Wring out the old

From Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford, "Reenacting the Bay of Pigs Invasion with Pigs", January 2014.

When I tell you all about how Barack Obama and his spiritual director John O. Brennan have been working since 2008 to get the National Clandestine Service, the old CIA Ops division, out of the rightwing paramilitary business and into legitimate intelligence work under presidential supervision, you don't even bother to tell me I'm wrong—you just quietly tiptoe away, but I know what you're thinking.

So what do you think about this, suckers?

John O. Brennan, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is planning to reassign thousands of undercover spies and intelligence analysts into new departments as part of a restructuring of the 67-year-old agency.... Mr. Brennan’s plan would partly abandon the agency’s current structure that keeps spies and analysts separate as they target specific regions or countries. 

Don't be misled by the annoying business-major language with which he tries to explain it

He spoke of wanting to “wring efficiencies” out of the system and trying to identify “seams” in the agency’s current structure that hinder the C.I.A. from adequately addressing complex problems.

(it would be more reassuring if he wanted to wring the efficiencies in) or the way he insists that there's nothing actually wrong with the agency, except that there is,

The C.I.A. needed to modernize even if the current system was not “broken,” he said, citing how Kodak failed to anticipate the advent of digital cameras.

or the bureaucrat's tone of personal distress about not being fully in charge (it takes a true bureaucrat to do this job)

During the briefing on Wednesday, he showed flashes of frustration that, under the C.I.A.’s current structure, there is not one single person in charge of — and to hold accountable for — a number of pressing issues.

What's telling here is how the clandestine service regards it, as an attack on their independence, and in particular their independence vis-à-vis the analysis division, with which it will now be merged in the new structure of ten different "mission centers" focused on particular problem areas like the already existing Counterterrorism Center or a new Directorate of Digital Innovation:

Mark M. Lowenthal, a former senior C.I.A. analyst, said that the reorganization “is not going to go down smoothly” at the agency, especially among clandestine spies who have long been able to withhold information from analysts, such as the identity of their foreign agents. “The clandestine service is very, very guarded about giving too much information about sources to the analysts,” he said.

And the head of the Clandestine Service itself, known only as Greg V., has suddenly retired, apparently in a resentful bureaucratic rage. It's clear that Analysis, the division where Brennan himself made his career, will be getting more power and responsibility, because Brennan sees the traditional independence of Operations and its refusal to communicate with Analysis as a cause of disaster:

the new mission centers could help avoid a debacle like the intelligence assessments before the Iraq war, when analysts trusted information from sources they knew little about, and who were later discredited.

It's also a good sign that the paranoids are up in arms looking for something in the plan to be paranoid about, Alex Jones joining forces with RT

“I know there are seams right now, but what we’ve tried to do with these mission centers is cover the entire universe, regionally and functionally, and so something that’s going on in the world falls into one of those buckets,” [Brennan] told reporters.... “The real danger here is the US, the superpower,” Kristinn Hrafnsson, spokesman for WikiLeaks, told RT last month. 

and focusing on the digital department, as does Ryan Devereaux at Pierre Omidyar's The Intercept:

the Directorate of Digital Innovation, which will handle the CIA’s cyber-operations, taking on the responsibilities of two existing directorates — the Open Source Center and the Information Operations Center. The former monitors social media, while the latter conducts cyber-penetrations and attacks. The new digital directorate will have significantly more leeway than both its predecessors, according Brennan. “What we need to do as an agency is make sure we’re able to understand all of the aspects of that digital environment,” he told reporters

(missing "to" after "according" and missing period at the end of the sentence both from the original, editing at FirstLook continues to need work). Note how Devereaux makes it sound as if the Open Source Center is explicitly designed to spy on your Instagram instead of its actual range of all open information sources:

the Internet, databases, press, radio, television, video, geospatial data, photos and commercial imagery

That's in line with the usual FirstLook program of implying that the focus of US intelligence in cyberspace is on your privacy, dude, rather than that of state-sponsored cyberwarriors, money launderers, arms smugglers, and international tax cheats—and on the, like, open sources, reading the foreign newspapers, which are increasingly in digital formats and which have always had more useful information, including the lies, if you know that's what they are, than all the undercover joes you could ever recruit.

All we need now is for Senator Feinstein to express her "concern" about the reorganization (or should it be Lankford and Cotton in the new world?) and we'll know for sure this is really the most positive development in US intelligence since we started realizing what kind of shape it was in around, um, 1961, a condition the Omidyars and Feinsteins complain about but do everything in their power to maintain.