Espionage is a constant in human civilization. Spying features prominently in theOld Testament and it’s often called the “second oldest profession” with good reason. The ancient Chinese sage Sun Tzu wrote eloquently about the strategic importance of espionage and counterespionage fully 2,500 years ago. As long as people have lived in anything resembling societies, they have been stealing secrets from each other.
Although America has the world’s best-funded intelligence services, and our behemoth seventeen-agency Intelligence Community is sufficiently vast to please any Beltway bureaucrat, there are persistent calls for our spies to do more. This has become a drumbeat of late, as the Obama White House fumbles aimlessly around the Middle East in its not-quite-a-war against the Islamic State, the notorious ISIS.
Beyond the politicization of our intelligence regarding ISIS, which is known to be a problem, with inaccurate good news being valued over more accurate bad news by certain senior policymakers, many believe that we simply don’t know enough about what the black-clad jihadist madmen in Syria and Iraq are up to.
In particular, we’re hearing increasing cries for more spies on the ground, what professionals term human intelligence or HUMINT. Ritualistic chants for “more HUMINT” occur any time Uncle Sam finds himself in a jam somewhere, and they usually come from people who don’t know much about the spy business. They also find fault with our alleged overreliance on technical espionage, and their particular bugbear is signals intelligence or SIGINT.
American spies work the embassy cocktail circuit, just like in the movies, hoping to land a golden source.
Above all, the “more HUMINT” crowd pretends our Intelligence Community doesn’t do plenty of it already, when in fact we do more of it than almost anybody. This is often accompanied by implied criticism that risk-averse American spies are just sitting around in embassies worldwide, not doing much. They need to “get in the fight,” advocates state from their comfy chairs. Inevitably there will be cries to recreate the derring-do of the Office of Strategic Services of World War Two fame, when brave men jumped out of airplanes behind enemy lines and did… something. That the espionage track record of the OSS can be charitably termed mixed is always omitted.
Read the Remainder at The Observer