Do We Need the CIA?

Over the years the CIA has provided a useful role. It has been the face of the US intelligence community, the symbol against which all good lefties rebelled.

In fact the CIA is just one of a constellation of intelligence agencies within and without the Department of Defense, and maybe not the most important.

And the CIA is infamous for its cloak-and-dagger arm: The spy-novel side of things.

According to Derek LeeBaert the CIA has always made a mess of this side of its business, the covert and clandestine operations like the Bay of Pigs.

The agency bloodily botched its airdrops into the occupied Baltic republics during the late 1940s. It impeded commando work during the Korean War. It parachuted Tibetan patriots smack among the brutal Chinese occupiers. It mismanaged the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation... And, as the Red Army crushed the Afghans during the early 1980s, CIA refused to deliver the Stinger shoulder-fired missiles that - after Congress overruled it - turned the war around.

Since 9/11 the Special Operations Command has started to move in on the CIAs covert/clandestine turf. The Special Operations Command includes the Green Berets, the SEALs, and those bearded guys that were pictured riding across Afghanistan on horses a few years ago.

Unlike the CIA, Special Operations Command has a culture of stern accountability and severe self-criticism, of focus and rapid adaptability - the culture of a profession that lives with death.

With the controversy surrounding the CIA recently, with the Plame affair and the leaking of secret anti-terrorist activities, comparison with the Special Operations guys is stark. The CIA exhibits a culture that is more interested in playing Washington power politics and Vanity Fair covers than sternness, accountability, and getting on with the job.

Not that that’s anything unusual. The failures of the federal government in everything from the War on Poverty to the combined governmental operations failure in Hurricane Katrina tell us something.

They tell us that bold, persistent, deep reform of the governmental structures in the US is long overdue.

But meanwhile the US economy throws off huge revenues and the governments at all levels feed hungrily off it.

But it would be nice if they did either something useful and productive with it—with sternness, accountability and severe self-criticism—or had the decency to give it back.