March 12,
2001
What Are Spies For?
In Intelligence committee rooms on Capitol
Hill and in briefing sessions in the FBI, CIA, and other redoubts
of the national security establishment the air now quivers with
gloomy assessments of the secrets "compromised" by
the FBI's Robert Hanssen, a senior official who stands accused
of working for the Russians since 1985.
If you believe the FBI affidavit
against him filed in federal court, Hanssen betrayed spies working
for the US, some of whom were then executed. Among many other
feats he allegedly ratted on "an entire technical program
of enormous value,, expense and importance to the United States"
which turns out to have been the construction of a tunnel under
the new Soviet Embassy in Washington DC. He trundled documents
by the cartload to "dead drops" in various suburbs
around Washington DC, often within a few minutes walk from his
house.
It's amusing to listen to the
US counter-intelligence officials now scorning Hanssen for lack
of "tradecraft" in using the same drop week after week.
These are the same counter-intelligence officials who remained
incurious across the decades about the tinny clang of empty drawers
in their TOP SECRET filing cabinets, all contents removed on
a daily basis by Ames and Hanssen who deemed the use of copying
machines too laborious. In just one assignment, the CIA later
calculated, Ames gave the KGB a stack of documents estimated
to be 15 to 20 feet high. Hanssen was slack about "tradecraft"
because he knew just how remote the possibility of discovery
was. The only risk he couldn't accurately assess was the one
that brought him down, betrayal by a Russian official privy to
the material he was sending to Moscow.
The record of proven failure
by US intelligence agencies is long and dismal. To take two of
the most notorious derelictions, the CIA failed to predict the
Sino-Soviet split, and failed to notice the Soviet Union was
falling apart, a lapse that the Agency later tried to blame on
Ames.
In the mid-1990s CIA director
John Deutch testified to Congress that "taken as a whole
Ames's activities "facilitated the Soviet, and later the
Russian, effort to engage in 'perception management operations'
by feeding carefully selected information to the United States
through agents they were controlling without our knowledge (O)ne
of the primary purposes of of the perception management program
was to convince us that the Soviets remained a superpower and
that their military R&D program was robust."
So here was Deutch (himself
scandalously pardoned by Clinton for personally perpetrating
some of the most egregious security lapses in the CIA's history,)
claiming that treachery by its man Ames was the reason the CIA
failed to notice the Soviet Union was falling apart.
Following that line of analysis
Ames could have entered a plea of innocence on the grounds that
in helping the Soviet Union exaggerate its might he was only
following official Agency policy. One of the prime functions
of the CIA in the cold war years was to inflate the military
capabilities of the Soviet Union, thereby assisting military
contractors and their allies in Congress and the Pentagon in
the extraction of money to built more weapons to counter these
entirely imaginary Soviet threats.
Back in the mid-1970s CIA director George
H.W. Bush found that the regular CIA analysts were making insufficiently
alarmist assessments of Soviet might and promptly installed Team
B, a group replete with trained exaggerators who contrived the
lies necessary to justify the soaring Pentagon procurement budgets
of the Reagan Eighties.
Reviewing this torrent of lies
at the start of the 1980s CounterPunch contributing writer Andrew
Cockburn wrote The Threat, a pitilessly accurate estimate of
Soviet military potential based on interviews with sources secured
by Andrew's tradecraft, some of said sources being Russians immigrants,
many of them living in Brighton Beach, New York. He described
how the US civil and more seriously military intelligence organizations
were grotesquely miscalculating the Soviet defense budget and
routinely faking the capabilies of weapons systems such as the
T-80 tank, the range of planes such as the MIG 23 and SU 24 and
the accuracy of their long-range missiles.
Military experts deprecated
Andrew's findings as did many of the liberal Pentagon watchdogs,
who found it too offensively simple to say that Soviet weapons
were badly made, and overseen by semi-mutinous drunks.
But as history was soon to
show, Andrew had it right. Against the entire US intelligence
budget for spying on the Soviet Union's military potential you
could set the $19.50 necessary to buy The Threat and come out
with superior information.
Real secrets, such as amuse
presidents over breakfast, don't concern weapons but gossip:
the exact capabilities of Dick Cheney's heart; the precise amount
of cocaine sold by George Bush at Yale and so forth. The nation's
real intelligence work is being done by the National Inquirer.
We could cut off the CIA's and FBI's intelligence budgets and
improve the security of this nation at once.
A final parable, also from Andrew, about
another US intelligence failure to predict Egypt's attack on
Israel in the Yom Kippur war in October of 1973. In fact a CIA
analyst called Fred Fear had noticed earlier that year that the
Egyptians were buying a lot of bridging equipment from the Russians.
Assessing the nature and amount of this equipment, Fear figured
out where the bridges would be deployed across the Suez Canal
and how many troops could get across them. He wrote a report,
with maps, predicting how the Egyptians would attack. His superiors
ignored it until the attack took place,. Then they hauled it
out, tore off the maps and sent them to the White House, labelled
as "current intelligence".
While the Egyptians were planning
the Yom Kippur assault, they found the Israelis hand built a
defensive sand wall. Test disclosed the best way to breach this
wall would be with high pressure hoses.So they ordered the necessary
fire hoses from a firm in West Germany, putting out the cover
story that Sadat was promising a fire engine to every Egyptian
village. Then a strike in the West German hose factory held up
production into the fall of 1973. As the days ticked away the
desperate
Egyptians finally deployed
all Egyptian cargo planes to Frankfurt to pick up the fire hoses.
The planes crammed the airfield. Frankfurt is a notorious hub
for intelligence agencies. None of them noticed. CP
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