front: Politix |
| Ex-CIA spy sez Agency trapped in Cold War mode |
| 2004-12-23 |
| In 1999, a year after the CIA's director declared war on al-Qaeda, the agency was still training its spy recruits in the art of working embassy cocktail parties and giving James Bond-esque classes in evasive driving, according to a book by a woman who spent five years in the CIA's clandestine service. Even after the Sept. 11 attacks, wrote Lindsay Moran in her forthcoming book, Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy, the CIA was slow to change espionage tactics. Sept. 11, she wrote, "sent everyone at Headquarters into a tailspin" trying to understand the intelligence failures that let the terrorist plot go undetected. But when Moran, then stationed in Macedonia, developed a source who claimed to know Islamic extremists, her overseers at the CIA's Directorate of Operations cabled her that because "Subject may at one time have had terrorist ties," Moran should "cease and desist from any further contact with Subject." Two years later, after a stint working on Iraq issues before the U.S.-led invasion, Moran resigned from the CIA. She says she was frustrated with the crimp her career had put on her personal life and was disillusioned by CIA bureaucracy. Her account is the latest in a series of critiques that have portrayed an agency slow to respond to new kinds of threats in countries that don't have U.S. embassies and where cocktail parties violate Islamic law. "When I was in training in 1999, the agency was still using this paradigm for training that, so far as I can tell, was implemented sometime in the Cold War," Moran said last week in an interview. Moran said she has friends at the CIA who have just completed training to be "case officers" for the Directorate of Operations. "I've asked them, 'Are they still using the same training model?' They say they are. We still have spy trainees who are being asked to troll the diplomatic cocktail circuit." Her year of training at "The Farm" — the CIA's field academy for clandestine officers at a base outside Williamsburg, Va. — included paramilitary exercises, mock ambushes and parachute jumps. It also had a section in evasive driving that students called "crash-and-burn" and an exercise in which students at a pretend embassy reception sought to recruit "foreigners" to spy for the CIA. She completed training in December 1999, a year after then-CIA director George Tenet, in a memo to his top lieutenants, declared that the CIA was at war with al-Qaeda. "I want no resources spared in this effort," Tenet wrote. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |