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| Alex Bolling: The OSS, 9/11 & Gina Haspel: Intelligence Under Fire |
| 2018-04-26 |
| [The Cipher Brief] Just weeks after the attacks of 9/11, a flatbed truck was parked unceremoniously in the tree-lined fire lane next to the CIA’s New Headquarters Building, surrounded by furious activity. The team was packing gear on shipping pallets for a mission of uncertain duration: bandages, trauma packs and children’s kites. The ballistic body amour was on back order ‐ added to the growing list that would have to be air-dropped to wherever the team ended up. In the melee, a white-bearded paramilitary officer collected "other paper work"‐ a euphemism for final letters to loved ones. Military members of the team were unaccustomed to the improvisational nature of agency planning. Bare bones staffing, just enough provisions to get by, and constantly shifting priorities ‐ like the World War-II era "Glorious Amateurs" of the Office of Special Services or OSS. Special operators and CIA officers were deploying together again, as they’d once fought side-by-side in the fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants OSS, with a new shared mission: stop the next al-Qaida attack on the homeland. We were at war. More than a decade and a half later, we are still a nation at war. If anything, the threats have multiplied. That’s why we need a seasoned and experienced field officer like Gina Haspel at the helm of the CIA, who served through those fraught times. We need the insights and leadership of a senior officer who took on some of the hardest collection missions to keep our nation safe to lead the organization into the future. Her upcoming senate confirmation hearing is an opportunity to define how we as a nation collect intelligence and how we respond to threats to our country in an era of perpetual conflict. The agency is designed to work in the murky grey world of perpetual ambiguity. The primary goal of agency operations (paramilitary, technical and human) is to obtain intelligence of value to the U.S. decision-makers. The more valuable the intelligence, the more risk to the collection and the collector. Among the many paradoxes of intelligence collection is the notion of plausible deniability. The ability to deny that an operation is conducted on behalf of the government is a fundamental tenet of espionage, one designed to protect reputational and political risk, and thwart and misdirect possible retaliation by our enemies. The reality that a clandestine intelligence operation can be disavowed and denied by the very government it is a part of is a foundational component of "diplomacy by other means." This paradox is difficult for a spy organization in a free an open society, and is particularly vexing for lawmakers outside the oversight committees to grasp and distill for their constituents in the era of sound bites and tweets. Plausible deniability codifies the popular ethos that intelligence operations are rogue, unapproved and out of control. Continues. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #1 Because the Dems do not care what kind of damage they do to our intelligence services, I worry about what kind of drilling they will do into Ms. Haspel's career for the sake of political capital and embarrassment of DJT. There are lots of things we have done over the years that have and should remained out of the public record because of potential diplomatic fallout. |
| Posted by: Sock Puppet of Doom 2018-04-26 14:45 |