The New Zealand Herald September 26, 2004
Inept spy networks thrive in the face of constant bungling
You are the chief executive of a multibillion-dollar business and life is not easy.
In less than 18 months, you notched up two strategic failures of nightmarish proportions. Your stakeholders are deeply worried. There was a huge row. Even now, new challenges are heading down the track but still you seem powerless and floundering, reacting to events rather than acting before them.
This is the situation in which western intelligence agencies find themselves today.
US and British inquiries have exposed how the spooks failed about 9/11 and Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the cause of two wars that have so far cost hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives.
Equally clear is the fumbling blindness of western espionage faced with other threats: North Korea's quest for a nuclear bomb, Iran's own nuclear programme and the flashpoint of the Caucasus.
But - unlike any business with the same calamitous record - there has been no cleanout of the US Central Intelligence Agency, the British Secret Intelligence Service, France's DGSE and their cousins. There has been no downsizing, no budget axe, no reorientation of activities.
Quite the opposite has happened, in fact.
The structures of these agencies and, apparently, most of their top echelons remain not just intact but strengthened. The services are richer than ever, with cash pumped in by Governments and approved by legislatures. Journalists still sniff out the opinion of the spies, and an "intelligence source" is still considered to carry weight despite glaring evidence to the contrary.
One of the most lucrative new businesses is that of security consultant, in which former spooks - including some responsible for the screwups - hawk advice to business. Recruitment fairs for former agents, such as one held last week in Virginia, USA, scouting for ex-talent from the CIA, are commonplace. In short, the losers have become winners.
How did this irony come about? And what is the charm of the spy business that makes a Government, chequebook in hand, turn pleadingly to the same people to fix problems they overlooked?
Andrew Rathmel, of the Department of War Studies at King's College, London, says the intelligence services missed the 9/11 Islamist threat and were in the dark about Iraq because, like generals fighting the last war, their eavesdropping capabilities and agents were geared for the Cold War.
Even though, in the 1990s, the agencies knew the Soviet peril was over, their structures remained unchanged. They fumbled for a role. They got involved with peacekeeping operations in failed countries from Somalia, Haiti and the Balkans to Cambodia, and toyed with diverse activities such as the fight against drug smuggling.
"The intelligence community is a big organisation," Rathmel told the Herald.
"When the Berlin Wall came down, it didn't just turn around at the drop of a hat and suddenly acquire new expertise. It didn't suddenly shift overnight and throw away all its satellites and recruit lots of Arabic- and Uzbek-speaking spies. So it had those gaps."
John Pike, who heads GlobalSecurity.org, a private intelligence company near Washington, speaks scathingly about the overwhelming US dependence on technology rather than human resources, on the ground and in analysis.
"I have target folders on a few dozen sites in North Korea, Iran, Iraq," Pike said in an interview.
"The intelligence community has target folders on hundreds of locations in each of those places. I have one or two satellite [photos] of each of them, they have hundreds of images of them. I don't think at the end of the day they know that much more about those countries than I do."
Pike adds: "They collect data, but it is much easier to collect data than it is to transmute it into knowledge, and it's enormously difficult to transmute knowledge into wisdom. And what we need is wisdom."
So why does the intelligence business seem to be coming out of this mountain of manure smelling of roses?
Part of it is the allure of secrecy, the myth of cloaks and daggers, the charisma of James Bond imbedded in our culture..
Former CIA official Arthur Hulnick, now a professor of international relations at Boston University, says: "People are fascinated by what appears to be the world of espionage. It really isn't that way at all. A lot of it requires patience, dedication and a lot of long, uncomfortable hours trying to chase down people who have information."
As for the outflow of former intelligence agents into the consultancy business, some left for ideological reasons, others because of career failure, says Rathmell. "Some of those who have left for more personal reasons have a short shelf life and they need to make a fast buck out of it, so of course they do elaborate and spin."
Then there is the other reason we keep going back to the intelligence services. They meet a need, from Governments and peoples who feel at threat from the darkening clouds of jihadism. Like an old couple, we and they are somehow inseparable.
"It's an imperfect world, and they have had a number of failures," says Pike.
"But by and large, generally they more or less sort of get it right, and something is better than nothing."
© Copyright 2004, The New Zealand Herald
