One of the nicer side effects of the 2016
election has been the trashing of the reputations of US intelligence agencies,
specifically the FBI and the CIA. During the election, of course, it became
apparent that there was some sort of tug-of-war within the FBI which led James
Comey to first declare that no “reasonable” prosecutor would ever go after
Hillary Clinton. Then, as election day approached, Comey came back and, contrary to the
usual protocol, waged a PR war against Clinton, implying that this
time, new evidence suggests she is, in fact, a crook. Naturally, the Democratic
party has declared the FBI to be corrupt and has even accused
FBI direct James Comey of covering up Russian crimes.
In the wake of the election, the CIA has
now decided that the Russians were influencing the election and an attempt to
cast doubt on the validity of the election itself. In response, Donald Trump simply dismissed
the CIA as incompetent, declaring “These are the same people that said Saddam
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” It is entirely possible that the
Russians attempt to influence American elections. Unfortunately, the CIA is not
exactly a reliable source from which to draw any conclusions.
Today, the FBI and the CIA remain at war,
with the FBI slamming the CIA’s “fuzzy” and “ambiguous” remarks about the
elections.
Indeed, the whole CIA story remains
primarily based on nameless sources and leaked comments, with no evidence
provided. Even the Washington
Post admits the CIA functions on a model of “drawing inferences”
and isn’t overly concerned with presenting actual facts.
The lesson to be learned from all of
this is that the CIA and the FBI are nothing more than typical government
agencies that spend much of their time fighting little battles on Capitol Hill
and are motivated primarily by protecting their own agendas, their own budgets,
and their own empire-building. As with the FBI, the CIA behaves exactly as
Public Choice theory tells us a self-interested collection of government
bureaucrats would behave.
For far too long has the intelligence
community received a free pass from astoundingly naive advocates for “free
markets” who claim for be for the limited government one minute, and then sit
back and blithely defend everything the CIA does the next minute because “they
keep us safe.”
While obviously motivated by his own
self-interest, Donald Trump has nevertheless been right to not regard the CIA
as a sacred cow, especially since his attacks on the CIA’s questionable record
are based in reality.
Iraq and the Bay of Pigs
Trump’s mockery of the CIA for its position
on Iraqi weapons is at least partially true. In the lead-up to the
Iraq war, the CIA did indeed emphasize Iraqi capability for non-nuclear weapons
of mass destruction. In careful CYA language, the CIA did
refrain from concluding that the Iraqi state had nuclear capability. That
claim was a complete fabrication by the Bush administration. Nevertheless, the CIA invented
many fictions of its own, including the much-touted “mobile
biological labs” in which Saddam Hussein was busy cooking up bio-weapons.
What the report perhaps told us more than
anything was how useless the CIA is in a time of urgently needed intelligence.
A Rand report on the CIA intelligence at the time concluded that “Human
intelligence was scarce and unreliable.”
In the big scheme of glaring CIA failures,
the WMD report isn’t even the worst on the list, although it is arguably worse
than the CIA’s planned Bay of Pigs Invasion in which the CIA decided that
a small force of Cuban exiles would invade Cuba and lead an uprising of locals.
It was the 1960s version of “we’ll be greeted
as liberators.”
The CIA’s Failure to Understand the
Soviet Union
The worst CIA failure would have to be the
CIA’s utter inability to comprehend the internal economic situation in the
Soviet Union as the Soviet economy went into steep decline.
Right until the very end, the CIA insisted
that the Soviet Union was an economic powerhouse that was poised to overpower
the United States.1
Even by the 1980s, it was clear that the
CIA was too incompetent to provide respectable analysis on the situation inside
the Soviet Union. Among the Agency’s harshest critics was New York Senator
Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In a lengthy analysis, Marc
Trachtenberg writes:
Indeed, Moynihan felt, the CIA had done
such a poor job in this area that he thought the Agency should be abolished.
The CIA, in his view, had utterly failed to see how serious the USSR’s economic
problems were, and he made that point over and over again. “For 40 years,” he
wrote in 1990, “we have hugely overestimated both the size of the Soviet
economy and its rate of growth. This in turn has persistently
distorted our estimates of the Soviet threat—notably, in the 1980s when we
turned ourselves into a debtor nation to pay for the arms to counter the
threat of a nation whose home front, unbeknownst to us, was collapsing.”
Moynihan boasted later that year that he had been able to see as early as 1979
that “Soviet economic growth was coming to a halt,” and that “the society
as well as the economy was sick.” “But our intelligence community,” he
said, “just couldn’t believe this. They kept reporting that the economy
was soaring!”
In the public discussion, and to a certain
extent even in the scholarly literature, such claims were treated as
established fact. “As the Bay of Pigs was to intelligence operations,” the
columnist William Safire wrote in the New York Times in 1990, “the
extended misreading of the Soviet economic debacle is to intelligence
evaluation.” According to a 1992 article in the Wall Street Journal, the
CIA’s track record “on the really big developments” was “hit-or-miss at
best,” with “the downward spiral of the Soviet economy” counting as one of
the “more spectacular misses.”
In 1994 a Newsweek columnist noted
in passing that the CIA story was “one of repeated intelligence failures,”
culminating in the “monumental miscalculation of the size of the Soviet
economy, which the CIA judged to be three times as big as it really
was.” And in 1995 the Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory
asked rhetorically whether any government department had “goofed up more
than the Central Intelligence Agency?” “Their most egregious and expensive
blunder about the Soviet economy we are still paying for.”
The importance of this failure for the CIA
cannot be overstated. After all, during the Cold War, the primary purpose
for the CIA’s existence was to collect intelligence on the Soviet Union and
analyze the situation in that country. Thus, the agency’s abject failure
in its primary mission was indeed a good reason for Moynihan to call for the
Agency’s abolition.
Later, the CIA’s defenders attempted to
make excuses for the agency by claiming that no Western economists had figured
out that the Soviet economy was slowing down. In other words, they claimed, the
CIA was just like everyone else.
In fact, numerous economists — not counting
the pro-Soviet Keynesian Paul
Samuelson — had observed the Soviet decline:
Was it true, as many observers have
claimed, that the academic economists had failed to see what was going on with
the Soviet economy, that the CIA analysts had presented much too rosy a
picture, and that the Soviet leadership itself did not really understand
what was going on? If true, that conclusion would have a major bearing on
how we should interpret the period. But is it in fact correct?
In a word the answer is no. There is, for
example, no basis for the claim that western economists had failed to
“‘diagnose observable tendencies,’ such as the continued decline of
economic growth rates.” Experts in this area had little trouble
recognizing that the Soviet growth rate was falling. It was widely
understood by the mid-1960s that the Soviet economy was growing less rapidly
than in the past. As the CIA’s leading expert on the Soviet economy, Rush
Greenslade, pointed out in 1966, “the slowdown of economic growth in the
U.S.S.R. is now a well-known story,” and Abram Bergson, Professor of
Economics at Harvard and the most prominent scholar working in this area,
referred to it in a 1966 roundtable as a “very familiar fact.” That
general point, moreover, was commonly noted in the press at the time. Even a
casual reader of the New York Times, for example—someone who merely
glanced at the headlines—could scarcely fail to note that the Soviet
growth rate had declined. Subsequent calculations simply underscored the basic
point here.
In other words, a casual reader of American
newspapers probably had a better sense of the Soviet economy than the CIA.
But, then as now, the CIA lived in its own
little elite bubble where it credulously imbibed foreign propaganda and
repeated it as fact. In other cases, as in the case of both Iraq and the Bay of
Pigs, the CIA credulously accepted the testimony of Iraqi and Cuban exiles and
repeated that as fact.
As Trachtenberg recognizes, the debate over
just how wrong the CIA was continues to be debated among academics
today. There is no denying however, that at the core of the CIA’s
assumptions were the fact that the CIA, just like the Ivy League elite from which CIA
agents are drawn, believed that Soviet-style socialism was probably
working pretty well, and it was perfectly plausible to believe that the Soviet
Economy could indeed overtake that of the US.
Put another way, the CIA is infected by all
the same political and ideological biases and errors harbored by the political
elites in general. This should shock no one who takes a realistic view of
Washington politics, although it will no doubt continue to surprise — and
by denied by —those who fancy themselves as the “adults in the room” who
advocate endlessly for ever more spending for military and intelligence
agencies.
After all, the CIA’s enormous failure on
the Soviet Union did not come without serious effects. As Moynihan pointed out,
the US “turned [itself] into a debtor nation” to fight an allegedly implacable
foe that was actually collapsing.
How nice for the CIA, though, that it’s
fifth-rate intelligence made it easier for the CIA to claim that more funding
was needed for the CIA’s budgets.
Nowadays, the Russians are yet again the
CIA’s looming threat. But does the Agency have any actual evidence to present?
“Just trust us” seems to be all the CIA can muster.
- 1.In
his book It Didn’t
Have to be This Way, Harry Veryser writes: “In the 1980s
the CIA estimated that the Soviet Union’s rates of economic growth dwarfed
those of the United States and that consequently, the USSR could someday
catch up to the US economy. Of course, after the Soviet Union collapsed,
we learned that the Soviet economy had been dramatically smaller than the
CIA estimated, with its central planners managing an economy perhaps
one-eighth the size of the US market economy.”
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/12/ryan-mcmaken/cia-bad-joke/
