U.S. Intelligence Agencies Have Not Aged Well

Jeffrey Rogg’s new book addresses American intelligence history from the founding of the Republic to present times. Despite its vast sweep, “The Spy and the State” is not an unmanageable tome because Rogg examines that history through a particular lens, that of civil-intelligence relations, an understudied analog to civil-military relations. Indeed, his title echoes Samuel Huntington’s foundational “The Soldier and the State,” published nearly 70 years ago. So, how have U.S. intelligence agencies related to the rest of the government and to the population over the centuries? The sad answer, Rogg finds, is “badly.”

This very readable book discusses numerous pathologies that have afflicted the relationships between American intelligence agencies and the president, the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the American people. One of the book’s great values is that it shows what a long history many of these troubles have had. Rogg also does not hesitate to make clear his own policy views, some of them implying the need for deep—perhaps too dramatic and infeasible—structural reforms to the U.S. intelligence system. Nevertheless, the book is very rich because the author brings to bear expertise not only as a history Ph.D. but also as a lawyer.

Right up front, Rogg provocatively argues that intelligence “is inherently ‘un-American.’” He hastens to add that he does not think that intelligence personnel are un-American, just that their profession is. Indeed, the book makes clear that intelligence is a necessary function of government. Nevertheless, the reliance of intelligence services on secrecy and deception is, in Rogg’s view, antithetical to American aspirations—until perhaps recently—to an open and democratic government. Moreover, intelligence work has involved overthrowing democratically elected governments and “inevitably involves invasions of privacy.”

The inherently problematic nature of intelligence means that civil-intelligence relations have been dysfunctional from the very birth of the country. The founders portrayed themselves as “plain, honest men,” in the words of Gouverneur Morris, even as their ranks included spymasters. These men were obliged to write a Constitution that did not mention intelligence because otherwise “the stain of espionage would discredit their work.” This leads to one of the major themes of “The Spy and the State”: the hypocrisy of presidents, policymakers, Congress, and the American people in wanting the intelligence community—a group of support agencies, it must be remembered—to do distasteful things for them but leave it holding the bag.

There is a long list of culprits in this book, among them the country’s presidents. Some of those who evoke the most patriotic pride—George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan—“resorted to intelligence measures that were at odds with the very principles they were intended to defend.” Rogg also seems skeptical of executive oversight of intelligence, pointing to efforts by presidents since the 1950s to ward off congressional oversight through inherently more friendly executive branch oversight. For instance, he suggests that President Reagan’s re-creation of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in 1981 after President Jimmy Carter had abolished it four years previously meant there was unhelpful competition in intelligence oversight with the Congress. He even criticizes the existence of a statutory inspector general in the CIA on similar grounds.

The rest of the executive branch has also contributed to civil-intelligence dysfunction in Rogg’s telling. He employs to good effect the old saw that “there are no policy failures, only intelligence failures.” In fact, often policymakers “find it more convenient to make intelligence the scapegoat than to question or even admit the roles they played.”

And there are a great number of policymakers below the president wanting intelligence support. While in the early decades of the Republic, intelligence operations were handled out of the president’s back pocket and served him directly, since the 1880s an ever-increasing number of cabinet departments and other agencies have created their own intelligence components. This “subordination”—a word that appears repeatedly—worries Rogg, who argues that “mixing intelligence and other institutions of national security created inconsistencies and conflicts” and has repeatedly undercut the development of the profession of intelligence. In this regard, Rogg is most persuasive when discussing the relationship of law enforcement and intelligence, two “fundamentally different” professions that “require separate organizations for constitutional, legal, ethical, policy, and political reasons.” Law enforcement, of course, has substantial coercive power and the authority to use it against Americans, given certain predicates, characteristics that until recent months have not really applied to diplomats or soldiers. In any event, Rogg presents a long list of problematic or questionable instances of overlaps between intelligence and law enforcement. These run from the Secret Service’s counterespionage work during the Spanish-American War to the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation a decade ago of potential links between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia. And in between was J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

Rogg also describes the many missed opportunities and setbacks dating back to World War I for the creation of a central and independent intelligence organization. The founding of the CIA with the National Security Act of 1947 was a major step forward, but the United States was quickly lured into extensive use of covert action abroad. Initially, covert action was conducted by the Office of Policy Coordination. This was an operational component of the CIA, but the State Department and the Defense Department gave it policy direction. Thus, Rogg says, the two cabinet departments “subordinate[d] the CIA by controlling its covert operations and yet [would] not be held responsible for them, thus positioning the CIA to be a scapegoat for covert action failures.” The specific processes for conceiving and approving covert actions would change over time but the CIA would continue to be that scapegoat for three decades. This condition continued in various forms until the 1970s, when Sen. Frank Church recanted his claim that the CIA was a “rogue elephant” and correctly stated that it operated at the behest of presidents. This soon led to legislation that required the president to sign a “finding” authorizing each covert action and then to notify the Congress of it.

Aside perhaps from the president, the biggest intelligence power in the executive branch is the Department of Defense. A simple look at budgets, numbers of personnel, or clout on Capitol Hill will show this. Rogg is rightfully worried about this fact, and he describes how over decades the department has gained a stranglehold on the technical collection of intelligence, often at the expense of the CIA. Indeed, the department’s expansionist inclinations have not been limited to technical collection. The so-called global war on terrorism saw Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld upset by the department’s dependence on the CIA for human intelligence (HUMINT). So he established a clandestine HUMINT capability for the department by characterizing that function as falling under the rubric of “traditional military activities” and thus outside the scope of Title 50 of the U.S. Code, which governs intelligence.

Then there is the Congress. While Rogg lauds the creation of the CIA, he laments that the National Security Act of 1947 and the CIA Act of 1949, saw Congress largely “legislat[ing] itself out of intelligence oversight,” a situation that would continue until the 1970s. He also roundly criticizes Congress for all too often being briefed on CIA operations but then, when controversial operations came to public attention, denying that they had been briefed and accusing the agency of misleading them. He notes, as have other scholars, that congressional attention to intelligence is episodic, driven largely by failure or scandal. This means that problems can fester during the periods of relative congressional inattention and that legislation fails to keep pace with technological advances. One thinks, for instance, of the price that has been paid over the years for the failure to keep the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 up to date with the changing communications technologies.

Nor does Rogg let the intelligence community off the hook for problems in its relations with the American people. For instance, he quotes former CIA Director Richard Helms as saying during the 1970s that the “CIA wasn’t established to keep in touch with the people.” Rogg also observes that views along these lines persist to this day. (I myself recall serving with a CIA operations officer in the mid-1990s who believed that the agency should not have a public affairs office.)

None of this is good, but Rogg makes clear his view that when it comes to civil-intelligence relations the American people are not pure and unstained, either. “Too often,” he writes, Americans “throw … ideals to the wind when faced with danger, only to reproach their elected representatives and their intelligence establishments—though only rarely themselves—after a war or emergency ends.” He aptly quotes Jack Goldsmith from his book “The Terror Presidency” as saying that these “cycles of timidity and aggression are a terrible problem for our national security.” Rogg also laments that the American public does not understand intelligence, a problem created by the secrecy inherent in intelligence work. As a result, people fill out their understanding with the products of their suspicions and with fictional portrayals and thus have unrealistic ideas of the “purposes and limitations” of intelligence.

Another major theme of Rogg’s book is the gradual creation of an intelligence profession within a centralized intelligence organization, the latest step being the sweeping Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA), which, among other things, created the position of the director of national intelligence and an office to support that director. However, in Rogg’s view, the “IRTPA missed an even more historic opportunity by leaving the [intelligence community] fractured among different domestic departments and institutions of national security. While there were executive departments representing the military, diplomatic, and law enforcement institutions, there would be no Department of Intelligence representing the intelligence institution.” As a slight variation, he also seems to suggest that there might be utility in an independent domestic intelligence organization, which, of course, was debated in the years after 9/11 and but ultimately not created.

Needless to say, a department of intelligence is not in the political cards, not least because the Department of Defense would never agree to it. Moreover, one might reasonably argue that there should not be one intelligence agency completely independent of policy agencies because intelligence is inherently a support function, not an end in itself. One might also wonder how such an agency could adequately serve the needs of all policy agencies. For instance, a department of intelligence that tried to provide all of the Defense Department’s intelligence needs would have to be quite large. One supposes that it would include a great many uniformed military personnel—necessary because of their technical expertise—which, presumably, would continue to sully the intelligence profession, precisely one of the big problems that Rogg would like to see solved.

In his discussion of this issue, Rogg is, in part, touching on one of the great intelligence debates of the 20th and 21st centuries: What should be the relationship between intelligence analysts and their policymaking consumers? There are two broad models for this relationship. One, associated primarily with Sherman Kent, a trailblazing CIA analyst, holds that the highest value for intelligence analysts should be objectivity, which requires a high wall between analysts and their policy customers lest the latter politicize the work of the former. This separation means that analysts will struggle to produce analyses that are germane to policymakers’ needs. The other model, generally associated with former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, argues that the highest value for intelligence analysts should be relevance, which requires close proximity to policymakers and thereby risks politicization. Rogg seems to prefer the former model, but admittedly the latter model is in fashion these days.

Rogg also returns many times to the long, sordid history of intelligence agencies becoming embroiled in partisan politics, and he points to the war on terrorism as having greatly widened a partisan divide over intelligence, often due to the behavior of Congress. In this context, he is very concerned by the partisan implications of the FBI’s 2016-2017 Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence investigation into potential collusion between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia. He contends that either the FBI was spying on American citizens, including presidential candidate Trump, of its own accord or the Obama administration was conducting a “politicized intelligence operation on behalf of the incumbent administration,” both possibilities being troubling. He is right to characterize these possibilities as troubling. However, he does not acknowledge that not investigating what appeared to be credible information about links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government would have been its own form of partisan politicization at the expense of voters, not to mention the Democratic Party. This example illustrates a tragic fact that could have benefited from exploration in this book: that some intelligence issues are inextricably partisan no matter how they are addressed.

Rogg also describes a related issue of recent years: the question of the proper place in the public debates of a partisan nature of former intelligence personnel, particularly former senior officials. For years, retired generals and admirals have been endorsing political candidates and criticizing the proposed defense policies of their candidates’ opponents—for better or for worse. With the advent of Trump, this behavior has come to the intelligence world, with people such as former CIA Directors John Brennan and Gen. Michael Hayden publicly opposing Trump and former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn—whom Rogg does not mention—supporting Trump and calling for candidate Hillary Clinton to be thrown in jail. Such behavior has “exacerbated the strains in civil-intelligence relations” and may lead the already-underinformed public to attribute partisan sympathies to intelligence agencies and their present-day employees.

While some of Rogg’s policy preferences seem unrealistic or even undesirable, the final pages of his book offer a well-considered call for increasing transparency. Too often, he says, the intelligence community has “done injury to the US constitutional system regardless of the intentions or exigencies that motivated them” and “too often, the American people discovered these trespasses in spite of secrecy rather than on account of transparency.” Despite the fact that the United States has, by comparison with other Five Eyes countries, a strong system of intelligence oversight and world-leading declassification programs, Rogg is precisely correct in this critique of excessive secrecy. His solution is that the intelligence community should declassify “its own abuses and failures” before they become public. While this cannot be done in all cases, it is an excellent proposal that merits serious consideration, though it will probably have to await a future presidential administration.

It is all very well to question some of Rogg’s other policy preferences, but, to be fair, there are no obvious answers to many of the problems outlined in his book. That very fact points to the need for more and sustained attention to the tragic topic of civil-intelligence relations. The fate of the Republic may literally depend on scholars, practitioners, politicians, and the American public figuring these things out, hopefully facilitated by more vigorous declassification policies. Rogg’s book will be an indispensable basis for their work. Still, it is hard to ignore the most fundamental dilemma laid out here. If intelligence is both un-American and necessary, one must conclude that the United States can never truly live up to its ideals.