I have two uncles who served in military intelligence, both my mother's brothers. One, her oldest brother, now in hospice care, entered the Navy the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese. After boot camp at Great Lakes in Chicago, he disappeared. Literally. His family didn't hear from him again until the day after the Germans surrenedered, when he called from Switzerland to let his mother and father know he was alive and would be home . . . sometime. The other, her younger brother, entered the Marine Corpse after graduating from high school in 1945. First, he prepared for the invasion of Japan. When that was cancelled due to the Japanese surrender, he was ready to muster out, only to have his plans change; he spent a year in China, first in Tientsin, then in Peking, attached to the First Marine Division. The war against the Japanese may have been over, but Mao Tse-tung's insurgency against the Republic of the corrupt Chiang Kai-shek went on. I have many written reminiscences of his activities then, and later as a reserve member of the Corps (including being called back to active service in Korea).
In both cases, while the stories I have heard range from the fanciful to the improbable, I also have enough corroborating evidence to conclude that, even if memory has failed on details, and individual incidents may have become overlaid with a patina of flag-waving and even nostalgia, the aura of romantic adventure around them might just be accurate.
The legacy of wild-west, free-wheeling, extra-legal activities that we think of as "intelligence operations" in many ways leads back to one man in our history, William "Wild Bill" Donovan. Donovan was recruited by Pres. Franklin Roosevelt to set up the Office of Strategic Services, a quasi-military intelligence group that would gather information on the enemy and coordinate paramilitary operations under cover of classification. Donovan's legacy included not just a willingness to try all sorts of wild stunts, and fanciful schemes; he also started a tradition of recruiting club and fraternity men from the Ivy Leagues, particularly Yale, and searched the United States Navy in particular for individual operations officers (while never confirmed, either by my Uncle or any research I could find, I am convinced my mother's oldest brother, being both Navy and far too bright for his own good, was an OSS field operative; why else would he be in landlocked Switzerland at the end of the European war? I do know what he was up to, and I'd tell you, but then I'd have to kill you). After the war, like all good bureaucratic entities, the OSS struggled on, eventually transmogrifying, via the 1948 National Security Act, in to the Central Intelligence Agency.
Whether it was the various coups in the Third World or assassination plots against foreign leaders, or even figuring out what our various adversaries were up to, the CIA's record, even should one consider its most ardent supporters, can only generously be described as "mixed". Its later history, from the Iran-Contra operation through the establishment of various "black site" prisons in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, shows the CIA seems too attached to activities that are outside not only any legislative mandate, but any legal architecture at all. In the meantime, the CIA had two abject failures at the core of its mission. It was caught completely flat-footed in 1989 as Central Europe dismantled its communist governments one by one (and later in the 1991 coup in the Soviet Union). The discovery of long-serving double agent Aldrich Ames, who not only fed information to the Soviet Union on our activities for years, but also may have been responsible for the deaths of many sources of information, should have undermined any confidence in the CIA.
Alas, failure in reality has little traction against the romance of possibility, especially when the argument continues to be heard the we as a nation "need" an intelligence apparatus. So what if it is susceptible to penetration by other states? So what if it acts outside any legal structure, torturing persons it kidnaps, "disappearing" them a manner more reminiscent of tin-pot dictators in South America than a supposed world leader? So what if it missed the most important single political event since the end of the Second World War, the one event toward which it was supposed to be working?
We do need some sort of intelligence apparatus. We do have pretty effective ones, especially the National Security Agency, although it has its failures and over-zealous moments as well. While bureaucratic inertia and intransigence may brake any attempt at real reform, the announcement that Attorney General Eric Holder is going to set up an investigation of the CIA's activities during the Bush years is a good start. It would be nice if we could do more, not least including maybe asking whether the structure of our intelligence activities - which stretch across all branches of military service, and several civilian departments as well (did you know there's an intelligence division in the Agriculture Department?) - isn't just a wee bit cumbersome and far too complex and redundant to be effective. It might also call in to question the legacy of Bill Donovan. The "best and the brightest", David Halberstam's ironic phrase for the second generation of folks who lived Donovan's dream in to the morass of southeast Asia, have failed us far too often, and we need to rethink the whole scheme of intelligence.
Virtual Tin Cup
