Politics and intelligence

Captain's Quarters notes some of the same problems with the NY Times and Washington Post coverage of Mary McCarthy's actions at the CIA that I noted here. He also adds this about the corrosive effect of politics on the agency.

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... McCarthy decided to leak it to the press, rather than attempt to solve the problem she perceived. Why? Michael Tanji, a former intel officer who writes for the blog Group Intel, has his own perspective:

[I]f you ever wanted a strong indication that our intelligence services have been penetrated, the McCarthy case is it. I don’t mean penetrated by a foreign intelligence service (forgive me JJA) but by something worse: politics. After nearly two decades of service in the IC I am happy to report that robust dialog about personal political opinions is alive and well. I would however, be hard pressed to name a case where someone I worked with let their politics interfere with the job at hand. ...

Unlike the names associated with real or perceived IC fiascos (Tice, Edmonds, Shaffer, etc.) if Ms. McCarthy had a serious, legitimate gripe with what was going on at the CIA, she could have walked down the hall to the IG, she could have had lunch with someone at the FBI or Justice, or she could have made a phone call and been talking to members of Congress. In short she would have suffered almost none of the pain that most whistleblowers normally face. ...

Time was that that a lot of people in the IC (myself included) didn’t vote; lest someone have cause to accuse us of pushing a political bias in our work. We prided ourselves on the fact that we dealt in hard data and well-reasoned deduction; not political agendas or pet academic theories. We accepted the fact that ours was merely one voice that decision-makers listened too, even if we didn’t like their courses of action. When certain elements in the IC decided that they were going to stop talking to power and start taking it I don’t know, but one thing is for certain: this is a practice that we cannot allow to stand.

The CIA has rotted through the adoption of politics. They have joined the State Department as an activist bureaucracy rather than an effective arm of the US government, thanks to people like McCarthy, who have decided that their concerns and their politics trump national security. Michael Tanji is correct; we cannot allow this to stand. We need to clear out the political players within the intelligence community, people like McCarthy, Valerie Plame, and others who want to overrule the elected government through selective and deceptive leaking.

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She has also turned ever Democrat contributer within the agency into a suspect. Between her and the Wilsons Democrat contributers make up 100 percent of the exposed leakers. It is more than interesting that the major newspapers who were the benficiary of the leaks fail to disclose this obvious motivating factor for the leaks.