Bill Clinton grasps the point, but the politics of the Russian issue are now moving strongly against more help. GOP senators have begun using the Ames spy case as an excuse to hold up a paltry $1.7 billion in aid. This marks a new level of geopolitical myopia. The amount we’ve pledged to Russia represents less than 1 percent of the defense budget, and less than 5 percent (in constant dollars) of what we spent on the Marshall Plan for rebuilding Europe after World War II. Yes, devastated Europe was able to absorb the money better than Russia. But this time we’re not even trying.
Why? The short answer is old thinking by the public, which loathes foreign aid, and by the defense establishment, which has no clue anymore about what investment in national security really means. These folks have forgotten that the Marshall Plan was a successful national-security program-far more successful than, say, the CIA. Consider this: thanks to traitors and incompetents, the CIA failed in recent years; more than 30 operations went sour. But this happened at precisely the moment communism was collapsing. Cold-war final score: KGB EDGES CIA, but U.S. TROUNCES U.S.S.R. In other words. the long-assumed connection between the spy game and the cold war-between successful espionage and true national security-is a little shaky, isn’t it? And it should be. Nowadays, if John le Carre’s George Smiley were really trying to save the West, he’d be using dead-drops to pass along loans to Russian (business) agents.
Obviously there are huge problems in aid to the old Eastern bloc that remain to be worked out. Listless state industries and the Russian mafia strangle enterprise, and as The Wall Street Journal reported in a terrific series last week, shameless American consultants are skimming large chunks of the aid meant for struggling entrepreneurs. But thousands of scrappy small businesses are launching anyway, and even with the purge of reformers from Boris Yeltsin’s cabinet, they still deserve help. Can anyone justify, for instance, why almost no money has yet made its way to Russian scientists trying to make the transition to civilian projects? “The bottom line: The West has been stingy,” the Journal concludes.
Last week’s easy outrage was a reminder of the comforts of the cold war. “It’s like Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston,” says John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists, referring to the famous bout that took place 30 years ago last week. “Ali’s shouting at Liston to stand back up. We’ve got this quarter-of-a-trillion-dollar [defense] budget that is based on there being a worthy adversary. Kim Il Sung [of North Korea] may be a serious irritant, but he is not a worthy adversary.”
Pike’s expertise is in analyzing the supersecret National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which spends about $6 billion of the estimated $29 billion a year that this country devotes to intelligence. (The CIA itself represents less than 15 percent of that budget.) His argument is that the amount of money we’re wasting on intelligence is extremely large compared with the sum we’ve invested in Russia. The NRO budget, for instance, is now twice what it was when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. And we don’t need to cover the old Soviet Union the way we once did: “We know where the Soviet fleet is: it’s in port rusting,” says Pike.
If you think this is just liberal carping, check in with Angelo Codevilla of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, an important conservative intelligence expert. Codevilla also thinks the SIGINT picture-taking is way out of hand, and he adds that the agency’s multibillion-dollar decoding operation is now pointless, because encryption is so advanced.
CIA Director R. James Woolsey’s argument for keeping his budget is that “we have slain a large dragon, but we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes.” True enough, and fighting terrorism, drugrunning and nuclear proliferation are worthy missions for an intelligence agency. The problem is that about half of the intelligence budget-known as the National Foreign Intelligence Program-is not assigned specifically to those tasks. That money is largely devoted to old bureaucratic ways of collecting data that are unconnected to new missions. “It’s no surprise they couldn’t find the [Iraqi] Scuds,” Codevilla says.
Helping the former Soviet bloc may be wasteful, but it has a long way to go before it’s more wasteful than the postwar record of American intelligence. The CIA story is one of repeated intelligence failures, as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan likes to point out, 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. Despite the waste, we need intelligence. And despite the waste involved in getting the old Soviet bloc on its feet, we need to try. Right now, the balance between those two tasks is badly skewed, and shifting in the wrong direction.
title: “Not So Smart Intelligence” ShowToc: true date: “2023-02-01” author: “Thomas Mata”
Bill Clinton grasps the point, but the politics of the Russian issue are now moving strongly against more help. GOP senators have begun using the Ames spy case as an excuse to hold up a paltry $1.7 billion in aid. This marks a new level of geopolitical myopia. The amount we’ve pledged to Russia represents less than 1 percent of the defense budget, and less than 5 percent (in constant dollars) of what we spent on the Marshall Plan for rebuilding Europe after World War II. Yes, devastated Europe was able to absorb the money better than Russia. But this time we’re not even trying.
Why? The short answer is old thinking by the public, which loathes foreign aid, and by the defense establishment, which has no clue anymore about what investment in national security really means. These folks have forgotten that the Marshall Plan was a successful national-security program-far more successful than, say, the CIA. Consider this: thanks to traitors and incompetents, the CIA failed in recent years; more than 30 operations went sour. But this happened at precisely the moment communism was collapsing. Cold-war final score: KGB EDGES CIA, but U.S. TROUNCES U.S.S.R. In other words. the long-assumed connection between the spy game and the cold war-between successful espionage and true national security-is a little shaky, isn’t it? And it should be. Nowadays, if John le Carre’s George Smiley were really trying to save the West, he’d be using dead-drops to pass along loans to Russian (business) agents.
Obviously there are huge problems in aid to the old Eastern bloc that remain to be worked out. Listless state industries and the Russian mafia strangle enterprise, and as The Wall Street Journal reported in a terrific series last week, shameless American consultants are skimming large chunks of the aid meant for struggling entrepreneurs. But thousands of scrappy small businesses are launching anyway, and even with the purge of reformers from Boris Yeltsin’s cabinet, they still deserve help. Can anyone justify, for instance, why almost no money has yet made its way to Russian scientists trying to make the transition to civilian projects? “The bottom line: The West has been stingy,” the Journal concludes.
Last week’s easy outrage was a reminder of the comforts of the cold war. “It’s like Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston,” says John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists, referring to the famous bout that took place 30 years ago last week. “Ali’s shouting at Liston to stand back up. We’ve got this quarter-of-a-trillion-dollar [defense] budget that is based on there being a worthy adversary. Kim Il Sung [of North Korea] may be a serious irritant, but he is not a worthy adversary.”
Pike’s expertise is in analyzing the supersecret National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which spends about $6 billion of the estimated $29 billion a year that this country devotes to intelligence. (The CIA itself represents less than 15 percent of that budget.) His argument is that the amount of money we’re wasting on intelligence is extremely large compared with the sum we’ve invested in Russia. The NRO budget, for instance, is now twice what it was when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. And we don’t need to cover the old Soviet Union the way we once did: “We know where the Soviet fleet is: it’s in port rusting,” says Pike.
If you think this is just liberal carping, check in with Angelo Codevilla of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, an important conservative intelligence expert. Codevilla also thinks the SIGINT picture-taking is way out of hand, and he adds that the agency’s multibillion-dollar decoding operation is now pointless, because encryption is so advanced.
CIA Director R. James Woolsey’s argument for keeping his budget is that “we have slain a large dragon, but we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes.” True enough, and fighting terrorism, drugrunning and nuclear proliferation are worthy missions for an intelligence agency. The problem is that about half of the intelligence budget-known as the National Foreign Intelligence Program-is not assigned specifically to those tasks. That money is largely devoted to old bureaucratic ways of collecting data that are unconnected to new missions. “It’s no surprise they couldn’t find the [Iraqi] Scuds,” Codevilla says.
Helping the former Soviet bloc may be wasteful, but it has a long way to go before it’s more wasteful than the postwar record of American intelligence. The CIA story is one of repeated intelligence failures, as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan likes to point out, 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. Despite the waste, we need intelligence. And despite the waste involved in getting the old Soviet bloc on its feet, we need to try. Right now, the balance between those two tasks is badly skewed, and shifting in the wrong direction.
