Intelligence, Ideology and Empire

Those who wield power in the inner realms of the American state and in the elite circles of the American political class have greater access to information and raw intelligence than any comparable cohort of rulers in human history. What they lack, though, is judgment and perspective, and that renders all the mountains of information at their disposal next to useless.

Gathering intelligence, the job of the Central Intelligence Agency, along with the clandestine missions of the CIA, have been mainstays of American global power since the Second World War, when the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) preceded the CIA in the brave new world of extending American power through a host of dirty tricks.

New York Times writer Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA was one of the most important books of 2007. Weiner relates the story of the establishment of the CIA and the six decades of its history.

As the title implies, it has mostly been a history of failure, and regularly of catastrophic failure, from the viewpoint of the managers of the American state. As it turned out, the CIA’s clandestine operations often undermined the agency’s ability to gather reliable intelligence.

Some of the spectacular pratfalls of American intelligence are well known, for instance, the myriad attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro with explosives and poisons and if these didn’t work, American spooks considered deploying a powder that would cause the Cuban leader’s beard to fall out, the theory being that this would undermine his standing with the Cuban people.

Over the course of the Cold War, the CIA dispatched hundreds of its agents to the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and other Communist countries, often to their deaths, and almost always with nothing to show for these efforts in terms of intelligence or successful subversion.

The agency did have its major triumphs, among them the sponsoring of the 1953 coup in Iran that removed the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mossadeq that had been dedicated to wresting control of Iranian oil from British and American petroleum companies. What followed was the repressive regime of the Shah with its torture chambers, imprisonment of political opponents, and policies tailor made to suit Washington and London. The long run consequence of the coup was the permanent distrust of America by Iranians, a factor in the current relationship between the U.S. and Iran.

In 1954, the CIA helped turn out the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz, playing a pivotal role in generating violent struggles that consumed the lives of two hundred thousand people. As in Iran, the U.S. role in the overthrow of the Arbenz government has heightened anti-Americanism across Latin America over the past half century. The CIA’s close working relationship with the Pinochet regime following its seizure of power in Chile on September 11, 1973 (in Latin America, September 11 has its own meaning) and the death of democratically elected Salvador Allende, have contributed to antagonistic feelings toward the U.S. in South America.

Western Europeans have long known and resented the fact that the CIA pumped millions of dollars into buying politicians and election outcomes in Italy and other Western European countries during the post war decades.

In addition to clandestine ops that failed or those that succeeded with long-term negative consequences for the U.S., there have been spectacular intelligence failures. The CIA told the White House, on the eve of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, that the Soviets would not invade and they told the administration of George Bush the Elder in July1990 that Saddam Hussein would not send his armed forces into Kuwait.

When U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell made his notorious appearance at the United Nations on February 5, 2005---just weeks before the invasion of Iraq---to insist that the U.S. had hard evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, CIA director George Tenet stood at his shoulder, silently bestowing the agency’s imprimatur on the Bush administration’s claim that action was needed. In this instance, the White House exerted immense pressure on the CIA to unearth evidence that would support the case for invasion.

In early December 2007, all sixteen U.S. intelligence services, including the CIA, issued an assessment that concluded that Iran had ceased its program to develop nuclear weapons in 2003. This time the intelligence services were releasing a finding that clashed directly with the case the Bush administration had been developing that if Iran built nukes, war could be the result. The response from the White House was barely controlled fury. Administration spokespersons insisted that the finding could be wrong and that America must not let down its guard. Apparently the spooks, having been badly burned in Iraq, were not prepared to do the Bush administration’s bidding in Iran. With only a year to go before a presidential election, infighting involving the White House, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies had reached a new pitch.

What’s wrong with American intelligence? With all its toys, money and training, why has the track record of the CIA been so poor from the standpoint of U.S. policymakers?

Part of the answer has to do with the clash between the needs of those collecting intelligence and those engaged in clandestine ops.

There is a larger answer, though. From the very beginning, the rules of engagement of the CIA have made it clear that the United States government has no respect for the sovereign authority and the rights of other countries, and this includes democratic countries and close American allies. Buying politicians, helping fix elections, seizing captives to torture in secret CIA prisons, and assassinating foreign leaders have been normal operating practice from Day One. It’s not that the U.S. is the only nation in the world to engage in such practices, but the glaring contradiction between these methods and the insistence of American leaders that their country stands for freedom, human rights and self-determination for all peoples, has soured much of humanity on America.

Finally, there is the imperial mindset which has doomed the rulers of empires throughout history, from the pharaohs of Egypt, the emperors of Rome, the viceroys of the British Raj to the best and the brightest in Washington. Those who imagine themselves to have a right to rule others, because they believe they have a superior culture or because they have a bigger economy or a stronger military, have never learned how to understand those they dominate. Even if the next U.S. president is considerably brighter than the present occupant of the White House---how could he or she not be---efforts of the new administration to fix the problems of U.S. intelligence agencies are likely to falter for that oldest of reasons. The Americans, like the rulers of the great powers that preceded theirs, cannot understand that peoples everywhere want to run their own affairs. That’s why the American invaders were not showered with garlands when they invaded Iraq, and it’s for that reason that they are being driven out of that country just as an earlier generation of Americans was driven out of Vietnam.