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Monday, August 23, 2004

# Posted 8:24 AM by Patrick Belton  

INTELLIGENCE REFORM, A KGB PERSPECTIVE: A Russian veteran of the KGB of major-general rank offers his perspective about the Senate Republicans' proposal to dismantle the CIA: (Kobyakov served as deputy director of the KGB's American Division in the late 1980s.)
Back in the heyday of Cold War some of my KGB colleagues
toyed with an idea of breaking-up the C.I.A. by setting it
off against the F.B.I., and both of them against the Pentagon.
Most were harebrained schemes but none had been as sweeping
as the one proposed by Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas.
(This is not to imply that present set-up is perfect.)

But as a KGB/SVR veteran, who lived through quite a few sweeping
reorganizations of the Soviet/Russian era I can share my general
experience.

It usually looks swell on charts with all the bells and whistles
but when you try to implement it the place stops working, then it
falls apart with some of the best people running sway. And then the
ones, who for this or that reason stayed behind are faced with an
enormous Sisyphean labor of trying to jump start the new bastard,
or parts of what was once a functioning system. This may take years.

Good luck,

Julius Kobyakov
Major General SVR (Ret.)
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