The CIA will be adding 6 new stars to it's memorial wall at it's Langley headquarters. My condolences go out to all of the families and I honor their service. This will bring the total number of CIA officers killed to 97 since it's formation in 1947; all of them deserve our respect. I want to state categorically that the point I am about to make is not meant to demean the work, sacrifice or service of anyone who has ever worked for the CIA. Less than 100 dead in 50+ years is not enough. That sounds harsh I know, but I think it represents risk-averse culture and lack of focus on human intelligence that has hamstrung our ability to know what our enemies are doing. That number includes accidental deaths as well, so the number of operational ones is even less. I fervently wish we lived in a world where no one actually had to give their life for our country, but we do not and never have. Evil is a constant part of the human condition and we can either accept it's depredations, or we can organize and act against it. I don't need to catalog the times where we have had no clue what our enemies were doing or intended to do. Spying is a dangerous and dirty business and it requires a commitment to accept that bad things will happen. We once knew that and operated accordingly, but there were abuses and eventually in 1975 the Church Committee in the Senate investigated the CIA and concluded it was operating out of bounds. The result of this was a near complete destruction of our human intelligence activities. As the CIA rebuilt it's capabilities it relied very heavy on technical means and electronic surveillance. That remains the case to this day. If we want to have accurate intelligence and the ability to know what our enemies are up to, we need to augment the electronic piece with an active human intelligence component. If anything the bombing in Afghanistan points out that we need to be much better at this, and also that doing so is inherently risky. So be it. When Grim and I were at the recent journalism fellowship I had a chance to ask a senior State Department official who was discussing how they were going to increase the number of civilians in Afghanistan. These folks were going to be teaching the Afghans all kinds of things and make an impact on the quality of governance and life. I asked him if he was willing to get these people killed, because otherwise they would never be out where they needed to be to make that impact. He spit and sputtered and looked daggers at me, but he never got around to saying yes. I do understand that the provincial reconstruction teams are doing great work, but they are too few and most are contractors not State employees. The same decision faces our intelligence community. If we want to know what is going on, then we need to infiltrate our enemies, we need to recruit agents from among them and we need to be dealing with all kinds of criminal and unsavory characters. This applies to state actors as well as terrorist groups. This will be dangerous and some of these people will be killed, but over all we will have a much better picture of the threats we face and that will save more lives in the end. Wouldn't it be nice to have an agent in Iran telling us about their nuke program rather than a 2007 national Intelligence Estimate claiming the Iranians had abandoned weaponization. That NIE was so fantastically wrong that those involved in it's production should be flogged. If we had agents in Saddam's Iraq we may have found out that he was putting up a front and pretending to still have WMD programs, instead we acted on the basis of under-informed reports that were wrong. There are too many dangers in this world to fly as blindly as we have been. We need to quit spending billions of dollars creating bureaucracies that create nothing but reports and collectively don't seem to be able to find their asses with both hands. It's time to get back in the spy game.
Read the complete post at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Blackfive/~3/F98Qs14pR0Q/cia-needs-to-get-in-the-spy-business.html
Posted
Jan 08 2010, 12:32 AM
by
BLACKFIVE