I find the case for getting rid of the CIA uncompelling, largely for the reasons laid out in this Nation piece I wrote last year. I’ll expand on this when I get some time. But quickly: the failures of the CIA are failures of American policymaking, which is to say the belief that you can launch all these zipless activities and get away it with it in the dark. The CIA is wishful thinking made into an agency. Getting rid of the agency is less important than getting rid of the wishful thinking.

As for the argument that intelligence analysis would be better off split away from a dismembered CIA — a Central Analysis Agency, maybe, or a beefed up State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, as Yglesias proposes — it’s not a bad one, but it needs to contend with the question of who’s going to collect the intelligence that such an agency would interpret. Not all information can be open-source information. Someone is going to need to acquire it. And that’s not something you can leave for the military, since the military has no legal charter for covert action — that is, an activity designed to be denied by its author government — and you wouldn’t like living in a world where it does. At least some intelligence collection is going to have to occur through such a way — using a dummy corporation to gain information on, say, a nuclear-proliferation ring like A.Q. Khan’s, for instance — without disputing the value of significantly dialing back the political activities for which it’s often used. (Assassinating foreign leaders, organizing coups, you get the idea.) If there’s a better alternative, I’d like to hear it.

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