Frederick Hitz was the inspector general of the CIA from 1990 to 1998, and now teaches at the University of Virginia law school. Inspectors general know a lot, because they investigate allegations of malfeasance inside the Agency, and thus get to ask probing questions of the sort the rest of us don’t. Mr. Hitz is an insider’s insider, and few people this side of the top guys in the Operations Directorate know as much about the nitty-gritty of espionage. Plus, he has a reputation for fairness and thoughtfulness, which God knows is rare in Washington. So I was looking forward to this little book, hoping to get some real insight into the strengths and shortcomings of our intelligence community, and perhaps some thoughtful recommendations for useful change.

There are some valuable things in “Why Spy?” (Thomas Dunne, 224 pages, $22.95), but far fewer than I had hoped. (Despite the book’s admirable brevity, it’s full of bureaucratic jargon that a good editor should have terminated with extreme prejudice.) I had not before heard the amazing fact that our analysts working at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., can’t go online to surf the Internet, chat, or exchange e-mails with anyone outside “their employment component or classified milieu”; they have to stay inside the Agency’s own servers and networks. As Mr. Hitz says, this is ridiculous, and he is right that “we need to be on the open circuits as much as we can,” both to ferret out our enemies‚ hyperactive online, and to keep up with the information flow, much of which comes via Web logs.

He rightly stresses the importance of the coordination and sharing of information among our various intelligence, military, and law enforcement agencies, although this is hardly news, the point having been made by most everyone who looked at the intelligence debacle leading to the attacks of September 11, 2001. And he’s right that we need good leaders, although it’s curious that he has only positive things to say about George Tenet, who, as the person in charge of the intelligence community when Al Qaeda terrorists killed 3,000 people in half a day, should surely have been replaced immediately.

Mr. Hitz is outspoken in his criticism of “torture,” and adamant about the importance of the rule of law. By and large I agree with this, although he is often too willing to base his argument on foreign anti-Americanism, and he has a disappointing tendency to speak warmly of people with dubious records of reliability and common sense, from Seymour Hersh to Michael Scheuer. Not surprisingly, he sometimes bemoans American support for Israel. And there is one sentence that sets my teeth on edge: “It has always shocked my conscience,” he says, “that after having missed the Khomeini revolution in Iran in 1979, the intelligence community did not learn its lesson and devote sufficient analytical resources to the rise and growth of Islamic fundamentalism.” Good grief! The truly monstrous intelligence failure after 1979 was, and is, the failure to understand the nature of the Iranian regime itself — our greatest enemy in the world today, and arguably the most important element in the rise of radical Islam.

Most of “Why Spy?” is dedicated to the strategy of recruiting spies, and Mr. Hitz runs through a laundry list of possible motives for betraying one’s own country in the service of American intelligence or, in the case of contemporary terrorists, one’s organization. I doubt anyone who has read John Le Carré or Charles McCarry will learn anything new, aside from a few details about some of the most famous foreigners (mostly Soviets) who spied for or betrayed America. He says that these are the motives that our spymasters must keep in mind in order to recruit agents, and he writes as if our case officers (he calls them “spy runners”) have had great success over the years in identifying and then recruiting foreign agents. However, so far as I have been able to learn, virtually every important American agent during the Cold War was a “walk-in” — someone who contacted us because he had already made the decision to work with us. We didn’t recruit them at all, but simply accepted their offer. And all too often, we didn’t even do that, as in the case of the KGB archivist, Vasili Mitrokhin. He had copious notes and texts about Soviet espionage activities. His material is arguably the greatest treasure trove of information about the KGB ever offered to the West. But we were not interested, and sent him away. Luckily, the Brits were smarter, and took him in.

The Mitrokhin story points to one of the fundamental failures of our intelligence community: We are looking for people to work for us, but we have great difficulty finding ways to work with foreigners. This is a cultural shortcoming, and it cuts across geographical and linguistic lines. Over and over again, talented people with rare access to enemy headquarters have come to the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency and offered to help, only to find themselves facing a routine that offends and frightens them: They have to sign a contract, they have to accept money (even if they are fabulously wealthy), and they then are “run” by a CIA case officer. But many of these people will never accept such a relationship. And so we lose them.

Mr. Hitz argues that we desperately need native Arabic speakers — no doubt about it — and he rightly complains that we have been far too slow to give security clearances to Arabic-speaking Americans, because they have relatives in the Middle East. Things are even worse than he thinks. I can give him several examples of Iraqis who risked their lives on the battlefield as interpreters for our combat forces, who cannot get security clearances because they are not American citizens, or because of “security concerns.” This is not only counterproductive; it’s churlish. And yet it’s common practice. Mr. Hitz speaks well, and knowledgeably, about cooperation with friendly intelligence services, and he eloquently calls for new techniques and insights “from other disciplines such as law enforcement and the military,” but he is curiously uninterested in learning the methods of our allies, even though some of them have been spectacularly successful. He calls for new technologies and “new teamwork,” but he never asks why the Israelis, French, and British have been so much more successful in the Middle East than we have. Nor does he discuss f Israel’s proven techniques for developing good analysts, one of which has always struck me as totally obvious, once you think about it: The Israelis require their analysts to serve in operations before they get a desk job. That way, the analysts understand what the men and women in the field are up against, and can read operational reports with far greater insight than somebody who has gone straight from college to an analytical position.

So while Mr. Hitz is often excellent at identifying the problems, he’s disappointingly weak in proposing solutions. It’s all well and good to call for greater cooperation in the intelligence community, but we also need competitive analyses, and we need outsiders to challenge both the reliability of our intelligence and the common sense of our finished products. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the grotesque National Intelligence Estimate on Iranian nuclear programs, which conveyed the conviction that the mullahs were no longer frantically working to develop atomic bombs and their attendant delivery systems. Just this past weekend, the head of the CIA went on national television to say that he was quite sure Iran was doing just that, a conclusion that any sensible person would undoubtedly have reached. The NIE had a major impact on policy, and I suspect the whole mess could have been avoided by asking a group of outside experts to take a look at a draft NIE before it was released. Mr. Hitz alludes to this idea in passing, but doesn’t give it any real weight.

I think he’s also often misleading about the way the intelligence community works nowadays. He says that the “civilian intelligence agencies,” by which he surely means the CIA above all, are no longer “top dog” in the intelligence business. Would that it were so. The CIA still holds an absolute veto over all human intelligence operations, and there have been several cases in recent years when military officers wanted to pursue promising lines of working with foreign locals, only to have the operations quashed, apparently because the CIA was unwilling to give up control. This has to change.

“Why Spy?,” then, is a useful primer in many ways, but certainly not the new road map we so desperately need to rebuild our intelligence agencies.

Mr. Ledeen is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor at the National Review. He blogs at PajamasMedia.com.