[Newspoetry] riddle raps enigma (WWI code machine); mystery shrouds ambiguity

[emerick at chorus.net]

© 2004 The Washington Post Company 
Today, September 30, 2004 Intelligence Failure   Page A24    The 911 commission recently recommended that the amount of money this country spends on intelligence no longer be kept secret. That makes sense, but before holding your breath for glasnost at the CIA, consider the case of Steven Aftergood. Mr. Aftergood is an anti-secrecy activist with the Federation of American Scientists who since 1995 has been pushing for openness on the intelligence budget. Earlier this month, responding to a lawsuit he filed seeking historical budget data, the CIA even refused to turn over material concerning spending from fiscal 1947 though fiscal 1970. The acting director of central intelligence, John E. McLaughlin, said that release of such data "would tend to reveal intelligence methods."

What did they buy with all that money, the historical pattern of which spending would reveal too much about the American intelligence community?

Friends, neighbors, roamin’ kids on the block, backstreet boys and alley girls


Enter your imaginative reconstructions of CIA (etc) spending for the last 57 years!!!!

There are no right answers, and not even any conceivable wrong answers.

Must have been born alive and possess functioning brain stem cells, fully installed, to enter contest.  CIA-etc employees, professional spies, members of Congress are not eligible to enter this contest, nor to win.  (Of course, we have no idea of who you might be (unless someone from Bush’s office leaks word to us), so we’ll just have to take your unspoken word on the validity of your remarks).)

Hints du jour:
1.  How much do 731,000 copies of the game RISK cost?
2.  How much does it cost to travel in foreign lands incognito?
3.  How much does it cost to bribe at least some members of most of the governments of the world, on regular stipends, to ensure constant and loyal sources of intelligence?
4.  How about the costs of special bugging equipment?
5.  How about the costs of assassins and of their special assassination weapons (typically, various poisons, administered as lethal injections, surreptitiously, leaving few traces in blood stream)?  (A James-Bond-Golden-Gun would leave ugly evidence.)
6.  How much does it cost to corrupt your own domestic government, to ensure that members of your nominal OverSight committees are selected for the Committtees because they were your former(?) employees?  (How does it happen that Goss, former House Intelligence Oversight Committee Chair, was quite diligent at keeping the House from engaging in any oversight.  Nonetheless, he was recently selected as new CIA chief.  How does it also happen that Goss spent years as an employee of the CIA before being able to worm his way into Congress?  These are mildly troubling questions, my friends.)
7.  As the agency’s internal reports amply demonstrate, we do not have intelligence failures in this country.  We have multiple disclosure failures.  We have darkest secrecy.  We have underhandedness.  We have surreptition.  And then, as Harry Howe Ransome once asked in his old book, long ago:  Can Democracy Survive the Cold War?  Today we have to ask, can Democracy survive the so-called War on Terror?