How the CIA Forgot the Art of Spying

This is interesting...

With the war on terror came a new, more militarized way of gathering intelligence. But now, America needs the kind of spooks who can work the cocktail party circuit—more James Bond, less Jason Bourne.

It was in a CIA station in Europe in 2005 that I realized how much was changing about American spycraft. I was chatting with a supervisor working to set up his next assignment. He was eagerly volunteering to go to what we referred to as the War Zone, a group of countries that formed the nexus of the global war on terror. We were four years out from the September 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden was still out there somewhere, and stopping the next terrorist strike was paramount in our minds.

But why, I asked him, was he so eager to go in person? My colleague had no military background. In Europe, we were free to walk the streets while still contributing to fighting the war on terror. Over there, he would be separated from his family for a year, living in a shipping container on a compound surrounded by fortified walls and barbed wire, the target of mortar-shooting terrorists. His answer: In 20 years, when CIA officers looked back, serving in the War Zone in the early 2000s would be like having served in Europe in the 1980s. The Cold War had been formative for the officers who preceded us. And the global war on terror would be the defining conflict of our generation. He needed to be in the middle of it.

He was not alone in thinking this way. The aftermath of September 11 was a tumultuous time for the CIA. The agency was publicly blamed for not stopping the attacks; then it was blamed for supporting the misconception that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. To call these “intelligence failures” was unfair, in my opinion, but the critique stuck, and the agency quietly went about reorganizing itself.

The new threat demanded a new way of spying. What the classic Cold War spycraft officers had painstakingly learned didn’t help in this new mission. Attending soirees and rubbing elbows with international VIPs wasn’t how you tracked down terrorists, who hid in hillsides and remote compounds in hostile territory. Chalk marks on a street lamp to signal a meeting; dead drops in a park, filled or emptied after hours traipsing through a bustling city to determine whether you were under surveillance—these techniques now seemed obsolete. The new kind of spying, the kind my colleague was jumping into, was done by officers based in military compounds, only able to leave with a Glock on the hip, in armored personnel carriers, guarded by armed men and women in uniforms with the American flag sewn on the arm.
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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/cia-art-spying-espionage-spies-military-terrorism-214875