After 20 years of anti-terror work, CIA gets back to spycraft basics in shift to China

After two decades of intense paramilitary action against Islamist terror groups, some former officers and intelligence overseers say the CIA needs to get back to the kind of traditional, quiet tradecraft needed to collect intelligence against complex nation-states — in particular China, which senior officials have openly acknowledged presents the agency with its biggest challenge.

Made at a time when the CIA needed to staff America's growing war zones, the post-9/11 change was controversial among officers. While it gave them more flexibility, some former operations officers say the result was that officers received less mentorship and thoughtful career development as a result.

"The agency appears in many ways to be trying to replicate some of the things that worked well before the counterterrorism wars dominated everyone's focus," said Thad Troy, a former operations officer who served as chief of station in several European capitals. He cautioned he did not have knowledge of the policy change.

"We are very focused on China these days, although I will hasten to add that in all of our conversations about China, we made clear that we are the Central Intelligence Agency, we are not the Chinese Intelligence Agency," Deputy Director David Cohen said at a recent intelligence conference. "For us, it's important for the overall mission to have expertise in a geographic area or on an issue," Troy said."You don't acquire that in six months, but over the course of working in a region or on an issue for 10 years or more."

Meanwhile, the rapid proliferation of big data and ubiquitous surveillance technology has made the job of intelligence collectors infinitely more difficult. Gone are the days when a CIA operations officer could simply pick up a new passport and assume a new identity in a different country, senior officials have acknowledged publicly.

please hire me CIA

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