As if the CIA didn’t have enough problems already, it has come out this past week that everyone’s favorite spy agency employed psychics in the past to assist with various intelligence gathering operations.

Yes, the Central Intelligence Agency and psychics — insert “intelligence, lack of” joke here. Welcome to the land of no credibility, guys.

I can just see it. Some lonely, desperate agent or analyst, in dire need for a lead or some tidbit of information on the whereabouts of a terrorist of KGB agent or Moammar Gadhafi, phones up the Psychic Friends Network during a late night infomercial. “Hello, Psychic Friends? I need some help at work…”

Actually, it wasn’t so entertaining or funny. The CIA has dished out $20 million or the services of psychics, who were used on a variety of missions to try and help find various foreign leaders, nuclear weapons and kidnapped Americans. $20 million, kids.

That is a mere speck of the CIA’s cumulative budget since the 1970s, but it is still $20 million that could have been used for something better than hiring the crystal ball crowd for such important work.

That money could have been spent on proven intelligence gathering methods. Human intelligence, or HUMINT, which is nothing more than good-old fashioned spying with people doing the work, has never been the CIA’s strong suit.

Hell, $20 million could have been put toward training and recruitment of good field agents to work in the countries the psychic frauds network were trying to “view.”

$20 million could have paid for a few overflights by spy aircraft or satellites, and paid the salaries of qualified photo analysts for years to look at the pictures and try to find evidence of Moammar’s movements or plutonium production facilities. But no; the CIA decided to try the services of people best left for the plot of next week’s episode of the X-Files.

To make this even more embarrassing, the KGB has tried exactly the same thing. In fact, their psychic spy program was even bigger during the 1970s and it actually caused some consternation in the U.S. intelligence community.

Think of it: Russian agents, psychics no less, on the loose in the U.S., broadcasting their information back to the Evil Empire and us unable to stop it! Sounds like someone rented Scanners once to often.

This affair is yet another disgrace for the CIA, an agency that actually started small after World War II.

It was to have been a clearing house for raw intelligence data brought in by the intelligence branches of the military and the State Department, and would process and interpret the raw data into usable reports for the government

It began growing past that modest mission almost immediately, and its covert operations wing, the Operations Directorate, got more and more powerful relative to the Intelligence Directorate, which still performs the original mission of the agency.

The DO is the cause of most of the negative press the CIA gets, including Psychicgate.

It has toppled governments, in Guatemala and Iran in the 1950s. It has attempted assassinating the likes of Fidel Castro, with — get this — a mine disguised as a sea shell to get him while he was scuba diving and a wet suit contaminated with various toxins and biological weapons.

Castro’s appearance at the United Nation’s 50th anniversary gives an indication of how successful Operation Mongoose was.

Its not that I have a real problem with the DO’s actions in general. In the realpolitik world of international relations, such actions are sometimes necessary. But the DO seems to have been run by boobies and numbskulls.

The Guatemala and Iran actions eventually resulted in some very unsavory characters coming to power in those countries, and both are now a real pain in the neck for the United States.

Even worse, the DO can’t police itself, as evidenced by the grotesque Aldrich Ames affair. His actions, including keeping classified information unencrypted on his laptop computer (in a file with a Russian name, no less) and spending money well in excess of his salary should have set off some serious alarms in the CIA, but no one did a thing about it.

United States efforts in the Soviet Union and later Russia were compromised, and the Russians working for the United States lost their lives as a result of his actions.

The DI is just as guilty of stupidity. It passed on tainted or false intelligence to “end users,” leaders in the government who make use of the CIA’s reports. It also skewed reports, tailoring analysis to serve the needs of whoever requested the information.

The CIA can still serve an purpose in the post-Cold War world. In fact, the agency, or some intelligence agency, is needed more than ever in these chaotic times.

But a major housecleaning is needed before the CIA can effectively execute its mission. A vision is coming to me, a feeling; the CIA will go under for good if it continues hiring psychics and agents like Aldrich Ames, and the United States will be in serious trouble in these dangerous and uncertain times.

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Kevin S. Kirby is a senior in journalism mass communication from Louisville, Ky. He has a B.A. in political science from the University of Wyoming.