Everyone Line Up--It's Time To Bash CIA

The Geek is glad he is not in the spook business. It's getting more dangerous to work for CIA than it is to go out for a meal in Peshawar. Try to do the job of obtaining time sensitive intelligence according to the rules du jour and some day you'll be looking for a lawyer as the Justice Department of a new administration tries to hang your butt from the highest yardarm to the applause of the "progressives" within We the People.

Then, if in a time of great panic such as the immediate aftermath of 9/11, should you be so bold as to come up with an idea for a "needed capacity" to counter terrorism and have the effrontery to keep it concealed from Congress at the direction of a secrecy freak Vice-President, the politicos of the Democratic Party and a goodly chunk of the MSM will howl as if you had both burned the Constitution and plotted a coup d'etat. It doesn't matter if the still undescribed program never went beyond the initial planning stage and that only in fits and starts. No siree, all that matters is that the evil three initial agency and the troglodyte veep were involved.

The performance of CIA Director Leon Panetta in this flap is, to say the least, both suspicious and unseemly. Mr Panetta, who has an unexcelled record in partisan politics of the most bare knuckled sort, seems to have moved with a speed and directness which was as unwarranted by the presumed threat to the Union as it is compelled by the needs of the Democratic Party, particularly the need to provide cover to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi concerning her allegations of having been kept in the dark and fed only horse poo-poo regarding waterboarding and the rest of the "intensive interrogation" panoply.

On the other hand if you play by all the Congressionally mandated rules such as those prohibiting using unseemly individuals as humint sources and, as a result, do not accurately predict hostile actions, then you will stand both accused and convicted of the high crime and misdemeanor of "intelligence failure." Or, because the rules established by Executive and Congress alike prohibit assassination, some high profile political figure will lambaste you for having failed to protect the Republic and, thus, failing to fulfill your oath of office.

It is no wonder that Janet Reno in one of her few trenchant comments accurately characterised CIA as suffering "battered child syndrome." Those folks just can't win no matter what they do.

The American intelligence community generally and CIA in particular have shown a distressingly high number of institutionally driven failures over the past several decades. Most of these have originated from a proliferation of intelligence community members, which brings with it turf battles, institutional agendas and related negative features. Still other failures have resulted from the excess of caution which has struck the agencies generally and CIA in particular in the years since the Vietnam War. Layers of committees, liaison groups, ad hoc working groups have conspired with the growth of a CYA bureaucratic mentality to make assessments ever more fuzzy, increasingly Delphic, and decreasingly useful to decision makers.

One longs for the days when a brilliant senior analyst such as Dr Sherman Kent, the Director of the Office of National Estimates, could write an assessment which ran counter to the desires of the chief consumer of intelligence, the president, which was clear, internally consistent, well-documented, and absolutely bang-on. That the president decided to reject the intelligence and follow his own inclinations is not the responsibility of either Dr Kent or CIA.

During the Vietnam War, CIA became increasingly the non-team player of the spook community. Both Presidents Johnson and Nixon became ever more frustrated with the Agency's lack of team spirit and finally stopped reading product they did not find agreeable. As a result CIA massaged the data, weakened the conclusions, and fuzzed up the analyses in an attempt to meet with presidential favor. This was a blunder of world class proportions.

Another blunder which severely damaged, even permanently impaired the Agency was the Congressional hue and cry over actions taken by CIA at the behest and direction of presidents ranging from Eisenhower to Nixon and including Democratic icon JFK. These actions and programs were quite understandable and even appropriate in the context of the Cold War as perceived by the the men in the Oval. Nonetheless in the wake of the defeat in Vietnam and the self-inflected wound of the Watergate Affair, the revelations of the so-called "family jewels" to the Church and Pike Committees filled the nostrils of Americans with a foul stench.

The stench adhered improperly to the Agency which did the work not the presidents who ordered the work be done. An uncritical media and less than candid politicians were ready, no, eager to portray the CIA as a policy making body rather than the policy executing entity it actually is. The end result was to convince We the People that the folks in Spookville were a bunch of dangerous rogues who needed the closest supervision by the presumably responsible adults of Congress.

Without close supervision and a tight leash, the people of CIA were a clear and present danger to the Republic. We the People were quite willing to believe this utterly wrong view since to most of us the activities of an agency tasked with, among many other things, espionage and clandestine activities, must be filled with psychological monsters of the worst sort. After all, who other than a warped individual would deal in treachery, suborn treason, steal secrets and, when ordered to do so, conspire to overthrow the government of a foreign power?

Given the abuse which included the infamous action by President Carter and his CIA Director, Stan Turner, in ridding the Agency of its "deadwood," which included some of the most experienced covert and clandestine operators, it is not surprising that the spooks coiled in on themselves. CIA went into a form of fetal position with committees proliferating and caution becoming the watchword.

The Reagan administration slowed but did not reverse this trajectory. CIA was used properly in the opening years of the proxy war in Afghanistan but its assets were wasted on the poor policy choices made by the Reaganites in Central America. By the time the dust was settling and the Cold War entering the pages of history, CIA was remembered for its failures (eg it didn't get the implosion of the Soviet empire right) rather than its successes (for example, don't turn Afghanistan over to the Pakistanis.)

Now CIA gets some grudging credit for the results of such direct actions as the use of armed Predators in the FATA. (An interesting side note. In the old days, CIA did the same sort of thing in, for example, Southeast Asia, using its paramilitary capacity. This was latter the recipient of much congressional opprobrium during the days when Frank Church rode high.) On the other hand, CIA is damned for having used unsubtle techniques to obtain time sensitive information from captured enemy personnel and running "secret" prisons in assorted distant places.

Unfortunately, it will be a mort of years before currently classified intelligence estimates regarding critical topics such as pre-invasion and post-invasion Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the totality of the hostile Iranian programs will be available to historians. Starting twenty and more years after the fact, historians came into possession of Vietnam era estimates and prognostications. Those of CIA are, retrospectively, the most accurate and honest of all the products of all the competing members of the "intelligence community."

The same may well be true regarding contemporary topics of concern. It may prove that the controversial actions of intensive interrogation, off-shore prisons, extraordinary renditions, and even the unknown but never brought to the real world program presently causing such bloviation were necessary, even essential.

In short, Congress and Attorney General Holder are poorly advised to start bashing and seeking indictments when so little is known not only about the programs, but, more importantly, the results of these taken in the context of the gestalt of the intelligence picture over the past decade or so. The Republic is less endangered by the spooks than it is by politicians and media in need of a quick fix of publicity and artificially engendered public fears.