Two years after the CIA reorganized itself to create 10 "mission centers," the spy agency is adding a new one devoted specifically to North Korea.
Then-director John Brennan launched that 2015 restructuring -- it also created the Directorate for Digital Innovation, the agency’s first new directorate in half a century -- to modernize the agency and eliminate stovepipes between its analysts, agents, and hackers. Instead of offices built around kinds of expertise, the new mission centers house cross-functional teams focusing on a threat or a region. That allows them to "harness the full range of CIA’s operational, analytic, support, technical and digital capabilities," the CIA said in a Facebook post.
The new Korea Mission Center at CIA headquarters in Virginia is intended to do the same thing for a country that at least one intelligence expert calls "the hardest of hard targets."
In a press release, CIA Director Mike Pompeo said the new center "allows us to more purposefully integrate and direct CIA efforts against the serious threats to the United States and its allies emanating from North Korea."
Pompeo also said the move reflects the CIA’s agility. Keeping the organizational chart malleable and adding the new center is part of the agency’s efforts to stay responsive as national security threats evolve and priorities shift.