Appreciation: Weiner on the CIA

Say this for Cheney. When he set out to ignore the intelligence of the CIA on Iraq, he had good practical justification behind him. With one dramatic exception (mentioned below) the fact is that the CIA had missed ever intelligence call since World War II.

This is one lesson tht Tim Weiner does not draw from his long, shambolic, somewhat misnamed but resoundingly fashionable Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA (2007).

Not that there is anything particularly appropriate about the “Legacy of Ashes” part: Weiner makes a good case for the proposition that the CIA has, through a toxic mixtue of arrogance, incompetence and organizational pathology, more or less worked itself out of a job.

Compulsive and instructive reading, but at the end of the day, not really “A History of the CIA.” The problem begins with the notion of “intelligence” itself, as the CIA may or may not have defined it. There are at least three possible meanings:

• The tedious and unending search for data, and the attempt to process same.
• As a distinguishable subset, the sometimes tense and dramatic campaign to steal information, to expand or enrich the the more general inquiry.
• Dirty tricks: rigging elections, overthrowing governments, and all the attendant business of so many “spy stories.
  

What Weiner has achieved is a breezy, entertaining jog-trot through the final category above (dirty tricks), with somewhat more disjointed comments, insights, etc., about the second. He’s got some stuff about the first, but only incidental, indirect—hey, I said it was tedious.

Weiner makes it clear that so far as “gathering intelligence” goes—either via route #1 or route #2—we are really pretty awful. As far as “dirty tricks” goes, the record is more complicated. We clearly had some short-term “successes”—overthrew (or helped to overthrow) Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatamala, Allende in Chile (to name the more obvious examples—Diem in Viet Nam was more of a State Department job)—but many of these short-term “successes” can be understood in retrospect as tactical successes only, strategic failures (think “Japanese win at Pearl Harbor”). We also, bye the bye, slipped hundreds, perhaps thousands, of agents, into enemy territory to “spy: for us—only to have them captured or killed, sometimes moments after they touched the ground. But they are dead, and so not a powerful lobby.

Weiner also offers a few tantalizing—but sadly transitory and disjointed—insights into larger issues in intelligence. For example, he suggests that one reason the CIA so vastly overestimated Soviet economic strength is that it spent all its time looking at military targets (on directions of our military) and for economic data, pretty much took the Soviets at their word. As another, he suggests that for all of (whatever) success we may have had in tracking down information about what the Soviets had done, we were never good at all at sorting out their purposes—okay, so they had all those rockets; did they intend to use them? And where? And when?

All this suggests that what we can really use is something vastly more ambitious than Weiner’s already ambitious undertaking—namely, a more thorough analytic assessment of what intelligence can be expected to do, and how it can accomplish the job. This would require a sifting and resifting of the raw data that Weiner has assembled—plus a lot more about the CIA that he has not assembled here, plus all that stuff about intelligence operation sin the Defense Department or the State Department or the National Security Agency. A tall order: maybe an agenda for Weiner’s next book.

Update: Oops, I forgot to mention the promised "exception." Anyway: the CIA failed to anticipate the Korean War, the Chinese counteroffensive, the chances of a Hungarian counterrevolution, the Cuban missile crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the collapse of the Soviet Union--just to hit the high spots. And they were wrong about WMD in Iraq in 1991: specifically, they failed to see how far along the Iraqis were in their quest for the bomb. By Weiner's count, they were right exactly once: they did anticipate 1967 Arab-Israeli war. But the Israelis were our friends--for my money, getting a heads-up whisper from them doesn't quite count as an espionage victory at all.

One-Liner of the Day:Conquering the CIA

The New York Times (link) this morning documents the difficulties encountered by Porter Goss when he tried to control of the CIA’s “operations wing.” The Times recounts how Goss discovered “that operatives who were trained to destabilize foreign governments could sometimes put those same skills to work inside the agency.” And then:

In a striking metaphor for Mr. Goss’s powerlessness, as officers of the Directorate of Operations, or D.O., ignored his instructions and shunned his staff, he later told a colleague that “when he pulled a lever to make something happen in the D.O., it wasn’t just that nothing happened,” the colleague recalled. “It was that the lever came off in his hands.”

A Hypothetical Universe: Life Without the CIA

Quote of the day, from the Evan Thomas in the NYT Sunday Book Review (link):

The C.I.A. never did have much luck operating inside Communist China, and it failed to predict the Iranian revolution of 1979. “We were just plain asleep,” said the former C.I.A. director Adm. Stansfield Turner. The agency also did not foresee the explosion of an atom bomb by the Soviet Union in 1949, the invasion of South Korea in 1950, the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the explosion of an atom bomb by India in 1998 — the list goes on and on, culminating in the agency’s wrong call on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in 2002-3.

The question inevitably arises: so, how would things have been different had there been no CIA at all? Here’s a partial answer: we would have had to find something to do with all those testosterone-surplus young bravos who got a chance (via the CIA) to play cops and robbers around the world. It’s one clear advantage of having an empire: gives you a chance to get rid of some otherwise unemployable energy, i.e., by exporting to others who have to suffer their ministrations without having any say in the matter. Lacking empire, you have to find some good use for all that surplus, like maybe this.