I had to remember how much I despised intelligence-gathering. I can’t decide if Dana Priest and William Arkin are fools, serviceable or otherwise. There are moral limits to human perfectibility, beyond which lies something that is incomprehensibly other than human.

I had another chance to watch the excellent documentary about Daniel Ellsberg, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.

Unfortunately, my review of Ellsberg’s Secrets is no longer online, but some excerpts are available here and here.

My ambivalence about Ellsberg’s whistle-blowing, the intelligence profession, my admiration for Ellsberg, or either opinion in those two previous Ellsberg posts are unchanged. They all exist in unhappy equilibrium deep in my conscience, which, as many of my former supervisors remarked, is a part of my genetic inheritance as an intelligence analyst. It’s a bit torturous to watch this documentary. Yet, it’s also necessary. Some people have to run sprints, or calculations in long form. I have to let my conscience get flailed. I might have passed up the calling of a lifetime when I left intelligence work. But, I also knew in 1999 I hated the job as much as I was enslaved to the power of getting minute tidbits of really worthless classified data.

So, I have to chuckle at the WaPo‘s “Top Secret America” series. There’s something brutally and deliciously tribal about intelligence-gathering. One has to be a Herbert Yardley bot to collect data about an enemy, and then use that same information as an argument in a very public debate about the importance of secrecy and intelligence-collection. One has to live and breath the tribe, the state, the group. My father was both an NSA employee and a Free Mason. The juggernaut of secret oaths all fit for him into one big vacuity where his conscience laid supine like an unused rag. Taking the juggernaut to task, as Dana Priest and William Arkin are, is just another form of tribalism, this time one fighting for another perspective on the state. It’s also reminiscent of bailing out the Wall Street megafauna and regulating them, instead of crushing and redistributing their pieces throughout the economy. Secretary Stimson is using the newspapers tribe to war with Yardley again.

Marc Ambinder loses a lot of respect from me for mentioning God in the same article with intelligence-gathering. If the two tribal constructs belong together, then I’m not just an atheist; I’m Milton’s Lucifer. There is no compromising with the juggernaut once individuals allow for the need that it exist in the first place.

Joshua Foust knocks how much of a love tap TSA is.

The Post has made it very clear that they are performing a public service in providing all of this information, and in one sense they are: their work has made public information about the intelligence community (IC) much more accessible for regular people who wish to understand it. But so what? The series lacks the context, scope, and inquisitive spirit necessary to help people better understand what this information means, and how alarmed they should be by it all.

Priest and Arkin have written in their stories that agencies have grown out of control… and that could easily be true, but where is the line? Is the NSA an acceptably-sized organization with 10,000 employees, but not with 10,001? They state that contracting firms routinely perform jobs that are “inherently governmental functions,” to borrow the legal term. Only Priest and Arkin never define what they think that term means (it’s legally somewhat nebulous), nor do they provide examples of contractors performing said un-contractable work.

Let’s look at the sheer size of the IC. No one could possibly deny it has grown enormously in the last eight years. I noted earlier this week that the IC’s growth didn’t happen in a vacuum: it took place at the behest of Congress and the public, demanding “more” intelligence to counter the global counter-terror threat. The use of contractors has grown because the IC’s mission has expanded tremendously, but the ease of hiring permanent employees has not.

It is healthy to question why these two dynamics are at play. Why do we demand the IC perform more tasks, then restrict its ability to hire employees, then complain when it contracts out work to compensate? Is it even appropriate to give the IC such an expanded mission? If so, how can we modify how the community as a whole functions to reduce waste?

Priest and Arkin ask none of these questions. In fact, it’s not clear what they were asking. In the piece about intelligence contractors, we hear some eye-popping stories: cleared contractors can fetch $50,000 finders’ fees, some companies reward their employees with BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes, and signing bonuses of $15,000, and so on. But there’s no indication such practices are widespread: Priest and Arkin simply say such things are “common,” and cite “industry insiders” as their source.

Let’s unpack that $15,000 signing bonus. Priest and Arkin say it was for a group of software developers hired at Raytheon, a large firm that provides missile technology and computer security systems to the government. According to Glassdoor.com, a software development engineer at Microsoft can expect bonuses of up to $45,000 in a single year, when cash and stock bonuses are accounted for. A one-time $15,000 bonus merely for joining a company is relatively paltry in comparison, however enormous it might seem on its own.

Private companies are not the only members of the intelligence community that offer surprising perks to their employees. The CIA recently emerged from a lawsuit against a onetime recruit who billed the agency for $13,500 in moving expenses but then declined to take the job. A federal judge ruled the CIA’s lawyers committed fraud in the lawsuit, and instructed the CIA’s general counsel to “initiate an investigation into the actions that took place in this matter and whether there exists a pattern and practice of abuse by the CIA with respect to debt collection.” Yet few complain about suspicions that the CIA routinely hassles and defrauds young college graduates.

You wouldn’t learn these things from “Top Secret America.” That’s because much of it is written without context—there is outrage there, but Priest and Arkin never say what we should be outraged about. The growth of the intelligence contracting universe is indeed worrying, but not for the reasons Priest and Arkin state: it’s not the size that matters, but how manageable it is. They say it is unmanageable, but don’t say how or why (there are hints, as when Vice Adm. David Dorsett, the Director of Naval Intelligence, reveals he was able to convert only one single contractor to a government position over the course of an entire year, but Priest and Arkin don’t follow through on what that means).

I was offered $19,000 for a four-year re-enlistment as a SIGINT analyst in 1999. As far as I know only one member of my squad of linguists and analysts accepted this deal, and I only know one analysts who became a civilian NSA employee after his Army discharge. Maybe we were all fools. The economy seemed stronger then, and none of us liked the military or intelligence lifestyle. I hated never being able to talk about a bad day at work. I also despised how soldiers inched away nervously if I even mentioned intelligence-gathering for a calling card. The work was boring, more like assembling hamburgers than any kind of brain work. Whenever it did exunerant – aside from a lonely, guilty pleasure in some esoteric topic – I saw the worst examples of human behavior on display in frantic, bellicose, petty, back-stabbing shades of black and blacker. These analysts are not higher denizens of the platonic cave. They’re detritus, long ago forgotten because the tribe needs them to slither in the muck without a moral compass.

Srewart Baker has another theory for WaPo‘s motives.

Here’s a theory: if the Post is looking for new sources of ad revenue, it may think that maintaining the best web resource on the classified sector of government spending will allow it to target classified-contracting companies for advertising. It can aim advertising at them (“We can clean your SCIF cheaper than anyone else – outsource that job to our cleared maintenance workers!”). And it can seek ads from them (“Tell Congress to preserve TSA’s crucial Classified Border Control Research Program!”). Plus, while there aren’t a lot of business sectors that the Post can cover better than the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, this government-driven sector could be one.

For purposes of both coverage and advertising, then, the series may be an Washington Post exercise in market segmentation. Which would make this series the journalistic equivalent of a dog marking its territory. Of course, that’s not especially pleasant for the companies and agencies in the database, since they’re playing the role of hydrant. With one difference: ordinarily a dog doesn’t expect the hydrant to buy him more water.

A disease-ridden swamp is just as productive as any other piece of property, eh? Why bother trying to drain and fill it for marginal gains? But, please, let’s not call it a noble calling, or try to milk it like any other toxic asset. Be ashamed because intelligence-gathering is human, like God, tribal and tribal, and remind the denizens of that disdain everyday without feeding them bribes or praise.

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Filed under: History, Military, Quick Posts, Spleen, USA, YouTube Tagged: daniel ellsberg, herbert yardley, intelligence-gathering, nsa