Originally published in Sic Semper Tyrannis
The Central Intelligence Agency was born out of American experiences in the Second World War and our anxiety over Soviet intentions and activities in the post war period.
Having had no formal intelligence organization prior to World War Two, the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, was put together under the Joint Chiefs of Staff to meet the needs of the war itself. That meant that the origins of the American intelligence were paramilitary. The OSS was there, in effect, to fight the war from a paramilitary perspective. OSS parachuted into occupied Europe and contacted indigenous partisan groups there. They blew up bridges and dams and other important pieces of European infrastructure. They were, quite simply, heroes running the unconventional part of our war against the Axis powers.
We came out of that hot war into the Cold War. Many of the people who had run OSS during the hot war were tapped for leadership roles in the new CIA. And that was what we got, a management structure whose primary experience was in paramilitary, hot war operations. And we were facing the entirely new requirement that we produce intelligence on the capabilities and intentions of our enemies in a peaceful environment, a task that was essentially alien to a majority of our managers.
The CIA headed into the Cold War largely unprepared to run the kinds of operations that would be required of it. The Cold War was an intelligence war of subtleties. No more hand grenades or parachute drops. No more paramilitary operations. No more hot war. Just the difficult and demanding job of recruiting spies in the Soviet empire and running them in place in hostile environments characterized by pervasive 24/7 surveillance. We did this with no experienced leadership. We felt our way, had our share of failures, but ultimately got to the point where we could recruit the kinds of assets we needed and then run them in place in their homelands.
The Cold War ended. A decade later, we were suddenly post-9/11. And where did that put us? Right back in a paramilitary environment without the guidance and experience of all those Second World War OSS veterans who actually knew how to run the needed operations!
So, the twenty-first century edition of the CIA rushed back headlong into paramilitary operations. Having cut our teeth in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, we now found ourselves back in a kind of role reversal.
According to press reports, that has now morphed into the lead role in the drone business. CIA, the organization that had to work its tail off to get out of the paramilitary business, is now back in that business in spades. The real question here is not the alleged validity of the drone program. It is to question the appropriateness of having it vested in the CIA.
This is not the first time this discussion has emerged. In the early years of the CIA, two completely separate organizations within the Agency ran intelligence operations. OSO conducted intelligence collection operations, where OPC was responsible for what remained of the OSS’s psychological and paramilitary operations. The ultimate decision was that they would be combined with the result that an uneasy relationship existed between them throughout the Cold War.
Those who conducted intelligence collection operations always felt there was a real incompatibility in being lodged in the same organization with those who ran our propaganda and paramilitary operations.
Since its inception, the CIA has been charged with producing intelligence on the capabilities and intentions of its enemies. To have propaganda operations, and, even more, paramilitary operations, woven into the same organization is not good thinking, however “convenient” it may be. At best the relationship is uneasy, at worst it is competitive and self-destructive.
An excellent example of this is Pakistan today where, given the realities of Pakistan’s perpetual and dangerous rivalry with a nuclear India, the organization that allegedly flies the hated drones hamstrings itself when it is the same one that is responsible for securing the covert cooperation of important people who are our best hope for learning what’s really going on in that important, nuclear country.
If the US Government must have a paramilitary drone capability, then it should be lodged somewhere in the military establishment or in an organization completely separate from our CIA and its human collection operations. To put it anywhere in the CIA is risky, foolhardy and ultimately counterproductive, serving neither our covert human collection nor our paramilitary operations.
Rural Ruminations 