Didn't Bobby Inman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Ray_Inman attempt to start such a private company with private clients? While he had no problem speaking his mind, it doesn't appear that he was as pugnacious as Clarridge.
I met Clarridge during college. I took a class taught by an ex-spook where we read spy novels and talked about the ethical dilemmas involved. We read Clarridge's autobiography, "A Spy for all Seasons" and then he came and glowered at us for 3 hours and answered questions. He really doesn't like the CIA these days anymore. If you're interested in this sort of thing, his book's pretty darn good: http://www.amazon.com/Spy-All-Seasons-Life-CIA/dp/0743245369
Clarridge denies Pinochet caused thousands to disappear or be murdered under his dictatorship. He also calls Amnesty International a propaganda mill. Judge for yourself:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNgCyDsvi84
"Over the past two years, he has fielded operatives in the mountains of Pakistan and the desert badlands of Afghanistan. Since the United States military cut off his funding in May, he has relied on like-minded private donors to pay his agents to continue gathering information about militant fighters, Taliban leaders and the secrets of Kabul’s ruling class."
Sounds like the government is now outsourcing paying for private intelligence and security services as well as the work. I can see why 'small government' people would like this but from the oversight and human rights perspectives it seems like a really bad idea.
Government has a terrible record but with the government, there's a slim possibility of sunshine appearing sooner or later. With private industry, it's even less so.
I'm not so sure. With private industry a good willed (and relatively wealthy) entrepreneur can just make a cheaper offer and hope to get the job, and actually try to respect human rights. With government you are kinda stuck with what you got.
1. said entrepreneur is likely to be from a similar background, eg having served in the same agency, and thus being exposed to the same culture, and from this might very well be a bit desensitized to human rights abuses.
2. a cheaper, but also more ethical, solution isn't necessarily available. An organization with fewer morals has more tools available to it, such as nonempty death threats, which ultimately lower costs. A cheaper solution has to cut somewhere else to compete.
3. sometimes an organization cannot completely keep tabs on employees, especially an intelligence organization.
Simply put, this is the wishful thinking wherein the thinker believes that the private sector will correct for any nastiness and then creates a fantasy to support this belief in the specific case being discussed.
The thing that you have to realize is that the classified world is more like a club than an open market (as is the military contracting world in general).
Merely having a bunch of money in way qualifies you to bid for a large military contract.
Most if not absolutely all of the staff of private military contracting firms are ex-military of some sort. So you basically start out, for good or ill, with the ethos of the military and the baggage of the military. The only question is what kind of supervision will you give to more-or-less-the-same-guys. That's it. So the whole privatization theory is essentially a "let's do it faster with less supervision" equation. There's no way human rights enters into that equation.
It's a lot easier to fire a contractor and replace them with a better contractor than it is to change an entire mode of thinking and operations within a branch of government.
Actually, this is a terrific idea from the oversight and human rights perspectives. Let's consider a hypothetical for-profit corporation to which the government would outsource these operations. Under a broken system (what we have now), the management of these companies would have some sort of non-business relationship with the government officials responsible for awarding the contracts. Moreover, these companies, under a broken system, would keep their books shut, offering less transparency than we already have.
Now let's consider the best case: these companies compete with each other for government contracts, which the people award. This type of system would compel the companies to maintain high levels of transparency, especially with the SEC and IRS now taking interest.
The reason the government is so inefficient is because they don't have any external auditing agencies. The SEC and the IRS, for example, will never put the CIA or FBI through the same rigorous audits that they would put private companies through.
You only know about non-classified private companies.
Classified private companies today have pretty much carte blanche in similar fashion to the CIA or FBI.
A friend of mine was unable to resolve a labor dispute with his classified employer because he could only sue them using a lawyer with clearance (and then his manager coerced him into signing a termination agreement... using a baseball bat! Again, try and sue?)
This was not a small, fly-by-night operation either but one of the largest government contractors.
That was pretty much the point of my comment. Non-classified companies get that status because of their corporate structure. The hypothetical company that I referenced would be structured such that being classified would be impossible.
The same way companies contract with other service providers without disclosing secrets. Companies do this all the time: obviously they can't give away all the details about whatever it is they're doing, so they either do it in-house, or they reveal the minimal information necessary to attract candidates, and use non-disclosure agreements to begin discussing the rest of the details. This is absolutely something that contract law could handle.
So what issues do you see? Oh right: the over-arching theme of corruption. However, I addressed that in my initial post; the only way we can get to a point where government efficiency is no longer questioned is by eliminating corruption.
I think one way to reduce corruption is to decrease the government's size, but that of course leads to situations like those we presently face. There will always be corrupt politicians who award contracts to their friends in return for some sort of illegal remuneration, but I think by reducing the number of politicians/government employees with the power to make those decisions, we will lower the amount of corruption present.
It looks like everyone missed the point of this post. I'm advocating for transparency in the companies with which we contract regarding their day-to-day operations, their budgets, etc. For-profit corporations have an economic incentive to remain frugal, which comes, in part, from external government pressure. My point is that the government does not have the equivalent financial oversight that corporations have.
Any questions of classified operations is completely irrelevant; of course you won't be able to load profiles of all spies à la tv shows like '24'.
I think everyone did get your point, but you've not addressed the problems that people have mentioned. Just hand-waving and saying 'transparency' is not convincing.
There are plenty of private intelligence agencies. It's an industry pretty much like any other. Few are dumb enough to compete with the CIA. Why hire a private agency in Afghanistan when the American taxpayer is already paying for those services? If you run a private intelligence firm, just how desperate for customers/donors do you have to be to get an article in the New York Times?
The "intelligence community" is a community - whether a given actor is in or out of government does not seem as important as whether they in the community.
Secrecy grants it's possessors the ability to act very informally.
We probably need outfits like this. The CIA seems to have completely lost the ability to do human intelligence. They get punished when they deal with unsavory characters, which is a necessity in that business. So they don't bother, and rely instead on signals intelligence. Nobody ever got fired at CIA running a program to listen in on jihadi phone calls. But you're not going to pick up everything through signals intelligence.
Specifically they got their asses handed to them by the Soviets in human intelligence, and choose to do what they were good at. But why would you need a group like this, with all the problems of privatizing intelligence operations? Would reform be a better choice? Or the acknowledge that the disadvantages of covert operations are great enough to find an alternative (similar to how the disadvantages of conventional warfare lead to covert ops)
Making it politically viable for a government organization to inadvertently fund people like Osama Bin Laden in order to gather intelligence is hardly what most people think of as reform even if it could be effective.
My reading of material like `The Sword and The Shield` and other books sourced from the Mitrokhin papers don't really support the idea that the Soviets had much success in HUMINT, especially after the 50s.
The problem is "reform" is what got us where we are today. When a human intelligence operation blows up it's embarrassing. Congress gets involved "reforming" things. So you get stupid rules like "The CIA can never pay someone who's been accused of human rights violations".
People genuinely put the interests of their country first and they get hung out to dry after the next election cycle. So the people who survive do what risk-averse bureaucracies always do: nothing.
This article reads like the back-story of a season of 24...
Owner of intelligence-agency-for-hire is "determined to remain a player." President/government has a different take on things and attempts to shut down the agency. Agency plants WMDs on American soil in order to distract country and guarantee relevance.
Wait. That was a season of 24.
Oh well. In actuality I'm surprised at myself for being surprised that such outfits exist.
It is difficult to assess the merits of Mr. Clarridge’s secret intelligence dispatches; a review of some of the documents by The Times shows that some appear to be based on rumors from talk at village bazaars or rehashes of press reports.
Actually, the New York Times could have gone back to older dispatches and evaluated whether the bazaar-based predictions came true, or were otherwise accurate.
The danger of using such information is much of it is not true, greatly exaggerated, subjective, etc., but is nevertheless being taken seriously by some military, diplomatic and intelligence staff and helping drive strategy and tactics on the ground. This potentially creates even more problems, misunderstandings, and mistrust and can even lead to unnecessary death and destruction.
36 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 80.8 ms ] threadThe end of the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNgCyDsvi84#t=2m20s
Reminds me that I can't handle the truth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hGvQtumNAY#t=1m36s
Sounds like the government is now outsourcing paying for private intelligence and security services as well as the work. I can see why 'small government' people would like this but from the oversight and human rights perspectives it seems like a really bad idea.
Well, it's not like the government has a very good track record wrt human rights either.
1. said entrepreneur is likely to be from a similar background, eg having served in the same agency, and thus being exposed to the same culture, and from this might very well be a bit desensitized to human rights abuses.
2. a cheaper, but also more ethical, solution isn't necessarily available. An organization with fewer morals has more tools available to it, such as nonempty death threats, which ultimately lower costs. A cheaper solution has to cut somewhere else to compete.
3. sometimes an organization cannot completely keep tabs on employees, especially an intelligence organization.
Simply put, this is the wishful thinking wherein the thinker believes that the private sector will correct for any nastiness and then creates a fantasy to support this belief in the specific case being discussed.
Merely having a bunch of money in way qualifies you to bid for a large military contract.
Most if not absolutely all of the staff of private military contracting firms are ex-military of some sort. So you basically start out, for good or ill, with the ethos of the military and the baggage of the military. The only question is what kind of supervision will you give to more-or-less-the-same-guys. That's it. So the whole privatization theory is essentially a "let's do it faster with less supervision" equation. There's no way human rights enters into that equation.
Now let's consider the best case: these companies compete with each other for government contracts, which the people award. This type of system would compel the companies to maintain high levels of transparency, especially with the SEC and IRS now taking interest.
The reason the government is so inefficient is because they don't have any external auditing agencies. The SEC and the IRS, for example, will never put the CIA or FBI through the same rigorous audits that they would put private companies through.
Classified private companies today have pretty much carte blanche in similar fashion to the CIA or FBI.
A friend of mine was unable to resolve a labor dispute with his classified employer because he could only sue them using a lawyer with clearance (and then his manager coerced him into signing a termination agreement... using a baseball bat! Again, try and sue?)
This was not a small, fly-by-night operation either but one of the largest government contractors.
So what issues do you see? Oh right: the over-arching theme of corruption. However, I addressed that in my initial post; the only way we can get to a point where government efficiency is no longer questioned is by eliminating corruption.
I think one way to reduce corruption is to decrease the government's size, but that of course leads to situations like those we presently face. There will always be corrupt politicians who award contracts to their friends in return for some sort of illegal remuneration, but I think by reducing the number of politicians/government employees with the power to make those decisions, we will lower the amount of corruption present.
or the guys who were pimping Afghan teenage boys to warlords?
yeah, that worked well.
Any questions of classified operations is completely irrelevant; of course you won't be able to load profiles of all spies à la tv shows like '24'.
The "intelligence community" is a community - whether a given actor is in or out of government does not seem as important as whether they in the community.
Secrecy grants it's possessors the ability to act very informally.
People genuinely put the interests of their country first and they get hung out to dry after the next election cycle. So the people who survive do what risk-averse bureaucracies always do: nothing.
Bounty Hunter? Mercenary? Vigilante? Somehow, none of those labels really seem to fit quite right. Is this sort of thing something new?
Owner of intelligence-agency-for-hire is "determined to remain a player." President/government has a different take on things and attempts to shut down the agency. Agency plants WMDs on American soil in order to distract country and guarantee relevance.
Wait. That was a season of 24.
Oh well. In actuality I'm surprised at myself for being surprised that such outfits exist.
Actually, the New York Times could have gone back to older dispatches and evaluated whether the bazaar-based predictions came true, or were otherwise accurate.
The danger of using such information is much of it is not true, greatly exaggerated, subjective, etc., but is nevertheless being taken seriously by some military, diplomatic and intelligence staff and helping drive strategy and tactics on the ground. This potentially creates even more problems, misunderstandings, and mistrust and can even lead to unnecessary death and destruction.