RSS Feed for This PostCurrent Article

Fixing Intelligence–Larry Interviews Val

By George Kenney on October 23, 2007 at 6:00 AM in Current Affairs, Plamegate

With Electric Politics providing some technical assistance, Larry Johnson interviews his former CIA classmate Valerie Plame Wilson, author of Fair Game. Click the “Audio mp3″ icon to listen or download here. Total runtime thirty five minutes (and please use the link on this page to buy the book).

It’s a fascinating conversation between two seasoned intelligence professionals, highly regarded by their peers, full of insight and humor.

To pick up on a point that both Larry and Valerie make: Following WWII, politicization of the U.S. administrative branch of government has run in one direction: it just gets worse. It’s been a serious problem at the State Department for decades, where successive administrations place political appointees at increasingly lower levels. With increasingly stupid policy outcomes. At the Defense Department, costs of useless but politically valuable weapons systems are legendary — indeed, the only natural correction there may be national bankruptcy. Now, it seems, the intelligence community is headed down the same path. Particularly at CIA with Mike Hayden. What we tend to forget is that the people who organized or re-organized our national security institutions after WWII had the discipline to be able to impose certain constraints on political influence. And while the institutions can perpetuate that ethos, and have done, in and of themselves they can’t regenerate it. Stand-alone reforms ain’t the answer. The big picture strongly suggests the need for government-wide overhaul, and imaginative proposals salted with the wisdom of our experience.