Original Rorschach Junwu sub-plane
On October 7, local time, William Burns, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), announced that the CIA would set up a "China Mission Center" to ensure that the CIA could concentrate resources on responding to the evolving China.
In his statement, Burns said China was "the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st century." ”
"In our history, the CIA has stood up to any challenge we face," the statement said. "Today, we are facing the toughest geopolitical test of the new era of great power competition, and the CIA will be at the forefront of this effort."
Previously, China-related missions were under the CIA's East Asia-Pacific Mission Center, which did not have a separate division. A senior CIA official said the CIA would send more officials, linguists, technicians and experts around the world to gather intelligence on China, recruit and train more Mandarin-speaking staff, and reduce the review time for employees from 2 years to 6 months.
I'm just training myself, and I'm now curious where the CIA is going to recruit these Mandarin-speaking employees.
This "China Mission Center" has been thought about by the CIA for a long time. The Wall Street Journal notes that the concept was first proposed by former U.S. President Barack Obama's CIA director, Brennan, "If there's any country that deserves a 'mission center' at the CIA, it's China." ”
In addition to specifically targeting China, the CIA has singled out other priorities for its work, including terrorism and "aggressive Russia, provocative North Korea, and hostile Iran."
Although the posture is quite large, just a few days before the establishment of the "China Mission Center", the CIA has just been exposed to have experienced a serious overturning.
According to people familiar with the matter, senior CIA officials sent a "top-secret cable" to C.I.A. intelligence sites around the world a few days ago, saying that dozens of informants and spies recruited by the CIA from other countries had been arrested, killed, and plotted in recent years, according to people familiar with the matter.
In the cable, the CIA acknowledged that the risks of recruiting spies were high, including poor espionage techniques, too much trust in intelligence sources, underestimation of foreign intelligence agencies, and recruiting informants too quickly to ignore the risks. Meanwhile, intelligence agencies in countries such as Russia, China, Iran, and Pakistan have been pursuing C.I.A.'s informants, sometimes turning them into double agents.
As for why staff are so quick to recruit informants, a former C.I.A. official explained that the main way for CIA intelligence officers to get promoted is to develop new informants, not to see how well they do their intelligence work — for example, to find out whether informants work for other countries.
Since the assessment criterion is the number of new informants, intelligence officials naturally have to develop the downline non-stop, and whether these informants are reliable and whether they will be dangerous is not the focus of attention at all. "If something goes wrong with the agent (informant), no one is responsible." Douglas London, a former CIA agent, said, "Sometimes something is out of our control, but there are also sloppy and neglected situations, but people in senior positions are never held accountable." ”
For the CIA, "the task is greater than the security," let alone the recruited informants from other countries. However, in just a few years, dozens of informants have been lost, and the informants have become consumables for performance, and your image of "evil and powerful mysterious behind-the-scenes black hands" is difficult to maintain.
And aren't all of your agents supposed to be able to fight like Bourne in Spy Movie?
To put it bluntly, the CIA is really powerful, but not as powerful as many people think.
The powerful and mysterious image of the CIA is indeed closely related to the shaping of many movies, and the real CIA is far less omnipotent, pervasive, and even secretly manipulating the development and direction of the entire world in movies and folklore.
On the contrary, the CIA is at the bottom of the entire chain of contempt in the intelligence community.
In the beginning, the Americans were still influenced by the British in intelligence work.
In December 1940, President Roosevelt sent his old friend Colonel William Donovan to London to find out whether the British wanted to resist after seeing France's defeat. After arriving in London, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the head of the British spy agency, Menzies, told William Donovan that your American intelligence work is too bad to continue.
Upon his return in 1941, Donovan enthusiastically suggested to Roosevelt that an intelligence agency should be set up in the light of Britain. After the German blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union, Roosevelt also felt that it was impossible not to engage in intelligence, so in July 1941 he established the Intelligence Coordination Bureau (COI), with Donovan as its director.
The COI employed more than 1,800 people in its first year, and intelligence work was in full swing, but at that time the Army and Navy had their own intelligence agencies, and an FBI was nearby. These intelligence agencies in the United States were independent of each other, pulling each other's legs, and were unwilling to share intelligence with each other, and as a result, Donovan still received a call from Roosevelt and learned that Pearl Harbor had been bombed by the Japanese.
In June 1942, the COI was reorganized into the Strategic Intelligence Agency (OSS), the first true CIA agency in the United States and the predecessor of the CIA. OSS did play an important role during World War II, especially in the North African theater, providing a lot of intelligence, and after the end of World War II, the U.S. government funded the Strategic Intelligence Agency to $60 million a year, and Donovan was promoted to major general.
But OSS suffered a huge blow in the later stages of the war, the military, the State Department, the FBI were unwilling to obey Donovan and OSS, roosevelt, who supported Donovan," was equally distrustful of an intelligence agency, the media described them as "a Gestapo above all intelligence agencies", and on September 20, 1945, President Truman ordered the dissolution of the Strategic Intelligence Agency.
A year later, Truman found himself receiving daily intelligence from the Army Intelligence Agency, the Naval Intelligence Agency, the State Department's envoys abroad, the FBI, as well as the Treasury, The Department of Commerce, the Department of Agriculture, and so on.
But it can be seen from this that the CIA has never had a hand to cover the sky, and on the contrary, it has been met with hostility from the military and the FBI and other departments from the beginning, and the suspicion of the people, and a nascent intelligence service is trembling under the gaze of the big brothers.
▲Do you still want to engage in intelligence so quietly?
When it comes to secret agents, the peak of the CIA's agents was in the early days of its existence, especially during the period when it was the Strategic Intelligence Agency (OSS).
At that time, OSS was not only engaged in intelligence acquisition, but also often sent small teams to the battlefield to destroy communications and key facilities, provide guides, etc., and because the means of communication at that time were far less developed than they are now, osS's work was more dependent on the construction of spy networks.
In February 1945, OSS had only two spy groups in Berlin, and just a month later, there were thirty spy groups operating in Berlin alone, and after another month, the number became sixty. By the end of World War II, more than half of OSS's more than 20,000 employees were lurking behind enemy lines...
As for now, most CIA employees are far less thrilling than they used to be.
At present, the CIA mainly has the Analysis Division, the Operations Division, the Science and Technology Division, the Digital Innovation Division, the Logistics Division, the Mission Center and the Management Office, of which the main responsibility for the field is the Operations Division.
A large part of these field operations requires cooperation with the Ministry of Defense and the military's special forces. In the movie "The Assassination of Bin Laden", the CIA female agents are decapitated by the Navy SEAL after discovering bin Laden's whereabouts.
The Navy SEALs in Assassination of Bin Laden
The second part of the CIA's field force is mainly composed of retired special forces members recruited by it, who are called "global response staff" (GRS), which is mainly responsible for the security of the CIA's premises and provides security for intelligence personnel, belongs to the re-employment of laid-off agents, and grs members usually earn $140,000 or more a year and perform 90- or 120-day missions abroad. The most skilled GRS members have an informal name – Scorpion.
The last part of the field force is the Special Operations Center (SAC) under the CIA, which has two different operational teams: the SOG (Special Operations Group) for tactical paramilitary operations and the PAG (Political Action Group) for covert political operations, with no more than 200 people, and Bourne should belong to the SAC's agents.
The CIA's own dirty work is basically done by these people, and there are now 137 stars on the memorial wall of the CIA headquarters, and most of these martyrs belong to the Special Operations Center, and the informants recruited by the CIA abroad are certainly not on this.
It's just that these agents are far less powerful than in the movie, and if you look up the causes of death of these 137 people, you will find that many of them died in car accidents or plane crashes.
Of course, saying that the CIA is not so powerful does not mean that they have not done bad things, after all, since the beginning of their existence, they have been doing things all over the world.
But the reason why the conspiracy theories around the CIA are particularly exuberant are really not something they can control, because in many cases, the CIA is the perfect object for the president and the government, and the pot buckles more, which makes people feel that behind everything is you are a ghost?
It is estimated that when they see a lot of conspiracy theories, they themselves can't help but shout: If Lao Tzu is really so powerful, will he still be like this?
In 1975, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger assured Congress that "every action of the CIA was personally approved by the president." And in case these jobs are messed up, the pot will have to be carried by the CIA itself.
Harry Rossitsk, the CIA's chief station in New Delhi, wrote a 1977 book, "The Secret Activities of the CIA," and at the end of the book he complained bitterly about the CIA's back-and-forth attributes, the most classic example of which was Allende's election as president of Chile in 1970.
At that time, a senior government official complained: "Allende's campaign has won consecutively, why did the CIA not make an announcement?" ”
Analysts said that in fact, we have made an analysis preview, it is estimated that you did not look carefully when you read the report.
As a result, people directly came to the sentence: "Why doesn't the CIA sell more strength?" Don't let Allende come to power! ”
In addition to being subject to various restrictions at home and constantly carrying the blame, in the entire intelligence community, the CIA is also at the bottom of the entire chain of contempt, deeply despised by its counterparts in Europe and other countries.
This is not to say that they feel that the CIA has not obtained any intelligence, but that the input-output ratio is not good, and the whole day reveals a feeling of wealth and wealth, in short, they feel that the CIA is too rough.
In contrast to the United States, Britain's intelligence agencies are at the top of the entire chain of contempt.
In 1966, when Masaharu Gotoda, then deputy secretary of the Japanese Police Agency, visited michi and MI6 in Britain, a MI6 official in charge of reception made a very strange request to Gotoda, hoping that the Japanese side would provide a batch of information about the "Sorge Incident."
Gotoda Masaharu was very confused about this request from MI6 and asked the other party, "Why do you need to know about this matter until now?" Didn't that happen in the Middle of World War II? ”
The other person replied: "No, the relevant personnel are still there." Gotoda asked, "Where?" "In Shanghai, because the roots are still there, we are still pursuing."
This incident left a deep impression on Gotoda Masaharu, "The British intelligence collection work is very thorough, in-depth, and very persistent."
▲ MI6
But he was a little dismissive of the U.S. intelligence agency: "Compared with this, the U.S. intelligence agency, although large and well-funded, makes people feel that its intelligence is quite superficial." That is to say, the organization is large and the intelligence is shallow. ”
In his view, the CIA "although it is also engaged in various activities, as an intelligence agency, its approach is not smart." All in all, everything is driven by a lot of material resources. If you think about it from an intelligence point of view, I am afraid that it is not a bit calculated. It is not so much that it is not counted, but that it is difficult to see results. ”
He also said very directly that "the total number of MI5 may be fewer than the number of people in Thailand in the US Central Intelligence Agency, but the results are not lost to them."
Now that the CIA has set up a China mission center and said that it will recruit more Mandarin-speaking staff, we must of course be vigilant about this.
However, according to the CIA's industry evaluation and the wasteful behavior of recruiting informants to fight for performance, I am afraid that the people they find will come to a sentence with one mouth: Hello, I am a netizen in the north of the mainland...