WASHINGTON – The CIA has been gradually submerged in the murky world ofself-serving politics, particularly in the last couple of decades. It’s adevelopment that is fundamentally corrosive to the very nature of aninvestigating agency. It was President Truman who set up the CIA forcorrection of the analysis of military deployment and prowess that wasoften inflated by the Soviet Union’s defense machinery.
He would be turning in his grave to see how his brainchild has so palpablyswerved from its original task to morph into a covert espionage agencybuttressing the ideological leanings of the President and his foreignpolicy. From a civil agency it gradually moved to an institution under theDefence Department, a far cry from its envisioned character. As a researchinstitution it could have become a valuable source of Intelligencegathering, having a direct bearing on appropriate and well-consideredpolicy in the execution of international affairs.
*Fly-on-the-wall view*
One would be hard-pressed to find someone more suitable to the task ofexposing the rot festering within this agency than Melvin Goodman, whohaving worked for it for 25 years has brought to bear the depth of hisexperience and fully exposed the corrupt entrails and its troubled nature.
He offers the fly-on-the-wall perspective on the misdeeds of directors ofthe CIA ever since he joined the service in the 1960s. His book *Failure ofIntelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA*, 2008 and the recent*Whistleblowerat the CIA *continues with the theme of the criticism of the goals andoperations of the CIA.
Though Goodman has favourable things to say about the directors of the CIAduring the early years of his service with the agency, he is categoricallycritical of all the others, especially his friend of long standing, RobertGates, who through sheer manipulation and outright fabrications andmisrepresentation succeeded in rising up the ranks, subverting “the processof ethics and of intelligence” by deliberately misinforming the Presidenton major world events and secret operations.
This was Goodman’s argument in leading a frontal attack on Gates’appointment as Director of CIA. Goodman’s chief target is George Bush whomanipulated the ‘truth’ about the enemy through false intelligence reports,corruption and intimidation thereby succeeding in getting the approval ofthe American public for the Iraq War and his supposed fight againstterrorism, leading to a disastrous series of foreign interventions with theaid of the CIA, which continue to this day.
*Vigilant checks needed*
Indeed, the version we get of the quality of the CIA’s activities is a farcry from Henry Truman’s vision for the future of the CIA. Goodman argues infavour of a whistleblower to keep a vigilant check on the workings of theCIA:
“As long as Congress defers to the President on the conduct of nationalsecurity; the courts intervene to prevent any challenge to the power of thepresident in national security policy making; and the media defer to itsofficial and authorized sources, the nation will need courageouswhistleblowers to make sure that CIA actions are legal, ethical, and moral.”
Strangely enough, the President remains untarnished in spite of beinginstrumental in the larger control of the two spheres of the CIA’sfunctioning: Operations and Analysis.
Operations involve spying and data collection, whereas the Analysis wingmeticulously studies the data to arrive at judicious conclusions about thenature and significance of the task at hand. The President often turns theblame on the CIA if a policy goes amok while the CIA has no escape routedue to the “plausible deniability” of the orders ensuing from thePresident. As Goodman argues, it is up to an upright officer in theAnalysis wing to come up with intelligent and objective findings withoutbowing to the pressure of the ideological slant of the White House.
The case of the historic humiliation in Vietnam is noteworthy, keeping inview the sane advice given by CIA analysts to the Defence Departmentarguing for an anti-war policy. However, the Secretary of Defence,McNamara, misrepresented the information given to him by the CIA that thewar in Vietnam was a foolhardy move, bound to fail.
When the Americans finally did suffer a humbling defeat, who but the CIAanalysts were made the scapegoats. Similarly, Lawrence Wilkerson, formerChief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, endorsing Goodman’shonest and objective appraisal of the CIA’s failure, confirms his own viewson the U.S.’s disaster in disarming Iraq.
The jewels and the warts, the achievements and fiascos of Americanintelligence in the age of demonising the whistleblowers by the statemachinery are adequately and candidly exposed in a book that becomesrelevant to students of political and military ethics, a subject of immensevalue to world peace, foreign policy and international relations.
The enemy, as is often seen, motivated by reprehensible political ends,arises from within and is often more formidable than the externaladversary. This deleterious politicisation and the implicit motives ofcorruption have indeed damaged not only the intelligence agency, but theupright global standing of the U.S.
The world is becoming increasingly volatile and unstable, authoritarianismis raising its ugly head across the globe, making the need forwhistleblowers ever greater.
This book is a wake-up call, particularly in light of the dictatorialonslaught, for world-wide investigation agencies to examine their practicesand decide either to follow the course of exploitation, bullying anduntruths, dictated by the ideological biases of the leaders or beemboldened to observe neutrality, fairness and principles of ethics so asto ensure a more meaningful and productive intervention in global affairs.