US Spy Agency CIA Announces Structural Reforms: Forms Cyber Directorate To Tackle Digital Terror

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States has announced a major organisational overhaul. The CIA director John Brennan in a memo posted on the organisation’s website announced the changes. Notable among them are the creation of an entirely new wing known as the Directorate of Digital Innovation. This will be the fifth wing of the American spy agency.

The new wing has been designed to improve handling of cyber threats and for enhanced use of digital technology to streamline management, quality of recruitment and training besides expediting intra-agency information sharing, reports The Guardian. “Never has the need for the full and unfettered integration of our capabilities been greater,” Brennan said in the memo and compared the restructuring process to the agency’s post-9/11 response to the “emergence of global terrorism”.

As a foremost spy agency, the CIA is vested with many important responsibilities including protecting the life of the President. It went for a major personnel overhaul in January and removed many assistant directors. In the past few years, the CIA has been going through a restructuring process and the agency also took to drone warfare in Yemen and other places, marking an important transformation in the spy agency's functional domain akin to a paramilitary organisation.

Mission Centres

Apart from creating the Digital directorate, Brennan’s blueprint also aims at establishing 10 new “Mission centers” where the expertise and operations of a particular region will be pooled together to tackle various threats. The CIA will continue to retain its longtime agency directorates, with two of them taking different names. There will be no change in two directorates -- the Directorate of Science and Technology and Directorate of Support Handling and administrative work. The National clandestine service, which runs covert actions, will be renamed as Directorate of Operations, while the Directorate of Intelligence will also be renamed as Directorate of Analysis.

External Threats

Meanwhile, Euro News report looks at the background of the revamp and noted that the reforms are coming in the aftermath of many scandals that rocked the agency, including charges of torture and alleged spying on the U.S. Congress. It said the new plans seem to place more thrust on addressing external threats than solving the internal problems. The creation of new Mission centres and recasting thousands of spies are part of the plan to target new geographies. The current restructuring also seeks to keep spies and analysts separate. But the reforms are not seen bound by any deadline for implementation, and the report said these changes will take several years to reflect in the agency.

Flawed Reform

Tim Weiner, author of the Award-winning book “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA”, questioned the wisdom behind Brennan’s organisation revamp. He said “Intelligence is not about corporate structures" and drew the attention of Brennan to the definition of intelligence by Sun Tzu in The Art of War, 26 centuries ago, as “know your enemy.” That is the job of spies and it requires knowing foreign languages and going out into the world and talking to many, including enemies. He quipped that putting out a power point that creates a new flowchart for the architecture of intelligence is above that problem.

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