In his masterwork, On War, Carl von Clausewitz discussed the inner logic of war. He maintained that it is a logic of maximum violence without pause, violence that ceased only with the utter and permanent subjugation of the adversary. However, he also noted that war is the continuation of policy through other means. These two notions combine to form a paradox: Though war is inherently violent, political purposes are seldom, if ever, served by the senseless violence of absolute war. Therefore, if it is to be useful, war must be restrained by policy and policy leaders from fulfilling its brutal inner logic.
Christopher Moran addresses an analogous issue in his book Company Confessions: Revealing CIA Secrets, which was published late last year in the United Kingdom (though, oddly it will not be out in the United States until August of this year and then under the title Company Confessions: Secrets, Memoirs and the CIA). The book is a vastly entertaining, though ultimately depressing, discussion of the inner logic of intelligence, at least as it is interpreted by the Central Intelligence Agency. Moran, a professor at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, whose previous bookdealt with secrecy in the British government, admits in Company Confessions that “the danger of not having a veil of secrecy for sources and methods should not be underestimated.” Nevertheless, he describes an agency whose devotion to secrecy is so extreme that it comes at the cost of its effectiveness within the American policy and political systems.
If one believes (as I firmly do) that intelligence agencies are necessary to the security and prosperity of a democratic country, then there are two main measures of merit for those agencies. One is whether they are efficient and effective at carrying out their core missions. For the CIA, these missions are collecting human intelligence, doing all-source intelligence analysis and conducting covert actions abroad as directed by the president. The other is whether the agency maintains a level of public and congressional support that allows it to continue to perform those core missions.
Like any government agency, the CIA has had its ups and downs in carrying out its core missions. For the last 45 years or so, however, the agency has, at best, muddled through in maintaining support and even at fending off misconceptions — such as the claim (engineered behind the scenes by the KGB) that the CIA was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Moran’s book suggests that the agency itself is to blame for many of these problems. It has been insistent on secrecy, but then when a scandal or crisis occurs it complains that it is misunderstood.
Read the Remainder at War on the Rocks
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