The Senate on Thursday confirmed career CIA officer Gina Haspel to lead the agency as its first female director. But for Haspel, who has been working as acting director since former CIA Director Mike Pompeo joined the State Department, there’s little time for celebration.
The new director faces two immediate challenges: how to organize her agency and how to employ its resources.
First off, Haspel must decide whether to re-arrange the CIA’s organizational structure away from what former director John Brennan introduced during the Obama administration. While Brennan’s reforms look sensible on paper – breaking down the barriers between analysts and officers – some on the CIA’s operational side believe they damaged the CIA’s spying tradecraft.
That’s not the only organizational question for Haspel’s attention. The director must also decide who to promote to senior positions in the agency and whether to continue with Pompeo’s approach of encouraging lower ranking officers to take greater risks in order to steal more valuable secrets abroad.
As one former senior operations officer Mark Kelton told me, “The key question about [success in leadership at] CIA is not whether you’re a risk-taker but whether you can manage risk effectively. And that takes strategic and tactical awareness, and Gina [Haspel] has both.” Another former official Carmen Middleton argued that “Senior [CIA] leaders are often sleep-deprived and stressed, but I have found [Haspel] in those stressful moments just poised and the epitome of calm and focus.”
Next up, Haspel must decide how to resource the agency’s spy operation. While the U.S. is one of just three global powers who operate at-scale global human intelligence operations (China and Russia are the other two), the CIA doesn’t have limitless resources or powers. In concert with President Trump’s focus areas, Haspel will thus have to decide where to balance her resources so as to maximize the collection and assessment of intelligence that helps inform policymakers or what the CIA calls “consumers” or “customers.”
While China and Russia will require significant resource allocations (Russia will be very upset that Haspel has been confirmed), Haspel must spread the remaining resources at her disposal across the rest of the world. Other hotspots that will demand key attention include Iran – both in terms of weapons proliferation, regional activity and internal tensions – and the ongoing threat posed by terrorist groups like ISIS.
Then there’s that especially daunting of “hard targets,” North Korea. And while Kim Jong Un’s hermit kingdom is extremely important to U.S. security interests it’s also an extremely challenging place to collect quality intelligence.
Haspel’s work in resolving these challenges will be significant and obviously stressful. Still, the newly minted spy chief’s existing record – at least when correctly reported – suggests she is up for the job.
