The title I chose, A Country Named Intrepid, reflects my feelings that we perverted of the wholesome counter intelligence efforts of a by-gone era. Specifically, a wonderful book called, A Man Named Intrepid, described the fledgling secret service cooperation between the United States and Great Britain during World War II. A small group of men and women worked clandestinely during World War II to break the German and Japanese military codes, sent small teams of spies into ‘occupied’ Europe, and provided misleading information to our enemy combatants about Allied War plans. The British and America spy agencies were composed a well-educated, brave, and patriotic people. Working selflessly they accomplish wondrous goals. In that era our counter-espionage efforts made sense and were conducted within finite bounds.
Like the proverbial ‘bridge too far’, our ‘spy’ bureaucracy has grown totally out of perspective. In recent weeks there have been massive leaks showing that the America national security effort has become a monstrosity–a ludicrously large behemoth. The Washington Post, using the public record discovered that we now have 1,271 agencies and 1931 private companies working on terrorism, employing about 854,000 people with top secret clearance. The absurdities of such numbers can be reflected in the comment of the director of national intelligence who said “We are achieving untold success every day. Without telling the rest of the government and people about the successes, the vast intelligence bureaucracy looks like a failure and a huge waste of money.” The Director is right—we are wasting a lot of money.
Every day our agencies produce a volume of material equal to 10% of the total holdings of our Library of Congress. Thus in one year, they are producing 36 times the volume of its holdings. This is not an achievement. It is a problem. Nobody or no agency can absorb so much data. The Washington Post found that “in the current situation getting the right information to the right people is almost impossible.”
Our Catch 22 counter espionage efforts could not prevent the distribution of 92,000 military documents about the war in Afghanistan to WikiLeaks. Instead of the government looking introspectively at the data provided, they are hell bent on exposing the leaker. Specifically, the papers highlighted serious of flaws in the pursuit of our Afghanistan War—our cup runneth over with toxic information.
Large Scale Corruption in Afghanistan at all levels of the government
Failed efforts to ameliorate the living conditions of the Afghan public
Selling of somewhere between 33%-50% of all U.S. shipments of material to Afghanistan to our enemies
Failure of pay Afghan soldiers working in our behalf
The Pakistani government cannot or will not stop Taliban insurgents and al Qaeda officials from operating within their borders
The Pakistani government has gotten $ billions of bribes to provide lip service to “supporting” our side.
The response by the administration is that “this is not news.” The 90,000 documents only revealed information already known. Hence, we can dismiss them as irrelevant. In essence, our government has uncovered the “Dead Sea Scrolls” and finds that it has no relevance to the Biblical Age. Given our government’s mind set, our best course of action is to pursue the failed policies of the past decade.
Alternatively, the government never acknowledged that possibly hiring directly or through consultants 900,000 people invariable reduces the quality of our operatives and our ability to keep secrets. It seems counter-intuitive that we could have hundreds of thousands of consultants possessing “top clearance” who could change their jobs and therefore their allegiances without serious repercussions to their careers or lifestyles.
In conclusion, I recognize that I belong to a dinosaur generation that enjoyed the spy stories of Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, and John Le Carre. Nevertheless, these mythical heroes had specific missions that were intelligible. Instead, America appears to have reached out to replicate the police methodology of Joseph Stalin. As the Soviet Union learned, having hundreds of thousands of KGB agents did not prevent Communism from falling because in the words of Gorbachev, “The USSR could not make tooth paste.”
