The Corruption of the CIA

One of the little-reported stories of the Bush administration has been its determined attempts to reform the nation's intelligence services, especially the CIA. Unfortunately the corrupt, complacent and incompetent agency does know how to do one thing extremely well -- defend its turf. The agency, led by a group of self-styled VIPs ["veteran intelligence professionals"] has hit back hard against the reformers, manufacturing and leaking information calculated to embarrass and undermine the current administration.

Critics of the Bush administration, many of whom have been highly critical of the CIA in the past, have seized eagerly on this material and used it to support their contention that Bush and his top advisers are "incompetent." That is to be expected in a partisan political culture. But an unbiased observer would do well to discount information originating within the intelligence community -- it is seldom fully accurate, and always calculated to produce a political effect.

Now comes confirmation of the abject incompetence and deep corruption of the CIA in the form of Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes. Weiner is a Pulitzer Prize winning writer for the New York Times, and no friend of the current administration. He is, however, an expert on intelligence activities and has produced a damning indictment.

The C.I.A.’s loudest champions have traditionally insisted that its successes were classified and its failures heralded, and that anyone with full access to the secret record would venerate its role in United States national security since its founding under President Harry S. Truman. With Iraq as the end point, Mr. Weiner’s thesis is instead that from the 1940s on, intelligence gaffes, sloppy covert action and bootlicking in the Oval Office have kept the agency from making the kind of grandiose contributions often claimed for it and, at crucial times, have done this country damage.

Anyone tempted to write this book off as an anti-C.I.A. screed had better look at Mr. Weiner’s sources. The author has impressively studied the archival record, teased out newly declassified primary documents and done numerous interviews to glean as much as can be publicly known about the agency’s history. Some of the most damning criticism of the C.I.A.’s past performance in this book comes not from gadflies or ideologues but from ex-officials and long-secret authorized accounts by C.I.A. historians.

Read the whole thing here.

Whenever I have criticized the CIA's record in conversations with liberals and government bureaucrats, I have heard time and again the statement that we just don't hear about their successes. Well now we do know. There are damn few of them. Information leaking out of the intelligence community has long been, and remains to this day, of limited value. Take its criticisms of current policy and its apocalyptic predictions with a grain..., no make that a shaker, of salt.

Thompson on Civil Service Reform

I can't take Fred Thompson very seriously as a candidate..., yet. At this point he, like Barak Obama, seems to be more a symbolic focus of voter discontent, a fantasy alternative to realistic political action, than anything else. But, unlike Obama, he does have some interesting things to say. I was particularly struck by this excerpt from an interview with David Frum:

Mr. Thompson says that while a senator he was long concerned with U.S. intelligence failures. "The CIA has better politicians than it has spies," he says, referring to the internecine turf wars that have been a feature of the Bush administration.

A key problem, Mr. Thompson notes, is a general lack of accountability in government, where no one pays any price for failure. When asked about President Bush's awarding the Medal of Freedom to outgoing CIA Director George Tenet after U.S. intelligence failures in Iraq became apparent, he shakes his head: "I just didn't understand that."

The next president, according to Mr. Thompson, needs to exercise strong leadership "and get down in the weeds and fix a civil-service system that makes it too hard to hire good employees and too hard to fire bad ones." He doesn't offer specifics on what to do, but notes the "insanity" of the new Congress pushing for the unionization of homeland security employees only five years after it rejected the notion in the wake of 9/11. "Should we tie ourselves up in bureaucratic knots with the challenges we may have to face?" he asks in wonderment.

Read it here.

At last, a major political figure who is willing to admit that the permanent federal government is dysfunctional and, more to the point, is willing to campaign on that issue. I can remember JFK complaining about the problem, but doing nothing about it. Reagan, too, complained and threatened to take action, but settled on "starving the beast" which achieved little. Clinton/Gore talked about the problem, but referred it to a commission that went nowhere. Dubya is the first President to actively confront the issue -- pushing for wide-reaching reforms of the DOD, State, the entire intelligence apparatus and FEMA. The result has been a concerted bureaucratic effort to undermine and destroy his administration -- one that in wartime borders on treason.

At least the Iraq war has provided an opportunity to clear some of the deadwood out of the DOD. It's taken four years, and the forced resignation of a lot of people, but at last the military is beginning to function effectively and efficiently in the face of today's challenges. What is needed now is a similar assault on other federal agencies -- breaking up the logjams, and clearing out the deadwood careerists.

Is Fred Thompson the guy to do it? We will see. If he makes civil service reform a major campaign issue, I may just vote for the guy.