Spy v. why

The September/October issue of Foreign Affairs magazine is a good one and will doubtless occasion a few essays over the following weeks. Perhaps the most interesting essay is one by David Kahn (“The Rise of Intelligence”) discussing the role of intelligence gathering in today’s military. I have long had an interest in spycraft and intelligence, not so much the cloak-and-dagger stuff, but research and analysis, and Kahn’s essay is a fascinating look at the past two-hundred years of military intelligence efforts, even for folks like myself with no real expertise in the field. He concludes his essay by claiming that, while intelligence offers the ability to enhance military operations in our current struggle against Islamic extremism, it will not—can not—be the decisive factor, or as he states it:

Far from being disrespected as they once were, intelligence gathering and analysis are now considered such indispensable government functions—and so much is expected of them—that their inability to disperse the fog of war or of international politics causes outrage. The irony is that even though intelligence has come of age, it will inevitably fall short of the public’s expectations, no matter what resources and attention it receives, because of the irreducible unpredictability of its targets. And no matter how accurate intelligence is, it will be useless if ignored.

Moreover, information cannot win wars by itself. Information helps commanders make their operations more effective and efficient. It magnifies physical resources by enabling troops and guns to be better used in combat. It improves will and morale by reducing anxiety and steadying command. But ultimately its effect is secondary: it works only as a multiplier and guider of force and determination. If the Axis had possessed the best intelligence and the Allies the worst, the Allies still would have won.

It is possible that in the new and strange kind of war currently being fought, with the extraordinary premium that is placed on timely and accurate information to ward off attacks and to track down the enemy, intelligence may play an even greater role in national security than ever before. But even then, it will never be decisive on its own. Strength is. Ulysses may have been the cleverest of the Greeks and the one who understood best the purposes to which intelligence can be put. But in the end not even he relied on it to recover his kingdom. He slew his enemies with a bow that only he was strong enough to string.

I think, by and large, the generals would agree with Mr. Kahn. No military man—except perhaps those within the military’s intelligence organizations—believes that espionage is the most important factor in war. It’s not Mr. Kahn’s conclusion that strikes me as odd, but how he gets to it—and why.

According to his website, Mr. Kahn is an historian of intelligence, with an emphasis in signal intelligence, including codebreaking and electronic communications. This is borne out in his essay, which serves as a fine historical survey of signal intelligence from Napoleon to the present. But focusing too tightly upon military signal intelligence tends to distort our contemporary efforts at espionage and does not adequately explain our successes and failures. In short, military signal intelligence has so little to do with the big questions of the day concerning intelligence. Having said that, Mr. Kahn’s ultimate conclusion, as I hope to demonstrate, is still the right one, but for different reasons.

Of course, the obvious gap in Kahn’s approach is that the majority of espionage undertaken by the US is not military in nature. Our intelligence efforts so rarely seek to enhance a military operation. Even during the Cold War—the supposed heyday of US intelligence—our primary intelligence operations were not directed by the military and had no military objectives. While it is certainly true during this time that we endeavored to know militarily valuable information by spying on our enemies—such as Russian missile deployments in Cuba or Chinese troop deployments along the Korean border—so little of what the CIA actually did fits into this category of espionage.

Carl von Clausewitz once famously noted that “all war is a continuation of Politik by other means.” In the modern world, though, we have inverted Clausewitz: all Politik is a continuation of war by other means. We have done this to such an extent that no regime in the world falls without alleged CIA involvement. Take the recent coup attempt against Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. Or for historical perspective, take Operation Ajax, the 1953 CIA-led coup against Iranian socialists. Such efforts take us a long way from Mr. Kahn’s history lessons on signal intelligence. The unexpurgated truth is that the CIA—and indeed, the whole central intelligence model—has been, and is today, an ideological tool more so than a military one. Mr. Kahn is right to look back to the Napoleonic age in his essay, but not because of any innovation in military signal intelligence. Instead, it was during this period and its aftermath that the modern sense of ideology was born, and with it, the espionage that sought to further its ends.

To understand how this is so, it is helpful to dust off an old, forgotten volume of military history, Lynn Montross’ War through the Ages (1944), where one will find the following passage:

Bonaparte’s own failures in Egypt had been as complete as the French defeats in Italy, even if less conspicuous at the time. From the outset he realized that an army of 40,000 could make no headway unless the hordes of the East were won over to his side. Hence he began by dating his proclamations according to the Mohammedan calendar, while organizing an Institute of Egypt for the exchange of cultural ideas.

This phase lasted but a short time when it grew evident that the masses were too fatalistic to be stirred by promises of a liberty they neither understood nor trusted. The despised Orientals, in short, proved more clear-sighted than their contemporaries of Europe when it came to estimating Bonaparte’s ambitions.

They gave him their answer by general uprising which began with the massacre of a convoy of French wounded. Bonaparte put down the revolts without hesitating to shell the mosques which he had only lately caused to be respected. In further confession of political failure, he abandoned persuasion for age-old Eastern methods of terrorism. There is even a frantic note in his order for the heads of the executed rebels to be rolled into the public squares of Cairo as an object lesson.

Despite being written over 60 years ago—and despite capturing a time nearly a century and a half before then—this short excerpt shows, as few things can, the current crisis in contemporary intelligence…and it has nothing to do with signal intelligence. Montross recounts an attempt by Napoleon to win what we call today the ‘battle of hearts and minds,’ or the so-called ‘Arab street.’ Just as Napoleon sought to ingratiate himself upon the Mamluks, the US is today engaged in a similar gesture, pandering a ‘liberty…neither understood nor trusted’ by the Arabs we seek to impress. Indeed, our intelligence efforts today have more in common with the ‘battle of hearts and minds’ (or ideology) than any real battle. While not officially an ‘intelligence operation,’ one need look no farther than the ill-planned Al-Hurra—the US-sponsored Arabic-language television station created in 2004, based in Springfield, Virginia, and broadcast throughout the Near East via satellite—in order to see that our current approach to the Middle East is not so much militarily oriented as it is ideological.

Al-Hurra, which means ‘the free one’ in Arabic, has been compared favorably to the Voice of America (VOA) network, created in 1942, and which helped to spread anti-communist ideas during the Cold War. But there are some key differences between the two that often get papered over by Al-Hurra’s supporters. The strength of VOA was that it ‘preached to the choir.’ It represented hope for the millions of people caught behind the iron curtain who rejected the Marxist-Leninist ideology of their nation-states. Whereas VOA was concerned, we didn’t so much have to win the battle of hearts and minds, for it was already won; we merely had to offer hope to the disaffected, to let them know that the rest of the world still cared.

Today’s Near East is an entirely different affair. Those to whom we offer a direct challenge constitute a far larger proportion of the population than the old communists of Eastern Europe…and they are far more loyal to their set of ideas than were the communists. In fact, the percentage of the population that is predisposed to American ideology is quite small, so to whom, exactly, are we broadcasting? It would seem ourselves chiefly. In a withering op-ed piece appearing in the Los Angeles Times back in February, Anatol Lieven and David Chambers blasted Al-Hurra, concluding:

The propaganda techniques of the Cold War made sense once. But such state propaganda is not the real American way. Rather, our approach should be based on Oliver Wendell Holmes’ belief that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” The Arab media provide such a market. Let’s compete in it with the high-quality, independent media that the U.S. produces and Arabs respect. Al Hurra should be closed down at once.

Messrs. Lieven and Chambers are, of course, correct. Al-Hurra is a waste of money and begins to resemble Napoleon’s Institute of Egypt. And similarly, American intelligence efforts in the Muslim world are destined to fail so long as they are premised upon ideological goals, for surely we will discover—just as Napoleon did—that there is no winning the battle of hearts and minds with motives as impure as ours.

Energy security dictates our policy, not the well-being of the Arabs. We know this, and they know this, and everything else is merely the white noise of propaganda. What we lack now is not a proper understanding of intelligence, but an understanding of ourselves and our own ambitions.