Captured, Killed, Compromised: CIA Admits Losing Dozens of Informants | Hacker News Reader

Captured, Killed, Compromised: CIA Admits Losing Dozens of Informants

nytimes.com

49 pointsgraderjs9 comments

The more I read about the CIA the more I am convinced it either needs to be massively restructured and reorganized, or removed completely. Reading histories of the organization I see it has consistently been incompetent and destructive, causing many failures which have then backfired on the US. Not to mention the many characters in its history who put their own ideological biases above the good of the country, which contributed significantly to the aforementioned failures. The Iraq War shows that this culture was still the case in the early 2000s, as intelligence was ignored and instead higher ups in the agency were used or themselves pushed intelligence which was not supported for political and ideological reasons. If the intelligence is going to be manipulated or ignored then as I see it there's no point of collecting it because it's not going to be used accurately anyway. As the US Intelligence Community these days is massive I am sure the other agencies can pick up the many other roles of the CIA.

I'll edit this to add a comment more relevant to the article that there perhaps is a culture of arrogance at the CIA because of a lack of consequence for their mistakes.

> many failures which have then backfired on the US

Sure they have mistakes, like the failures in this article and many others, but to claim they are in general harmful to US interests...I think it probably just appears that way.

Because I think they probably serve the capitalist and mercantilist interests of the US, which probably differ in appearance from the more symbolic or mythological appearances of what the US is. So on the outside, the idea of patriotism is quite sentimental, perhaps on the inside it's all about capital and mercantile power.

So things which seem to violate the more sentimental and mythological idea of the US and patriotism, perhaps are actually wins from a mercantile or capitalist perspective....or maybe they are just failing on that mission as well I don't know.

I think overall they generally are harmful to US interests. What is the CIA most known for? Overthrowing countries and supporting dictators because of their past anti communist paranoia. What have been their major successes? I would say the regular intelligence work they do, collecting intelligence from various agents around the world and in general HUMINT. It's their clandestine and paramilitary work that's caused the biggest problems in my view, and not just in a strategic sense, but in a ideological way too, you can excuse regular spying in a free country because it's obviously necessary to maintain accurate information on any potential adversary, but coups in countries that go against US interests is a lot harder to justify in an ideological sense, especially if you want to say that one of the core American ideals is "freedom". This is something in my view that the US shouldn't do at all, and hence the need to purge the CIA of bureaucrats and others would push for this kind of action because it's what the CIA is historically known to do.

Even on the surface, when has giving arms to a third world paramilitary group ever worked out in the long run?

My theory is that CIA is getting used to do counterinsurgency against non state actors/irregular forces like terrorist groups and they are caught off guard against "great power" state with significantly better counter intelligence, surveillance and tech.

All organizations need a certain amount of idealism to work. You have to on some level believe that you're creating something valuable, doing something good in the world, or whatever.

Because people in an organization run into problems all the time, where they have a choice between doing what's best for the organization, and doing what's best for themselves. There will always be a gap.

For instance, if you see a policy that's clearly bad for the organisation (like, say, informants recruited used aggressively as a metric in the CIA, without regard to whether they would be useful or dead in a year) - do you do the thankless, risky job of trying to change it, do you just play along half-heartedly or do you aggressively exploit it to juice your own metrics to the organisation's detriment?

The CIA has an obvious problem here, in that it's a fucking evil organization with a fucking evil history. Anyone who goes along with the rhetoric that it is somehow heroic, the US' "first line of defense" etc. is either deeply cynical or horribly ignorant and naive. It's not as if the latter sort is any better employees, at best they'd be useless, at worst they will do what Snowden did when he lost his 9/11-inspired naivety.

Not to defend a murderous secret organization, but the problem is more a panopticon of data on the "users" of this data in any democracy.

Lots of information can be deduced by the words and actions of policymakers, organizational staff and lobbyists alone. If you are briefed on secret information and act on it, that process of action alone, if justified is prone to give away lots of information.

Add to that a healthy dose of jingoism, were the source on the ground is always less worthy then the voter at home and you have a perfectly distrust-able agency.

https://archive.is/kWKiv

> Counterintelligence officials said in a top secret cable to all stations and bases around the world that too many of the people it recruits from other countries to spy for the U.S. are being lost.

So Top Secret we're reading about it on HN.

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