Mike Pompeo’s old friend, Brian Bulatao, is bringing business school lessons to the world of espionage.
Brian Bulatao remembers the call as if it came yesterday. After the 2016 election, he was on the phone with his old buddy Mike Pompeo, congratulating him for being Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Central Intelligence Agency. Bulatao, who went to West Point with Pompeo in the early 1980s and later started a business with him in Kansas, was telling his friend what a great job he’d do—when Pompeo interjected. “He goes: ‘Well, not so quick. I’m going to drag your butt with me!’ ”
In January 2017, Pompeo did just that, first bringing Bulatao on as a senior adviser at the CIA, and then tapping him as the agency’s No. 3 executive. The job used to be called executive director, or exdir, and entails overseeing the day-to-day running of the CIA—budgets, logistics, personnel. But after Bulatao was appointed to the job in June 2017, he and Pompeo agreed to change his title to chief operating officer, underscoring their aim to bring a veneer of the private sector to the world of espionage.
Since then, Bulatao has tried to impose MBA-style management lessons on the CIA, to mixed reviews. Now, as his friend and boss prepares to take over as secretary of state, officials in Washington are wondering whether Bulatao will join him. The State Department, already hollowed out and demoralized by one management overhaul, may be about to get another one.
A former McKinsey & Co. consultant and Harvard MBA graduate, Bulatao exudes the air of a management consultant, ticking off such buzzwords as “streamline” and “strategic sourcing strategy” to describe the shakeup he says is under way at the agency. Like his boss, Bulatao had zero government administrative or intelligence experience before going to work at the CIA; six years ago, he was running an industrial packaging company in Dallas.
Bulatao declines to say whether he plans to join Pompeo at the State Department. For now, he says, Pompeo, Deputy Director Gina Haspel, and he do “a morning huddle” a few times a week. His office, on the seventh-floor executive level of CIA headquarters, is directly across the hall from Pompeo’s. But whereas Pompeo spends most of his time outside of the building—for example, traveling to North Korea for a secret meeting with Kim Jong Un—Bulatao is a fairly constant presence at headquarters, arriving most days around 7 a.m. and often staying late.
“I can tell you that the lights usually never go off in this building,” Bulatao says while sipping coffee and then Mountain Dew during an interview in late March. He has a standing desk, empty in and out baskets, and a large flatscreen TV in his office. Out his bank of windows, he has a panoramic view of a large swath of the CIA campus, including the greenhouse-like roof of the cafeteria and the new headquarters building finished in 1991.
As part of his management-reform push, Bulatao has cut the number of meetings Pompeo attends, shut down mission centers that focus on certain regions and some specific issues, and slashed programs he deemed unnecessary—though he wouldn’t offer examples. He’s also “shooting to reduce” the time it takes to join the CIA by “40 percent,” in part by shifting it from a paper-application process to a digital system.
The biggest change he touts is pushing “decision-making down to the lowest level possible,” he says. There are now “a significant number of fewer decisions coming to the seventh floor to be made.” As an example, Bulatao points to the benefits of giving CIA agents more freedom to act. “If an officer in a foreign country says, ‘I really want to go after this target,’ and his in-country supervisor says, ‘Yeah, that makes sense,’ why send that decision back to headquarters here to go through another process?” Bulatao asks. “Let’s let them make that decision locally.”
That’s “music to the ears of the collectors” in the field, says John Sipher, a former senior officer in the CIA’s clandestine service.
Trump has endorsed a similar campaign in the military to grant commanders in the field additional authority. But it’s raised questions over whether hasty decisions have backfired, such as an ambush in Niger that killed four U.S. soldiers. The concept is also not that new. “Pushing authority down and making decisions at a lower level—that’s the kind of thing people have been talking and saying and doing forever,” Sipher says.
A number of moves the CIA is undertaking are unprecedented, Bulatao says. Recently, he’s had “every component lay out their strategic business plan” in a new format, with each program’s leader presenting his or her “strategic objectives and priorities” in front of peers. Several months ago, “for the very first time in the history of the CIA,” there was a meeting with the agency’s chief financial officer, chief of talent, and the newly created chief strategy officer, all posts reporting to what Bulatao calls his “portfolio.” It was a chance to identify “our highest priorities correctly, which we’ve never done before in an integrated fashion.”
Former intelligence hands argue that Bulatao’s approach isn’t so new, and that he’s simply couching it in the parlance of business-speak. This can have the effect of rubbing career rank and file the wrong way, because it comes off as patronizing, they say.
“I’m skeptical of any bureaucrat’s call for cutting bureaucracy, especially when it involves creating a new position: the chief strategy officer, who, no doubt, will need a staff and who will probably have to review and chop on major decisions,” says Nicholas Dujmovic, who spent 26 years at the CIA and served as the agency’s deputy chief historian. He’s now director of the intelligence studies program at Catholic University of America in Washington. “A lot of this has been talked about for decades, leading me to think that there is less here than meets the eye.”
There’s also the bigger question as to whether intelligence gathering—by nature time-consuming and expensive, with hard-to-quantify measures of success—is the best arena to apply lessons from the business world. Bulatao acknowledges it’s not a perfect fit. “In the business of intelligence, you don’t have those quantitative measures” as in the private sector. “They’re usually lagging, and the critical question is, What are we measuring to begin with?”
Ultimately, efficiency might not be the best match for intelligence work. There are built-in checks—whether in producing an analytical report or collecting information—that purposely slow down the process. “There are some places where efficiency should not be the goal,” Gail Helt, a former CIA analyst who is now professor and director of the Security and Intelligence Studies program at King University in Bristol, Tenn. “There needs to be some higher level of accountability than just the chief of station or a case officer who is charged with getting information. That is an incredibly risky proposition,” removing layers of oversight.
Earlier attempts to bring people into the CIA from the private sector haven’t always worked out. CIA Director William Casey’s effort in the 1980s “to salt CIA with a couple of Wall Street colleagues” became “an unpleasant memory for many CIA veterans,” according to a book by Douglas Garthoff that was published by the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence.
The White House sent Haspel’s nomination to lead the CIA to the Senate on April 17, a week after Pompeo’s confirmation hearing to become secretary of state. It’s hard to imagine Bulatao staying at CIA without Pompeo, given how much his position rests on his pal’s personality. Working with his “closest friends” is where Bulatao seems most content. “I’ll tell you what, the thing that I find joy in,” he says. “You could argue—whether it’s in the private sector or public sector, government or not—it’s making a difference and doing it with your lifelong friends and just really having an impact.”
Even if Bulatao stays at CIA, Pompeo will never be far. “I know his personal cell number, I can get a hold of him anytime,” he says with a chuckle. “So I’ll know where to find him.”
