[American Soldier]

Ugh... Talk to a CIA or FBI recruiter sometime, it's ridiculous. They act like they're hiring for a bulge bracket bank or a Wall Street accounting firm. HELLO?? We need people to infiltrate the dirtbag community, not the fatcat community!

Qualifications for intelligence work should be based more on raw intelligence and cultural experience, not level of education. The types of things you learn (if they learn anything at all) in graduate school generally will not help them in intelligence work. (I am mostly referring to folks like law school graduates, whose skills are really not applicable...of course someone who took an Asian or Arabic studies degree could be useful in certain situations).

Probably the biggest source of recruits for the FBI and CIA should be military - but NCOs, not so much officers. NCOs are more likely to have the intensive interpersonal experience needed. I thought that this might actually make Tom Ridge a good Homeland Defense secretary, but I haven't figured out exactly what that agency is going to do yet...

[archy]

Probably the biggest source of recruits for the FBI and CIA should be military- but NCOs, not so much officers. NCOs are more likely to have the intensive interpersonal experience needed.

So far as the CIA is concerned, they do draw from a good many military warrant officers, particularly for the Technical Services Division and Office of Security. But the really sharp ones, particularly the qualified linguists and former technical communications personnel, can find both better pay and better working conditions elsewhere.

The problem for the feebies and spooks is that those NCOs with *intensive interpersonal skills* can tell when the CIA and FBI recruiters are lying to them. They've heard it before, from retention NCOs....

-archy-/-

[Man of the Right]

I agree with you.

People who do well in counter-intelligence require both organizational ability and creativity. This is the anti-thesis of the FBI labor pool, which is college graduates of average intelligence from third-rate schools who seek predictability, security, and power in that order. Similarly, Mueller is a lawyer. Unfortunately, not a litigator but a career prosecutor and U.S. attorney. His education, background, mind set, and skill set are the antithesis of what's required to perform in his position.

Real cops would be far better.
Soldiers would be better.

In my opinion, the kind of people OSS, MI-5 and the CIA recruited during World War II and the early days of the Cold War respectively, would be best: patriotic, passionate eccentrics.

In real life, this won't happen until the kill rises from 3,000 September 11 to six or seven figures per major incident. The change in the culture makes it impossible for a large minority of Americans to organize for their own preservation. They have no coping mechanism.

When Mid-Town, the District, west LA, the Magnificent Mile, Seattle, or Miami are wiped off the face of the earth, at long last the job security of Mueller and 9,000 FBI agents will seem to matter less than national survival. But not before. Meanwhile, the FBI will fall on its face more often than the Keystone Cops in a Mack Sennett comedy.