CIA acquires new U.S. clandestine leadership role [the new National Clandestine Service....]

The CIA will lead a new clandestine service designed to coordinate all traditional U.S. spying activities overseas, including those of the FBI and Pentagon, top intelligence officials said on Thursday.

As part of an ambitious strategy to rebuild U.S. human intelligence after debilitating lapses over Iraq and the September 11, 2001, attacks, the new National Clandestine Service, or NCS, will operate out of the spy agency under a director reporting to CIA Director Porter Goss.

The new service will act as the national authority for the integration and coordination of human intelligence operations, which involve spying by people rather than satellites and other sophisticated technology.

Intelligence experts view the service, which won President George W. Bush's approval in recent days, as an effort to restore some of the stature which the CIA lost when congressionally mandated reforms largely stripped the agency of its community role last year by establishing the position of director of national intelligence, held by John Negroponte.

"I am confident that with the creation of the NCS, the U.S. government will have a more cohesive and truly national human intelligence capability," Negroponte said in a statement announcing the service.

"This is another positive step in building an intelligence community that is more unified, coordinated, and effective, and is better positioned to meet the increasingly complex intelligence challenges of the future," he said.

With the new clandestine service based at his agency, Goss will have a dual role as CIA director and "National HUMINT Manager." HUMINT is bureaucratic parlance for human intelligence.

This should be an agency that doesn't exist. If the people in this group see themselves as government employees who expect to get a fixed monthly salary and work their way up an org chart, all the while getting semi-annual reviews and salary increases, we're doomed.

The people in this group should be people who can swim in the waters where they are expected to swim. They should, frankly, include people like another Johnny Walker Lindh who would be prepared to live in the dirt for years to get near Bin Ladin. They should include bankers and lawyers and gunrunners and drug runners and real estate brokers and "ex" commandos, they should include people who are actively involved in the politics of the target country, both for you and against you. They should focus on building a kind of mafia that can operate below the radar in a target country, and influence its politics, and reveal its intentions because they are actively involved in determining those intentions.

They should focus on building another kind of mafia that would intersect with terrorist organizations such as Bin Ladin's, which is where the gunrunners and drug runners and bankers and religious misfits like Walker come in. They should focus on building organizations that don't know they are ours, and developing a network of people who don't know they are working for us.

In other words, just like the old days, before spying became a "career" with a pension.

Good move. Hopefully, this will get overseas human intelligence out from under the control of the incompetent lefties which seem to have been populating the CIA since at least the post-Church Commission time period. And further, hopefully this new department will not follow the "Torricelli rules" which, IIRC, Congress rescinded but are still being followed on an administrative level within the CIA. Torricelli could not have hamstrung the intelligence community more if he had been in the direct pay of a hostile foreign power (hmmm...).

"the new National Clandestine Service, or NCS, will operate out of the spy agency under a director reporting to CIA Director Porter Goss."

In other words, the new agency skips the corrupt old CIA bureaucrats and reports only to patriot Porter Goss.

Which is to say, this is all part of the on-going purge of the leftists who have embedded themselves deep into most of our old intel agencies (and we can't just close those agencies down in the middle of a World War ... we have to transition in the new guys).

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