Of the various branches of U.S. statecraft, intelligence is unique for its combination of influence and obscurity. As Amy Zegart notes in her new book Spies, Lies, and Algorithms, American colleges have more courses on rock music than on espionage. Zegart manages both to give an educational overview of American intelligence and show precisely how sorely policymakers need that education. Like the general public, congressmen have only the foggiest notion of how the CIA or NSA work — their views of the intelligence field are more likely to come from Bond or Bourne than from real life.
Spies, Lies, and Algorithms is a primer and reads like it. Most of it is structured like an introductory textbook, proceeding from questions such as “what is counterintelligence?” to concise passages that explain the basics. Zegart’s pedagogical style sometimes leads her to state the obvious — for example, no one should need to be told that intelligence isn’t policymaking. Yet if some of her chapters seem rather basic, it’s with good reason. Her hand-holding is merited by the fact that her intended audience in Congress knows next to nothing about U.S. intelligence: Competent politicians, as H.L. Mencken remarked, are as rare as honest burglars.
In one of the book’s most remarkable passages, Zegart shows that fanciful tropes from spy movies have replaced real knowledge of how intelligence functions. The Fox television series 24, starring Kiefer Sutherland as FBI counterterrorist officer Jack Bauer, often portrayed torture as an effective method of eliciting information. Even supposedly serious people have let the show color their views of torture. In 2002, the staff judge advocate general of Guantanamo ran brainstorming sessions on how to “enhance” the interrogation of prisoners. Bauer, she said, “gave people lots of ideas.” The Guantanamo thugs eventually settled on waterboarding, sexual humiliation, and the use of dogs. Yet Bauer came to serve not only as inspiration but as justification for torture. Both Antonin Scalia and former CIA Director Leon Panetta used Bauer to forward the belief that torture might be a necessary counterterrorism tool.
The internet, Zegart argues, has been a force multiplier for espionage and propaganda. She shows how the intelligence field has been changed by emerging technologies and open-source information. Whereas espionage threats in the past originated exclusively from rivaling countries, nowadays, anyone can hack or gather intelligence from their armchairs. This has allowed journalists and scholars to track nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, but it has also made the United States vulnerable to countless new cyberthreats. When CIA officer Aldrich Ames began spying for the KGB in the 1980s, he had to smuggle documents out of safe rooms over the course of years. Today, thousands of times more information can be stolen in a matter of minutes from across the globe.
The U.S. has struggled to cope with these new challenges. When Russia penetrated the network-monitoring vendor SolarWinds, it gave it access to sensitive U.S. state and commercial networks. China, meanwhile, has stolen intellectual property worth trillions. Some military experts believe that every single major Chinese weapons system is based on stolen U.S. technology. Perhaps China’s boldest move was hacking the Office of Personnel Management, retrieving more than 21 million security clearance records. With the help of a mole in the CIA, coupled with hacking a weak firewall, China completely toppled a CIA spy ring, resulting in at least 20 executions. Yet U.S. intelligence has several successes of its own. The CIA and NSA reportedly collaborated with Israel to launch a cyberattack that destroyed 1,000 Iranian nuclear centrifuges.
One of the most important parts of the way America does intelligence work has often been the weakest link: Congress. It exercised practically no intelligence oversight until a series of scandals in the ’70s forced a change: The New York Times reported on a vast surveillance program targeting domestic dissent, the CIA ran covert operations to oust Salvador Allende, and Watergate forced Richard Nixon to resign. Several investigations into CIA and FBI misconduct were launched, but it was the Senate’s investigation, chaired by Frank Church, that forced the issue. It reached the conclusion that intelligence agencies had infringed upon constitutional rights primarily because they were not subject to Madisonian checks and balances. As a consequence, both the House and Senate created permanent committees to oversee intelligence, and new rules and regulations were created to keep intelligence within legal boundaries. For example, killing foreign heads of state became illegal — rather belatedly, one might think.
The oversight, however, has rarely been functional. This is for a host of reasons. One problem is overclassification — even trivial information is routinely classified. This means that public organizations struggle to scrutinize the intelligence community, leaving congressmen on their own. Few people in Congress, moreover, have worked in intelligence. Perhaps most importantly, serving on the intelligence committees is not vote winning. The committees also have uniquely weak budgetary powers because the intelligence budget is tied to the $777 billion military budget, and secrecy hampers coordination with appropriators. The House compounds the problem by having an eight-year term limit on its committee, rendering it full of inexperienced first-timers. Furthermore, new technology exacerbates old problems — most members and senators struggle to understand social media, never mind cyber intelligence.
American intelligence is both old and new. George Washington engaged in spycraft to win the Revolutionary War, but his intelligence circle didn’t survive his presidency. Gathering intelligence on foreign powers was seen as a strictly wartime enterprise. It was only in the 1880s that the Army and Navy established their own permanent, if inconsequential, intelligence organizations. Domestic surveillance of socialists became widespread in the ’20s during the Palmer Raids, but while spying on “subversives” was normal, foreign governments were rarely targeted. Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, explaining why he opposed spying on diplomatic communications, put it that “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”
It was only with Pearl Harbor that Congress realized the need for a permanent central intelligence agency whose primary task would be to prevent surprise attacks on the American homeland. Subsequent reviews showed that the reason the U.S. was caught off guard was not because of a lack of intelligence — there were in fact numerous signs that Japan might attack — but because of poor integration of it. The signal had gotten lost in the noise. There was no one in charge of coordinating intelligence analysis. But as 9/11 showed, creating the CIA did not solve the problem of intelligence fragmentation. The CIA failed to share crucial information with the FBI that might very well have averted the attack. Despite further intelligence reforms, the fragmentation problem persists. The director of national intelligence is tasked with overseeing the intelligence community but has a hard time performing that role. Information sharing between agencies remains limited, and the ever-increasing classification rate makes sharing even harder. This leaves the U.S. vulnerable to future attacks.
With the Soviet Union toppled, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan recommended abolishing the CIA on the grounds that America faced no major threats. Yet the end of the Cold War brought no end to history or ideology. In fact, since the end of the Cold War, ideology has only become more important in motivating Americans to spy for foreign powers. Jerry Chun Shing Lee, the former CIA employee sentenced to 19 years for espionage conspiracy, was ideologically committed to the People’s Republic of China. During the Cold War, ideology was the main reason in roughly 20% of treasonous espionage. In the present era, that number is close to 35%. It seems the sclerotic USSR had less allure than today’s PRC.
The former chief of CIA counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, became obsessed with hunting for traitors. Angleton had known Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge Spies, and he was crushed by the revelation that Philby had been working for the KGB. He soon became convinced that the Soviets had placed a spy, nicknamed “Sacha,” in the CIA. In the course of trying to smoke out Sacha, Angleton paralyzed the CIA by embarking on endless mole hunts. He thought every genuine defector was a Kremlin plant. In the end, Angleton even accused James Schlesinger, the CIA director, of being part of the Soviet conspiracy. Angleton, taking a phrase from a T.S. Eliot poem, called the espionage world “a wilderness of mirrors.” It is a fitting phrase because intelligence, especially in the digital age, is a bewildering field rife with paranoia and conspiracy. And yet, with Spies, Lies, and Algorithms, Zegart has managed to make sense of that wilderness.
Gustav Jönsson is a Swedish freelance writer based in the United Kingdom.
