After digesting three days’ worth of the Washington Post’s TopSecretAmerica series, consider me unimpressed.

As I said in my initial post, I do generally support the series’ aim — to demonstrate that we’ve had a massive intelligence community bureaucracy sprout up since 9/11, and that oversight and public accountability seem to be lacking. That point is well-taken, and one that I support.

My critiques are simple: TopSecretAmerica is neither even-handed nor nuanced. It paints the intelligence community in a broad-brush negative light while ignoring many of its achievements in the last decade.

The series’ point of departure seems to be that the intelligence community is a secretive monster. The articles lean too heavily on the notion that big, expensive and secretive mean scary and, by implication, counter-productive: Companies put the bottom line before country, no one knows what happens at Ft. Meade, and the super-nerds of the NSA are too affluent … and … what? The country is weaker for it?  We don’t know for sure, but that’s the impression I get.

Rarely do the authors acknowledge that much of the money spent in the IC actually, you know, helped keep Americans safe. KSM’s capture? Al-Zarqawi’s death?  Catching the Times Square bomber in 53 hours? The Russian spy ring? The recent slate of high-level Taliban takedowns in Afghanistan and Pakistan? All these, and more, were left conspicuously off the final draft. Of course, this is the IC’s inherent PR nightmare: its shortcomings are publicly scrutinized; its successes often remain hidden.

Instead of striking a proper balance that tells a measured story of waste, overlap and needless spending mixed with strategic intelligence successes, “TopSecretAmerica” is too quick to throw the baby out with the bath water.

The lack of nuance is equally disappointing. As intelligence analysts, the contractors I worked with couldn’t have been more conscientious, patriotic employees. They were crucial components of our analytic team. Should they have been replaced by civilian employees on a purely cost basis (for purely economic reasons)? Probably, and the government is working to facilitate that transition (a point mentioned in the text). But that’s only part of the charge the Post levels against them — did my colleagues value their shareholders more than their country? No way.

And should my colleagues be lumped in with the protective service contractors who did irreparable harm to America’s mission by murdering Iraqi citizens? No, but to the intelligence novice, it’s easy to lump all contractors under one umbrella. A distinction should have been made.

Take the issue of overlap. In instances the Post highlights, yes, analytic overlap, most egregiously in the form of the “soccer ball syndrome“, creates inefficiencies that should be sussed out in better oversight.

However, overlap can provide necessary perspective to individual customers. In my old job, I was once the U.S. government’s foremost expert on maritime terrorism in the Strait of Gibraltar. That’s quite a niche, huh? I focused on all the major terrorist groups in Spain, Morocco, and Gibraltar (amongst other responsibilities) just like every other CIA or DIA analyst charged with those countries. But I did so with an eye towards my Department of the Navy customer as a maritime and regional specialist. If a group’s activity suddenly indicated a maritime inclination in that area, I took over as the lead because I was the subject expert.

Overlap makes contributions elsewhere, too. In another personal example, I worked with my agency’s team in Spain to determine, based solely on random, personal connections between my colleagues and their Spanish intelligence contacts, that Islamic extremists, not ETA as the Spanish first decreed, were responsible for the Madrid bombings of March 2004. Once we — the Navy — issued our initial report stating this possibility, other more appropriate agencies took over.

The lack of oversight in intelligence spending must be addressed, but let’s not forget the IC’s valuable successes, either.

Photo Credit: Marcin Wichary’s Photostream

The Washington Post’s new series Top Secret America is well intentioned:

When it comes to national security, all too often no expense is spared and few questions are asked – resulting in an enterprise so massive that nobody in government has a full understanding of it.

That’s right. As an intelligence community analyst for some five years, I’ve seen plenty of the bureaucratic inefficiencies, excess and unchecked spending, and unwieldy sprawl that have mushroomed since 9/11. From this perspective, it’s important that questions get asked, money be justified, and overlap — where necessary and possible — be reduced.

My beef with the article — the first in a three-part series — is that it is framed as “big = bad.” Its thesis seems to be that more construction, more analysts, more information, more publications are all fleecing America. The series’ lede lays out this premise:

The investigation’s other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings – about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year – a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

If you’re writing a piece of investigative journalism that is an implicit call for more oversight, pointing out physical size is an obvious organizing frame that seems to illustrate the problem. If there are a bunch of big buildings and no one knows what happens in them, are they necessary?

The problem, however, is delving into why physical size is symptomatic of the problem. Here, the article falls short — lost is that some of these mysterious, large building have contributed to our national security. Raw size isn’t the intelligence community’s problem.

For example, former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair released the IC’s budget for the first time. At $75 billion, it’s almost twice the State Department’s, but only ten percent of DoD’s (however, though the Pentagon’s intel spending is counted in Defense’s budget). If increased oversight improves efficiency by — oh, pick a number — 15 percent, the IC’s budget is still $64 billion and the vast majority of those new buildings out in suburban Maryland are still being built.

Or take the National Security Agency’s budget, the agency that controls our satellite spies that listen in to bad people (when not embroiled in Bush-era domestic eavesdropping cases). It’s budget has doubled.   Based on the “big = bad” frame, you might think this is inherently negative. I’d argue that there’s more to the story, and that the increase in signals intelligence collection has kept the country safer by forcing Al Qaeda to use arcane and slow means of communicating.

Buried are two important reasons why size matters, a link that should be made more explicitly. First:

The overload of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annual reports is actually counterproductive, say people who receive them. Some policymakers and senior officials don’t dare delve into the backup clogging their computers.

IC bean-counters value quantity over quality, the latter being more difficult to judge. I can’t tell you how many times we were told to “produce more,” irrespective of whether that production had any mission impact. A lot of dog shit is more valuable that one diamond. That’s because budgets are justified by numbers.

And second:

[S]ecrecy can undermine the normal chain of command when senior officials use it to cut out rivals or when subordinates are ordered to keep secrets from their commanders.  One military officer involved in one such program said he was ordered to sign a document prohibiting him from disclosing it to his four-star commander, with whom he worked closely every day, because the commander was not authorized to know about it.

Almost four years ago, I was in a meeting with the new intelligence chief for a certain country I was working on. He was briefed by my boss’s boss on a variety of secret operations my organization had going in the area. When the chief asked for further information about a specific operation, my boss’s boss continued on for several minutes about all the amazing intelligence we’re getting from it.

It was highly inconvenient that I knew better: in truth, that operation had been shut down for over a year, and continued to exist on paper only. My boss’s boss was giving the new chief a complete snow job, only to give the appearance of competence and justify more money. I decided to quit that afternoon.

In sum, there’s been no question that the intelligence community was ill-equipped to deal with the new security threats facing the country that grew in complexity and immediacy between the end of the Cold War and 9/11. An overhaul was necessary, and the community continues to face growing pains in the aftermath of that reorganization and the increased budgets that come along with it.

The central tension in intelligence spending is striking a balance between dollars and security. Much of the post-9/11 intel money has effectively contributed to the country’s security, an inconvenient truism that’s glossed over in the Post’s new series. In the remaining articles, I hope the focus is on the marginal rate of increased security for every dollar spent. And in cases where we’re not getting enough bang for our buck, I hope there’s a better explanation of what drives those inefficiencies. Raw size is an occasional indicator of a deeper problem, not the problem itself.

Photo Credit: Orin Zebest

President Obama has reorganized U.S. foreign policy around a new trinity of diplomacy, development and defense. That’s been a sore point among some progressive internationalists, who see the omission of a fourth “d” – democracy – as an overreaction to George W. Bush’s messianic freedom agenda.

Administration officials insist that they aren’t abandoning democracy, just promoting it in new and more subtle ways. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently offered an intriguing case in point.

As Americans celebrated Independence Day, Clinton was in Krakow, Poland for the 10th anniversary gathering of the Community of Democracies. In an important speech that got little attention back home, she unveiled what she called a 21st century approach to promoting democracy by defending civil society. Clinton described an independent civic sector as a nursery for democratic citizenship, no less critical to a free society than representative government and a market economy. And she warned of a spreading global backlash against civil society.

Over the last six years, Clinton noted, 50 governments have clamped down on the ability of civil society or non-governmental organizations to operate freely. She called out persistent violators by name: not just usual suspects like Russia, China and Iran, but also aspiring autocracies like Venezuela under Hugo Chavez and some, such as Egypt and Ethiopia, that are closely allied with Washington. “An attack on civic activism and civil society is an attack on democracy,” she told the assembly.

This marks a significant departure from the Bush administration’s approach to democracy, which centered on demands for elections and accountable political institutions. “All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you,” Bush declared in his 2004 inaugural address. Against the backdrop of the war in Iraq and the war on terror, however, Bush’s freedom agenda acquired a menacing and coercive aura. And when the United States insisted on elections in Gaza, only to see Hamas win in 2006, many critics questioned whether elections are always the right starting point in democracy promotion.

Clinton aimed more modestly, but shrewdly, at bolstering a particular aspect of liberty – freedom of association. In authoritarian countries, civil society or “third sector” organizations play an especially vital role in building the infrastructure of liberal democracy. The United States learned the hard way during the Bush years that democracy can rarely be imposed by force, and from the top down. Support for local voluntary associations, on the other hand, is harder to caricature as some heavy-handed U.S. attempt to “export democracy.” Yet it’s deeply subversive, in that it enables indigenous reformers to carve out space for civic action that is independent of state control. By defending the right of CSOs to organize and operate, and receive international support, the United States and other free countries can promote democracy from the ground up.

Also intriguing was Secretary Clinton’s choice of venue. The Community of Democracies (CD) was launched in 2000 by then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Bronisław Geremek. Although originally seen as a way to consolidate the wave of democratic reformism that swept the world after the end of the Cold War, the Community often seemed adrift during the last decade. Lax membership rules haven’t helped: some of its 104 members aren’t by any stretch genuine democracies.

If it is going to be a force for democratic solidarity in the world, the CD needs a clear and invigorating mission. Clinton suggested one: rallying the world’s democracies to support embattled civil society groups. She proposed a four-part plan:

1. Setting up a mechanism at the CD for monitoring repressive measures against civil society organizations.
2. Encouraging the United Nations Human Rights Council to champion the right of association.
3. Enlisting regional organizations such as the Organization of American States, the African Union and the Arab League to protect civil society.
4. Creating some sort of “rapid response mechanism” to bring joint diplomatic pressure to bear on governments that suppress civil society.

In addition, Clinton said the United States would contribute $2 million to a new fund dedicated to helping NGOs targeted by repressive rulers.

True, these are not especially bold measures. And the Human Rights Council, dominated by autocratic regimes, can scarcely be trusted to defend human rights, let alone the right to associate. But Clinton rather deftly managed to elevate the issue of defending civil society without turning it into a purely American demand or preoccupation. In fact, a CD working group headed by Canada is expected to take the lead.

An internationalist approach, in which America coaxes rather than trying to dominate, is essential at a time when distrust of U.S. unilateralism still lingers, even in a relatively friendly forum like the CD. Our task now is to work with like-minded countries to make defense of civil society an international norm, just as Americans were instrumental in getting the United Nations to adopt the International Declaration of Human Rights after World War II. In this respect, Secretary Clinton’s speech was a strong start.

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“Is America really Israel’s ally? You think so? We’re not so sure.” An Israeli Defense Force reservist said this to me during a post-dinner drink on a deck overlooking the captivating Sea of Galilee last week.

My response was curt — “You better start believing it. Otherwise, you’re screwed.” Okay, perhaps that wasn’t terribly “PC” and perhaps my tone did little to convince him. After all, my reservist friend wasn’t particularly predisposed towards diplomatic nuance — he opposed any peace deal whatsoever.

However, the sentiment he expressed — that Israel is alone, that it has been abandoned and that it can only count on itself — is deeply embedded in Israel’s national psyche. I’m not here to argue whether this world-view is correct, but like it or not, it’s important to recognize that it exists, and that it lies at the heart of many Israeli foreign policy decisions.

It was hardly just one IDF reservist that tingled my spidey-sense. A top-level Israeli ex-peace negotiator was even more explicit: “Are we paranoid? Yes.” The IDF soldier based along the “blue line” separating Israel and Lebanon believed what UNIFIL — the UN’s peacekeeping force along the border — was doing “is not sufficient” to protect Israel.

The former peace negotiator went on to recount a meeting with a well-known European newspaper’s editorial board. When the board asked what the Israeli government disliked about the newspaper’s writing style, he responded succinctly: “To be sure comma,” a phrase that typically starts the sentence that ends with, “Israel has the right to defend itself.”

That caveat –“To be sure, Israel has the right to defend itself” – is standard fare among American and European opinion columns that go on to criticize Israeli actions. From his perspective, that disclaim glosses over the threats Israel lives under — international terrorist groups in southern Lebanon and Gaza bent on firing rockets and sending suicide bombers into his country, coupled with the stress of a perpetually unstable region, and Iran’s repeated threats of Israeli destruction. His point was: that in Washington, London or Paris, it’s easy to discount the seriousness (would it really make sense for Iran to attack?), scale and immediacy of these threats as these cities don’t live under them every day.

But in Israeli eyes, these threats loom larger. That’s what drove Israel’s unapologetic heavy hand in the 2nd Lebanon War, in Operation Cast Lead, and during the flotilla incident when so many Palestinian civilians were killed in the fighting. Israel is prepared to endure the resulting international condemnation, because civilian causalities and a soiled reputation are lesser evils when compared with looming national security threats, “It’s us or them, and I’d rather it be them. We can’t count on anyone else, so we’ll do it ourselves.”

In short, Israel is banking on military victories to create the appearance of invincibility. Israel reasons that, if the Arab countries believe they can defeat Israel militarily, why then would the Arabs be interested in a peace agreement. Yet that sentiment lands Israel in a catch-22 — if Israel appears militarily invincible, then why negotiate peace? The answer is, of course, that the longer conflict drags on, the higher the cost of appearing invincible will be — in lives, resources, and reputation.

Israel shouldn’t be given a pass for its heavy-handed actions, particularly ones that needlessly take the lives of innocent civilian bystanders. But understanding Israel’s conflicted inner-monologue is a critical component in brokering a lasting peace.

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