La notizia era stata fatta filtrare già a novembre ed ora, dopo una conferenza stampa del direttore della CIA, trova un’ulteriore conferma. Brennan intende ristrutturare l’agenzia di intelligence strategica adottando estensivamente il modello dei fusion centers (stile Counter Terrorism Center, per intenderci) senza, però, chiudere le quattro divisioni sulla base delle quali è attualmente organizzata la CIA. Sembra, anzi, che oltre a aprire 10 nuovi “mission centers” Brennan intenda accorpare tutte le competenze cyber all’interno di una nuova divisione.
Alla base del programmato riordino due iprincipi chiave: la riduzione – se non la totale eliminazione – delle barriere tra analisti ed operativi (esattamente come nel CTC) e l’accountability ovvero la fissazione di una chiara leadership per le principali missioni.

Scrive Mark Mazzetti sul New York Times:

John O. Brennan, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is planning to reassign thousands of undercover spies and intelligence analysts into new departments as part of a restructuring of the 67-year-old agency, a move he said would make it more successful against modern threats and crises.
Drawing from disparate sources — from the Pentagon to corporate America — Mr. Brennan’s plan would partly abandon the agency’s current structure that keeps spies and analysts separate as they target specific regions or countries. Instead, C.I.A. officers will be assigned to 10 new mission centers focused on terrorism, weapons proliferation, the Middle East and other areas with responsibility for espionage operations, intelligence analysis and covert actions. […]
One model for the new divisions is the agency’s Counterterrorism Center, an amalgam of undercover spies and analysts charged with hunting, and often killing, militant suspects across the globe. Once a small, occasionally neglected office in the C.I.A., the Counterterrorism Center has grown into a behemoth with thousands of officers since the Sept. 11 attacks as the C.I.A. has taken charge of a number of secret wars overseas.
But Mr. Brennan also cited another model for his new plan: the American military. He said that the Defense Department’s structure of having a single military commander in charge of all operations in a particular region — the way a four-star commander runs United States Central Command — was an efficient structure that led to better accountability. […]