Commentary By Ron Beasley
The headline reads: Ex-Intelligence Officials Cite Low Spirits at CIA. Should we really care? What has the CIA really done for us in the last 60 years?
When I worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency in the late 60s and early 70s we didn't think much of the CIA. They were viewed as a bunch of loose canons - would be cowboys who frequently got it wrong. Using methods that wouldn't make a very good movie we at the DIA obtained reliable intelligence on the old Soviet Union. We would write reports and send them to Washington. The CIA would tell us we were wrong at once but days, weeks, months or in some cases years later it would turn out we were right and it was the CIA that got it wrong.
As a result of my experience I read with interest CIA fails mission to detect danger by Pierre Tristam in the Daytona Beach News-Journal.
The CIA wasn't created to run cloak-and-dagger operations, rig elections, overthrow governments, cozy up to thuggish regimes or run secret prisons. That's what it's done for 60 years, to the detriment of its original mission and at catastrophic costs to this country. The CIA was created in 1947 to prevent another Pearl Harbor. Harry Truman wanted presidents informed of dangers over the horizons.
The CIA hasn't improved matters. It's often made them worse. The spy agency's history of failures makes a parody of its motto -- "And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free," from the Gospel according to John. This is the agency that failed to warn of the Soviet Bomb in 1949, of the Korean war the following year and of Soviet ballistic missile capabilities in 1957 while inventing a "missile gap" three years later, overstating Soviet military capabilities for 40 years thereafter and predicting, within weeks of its downfall, that the Soviet empire would last well into the 21st century.
The agency's record in the Islamic world is even more dismal. The agency also failed to warn of the Egyptian-Israeli war of 1956 or the Arab-Israeli war of 1973 and assured President Carter that the Soviets would not invade Afghanistan in 1979. Its agents, who'd propped up the shah of Iran's secret police and trained its torture-chamber goons for 25 years, also assured Carter weeks before the shah was deposed that Islamist militants agitating in the streets were not endangering the regime. The consequences of that failure are with us still, as are those of Afghanistan, where the CIA failed to detect how the jihadists it had nursed during the Afghan war were America's next-greatest threat. All that -- a mere fraction of the agency's failures -- before the CIA's ultimate failures of 9/11, of Iraqi WMDs and subsequent torture scandals at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere (after it had outsourced half the agency's responsibilities to private contractors).
"Amateur hour" is over, Michael Hayden, the 18th CIA director, promised senators at his 2006 confirmation hearing. You can bet the next 10 years' $9 trillion deficit and yet-unimagined failures that it isn't.
Tristam doesn't believe it makes sense to go after individual agents - after all it was the Bush/Cheney administration who changed the laws because they thought they could.
There's no sense arguing the absurd. It'll defeat you every time, as Kafka's Josef finds out in "The Trial." There's no sense prosecuting interrogators, either. They didn't re-write the book on torture. Their bosses and their lawyers did. Their prosecution, which will never take place, may be a useful disinfection of national ideals. But it wouldn't get at the founding rot. Presidents come and go, even bad ones. The CIA remains. It's time to ask if it should.
We have to ask if the CIA has done more harm than good over the last 60 years.
There are two problems. One is that American exceptionalism prevents the development of good intelligence agents. Empathy is a necessary (and admittedly dangerous) trait for an intelligence agent. The British were good at this and produced good agents. American station chiefs in the "underdeveloped" countries often don't even speak the language. Their level of understanding is limited to whatever is fed them by the most accomplished sycophants in the local population. This is not to say that there are not professionals in the CIA. But usually they are marginalized.
ReplyDeleteThe second is that power is sweet. No president is intelligent enough (no pun intended) to willingly give up a secret army of thugs. Intelligence gathering and analysis is nowhere as sexy as covert operations. Who would a gung ho President rather have, an army of Kermit Roosevelts or a bunch of bleeding-hearts gone native? The consequences follow.