[Peace] CIA on WILL

[C. G. Estabrook]

"Focus 580," WILL-AM radio's discussion program, will have two programs 
on the CIA tomorrow, Friday, July 27:

	10am - "Legacy Of Ashes: The History Of The CIA," a new book by
Tim Weiner, a reporter for The New York Times; and
   	
	11am - The National Security Archive: The CIA’s “Family Jewels” And 
Beyond, with Malcolm Byrne, Deputy Director and Director of Research at 
the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

Here's a review of Weiner's book from Chalmers Johnson, author of 
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (Metropolitan Books, 
2007), the third volume of his Blowback Trilogy, which also includes 
Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire:

	The Life and Times of the CIA
	Wall Street Brokers, Ivy League Professors, Soldiers of Fortune,
	Ad Men, Newsmen, Stunt Men, Second-Story Men, and Con Men on
	Active Duty for the United States.
	Chalmers Johnson
	July 24 , 2007

This essay is a review of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim 
Weiner (Doubleday, 702 pp., $27.95).

The American people may not know it but they have some severe problems 
with one of their official governmental entities, the Central 
Intelligence Agency. Because of the almost total secrecy surrounding its 
activities and the lack of cost accounting on how it spends the money 
covertly appropriated for it within the defense budget, it is impossible 
for citizens to know what the CIA's approximately 17,000 employees do 
with, or for, their share of the yearly $44 billion-$48 billion or more 
spent on "intelligence." This inability to account for anything at the 
CIA is, however, only one problem with the Agency and hardly the most 
serious one either.

There are currently at least two criminal trials underway in Italy and 
Germany against several dozen CIA officials for felonies committed in 
those countries, including kidnapping people with a legal right to be in 
Germany and Italy, illegally transporting them to countries such as 
Egypt and Jordan for torture, and causing them to "disappear" into 
secret foreign or CIA-run prisons outside the U.S. without any form of 
due process of law.

The possibility that CIA funds are simply being ripped off by insiders 
is also acute. The CIA's former number three official, its executive 
director and chief procurement officer, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, is now under 
federal indictment in San Diego for corruptly funneling contracts for 
water, air services, and armored vehicles to a lifelong friend and 
defense contractor, Brent Wilkes, who was unqualified to perform the 
services being sought. In return, Wilkes treated Foggo to thousands of 
dollars' worth of vacation trips and dinners, and promised him a top job 
at his company when he retired from the CIA.

Thirty years ago, in a futile attempt to provide some check on endemic 
misbehavior by the CIA, the administration of Gerald Ford created the 
President's Intelligence Oversight Board. It was to be a civilian 
watchdog over the Agency. A 1981 executive order by President Ronald 
Reagan made the board permanent and gave it the mission of identifying 
CIA violations of the law (while keeping them secret in order not to 
endanger national security). Through five previous administrations, 
members of the board -- all civilians not employed by the government -- 
actively reported on and investigated some of the CIA's most secret 
operations that seemed to breach legal limits.

However, on July 15, 2007, John Solomon of the Washington Post reported 
that, for the first five-and-a-half years of the Bush administration, 
the Intelligence Oversight Board did nothing -- no investigations, no 
reports, no questioning of CIA officials. It evidently found no reason 
to inquire into the interrogation methods Agency operatives employed at 
secret prisons or the transfer of captives to countries that use 
torture, or domestic wiretapping not warranted by a federal court.

Who were the members of this non-oversight board of see-no-evil, 
hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkeys? The board now in place is led by 
former Bush economic adviser Stephen Friedman. It includes Don Evans, a 
former commerce secretary and friend of the President, former Admiral 
David Jeremiah, and lawyer Arthur B. Culvahouse. The only thing they 
accomplished was to express their contempt for a legal order by a 
president of the United States.

Corrupt and undemocratic practices by the CIA have prevailed since it 
was created in 1947. However, as citizens we have now, for the first 
time, been given a striking range of critical information necessary to 
understand how this situation came about and why it has been so 
impossible to remedy. We have a long, richly documented history of the 
CIA from its post-World War II origins to its failure to supply even the 
most elementary information about Iraq before the 2003 invasion of that 
country.

Declassified CIA Records

Tim Weiner's book, Legacy of Ashes, is important for many reasons, but 
certainly one is that it brings back from the dead the possibility that 
journalism can actually help citizens perform elementary oversight on 
our government. Until Weiner's magnificent effort, I would have agreed 
with Seymour Hersh that, in the current crisis of American governance 
and foreign policy, the failure of the press has been almost complete. 
Our journalists have generally not even tried to penetrate the layers of 
secrecy that the executive branch throws up to ward off scrutiny of its 
often illegal and incompetent activities. This is the first book I've 
read in a long time that documents its very important assertions in a 
way that goes well beyond asking readers merely to trust the reporter.

Weiner, a New York Times correspondent, has been working on Legacy of 
Ashes for 20 years. He has read over 50,000 government documents, mostly 
from the CIA, the White House, and the State Department. He was 
instrumental in causing the CIA Records Search Technology (CREST) 
program of the National Archives to declassify many of them, 
particularly in 2005 and 2006. He has read more than 2,000 oral 
histories of American intelligence officers, soldiers, and diplomats and 
has himself conducted more than 300 on-the-record interviews with 
current and past CIA officers, including ten former directors of central 
intelligence. Truly exceptional among authors of books on the CIA, he 
makes the following claim: "This book is on the record -- no anonymous 
sources, no blind quotations, no hearsay."

Weiner's history contains 154 pages of end-notes keyed to comments in 
the text. (Numbered notes and standard scholarly citations would have 
been preferable, as well as an annotated bibliography providing 
information on where documents could be found; but what he has done is 
still light-years ahead of competing works.) These notes contain 
extensive verbatim quotations from documents, interviews, and oral 
histories. Weiner also observes: "The CIA has reneged on pledges made by 
three consecutive directors of central intelligence –- [Robert] Gates, 
[James] Woolsey, and [John] Deutch -- to declassify records on nine 
major covert actions: France and Italy in the 1940s and 1950s; North 
Korea in the 1950s; Iran in 1953; Indonesia in 1958; Tibet in the 1950s 
and 1960s; and the Congo, the Dominican Republic, and Laos in the 
1960s." He is nonetheless able to supply key details on each of these 
operations from unofficial, but fully identified, sources.

In May 2003, after a lengthy delay, the government finally released the 
documents on President Dwight D. Eisenhower's engineered regime change 
in Guatemala in 1954; most of the records from the 1961 Bay of Pigs 
fiasco in which a CIA-created exile army of Cubans went to their deaths 
or to prison in a hapless invasion of that island have been released; 
and the reports on the CIA's 1953 overthrow of Iranian prime minister 
Mohammad Mossadeq were leaked. Weiner's efforts and his resulting book 
are monuments to serious historical research in our allegedly "open 
society." Still, he warns,

     "While I was gathering and obtaining declassification authorization 
for some of the CIA records used in this book at the National Archives, 
the agency [the CIA] was engaged in a secret effort to reclassify many 
of those same records, dating back to the 1940s, flouting the law and 
breaking its word. Nevertheless, the work of historians, archivists, and 
journalists has created a foundation of documents on which a book can be 
built."

Surprise Attacks

As an idea, if not an actual entity, the Central Intelligence Agency 
came into being as a result of December 7, 1941, when the Japanese 
attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. It functionally came to an 
end, as Weiner makes clear, on September 11, 2001, when operatives of 
al-Qaeda flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade towers in 
Manhattan and the Pentagon in Washington, DC. Both assaults were 
successful surprise attacks.

The Central Intelligence Agency itself was created during the Truman 
administration in order to prevent future surprise attacks like Pearl 
Harbor by uncovering planning for them and so forewarning against them. 
On September 11th, 2001, the CIA was revealed to be a failure precisely 
because it had been unable to discover the al-Qaeda plot and sound the 
alarm against a surprise attack that would prove almost as devastating 
as Pearl Harbor. After 9/11, the Agency, having largely discredited 
itself, went into a steep decline and finished the job. Weiner 
concludes: "Under [CIA Director George Tenet's] leadership, the agency 
produced the worst body of work in its long history: a special national 
intelligence estimate titled ‘Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of 
Mass Destruction.'" It is axiomatic that, as political leaders lose 
faith in an intelligence agency and quit listening to it, its functional 
life is over, even if the people working there continue to report to 
their offices.

In December 1941, there was sufficient intelligence on Japanese 
activities for the U.S. to have been much better prepared for a surprise 
attack. Naval Intelligence had cracked Japanese diplomatic and military 
codes; radar stations and patrol flights had been authorized (but not 
fully deployed); and strategic knowledge of Japanese past behaviors and 
capabilities (if not of intentions) was adequate. The FBI had even 
observed the Japanese consul-general in Honolulu burning records in his 
backyard but reported this information only to Director J. Edgar Hoover, 
who did not pass it on.

Lacking was a central office to collate, analyze, and put in suitable 
form for presentation to the president all U.S. government information 
on an important issue. In 1941, there were plenty of signals about what 
was coming, but the U.S. government lacked the organization and 
expertise to distinguish true signals from the background "noise" of 
day-to-day communications. In the 1950s, Roberta Wohlstetter, a 
strategist for the Air Force's think tank, the RAND Corporation, wrote a 
secret study that documented the coordination and communications 
failings leading up to Pearl Harbor. (Entitled Pearl Harbor: Warning and 
Decision, it was declassified and published by Stanford University Press 
in 1962.)

The Legacy of the OSS

The National Security Act of 1947 created the CIA with emphasis on the 
word "central" in its title. The Agency was supposed to become the 
unifying organization that would distill and write up all available 
intelligence, and offer it to political leaders in a manageable form. 
The Act gave the CIA five functions, four of them dealing with the 
collection, coordination, and dissemination of intelligence from open 
sources as well as espionage. It was the fifth function -- lodged in a 
vaguely worded passage that allowed the CIA to "perform such other 
functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national 
security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct" 
-- that turned the CIA into the personal, secret, unaccountable army of 
the president.

 From the very beginning, the Agency failed to do what President Truman 
expected of it, turning at once to "cloak-and-dagger" projects that were 
clearly beyond its mandate and only imperfectly integrated into any 
grand strategy of the U.S. government. Weiner stresses that the true 
author of the CIA's clandestine functions was George Kennan, the senior 
State Department authority on the Soviet Union and creator of the idea 
of "containing" the spread of communism rather than going to war with 
("rolling back") the USSR.

Kennan had been alarmed by the ease with which the Soviets were setting 
up satellites in Eastern Europe and he wanted to "fight fire with fire." 
Others joined with him to promote this agenda, above all the veterans of 
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a unit that, under General 
William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan during World War II, had sent saboteurs 
behind enemy lines, disseminated disinformation and propaganda to 
mislead Axis forces, and tried to recruit resistance fighters in 
occupied countries.

On September 20, 1945, Truman had abolished the OSS -- a bureaucratic 
victory for the Pentagon, the State Department, and the FBI, all of 
which considered the OSS an upstart organization that impinged on their 
respective jurisdictions. Many of the early leaders of the CIA were OSS 
veterans and devoted themselves to consolidating and entrenching their 
new vehicle for influence in Washington. They also passionately believed 
that they were people with a self-appointed mission of world-shaking 
importance and that, as a result, they were beyond the normal legal 
restraints placed on government officials.

 From its inception the CIA has labored under two contradictory 
conceptions of what it was supposed to be doing, and no president ever 
succeeded in correcting or resolving this situation. Espionage and 
intelligence analysis seek to know the world as it is; covert action 
seeks to change the world, whether it understands it or not. The best 
CIA exemplar of the intelligence-collecting function was Richard Helms, 
director of central intelligence (DCI) from 1966 to 1973 (who died in 
2002). The great protagonist of cloak-and-dagger work was Frank Wisner, 
the CIA's director of operations from 1948 until the late 1950s when he 
went insane and, in 1965, committed suicide. Wisner never had any 
patience for espionage.

Weiner quotes William Colby, a future DCI (1973-1976), on this subject. 
The separation of the scholars of the research and analysis division 
from the spies of the clandestine service created two cultures within 
the intelligence profession, he said, "separate, unequal, and 
contemptuous of each other." That critique remained true throughout the 
CIA's first 60 years.

By 1964, the CIA's clandestine service was consuming close to two-thirds 
of its budget and 90% of the director's time. The Agency gathered under 
one roof Wall Street brokers, Ivy League professors, soldiers of 
fortune, ad men, newsmen, stunt men, second-story men, and con men. They 
never learned to work together -- the ultimate result being a series of 
failures in both intelligence and covert operations. In January 1961, on 
leaving office after two terms, President Eisenhower had already grasped 
the situation fully. "Nothing has changed since Pearl Harbor," he told 
his director of central intelligence, Allen Dulles. "I leave a legacy of 
ashes to my successor." Weiner, of course, draws his title from 
Eisenhower's metaphor. It would only get worse in the years to come.

The historical record is unequivocal. The United States is ham-handed 
and brutal in conceiving and executing clandestine operations, and it is 
simply no good at espionage; its operatives never have enough linguistic 
and cultural knowledge of target countries to recruit spies effectively. 
The CIA also appears to be one of the most easily penetrated espionage 
organizations on the planet. From the beginning, it repeatedly lost its 
assets to double agents.

Typically, in the early 1950s, the Agency dropped millions of dollars 
worth of gold bars, arms, two-way radios, and agents into Poland to 
support what its top officials believed was a powerful Polish 
underground movement against the Soviets. In fact, Soviet agents had 
wiped out the movement years before, turned key people in it into double 
agents, and played the CIA for suckers. As Weiner comments, not only had 
five years of planning, various agents, and millions of dollars "gone 
down the drain," but the "unkindest cut might have been [the Agency's] 
discovery that the Poles had sent a chunk of the CIA's money to the 
Communist Party of Italy." [pp. 67-68]

The story would prove unending. On February 21, 1994, the Agency finally 
discovered and arrested Aldrich Ames, the CIA's chief of 
counterintelligence for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, who had 
been spying for the USSR for seven years and had sent innumerable U.S. 
agents before KGB firing squads. Weiner comments, "The Ames case 
revealed an institutional carelessness that bordered on criminal 
negligence." [p. 451]

The Search for Technological Means

Over the years, in order to compensate for these serious inadequacies, 
the CIA turned increasingly to signals intelligence and other 
technological means of spying like U-2 reconnaissance aircraft and 
satellites. In 1952, the top leaders of the CIA created the National 
Security Agency -- an eavesdropping and cryptological unit -- to 
overcome the Agency's abject failure to place any spies in North Korea 
during the Korean War. The Agency debacle at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba led 
a frustrated Pentagon to create its own Defense Intelligence Agency as a 
check on the military amateurism of the CIA's clandestine service officers.

Still, technological means, whether satellite spying or electronic 
eavesdropping, will seldom reveal intentions -- and that is the raison 
d'être of intelligence estimates. As Haviland Smith, who ran operations 
against the USSR in the 1960s and 1970s, lamented, "The only thing 
missing is -- we don't have anything on Soviet intentions. And I don't 
know how you get that. And that's the charter of the clandestine service 
[emphasis in original, pp. 360-61])."

The actual intelligence collected was just as problematic. On the most 
important annual intelligence estimate throughout the Cold War—that of 
the Soviet order of battle—the CIA invariably overstated its size and 
menace. Then, to add insult to injury, under George H. W. Bush's tenure 
as DCI (1976-77), the agency tore itself apart over ill-informed 
right-wing claims that it was actually underestimating Soviet military 
forces. The result was the appointment of "Team B" during the Ford 
presidency, led by Polish exiles and neoconservative fanatics. It was 
tasked to "correct" the work of the Office of National Estimates.

"After the Cold War was over," writes Weiner, "the agency put Team B's 
findings to the test. Every one of them was wrong." [p. 352] But the 
problem was not simply one of the CIA succumbing to political pressure. 
It was also structural: "[F]or thirteen years, from Nixon's era to the 
dying days of the Cold War, every estimate of Soviet strategic nuclear 
forces overstated [emphasis in original] the rate at which Moscow was 
modernizing its weaponry." [p. 297]

 From 1967 to 1973, I served as an outside consultant to the Office of 
National Estimates, one of about a dozen specialists brought in to try 
to overcome the myopia and bureaucratism involved in the writing of 
these national intelligence estimates. I recall agonized debates over 
how the mechanical highlighting of worst-case analyses of Soviet weapons 
was helping to promote the arms race. Some senior intelligence analysts 
tried to resist the pressures of the Air Force and the 
military-industrial complex. Nonetheless, the late John Huizenga, an 
erudite intelligence analyst who headed the Office of National Estimates 
from 1971 until the wholesale purge of the Agency by DCI James 
Schlesinger in 1973, bluntly said to the CIA's historians:

     "In retrospect.... I really do not believe that an intelligence 
organization in this government is able to deliver an honest analytical 
product without facing the risk of political contention. . . . I think 
that intelligence has had relatively little impact on the policies that 
we've made over the years. Relatively none. . . . Ideally, what had been 
supposed was that . . . serious intelligence analysis could.... assist 
the policy side to reexamine premises, render policymaking more 
sophisticated, closer to the reality of the world. Those were the large 
ambitions which I think were never realized." [p. 353]

On the clandestine side, the human costs were much higher. The CIA's 
incessant, almost always misguided, attempts to determine how other 
people should govern themselves; its secret support for fascists (e.g., 
Greece under George Papadopoulos), militarists (e.g., Chile under Gen. 
Augusto Pinochet), and murderers (e.g., the Congo under Joseph Mobutu); 
its uncritical support of death squads (El Salvador) and religious 
fanatics (Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan) -- all these and more 
activities combined to pepper the world with blowback movements against 
the United States.

Nothing has done more to undercut the reputation of the United States 
than the CIA's "clandestine" (only in terms of the American people) 
murders of the presidents of South Vietnam and the Congo, its ravishing 
of the governments of Iran, Indonesia (three times), South Korea 
(twice), all of the Indochinese states, virtually every government in 
Latin America, and Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The deaths from these 
armed assaults run into the millions. After 9/11, President Bush asked 
"Why do they hate us?" From Iran (1953) to Iraq (2003), the better 
question would be, "Who does not?"

The Cash Nexus

There is a major exception to this portrait of long-term Agency 
incompetence. "One weapon the CIA used with surpassing skill," Weiner 
writes, "was cold cash. The agency excelled at buying the services of 
foreign politicians." [p. 116] It started with the Italian elections of 
April 1948. The CIA did not yet have a secure source of clandestine 
money and had to raise it secretly from Wall Street operators, rich 
Italian-Americans, and others.

     "The millions were delivered to Italian politicians and the priests 
of Catholic Action, a political arm of the Vatican. Suitcases filed with 
cash changed hands in the four-star Hassler Hotel. . . . Italy's 
Christian Democrats won by a comfortable margin and formed a government 
that excluded communists. A long romance between the [Christian 
Democratic] party and the agency began. The CIA's practice of purchasing 
elections and politicians with bags of cash was repeated in Italy -- and 
in many other countries -- for the next twenty-five years." [p. 27]

The CIA ultimately spent at least $65 million on Italy's politicians -- 
including "every Christian Democrat who ever won a national election in 
Italy." [p. 298] As the Marshall Plan to reconstruct Europe got up to 
speed in the late 1940s, the CIA secretly skimmed the money it needed 
from Marshall Plan accounts. After the Plan ended, secret funds buried 
in the annual Defense appropriation bill continued to finance the CIA's 
operations.

After Italy, the CIA moved on to Japan, paying to bring Nobusuke Kishi 
to power as Japan's prime minister (in office 1957-1960), the country's 
World War II minister of munitions. It ultimately used its financial 
muscle to entrench the (conservative) Liberal Democratic Party in power 
and to turn Japan into a single-party state, which it remains to this 
day. The cynicism with which the CIA continued to subsidize "democratic" 
elections in Western Europe, Latin America, and East Asia, starting in 
the late 1950s, led to disillusionment with the United States and a 
distinct blunting of the idealism with which it had waged the early Cold 
War.

Another major use for its money was a campaign to bankroll alternatives 
in Western Europe to Soviet-influenced newspapers and books. Attempting 
to influence the attitudes of students and intellectuals, the CIA 
sponsored literary magazines in Germany (Der Monat) and Britain 
(Encounter), promoted abstract expressionism in art as a radical 
alternative to the Soviet Union's socialist realism, and secretly funded 
the publication and distribution of over two and a half million books 
and periodicals. Weiner treats these activities rather cursorily. He 
should have consulted Frances Stonor Saunders' indispensable The 
Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters.

Hiding Incompetence

Despite all this, the CIA was protected from criticism by its 
impenetrable secrecy and by the tireless propaganda efforts of such 
leaders as Allen W. Dulles, director of the Agency under President 
Eisenhower, and Richard Bissell, chief of the clandestine service after 
Wisner. Even when the CIA seemed to fail at everything it undertook, 
writes Weiner, "The ability to represent failure as success was becoming 
a CIA tradition." [p. 58]

After the Chinese intervention in the Korean War, the CIA dropped 212 
foreign agents into Manchuria. Within a matter of days, 101 had been 
killed and the other 111 captured -- but this information was 
effectively suppressed. The CIA's station chief in Seoul, Albert R. 
Haney, an incompetent army colonel and intelligence fabricator, never 
suspected that the hundreds of agents he claimed to have working for him 
all reported to North Korean control officers.

Haney survived his incredible performance in the Korean War because, at 
the end of his tour in November 1952, he helped to arrange for the 
transportation of a grievously wounded Marine lieutenant back to the 
United States. That Marine turned out to be the son of Allen Dulles, who 
repaid his debt of gratitude by putting Haney in charge of the covert 
operation that -- despite a largely bungled, badly directed secret 
campaign -- did succeed in overthrowing the Guatemalan government of 
President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. The CIA's handiwork in Guatemala 
ultimately led to the deaths of 200,000 civilians during the 40 years of 
bloodshed and civil war that followed the sabotage of an elected 
government for the sake of the United Fruit Company.

Weiner has made innumerable contributions to many hidden issues of 
postwar foreign policy, some of them still on-going. For example, during 
the debate over America's invasion of Iraq after 2003, one of the 
constant laments was that the CIA did not have access to a single agent 
inside Saddam Hussein's inner circle. That was not true. Ironically, the 
intelligence service of France -- a country U.S. politicians publicly 
lambasted for its failure to support us -- had cultivated Naji Sabri, 
Iraq's foreign minister. Sabri told the French agency, and through it 
the American government, that Saddam Hussein did not have an active 
nuclear or biological weapons program, but the CIA ignored him. Weiner 
comments ruefully, "The CIA had almost no ability to analyze accurately 
what little intelligence it had." [pp. 666-67, n. 487]

Perhaps the most comical of all CIA clandestine activities -- 
unfortunately all too typical of its covert operations over the last 60 
years -- was the spying it did in 1994 on the newly appointed American 
ambassador to Guatemala, Marilyn McAfee, who sought to promote policies 
of human rights and justice in that country. Loyal to the murderous 
Guatemalan intelligence service, the CIA had bugged her bedroom and 
picked up sounds that led their agents to conclude that the ambassador 
was having a lesbian love affair with her secretary, Carol Murphy. The 
CIA station chief "recorded her cooing endearments to Murphy." The 
agency spread the word in Washington that the liberal ambassador was a 
lesbian without realizing that "Murphy" was also the name of her 
two-year-old black standard poodle. The bug in her bedroom had recorded 
her petting her dog. She was actually a married woman from a 
conservative family. [p. 459]

Back in August 1945, General William Donovan, the head of the OSS, said 
to President Truman, "Prior to the present war, the United States had no 
foreign intelligence service. It never has had and does not now have a 
coordinated intelligence system." Weiner adds, "Tragically, it still 
does not have one." I agree with Weiner's assessment, but based on his 
truly exemplary analysis of the Central Intelligence Agency in Legacy of 
Ashes, I do not think that this is a tragedy. Given his evidence, it is 
hard to believe that the United States would not have been better off if 
it had left intelligence collection and analysis to the State Department 
and had assigned infrequent covert actions to the Pentagon.

I believe that this is where we stand today: The CIA has failed badly, 
and it would be an important step toward a restoration of the checks and 
balances within our political system simply to abolish it. Some 
observers argue that this would be an inadequate remedy because what the 
government now ostentatiously calls the "intelligence community" -- 
complete with its own website -- is composed of 16 discrete and 
competitive intelligence organizations ready to step into the CIA's 
shoes. This, however, is a misunderstanding. Most of the members of the 
so-called intelligence community are bureaucratic appendages of 
well-established departments or belong to extremely technical units 
whose functions have nothing at all to do with either espionage or 
cloak-and-dagger adventures.

The sixteen entities include the intelligence organizations of each 
military service -- the Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marine Corps, 
Navy, and the Defense Intelligence Agency -- and reflect inter-service 
rivalries more than national needs or interests; the departments of 
Energy, Homeland Security, State, Treasury, and Drug Enforcement 
Administration, as well as the FBI and the National Security Agency; and 
the units devoted to satellites and reconnaissance (National Geospatial 
Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office). The only one of 
these units that could conceivably compete with the CIA is the one that 
I recommend to replace it -- namely, the State Department's Bureau of 
Intelligence and Research (INR). Interestingly enough, it had by far the 
best record of any U.S. intelligence entity in analyzing Iraq under 
Saddam Hussein and estimating what was likely to happen if we pursued 
the Bush administration's misconceived scheme of invading his country. 
Its work was, of course, largely ignored by the Bush-Cheney White House.

Weiner does not cover every single aspect of the record of the CIA, but 
his book is one of the best possible places for a serious citizen to 
begin to understand the depths to which our government has sunk. It also 
brings home the lesson that an incompetent or unscrupulous intelligence 
agency can be as great a threat to national security as not having one 
at all.

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