Try holding the cocktail party in a cave.

Having long contended that the CIA needs more NOCs (spies with non-official cover), I'm happy to find my position supported by Reuel Marc Gerecht in a recent Washington Post op-ed. If you've heard Gerecht pontificate on the Middle East, you might find his views a little more hawkish than your own. I certainly do. But in describing the facts of life within the CIA, few do it better than Gerecht. His February 1998 article in The Atlantic Monthly, "Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?" written under the pseudonym "Edward G. Shirley" remains the best thing I've read about the culture of the CIA.

What he says now is that the case officers who represent the vast majority of the CLA2s spies are in fact hopelessly unsuited to effective espionage. They operate as American embassy officers and are pathetically easy for our enemies to spot. Their favored milieu, embassy cocktail parties, was useful in recruiting Soviet diplomats but is definitely not where members of al Qaeda congregate. Nevertheless, we have lots of case officers and few NOCs, because case officers are the way it has been done and the old boys always like to stick to the old ways. Also NOCs, who operate completely outside American embassies, pose bureaucratic problems. How are they to be paid, should taxes be deducted, and most absurd, as we mentioned in our last issue, should they be required to travel on American airlines. But the point is, the only way to have more spies is to have more NOCs, meaning the bureaucratic problems must be overcome.