In American culture, the words "rogue CIA mission"

call to mind squads of agents ready to take out targets, run guns, and rig elections—often for agendas too unsavory to be public. But even if rogue agents were amoral, at least they were thought to be capable. Recent allegations have upset the established idea of a rogue CIA operation, and this new version is somehow more insidious: This time, it's amateurs playing a global spy game and getting people hurt.

The Associated Press unearthed the troubling story behind the disappearance of a contractor, retired FBI agent Robert Levinson, who was seized by Iranian agents seven years ago and never seen again. According to the AP, a CIA analyst named Anne Jablonski overextended her reach when she sent Levinson to Iran to investigate leads on an assassination. Jablonski and two other analysts were fired, and the CIA paid Levinson's family $2.5 million to preempt a revealing lawsuit, according to the AP (which has sat on the story since 2010).

The CIA says it has rewritten its rules to restrict how analysts can work with outsiders. But the flagrant violation of rules in this case shows there is something more to what happened to Levinson. It's the sign of a bureaucracy so vast that it can't police itself. Here are four ways the intel world is becoming its own worst enemy.

Analysts Acting Like Spymasters

Levinson was, among other things, looking into Iran's nuclear program, the AP found. In 2007, he was meeting with a known killer, Dawud Salahuddin, who admitted to murdering a former Iranian diplomat in Maryland in 1980. Levinson disappeared after that meeting.

Levinson was tapped to work with CIA analysts under an $85,000 contract. But instead of writing reports, he dashed around the world as the analysts' private eye. This is a bad idea. Analysts may be very smart people, but they are not spymasters. And the world is filled with craftier foes who eat would-be spies for lunch.

Jablonski, who sent Levinson to Iran, is an expert on Russian organized crime, In 2005, she moved to the Office of Transnational Issues, the CIA team that tracks threats across borders. The office tracks trends in organized crime, terrorism, and infectious disease. Analysts write reports, but they do not launch intelligence operations. That is the job of an intelligence operative.

Operations people are supposed to follow some basic rules. Before someone travels on behalf of the CIA, local agency officials are supposed to be told. This is a courtesy and a safeguard in case something goes wrong during the trip. Levinson also met with sources without the usual vetting by CIA officials. This kind of sloppy tradecraft contributed to his capture—he had no backup.

Analysts Jockeying for Position

There are 1271 U.S. government organizations working on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence gathering, according to a Washington Post investigation. A lot of this work is redundant. Competition is good in the private sector, but inside the intelligence world competition drives an urgency to produce results that encourages overreach. How else can an analyst's report distinguish itself from the 49,999 other reports analysts produce every year?

Reliance on Contractors

NASA may be better and leaner with contractors running rocket launches, but in the intelligence world, relying on outsiders leads to trouble. Rampant outsourcing makes it hard to track what people are doing. (Levinson was hired to wrote reports, after all, which is what the analysts who hired him are paid to do.)

It's the same thing you can see elsewhere, from city halls to federal agencies: Whenever something needs to be done that exceeds a mandate, the solution is to hire an outside firm. Not every contract costs someone his or her life, of course, but it's hard to spot overreach in the fog of contracts. And at the time of Levinson's disappearance, America's intelligence apparatus (reeling from accusations of group-think after no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were found) was pushing a mandate to stock up its Rolodexes. In 2006, a year before Levinson's disappearance, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued "A Strategy for Analytic Outreach." The CIA's Office of Transnational Issues was a key player.

Thousands of conferences and meetings were held. No one wants a fully insulated intelligence world, but with so much schmoozing, lines are almost sure to be blurred. And when they are, the consequences can be fatal.

More People, More Risk

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the intelligence world expanded. The Washington Post estimated that 854,000 people hold top-secret security clearances. If even a small percentage screw up, that's still too high a risk. The Edward Snowden debacle is one sign that too many people are involved in the national security game.

Anne Jablonski by most accounts is a good analyst. She is considered one of the best minds when it comes to Russian organized crime. As this scandal unfolds, many people will focus on her non-traditional personality—after being fired, she became a yoga instructor in Virginia. But the point is not to go back to the days of identical Ivy League CIA analysts. It's to trim the fat from the agency, so that the glut of personnel does not lead to intelligence reports no one reads and staff that no one can control.

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