CIA Operations Outsourcing

Yesterday the NYT ran this story on the CIA trying to get Blackwater PMCs to work counterterrorism around 2002 or so.

What's interesting to me is that they attempted it in earnest but still had significant doubts about the wisdom of the program, which eventually won out. What that probably means is that the Directorate of Operations needed more personnel and didn't know of a way to get them any faster than hiring them, even with the amount of risk involved in bringing private contractors into a clandestine environment.

I've read two books on this particular period; one by Ron Suskind called "The One Percent Doctrine" and the other by Bob Woodward called "Bush at War". Both are very credible journalists, so I'm willing to trust what they wrote on the subject.

After 9/11, the intelligence services spent a lot of time hunting shadows in an attempt to stop a "second wave", another attack or set of attacks that was supposed to follow on the heels of the 9/11 attacks. For a time, analysts didn't know what to regard as a credible threat and what could be ignored, so a lot of items that were unrealistic still made their way up the chain, which forced the people in charge to react to them. Intelligence services were jumpy, didn't have a realistic threat assessment, and the combination probably convinced DCI George Tenet that he had two options: start ignoring things that the Directorate of Intelligence told him shouldn't be ignored, or beef up the Directorate of Operations to try to augment the CIA's ability to prosecute those threats.

With concerns over Pakistan dealing in nuclear secrets with al-Qaeda mounting - a concern that served as a trump card in "second wave" discussions - the decision probably looked painful but obvious.