Pendragon_6
05-10-2006, 12:23 PM
Blowing Up Their Own Agency
By: Phil Brennan
Underlying all the ruckus boiling to the surface about the state of the so-called "intelligence community" in the wake of the resignation of Porter Goss, is the unhappy fact that the various agencies involved in spookery are an unmitigated mess.
Intelligence gathering in itself is a messy business, largely misunderstood in a nation of people most of whom prefer to go about their private business, play by the rules and don't much care for the kind of dirty underhanded tricks involved in the spook game.
In 1929 Henry Stimson, later FDR's Secretary of War, typified that attitude when he sniffed that "gentlemen do not read each other's mail." In 1963, responding on behalf of the more realistic Americans, Allen Dulles, then CIA Director said that "gentlemen do read other peoples' mail, if they can get their hands on it." according to Charles E. Lathrop, author of "The Literary Spy: The Ultimate Source for Quotations on Espionage & Intelligence."
The process "of getting their hands on it" is not a gentleman's job - that task belongs to the spooks, and of late those at the CIA have not been very adept at doing it. A good number of them, to the contrary, have proved capable of getting their hands on the administration's "mail" and passing it on to media friendly to their left-leaning political persuasion which is widely at variance to that of the administration they serve.
This has been the modus vivendi of a clique of CIA staffers which has employed the leaking of secrets as their way of displaying their disapproval of administration policies, much in the same manner as Benedict Arnold displayed his disapproval of the policies of the Continental Congress and their failure to compensate him for his expenses. He was also fearful that the alliance with then-Catholic France would somehow expose the Colonies to the deadly virus of papism. So he tried to leak information to the British, the Revolution's equivalent of the New York Times and the Washington Post.
When you get right down to it, with some notable exceptions, Uncle Sam has not been very good at playing the spook game, partially because of that reluctance to open other peoples' mail. In the interim between the two World Wars, aside from the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the army's spook corps, the only civilian intelligence operation was a rather informal arrangement run out of Wall Street law firms by World War I heros General "Wild Bill" Donovan * who had established a close relationship with Britain's intelligence services.
Early in World War II Donovan organized the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which, while largely successful in both penetrating and combating the Nazi war machine, was itself seriously penetrated by the Soviets.
Thanks to the intercepts of Soviet communications known as the Venona project, it was revealed that a senior aide to Donovan, Duncan Lee, shamefully a descendant of Robert E. Lee, had divulged secret OSS operations in Europe and China to the Soviets.
Other OSS employees such as Maurice Halperin and Donald Wheeler of the agency's Research and Analysis Divisions both spied for the Soviets and slanted their reports to favor Soviet aims. There were as many as 20 other Soviet moles working for the OSS.
Aside from these traitors, the OSS had a strong contingent of leftists, many of whom could not view the Soviets as anything more than simply competitors in the international economic struggle. Quasi-Marxists themselves, they clung to the old Communist credo of having "no enemies to the left."
The significance of all this is the fact that the OSS sired the Central Intelligence Agency, which while performing yeoman service in the Cold War, particularly under CIA Director Bill Casey, who ran circles around the Soviets and was a principal contributor the fall of the Evil Empire, continued to be full of the same kind of left wingers who infested the OSS.
Despite his successes, however, Casey failed to rid the agency of its large cadre of left leaning employees who dominated the analysis section, and still do today. Such Bush-hating CIA employees as Valerie Plame Wilson, leaker Mary McCarthy, and a host of others most of whom gave big bucks to the Gore and Kerry campaigns and the DNC were intelligence analysts, not the handful of covert operatives risking life and limb overseas to gather information. So was that Israel hating heckler Ray McGovern, who attacked Donald Rumsfeld last week.
Porter Goss set out to cleanse the CIA of this disloyal crew who have proved willing to endanger the national security in their frenzy to damage George W. Bush and his administration, and he was well on his way to doing it when he fell victim to the bureaucratic wars.
Much of the current controversy revolves around the turf wars that always erupt when bureaucracies clash. Goss's CIA was superseded by the new Department of National Intelligence, headed by Ambassador John Negroponte and his second in command, Air Force General Michael Hayden. One issue between Goss and his new superior was reportedly Negroponte and Hayden's plan to move the analysts out of the CIA and into their shop - rather neat solution to the need to get the foxes out of the hen house and into a place where they could be kept under closer supervision.
Like any head of a bureaucracy, Goss recoiled at the idea of having a large chunk of his agency swept up and carried off by Negroponte to his own growing empire. This set the two old college friends at odds, and Negroponte won.
None of this really helps to resolve the main problem, which is the fact that aside from spectacular technological advances in monitoring communications, our overall intelligence gathering capacity stinks. Goss was trying to build a human intelligence capacity but he had a long way to go since the Church Committee and the Clinton administration just about destroyed that vital function of the spook game.
The Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal put it well on Tuesday: "We love the notion that Porter Goss somehow crippled the CIA's effectiveness by "politicizing" the agency. It looked to us as if the place had given up spying for politicking well before Mr. Goss took over in 2004. The leaks out of Langley the past four years are not infighting as usual; they represent a new and corrosive level of institutional disloyalty. This is a breakdown in discipline of a degree that can be very difficult to reverse once begun. Short of prosecutions, it is hard to see what General Hayden can do to get the dogs back in the kennel. And if that proves true, then let it be said that the CIA's leakers have probably succeeded in blowing up their own agency.
"Testifying before the 9/11 Commission, former DCI and Defense Secretary James Schlesinger made a broad point worth holding in mind as the Hayden confirmation unfolds: "Intelligence is highly successful in dealing with routine developments. It is, however, particularly prone to failure at the turning points of history."
We happen to be at one of those "turning points of history," and we'd better get a grip on the problem of reading other people's mail before one of those letters has a nuclear weapon inside it.
Good luck, General Hayden, and be sure to sharpen your letter opener.
*(Apropos of nothing, although I never met Wild Bill Donovan and had nothing whatsoever to do with him in his lifetime, I was an honorary pall bearer at his funeral. That may sound impressive but it was actually one of my more bizarre exploits in klutzery. Although uninvited, my overly aggressive partner, the late Frank Kluckhohn, flashing his State Department security credentials, bullied us into the crowded St. Matthew's Cathedral and pushed our way into a section of the jam-packed pews which, unbeknownst to us, turned out to be reserved for a distinguished group of honorary pall bearers. When the funeral ended, we found ourselves ushered into in their midst as they performed their function of escorting General Donovan's coffin to the waiting hearse. That's penetration by klutzery at its highest level.)
"Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact."
ETHER ZONE (http://www.etherzone.com/2006/bren051006.shtml)
Phil Brennan can be reached at pvb@pvbr.com
We invite you to visit his website at Wednesday on the Web
By: Phil Brennan
Underlying all the ruckus boiling to the surface about the state of the so-called "intelligence community" in the wake of the resignation of Porter Goss, is the unhappy fact that the various agencies involved in spookery are an unmitigated mess.
Intelligence gathering in itself is a messy business, largely misunderstood in a nation of people most of whom prefer to go about their private business, play by the rules and don't much care for the kind of dirty underhanded tricks involved in the spook game.
In 1929 Henry Stimson, later FDR's Secretary of War, typified that attitude when he sniffed that "gentlemen do not read each other's mail." In 1963, responding on behalf of the more realistic Americans, Allen Dulles, then CIA Director said that "gentlemen do read other peoples' mail, if they can get their hands on it." according to Charles E. Lathrop, author of "The Literary Spy: The Ultimate Source for Quotations on Espionage & Intelligence."
The process "of getting their hands on it" is not a gentleman's job - that task belongs to the spooks, and of late those at the CIA have not been very adept at doing it. A good number of them, to the contrary, have proved capable of getting their hands on the administration's "mail" and passing it on to media friendly to their left-leaning political persuasion which is widely at variance to that of the administration they serve.
This has been the modus vivendi of a clique of CIA staffers which has employed the leaking of secrets as their way of displaying their disapproval of administration policies, much in the same manner as Benedict Arnold displayed his disapproval of the policies of the Continental Congress and their failure to compensate him for his expenses. He was also fearful that the alliance with then-Catholic France would somehow expose the Colonies to the deadly virus of papism. So he tried to leak information to the British, the Revolution's equivalent of the New York Times and the Washington Post.
When you get right down to it, with some notable exceptions, Uncle Sam has not been very good at playing the spook game, partially because of that reluctance to open other peoples' mail. In the interim between the two World Wars, aside from the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the army's spook corps, the only civilian intelligence operation was a rather informal arrangement run out of Wall Street law firms by World War I heros General "Wild Bill" Donovan * who had established a close relationship with Britain's intelligence services.
Early in World War II Donovan organized the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which, while largely successful in both penetrating and combating the Nazi war machine, was itself seriously penetrated by the Soviets.
Thanks to the intercepts of Soviet communications known as the Venona project, it was revealed that a senior aide to Donovan, Duncan Lee, shamefully a descendant of Robert E. Lee, had divulged secret OSS operations in Europe and China to the Soviets.
Other OSS employees such as Maurice Halperin and Donald Wheeler of the agency's Research and Analysis Divisions both spied for the Soviets and slanted their reports to favor Soviet aims. There were as many as 20 other Soviet moles working for the OSS.
Aside from these traitors, the OSS had a strong contingent of leftists, many of whom could not view the Soviets as anything more than simply competitors in the international economic struggle. Quasi-Marxists themselves, they clung to the old Communist credo of having "no enemies to the left."
The significance of all this is the fact that the OSS sired the Central Intelligence Agency, which while performing yeoman service in the Cold War, particularly under CIA Director Bill Casey, who ran circles around the Soviets and was a principal contributor the fall of the Evil Empire, continued to be full of the same kind of left wingers who infested the OSS.
Despite his successes, however, Casey failed to rid the agency of its large cadre of left leaning employees who dominated the analysis section, and still do today. Such Bush-hating CIA employees as Valerie Plame Wilson, leaker Mary McCarthy, and a host of others most of whom gave big bucks to the Gore and Kerry campaigns and the DNC were intelligence analysts, not the handful of covert operatives risking life and limb overseas to gather information. So was that Israel hating heckler Ray McGovern, who attacked Donald Rumsfeld last week.
Porter Goss set out to cleanse the CIA of this disloyal crew who have proved willing to endanger the national security in their frenzy to damage George W. Bush and his administration, and he was well on his way to doing it when he fell victim to the bureaucratic wars.
Much of the current controversy revolves around the turf wars that always erupt when bureaucracies clash. Goss's CIA was superseded by the new Department of National Intelligence, headed by Ambassador John Negroponte and his second in command, Air Force General Michael Hayden. One issue between Goss and his new superior was reportedly Negroponte and Hayden's plan to move the analysts out of the CIA and into their shop - rather neat solution to the need to get the foxes out of the hen house and into a place where they could be kept under closer supervision.
Like any head of a bureaucracy, Goss recoiled at the idea of having a large chunk of his agency swept up and carried off by Negroponte to his own growing empire. This set the two old college friends at odds, and Negroponte won.
None of this really helps to resolve the main problem, which is the fact that aside from spectacular technological advances in monitoring communications, our overall intelligence gathering capacity stinks. Goss was trying to build a human intelligence capacity but he had a long way to go since the Church Committee and the Clinton administration just about destroyed that vital function of the spook game.
The Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal put it well on Tuesday: "We love the notion that Porter Goss somehow crippled the CIA's effectiveness by "politicizing" the agency. It looked to us as if the place had given up spying for politicking well before Mr. Goss took over in 2004. The leaks out of Langley the past four years are not infighting as usual; they represent a new and corrosive level of institutional disloyalty. This is a breakdown in discipline of a degree that can be very difficult to reverse once begun. Short of prosecutions, it is hard to see what General Hayden can do to get the dogs back in the kennel. And if that proves true, then let it be said that the CIA's leakers have probably succeeded in blowing up their own agency.
"Testifying before the 9/11 Commission, former DCI and Defense Secretary James Schlesinger made a broad point worth holding in mind as the Hayden confirmation unfolds: "Intelligence is highly successful in dealing with routine developments. It is, however, particularly prone to failure at the turning points of history."
We happen to be at one of those "turning points of history," and we'd better get a grip on the problem of reading other people's mail before one of those letters has a nuclear weapon inside it.
Good luck, General Hayden, and be sure to sharpen your letter opener.
*(Apropos of nothing, although I never met Wild Bill Donovan and had nothing whatsoever to do with him in his lifetime, I was an honorary pall bearer at his funeral. That may sound impressive but it was actually one of my more bizarre exploits in klutzery. Although uninvited, my overly aggressive partner, the late Frank Kluckhohn, flashing his State Department security credentials, bullied us into the crowded St. Matthew's Cathedral and pushed our way into a section of the jam-packed pews which, unbeknownst to us, turned out to be reserved for a distinguished group of honorary pall bearers. When the funeral ended, we found ourselves ushered into in their midst as they performed their function of escorting General Donovan's coffin to the waiting hearse. That's penetration by klutzery at its highest level.)
"Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact."
ETHER ZONE (http://www.etherzone.com/2006/bren051006.shtml)
Phil Brennan can be reached at pvb@pvbr.com
We invite you to visit his website at Wednesday on the Web