America's Intelligence System: Part III –
Political Chemotherapy For This Growing Cancer

by Jim Grichar (aka Exx-Gman)

Part 1: Bloated and Ineffective
Part 2: Why It Has Failed

This is Part III of a three-part essay on America's intelligence system. This first part dealt with what it is and how it has failed. Part II dealt with the specific reasons for its failure. Part III describes how it is morphing into an instrument of a police state and, given that we are currently stuck with a protection racket government, how to cut it down to size to preserve our rights to life, liberty, and property.

Since the end of the Cold War and despite the many failures cited in Part I of this essay, America's intelligence agencies have survived virtually intact. Now they are thriving again, thanks to their collective failure to warn of and prevent the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. The budget for the intelligence community has been increased – possibly on the order of $5 – 10 billion per year, and most components of the intelligence community are going on a spending spree. More of the same bureaucratic incompetence and waste, in and of itself, will continue to leave the nation exposed to internal and external threats. Treating the symptoms and not the causes, politicians of almost all political stripes have been pushing additional new solutions to the intelligence problem, many of which threaten our rights to life, liberty, and property.

The Department of Homeland Security bill – the House bill was passed by the Senate on November 19, 2002 in the lame duck session of Congress – contains some extremely troubling provisions. First, this department is being structured along the lines of the interior or home ministries in European countries, which means that it may eventually pick up some sort of law enforcement/internal spying/secret police functions. The Secret Service will be transferred to this department, and one should wonder why? Like Jim West and Artemus Gordon in the old "Wild, Wild West" television series, will U.S. Secret Service agents begin prowling the country in search of bad guys, breaking any laws deemed necessary to get the job done?

Then, too, there is a provision in the Homeland Security bill that will allow the department to start funding the development of new technologies to enhance U.S. security. Such technologies would include the type that could be used to spy on citizens, keep track of their movements, and help turn the nation into a police state. There is also a provision in the bill that affects the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA. DARPA is now being run by the infamous John Poindexter, the former Navy Admiral/National Security Adviser who took the hit on the Iran-Contra affair in the Reagan Administration. The bill will allow DARPA to set up a Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (SARPA – don't you love all these crazy acronyms!) that will conduct research into new technologies for security as well as set up a massive database on all people in the U.S. – both citizens and non-citizens. The database will contain information from one's bank and brokerage records, spending and travel habits from credit card receipts and checks, information on one's passport and its usage, tidbits gleaned from personal e-mail messages, web sites visited, and probably phone records and even phone conversations. Poindexter refers to this as the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, and the motto for this program is knowledge is power. To aid Poindexter, the National Security Agency might well turn its listening devices on the American public and begin shipping the information to his TIA database. After all, NSA needs a mission as all it can seem to do with regard to Al Qaeda is tell us that there is a lot of chatter, an indicator that Osama and his boys are possibly up to no good. NSA cannot seem to pick up Al Qaeda conversations in which direct orders of specific attacks are given as Osama and the boys apparently have learned how to communicate without being tracked or decoded by NSA or the CIA.

Not to be outdone in the post-9/11 expansion game, the CIA has gone on its own spending binge, trying to hire new spies and those with the ability to read and translate the foreign languages utilized by Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian terrorists. Furthermore, CIA has begun to station its employees at FBI field offices, all in the name of making sure that CIA foreign intelligence is passed to the FBI to help in the war on terror. This is a major violation of the principles upon which CIA was created – that is, keep foreign intelligence gathering and analysis – which often involves law breaking – separate from the FBI so as not to create an American KGB. CIA is also going to teach FBI employees how to analyze intelligence information; this is a real hoot given CIA's failure to predict the Soviet economic and political collapse. Finally, CIA seems to have been given the go-ahead to get heavily involved in covert operations, actions which, in the past, have come back to haunt the agency and hurt America's security.

Then there is the FBI, which has for a number of years been stationing special agents around the world (nothing like a foreign assignment with government-paid housing and other extras!) to fight crime. Any American with a foreign bank account should consider himself open to FBI overseas snooping, all of which is now being done in the name of fighting terrorism. The FBI's budget has also been increased sharply, to hire and train more special agents and upgrade their computers, again all to help with the war on terrorism. Given the USA Patriot Act, one should question whether the FBI has not been running amok conducting black bag jobs on suspects' domiciles since the law was passed in late 2001 (black bag jobs are illegal break-ins to snoop around suspects homes, done without a proper search warrant).

Finally, rumors continue to surface regarding a major reorganization of counter-espionage and counter-terrorism functions of the U.S. government, all along the lines of Britain's MI5 (known as the British Security Service). Components from the FBI's counter-espionage and counter-terrorism units would be taken and moved into such an organization. Would the new organization stay in the Justice Department or would it be moved to the proposed Department of Homeland Security; in Britain, MI5 is under the Home Secretary. Would it be given extensive powers to violate the Constitution, such as being allowed to conduct illegal breaking and entering of individual homes as well as conduct warrant-less wiretaps and buggings? As stated above, the current USA Patriot Act allows some of this, and it could be expanded even further, all in the name of protecting us from Islamic terrorism.

In any case, the combination of all these changes are the types of powers that the Soviet KGB had – the ability to gather information on anyone or any organization inside or outside the country, all in the name of preserving national security. Just as the sun will likely rise in the morning, the one thing we can be sure of is that once the government has this power, citizens' rights to life, liberty, and property will be grossly abused. It is only a question of when, not if.

What Should Be Done

The whole American intelligence apparatus needs to be drastically trimmed and refocused. The first steps are to change the U.S. government policy of trying to run a world empire. By ending our meddling in other nations' affair, bringing our troops home, refocusing our defense efforts on protecting the U.S. from external attacks, extending the hand of free trade to all countries, and setting up a proper system to end illegal immigration, we would be able to sharply reduce our intelligence efforts. This means that the U.S. must adopt a foreign policy of strict neutrality.

To paraphrase Dr. Hoppe from his Democracy: The God That Failed, as long as we have a publicly-owned government with a territorial monopoly of protection over its citizens along with the power to tax them to pay for it, there will always be a tendency to a larger organization, with a decreasing quality of service and an ever-increasing cost of such service. Thus, regardless of any major changes in U.S. foreign policy and regardless of what we do to reduce the intelligence community, bureaucrats and politicians will immediately commence a new round of scheming and conniving to increase the size and scope of their territorial protection monopoly. That is why the intelligence community must always be subject to as much public examination and questioning as possible; given the awesome and frightening powers that they have, they should never be trusted.

That said, let me offer these guidelines for cutting the intelligence community down to a useful, Constitutionally consistent size and keeping it on a short leash:

• The Defense Department and CIA need to be forced to rely on commercial sources for as much intelligence as possible, especially in the area of spy-in-the-sky satellite photography. This can saves billions of dollars without compromising U.S. national security. Special government programs should only be used to fill in legitimate gaps in coverage;

• The NSA mission needs to be rationalized and downsized, consistent with getting the information needed to prevent sneak attacks on the U.S. This cut in funding will also help reduce its capability to spy on U.S. citizens;

• The Defense Intelligence Agency needs to be downsized considerably, as its major mission is apparently justifying higher defense spending. Once again, a sharp cut in funding will force DIA to focus on the mission of identifying the strength and capability of potential adversaries;

• The CIA needs to be downsized significantly, notably in its collection, analytical and administrative functions. A downsized CIA will be better able to focus on the most important missions and provide better information to the president. While the nature of human intelligence collection is such that spies must recruit agents and get regular reports from them, getting fewer good agents – who consistently produce better and more useful information that does not need analysis – needs to be emphasized. It is obvious that the current quantity and detail of CIA analyses are not needed, especially with the expansion of private sources of intelligence that are now available to the public. CIA needs to have far fewer, and more intelligent, analysts to track important areas of concern to U.S. national security. It need not cover the world in detail to support the imperial ambitions of American presidents. Finally, CIA's administrative unit is a pox on the agency. It has wrapped the rest of the organization in such red tape that reasonable operations cannot be conducted in a timely manner. It has become a vehicle for imposing political correctness in a function where political correctness can cost lives; and,

• The FBI needs to be drastically downsized. It had been grossly overexpanded, not only to the point of meddling in State and local law enforcement but also it is being used as a tool to harass groups or individuals considered politically incorrect. The Ruby Ridge and Waco fiascos, along with its bungled handling of the evidence in the Timothy McVeigh bombing case, make the FBI a target for downsizing in and of themselves. In addition, its deployment of a major contingent of special agents overseas borders on the ridiculous. Where does the U.S. get the nerve to span the globe and demand enforcement of its domestic laws overseas? Ending this nonsense will go a long way towards changing the U.S. image of being a world imperialist. That would leave the FBI with a force designed to investigate national security related crimes and the crimes committed by federal employees.

All of these recommendations would be much more effective if coupled with implementation of a strict immigration control program. Together with a new foreign policy of neutrality and non-interference in the affairs of other countries, these actions would reduce the threat that federal national security programs would pose to our rights to life, liberty and property. With these measures taken, we might be able to cut the intelligence community budget up to half, if not by more, in the short-term. Over the much longer-term, strict adherence to a foreign policy of neutrality and non-interference would enable us to save further resources on this area as we would likely not have as many enemies to worry about!

November 23, 2002

Jim Grichar (aka Exx-Gman) [send him mail] was an economist with the federal government. He writes to "un-spin" the federal government’s attempt to con the public, whether through its own public relations organs or via the usual stooges and dupes in the mainstream media.

Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com