The CIA and the culture of failure
by Robin Ramsay
[ bookreviews ]
In his farewell address to the American people in 1961 (which is now on Youtube) President Eisenhower issued his now famous warning about the dangers of what he called the military industrial complex (MIC), the Pentagon and the companies which make the munitions it consumes. Almost 50 years later the Pentagon now receives half of all US federal tax revenues. This is extremely profitable for some. The problem the MIC has is to square this vast weapons expenditure with America's picture of itself as a peace-loving country which responds only to external threats. In other words, at the heart of the MIC is the requirement that there be sufficient 'threats' to America to justify the taxation. How tricky this can get can be seen by the attempts in 1984/5 to create a military 'threat' from Nicaragua and Cuba, which produced the 1984 film Red Dawn about the Cuban invasion of America. (No, this was not a joke.)
At the head of the threat-evaluation process is the CIA's intelligence-gathering and assessment branches. Yes, there are other intelligence-gathering agencies (NSA and DIA; as well as Air Force and Naval intelligence) but structurally the CIA remains the most important. The CIA's intelligence estimation process is thus the key area of contest for the MIC: no threat, no dollars. This large (500 pages), nicely produced and thoroughly documented book is a history of the most important of those contests from the debate in the 1970s over the scale of the Soviet missile 'threat', through to the invasion of Iraq. Essentially, the CIA has been in an impossible position.
On the one hand tasked with surveilling the entire planet, which can't done, even with satellites, on the other constantly being attacked by the MIC and its allies for getting it wrong when it fails to predict something (e.g. the collapse of the Soviet empire) and for 'putting America at risk' if its estimates of the 'threat' are too low for corporate profitability. In this cleft stick, the Agency has tacked up and down wind, trying to retain some grasp on reality against the delusions and desires of the military and the right, without going so far offside that it became marginalised. This process reached its climax when the Agency buckled under the pressure from the Republican administration to confirm that Iraq had WMDs and announced, against all the available evidence bar that of one dodgy defector, ironically codenamed 'Curveball', that Iraq did.
This is a fascinating story about really big events in our time with important lessons for our politicians (had they the desire to learn them) about the dangers in politicising the intelligence-gathering process.
