Derring-Do Becomes Don’t

If you want to know what’s wrong with the CIA -- and these days who doesn’t? -- start with the fact that it’s almost 60 years old. How many 60-year-olds do you know who take insane risks, rethink cherished shibboleths and produce brilliant flashes of insight? That is what’s required to win the war on Islamist terror.

But, like many other prosperous geezers, the CIA would prefer to hit the links and avoid uncouth places where nobody has heard of Metamucil.

Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of bright, energetic people at the CIA (I’ve met some of them), but, as the reports of the 9/11 commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee attest, they work in a sclerotic institution.

Fixing this problem is going to require a lot more than a new intelligence czar -- unless the person picked for that post plans to emulate Tom Clancy’s fictional hero, Jack Ryan, by personally nabbing bad guys between meetings. What’s needed is not another organizational reshuffle but a time machine that would return the CIA to the glory days when it was young and frisky.

The CIA grew out of the Office of Strategic Services, formed in 1942 under the leadership of William Donovan, who wasn’t known as “Wild Bill” for nothing. A World War I hero, a wealthy lawyer and an incurable romantic, he molded the OSS into his own image: dashing, slightly madcap and highly effective.

Donovan came from the upper crust, and that’s where he recruited from too. As analysts, he hired a who’s who of notable scholars, such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Walt Rostow and William Langer. Allen Dulles, nephew of one secretary of State and grandson of another, ran the station in Bern, Switzerland. Even Julia Child was on the payroll -- before her cook-show fame.

This led to sniffing that OSS stood for “Oh So Social,” but Donovan’s high-powered recruits did impressive work, often utilizing connections that no humdrum bureaucrat could possibly have cultivated.

Recently, we’ve been told that the CIA was too scared to send agents into Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Donovan, by contrast, sent teams into Nazi-occupied Europe and Japanese-occupied Asia to run a guerrilla war. Donovan was most excited by daring espionage and covert action, not sterile analysis.

The OSS had its share of failures -- for instance, not foreseeing the 1944 German offensive in the Ardennes -- but it was widely recognized as the epitome of an effective intelligence agency.

The CIA, created in 1947 and staffed by many OSS veterans, was imbued with the same can-do spirit -- at first. The agency was willing to do whatever it took to combat communism, whether starting up Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, funding non-Marxist politicians and intellectuals in Western Europe, supporting counterinsurgencies from Greece to the Philippines or overthrowing leftist governments in Iran and Guatemala.

The CIA was guilty of abuses and blunders (e.g., the failed plots to bump off Fidel Castro), but that was the price you paid for trying to win the Cold War.

By the 1970s, unfortunately, the agency’s gung-ho mentality had gone the way of fedoras and narrow ties. The Senate’s Church committee and the Carter administration effectively neutered the Cold Warriors.

William Casey, an old OSS hand who became CIA director in 1981, temporarily revived the spirit of “Wild Bill” by supporting anti-communist guerrillas in places like Nicaragua and Afghanistan. The Iran-Contra scandal and Casey’s death in 1987 put an end to that renaissance.

There was another brief burst of life after 9/11, when the usual restrictions were temporarily cast off and CIA officers were dispatched to Afghanistan again, this time with orders to bring back Osama bin Laden’s head in a box.

The problem is that this kind of free-wheeling approach can’t last very long amid Langley’s stultifying bureaucracy. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to shut down the CIA and start from scratch. But that would be expensive and wasteful. Failing that, why not let the CIA continue with its routine tasks while creating a small, elite outfit with only one mission: to eradicate the Islamist terror network.

Call it OSS II. It would be free to recruit the best people from the CIA but also from the outside, whether from Wall Street investment banks or Muslim mosques in Detroit. It would seek the kind of people who don’t want lifetime sinecures and offer them ample rewards -- say $250,000 a year -- to take risks that ordinary GS-10s won’t.

And then it would unleash them with only one guideline: Get results.

Of course, it’ll never happen.

The CIA may not know what’s going on in Tehran or Pyongyang, but it’s all too plugged in to Washington. With its mastery of political infighting, the agency is well placed to defeat any attempts at serious reform.

At least until the next 9/11.