With Spies Like These . . .

Intelligence professionals have to sort through these kinds of problems all the time. But it's rarely, if ever, possible to come to a definitive conclusion.

So the CIA, on the eve of war, may have had something close to the dream recruit -- a member of Hussein's inner circle -- and he was providing intelligence on the most salient question of the war -- did Iraq possess WMD? -- and he was right. But what good did the intelligence do? None.

This shouldn't be a surprise. Although we dedicate enormous resources to recruiting "human sources," there just aren't many good ones available. The central problem is that the people who actually know the secrets we'd be interested in aren't recruitable. Officials at the highest reaches of foreign governments have wealth and power and usually no compelling reason to put those at risk. The most knowledgeable members of terrorist groups are ideologically committed and aren't going to work for the CIA or anyone else.

Unfortunately, everyone expects the CIA to recruit sources with access to important secret intelligence, and both Congress and the public count it as a "human intelligence failure" when there aren't any such sources to tip us off before major events. After each of these "failures" -- the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Sept. 11 attacks, Iraq's non-weapons -- the usual suspects are trotted out to explain what happened: Cuts in CIA funding as far back as the Carter presidency devastated the Directorate of Operations (poor Stansfield Turner is still getting blamed for CIA failures 30 years after he reduced the number of overseas slots for case officers); case officers don't receive adequate language training; Anglo-American case officers can't pass for locals in the world's foreign bazaars; and the CIA uses inadequate cover arrangements for its officers abroad. But the actual explanation is much simpler: The CIA can't recruit top-quality agents because it isn't possible.

This does not mean that there isn't some useful intelligence to be gleaned from various human sources -- just that these sources aren't always going to be recruited agents and that they aren't going to prevent terrorist attacks or change the outcome of wars. Sympathetic Europeans who work at companies involved in the illicit transfer of nuclear components might help us understand how the underground nuclear supply chain works. Scientists who attend highly specialized conferences might glean valuable insights into foreign capabilities.

But the majority of CIA agents do not fall into even these less glamorous categories. Most are worthless as sources of information, mid-level bureaucrats with no access to vital intelligence. They are recruited to give case officers something to do (at least they were when I worked at the CIA) since recruiting truly valuable sources is close to impossible.

Although the CIA probably can't alter this equation in any fundamental way, there are some ways to change how agents are recruited that would have a positive effect. Far fewer case officers, working in teams that carefully targeted potential agents, might be a good start. If the CIA had six or seven such teams, with 10 members each, and each team hoped to recruit a single agent every few years, the number of valuable agents might go up and the number of useless agents would definitely go down. Potential foreign agents should also have to pass a simple test before being selected as recruitment targets: Can they currently produce, or are there concrete reasons to believe they will eventually produce, information that would alter U.S. policies or actions? If the answer is no, recruiting and running a foreign agent isn't worth the personal risk to the agent, not to mention the risk to the United States in a world that is already paranoid about the CIA and where international reputation is an increasingly vital component of national security.

Joseph Weisberg worked in the CIA's Directorate of Operations from 1990 to 1994. His novel "An Ordinary Spy" will be published next month.