Please engage with at least one question, or feel free to make up your own question and respond to it:
1. What was the most surprising thing you read about for class this week? Why?
2. The central finding of this chapter is that the practices that make individual intelligence agencies strong are exactly what makes collaboration with other agencies different. Based on what you've read, can you think of any ways to try to make collaboration easier or more palatable for the officers? (I'm not asking you to fix the intelligence community here! I just want to see how you are thinking through the organizational patterns we've read about.)
3. Read and respond to this current events news item about the intelligence community, coronavirus, taskings, interactions between intelligence officers and policymakers, and other things we've talked about in class:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-administration-asks-intelligence-agencies-find-out-whether-china-who-n1194451
Readings:
Dissertation, Chapter 3 (pages 57-87)
PLEASE ONLY ANSWER ONE OF THE QUESTIONS AND INDICATE WHICH ONE YOU'VE CHOSEN
Untitled 57 Chapter 3: Acculturation, Status, and Collaboration at CIA and NCTC CIA as a “Greedy Institution” The CIA certainly embodies the greedy institution. Lewis Coser coined the term and states that greedy institutions “seek exclusive and undivided loyalty… they attempt to reduce the claims of competing roles… and erect strong boundaries between insiders and outsiders so as to hold the insider in close bonds to the community to which he owes total loyalty” (1974, p. 4-5). CIA draws that boundary with the very first communication it has with prospective employees and reinforces the line each step of the way before an applicant ever walks through the front door of the Headquarters building. Before the Agency even makes an offer of employment, the processing paperwork states: “Be discreet about your employment processing. Do not discuss information about your processing or prospects for employment with individuals beyond immediate family.” The acceptance letter begins with the usual congratulations and instructions, followed by: “It is important that you limit the number of people you tell about your new employer. During the ACCESS [orientation] class you will receive a briefing on what you may tell friends, apartment managers, mortgage companies, and others.” Even before the prospective employee gets the job, the CIA begins to separate the employee from all non-CIA personnel. The background and clearance processing procedures are extreme—perhaps not too extreme for this type of job, but certainly extreme compared to hoops through which most other employers expect employees to jump. Before he even really knows what the job is going to be, the prospective employee must open not only his own life to the CIA, but also the lives of his family, friends, and anyone he has ever chosen to or been assigned to live with, especially foreign nationals. He must submit to days of physical and psychological testing, including a harrowing polygraph examination, during which 58 the examiner makes accusations of crimes unthinkable to the applicant—in my case, over the course of eight hours, I was accused of hiding contacts in the Irish Republican Army and of abusing drugs, among other things. No matter how squeaky-clean the background, this experience leaves the applicant shaken at best, not to mention utterly convinced that there is no chance of passing all of the requirements. When the Conditional Offer of Employment arrives in the mail, then, the surprise is genuine, and, in perhaps a classic example of cognitive dissonance, there is a flood of emotion including honor, bewilderment, gratitude, patriotism, and an overwhelming sense of belonging to what they call “the Company.” All of this happens without ever really getting any information from the Agency itself: the nature of the job is unclear; contact people only ever give their first names; and caller ID does not reveal Agency phone numbers, so the applicant must remain passive and beholden to the Agency’s schedule, ready to jump when the Agency says to jump. The prospective employee simply must take everything on faith. This is an excellent way for the CIA to engender loyalty: the Agency features a self-selecting group of patriotic volunteers, and everything is freely given up front with no guarantees, both of which create a bond with the organization before the first day. In the language of the greedy institution, Coser puts it this way: Nor are greedy institutions typically marked by external coercion. On the contrary, they tend to rely on voluntary compliance and to evolve means of activating loyalty and commitment. The monk or the bolshevik, the Jesuit or the sectarian have chosen a way of life in which they engage themselves totally even though they may be subject to rigid social controls… Greedy institutions aim at maximizing assent to their styles of life by appearing highly desirable to the participants. (1974, p. 6) The ways in which the Agency appears “highly desirable to the participants” hardly need elucidation here; for most people there is some combination of a sense of patriotism or 59 civic duty mixed with Hollywood’s imagery, which, though inaccurate, is essentially the only imagery available to the applicant before the Agency makes an offer. At this point, the loyalty created by CIA is already head and shoulders above the rest of the Intelligence Community’s agencies. Each agency is different in terms of the rigor of the clearance process: some agencies do not require a polygraph, for instance, or require a less severe form of it. There is certainly a sense of pride or camaraderie—some might call it smugness—that comes with having survived the most difficult onboarding process in the Intelligence Community. When I started at CIA, I was placed into a four-day orientation program known as ACCESS. The stated purpose (and one actual purpose) of the program is of course to introduce new employees to the ways of the Agency, which are no doubt different from what they are used to on the “outside.” New “EODs,” as they are called (as in Entrance On Duty), learn how to classify documents, how to operate the technology systems, how to navigate the often Byzantine bureaucracy, etc. But these four days also serve as an intense bonding experience coupled with a series of symbolic separations between the outside world and the new CIA world of which the new EOD is now a part. The idea of the greedy institution might echo Goffman’s (1961) idea of the total institution, but it is important to note that there is a clear distinction between the two concepts. From Coser: There are evident overlaps between “total” and “greedy” institutions, yet these terms denote basically different social phenomena. Goffman focuses on physical arrangements separating the “inmate” from the outside world, while I shall show that greedy institutions, though they may in some cases utilize the device of physical isolation, tend to rely mainly on non-physical mechanisms to separate the insider from the outsider and to erect symbolic boundaries between them. The celibate servants of the Church or the Court Jew serving a German prince with his whole person are not physically separated from the rest of the population with which they are, on the contrary, engaged in continuous social intercourse. They are nevertheless socially distant from the ordinary run of citizens because of the nature of their statuses and prerogatives. (1974, pp. 5-6) 60 Thus, the loyalty and separation engendered by the greedy institution is, for the most part, psychological rather than physical (although CIA analysts certainly spend their fair share of overtime physically at the office). For lack of a better way of putting it, the CIA gets into its employees’ heads. The CIA does not leave the mind once the employee leaves the CIA at the end of the day, as illustrated in the grocery store example below. The Agency way of seeing the world colors all relationships and even mundane interactions in the “real” world. Of course, it is also true that the CIA certainly employs the instruments of physical separation (Goffman, 1961): the Headquarters compound is heavily guarded by armed officers and other security features such as barbed wire and impenetrable doors, although these are ostensibly to keep unauthorized personnel out, not necessarily to keep the “inmates” inside. Because of the work with classified sources and methods, the work at the Agency is not the type that employees can physically take home. Therefore, the Agency’s grip on external relationships and interactions outside the office must be mental. Lindsay Moran, a former case officer who wrote a best-selling memoir entitled Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy, said early in her training that “every Agency officer, I would come to realize, carries home his job in the form of unparalleled stress and near- constant anxiety” (Moran, 2005, p. 37). One analyst told me the following story about a routine trip to the grocery store that was turned on its head just days into her employment, illustrating the way in which the CIA psychologically infiltrates even mundane circumstances: I actually saw someone I knew to be under cover at a Safeway [grocery store] once, and had to pretend I didn’t know them or recognize them because we hadn’t figured out a cover story ahead of time for how we knew each other. You constantly have to be in that mode. Being a brand new EOD, I wasn’t sure I’d pulled off the necessary face work and became obsessed with trying to determine if other people in the store had noticed that I had recognized this person, and then I became conscious of trying not to stare at them. I was instantly suspicious of everyone. They [the CIA] have you thinking enemies are everywhere. It went 61 on and on in a loop in my head. One minute I was thinking about what I’d like to have for dinner, and the next minute I’m in a James Bond movie in my head—but not in the fun Hollywood way, in the terrified, did-I-blow-his-cover kind of way. Friendships and Marriage: CIA Endogamy The CIA has valid reasons for placing restrictions on the types of people with which its employees can associate, particularly spouses. Any unvetted person is simply a security risk, so all potential spouses—including American citizens—must undergo a background check similar to that for prospective employees before a marriage can take place, even if the spouse never expresses an interest in working for the CIA. The process is even more difficult for employees under cover. Officially, the CIA does not place many restrictions on friendships unless the friend is a foreign national. Unofficially, however, the stress, pace, and secrecy of the workplace continue to intensify the line between “insiders” and “outsiders.” In the language of greedy institutions, Coser puts it this way: Greedy institutions are characterized by the fact that they exercise pressures on component individuals to