DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The tangled web of US
'intelligence' By Tom
Engelhardt
In recent months, among other
uproars and scandals, Americans learned:
That the Defense Department has been
collecting intelligence on and tracking domestic
anti-war activists.
That, since 2001, the National Security Agency
(NSA) has had a presidentially authorized,
law-breaking, warrantless surveillance program to
listen in on the international phone calls of
possibly tens of thousands of US citizens.
That, with the help of three of the four major
US telephone companies, it also has had a
data-mining operation - "the largest database ever
assembled in the world" - linked, in at least one
case,
directly into a major telecommunication carrier's
network core ("where all its data are stored"),
giving it access to almost all telephone calls
made in the United States.
That, as director of the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), Porter Goss, a President George W
Bush-appointed, Vice President Dick Cheney-backed
ex-congressman, had whipped out his lie detector
and conducted an internal war and purge of an
agency viewed by the administration as little
better than the axis of evil, tearing its upper
ranks apart via numerous resignations and
retirements.
That, meanwhile, Goss's third in command, a
fellow with the evocative name of Kyle "Dusty"
Foggo (think: fog o' intelligence), was being
investigated for possibly granting illegal agency
sweetheart contracts to a pal already involved in
another major Washington corruption scandal (and
don't even get me started on those poker games and
prostitutes).
That Goss, in turn, was pushed out of the CIA
by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John
Negroponte, head of a new uber-intelligence
"office" (ODNI) meant to coordinate the whole
sprawling "intelligence community", and his second
in command, air force General Michael Hayden, the
former head of the NSA (who oversaw those
surveillance and data-mining operations for the
administration).
That the president then nominated the
active-duty general to take Goss's place as the
head of the country's major civilian spy agency -
in his Senate hearings, he would offer the
following comment on Goss's tenure: "You get a lot
more authority when the workforce doesn't think
it's amateur hour on the top floor."
That Republican and Democratic senators,
having questioned the credibility of a military
man who had overseen a patently illegal
surveillance program on US citizens for years and
then defended it vigorously, promptly collapsed in
a non-oppositional heap of praise, and
rubber-stamped him director by a vote of 78-15.
That in the ever-upward-rippling
CIA-agent-outing case of Valerie Plame - about
which a stonewalling Goss said, while still head
of the House Intelligence Committee, "Somebody
sends me a blue dress and some DNA, I'll have an
investigation" - rumors of Karl Rove's indictment
continued to circulate; while special counsel
Patrick Fitzgerald reserved the right to call the
vice president, whose office seems ever more in
his sightlines, to testify in former aide I Lewis
"Scooter" Libby's trial next year.
All
this news involving what we call "intelligence" -
and much more - played out on the front pages of
US newspapers and on television, replete with
copious leaks from within the intelligence
community, threats from the White House to
prosecute journalists reporting those leaks,
outraged press editorials about sundry
intelligence topics, and a great deal of heat and
noise.
Each scandal came and went, the
news spotlight flickering from one to the next;
and yet, as Hayden's testimony before the Senate
made clear, just about no one seemed to have the
urge to ask the obvious "what's it all about,
Alfie?" question. Nobody wondered what this thing
called "intelligence", over which so many tens of
thousands of analysts, code breakers and agents
labor with so many tens of billions of the United
States' dollars, really is; what sort of knowledge
about the planet all those acronymic intelligence
organizations really deliver.
The value of
the "intelligence community" to deliver this thing
called "intelligence", whatever mistakes or
missteps might be made, is simply taken for
granted.
Department of redundancy Let's back up a moment, though, and consider
what any of us out here can know about the
alphabet soup of the US intelligence community, or
IC as it likes to term itself.
Start with
the simplest thing: there's obviously a lot we
don't know. Much of this world is, by definition,
plunged into the darkness of secrecy, including
untold billions of dollars hidden away in highly
classified "black" budgets. Moreover, the blanket
of intelligence secrecy (regularly broken by leaks
to the media from so many unhappy members of that
roiling "community") has grown ever more
encompassing, given the Bush administration's
general mania for secrecy.
So whatever
numbers follow have to be taken with a large grain
of unverifiable salt. But we do know this: the IC
is simply enormous with, seemingly, a life of its
own - imperially vast, a veritable mountain of
proliferating agencies, groups and organizations,
larger by multiples than that of any other country
- and growing more enormous almost literally as
you read.
Until fairly recently, newspaper
articles regularly cited an iconic 15 civilian and
military intelligence agencies in that
all-American "community", a number now raised to
16 at the official website of the IC, and that
figure doesn't even include Negroponte's new
Office of the Director of National Intelligence
with its nearly billion-dollar budget.
In
addition to the CIA, the gang of 16 includes the
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the NSA
(surveillance and code-breaking), the National
Reconnaissance Office (NRO - satellites), and the
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA -
mapping), all under the aegis of the Pentagon, as
well as the intelligence agencies of each of the
Armed Services and the Coast Guard.
The
United States' second "defense department", the
Department of Homeland Security, has its own
expanding intelligence arm with a mouthful of a
name: the Information Analysis and Infrastructure
Protection Directorate. (No self-respecting agency
in the US government would be without one!) So do
the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the
State Department, the Energy Department, the Drug
Enforcement Department, and the Treasury
Department.
But the iconic 16 (or 17)
don't include numerous other intelligence
groupings tucked away in the government. Some
outsiders doing the counting have come up with
upwards of 30 entities in the IC. That assumedly
represents a whole heap of secret knowledge and,
certainly, a whole heap of taxpayer money.
Recently, in a slip of the tongue, Mary
Margaret Graham, deputy director for national
intelligence collection under Negroponte, offered
(for only the third time since the founding of the
CIA) a public estimate of the overall annual US
intelligence budget - $44 billion just to cover
the iconic 15. Undoubtedly that's a low-ball
figure, but as a crude measure of IC growth,
consider that it's almost $18 billion higher than
the 1998 IC budget - that being the last time such
an estimate came our way.
Of the various
intelligence outfits, the CIA, the IC's star of
the big and small screen, is the most famous (or
infamous, depending on your address on this
planet). Its budget is estimated at perhaps $5
billion a year and, by another ballpark estimate,
it has 16,000 employees; yet in budgetary and
payroll terms, that makes up a relatively small
part of the intelligence landscape, dwarfed by the
Pentagon's intelligence organizations. The NSA has
a budget estimated at $6 billion to $8 billion
yearly; the NRO, $6 billion to $8 billion; the
NGA, $3 billion; the DIA, $1 billion; and that's
not even counting the sizable intelligence outfits
run by the four individual Armed Services.
Cumulatively, an estimated 80-85% (or
possibly more) of the total US intelligence budget
is controlled by the Pentagon, the 800-pound
intelligence gorilla in the IC room - and in the
midst of a growth spurt that's threatening to send
it soaring into the one-ton range.
As with
so much else in these past years, the real story
in the intelligence community seems to have had
less to do with the production of, or analysis of,
intelligence than with its militarization. Known
for his skill as a bureaucratic infighter,
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld conducted a
tough rear-guard action against the creation of
Negroponte's 9-11 Commission-sponsored ODNI; then,
on "giving in", he managed to get what was in
essence a Pentagon veto over Negroponte's power to
meddle with military intelligence.
Rumsfeld also lobbied successfully in
Congress "to curtail much of Negroponte's clout
over personnel and budgets". (According to Doyle
McManus and Peter Spiegel of the Los Angeles
Times, when Negroponte did try to make changes at
the Defense Department, he was told "to take a
flying leap".)
Far more important, just as
in recent years the Pentagon has moved into areas
once controlled by the State Department, so
Rumsfeld has for several years been moving
aggressively to infringe on the CIA's key turf,
"human intelligence" or "humint". (Think:
operatives out in the field doing whatever.)
Not long after the attacks of September
11, 2001, according to Barton Gelman of the
Washington Post, Rumsfeld issued a written order
to end his "near-total dependence on [the] CIA"
for humint. Then, using "reprogrammed funds" not
authorized by Congress, he established a secret
organization, the Strategic Support Branch, to
provide him "with independent tools for the 'full
spectrum of humint operations'".
In March
2003, he set up his right-hand man,
neo-conservative Stephen Cambone, as the
first-ever under secretary of defense for
intelligence. (Cambone is now regularly referred
to as the Pentagon's "intelligence czar".)
Cambone, in turn, took on as his deputy the
notorious, born-again, evangelizing
Lieutenant-General William G Boykin, who plunged
himself into controversy in 2003 by saying of
Islam, "I knew my god was bigger than his. I knew
that my god was a real god and his was an idol,"
and of Bush, "The majority of Americans did not
vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this
morning that he's in the White House because God
put him there for a time such as this." Naturally,
he rose in the administration hierarchy as a
result.
Rumsfeld charged them both with
"reorganizing" - meaning, of course, expanding -
Pentagon intelligence operations through "the
Special Operations Command, which reports to
Rumsfeld and falls outside the orbit controlled by
John Negroponte". They were to expand specifically
into the CIA's "humint" area, creating
intelligence that would "prepare the battlefield"
- in part, by sending covert operations teams to
spy in various countries where no battlefield was
even faintly in sight.
Cambone now
"oversees 130 full-time personnel and more than
100 contractors in an office whose
responsibilities include domestic
counterintelligence, long-range threat planning
and budgeting for new technologies". And only a
month ago, Rumsfeld gave the "green light" for yet
another new group to be set up - the Defense Joint
Intelligence Operations Center, to "centralize"
intelligence further.
For some years now,
the IC has focused much attention on the issue of
global nuclear proliferation, but think of these
as the real "proliferation wars", inside the only
world, the only reality that truly matters. The
results, no matter which agencies top the list of
winners, add up to an unsightly, ungainly
Department of Redundancy and Overlap.
While the NSA may, for instance, be
conducting extensive data-mining operations, so is
another new Pentagon organization, the
Counterintelligence Field Activity or CIFA (on
which more below). You don't have to be inside the
IC to see it as a vast bureaucratic landscape for
fierce turf wars, power grabs, mini-empire
building, squabbling, scrabbling, coups and
purges, alarums and preemptive attacks; nor do you
need special insider's knowledge to recognize that
the basic urge to know the world in a deeper way,
to anticipate what one's enemies (and friends)
have in mind, to grasp how they think and what
they may do, takes, at best, a distinct second
place to the complex politics of, the real and
necessary knowledge of, the intelligence world
itself.
Intelligence empire
builders Put another way, the real story
of US intelligence is simply growth and
bureaucratic infighting. The Bush administration,
supposedly made up of "conservatives" who loathe
(and once endlessly railed against) "big
government", have ensured that like the Pentagon,
the IC, already an entangled monstrosity when they
arrived, would experience its greatest growth
spurt in memory, becoming an ever more bloated
example of hopeless big government.
This
reflects a more general pattern clearly visible in
the creation of the administration's pride and
joy, the Department of Homeland Security, another
vast, bloated, inefficient agency filled with
redundancy, riddled by turf wars, plagued by
inefficiency - and just to make matters worse
still, the creation of an ever-expanding US
Northern Command (Northcom) for the defense of -
you guessed it - the "homeland".
Within
the IC, consider but three examples of Bush
administration growth policies.
Start with
the CIA, an agency in the process of being
downgraded. It has, in fact, lost its central
position as the president's daily briefer -
Negroponte does that now - and the agency is no
longer his covert right arm either. As
intelligence expert Thomas Powers wrote recently,
"Historically the CIA had a customer base of one -
the president. When its primacy in reporting to
the White House was taken away, the agency was
being told in effect that henceforth it would be
talking to itself." But talking, it turns out, is
hardly everything in the IC.
In the very
period when the CIA was slipping down the pole of
influence, its forces on the ground were ramping
up. The agency has opened or reopened 20 stations
and bases abroad, experienced a flood of new
recruits, and, since 2001, tripled the number of
case officers it has in the field - without as yet
coming anywhere close to "a presidential
directive, announced in late 2004, to increase the
number of case officers and intelligence analysts
by an additional 50%".
Or take
Negroponte's ODNI operation. When originally
suggested by the 9-11 Commission and approved by
Congress, it was to be a lean, mean coordination
office meant to bring the sprawling IC under some
control. Its staff of perhaps 750 was to lop the
fat and overlap out of the IC. Instead, according
to Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, it has
undergone "rapid growth", now has a staff of more
than 1,500, and a budget of nearly $1 billion -
"about one-third the size of all CIA funding in
years before ... September 11, 2001" - without yet
having any significant accomplishments (other, of
course, than its own growth).
Or, to
return to the Pentagon, consider the
Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), which
started as a small office to protect military
facilities and personnel, but has "grown from an
agency that coordinated policy and oversaw the
counterintelligence activities of units within the
military services and Pentagon agencies to an
analytic and operational organization with nine
directorates and ever-widening authority".
As the CIFA garnered more power, it also
gained "the ability to propose missions to army,
navy and air force units, which combined have
about 4,000 trained active, reserve and civilian
investigators in the United States and abroad". At
the same time, according to the NBC Investigative
Unit, it is becoming "the superpower of data
mining within the US national security community
... Since March 2004, CIFA has awarded at least
$33 million in contracts to corporate giants
Lockheed Martin, Unisys Corporation, Computer
Sciences Corporation and Northrop Grumman to
develop databases that comb through classified and
unclassified government data, commercial
information and Internet chatter to help sniff out
terrorists, saboteurs and spies." Recently, the
CIFA reportedly "contracted with Computer Sciences
Corp to buy identity-masking software, which could
allow it to create fake websites and monitor
legitimate US sites without leaving clues that it
had been there".
Now, multiply what
happened at the CIA, ODNI and CIFA across 17-30
major and minor organizations, all sensing
financial good times and looking for expansive
"intelligence" missions to "protect" us all and
so, as Kurt Vonnegut might have written, it goes.
Thirty flew into the cuckoo's nest There is, of course, no way for an outsider -
or probably any insider either - to keep track of,
or make sense of, this imperial mess. In the
his-way-the-madness category, consider just how
blind to the larger impulsions of the intelligence
world you have to be to decide to reorganize,
coordinate and simplify it, so that
information-sharing and the like become normal
ways of life, by placing yet another "office" on
top of the hodgepodge of powerful competitors
already in existence.
You would have to be
nearly brain-dead not to predict that such a new
office would have no choice but to follow the
well-beaten path of expansion, develop its own
institutional base, its own institutional
prerogatives, and its own turf, only adding to the
chaos - or wither and die.
This is, by
now, a process that should be as predictable as
that at the Pentagon when it comes to the
competing weapons systems of the four services. In
the most recent Department of Defense budget, for
instance, Rumsfeld, supposedly intent on
"transforming" the military into a leaner, more
agile, more high-tech fighting force, let every
major weapons system, no matter how useless or
redundant, pass through essentially untouched and
with not a single one cut.
With the IC,
add in another factor: even if all its competing
parts really did add up to a "community" - rather
than a group of warring, bureaucratic mini-states
on a collective proliferation mission - what kind
of "intelligence" could possibly come out of such
a conglomerate entity?
Try to imagine
these organizations, each filled with thousands of
employees, most of them believing in intelligence
and that they are in the process of delivering it,
sorting through and pouring out information of
every sort. Globally, all those billions of
telephone calls, cell-phone calls, letters and
e-mails to be monitored, all those satellite
photos to be checked and interpreted, all those
data to be mined, all that territory to be mapped,
all that "humint" to sort through, not to speak of
the "open source" material in the media, online,
in foreign documents of every sort, spewing into
our world in a Babel of languages and images.
From such a tangled web of intelligence
organizations, fighting for turf, squirreling away
money in black accounts, running covert operations
(not to speak of secret prisons and
interrogations, kidnappings and assassinations),
surveilling everyone in hearing or sight, and
monitoring the universe, undoubtedly comes a
tangled mass of information, however computerized,
beyond the ken of any set of human beings.
This is the definition not of
"intelligence", but of information overkill. It is
a perfect formula either for drowning in data or
cherry-picking only the data and analyses that
suit your pre-existing plans and urges.
You can find hints of this problem in many
news pieces on individual intelligence programs.
For instance, the NBC Investigative Unit mentioned
earlier cited "Pentagon observers" who worried
that, "in the effort to thwart the next September
11, the US military is now collecting too much
data, both undermining its own analysis efforts by
forcing analysts to wade through a mountain of
rubble in order to obtain potentially key nuggets
of intelligence and entangling US citizens in the
US military's expanding and quiet collection of
domestic threat data".
Seymour Hersh in a
recent New Yorker piece on the NSA surveillance
and data-mining programs similarly quoted a
"Pentagon consultant" this way: "The vast majority
of what we did with the intelligence was
ill-focused and not productive ... It's
intelligence in real time, but you have to know
where you're looking and what you're after."
Almost by definition, what has to emerge
from the IC much of the time is in essence the
opposite of "intelligence", whatever that might
be. We out here often fret about being barraged by
information; now imagine a world filled with
hopeless reams and streams of information, a world
in which any piece of information will be but
another needle in an endless series of haystacks.
In a sense, the minute you begin "mining" billions
of phone calls, you've already admitted that, in
information terms, you're at a loss.
In
search of information on the inner workings of our
world, no one reasonable would ever set up a
system like the IC. Were you forced to reform such
an already existing mechanism, you would certainly
cut all those agencies and organizations down to,
at most, two competing ones - for alternative
views of the world. Not that that would be ideal
either.
For a maximum of a few million
dollars, you might put almost any 50 knowledgeable
people in a building with normal computers, access
to the usual search engines, libraries and
open-source information, and you would surely
arrive at a more comprehensible, saner view of our
planet and what to do on it than anything $44
billion and a bevy of militarized agencies could
produce.
If, in fact, you had simply read
Tomdispatch.com (produced for next to nothing) on
a number of areas of the world over the past few
years, you would have had more coherent, accurate
"intelligence" than the IC seems to have been able
to provide much of the time. And let's not forget
that human beings, no matter what they say on the
phone, in e-mails, or even to their closest
associates in private often don't themselves
understand what they are about to do or why they
are doing it, and so are in essence unpredictable.
In other words, whatever the IC may be, it
can't be a system for the reasonable delivery of
"intelligence" to US leaders. If you need proof of
this, just consider one thing: on the single most
important subject for every US administration in
the past decades of the last century, the
intelligence community simply didn't have a clue.
With so many of its resources focused on that
other empire, the USSR, they were incapable of
predicting its collapse even as it was happening.
Most of them didn't believe it even after it
happened.
Oh, and here's one more awkward
thing to throw into the intelligence mix. The
administration that has done more than any other
in recent memory to expand the IC, that has poured
untold billions into ever more active intelligence
capacities, has had a visible, violent allergy to
intelligence.
After the endless sorting of
information, after the blind alleys and lying
informants, after all that pressure from the vice
president as well as other top officials, and who
knows what else, when the IC actually got it
right, it made no difference whatsoever - as in
the daily briefing handed to the president on that
lazy August day in 2001 in Crawford, Texas ("Bin
Laden determined to strike in US"), or on al-Qaeda
links to Saddam Hussein, or on Niger yellowcake
and those infamous "16 words" in the president's
2003 State of the Union Address.
In those
cases, the intelligence was simply ignored in
favor of exaggerated or doctored versions of the
same, or lies based on nothing at all (except
perhaps a blinding desire to invade Iraq). For $44
billion a year, the Bush administration still had
to set up a small separate operation inside the
Pentagon, Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans,
to search for the "intelligence" that would take
it where it wanted to go anyway.
If the IC
actually worked as an effective
intelligence-delivery system, the US would be a
genius nation, a Mensa among states. It would have
an invaluable secret repository of knowledge that
would be the equivalent of the destroyed ancient
Library of Alexandria (which reputedly collected
all the knowledge in the then known world). And
you would have to wonder, looking back on the past
years: In that case, how exactly could the US be
quite so dumb?
But let's consider the
obvious: while undoubtedly filled with
hard-working, thoughtful intelligence analysts,
producing - sometimes - on-target intelligence,
the IC is not in any normal sense a system for the
delivery of "intelligence"; that is, operative
information through which US leaders could take in
the world, its dangers and its possibilities.
At the very least, that is only the most
tertiary aspect of its operations. And yet, based
on claims about the crucial nature of intelligence
in our world, it continues to expand without
cease.
If not primarily for intelligence,
then what is it for, if anything? Does anyone
know? Does it even matter? Those are certainly
questions worth asking. What we lack, in helping
us begin to answer them, is an American John Le
Carre, who could bring back in striking form from
the strange netherworld of the IC, as Le Carre so
devastatingly did from the Cold War world of
superpower espionage, a real sense of the lay of
the land.
Tom Engelhardt, who
runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com("a
regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the
co-founder of the American Empire Project and the
author of The End of Victory Culture, a
history of US triumphalism in the Cold War. His
novel, The Last Days of Publishing, is now
out in paperback.
(Used with
permission Tomdispatch. Copyright 2006 Tom
Engelhardt.)
