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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
One aspect of the current war on terrorism that must be particularly interesting to you is the resurgent emphasis on intelligence, especially human intelligence, rather than the high-tech stuff they'd been focusing on in recent years. Yet the old-school intelligence people that you depict in "Absolute Friends" -- people like Amory -- feel sidelined.
There are two breeds of intelligence people, two kinds of spook. We have people like Amory, who derive their attitudes from the Cold War. I think it's perfectly true that after the Cold War ended and the secret war against terror and the business of spying on terror got going, as always the new war was being fought with the weapons of the old one and it didn't work. It's terribly difficult to spy on a multinational organization that doesn't oblige you by using all the toys you can catch them out with: telephones, cellphones, radio, codes that you can break. It doesn't have a command and control structure that you can penetrate. If you get a brave or sufficiently corrupt person to get alongside the leadership, he still doesn't have anything like access to what used to be thought of as "the plans." It's all fragmented. They work in tiny cells. They've often transmitted their messages and their money by word of mouth. It's very, very hard to get into.
That's one side of it. The technological revolution in intelligence left people with the notion that the human side of intelligence was of secondary importance. I think that's always been a great nonsense. It was a great nonsense in the Cold War too, even if we did manage to break their codes. I think the CIA and the Brits or whoever else would much rather have had access to Gorbachev's private secretary than to Gorbachev's telegrams. Human sources -- you can ask them questions, they can reply. You can tell them what to look out for, what to listen for. You can get an impression of whether they think people are lying, which is completely unavailable in technological intelligence. They're vastly more economic.
How so?
Your intelligence budget for the CIA alone is, I think, $30 billion a year. The result is a huge proliferation of junk. The art of refining that and turning it into a lucid statement you can write on a postcard and put in front of a busy politician really is very, very difficult stuff. The intelligence business is threatened by exactly the same bad people that your business is threatened by. In good journalism, you've got people back from the field who are sitting behind desks who can smell a rat when it comes in. They can identify the young Turk who has just been taken on by the foreign desk who wants to make his name and may be fabricating. They can look at information obtained and think, "Well that may be planted so that we'll think that way. But is it really true?"
In the intelligence world, with so much money around, there are tremendously sophisticated peddlers who are just making stuff up, feeding information to the empty areas of your head and taking huge sums of money for it and disappearing into the smoke. And I think some of the intelligence services fell for some of that stuff.
What is the other kind of spook?
The other kind of spook in my book is trying to produce the information that conventional intelligence services wouldn't or couldn't produce and conducting the kind of operation they'd shy away from.
Do outfits like the kind you depict in the book actually exist?
I have no idea. But it's the kind of thing that Donald Rumsfeld's rather shadowy Office of Special Plans might have been set up to do, that is, to bypass the CIA and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency and to produce, by whatever means, sexed-up proof that certain bad things were happening.
In order to justify policy decisions?
Yes. Here, in Britain, we've watched this same process happening. The thing about spying is that it's simple. It sees itself as a pure science, exactly as very good journalistic reporting is. As with journalism, there are two absolutely sacred areas. One is the sanctity of sources and the other is the objective truth. What we saw here, in the preparation of that disastrous dossier that so embarrassed Colin Powell in the United Nations, was the attempted corruption, if you like, of pure intelligence and, at a certain level, the politicization of the intelligence arm. When you do that as a politician you actually deprive yourself of true objectivity. You say, "I know there are weapons of mass destruction out there, so go and damn well find them!" That's no way to give a brief. You've got to say, "Come to me and tell me what you've found."
Things have come to a pretty pass if you're making the CIA out to be a beleaguered bastion of integrity.
I'm certainly doing that here. A hundred years ago, for a short time, I was a totally ineffectual spook. What I remember in all seriousness is the extraordinary integrity with which people handled information. They may have gotten it wrong here and there, but they would not be bought off a particular view. And if they didn't know, they said they didn't know.
But when the pressure is so intense and politicians are screaming at the spooks, "You say there's nothing there. How can you prove a negative? You've got to say that there's maybe something there!" That was the level of conversation that was going on. The CIA is not an organization for which I have a natural sympathy, but I have to say that the marginalization of their product -- the American taxpayer paid for it, for heaven's sake, it should have been properly evaluated. Instead of which, a great impatience set in among the policymakers and they did something of almost medieval stupidity, which is to say, "Go and find me a different truth."
