The following cut and paste article is from “RUSSIAN INSIDER” and is part of an article titled “Peak Oil: does the CIA know?” Based on my experience I concur and my son who is an O5 in the Dept. of Homeland Security says it is spot on.
“During my career in a NATO country’s military establishment I had interactions with the Central Intelligence Agency often and some of the other US agencies occasionally. The characteristics of the CIA, as I saw them, are the subject of this essay. I think they are applicable across most of the forest of US intelligence structures.
The CIA is a very large organization and the result, bureaucratically speaking, of all these bodies and money is that it is very fragmented. Time and time again our guys would be talking to their guys about some country. Their political section would give us their views of who was in, who was out, power struggles and so on. We would then ask a question about how the economy fitted into this. A pause, well you’ll have to talk to our economy guy, and from the back of the room, blinking in the unaccustomed light, their economy guy would mutter something and then return into his dark burrow. Clearly, the political guys were the stars and economic guys were not: almost an afterthought. But in most countries the economy is the most important driver of politics most of the time; in some countries, it is almost the whole story. How can you possibly separate the two? I will confess, by the way, that we sometimes provoked this response for our amusement.
The politics people were completely obsessed with personalities. I will never forget the leader of their delegation in one of our meetings proudly handing out a piece of paper with the people around the Boss divided into several groups, each with a neat name: his Tribe, Security organizations, the previous Boss’s relicts I think they were. Imagine what that had cost the American taxpayer, the hours of discussion as to whether the Minister of Whatever was more of a Tribe than a Relict. I asked the CIA guy what was the point? What had we learned? How did this help us understand or predict? Of course it was all rubbish, the truth was that the Boss had put together a team; it was what that team did that was important, not from where he’d plucked its members. In another case we were all invited to make predictions about the future of a country. The CIA’s entry was a point series – if this guy becomes Boss, then this; if that guy gets in, then that; if somebody else, then something else. As it turned out, the new Boss wasn’t even one of the people on their list. But note their assumption that everything depended on who the new Boss would be. This obsession with personalities seems to be a built-in characteristic of American thinking for some reason and you see it in the political leadership, the media and intelligence all the time. Milosevic is the problem, Saddam Hussein is the problem, Ahmadinejad, Qaddafi, Assad, bin Laden, Putin. If we can only get this guy out, all will be well. No it won’t, all the objective local conditions that carried him to the top will elevate somebody similar. It’s not a person, it’s a whole country. But the Americans never learn, they force the Bad Guy out and they get either total chaos or a new Bad Guy who turns out to be rather like the old Bad Guy.
A third characteristic was illustrated by a presentation from the Defense Intelligence Agency. The author proudly presented a chart of combat missions by a certain country’s air force. The air force was said to be decaying with poorly maintained aircraft and untrained pilots. And yet his data showed numerous sorties in mountains in bad weather and no crashes. The obvious deduction was that the air force was in much better shape than we thought it was. But the author was so impressed with the data itself that this escaped him. And an impressive collection effort it would have been too, one that few intelligence structures could have carried out: that little chart had cost a great deal of money and involved some impressive and expensive technology. But I suspect that they are so often impressed by the collection technology that they forget why they are collecting it.
I mentioned these characteristics to a neighbor who had also had a lot of dealings with US intelligence and security structures. She agreed with my three and added a fourth: you never meet the same people twice. Indeed, I don’t recall ever meeting the same person twice either (and at her level and the nature of what she was doing – common security issues – the constant changing of the team would have had a much greater consequence). I don’t know how many people work in the US intelligence and security megalopolis but it surely is in the hundreds of thousands if not a million or two. A lot of turnover, cross-postings, promotions and so on. So maybe it’s not surprising that the teams do change quite a bit from year to year. Which raises the question, of course, of how much time on the job the average analyst has.
Another fact, emphasized in the book on the Dulles brothers, is that, from the beginning, the CIA combined intelligence with operations. The British warned them against doing this because the operational requirements will come to shape the intelligence and you’ll start confirming what you want to believe. No wonder the CIA has been surprised so many times.
(Speaking of Allan Dulles, I hope the level of knowledge in the CIA is higher today than his. When asked why he was supporting the Pakistan Army he replied that we need the only real fighters in the area to be on our side and we couldn’t do it without the Gurkhas. But the Gurkhas aren’t Pakistani, no, but they are Muslims. Well, they’re not Muslims either; Dulles is reported to have then changed the subject.)
I passed this to a former colleague who has had much more experience with the CIA than I and he added yet another problem: It’s known in the military as SOPO – senior officer present’s opinion. He told me that in numerous private conversations CIA analysts had complained to him that their assessments were frequently sent back to them to be re-written to fit the conclusions the higher-ups had already come to. And that, of course, is fatal because it creates a closed loop in which you only hear what you already believe and worse, think it’s confirmed by the intelligence. I am always amused how much people are impressed by that phrase “confirmed by the intelligence”. If they only knew.
The purpose of intelligence is to minimize surprise and you can’t expect to do that if you compartmentalize things, obsess about personalities, get carried away by the collection mechanics, change your personnel all the time and confirm what you want to believe.
I’m not going to say, by the way, that my group got it all right: in this business 50% is a pretty good score and too many analyses fall back on the “maybe this, maybe that, time will tell” school of waffle. But we did try to look at the whole picture, regarded individuals as important but embedded in a context, didn’t have a lot of collection technology and therefore went more for what is now pompously called OSINT (open source intelligence) and didn’t do operations at all. And, thanks to one former boss who was still setting the style in my time, we were encouraged to stick our necks out. But we – and all other intelligence organizations – do suffer to some degree from SOPO.
Even without the bosses demanding the “correct” answer, getting it right is very difficult – imagine trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle when you don’t know how big it is, what the actual picture is and have a random selection of pieces some of which may be from another puzzle altogether. I used to amuse myself by asking old intelligence guys when in peacetime in the Twentieth Century had the intelligence guys got it right and convinced the politicians (not much point in the first if you can’t do the second). Personally, I can only think of Richard Sorge. Intelligence is much easier in wartime, by the way, because then you have a very good idea of what the picture is and how big the puzzle is.
Which, come to think of it, seems to be another defect of American intelligence – if you convinced that Russia is a permanent enemy, then everything it does will be interpreted either as an openly hostile act or hostile in some cunning, sneaky, back-handed, barely detectable way.
So, in my experience, the US intelligence structure has made a difficult job almost impossible with these self-imposed handicaps. ”http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/
“You don’t need a God to have a mass movement but you do need a devil” Eric Hoffer “The True Believer”
When I was serving in the 82nd Airborne Division during the Reagan era we trained almost exclusively to counter a Soviet threat. We were told that the most likely scenario would be a push by Soviet armor through the Fulda Gap in Germany, that our life expectancy would be 18 hours max, that we would be severely over matched in numbers, that nukes would probably be used by us to stop the advance, etc. We had decks of Soviet armor cards that we studied so much that almost forty years later I can srtill tell the difference between a T-62 and T-72 and between a ZSU-111 and a BRDM which posed the greater threat and took precedence.
Then the Soviet Union fell. It turned out that they didn’t have anywhere near the number of Divisions or armor that we thought they had, that what passed for Infantry Divisions were really maintenance battalions, AK-47’s were really brooms, etc. We weren’t right about any of it. So not only was all that money spent on Intelligence for all those years wasted, so was all the training the military did. Our only real combat ops during that time were in small unit, jungle based adventures like Grenada, Panama and El Salvador (oops, I forgot, we were never there, wink-wink, nudge-nudge).
I came away from that experience so jaded about our mission not only as a unit, but as a military. What was our purpose? What did we know? Where was all that money going? Didn’t we have any assets on the ground to tell us anything near the truth about the enemy? And if not, how could we ever hope to accomplish anything based on nothing but mistaken conjecture?
The entire US Government is an operational money pit. They haven’t won the war on drugs, the war on poverty, improved education, reduced debt, made our dollar go further, improved overall health, protected our borders, instilled confidence, elevated our mood, restored pride, calmed divisions, reduced taxes or in any way, shape or form improved America as a country in half a century. It’s demoralizing to watch.
This much I have learned- the bigger a system becomes, the more likely it is to fail. Complexity equals fragility. Simplicity is stability.
But what do I know.
Hi Roy, Hi HSF,
As I see it, we’re all too naive for words. The purpose of the CIA, the military, the wars (on “foes” as well as on “poverty,” “drugs,” obesity,” “lack of access to housing, medical services, etc., etc.,) have absolutely nothing to do with their stated aims.
All of this is simply activity. All of it is organized by this vast artificial “market” called the political system. The political system has a constellation of “behaviors” that are well-characterized and quite predictable, and they organize an entire ecology of “jobs” that appear to be aimed at accomplishing some end but in fact are simply a set of actions and reactions that provide something for those involved to do while they are alive. Is there an actual market for the work of a million government intelligence employees in the natural world?
NO.
Spontaneous organization is the hallmark of human social behavior (and of the natural world as a whole). Here, at the apogee of political organization of human society, an entire ecology of false markets exists due to the spontaneous growth of a network of relationships that grew in quite predictable ways under the umbrella of the state’s ubiquitous coercion.
We live in a time where most of what everyone does has no real value. Tens of millions of worker-bees commute to work, labor hard, commute home, shop, clean, sleep, shower, shave, and do it all over again day after day but all of their activity is simply friction. Those who labor on behalf of the state’s apparatus, from soldiers to bureaucrats of every stripe (including all whose paychecks are largely funded by government transfer payments) are engaged in destroying the entire capital structure that gifted us with these astonishing (by historical standards) living standards.
All of this is quite predictably cyclical, as is the predictable transition of human empathy from a basic good to a catastrophic, decivilizing bad via institutionalization of it in the state.
We move from helping our cousins and protecting ourselves from visible threats to vast income redistribution (and a vast bureaucracy whose livelihoods depend upon harvesting ever more “poor” people) and an entire industry of people engaged in making threats out of whole cloth to justify their livelihoods. All it took was scale, and all that required was the embrace of the monolithic state as a means to “improve” humanity. Every mass movement of the past 150 years, from every shade of socialism (Marxism, Nazism, Fabianism, Corporatism) to the secular religion of Progressivism, all roads led to the Central State as a coercive Director of human social organization.
We are living in the apocalypse, the twilight of civilization. We just can’t see it because we’re conditioned to seeing such things play out in the span of a 120 minute feature film, and lack both the perspective and the patience to recognize the same plot as it plays out over a span of multiple lifetimes.
The “intelligence” organizations and panopticon they have generated are simply one symptom of this mortal disease. The rot of civilization is actually everywhere we look, if we allow our eyes to see.
BTW, the reason I say “We’re all too naive” is that all of us, each and every soul, cannot escape our indoctrination into the belief that what we are told is what is real.
Despite our ability to see each tree (falsehood) presented, we all still perceive the forest as described. It is simply too difficult to cast off our indoctrination entirely and see the world as it really is. We use the terminology of the forest pretty much all the time, and this reveals our deeper thoughts.
Metaphorically, we see past the curtain once in a while as it flaps in the breeze, but most of the time we’re all still stuck in the lights and sounds of the illusion spun by our individual participation in the collective fantasy.
It seems to me that the purpose of the intelligence community is to give the sheep a sense that their owners……..er govt, are “working for them” while the actions of the intelligence community only serve to further the agenda of the owners……I mean govt. Whenever the govt needs to gin up a war of choice they simply task the intel community with providing “the evidence” to justify it in the eyes of the sheep.
Consider the shoot down of the Malay flight over the Ukraine. The US intel community quickly provided intel imagery that showed the location of the mobile missile batteries that shot the flight down to help prove that Putin did it. A short time later, the Ukies, using the sat images, travel to these locations and photograph these “missile batteries” but it turns out it’s just farm equipment that is still sitting in the same location. A decade ago the govt missile battery story might have had wings but the interwebz seem to have clipped clipped them a bit.
Our owners could probably get by with an intel community about 5% the size of the current one but that makes it harder to justify/hide/skim/pilfer the hundreds of billions spent on it.
That’s why, at least as far back as Belisarius in the Byzantine Empire, standard procedure in a council of war has been for the leader (not chairman – it’s not a committee that votes, it’s a pool of information and action resources for the deciding commander the buck stops at) to canvass junior staff’s views before their seniors’ views. That way the juniors don’t adjust to their seniors (more likely through silence than through trimming – errors of omission rather than commission), and the seniors don’t get egg on their faces by being shown up and also have the chance to formulate reasoned qualifications and contributions in response.