They Don't Call It "Intelligence" for Nothing

A charmingly naive article in Newsweek on-line (http://www.newsweek.com/id/166999?tid=relatedcl) describes the intelligence community as being in a state of high anxiety as to what's going to happen once... not Obama, but McCain!... takes over the White House. The conventional wisdom is that Obama will no more than "tweak" the intel apparatus -- and so much for the much-celebrated liberal distaste for secrecy and covert operations! McCain, on the other hand, would unsheath the long knives and lop off a few richly-deserving heads. (Let's not forget that no one in the intel community ever paid for having totally dropped the ball re: 9-11 -- that is, assuming the ball was actually dropped... but that's another discussion.) But all of this misses the point, which is that the intel community, and particularly its two biggest components, namely the CIA and the NSA, are not only worlds unto themselves, but governments unto themselves. Their funding levels are not only top-secret, but they are virtually limitless, and there are no accountability mechanisms built in. As a former boss of mine used to say, their mission is to "do stuff", and they will be provided with all the resources they require in order to do that.

Another widely-held suspicion is that the rest of the government is at the beck and call of the intel people, rather than the intel people being in service to the rest of the government and, ultimately, the citizenry. And there is ample evidence for this notion, going way back to the immediate post-WW II era when the OSS morphed into the CIA and became, in effect, a parallel government which didn't have to depend on the whims of the voters to gain or retain power. And this, of course, is not unique to the intel agencies; much the same can be said of any large government entity. The difference, however, is that most government departments aren't heavily armed and they don't include vast private armies who operate on a completely secretive, anonymous level. HUD doesn't stay awake all night figuring out ways to overthrow foreign governments, for example (as far as I know -- and even if they did, what are they chances they'd succeed?). The National Park Service hasn't been implicated in JFK's assassination -- although they did do a bit of Keystone Kops distraction work in the Vince Foster case. So really, I think news of the intel community getting into hot water is greatly premature. Now, this is not to say they don't occasionally offer up a sacrificial victim as a way of throwing a bone to the media; this does happen on a fairly regular basis, and it serves as a soporific so they can get back to business and not be disturbed for a while. And one can take it for granted that the guys at the top (in this case, Michael Hayden) aren't part of the invincible core. Political appointees come and go. I'm talking about the guys in the basement -- you know, like in the movies -- the guys in windowless rooms surrounded by TV monitors and keyboards... the guys like "Cancer Man" in "The X Files"... the guys who labor for decades, anonymously, in order to achieve... well, what, after all? Nothing more, perhaps, than the feeling that they are the ones who are really in control, and that all the politicians and elected officials in the world are nothing more than superficial fluff. And in this, at least, I think we can agree with their world view.