Gwynne Dyer
Intelligence can be useful in war, but the bulk of what it does in peacetime is pointless
A long time ago now I was asked to do a television series about the world's intelligence services – and I turned it down flat. My main reason was a feeling that there was less to the whole intelligence world than met the eye, and the subsequent thirty years have only served to confirm that judgement.
The latest case in point is the recent revelations about the US CIA. In 2017, it turns out, the CIA flirted with the idea of kidnapping or killing Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, in his refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Wikipedia profoundly embarrassed the CIA in 2010 by putting a huge trove of secret US records about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the web. Fearing extradition to the United States, Assange (who is Australian), sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012.
The pace picked up in early 2017 when Donald Trump became president and Mike Pompeo heading the CIA convinced himself that the Russians were going to try to spirit Assange out of Britain into their own hands.
So, the CIA began planning to preempt the Russians by kidnapping Assange from the embassy and take him to the US – or, if that didn't work, kill him. Contingency plans were also discussed for thwarting a possible Russian attempt to get Assange out.
The Ecuadorian Government changed and Assange was expelled from the London embassy in 2019, but he still faced an American demand for extradition. A British court rejected that early this year, but he continues to sit in prison awaiting the outcome of a US appeal to a higher court.
And here's the thing. None of the information Assange released hurt anybody, and a lot of it needed to be revealed: war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and government surveillance of tens of millions of US citizens. The CIA made it all secret because it could, not because it was necessary or justifiable.
It's not just American intelligence agencies, of course, and they don't always think about killing those who spill their precious secrets. Thus Israeli Mordechai Vanunu, who confirmed the existence of Israel's nuclear weapons in 1986, was only kidnapped in Italy and jailed in Israel for 18 years (11 years in solitary).
Vanunu's revelation changed nothing: everybody already knew that Israel has nuclear weapons, even if it will never confirm it publicly. Thirty-five years after he was kidnapped, however, Vanunu is still not allowed to leave Israel. If he speaks to foreigners he is arrested, and sometimes jailed again for a few months.
Then there's Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee who revealed huge amounts of data about the US National Security Agency's global surveillance programmes in 2013. Revealing that the US was hacking the phones of friendly foreign leaders like Germany's Angela Merkel was the right thing to do, but he can never go home again.
These people are not ‘helping terrorists' or betraying their countries. The ‘intelligence services' (the old term ‘secret services' was less misleading) reflexively build bureaucratic empires and ceaselessly expand their reach because that's what bureaucracies do. They can be useful in war, but the vast bulk of what they do in peacetime is pointless.
I only suspected that in 1990, when the Cold War was just ending. By now, it is blindingly obvious. All these cases are victimless ‘crimes' where things that should be known about the illegal, counter-productive, and even criminal behaviour of governments are finally revealed – and the intelligence services then relentlessly harass the whistle-blowers to frighten others into silence.
(Gwynne Dyer's new book is ‘The Shortest History of War'. The views expressed are personal.)
