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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA US spying machine sees the
light By
Tom Engelhardt
They would have to be told
that, thanks to a single horrific event, a kind of
terrorist luck-out we now refer to in shorthand as
"9/11," and despite the diminution of global
enemies, an already enormous IC has expanded
nonstop in a country seized by a spasm of fear and
paranoia.
Preparing battlefields and
building giant embassies Staggered by the size of the
invisible government they had once anatomized, the
two reporters might have been no less surprised by
another development: the way in our own time
"intelligence" has been militarized, while the US
military itself has plunged into the shadows. Of
course, it's now well known that the CIA, a
civilian intelligence agency until recently headed
by a retired four-star general, has been
paramilitarized and is now putting a
significant part of its
energy into running an ever spreading "covert" set
of drone wars across the Greater Middle East.
Meanwhile, since the early
years of the George W Bush administration, the US
military has been intent on claiming some of the
CIA's turf as its own. Not long after the 9/11
attacks, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
began pushing the Pentagon into CIA-style
intelligence activities - the "full spectrum of
humint [human intelligence] operations" - to
"prepare" for future "battlefields." That process
has never ended. In April 2012, for instance, the
Pentagon released the information that it was in
the process of setting up a new spy agency called
the Defense Clandestine Service (DCS). Its job: to
globalize military "intelligence" by taking it
beyond the obvious war zones. The DCS was tasked
as well with working more closely with the CIA
(while assumedly rivaling it).
As
Greg Miller of the Washington Post reported,
"Creation of the new service also coincides with
the appointment of a number of senior officials at
the Pentagon who have extensive backgrounds in
intelligence and firm opinions on where the
military's spying programs - often seen as
lackluster by CIA insiders - have gone wrong."
And
then just this month the head of the Defense
Intelligence Agency, originally a place for
analysis and coordination, announced at a
conference that his agency was going to expand
into "humint" in a big way, filling embassies
around the world with a new corps of clandestine
operators who had diplomatic or other "cover." He
was talking about fielding 1,600 "collectors" who
would be "trained by the CIA and often work with
the Joint Special Operations Command." Never, in
other words, will a country have had so many
"diplomats" who know absolutely nothing about
diplomacy.
Though the Senate has balked
at funding the expansion of the Defense
Clandestine Service, all of this represents both a
significant reshuffling of what is still called
"intelligence" but is really a form of low-level
war-making on a global stage and a continuing
expansion of America's secret world on a scale
hitherto unimaginable, all in the name of
"national security." Now at least, it's easier to
understand why, from London to Baghdad to
Islamabad, the US has been building humongous
embassies fortified like ancient castles and the
size of imperial palaces for unparalleled staffs
of "diplomats." These will now clearly include
scads of CIA, DIA, and perhaps DCS agents, among
others, under diplomatic "cover."
Into
this mix would have to go another outfit that
would have been unknown to Wise and Ross, but -
given the publicity Seal Team Six has gotten over
the bin Laden raid and other activities - that
most Americans will be at least somewhat aware of.
An ever-greater role in the secret world is now
being played by a military organization that long
ago headed into the shadows, the Joint Special
Operations Command (JSOC). In 2009, New Yorker
reporter Seymour Hersh termed it an "executive
assassination ring" (especially in Iraq) that did
not "report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney
days... directly to the Cheney office."
In
fact, JSOC only emerged into the public eye when
one of its key operatives in Iraq, General Stanley
McChrystal, was appointed US war commander in
Afghanistan. It has been in the spotlight ever
since as it engages in what once might have been
CIA-style paramilitary operations on steroids,
increases its intelligence-gathering capacity,
runs its own drone wars, and has set up a new
headquarters in Washington, 15 convenient minutes
from the White House.
Big-screen moments and
'covert' wars At their
top levels, the leadership of the CIA, the DIA,
and JSOC are now mixing and matching in a blur of
ever more intertwined, militarized outfits,
increasingly on a perpetual war footing. They
have, in this way, turned the ancient arts of
intelligence, surveillance, spying, and
assassination into a massively funded way of life
and are now regularly conducting war on the sly
and on the loose across the globe. At the lowest
levels, the CIA, DIA, JSOC, and assumedly someday
DCS train together, work in teams and in tandem,
and cooperate, as well as poach on each other's
turf.
Today, you would be
hard-pressed to write a single volume called The Invisible Government.
You would instead have to produce a multi-volume
series. And while you were at it - this
undoubtedly would have stunned Wise and Ross - you
might have had to retitle the project something
like The Visible Government.
Don't misunderstand me:
Americans now possess (or more accurately are
possessed by) a vast "intelligence" bureaucracy
deeply in the shadows, whose activities are a mass
of known unknowns and unknown unknowns to those of
us on the outside. It is beyond enormous. There is
no way to assess its actual usefulness, or whether
it is even faintly "intelligent" (though a case
could certainly be made that the US would be far
better off with a non-paramilitarized intelligence
service or two, rather than scads of them, that
eschewed paranoia and relied largely on open
sources). But none of that matters. It now
represents an irreversible way of life, one that
is increasingly visible and celebrated in this
country. It is also part of the seemingly endless
growth of the imperial power of the White House
and, in ways that Wise and Ross would in 1964 have
found inconceivable, beyond all accountability or
control when it comes to the American people.
It
is also ready to take public credit for its
"successes" (or even a significant hand in shaping
how they are viewed in the public arena). Once
upon a time, a CIA agent who died in some covert
operation would have gone unnamed and
unacknowledged. By the 1970s, that agent would
have had a star engraved on the wall of the lobby
of CIA headquarters, but no one outside the Agency
would have known about his or her fate.
Now,
those who die in our "secret" operations or ones
launched against our "invisible" agents can become
public figures and celebrated "heroes." This was
the case, for instance, with Jennifer Matthews, a
CIA agent who died in Afghanistan when an Agency
double agent turned out to be a triple agent and
suicide bomber. Or just last week, when a soldier
from Seal Team Six died in an operation in
Afghanistan to rescue a kidnapped doctor. The Navy
released his photo and name, and he was widely
hailed. This would certainly have been striking to
Wise and Ross.
Then again, they would
undoubtedly have been no less startled to discover
that, from Jack Ryan and Jason Bourne to Syriana, the Mission Impossible films,
and Taken, the CIA and
other secret outfits (or their fantasy
doppelgangers) have become staples of American
multiplexes. Nor has the small screen, from 24 to Homeland, been immune to
this invasion of visibility. Or consider this:
just over a year and a half after Seal Team Six's
super-secret bin Laden operation ended, it has
already been turned into Zero Dark Thirty, a
highly pre-praised (and controversial) movie, a
candidate for Oscars with a heroine patterned on
an undercover CIA agent whose photo has made it
into the public arena. Moreover, it was a film
whose makers were reportedly aided or at least
encouraged in their efforts by the CIA, the
Pentagon, and the White House, just as the SEALs
aided this year's high-grossing movie Act of Valor ("an elite
team of Navy SEALs... embark on a covert mission
to recover a kidnapped CIA agent") by lending the
film actual SEALs as its (unnamed) actors and then
staging a SEAL parachute drop onto a red carpet at
its Hollywood premier.
True, at the time The Invisible Government
was published, the first two James Bond films were
already hits and the Mission Impossible TV
show was only two years from launch, but the way
the invisible world has since emerged from the
shadows to become a fixture of pop culture remains
stunning. And don't think this was just some
cultural quirk. After all, back in the 1960s,
enterprising reporters had to pry open those
invisible agencies to discover anything about what
they were doing. In those years, for instance, the
CIA ran a secret air and sizeable ground war in
Laos that it tried desperately never to
acknowledge despite its formidable size and scope.
Today, on the other hand, the
Agency runs what are called "covert" drone wars in
Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia in which most strikes
are promptly reported in the press and about which
the administration clearly leaked information it
wanted in the New York Times on the president's
role in picking those to die.
In
the past, American presidents pursued "plausible
deniability" when it came to assassination plots
like those against Congolese leader Patrice
Lumumba, Cuba's Fidel Castro, and Vietnam's Ngo
Dinh Diem. Now, assassination is clearly
considered a semi-public part of the presidential
job, codified, bureaucratized, and regulated
(though only within the White House), and
remarkably public. All of this has become part of
the visible world (or at least a giant publicity
operation in it). No need today for a Wise or Ross
to tell us this. Ever since President Ronald
Reagan's CIA-run Central American Contra wars of
the 1980s, the definition of "covert" has changed.
It no longer means hidden from sight, but beyond
accountability.
It is now a polite way of
saying to the American people: not yours. Yes, you
can know about it; you can feel free to praise it;
but you have nothing to do with it, no say over
it.
In the 48 years since their
pioneering book was published, Wise and Ross's
invisible government has triumphed over the
visible one. It has become the go-to option in
this country. In certain ways, it is also becoming
the most visible and important part of that
government, a vast edifice of surveilling,
storing, spying, and killing that gives us what we
now call "security," leaves us in terror of the
world, never stops growing, and is ever freer to
collect information on you to use as it wishes.
With the
passage of 48 years, it's so much clearer that,
impressive as Wise and Ross were, their quest was
quixotic. Bring the "secret power" under control?
Make it accountable? Dream on - but be careful,
one of these days even your dreams may be on file.
Tom
Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project
and author ofThe United States of
Fear as well as The End of Victory
Culture, his history
of the Cold War, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His
latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The
First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050. You can see his interview
with Bill Moyers on supersized politics, drones,
and other subjects by clicking here.
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