COUNTER INTELLIGENCE

The CIA also exaggerated the Soviet nuclear threat during the Cold War. (Jason Leopold, July 04, 2003, Online Opinion)

They say that history repeats itself. And so it does.

Two years ago, the Central Intelligence Agency released reams of intelligence documents on the former Soviet Union that had been classified for nearly 30 years. The findings were damning: the CIA for more than 10 years greatly exaggerated the nuclear threat the communist country posed to the world.

The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Raymond Garthoff, a longtime CIA military analyst, admitted in 2001 "there were consistent overestimates of the threat every year from 1978 to 1985."

Fast forward to 2003 and the CIA finds itself in a similar pickle.

Intelligence services have the same problem that every bureaucracy since the beginning of time has had: regardless of the purpoose for which they are originally intended their mission becomes self-perpetuation and aggrandizement. They didn't overstate the Soviet threat for reasons of state, but to get their budgets hiked and it's not even that conscious. Acknowledge that Iraq, China, etc., are no threat and the question becomes: why are we spending billions on the CIA and other intelligence agencies?

Similarly, the Education Department never says that the problem with public schools is too many mandates from Washington and the Agriculture Department never says that farm policy would be more rational if the feds butted out. Bureaucracies shape data to serve the furtherance of the bureaucracy itself--they don't deal in truths. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 9, 2003 10:14 PM