Posted on 09/29/2001 4:43:45 AM PDT by George Smiley
INTELLIGENCE: Pulling Teeth Isn't Always Dentistry
By E.G. Ross, Editor
On Fame's eternal camping-ground Their silent tents are spread, And Glory guards with solemn round, The bivouac of the dead.
A few years later, President Jimmy Carter blithely allowed CIA Director Stansfield Turner to scrape away most of the cream of what was left of our human intelligence. He chased out or fired scores of the U.S.'s top field agents and experts. Domestic anti-terrorism spies at the FBI faced similar pressure over the years, with many finally giving up in disgust and resigning. Not only our overseas intelligence about terrorists declined. So did our homeland intelligence. It did not stop there. Due to Congressional opposition, very little intelligence rebuilding occurred in the Reagan or Bush administrations. Some, but not enough. What was rebuilt, didn't last because the Clinton administration promptly threw things into reverse. Aided and abetted by certain allies in Congress, Mr. Clinton renewed the persnickety, moralistic disdain for human intelligence, further restricting our spies from doing what spies are chartered to do—or ought to be.
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Go after music and software pirating.
And searching his archive is tenuous at best.
Dude sure can write, though.
IT IS NOT EASY being a spook these days. Of course it is never actually easy. But for quite some time, it has been harder than usual. Twenty-six years ago, Congress, stampeded by the inflammatory Senator Frank Church, raked the agencies over the coals for being "rogues," for supposedly being out of control and somehow un-American. Why? Congress "discovered" that in order to gather intelligence, our agents had rubbed shoulders with bad guys. Dastardly! "If we stoop to their level, we are no better than them!" echoed the cry through the Capitol halls. Never mind that it was by infiltrating and associating with bad guys that we could learn most completely what the bad guys were doing and thinking. There was a name for the process: spying. It is exactly what agencies like the CIA, DIA, and others are supposed to do.
A few years later, President Jimmy Carter blithely allowed CIA Director Stansfield Turner to scrape away most of the cream of what was left of our human intelligence. He chased out or fired scores of the U.S.'s top field agents and experts. Domestic anti-terrorism spies at the FBI faced similar pressure over the years, with many finally giving up in disgust and resigning. Not only our overseas intelligence about terrorists declined. So did our homeland intelligence. It did not stop there. Due to Congressional opposition, very little intelligence rebuilding occurred in the Reagan or Bush administrations. Some, but not enough. Much of what was rebuilt, didn't last because the Clinton administration promptly threw things into reverse. Aided and abetted by certain allies in Congress, Mr. Clinton renewed the persnickety, moralistic disdain for human intelligence, further restricting our spies from doing what spies are chartered to do—or ought to be.
The decimation added up. The bad guys may not be the brightest rocks in the box, but they are always bright enough to do simple sums. As the years rolled along, they saw that with diminished probing of their activities they could get away with more and more. Criminals are always bolder when they believe that their victims do not see them or know them, and terrorists moreso. While the Church/Carter/Clinton emasculation of the U.S. human spy services was not precisely an invitation to terrorists to do dastardly deeds, it was certainly a form of appeasement. There is a difference. An invitation says, "Come in." Appeasement merely says, "I'm looking the other way." Scholars and jurists see the distinction. Terrorists and other enemies do not care one way or the other. Either an invitation or appeasement is fine with them—as either capitulation or carelessness is fine with the predators of the wild plains.
— Where Are We Now? —
We are in the position of having to rebuild our intelligence agencies under the worst of circumstances—in the middle of a terribly dangerous war. It is a war that has already taken over 6,000 lives on our homeland. At the same time, we must rely on foreign spies whose governments did not gut their resources—as we hope and pray that what overseas agencies give us is true and useful, and not packed with disinformation or clever misdirection. Some will not be. Allies such as Britain, for instance, will play it pretty straight. But will a nation like Pakistan? Will a nation like Russia? Will nations like Egypt and Indonesia? They and other countries harbor deep grievances against the U.S. Will their information be reliable? We are like a nearly blind man with only a few reliable friends to guide us—but who cannot guide us all the way, after which we must rely on half-friends, non-friends, and never-friends. It is not a pretty position from which to conduct battle to defend one's own soil.
This is the consequence of eating one's own political children. This is the effect of eviscerating what George Washington called America's first line of defense, its national intelligence. You may not know it, but Mr. Washington was the founder of U.S. intelligence. He had a deep regard for its power to frustrate, deflect, and defeat America's enemies. He understood particularly well how important it was to have spies in the camps of the other side. Unlike some modern presidents, he had no qualms about dirtying his hands with deception and lies.
"As the head of the Continental Army, George Washington had to rely on his own skills to develop an intelligence network," wrote Harold Hough in "High Ground" in the September 1995 edition of our then-sister publication, Understanding Defense. "For instance, at Valley Forge he personally created false documents that fell into British hands and convinced them that Washington had an additional eight thousand more soldiers."
The U.S. has done rather naughty things to preserve itself—things that many modern policymakers would never dream of doing. For example, when Dwight David Eisenhower (later President) oversaw U.S. intelligence as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe in World War II, he authorized the FBI to burglarize foreign embassies in Washington, D.C. The aim? To steal their secret codes. It worked. But could you see Church, Carter, or Clinton authorizing something like that? It would be a cold day in Hell.
— We'll Need More than Money —
There is an old rule in robbery: go where the money is. There is a comparable rule in spycraft: go where the dirt is. The nation that is too morally finicky to let its agents get their hands dirty is not going to find the dirt it needs, when it needs it.
A move is now afoot to greatly increase our intelligence agencies' budgets, which have suffered almost a quarter-century of funding decline (after adjustments for inflation). The move is a good thing. It is about time. In this modern world, you simply cannot do sound intelligence on the cheap. But if all we do is throw money at the agencies, it will not fix the problem. We also need to learn from America's founder of intelligence and be willing to permit our agents to mix with the bad guys, worm into their organizations, and get the kind of smarmy but critical facts that only such methods will produce. If we can do this, if we can rejuvenate our human intelligence, then we will significantly reduce the chances of more events like those of 9/11.
But it will take quite awhile. You do not rebuild 25 years of damage in a few months. We will be at it for most of this decade. Will we remain vulnerable during the rebuilding? Yes. Vulnerability and death are the price of intelligence neglect. But we can rebuild our intelligence agencies eventually. The 9/11 terrorism may have been the catalyst to assure that we do it. It is a hard catalyst. The U.S. sometimes allows its natural benevolence to degenerate into complacency and inadvertent appeasement. When that happens, the country regroups only around a hard catalyst.
—o—
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