The air now quivers with gloomy assessments of the secrets "compromised" by the FBI's
Robert Hanssen, a senior official who stands accused of working for the Russians since
1985.
If you believe the FBI affidavit against him filed in federal court, Hanssen betrayed spies
working for the United States, some of whom were then executed. Among many other
feats, he allegedly ratted on "an entire technical program of enormous value, expense and
importance to the United States," which turns out to have been the construction of a
tunnel under the new Soviet Embassy in Washington D.C. He trundled documents by the
cartload to "dead drops" in various suburbs around Washington D.C., often within a few
minutes walk from his house.
It's amusing to listen to U.S. counter-intelligence officials now scorning Hanssen for lack
of "tradecraft" in using the same drop week after week. These are the same counter-
intelligence officials who remained incurious across the decades about the tinny clang of
empty drawers in their TOP SECRET filing cabinets, the contents of which were removed
on a daily basis by both Aldrich Ames and Hanssen, who deemed the use of copying
machines too laborious. In just one assignment, the CIA later calculated, Ames gave the
KGB a stack of documents estimated to be 15 to 20 feet high. Hanssen was slack about
"tradecraft" because he knew just how remote the possibility of discovery was. The only
risk he couldn't accurately assess was the one that brought him down: betrayal by a
Russian official privy to the material he was sending to Moscow.
The record of proven failure by U.S. intelligence agencies is long and dismal. To take two
of the most notorious derelictions, the CIA failed to predict the Sino-Soviet split and also
missed out on the fact that the Soviet Union was falling apart, a lapse that the Agency
later tried to blame on Ames. In the mid-1990s, CIA director John Deutch testified to
Congress that "taken as a whole, Ames' activities facilitated the Soviet, and later the
Russian, effort to engage in perception management operations by feeding carefully
selected information to the United States through agents they were controlling without
our knowledge ... (O)ne of the primary purposes of the perception management program
was to convince us that the Soviets remained a superpower and that their military R&D
program was robust."
So here was Deutch (himself scandalously pardoned by Clinton after personally
perpetrating some of the most egregious security lapses in the CIA's history) claiming that
treachery by its man Ames was the reason the CIA failed to notice the Soviet Union was
falling apart. Following that line of analysis Ames could have entered a plea of innocence
on the grounds that in helping the Soviet Union exaggerate its might he was only
following official Agency policy. One of the prime functions of the CIA in the Cold War
years was to inflate the military capabilities of the Soviet Union, thereby assisting military
contractors and their allies in Congress and the Pentagon in the extraction of money to
build more weapons to counter these entirely imaginary Soviet threats.
Back in the mid-1970s, CIA director George H.W. Bush found that the regular CIA
analysts were making insufficiently alarmist assessments of Soviet might and promptly
installed Team B, a group replete with trained exaggerators who contrived the lies
necessary to justify the soaring Pentagon procurement budgets of the Reagan
Eighties.
The higher the grade of secrets relayed by a spy, the less his employers are inclined to
believe them. The Soviets for many years thought Kim Philby was a triple agent sending
them disinformation. Anyway, real secrets, such as divert the mighty over breakfast, don't
concern weapons but gossip: the exact capabilities of Dick Cheney's heart, sexual
peccadilloes of public figures, and so forth. That's the sort of stuff J. Edgar Hoover used
to keep in his safe. These days, the nation's real intelligence work is being done by the
National Inquirer. We could cut off the CIA's and FBI's intelligence budgets and improve
the security of this nation at once.
A final parable about another intelligence debacle: failure to predict Egypt's attack on
Israel in the Yom Kippur war in October of 1973. In fact, a CIA analyst called Fred Fear
had noticed earlier that year that the Egyptians were buying a lot of bridging equipment
from the Russians.
Assessing the nature and amount of this equipment, Fear figured out where the bridges
would be deployed across the Suez Canal and how many troops could get across them. He
wrote a report, with maps, predicting how the Egyptians would attack. His superiors
ignored it until the attack took place. Then they hauled it out, tore off the maps and sent
them to the White House, labeled as "current intelligence."
While the Egyptians were planning the Yom Kippur assault, they found the Israelis had
built a defensive sand wall. Tests disclosed the best way to breach this wall would be with
high pressure hoses. So they ordered the necessary fire hoses from a firm in West
Germany, putting out the cover story that Sadat was promising a fire engine to every
Egyptian village. Then a strike in the West German hose factory held up production into
the fall of 1973. As the days ticked away, the desperate Egyptians finally deployed all
Egyptian cargo planes to Frankfurt to pick up the fire hoses. The planes crammed the
airfield. Frankfurt is a notorious hub for intelligence agencies. None of them noticed.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St Clair of the muckraking
newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read
features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2001 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
