Thursday, October 24, 2019

If anything needs to be downsized and restructured, it's the CIA

"The Rise of the Western Spy Assclown" (by Thomas Farnan) A sample:
As happens with any sclerotic bureaucracy whose mission is lost to circumstance—see, for example, your local post office—the former Cold War spy apparatus has grown sloppy.

It serves political ends without sufficiently hiding its nefarious intentions. Even its spy arcana has become as ill-fitting as the vintage striped shorts letter carriers wear on hot days.
H/T to friend and commenter Bruce

Update Ace breaks out the flaming skull on the news that DOJ investigator John Durham has now reclassified the inquiry into the Russian hoax as a criminal investigation.

6 comments:

JeffS said...

I never had contact with the intelligence agencies while in uniform (I am happy to report), but I will say that the amount of pre-Soviet collapse tactical and strategic intelligence available at all levels of the Army was impressive. That took a major collection and analysis effort to produce.

But I never asked what happened to those intelligence agencies after the collapse of the Sovient Union. Not once. Not even while I watched the military being downsized in the 1990s, generally to the deteriment of operational readiness.

And I should have asked.

bruce said...

There's a WW2 set of aerial images online of Sydney with incredible detail: I can see the branches of the tree I played under as a kid 10 years later.

It has to have been done by the US (who had a base here), no one else had the ability or skill to that degree - we have some other images, limited and fuzzy. Absolute best in the world by far from WW2 onwards, for sure. Old veterans here were in total awe of the US Pacific mobilisation.

Gregoryno6 said...

Bruce - our veteran were in awe. At the same time our dock workers were doing everything they could to throw sand in the machine.
After reading Australia's Secret War, I was a little surprised that the US considered Australia worthy of a postwar alliance.

bruce said...

Yes I heard both things from old veterans. One told how he had to hold a gun to a dockworkers head to get him to do his job. The same guy said when they arrived in N Guinea under enemy bombardment, the trucks they were desperately trying to unload had tanks full of water, dockworkers again he said. (Of course they can claim it was the sea voyage).

Stalin didn't care who won in the Pacific as long as the Japs didn't trouble the Russian far east any more (see Russo-Japanese conflicts), he hoped our weakness would lure the Japs to concentrate south away from Russia, that's how I figure his minions' actions here.

Spiny Norman said...

Bruce,

...hoped our weakness would lure the Japs to concentrate south away from Russia

Their concentration on the south certainly made Stalin's ally Mao's life in Manchuria a lot easier.

My grandfather's brother (Uncle Pat) was in US Army Air Force Intelligence as a photo interpreter during the war (he spent almost 5 years in the UK, and didn't come home until the end of 1946). He brought home a few declassified pictures as souvenirs, and the detail in Allied photo-recon images was astounding. Not quite "read the license plate on Hitler's Mercedes Benz", but close. He liked to brag, with a Cheshire Cat grin, that he knew things that were still classified.

I'd ask, "We were spying on the Russians then, too, weren't we?" He laughed.

Skeeter said...

JeffS, I had a couple of contacts with our intelligence agencies while in uniform in the 1950s.
As one of 8 RAAF pilots flying Vampire jet fighters on a mobility exercise from the east to west coasts of Australia, I had to undergo a special security check three weeks prior to departure. The reason for the special check was that we would remain overnight at Woomera, a hot, desert base in central Australia, and a very secret place in those days. On arrival, my 7 colleagues were jeeped off to the bar for some icy-colds, but I was met by two service-police who escorted me to a cell. My special security clearance had not arrived at Woomera.
Fortunately, it was found an hour or so later and, to my great relief, I was reunited with my friends in the bar.
Another example of air force intelligence levels was when the RAF flew their V-bombers (Vulcan, Victor and Valiant) to our base in Australia to show us those very advanced aircraft. It was before I had been commissioned and, as a Sergeant-pilot my security level was not high enough to attend most of the RAF V-bomber demonstrations and movies.
However, we NCOs were allowed to crawl all over them while the officers were in the base cinema. We agreed that none of us had any desire to ever fly in them.