"One has to be concerned about the standing on the CIA," said one senior CIA official with three decades of experience. "I worry about the whole system. It's in risk of losing its elan."
The new CIA, predicted CIA officials, will be more narrowly, but intensely, focused on using U.S. spies and foreign agents to collect enemy secrets.
CIA Director Porter J. Goss and others in his agency would be under Negroponte's leadership.
(Manuel Balce Ceneta -- AP)
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In a recent executive order, Bush told Goss to increase the number of U.S. spies by 50 percent over a period of years. Goss gave his plans for achieving that goal to the president last week. CIA officials declined to describe the plans, even in vague terms, because they are classified.
Advocates of the reorganization say the new version of the CIA will be able to focus on its core mission. Gathering human intelligence "is simply going to be front and center," said Jamie S. Gorelick, a member of the 9/11 commission, which recommended the legislation. "They were trying to do too many things and weren't doing them well."
But, Gorelick said, "I can understand why folks at the CIA are despondent. They don't know what Goss wants them to do."
Some intelligence experts worry that the reorganization will leave the CIA dangerously isolated from the heartbeat of U.S. policymaking.
"You won't get the cross-fertilization, the healthy interaction between the collectors and the analyzers that you need to do intelligence work well," said Fred Hitz, a former CIA inspector general.
"When you isolate yourself, you become detached from the policy issues," a former head of the clandestine service said. "You don't let the air in. The smaller the group that approves a covert action, the greater the propensity for failure."
Even the CIA director's role in supervising human intelligence might be challenged by the reorganization, several intelligence officials said. They said Negroponte could decide to appoint his own deputy for human intelligence who would decide whether the CIA or another agency or department would be the most suited to a specific spy operation.
"The CIA is a wounded gazelle on the African plain," said another former senior intelligence official, lamenting the encroachment by other agencies onto the CIA's traditional territory. "It's a pile of bleached bones."
