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CIA: The perils of being a 'good citizen'
By Dmitry Shlapentokh
Recently the director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, Michael Hayden,
published documents previously highly classified. The documents were the result
of an internal review of the reasons, after enormous funds spent and thousands
of people involved, the CIA - in fact, the entire US intelligence community -
was not able to catch Osama bin Laden and, of course, why they had been unable
to prevent the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The documents were accompanied by a letter in which the CIA director stated
that he was strongly against publication of the
documents as highly damaging to US national security. And, he said, if he
published them, it was only because he was under direct orders from Congress
and he was acting under duress.
But what damaging truth has been revealed by the documents? They show that the
CIA is functioning in the same manner as do the majority of US institutions,
from big corporations to universities. In many of them, results are of little,
if any, importance. It is playing bureaucratic games and being "a good citizen"
that is often a key to survival and promotion.
One of the common illusions that foreigners entertain about the United States
is that the image the US often projects to the outside world since its rise as
an industrial power in the late 19th century is its true image. This image
implies that the US values results, and for this reason loves tough, straight
talk and despises Byzantine formalities. This might have been the case 100
years ago - at the time when the US transformed itself into the workshop of the
world - but not now.
And some foreigners have found this out in a rather unpleasant way. This
correspondent knows of one, an elderly Russian-Jewish emigre who landed in the
US more than 30 years ago with the conviction that in the US results, not
Byzantine ploys, are valued. He was also convinced that it is the prevailing
Byzantine formalities that prevented him from fully realizing his talents in
Leonid Brezhnev's USSR.
He arrived in the US when the "evil empire" was much in the focus of the US
elite and where well-educated ex-Soviets with special knowledge and expertise
were a comparatively rare breed. Consequently, he landed a dream job as
consultant with one of the big automobile manufacturers, whose management had
several plans for doing business with the Soviets. After reviewing the projects
of the top brass, he came to the conclusion that they were absolutely idiotic;
and he made this clear to the authors of the project.
Judging by the abysmal conditions of the present US auto industry, he most
likely was right. He expected a reward for saving quite a few million dollars
of company funds. Imagine his surprise and dismay when he was immediately
fired. Later, in what seemed to him to be at last a stroke of luck, he was
hired as a consultant by the CIA to write about the conditions of the Russian
economy. He wrote a report and - as the future would show - he was absolutely
right in his assessments. Yet what he wrote was completely different from what
had been preached by legions of "Sovietologists" in the CIA. He was, once
again, immediately fired.
His tribulation should not be attributed to the fact that he was just a poor
emigre with not much in the way of American credentials. Henry Kissinger, who
advised the CIA and, consequently, the present-day administration, in a way
that it did not want to be advised, suffered the same fate: he was dropped from
the list of advisers some time ago. Neither the professor nor Kissinger
performed as "good citizens". This dictum is well understood by all those who
wish to be employed by a big institution in the US, including the CIA. And one
could easily reconstruct a behavioral model of CIA employees even without being
close to CIA headquarters.
Let's imagine that you are a low-level employee of the CIA who discovers that
the entire system of intercepting and eliminating "highly valued targets" - so
much advocated by your superiors - is absolutely idiotic. And you send your
immediate supervisor a new plan for dealing with them. You also add that the
endless changes in the extremely expensive equipment and the hiring of
employees with quite limited linguistic skill in the targets' languages and
cultures is just wasting the taxpayers' money.
At best, your supervisor would just ignore the memo. Still, being a poor, naive
individual who has watched too many Hollywood movies in which the "good guy"
persisted and finally won, you send memos to your supervisor's superiors and
try to contact
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