The cia, much like the rest of the u. s. national security apparatus, had lost its bearings and stumbled while searching to regain a central focus during the post–Cold War period. The term “post–Cold War” awkwardly describes the period between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the attacks of 11 September 2001. The CIA's senior management was bewildered by the evaporation of the Cold War rivalry that had shaped the worldviews nurtured throughout their careers.

The CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO) managers were especially befuddled and, at least initially, had wanted to continue to place a priority on spotting, assessing, developing, and recruiting Russian agents even though these DO business practices had produced less-than-stellar human intelligence results during the Cold War. The DO's perpetuation of these failed practices produced even less impressive results in the post–Cold War period. As a former senior DO official, Milt Bearden, who had a justifiable hallway reputation in Langley as a free-wheeling and aggressive case officer, lamented of the difficulty the DO had in the transition from Cold War to the post–Cold War period, “Too much of the CIA's clandestine collection effort had too little relevance in the fast-moving new world. Landing a Soviet defector had been our bread and butter in the old days, but now we found ourselves simply in the resettlement game, with no real evidence that we were getting much of anything useful in return.”