Decades of failures: Why the CIA keeps blowing it

Decades of failures: Why the CIA keeps blowing it ---source is SALON

Every failure has been rewarded with more money -- and weakened America's standing around the world

By Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones

Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, Paul Wolfowitz   (Credit: AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta/Greg Gibson/J. Scott Applewhite)

Excerpted from "In Spies We Trust: The Story of Western Intelligence"

President Clinton gilded the lily when he said that Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan, D-N.Y., was a product of that desperate New York district Hell’s Kitchen. The senator had grown up at least partly in the Midwest. Yet it was true that he had experienced the downside of life. The grandson of a County Kerry horse breeder, his more immediate memories were of a father who gambled, drank, womanized, and left his mother in 1937. The young Moynihan had accumulated  dollars as a shiner of shoes and as a longshoreman. He attended high school on the unprivileged fringes of Harlem.
Early in his political career, Moynihan championed the cause of the poor and the rights of African Americans. In spite of this radical background, he must have seemed an unlikely person to lead the renewed attack on the CIA that took place in the 1990s. In some ways, he had become distinctly unradical. As with other self-made men, he felt he could be frank about the shortcomings of those who remained in poverty. He offended the left through his criticism of the morals of the black family, and was sufficiently conservative to  serve in the administration of Richard Nixon. In  fact, Moynihan  resembled that  well-known  brand of  neoconservative who started on the political left and ended on the right. That should have meant support for the CIA, as, by the 1990s, the agency had become a firm favorite of conservatives. Moynihan instead lent his prestige to a notable assault.
In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the time was ripe for renewed questioning of the CIA and of intelligence agencies generally. The removal of the Soviet threat meant one could criticize the CIA—or MI6/MI5—without feeling unpatriotic. With talk of peace dividends in the air, the intelligence agencies were in line for cuts. This was a threat to intelligence liaison, even if in principle liaison was a means to economy through burden sharing. Criticism also eroded confidence, an essential ingredient in the trust that enables liaison. If Western intelligence agencies had played their part in hastening the fall of communism, they had become victims of their own success.