WHAT are the true benefits of spying? How does the biggest spymaster of all, the US, believe it should proceed in the light of recent, rather obvious intelligence failures? And do the assumptions American spies make, about their trade and about the world, doom them to further failure?
These questions are answered (sometimes unintentionally) in Transforming US Intelligence, a collection of essays edited by Jennifer E. Sims, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University in Washington DC and sometime Department of State intelligence officer, and Burton Gerber, now a consultant after 39 years as a CIA operations officer.
The contributors consider institutional reforms of the US’s 15 agencies. But to read the essays as if conducting a research assessment exercise of those agencies is scary – because it seems as if nothing much has been learned, and that these agencies persist in cold-war certainties despite the complexities of our times.
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And what of the quality of their research? What would we have missed if all intelligence services had been wound up in, say, 1945? They have notched up some impressive failures. Douglas McEachin, CIA deputy director of intelligence for two years, has a list. The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the 1973 attack on Israel by Egypt and Syria, the 1981 imposition of martial law in Poland – and both attacks on New York’s World Trade Center – all, he says, took politicians by surprise, despite what were, in retrospect, copious clues.
McEachin also lists the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as a “surprise”. But in 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski, US National Security Advisor during the invasion, spoke to Le Nouvel Observateur of “drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap”. Did he later regret supporting the jihadis? “What is most important to the history of the world?” he asked in reply, “Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of central Europe and the end of the cold war?”
From there we descend to more recent stupidity. John McGaffin, a security consultant after 31 years in the CIA, sets great store by the opportunities the agency would have had to assassinate one jihadi, Osama bin Laden, had it not been for political considerations. Many would view this as akin to believing that taking out the actor who plays Colonel Sanders would destroy the whole fried chicken franchise. Surely the real game now is one of non-hierarchical opposition movements – some peaceful, some not, but all of them brands rather than structures, with no head to decapitate?
Sims in particular portrays the intelligence services as guardians of a US national interest that they know with certainty. There is no hint that the will of the people or new information from, say, science could challenge the services’ view of that interest. Aside from providing the new Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, with a handy action plan, the book aims to make US surveillance more efficient in ways compatible with its citizens’ perceptions of the US as democratic. The US is presented as the last nation-state, the only one that can have interests in isolation from the rest of the world.
But what about those benefits of spying? Were it not for the spies’ technological requirements, we would not have a cornucopia of whale song accidentally recorded by navies looking for submarines. Earth-imaging satellites would be much less developed, if at all. The Hubble telescope is at heart a “Big Bird” spy satellite, pointing the other way. And we’d know much less about the deep oceans and the ice caps. The list goes on, but it’s an odd pay-off. The US administration might know much more about the world of political risk if it had invested much smaller sums in journalism through, say, public service television news stations -and paid attention. The supreme irony is that the biggest single scientific spin-off from the spooks’ development of satellite and underwater surveillance has been data on global warming.
Transforming US Intelligence
Georgetown University Press