Commentary
President Biden has given the U.S. intelligence community 90 days to figure out where COVID-19 came from.
Really?
American taxpayers just might wonder what they are getting for their $80 billion that funds the nation’s mammoth intelligence bureaucracy each year.
Shouldn’t the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—the crème-de-la-crème of the intelligence community—already know about COVID?
In fact, shouldn’t they have known in late 2019 when the virus first appeared?
That is the CIA’s job after all—to know what’s going on in China and what Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party leadership are thinking and doing.
Hopefully, the CIA prioritizes China over, say, Slovenia.
Perhaps the CIA is just not very good at spying. And that is its principal duty: to obtain secrets by persuading foreigners to betray their countries or organizations for America’s interests.
Yes, this isn’t always easy. Nonetheless, it is what the CIA is supposed to do.
One does hear it argued—or better said, used as an excuse—that China is a “hard target.” And it is. China’s Ministry of State Security’s successes in rolling up CIA Chinese agent networks in recent times have been colossal intelligence disasters.
But being “hard” is a poor excuse. The intelligence targets most important to the United States are usually the most difficult. Imagine an airline pilot suggesting he should not be expected to land in a 30-knot crosswind because it would be hard.
Some nationalities are recruitable by the dozen in an afternoon, with a decent lunch and a little money. Russians and Islamic terrorists? Not so easy. Chinese? Not easy but not impossible.
Operating inside China is tough. But Chinese do travel overseas. And in dictatorships, like China, one’s position and even life can be precarious. Indeed, many Chinese of means and power are looking for overseas bolt-holes and places to stash their wealth and their relatives.
These are cracks for CIA officers to exploit. It takes patience and effort.
But if promotion in the agency’s Directorate of Operations (which does most of the recruiting) is still based on “scalps”—regardless of whose head they come off—guess which targets get the attention? The easy ones.
And a little … ahem … deception to jump-start a career isn’t unheard of. One recipient of the agency’s top case officer award offered sage advice—with a straight face—that “You should go to an agent meeting with the intelligence already written,” and “It’s okay to write what an agent would have said.”
In other words: make it up … or in plainer English … lie.
As for fake recruitments, there probably isn’t a current or former CIA case officer alive who can’t rattle off a few examples.
Another problem with the China target (and other hard ones) is language. Learning Chinese takes time and that’s “dead time” the way promotion boards look at it. Best to head off to Africa and rack up some easy scalps.
Adding to the spying challenge, after 9/11 the CIA got into paramilitary operations big time. That’s a lot easier than pursuing and convincing “hard targets” to give you information.