Congressman Curt Weldon has written a book titled Countdown to Terror. The congressman believes that the United States is in great danger, that the intelligence community isn't doing its job and a devastating terrorist attack is bound to take the government by surprise. Weldon has been working with an independent intelligence operative, code named Ali, who warns of catastrophic terrorist operations directed by the Iranian government. According to Ali, the Iranians are protecting bin Laden and effectively have command of al Qaeda's resources in their own undeclared war against the United States. Weldon is frustrated with U.S. intelligence because the CIA won't work with Ali unless he reveals his sources in Iran. Naturally, Ali refuses to comply and demands to be paid. According to Weldon, "The amazing intelligence given to the United States by Ali over the past two years has been begged and purchased out of his own pocket. It has been provided by his sources in Iran on the understanding that much more money would be forthcoming...." After describing Ali's espionage potential, Weldon ends his book with an indictment of the American intelligence community. He also offers a strategic plan to defeat terrorism, which involves an alliance with Russia.
Students of recent history, readers of intelligence biographies and analysts of the Cold War know something of the CIA's many failures. As someone who has directly dealt with America's intelligence community, Weldon flatly and persuasively argues that it is grossly incompetent. American intelligence, he says, is predicated on "group think" and the bureaucratic desire to "speak with one voice." The result is a mediocre intelligence product. To assure the primacy of the accessible and acceptable, to satisfy special interests and political correctness, the best and brightest are frequently purged from the leadership. The books have been cooked to safeguard prevailing assumptions that are dictated by political necessity instead of an honest search for the truth. It should be obvious, even to causal observers of the intelligence scene, that government intelligence is homogenized by a process that downplays threats for ideological reasons or reasons of political and economic convenience. According to Weldon, America's intelligence services "have long been dysfunctional." For those who think the CIA is devilishly effective, these revelations may come as something of a shock. "Intelligence community incompetence is especially marked in the area of human intelligence, or HUMINT," noted Weldon.
There has been an enormous failure of leadership, says Weldon. "Far too many intelligence community leaders are incompetent, arrogant, and entrenched. This applies to leadership in virtually all areas: analysis, collection, and the development of new technology. Most leaders in the intelligence community and among the agencies rose to their position during the Cold War. They learned their craft during a different era and their ideas are now obsolete." This is a powerful indictment, and more could be added to Weldon's bill of complaint (in greater detail). In truth, the leadership criticized by Weldon was just as incompetent during the Cold War as it is today. The CIA failed to win the "war of the moles" against the Soviet Union. Throughout the 1980s CIA sources in Russia were arrested and executed while Russia's moles operated unhindered at the apex of the CIA and FBI (e.g., Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen). Agencies that failed to penetrate the Kremlin twenty years ago, predicating themselves on the same nonsense that dominates academic culture, aren't going to locate bin Laden (even if his location is disclosed by Iranian mercenaries). The failure of American intelligence is due to intellectual bureaucratization under an academic culture in which the specialist misplaces the context for his specialty amid the collapse of general knowledge.
The administrative staff of the intelligence community is university educated. The average American has yet to grasp the ideological baggage that attends such education. Academics overwhelmingly lean to the left, which signifies all that is "progressive," humane and utopian. At the same time, nonsense is nonsense. We should not be surprised, therefore, if those who skip blissfully from the groves of academe to the corridors of Spooky Hollow, are just as worldly unwise as the pot smoking professors who praise Mao and Castro, or denounce President Bush as a "Hitler." Richard A. Posner aptly noted in his book, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, "[The failures of academic analysts] raise serious questions about the ability of professors to comment on current events at all. Academic time is not real time. The intellectual skills honed in academia are poorly adapted to perceptive commentary on the confusing onrush of contemporaneous events." He also noted: "The chief culprit in the quality problems of the public-intellectual market is the modern university."
It is not that the CIA's analysts are stupid. Their brains are physically normal, but their conclusions are invariably "academic." The bureaucratization of intellectuality that attends the modern university "makes stupid," because thinking is not something that can be taught. But imitative behaviors, especially intellectual mimicry, find an approved place in today's academic credential factories. Did Einstein come up with his theory of relativity because of helpful suggestions from his academic advisor? As a clerk in a patent office he was hardly so encumbered, and far from being pressured to please the vanity of empty old things long fatted at the bureaucratic trough. What many have failed to notice in the dishonesty of academe is, namely, that indoctrination is the main tendency of all large institutions. Worse yet, thinking is a subversive activity done on the sly by those brave souls who aren't afraid of being blackballed or kicked unceremoniously into the street.
The modern university is full of lost souls in search of a profession as well as ideological hobbyists. It isn't a hub of independent thought, but a petting zoo for the intellectually maladjusted. Once upon a time I sat in academic seminar after seminar and found myself baffled by one non sequitur after another, by one revolutionary troll after another - some of them reinventing the political wheel, only failing to make it round. Many have found that the life of the mind is dead at the modern university. The former dean at a School of Social Sciences once told me: "Most of these people [professors] don't belong here. They don't read, their work is silly and they aren't having any fun." The danger at a time of war, at a time of national peril, appears when the security establishment of the United States recruits its analytical and administrative staff from this sorry milieu. The newly minted Ph.D., trained to know more and more about less and less, leaves one unreal world for another; and to the sensitive work of spy versus spy the academic "expert" brings that same arrogance, that same sheltered mode of "thought" (with its anti-instinctual tendencies and nullities) to bear on problems that his peer-conditioned intellect cannot fathom.
Congressman Weldon has put his finger on an important problem. "Group think" does, indeed, pervade the American intelligence community. The reforms of the Bush administration are failing because the creatures themselves are made to resist common sense. If you fire the leaders and promote their followers, the old parade will continue under a new and misleading banner. That which is entrenched is doubly entrenched.
A solution is not easy to find.
