Rome’s Praetorian Guards began as a small elite imperial guard
that grew into a force unto themselves. Independent of the army and
the Senate they were the emperor’s own, and utterly loyal to him.
Until they were not. Over three centuries, as their wealth and
power increased, the scope of their loyalty shrank so that they
were not even loyal among themselves. Their end came when they
scrupled at nothing. They murdered emperors and anointed imperial
successors and were finally disbanded for disloyalty. We have never
seen such a rogue force in the United States, but among the
thousands of CIA employees is an influential number of Praetorians
whose political corruption threatens the whole agency. As the
Wall Street Journal said of the CIA in an editorial last
Wednesday, “The serious and disturbing question is whether the rot
is so deep that it is unfixable, and we ought to start all over and
create a new intelligence agency.”
The political corruption in the CIA is not of the Duke
Cunningham dollars for votes variety. It is a neo-Praetorian
corruption that grew out of the CIA’s failures. The last major
success our intelligence community produced was the 1962 appearance
before the UN General Assembly in which Adlai Stevenson displayed
pictures of Soviet missile sites in Cuba. They were irrefutable,
and Stevenson’s moment exposed Soviet lies and helped compel the
Soviets to back down. That was forty-four years ago. The CIA’s
record since then is a string of failures unblemished by a single
notable success. From the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse
of the Soviet Union, to the rise of bin Laden and 9-11, the CIA has
been a blind watchdog. These failures created in the CIA a CYA
culture that began as a desperate attempt to resurrect the CIA’s
reputation and has since turned into a covert operation against the
President, new CIA director Porter Goss, and — most importantly —
against the nation the CIA is supposed to help protect.
The only victories the CIA has achieved since the Cuban Missile
Crisis have been in the arena in which it is legally forbidden to
operate: in the domestic politics of the United States. The Joe
Wilson Niger trip was set up to produce publicity adverse to the
Bush administration and its case for war in Iraq. Wilson was sent
to Niger without a security agreement, which is normally required
of everyone working in intelligence. It’s a hard contract that also
reminds you of your possible criminal liability if you divulge
secrets. But Wilson wasn’t required to sign one, because the CIA
leaders he worked for wanted the predictable results to be made
public in the most embarrassing way. Their media pals took the
non-story of the Plame name leak and increased the benefit of the
CIA’s Wilson scam tenfold.
Now, there is an alliance between the CIA praetorians and the
media that works to hamper the President’s policies. It doesn’t
scruple at leaking top-secret information to upset policies with
which it disagrees. And it does so carefully, using its own
tradecraft to achieve its goals.
The CIA’s firing of Mary McCarthy, who reportedly leaked the CIA
secret detention facility program to Dana Priest of the
Washington Post, is a case study of the CIA’s interference
in American policymaking. As a top-secret program, the terrorist
detention facility program was apparently compartmented: the
information about it divided into small chunks so that only a few
people at the top could know all about the program and be in a
position to do damage by disclosing it. McCarthy wasn’t one of the
top people, so how could she learn?
Larry Johnson, a former CIA employee who has been loudly
defending Joe Wilson and bashing the president, has claimed that
his information about Plame’s so-called secret status was given him
by active-duty CIA employees. Last week, Johnson made a statement
about McCarthy that may show how the CIA Praetorians managed the
leak of the terrorist detention program. Writing in an overheated
lefty blog, Johnson said: “Mary [McCarthy] never worked on the
Operations side of the house…she subsequently worked at the
Center for Strategic and International Studies from 2001 to 2005.
That…would not put her in a position to know anything first hand
about secret prisons. Sometime within the last year, she returned
to the CIA on a terminal assignment.” That assignment put McCarthy
in one of the few places that compartmented information can be
assembled without the usual need-to-know: the CIA’s inspector
general office.
Johnson went on, writing, “[McCarthy] could find out about
secret prisons if intelligence officers involved with that program
had filed a complaint with the IG or if there was some incident
that compelled senior CIA officials to determine if an
investigation was warranted.” Johnson has been indiscreet before
about what he learns from inside the CIA. His bias is manifest, and
his reliability is — at best — questionable. But what he says in
this case makes sense.
What if the CIA praetorians wanted to stop the CIA secret
prisons program, but didn’t want the leak coming from one of the
few top people who knew all about it? Someone could, even
anonymously, make a complaint to the IG’s office about the legality
of the program knowing McCarthy — one of their own — would be in
a position to assemble all the scattered components, leak them, and
then retire. Even if she were caught, those who made the complaint
to set up the leak would be protected. And, working with the
Praetorians’ friends in the media, her leak (if that is whose it
was) would be sure to be published in utter disregard for the
effect on our ability to obtain secret cooperation from other
nations in the war against radical Islam.
The alliance between CIA dissidents and the press has brought
the agency to a point where it has become a danger to the
prosecution of the war. Nothing about this is solved by imposing
the new National Director of Intelligence as the overlord of
intelligence. It can only be fixed one of two ways.
CIA Director Porter Goss is working hard to fix the problems
with his agency, and the investigation that caught Mary McCarthy is
part of his extraordinary effort. If McCarthy and other Praetorians
(perhaps those who set up the Wilson affair and others who may have
leaked the NSA terrorist surveillance program) are punished
harshly, their influence can be destroyed and the CIA rehabilitated
to its principal mission. If not, perhaps the Castra Praetoria in
Langley will have to suffer the same fate as the original. Is the
rot so deep? Only by exposing it and scrubbing it out — with all
those who cause it — can we be confident that anyone knows. Only
if this is done can the CIA be saved.
TAS contributing editor Jed Babbin is the author
of Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe Are
Worse Than You Think (Regnery, 2004) and the forthcoming book
(with Edward Timperlake) Showdown: Why China Wants War with the United
States (Regnery, May 2006).
