How it looked in the summer of 2001

This article from the July/August 2001 Washington Monthly looks somewhat silly in retrospect.

The CIA's Weakest Link: What our intelligence agencies need are more professors

But Loch Johnson was/is one of the leading scholars of CIA and the US intelligence community. He also served on the staff of the Church committee and the Iran-Contra committee. Nonetheless, the article gives no inkling of the looming danger America faced that summer.

He barely mentions the threat posed by terrorists.

When he writes of the "the most egregious intelligence failure since the Cold War" he is talking about CIA's failure to find out that India was about to resume nuclear testing.

Nor did Johnson think that HUMINT was the greatest weakness of our intelligence process.

the agencies need a shift in priorities with less focus on the gathering of information and more focus on the harder job of providing insights into what that information means.

Finally, he thought the time was ripe for intelligence reform because the current international environment was relatively benign.

But what better time than now for bringing about change, when the world is relatively tranquil and the record of intelligence performance fairly shouts for reform?