John Ratcliffe, Trump’s appointee as CIA director, lately said he wants officers who are “willing to go to places no one else can go and do things that no one else can do”. This, one might have thought, is a straightforward enough description of any intelligence operative worth his keep, just as most analysts in Langley must really be fluent in foreign languages to do their jobs effectively. Certainly, Ratcliffe seems keen to only employ the best, announcing a scheme whereby serving officers would be given a golden parachute out of the agency, receiving eight months pay simply for resigning.

Yet barely had Ratcliffe opened his mouth than he faced furious attack. The CIA’s carefully cultivated friends in the press — media relations, Hollywood included, are the agency’s outstanding skill — assailed the director and the White House for a dangerous misstep. “He might be right that a leaner CIA could be meaner,” proclaimed David Ignatius in The Washington Post. “But how can he be sure the buyouts aren’t paring more muscle than fat?” Actually one must hope that many, very many, will take their chance to leave. The sad truth, confirmed by my extended work as a contractor for the CIA, to say nothing of encounters in the field, is that the Agency lost its way years ago — and now increasingly relies on secrecy to conceal its decay.

The CIA does have plenty of people who serve in “stations” overseas. That’s a dramatic term, for these places are actually humdrum offices in foreign embassies. This is where CIA officers work when they serve abroad, in full view of their host country’s intelligence services, which can keep them under constant observation if they so wish. That happens in China and Russia, of course, but also in places like Athens. Because Greece was a country where CIA employees were attacked during the Cold War, officers there are still monitored for their own good.

It is therefore obvious that officers working out of embassies find it impossible to “do things that no one else can do” — or indeed very much at all. In allied countries, CIA officers need not be detected, let alone followed, because they are “declared” to their host country. Not that this really matters: everyone knows who they are anyway.

The CIA does have another category of officers, one it strives very hard to misrepresent as the real thing, as people willing to do “what no one else can do”. These are the NOCs — the “non-official cover officers” — who do not live in diplomatic housing and do not work in diplomatic offices. Instead they live “on the economy” in regular flats and houses, pretending to be business people, or retirees, or artists, or anything else that sounds sufficiently innocuous.

That begs the question: why is Ratcliffe complaining? In theory, NOCs seem to fit the bill of dynamic field officers, and the CIA certainly does its best to keep their true identity secret. Some years ago, in fact, its officials made a huge fuss when a NOC’s identity was compromised in the course of a political controversy leading up to the Iraq War.

What is missing though, is that crucial line: “going where no one else can go”. The truth is that the most secret of all CIA secrets is that NOCs only serve in very safe countries, most unlikely to arrest (let alone torture) agents if they are detected. Think of France, Italy or Thailand: all places where reporters, tourists and maiden aunts travel safely every day.

One NOC who tripped up while trying to cajole secrets from a trade official — the latter was willing if the NOC slept with him, became indignant when she refused, and reported her to local security — did all she did (and refused to do) in a major European capital. Once the scandal came out, she was flown back to the US without incident. Another NOC officer I knew was competent enough to operate covertly in Warsaw, but only when Poland was no longer a communist country and was trying to join Nato.

There have been a few cases of US citizens recruited to visit dangerous countries: including one case I know of which ended in disappearance and probable death. But that particular individual was not a trained CIA officer, willing to risk all for the country, but rather an older gent hired expressly for the job. Remarkably unqualified, he would not have uncovered any secrets even if he had stayed uncaught.

In other words, then, the CIA does not have true undercover agents, genuinely competent intelligence officers who can enter foreign countries covertly, that is through legal entry points but with a persuasive false identity, or else in clandestine fashion by slipping over the border undetected. Without one or the other, the CIA will always find it impossible to have officers in hostile countries.

“The CIA does not have true undercover agents.”

Take Iran for example. The CIA considers the Islamic Republic a no-go zone — because, ever since the seizure of its embassy in 1979, the US has had no diplomatic presence there. For this reason, so the theory goes, Langley has no officers who can enter the Islamic Republic, blend into the population, and begin conducting operations.

Actually both those things are highly feasible: there is no way that the gendarmerie, the regular army or the Revolutionary Guards could possibly guard Iran’s 3,662 miles of land borders against infiltration. More to the point, Mossad gets in and out of Iran at will. Smuggling agents in either covertly or clandestinely, the Israelis regularly pull off spectacular coups against their Iranian foe. That includes everything from the theft of truckloads filled with nuclear documents, to the killing of heavily guarded nuclear scientists. Mossad even got to Ismail Haniyeh, the erstwhile leader of Hamas, by blowing him up while he was staying in a heavily guarded Revolutionary Guards VIP guesthouse — supposedly within a “secure” government zone in Tehran.

One could reasonably argue that the US is powerful enough not to need such exploits. Yet the CIA certainly needs to operate in Iran — and in China and Russia — to achieve something much less dramatic than assassinations: verifying “assets”. To take a theoretical example, imagine a medical doctor from Isfahan, recruited by the CIA on a visit to Frankfurt. Before returning home, he agrees to send information he hears from his son: a nuclear engineer, or perhaps an officer in the Revolutionary Guards, in exchange for money deposited to a German bank.

There is no need for James Bond skills to check the source’s credentials. A world-class holiday destination, complete with stunning Safavid architecture around its vast main square, Isfahan will always attract foreign tourists. Nor would an agent need much to verify the authenticity of the new asset. Things would be as simple as visiting the doctor in his office and verifying he exists: tourists get upset stomachs all the time. With a few questions, none of them compromising, the officer could also ensure that the man recruited in Frankfurt really is a doctor, and not a trolling security man or else just a con artist angling for a quick buck.

This is only a hypothetical, but there is clear evidence that Langley suffers in the real world too. For decades, certainly, the Agency has struggled to verify its assets: it was only after the fall of the Soviet Union that the CIA realised that, though many doubtless existed, they actually worked for the Russians, while genuine defectors were compromised by clumsy attempts at communication.

There have been more recent bungles too. After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the Agency wrongly predicted that the Zelensky government would not fight in earnest, even suggesting Russian troops would conquer Kyiv within 24 hours. That frightened the White House into evacuating all US diplomats, which in turn caused another 20 countries to do the same. That might even have demoralised Zelensky into surrendering — but for the fact he already knew the CIA was incompetent.

The essential challenge here is language skills. Even Obama’s CIA director, famed for his supposed Middle East expertise, apparently struggled with Arabic. Despite studying the language in Cairo, and serving in Saudi Arabia, he asked me to stick to English when we once met. With personnel like that, it obviously becomes much harder to engage with sources abroad, let alone survive for months at a time in hostile territory.

The reason for this inadequacy, it turns out, is not that Americans are notoriously lazy about learning foreign languages. Rather, the wound is self-inflicted by the Agency itself, something I totally failed to understand for many years, even though I worked closely with one CIA director and was a close friend of two more. The situation only became clear when my truly stellar research assistant, who went on to a splendid career elsewhere in government, applied to join the Agency at my suggestion.

Despite knowing two difficult languages really well, my colleague was rejected very early in the process. Why? Because of the CIA’s inflexible method of “vetting” applicants. They were not interviewed by experienced operators, nor by accomplished analysts with a deep understanding of their patch. Instead, would-be agents have to fill out tedious security forms, listing every place where they ever lived, or even just slept in for a single night. They also have to list every person they have ever had dealings with — whether tenants or landlords, lovers or friends, no matter how fleeting the relationship ultimately was.

It goes without saying that the sort of young American suited to life as a NOC — those who have studied or lived overseas, and are equally comfortable working or flirting in foreign languages — stand no hope of passing the security screening. Many of the security people I have run into seem to be Mormons, disciplined folk who forgo alcohol and even coffee. Applicants born in Utah, raised in Utah, who studied in Utah and married a spouse from Utah sail through the application process. But when tasked with working an asset overseas, they are destined to fail.

That, of course, leads to one further question: why? Why has the CIA been so obsessed with security that it excludes the people it needs? One explanation is that it is just too big. With over 20,000 staff, it employs far too many people to be vetted by individual experts. Rather, it must rely on very stringent criteria, applied by rather simple people, to exclude all risk — and the most promising candidates. Whatever the cause, anyway, it’s clear that Ratcliffe is right to make room for fresh talent, whether hard-nosed agents in the field or insightful analysts back home.