The year 2005 promises to be the Year of the Spy. More and more—from the Goss-led purge at the CIA to the battle over intelligence "reform" to the planned, vast expansion of spookdom—America's foreign policy is shaping up to be more covert than ever. Does that worry anyone but me?
Apparently content that Goss will crush CIA opposition to neoconservative foreign policy, the president has ordered a stunning 50 percent increase in both operations and analysis at CIA. Now let's put this in context. During the Cold War, when the Soviet Union had the ability to obliterate the United States in 24 hours, and the United States was engaged in dozens of proxy, hot wars around the globe (Central America, Angola, the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, etc.), we got along with an intelligence budget about half the current one. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, U.S. intelligence spending has ballooned from something like $27 billion to the current, estimated $40 billion. And now Bush wants a 50 percent increase in spooks, adding untold billions to the budget?
Oh. And Rep. Hoekstra, a dim bulb if ever there was one, has somehow scrambled to the top of the intelligence heap, chairing the House oversight committee. Here is his brilliant comment, from the Post :
Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, suggested that Congress should be "prepared to triple the budget for intelligence" if needed. "We will answer the issue of resources," he said.
I'm sure he didn't mean "triple." (Did he?) But it's clear that this Goss successor will snap to attention and salute the president's request.
Meanwhile, the debate over creating a National Intelligence Director totally misses the point. How the boxes on the flow chart are arranged won't fix intelligence, if indeed it needs fixing. (I don't think it does, at least not any kind of fix that Bush and Congress could agree on.) But a vast expansion of the CIA, combined with the ongoing explosion in the U.S. Special Forces command at the Defense Department, means that American foreign policy will have unprecedented ability to conduct covert operations worldwide, on the president's whim. Assassinate Iranian scientists? Go ahead. Support paramilitary rebels in the Ukraine? Sure. Secretly arm and deploy Syrian dissidents? Go for it.
That doesn't even begin to cover the domestic possibility for covert activities, given the effective merger between the CIA and the FBI begun by the Patriot Act and pushed hard by the 9/11 Commission.
