The Sensible Paranoia of a National Security State

It’s inevitable: people who steal secrets tend to wonder if someone else is stealing their secrets. Spies spy on spies to see if the spies are spying on them. And here we go again.

Several reports this week described allegations that the CIA monitored the computers used by staffers at the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, while those committee investigators were looking into the agency’s use of torture after the 9/11 attacks. “Did the CIA Spy on the U.S. Senate?” asked the McClatchy newspapers.

My money’s on yes.

Intelligence and counterintelligence—the act of stealing secrets, and the act of trying to guard them—breed a culture of sensible paranoia. If that’s world you’re operating in, it’s not at all unreasonable to believe that someone is secretly watching you. Every professional spy risks going what I call “The Full Angleton.”

In his Cold War-era career at the CIA, James Jesus Angleton spent a full decade spiraling down into his obsession with Soviet infiltration. Angleton’s infamous (and unsuccessful) hunt for a Soviet mole in the CIA “was a relentless pursuit, driven by labyrinthine logic that only Angleton fully understood,” as Garry Abrams of the Los Angeles Times put it. Kim Philby’s old friend just knew that someone in the building with him was a turncoat, and why wouldn’t he? As the MI6 liaison to the newly created CIA, Philby spent the early 1950s having long, leisurely lunches with Angleton, a counterpart who became a good friend. A decade later, correctly suspected of disloyalty, Philby decamped to Moscow, and Angleton got to spend the rest of his life thinking about all the secrets he’d given away to his former friend over “lobster and much bourbon.” Good luck not being driven crazy by that set of circumstances.

The FBI has had its own version of the same events. So has MI5, where a former employee published a book in 1987 accusing the director of the agency of being a mole. So does everybody. Conspiracy and transgression are the job, so it makes sense that you’ll begin to wonder if everyone around you is conspiring and transgressing. If a Senate committee set up a team of investigators inside a CIA building to investigate the CIA, what are the odds that the CIA took calmly to the presence, inside its own walls, of people digging into its secrets?

The science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle has formulated an “Iron Rule of Bureaucracy,” in three parts:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization…. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself…. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

The metastasization of the national security state is such that it will continue to build networks inside of networks. It will increasingly turn its eyes inward to the protection of the security apparatus itself, just as much as it uses the apparatus to look out at all of us. If the CIA is, in fact, spying on the Senate, it’s wildly illegal, shockingly improper, and entirely unsurprising.