Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan has convened a panel to consider Agency reorganization. The central issue is whether CIA analysts should be more operationally integrated with Clandestine Service officers, but reform might also include creating new staffs operating independently of the geographical divisions that have traditionally run the spies. China, might, for example, become a separate hybrid intelligence collection and analysis center divorced from East Asia Division.

Since its founding in 1947, the Agency has maintained a firewall between operations and analysis, though the rise to prominence of the Counterterrorism Center (CTC), as well as special staffs dedicated to counter-narcotics and nonproliferation, has broken down that barrier. CTC and the issue-oriented staffs have included not only analysts but also law-enforcement representatives from the FBI and Secret Service. In theory everything is shared, and the model is considered to be successful, fueling the drive to replicate it.

To be sure there is a cultural divide within the Agency, with ops officers frequently regarding analysts as out-of-touch eggheads while the analysts reciprocate by seeing case officers as psychopathic cowboys, but there are good practical reasons for separating analysts from spies.