The Perfect Soldier: Special Operations, Commandos, and the Future of Us Warfare by James F. Dunnigan
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Dirty Little Secrets
Why We Now Have Three CIAs
by James Dunnigan
February 22, 2005
Discussion Board on this DLS topic
The FBI and CIA are at odds again over the FBI being able to recruit and use
spies overseas. Since the CIA was created, the FBI could only seek out and hire
spies (“informants”) in the United States, while the CIA could only do it
overseas. Actually, the CIA could seek out, and hire Americans or foreigners
within the U.S., for spying overseas. But otherwise, the CIA could no engage in
espionage against American within the U.S. This has caused problems in the past,
particularly when looking for Russian spies. That’s the FBI’s job, at least
inside the United States. But the Russians moved their spies around a lot, and
the CIA and FBI often had fat files on the same Russian agents. The CIA and FBI
was supposed to cooperate in this area, but often that did not happen. Sometimes
it was just the usual confusion when two bureaucracies try to coordinate
efforts. At other times, one agency did not trust the other to keep
secrets.
The failure to get the information to where it was needed
before September 11, 2001 was mainly a coordination problem. The CIA knew about
some of the 911 terrorists, but the FBI dropped the ball when it came to
investigating and making arrests, or dragging the latest stuff out of the CIA.
Despite Congressional restrictions on how the CIA runs its espionage operations,
the CIA is blamed for not having a better idea of what Islamic terrorists were
up to before 2001. So the Department of Defense and FBI are going to be allowed
to run their own spies overseas. The attitude appears to be; better to have too
many spies, than too few. All three agencies are supposed to coordinate their
efforts, but no one expects that to work perfectly every time. The consensus is
that things won’t get any worse. Perhaps.
Other nations have had similar
problems. For decades after World War II, the Soviet Union had two different
organizations running spies overseas. Most of the effort was from the KGB (a
sort of combined CIA/FBI/Border Patrol/Coast Guard/Etc.) and a much smaller GRU
(military intelligence). GRU was thought to be more dangerous, perhaps because
they were a smaller operation and hustled a bit more as a result. Having two
Soviet spy agencies to worry about did make counterintelligence more
difficult.
The British adopted a different approach. They also have two
intelligence agencies; MI 5 for work inside the United Kingdom, and MI 6 to deal
with foreign stuff. When working on a particular case, either of these agencies
could do wherever they had to. Which meant that sometimes MI 5 people went
overseas, and sometimes MI 6 agents were operating inside Britain. This has
worked well for many decades.
Before World War II, the FBI had visions of
running espionage operations overseas. But that never happened, partly because
many Americans did not want to see an intelligence organization that powerful in
the United States. So the new intelligence system in the United States developed
to keep everyone happy, or at least less scared.
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