all the president’s spies
John Judis would like to have more discussion about the possibility of ditching the CIA, or at the very least completely restructuring it:
The question that Congress might ponder, but won’t, is whether the structure of our foreign policy apparatus – the power and responsibility vested in a secret branch of government — invites abuse. That was the position of the late Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan who argued for abolishing the CIA. He didn’t want to eliminate intelligence, but he wanted to return it to the purview of the State Department, while giving the armed forces the responsibility for overseas intervention.
The CIA, of course, was born after World War II, when the sudden lack of a real war rendered the OSS irrelevant. President Truman was reluctant to charter an intelligence agency to replace it, so former members of the OSS started what was essentially a private spy agency and then – for lack of a better word – forced their way into government. From that point on, clandestine operations have been largely out of the hands of the State and War Departments, and certainly out of the control of Congress.
Personality reigned supreme at the CIA, as did nepotism, for years under its original founders, and still does to large degree today. There is nothing at all surprising about Cheney using the agency to influence policy. It was always a convenient place for overly interventionist presidents (read: Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, Bush) to go when they wanted some dirty work done – coups, assassinations, and so forth. LBJ referred to the Kennedy brothers as “Murder Inc.” for their involvement with the CIA as essentially an assassination agency. It became, in many ways, a direct extension of executive power.
Now we’ve arrived at the torture debacle, and once again it’s the CIA at the heart of it all.
Yglesias writes:
It’s not just that CIA personnel were involved in doing something bad, it’s that the specific institutional structure of the government really does seem to have played a role. After all, why were CIA personnel involved in this at all? Pre-Bush, the CIA didn’t have any interrogators. The FBI had interrogators, and the military had interrogators, but the CIA didn’t. But responsibility for interrogations wound up gravitating toward the CIA not because the CIA had relevant expertise but precisely because the CIA has an institutional history and track record of law-breaking and war crimes.
For a lot more on the CIA, read Joseph Trento’s Secret History of the CIA. It’s fascinating.
“Harry Truman, who presided over the creation of the modern US intelligence apparatus, famously said that what he sought was a secret newspaper, something that would divine the hidden agendas and developments of mysterious foreign actors in the dawning cold war… But what Truman got was something more suited to what his cold war policies required: a sprawling apparatus devoted to covert action, subterfuge, disinformation and lawlessness. Once upon a time, the agency was candid about what it needed to be. ‘Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply,’ wrote Gen. Jimmy Doolittle in a secret 1954 report for Dwight D. Eisenhower about revamping the CIA’s covert actions. ‘We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.'”
“The CIA’s Failings” by Spencer Ackerman. The Nation 6/26/2008
If your proposition can be distilled to, “Replace the CIA with something better”, I guess I would have to vote for that. The bungling and failures of the CIA almost qualify as common knowledge. “Blowback,” a CIA internally coined term, expresses the nasty consequences of even purported successful operations. (Let’s not even consider the “blowback” of outright failures like The Bay of Pigs and Iraq WMD prior to 2003.)
So the obvious questions, “What would be better?” Or even, “Can there be something better?” “Would shifting intelligence gathering to State or Defense insure better results?”
Perhaps this whole enterprise is as General Doolittle wrote “fundamentally repugnant.”Report
I don’t really have the answers, Bob. I see the CIA as a dangerous weapon in the hands of a too-powerful executive branch. It lacks coherent oversight. Would that improve under the State or Defense departments? Probably not if the agency was merely transplanted. It would retain too much of its old self. We probably need to start from scratch, but Lord knows what sort of impossible task that would be…Report
well if you want to focus on actual intelligence gathering then rather than this ludicrous (and wasteful and illegal) programs like mass surveillance of US phone records in huge data banks, you could basically create an open-source intelligence gathering service. A kind of CIA-wiki I suppose. It’s not like bin Laden & Crew are particularly shy about publicly proclaiming what they are about. Same thing with the stupidity of creating an anti-cyber war department in the Air Force (WTF???) rather than simply using the talent (a lot of which can be accessed quite cheaply and is built much more around pride/esteem than bureaucratic gold stars) that already exists in society. To do so would require a loss of control over course, would make any gathering services more transparent and therefore more open to political review. Plus it’s well intelligent, so given our government we can rule that one out.
I suppose the CIA will continue to stumble and bumble along, largely missing out on the big stuff, lacking direction, definition, and purpose.Report
This only takes account of Soviet espionage and subversion against us—even during the years of alliance in WWII. We had no spy agency until after the war; the Soviet spy agency was founded at the same time as the October “revolution.”
Read the work of Christopher Andrews on the Soviets to be “fair and balanced.” The Cold War was a war, after all.Report
The Soviet spy network was so vastly superior to anything the West had in place – despite their continued practice of offing “westernized” agents – that it makes the CIA look truly laughable. Bumble along is right….Report
Ackerman again. Today, from attackermann.firedoglake.com he writes:
“I find the case for getting rid of the CIA uncompelling, largely for the reasons laid out in this Nation piece I wrote last year. I’ll expand on this when I get some time. But quickly: the failures of the CIA are failures of American policymaking, which is to say the belief that you can launch all these zipless activities and get away it with it in the dark. The CIA is wishful thinking made into an agency. Getting rid of the agency is less important than getting rid of the wishful thinking.”Report
The Soviet spy network was so vastly superior to anything the West had in place – despite their continued practice of offing “westernized” agents – that it makes the CIA look truly laughable. Bumble along is right….
And yet… we won.
Also @ Bob: Ackerman’s comment echoes George Friedman‘s analysis, which I posted in another thread here. He says that the torture program was because of our intelligence failures after the Cold War. He says that
He concludes,
Report
Yes we did, Roque, but not thanks to our intelligence service but rather to our superior economic model, our freedom and ideals – essentially, we maintained a more sustainable political/economic model than the Soviets.Report
ED Kain: It’s fantastic that you have the definitive answer to such a complex question as, How did we win the Cold War? We all should sit at your feet and learn.Report
How did we win the Cold War, Roque?Report
“The United States turned to torture because it [had] experienced a massive intelligence failure reaching back a decade.”
Okay, let’s say that is true. (I’m more inclined to say that FBI and CIA failed to follow the information it had. Remember the August 2001 PDB, Al Qaeda determined to strike? But leave that aside.)
Who is responsible for the “decade” long failure? That would cover the end of Bush I, all Clinton, and the first months of Bush II. So who or what precluded the CIA from gathering intelligence?
If torture was necessary to correct a “massive intelligence failure” Bush should have gone to Congress and sought changes in the law, abrogated treaties and other international agreements. God knows Congress was nothing but a rubber stamp in those months. Instead he cooked the law books and had his stooges redefine torture almost out of existence.Report
ED Kain:
Like any complex situation, the end of the Cold War will demand a complex solution. I’m certain that the CIA played its part in this explanation. So, I have to answer that I just don’t know the answer—unlike you, who are so sure of your answers.Report
Bob: I don’t know who was responsible for our intelligence failure. There is enough blame to spread around, for sure. But the fact of the intelligence failure is what I want to emphasize, no matter who’s to blame.
And with this, I want to emphasize that I do not “justify” the torture program—if that’s what it was. I just want to explain it in a way that allows me to understand how good people with good motives could do it. In doing this I can’t possibly put myself above the authorities who did authorize the program—if that’s what it was—much less demand their prosecution.Report