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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA US spying machine sees the
light By
Tom Engelhardt
Weren't those the greatest of
days if you were in the American spy game?
Governments went down in Guatemala and Iran thanks
to you. In distant Indonesia, Laos, and Vietnam,
what a role you played! And even that botch-up of
an invasion in Cuba was nothing to sneeze at. In
those days, unfortunately, you - particularly
those of you in the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) - didn't get the credit you deserved.
You
had to live privately with your successes.
Sometimes, as with the Bay of Pigs, the failures
came back to haunt you (so, in the case of Iran,
would your "success," though so many years later),
but you couldn't with pride talk publicly about
what you, in
your secret world, had done,
or see instant movies and TV shows about your
triumphs. You couldn't launch a "covert" air war
that was reported on, generally positively, almost
every week, or bask in the pleasure of having your
director claim publicly that it was "the only game
in town." You couldn't, that is, come out of what
were then called "the shadows," and soak up the
glow of attention, be hailed as a hero, join
Americans in watching some (fantasy) version of
your efforts weekly on television, or get the
credit for anything.
Nothing like that was
possible - not at least until well after two
journalists, David Wise and Thomas B Ross, shone a
bright light into those shadows, called you part
of an "invisible government," and outed you in
ways that you found deeply discomforting.
Their book with that
startling title, The
Invisible Government, was published in 1964
and it was groundbreaking, shadow-removing,
illuminating. It caused a fuss from its very first
paragraph, which was then a shockeroo: "There are
two governments in the United States today. One is
visible. The other is invisible."
I
mean, what did Americans know at the time about an
invisible government even the president didn't
control that was lodged deep inside the government
they had elected?
Wise and Ross continued: "The
first is the government that citizens read about
in their newspapers and children study about in
their civics books. The second is the
interlocking, hidden machinery that carries out
the policies of the United States in the Cold War.
This second, invisible government gathers
intelligence, conducts espionage, and plans and
executes secret operations all over the globe."
The
Invisible Government came out just as what
became known as "the Sixties" really began, a
moment when lights were suddenly being shone into
many previously shadowy American corners. I was
then 20 years old and sometime in those years I
read their book with a suitable sense of dread,
just as I had read those civics books in high
school in which Martians landed on Main Street in
some "typical" American town to be lectured on our
way of life and amazed by our constitution, not to
speak of those fabulous governmental checks and
balances instituted by the Founding Fathers, and
other glories of democracy.
I
wasn't alone reading The
Invisible Government either. It was a
bestseller and CIA Director John McCone reportedly
read the manuscript, which he had secretly
obtained from publisher Random House. He demanded
deletions. When the publisher refused, he
considered buying up the full first printing. In
the end, he evidently tried to arrange for some
bad reviews instead.
Time
machines and shadow worlds By 1964, the "US Intelligence
Community," or IC, had nine members, including the
CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and
the National Security Agency (NSA). As Wise and
Ross portrayed it, the IC was already a
labyrinthine set of secret outfits with growing
power. It was capable of launching covert actions
worldwide, with a "broad spectrum of domestic
operations," the ability to overthrow foreign
governments, some involvement in shaping
presidential campaigns, and the capacity to plan
operations without the knowledge of Congress or
full presidential control. "No outsider," they
concluded, "can tell whether this activity is
necessary or even legal. No outsider is in a
position to determine whether or not, in time,
these activities might become an internal danger
to a free society." Modestly enough, they called
for Americans to face the problem and bring
"secret power" under control. ("If we err as a
society, let it be on the side of control.")
Now,
imagine that HG Wells's time machine had been
available in that year of publication. Imagine
that it whisked those journalists, then in their
mid-thirties, and the young Tom Engelhardt
instantly some 48 years into the future to survey
just how their cautionary tale about a great
democratic and republican nation running off the
tracks and out of control had played out.
The
first thing they might notice is that the
Intelligence Community of 2012 with 17 official
outfits has, by the simplest of calculations,
almost doubled. The real size and power of that
secret world, however, has in every imaginable way
grown staggeringly larger than that. Take one
outfit, now part of the IC, that didn't exist back
in 1964, the National Geospatial-Intelligence
Agency. With an annual budget of close to US$5
billion, it recently built a gigantic $1.8 billion
headquarters - "the third-largest structure in the
Washington area, nearly rivaling the Pentagon in
size" - for its 16,000 employees. It literally has
its "eye" on the globe in a way that would have
been left to sci-fi novels almost half a century
ago and is tasked as "the nation's primary source
of geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT." (Don't ask
me what that means exactly, though it has to do
with quite literally imaging the planet and all
its parts - or perhaps less politely, turning
every inch of Earth into a potential shooting
range.)
Or consider an outfit that
did exist then: the National Security Agency, or
NSA (once known jokingly as "no such agency"
because of its deep cover). Like its geospatial
cousin, it has been in a period of explosive
growth, budgetary and otherwise, capped off by the
construction of a "heavily fortified" $2 billion
data center in Bluffdale, Utah. According to NSA
expert James Bamford, when finished in 2013 that
center will "intercept, decipher, analyze, and
store vast swaths of the world's communications as
they zap down from satellites and zip through the
underground and undersea cables of international,
foreign, and domestic networks." He adds: "Flowing
through its servers and routers and stored in
near-bottomless databases will be all forms of
communication, including the complete contents of
private emails, cell phone calls, and Google
searches, as well as all sorts of personal data
trails - parking receipts, travel itineraries,
bookstore purchases, and other digital 'pocket
litter.'" We're talking not just about foreign
terrorists here but about the intake and eternal
storage of vast reams of material from American
citizens, possibly even you.
Or
consider a little-known post-9/11 creation, the
National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which is
not even a separate agency in the IC, but part of
the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence. According to the Wall Street
Journal, the Obama administration has just turned
that organization into "a government dragnet,
sweeping up millions of records about US citizens
- even people suspected of no crime". It has
granted the NCTC the right, among other things "to
examine the government files of US citizens for
possible criminal behavior, even if there is no
reason to suspect them ... copy entire government
databases - flight records, casino-employee lists,
the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange
students, and many others. The agency has new
authority to keep data about innocent US citizens
for up to five years, and to analyze it for
suspicious patterns of behavior. Previously, both
were prohibited."
Or take the Defense
Intelligence Agency, which came into existence in
1961 and became operational only the year their
book came out. Almost half a century ago, as Wise
and Ross told their readers, it had 2,500
employees and a relatively modest set of assigned
tasks. By the end of the Cold War, it had 7,500
employees. Two decades later, another tale of
explosive growth: the DIA has 16,000 employees.
In their 2010 Washington Post
series, "Top Secret America," journalists Dana
Priest and William Arkin caught a spirit of
untrammeled expansion in the post-9/11 era that
would surely have amazed those two authors who had
called for "controls" over the secret world: "In
Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building
complexes for top-secret intelligence work are
under construction or have been built since
September 2001. Together they occupy the
equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 US
Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet
[158 hectares] of space."
Similarly, the combined
Intelligence Community budget, which in deepest
secrecy had supposedly soared to at least $44
billion in 2005 (all such figures have to be taken
with a dumpster-ful of salt), has by now nearly
doubled to an official $75 billion.
Let's add in one more
futuristic shocker for our time travelers. Someone
would have to tell them that, in 1991, the Soviet
Union, that great imperial power and nemesis of
the invisible government, with its vast army,
secret police, system of gulags, and monstrous
nuclear arsenal, had disappeared largely
nonviolently from the face of the Earth and no
single power has since arisen to challenge the
United States militarily. After all, that
staggering US intelligence budget, the explosion
of new construction, the steep growth in
personnel, and all the rest has happened in a
world in which the US is facing a couple of
rickety regional powers (Iran and North Korea), a
minority insurgency in Afghanistan, a rising
economic power (China) with still modest military
might, and probably a few thousand extreme Muslim
fundamentalists and al-Qaeda wannabes scattered
around the planet.
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