Tanji on Orientalism, HUMINT and the IC Bureaucracy
Blogfriend Michael Tanji weighs in on my “Orientalism” post with the bureaucratic facts of life:
Don’t misconstrue what HUMINT is about though. This is not the FBI and the goal is not to turn Bob Smith into the Islamic Donnie Brasco; the goal is to become the guy who meets, befriends, and manages the Donnie Brascos. Regardless, as tough as some say it is to get into the mix, clearly it does not take a degree in rocket science to make the grade; mostly it is about a willingness to put up with life in the third world.
….A day in the life of an analyst, functionally speaking, is not unlike that of many other cube-dwelling, research/writer-oriented jobs in the world. For a collector though it is in many ways unparalleled in both hazards as well as drudgery. The hazards are fairly obvious, since intelligence work is more or less illegal everywhere; drudgery because for every 30-minute meeting one has there are hours if not days of preparation necessary to help avoid the hazards. Use a car? Gotta document why and where to. Spend money? Gotta document why and who to and how much. Everything requires documentation, which is standard procedure for a bureaucracy, but extremely inconvenient if you are running around the hinterlands with a bunch of guys who would get more than a little suspicious if you started asking for receipts after every meal.
….Setting aside the very real psychological and physical issues involved in such a strategy, consider the equally real bureaucratic issues. This person(s) have to be recruited (creates a file); hired (admin shuffle and more papers to the file); trained far away from N. VA (more expense, admin and paper); and paid (more admin and paper). Now he’s an employee, he’s got all sorts of fun stuff like equal opportunity and ethnic sensitivity training to take, performance evaluations, etc., etc. The system isn’t designed for people or missions like this, so it’s either develop a series of waivers (more admin and paper) or do things off the books (dangerous and, depending on your point of view, more stuff-of-movies).
(In case you were wondering, the references to ‘admin and paper’ allude to both the level of effort involved, the fact that more and more people would know what was going on, and the fact that such a situation invites leaks.)
Read the rest here.
February 22nd, 2008 at 6:50 am
Hold on now. Are you actually saying that someone recruited off the streets of Islamabad to be a Donnie Brasco handler type actually has to go through sensitivity training? Please tell me I misunderstood? This just can’t be?
February 22nd, 2008 at 11:31 am
Now he’s an employee, he’s got all sorts of fun stuff like equal opportunity and ethnic sensitivity training to take, performance evaluations, etc., etc. The system isn’t designed for people or missions like this, so it’s either develop a series of waivers (more admin and paper) or do things off the books… Are you actually saying that someone recruited off the streets of Islamabad to be a Donnie Brasco handler type actually has to go through sensitivity training? Please tell me I misunderstood? This just can’t be?…I can actually see the sense of the intention. Consider that USA spying has long been the province of OSS-type patrician frat boys. That crowd needed to be educated in the dull blandness of Pentagon culture — otherwise they would pull out silenced .22 pistols during Congressional hearings and shoot their initials into the ceiling. "Sensitivity training," while ineffective, was the best that the state could come up with. "Performance evaluations" are pretty much unavoidable unless you work as a meth chemist.I think it was Lind who wrote that to visualize the Defense establishment, one ought to imagine an obese brontosaurus with three decaying teeth. The sad state of USA HUMINT is the belly of the brontosaurus.