Note: This is the first in a series of articles dealing with issues of intelligence and covert operations.

The Public has an unrequited love affair with covert operators. The more it seeks, the deeper into the nebulous dark of smoke and mirrors it recedes. The attraction is understandable. Since the Second World War, spies East and West have engaged in the sort of bloody mix of sex, violence, and lies that would have made Nero blush. These escapades, as well as the rumor and potential for even more sensational ones, have been eagerly devoured by the American public. Twenty-one plus James Bonds and a plethora of knock-offs, spin-offs, and Austin Powerses have not satisfied them. Yet, like Samson, the intelligence community was ruined by its most ardent lover.

“Blow-back” is spy-speak for an unforeseen consequence of covert action - you take out Mossadegh and the Ayotollah pops up. The most recent intelligence controversy in the controversy riddled-CIA revolves around former director George Tenet. Tenet, in an attempt to pass off the hot potato of guilt for invading Iraq, said that he knew it was a bad idea. What he has not explained is why he did not speak up and say so. He might look like a moral coward in the hypocritical black-and-white morality of the media. But the problem is bigger than him. It is a problem of blow-back.

Once upon a time, Americans liked their government—the government had after all given them welfare, defeated Fascism, and bestowed upon them the highest quality of living in the world. These Americans had children, and these children were baby-boomers. By the time they reached adolescence, their brains were so addled by the drugs and affluenza that they thought they knew more about political science than the demigods at the National Security Council. (The late David Halberstam may have used the epithet “The Best and the Brightest” with irony, but our national security apparatus could have been stocked a lot more poorly - see Carter administration.) These kids saw the wealth and order around them, and mistook their exceptional circumstances for the norm. Though the men’s scruffy beards and women’s unshaved armpits proved their physical maturity, it belied their emotional and mental immaturity. A little boy who tells his parents that their punishment is “not fair” has not learned yet that life is not fair.

In those days, the intelligence community was more independent. The organization heads had enough dirt on political leaders to make sure they did not get bullied. J. Edgar Hoover had files on every prominent American of his lifetime, and Richard Helms had more than enough intel to keep Dick Nixon at bay (their fictional interchange in the Director’s Cut of Oliver Stone’s film is one of the most intense scenes ever captured on celluloid).

In the late 70s, a confluence of factors turned what had been a comfortably long leash into a choke chain. Americans were pissed at the war in Vietnam and increasing social inequality, and to the mix was added some journalism that was worth its weight in rubles. Woodward and Bernstein uncovered Watergate and Seymour Hersch discovered the CIA and FBI were spying on citizens. Like a bag of garbage, the more light that shone on the situation, the more it smelled. The intelligence community’s “family jewels” were revealed, e.g. military intelligence spying on civilians, intelligence agencies reading civilian mail, infiltration and sabotage of socialists groups, etc.

A Senate Committee led by Senator Frank Church was formed to reign in “the rogue elephant.” The Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House became the precursors of today’s Senate and House Select Committees on Intelligence, respectively. The intelligence agencies must submit to the committees their budgets for review and inform them of all operations. Further regulation came by means of the Foreign Intelligence Service Act (FISA), which outlines the manner in which operatives of “foreign powers” might be observed (US citizens are off limits).

Executive Order 12333, signed of all people by Ronald “Mr. National Security” Reagan, makes it unlawful for anyone in the intelligence community to infiltrate a non-violent organization (the organization can advocate violence, e.g. Ku Klux Klan, but unless it can be shown to directly commit violence, it is considered non-violent) or assassinate foreign leaders (why it is not ok to kill Saddam Hussein, but ok to kill everyone else in Baghdad).

Senator Biden, who is today a presidential candidate and Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, once advocated a complete on ban covert action. Former New Jersey Senator Robert Torricelli thought that the CIA should not associate with unsavory characters. Today the most common reason a potential CIA operative is not given security clearance is because s/he has used marijuana in the past year (they are not joking around—they give hair sample tests and polygraphs to check). Morton Halperin - whose seat in Nixon’s National Security Council makes him an unusual candidate - is still leading the charge from his bully pulpit at the ACLU and Center for National Security Studies.

Bismark wrote making legislation is like making sausage—it is less appetizing once you have seen how it is made. Such sentiments are even truer of covert operations. The idea that a spy might uses sex to lure or blackmail an adversary (see Spielberg’s “Munich” for example) might be distasteful, but so is the idea that the animal whose flesh you are enjoying at the Hop spent his life caked in his own feces and was killed by a steel bolt shoved between its eyes.

Bureaucracy is the rust that slows entrepreneurship and progress to a halt. Stephen Knott, a historian of intelligence at the University of Virginia, has written that the lean, mean fighting machine of the Cold War has become a bureaucracy no different than the Department of Agriculture. Too many rules and not enough rewards is a recipe for decline. This paralysis has gripped the intelligence community. Left with two options - doing the job right or doing the job legally - far too many policy makers have chosen the latter.

Blackstone wrote that no man, not even the king, is above the law. Blackstone may have known a lot about Common Law, but enemies aren’t the same criminals. Harvey Mansfield, Harvard Machiavelli scholar by day and man-of-letters by night, explains that whereas criminals simply break the law, enemies try to replace our laws with their laws, and for that reason, the fight against them is by its very nature extra-legal.

But America’s stripped-down intelligence community is in no shape to partake in this fight. While critics of the intelligence community point to the moral dilemmas of intelligence work, the moral issues can be solved rather directly: if the U.S. is more moral than its enemy (Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, Al-Qaeda, etc.) it should use any means at its disposal to defeat them. It may seem simplistic and jingoistic, but there is a lot of truth in the President’s declaration that “you are either with us or against us.” Anti-war protesters are well-intentioned, but criminally na•ve. If the President decides on an ill-advised (stupid) course of action, the solution is not to hinder its execution. The only thing worse than a bad plan, is a bad plan poorly executed. No one can doubt that it is better to project stupidity and strength than stupidity and weakness. Bush may not be the greatest leader in history, but he is better than Stalin or Bin Laden—and those are the unfortunate options. You either support America or (directly or indirectly) support America’s enemies. The tragic emasculation of America’s intelligence services is of no help in a world where strong intelligence is needed more than ever.