Some of our readers will be familiar with the Gormenghast trilogy, which creates a desiccated and ossified world of utterly rigid, meaningless, Kafkaesque, and ineffectual bureaucratic processes. The Nigerian Underpants Bomber has put the spotlight on the CIA again, along with the realm of intelligence in general. It turns out that the CIA is rigid, meaningless, Kafkaesque, ineffectual--like an actual real-life Gormenghast castle.
The following account by a former long-serving deep-cover officer in the CIA is both alarming, but believable.
Flight 253: The Role of CIA Bureaucracy [Ishmael Jones]This description of administrative arteriosclerosis, where layer upon layer of minutiae, rules, committees, organs, and bodies exist in the end only to function for their own continued existence, is not isolated to the CIA. It is inevitable outcome of democracy's drift into soft-despotism. The more competencies arrogated by government, the thicker the layers of bureaucratic administration required. The sheer complexities of creation result in bureaucratic administrations which--when they attempt attempt illicitly to manage, rule, administer, and conform reality--end up becoming so convoluted they cease to function with anything remotely resembling competence or efficiency. In the end government not only becomes itself ungovernable, its sheer weight and incompetence chokes the breath of its subjects.
The Northwest Flight 253 bombing incident on Christmas Day is yet another indication of the need for intelligence reform, reform that can protect Americans and our allies.
According to CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano, the bomber’s father walked into the American embassy in Nigeria in November and advised embassy officials that his son was a terrorist threat.
“We did not have his name before then,” Gimigliano told journalists. With more than 90 percent of CIA officers living and working entirely within the United States, and most of the remainder stationed within American embassies overseas, traditional on-the-streets intelligence gathering is rare. We weren’t out there looking for this terrorist intelligence, it was just good luck that the information came walking into an embassy.
Sometimes good intelligence does come from walk-ins, and the challenge then becomes to process it efficiently. Security at American embassies is tight, and lots of visa-seekers, scam artists, and crazies request meetings with American embassy officials, so it can be difficult for a genuine intelligence volunteer to actually get in the door. History is filled with examples of people with valuable secrets who just couldn’t get into the embassy to tell them. The bomber’s father is apparently a former Nigerian government official, and chairman of a Nigerian bank, whose credentials would have given him the ability to speak directly to an American official.
Once he got inside, the bomber’s father likely met with a newly trained CIA officer who did not have the clout to get the information out fast. Meeting with walk-ins is considered low-level work. The officer would have typed up the information and relayed it to his superiors within the embassy. Depending on the number of management layers, he may have had to get the approval of just one or two, but possibly as many as four to six managers before the information was released and sent to CIA headquarters. The time it takes to do this is significant because the bomber’s father walked into the embassy in November and the attack occurred on December 25th — a nanosecond in the way government perceives the passage of time.
The information’s destination within CIA headquarters is a matter of art and magic. Nigeria is in the CIA’s Africa division, but counterterrorism is in another division. The bomber’s last address was London, in a separate division, and he had recently been in Dubai, yet another division. Each division has countless branches, chiefs, and deputy chiefs. Despite many years of CIA service, I do not know where the information would have gone or who would have been in charge. CIA officers can spend years at headquarters studying the unceasing intrigue of its internal relationships.
Ultimately, there are simply so many managers and administrators, in so many separate and loosely organized chains of command, that acquiring the intelligence is a stroke of luck, and getting it to where it needs to go, on time, is almost impossible.
To solve this, we need to get CIA officers out of the United States and into foreign countries, get them out of the embassies and on the streets, account for the money, and eliminate byzantine bureaucratic structures. In doing so, we will protect Americans and our allies, so that we can go about our lives in peace.
— “Ishmael Jones” is a former deep-cover officer with the Central Intelligence Agency. He is the author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture, published last year by Encounter Books.
It is arguable that a focused and concentrated effort by the US government, in this instance, upon its intelligence services, might make things in that function much improved. But the government machinery is now so vast that it is impossible to focus on anything for longer than the next headline or crisis du jour. Because the modern democratic government now rules over all of life (or so its laws, organs, and structures purport) there is always an unmanageable crisis at hand: border controls, immigration, global warming, crime, policing the Internet, terrorism, war making, public health, executive salaries, homeland security, bankruptcies, credit crises, unemployment, education, drugs . . . . The list is without end.
President Obama has taken to blaming all the crises faced by his administration on his predecessor. Bad move. He has not yet woken up to the fact that modern government is crisis, period. Modern western governments have grown to inescapable, perpetual incompetence, which means that they live in a perpetual state of crisis.
In New Zealand, we are insulated somewhat from these deformations merely by historical accident. The very smallness of our nation means that government idiocy and incompetence can be more quickly identified and corrected. But this advantatage is ephemeral in the long run. It merely takes us longer to get to a state of perpetual crises: we do not avoid it. Moreover, countries like New Zealand die more quickly in another way. The smallness of our economy means that the dead weight cost of bureaucratic government is proportionately greater, sooner. The entire country moves more rapidly into penury, weakness, and degradation.
Modern government is not the solution to the problem, it is the problem. But--and let it never be forgot--modern government is the problem only because the hearts of the people want their governments to be all-providing saviours. Obama's campaign slogan was ironic. "Yes, we can," was really a contraction. The slogan, properly expanded, was "Yes, we, the government, can". Both Obama and the people understood it that way. The inevitable degrading consequences of this idolatry will not end until the people repent and return to the God of their fathers.
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