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In response to TIME's questions about these shortcomings, two senior intelligence officials said the agency has worked hard to close the language gap and improve recruitment of informants. Since 1998, Tenet has instructed the CIA's espionage arm, the Directorate of Operations, to push its officers to diversify their language skills, boost recruitment and take greater risks. But despite some progress, a senior official admits, "we're not there yet." Robert Baer, a former CIA field operative in India, Tajikistan, Lebanon and Iraq, says the reforms did nothing to "break the cold war mold--it's all about the culture." The Administration has recalled old CIA hands with experience in Central Asia. Says an Administration official: "You ended up going back to retirees because the bench was so light on Afghanistan. We're still trying to get up to speed."
The dearth of qualified intelligence officers on the ground in Afghanistan has forced the U.S. to count on unreliable sources, dramatically increasing the risk of military mistakes, impeding the hunt for al-Qaeda leaders and giving Omar, bin Laden and their henchmen time to slip away. "The U.S. is totally dependent on locals, who have their own agenda," says an expert in the region. A senior intelligence official disputes the scope of the problem, telling TIME that "this institution has never produced better human intelligence than it does today--but that doesn't mean that we don't need to do more."
Even when America sets its own agenda, there are serious problems. The U.S. spends more than 90% of its $35 billion annual intelligence budget on spying gadgetry rather than on gathering human intelligence, and most of that money goes not to the CIA but to spy agencies within the Department of Defense, such as the National Security Agency (which does eavesdropping and code breaking) and the National Reconnaissance Office (which flies imagery satellites). The priciest gadgets are not always the ones suited to fighting the terrorist threat. During the past five years, while the U.S. spent billions of dollars to build and launch about half a dozen radar-imaging spy satellites, the CIA and others built 60 Predator unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS) at about $3 million apiece. The Predators, not the satellites, killed terrorists in Afghanistan.
High-tech surveillance can do little to track adversaries like the Sept. 11 hijackers, especially if they are in the U.S. legally and careful about what they say on the phone. So why does the CIA persist in spying the wrong way? Part of the answer lies in the culture of secrecy that arose during the cold war and continues to rule the agency's hearts and minds. Today the secrets the CIA needs to pick up are often easily accessible--such as the travel plans of the Sept. 11 hijackers, two of whom managed to pay for their airline tickets with credit cards in their own names, even though the CIA had placed them on the terrorist watch list weeks before. Exploiting such "open sources" by combining them with newly discovered secrets is critical to fighting terrorists and others who hide in plain sight. And yet for years the agency discounted the value of open sources and let slip the quality of the intelligence analysts charged with studying them.