Those were exactly the questions that the intel apparatus did not want asked. The Church Committee focused on excesses and abuses, implying that with the proper reforms and oversights, the intelligence structures could be set right. But as the Pike Committee started pulling up the floorboards, what they discovered quickly led Rep. Pike and others to declare that the entire intelligence apparatus was a dangerous boondoggle. Not only were taxpayers getting fleeced, but agencies like the NSA and CIA were a direct threat to America’s security and democracy, the proverbial monkey playing with a live grenade. The problem was that Pike asked the right questions—and that led him to some very wrong answers, as far as the powers that be were concerned.
The answers were devastating and embarrassing—in every instance, US intelligence failed miserably. Am I naive for still, against all odds, thinking we might be falling afoul of selection bias here? Fuck, they've got to be doing something.Did those risky and expensive intelligence operations make the United States safer? Did they prevent attacks on America or American interests, or correctly warn the White House of some impending crisis? To answer that, Pike looked into some major world events to see how US intelligence fared: The 1973 Yom Kippur War; Turkey’s 1974 invasion of Cyprus; and the 1974 coup in Portugal (as well as the US intelligence failure in the 1968 Tet Offensive).
It's a good question. I've grown jaded enough to have decided that, regrettably, I would have made pretty much every dismal, cynical, blood-soaked play the United States has made since the annexation of Hawaii. Taking it a beat at a time: - The Yom Kippur War was a "failing" of American intelligence. At the same time, it was a "failing" 17 years after the Suez Crisis (in which the British, French and Israelis decided to invade Egypt against the wishes and treaty obligations of the United States) and a few scant months before the OPEC crisis. Tit for tat: (1) Israel is nearly wiped off the map by Egypt and Syria. (2) The US backs Israel after it's clear they're going to win anyway. (3) OPEC punishes the US in retaliation for not allowing Israel its objective lesson (4) The House of Saud begins a cabinet-level influence in US politics. - Turkey's invasion of Cyprus was an excuse for the US to get rid of the government of Greece. The one they'd installed through CIA skullduggery had been pushed out by military junta in 1967; saber-rattling over Cyprus had the same pall as Galtieri invading the Falklands to stave off an Argentine coup in 1980. The Cypriot War was two NATO signatories battling it out, the Turkish being by far the most competent. The US really needed plausible deniability in this particular engagement and by pretending to know nothing, they got it. - The Portuguese coup brought an inevitable end to a fossil regime that had kept a European nation in the Stone Age since 1936. Much as Mark Ames wants it to, Portugal doesn't matter on the world stage and hasn't since the Golden Age. - the Tet Offensive was a military campaign brought about by a guerrilla army with little accountability to anyone. Realistically speaking, knowing what the Viet Cong were up to on a large scale is kind of like knowing what the Mahdi Army are up to on a large scale. Yeah, it'd be nice to know but an organization as fluid as ad-hoc jungle resistance is a tough target to get HUMINT out of. You sure as fuck can't wiretap 'em. Don't get me wrong - US intelligence has had some astounding failures. One of the reasons I've made my peace with Dick Cheney is he was a Senator when all the spooky shit Saddam Hussein had the first time came to light. The CIA knew nothing about any of it at the time; when they said "there's nothing of consequence in Iraq" he had no reason whatsoever to believe them. But at the same time, the 1900s were The American Century. That wasn't through luck; that was through some seriously shady but seriously successful skullduggery.