Should the CIA be broken up?

Top US Republican senator Pat Roberts has proposed a radical overhaul of US intelligence which would create a national intelligence tsar and effectively break up the Central Intelligence Agency.

Senator Roberts, who chairs the Senate Intelligence committee, said he was pushing for a National Security Protection Act to build on the findings of the commission on the 11 September attacks.

Democrats have broadly welcomed the plan, although the party's senators said they had not been consulted. The senator is to outline his ideas to White House officials later on Monday.

What do you think of the senator's proposals? Should the CIA be broken up? Send us your comments.

This debate is now closed. Thank you for your comments.

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The following comments reflect the balance of opinion we have received so far:

The idea of a national intelligence czar scares me. The way this has come about is just too much like the development of the security apparatus that would become the NKVD in the Soviet Union.
Jeff, Alabama, USA

The plan is doomed to failure. The CIA, and practically every other government agency not wielding judicial or legislative power, is organized under the executive branch, overseen and managed by the President. Each agency's mission and actual power (for lack of a better word) is derived primarily from the budgetary funding it receives. Big budget, big power; you get the picture.

Sentator Roberts' plan calls for the fragmentation of the CIA and the creation of a national intelligence tsar who would have no power to control budgetary authority for any office or agency under his/her oversight. This would, in effect, remove all ability the US has to track and to neutralize 'the bad guys' throughout the world.
David, Washington, DC, USA

The CIA should not necessarily be broken up, it should just focus more on the words "central" and "intelligence". The charter allowing "covert actions" should be revoked, too. So many of our current problems are the consequences of messes that the CIA made.
Nathan, Los Angeles, CA

This is no time to experiment. A failure of the CIA now could have catastrophic consequences. Fine tuning on a very carefully controlled and limited basis might point the way towards further improvement but a wholesale change could also destroy this invaluable if imperfect security force.
Mark, USA

The CIA should be totally reorganized and overhauled Ray Doherty, Waitsfield, VT USA

The CIA should be totally reorganized and overhauled. CIA's failures are legend: failure to foresee the break-up of the USSR, failure to warn about al Qaeda and the lead up to 9/11, false warnings concerning Iran, etc. The CIA needs to take itself out of being the "yes men" for policymakers, and needs to re-establish itself to provide objective and accurate reporting and be independent of political pressures.
Ray Doherty, Waitsfield, VT USA

Is Congress kidding itself talking about breaking the CIA in a time of war and heightened threat of terror? Why don't they settle for streamlining the bureaucracy and rearrange the chairs on the deck instead of chopping CIA into three agencies. I guess Congress has a gross misunderstanding of the nature of threat America faces and what intelligence is all about!
Bhawan, Washington D.C.

To break up the CIA is to complicate the chain of command even further. It seems to me that a breakdown in communication is what is ailing this government agency. Perhaps re-training, and re-defining priorities should be a proper change. To act so dramatically without finding the "root cause" of it's troubles, is just in effect chasing one's tail.
GG, Vancouver Wa USA

Should be definitely break up as it kills millions innocent people around the world.
Mili Malix, Montreal, Canada

No, it's not a good idea to break up the CIA. What would be better is to re-establish some semblance of intelligence in the Federal government itself.
Howard, Sacramento, USA

What the CIA needs most of all is freedom Matt, Kaysville, USA

Breaking the CIA up isn't the solution. Restructuring and refocusing might be good. But what the CIA needs most of all is freedom. Freedom from bureaucracy. Freedom to gather intelligence as best it can. Freedom from outside pressures shaped by political goals.
Matt, Kaysville, USA

They should be reducing the number of intelligence agencies, not expanding them. The main problem with the war on terror, is that these departments don't speak to each other. Increasing them will make the problem worse.
Nigel MacDonald, Camborne, UK

No! It seems one of the biggest problems we had before 9/11 was a lack of communication between the various agencies. How would splitting up the agency help?
David, Omaha, USA

No. The dismantling of the CIA, while it sounds like a good idea isn't. The government is trying to establish one monolithic police presence in America. A national Gestapo if you will. The longer that can be held off the safer we the people will be. We are already losing freedoms, we can barely use our own airports, and appeals to the government from many organizations to preserve our freedoms fall on deaf ears. This is going to happen to you Brits soon too. That's what the new world order is all about.
David, Portland, USA

To suggest that the CIA should be broken up is simply short-sighted and stupid E Campbell, Montego Bay

To suggest that the CIA should be broken up is simply short-sighted and stupid, it is okay for individuals to sit in their armchairs in peace and security sipping their cognac and pass judgements without experiencing the reality that these individuals who risk their lives every day. As an ex-intelligence officer I can say that if you remove the CIA then you would simply have to create another and that there is no such thing as a bad intelligence agency only stupid arrogant and short-sighted politicians who see only what they want to see and hear only what they want to hear.
E Campbell, Montego Bay, Jamaica

The CIA is already being made a scapegoat for the blunders of Mr Bush and the so-called "neo-conservatives" in Iraq. This proposal appears to be just one more effort to divert public attention from the massive failings of the current administration, in its foreign policy.
Jim Hopewell, Maryland USA

The Democrats in Congress spent 15 years neutering the CIA by forcing it to disband most of its field operations and making the others not much more than a clippings service. Now they have the gall to criticise the agency for not having a crystal ball for predicting terrorist events. They should be ashamed of themselves for even starting this discussion.
John R Smith, UK

The CIA and FBI should be made one organisation. This would remove non-sharing of data but would remove duplicated functionality and lead to immediate reduction in headcount and costs. There should also be an immediate move to make this a more "commercial" function where people and paid by success and fired for failure. This would make it a much more responsive set-up.
Ian, NY, USA

No, we should not break the CIA up. The CIA is one of the most important institutions the government can use to protect this country against all foreign enemies of the USA. We maybe should streamline the intelligence within the CIA, but not dismantle it.
Richie, Northbrook, IL, USA

Ironic that as the UK decides to set up a CIA style agency the US decide to get rid of it.
David R, Plymouth, UK

Break up the CIA? Into what exactly? The Decentralised Intelligence Agency? Presumably all the splinter groups would need to have a single person in charge of them all, so it would be a reshuffle in name only.
Jonny, England

Splitting up the CIA is no solution. The key here is to cut down the huge level of bureaucracy Joe, Boston, USA

Splitting up the CIA is no solution. The key here is to cut down the huge level of bureaucracy. The CIA is not a jobs programme. Put more money and human resources into field agents and less into accountants and lawyers and middle management.
Joe, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

The CIA should be shut down, not broken up. Too often the CIA works on behalf of outside interests and against the interests of democracy. Hopefully Kerry and Edwards will straighten things out when they come into office.
Kaye, NYC, USA

No! It should just be made more independent from the current rulers and internally arranged so that only solid, verified facts will be given to the political bosses and that any influence of the political bosses in the facts will always be neutralised. The same applies to UK intelligence or intelligence in all those countries where it works for the bosses and not for the truth.
Miklos Nomad, Gyor, Hungary

I see so many of you saying the CIA should be banned and our noses kept out of other countries affairs. I have two points, first, many of you who don't live here have no room to talk as you do not know the situation here. Second, I would love America to keep its nose out of others business, let the world fend for itself. The CIA needs to be "deleted" and a new agency set up, one that will better organised and won't run unchecked.
Dain, Washington DC, USA

Let's see - the CIA is top heavy with bureaucracy, so the solution is to split it up into new agencies, each with its own bureaucracy. Did somebody say "efficient"?
TJ Cassidy, Arlington, VA, USA

Don't forget that the CIA was working well under President Clinton. They helped provide a swift response to previous al-Qaeda attacks and together nearly succeeded in catching Bin Laden. It was the Bush regime's misfocus on nuclear missiles and the Star Wars defence system rather than on terrorism than let the warnings about 9/11 be ignored.
Andrew, London, UK

It's obviously broken, so let's start over and fix it for good Barry, USA

To Andrew: The CIA under Clinton worked well? Under Clinton the CIA was politicised and emasculated unlike any previous administration. The intelligence agencies need to be completely revamped to reflect the new threats in today's world. It's obviously broken, so let's start over and fix it for good.
Barry, USA

Rebadging, reforming, reinventing the CIA, however one chooses to label such an exercise, it surely can only be judged for what it obviously is: A PR offensive to tear up the charge sheet facing the organisation as it currently stands, allowing the grandees and reprobates of duplicitous US foreign policy to continue intimidating the rest of the world in the name of so-called democracy.
Patrick V Staton, Guildford, UK

The CIA is too top heavy. It has got too many career politicians and too few field agents Peter, Nottingham, UK

The CIA is too top heavy. It has got too many career politicians and too few field agents. It mutated from the lean and efficient OSS of Alan Dulles into a bloated and self-serving organisation. It's worth remembering that after the coup of 1991 the KGB was split into two departments (the SVR & FSB). This greatly improved efficiency and reduced the personal power of the head of KGB. America could do worse than copy Russia.
Peter, Nottingham, UK

The CIA should be disbanded and its elements not reformed elsewhere. It is time America learnt not to meddle in the affairs of others. If the CIA had not trained and funded Osama Bin Laden, if the CIA had not backed Saddam Hussein for so long, the dreadful events of September 11th and the Iraq wars may never have happened.
Dave, Cambridge

How about removing the CIA director and installing a team of five, all with equal power and none of whom should be politically active? Then taking all of the individual intelligence agencies and combining them into two entirely separate agencies whose only common link is the team of five. This would allow for independent checks of the intelligence as it came in.
Peter Hopper, Edinburgh

America's intelligence services need to be more integrated, not fragmented. Paradoxically, "breaking up" the CIA may do just that. An executive branch "Intelligence Tsar" must create an agency unencumbered with a Carter-Clintonesque be-nice-to-them-and-they'll-be nice-to-us mentality. In today's world, such an approach would be fatal.
Mark, Arizona, USA

The problem is not with the intelligence community. The problem is with the decision makers warping the intelligence to fit their political agendas. Congress should ask themselves why they did not question the validity of some of the intelligence claims that UN inspectors already debunked.
Gordon Uscier, N Lauderdale, Florida, USA

If the CIA is broken up, the effect will probably be comparable with the breaking up of the Baathist regime in Iraq; the US intelligence industry will just become more tribalised and less accountable to the democratic will of the people it is supposed to democratically serve.
Mike, Manchester, England

One of the things that has surprised me about the recent inquires into British Intelligence activities prior to the Iraq conflict was the number of fingers in the intelligence pie. I wouldn't pretend to be an expert, but the idea any country needs yet more intelligence organisations seems ridiculous.
Paul, London, UK

I think the CIA should be gotten rid off and not replaced. What is the point of it - apart from giving the USA the ability to put its nose into other people's business where it does not belong. No-one is allowed to go into the USA and change their policies on climate change so why should they be able to go into other countries and do the same?
Marc, London, UK

The CIA was originally created it give US Presidents an overview of intelligence. A kind of one stop intelligence shop. America already has too many intelligence agencies, DIA, Individual Army, Navy, Airforce, State, Homeland Sec, NIA, FBI as well as others I probably have forgotten. Surely, the "War on Terror" will not be served by fragmenting the intelligence services further. In theory, the DCI (Director of Central Intelligence) is already the US intelligence tsar. Why not disband the other agencies, put their resources under the aegis of the CIA, and have truly one intelligence agency instead of the 18th Century German hotchpotch of statelets that US Intelligence currently resembles.
Richard Corless, Bridgend, S Wales, UK

My concern would be that a national intelligence tsar could be acting more in the political interests of the administration in power and not quasi-independently as the CIA currently does Darryl LeCount, Germany

My concern would be that a national intelligence tsar could be acting more in the political interests of the administration in power and not quasi-independently as the CIA currently does. We've seen how the administration can cause intelligence to be "reinterpreted" to its own ends, how would it be if the intelligence was to be "created" for the same reasons? The potential for abuse of power is astounding.
Darryl LeCount, Paderborn, Germany

Would this be because the CIA is understandably hacked off at the way it was overlooked over Iraq and then had to take the blame over it? Now the CIA is leaking information about the "president's" lies like the last so-called alert? It seems that the Republicans have annoyed the military and the CIA and now that the agencies have had enough, they want to scrap them.
Vish, UK

Why now? When the terrorists are in the final stages of attacking the US before the election, this seems foolish in the extreme. What will it be replaced by? And more importantly how long will it take to become effective?
Roger Morgan Freedlan, Whitwick, England