The Politics of Spying

I have been following spying and the intelligence business for a long time.  And there are two kinds of spying:  fictional spying (fake spying?) and actual spying.  They are quite different.  Actual spies do not drive Aston Martins and hang out with gorgeous babes in sexy dresses.  It makes them conspicuous and being conspicuous makes you ineffective.  And, in spite of the fact that Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, actually worked in Intelligence during World War II, James Bond was a terrible spy.  With that I leave the realm of fictional spies and focus exclusively on spying in particular, and the intelligence business in general, as it is conducted in the real world.

Real world spying goes back thousands of years.  And even if we narrow our focus to the US, which I intend to do, there were spies during the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.  But these efforts were not organized and institutionalized to any extent.  George Washington, for instance, would designate an underling to create a pretty informal network of agents.  When the Revolutionary War ended Washington moved on and whatever network had been built was allowed to fall apart.

In the US this behavior changed, at least temporarily, with World War I.  The US did not have an elaborate intelligence operation during the War but various efforts were undertaken.  And to some extend this continued on after the War.  This consisted primarily of talking the international telegraph companies into providing whatever government intelligence group existed at the time with copies of diplomatic telegrams.  All of these were encrypted so the bulk of the effort consisted of trying to crack the various codes used.

This change in behavior arose in large part due to the famous Zimmermann telegram.  The British intercepted a telegram from a German official named Zimmermann who was trying to get the Mexicans to enter World War I on the German side.  This had a substantial effect on the US decision to enter the war.  And this incident also convinced a number of government officials that having some kind of intelligence operation was a good and important thing to do.

Then Henry L. Stimson became Secretary of State in 1929.  He famously opined that "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail" and set things back in the US almost to zero.  So before World War II intelligence was not a big deal and, to the extent it existed, it certainly had no clout.

In the mean time J Edgar Hoover got himself put in charge of the FBI.  He was a consummate political operative.  So he spent a lot of time and effort playing the politics game.  He famously collected dirt on politicians and then blackmailed them into providing the FBI with a nice budget and leaving him in charge and giving him a free hand to run the FBI as he saw fit.  But blackmail was not the only card Hoover played.  Blackmail was the "stick" part of his strategy.  He also had a "carrot" component.  He would provide politicians with dirt on their enemies and adversaries.  So being in Hoover's good side could prove very beneficial.

And one of the things Hoover did with his power was make sure the FBI was in charge of "domestic" intelligence.  If it happened inside the borders of the US then the FBI had primary jurisdiction.  And his success at playing the political game meant that the manifest failures of the FBI to do anything about the mob (presumably their primary focus) or communists (the intelligence part of the FBI's portfolio) didn't matter.  Politicians loved him and/or feared him so he went on his way.  And there's a lesson in all this.

Another thing Hoover was good at was the public relations side of things.  There were innumerable movies made featuring intrepid FBI agents busting crime and, when World War II got underway, breaking up numerous spy rings.  It was mostly complete fiction (or a great deal of exaggeration) but the public didn't notice.  So it worked.  The FBI's reputation with the general public was generally high.

And that brings us to World War II.  This was the real start of large bureaucratic intelligence organizations in the US.  And the poster child for all this was "Wild" Bill Donovan and the OSS.  Serious analysis of the track record of the OSS (see for instance, "The Secret War" by Max Hastings) indicates it was none too good.  They were good at making noise.  But blowing up the odd train was often very hard on the locals and produced little short term benefit and no long term benefit at all.

And the OSS was terrible at providing consistent, reliable, useful, intelligence.  The best source of intelligence turned out to be operations like the one at Bletchley Park.  The work was terribly hard and terribly unsexy but also terribly important in the end.  So why was the OSS so celebrated and, more importantly supported by astute politicians like Roosevelt?  Because it served an important purpose.

It was great for PR.  This was especially important in the early and middle part of the War.  And the best way to explain this was with something that was not an intelligence operation.  I'm talking about the Doolittle air raid on Tokyo early in the War.  The raid itself did almost no damage.  And we lost a bunch of planes and trained pilots at a time when there was a real shortage of both.  But Roosevelt was able to say "see -- we are doing something".  And, in the case of the Japanese, they severely over-reacted.  So from a strategic military sense the operation was a big success.

Most OSS operations were decidedly less successful.  But in the period before D Day in June of '44 it allowed Roosevelt to say "see -- we are doing something".  Now the Germans did not over-react so the strategic military "benefit" of these OSS actions was negative.  But look at France after the War.  The French Resistance was always a pretty small operation that was generally ineffective.  But after the War a lot of French could claim, whether it was true or not -- and usually it was not, that they had been on the side of the good guys and not a dirty collaborator.  This helped heal a lot of wounds after the War.

Donovan always ran an effective PR operation.  He hoped it would be enough to allow him to stay on after the War but he came up short.  But the people who ran the intelligence organizations that rose from the ashes of the OSS and can be traced back to the "National Security Act" of 1947 did pay attention to how Hoover and Donovan had conducted themselves and tried to do better.  They paid careful attention to the political side of things.

And let's be clear about something.  There is something sexy about the intelligence game to politicians.  It's called "plausible deniability".  Going back to "The Prince" by Machiavelli, powerful people know or quickly find out that their power is limited.  Even dictators don't have complete power.  There is always something they want to be able to do that for one reason or not they can't do.  And often the problem is that there is some kind of accountability that's getting in the way.  So there is always appeal in an "off the books" operation or organization.  A term of art is "unvouchered funds".  You can spend money and you don't have to tell anybody what it was spent on.

So in the same way that Hoover would provide untraceable dirt on an opponent or adversary to a politician intelligence organizations provide a way to go "off the books" when it comes to something a politician wants done.  And, oh by the way, as these intelligence organizations are going about their entirely legitimate business they might, just might, find out dirt on a politician.

The intelligence services were very popular with both politicians and the public in the '50s.  At one time the head of the CIA was the brother of the Secretary of State.  And the two got along very well together.  The CIA could (and often did during that period) meddle in ways that the State Department, which was accountable to both the US public and the rest of the world, couldn't.  The State Department had and frequently asserted total "plausible deniability".  To quote Sergeant Shultz, a character on the old "Hogan's Hero's" TV show:  "I know nothing - nothing!".

And the CIA saw it as part of its job to be the fall guy.  "It was the CIA's fault, not that politician or very important person."  The CIA put out the word that they were willing to play patsy but they expected something in response.  And, in exchange for services rendered, they got a fat budget and little oversight.

And this all worked fine until the Vietnam War blew up.  The intelligence community was made to shoulder a great deal of responsibility.  And in general, their scope of action was reduced as were their budgets.  And then the Soviet empire, the great villain in the intelligence melodrama, fell apart.  In the aftermath the whole justification for giving the intelligence community a lot of money and freedom seemed to no longer exist.  It was lean pickings for a long time.

Then 9/11 came along.  And the intelligence communities showed how well they could play the politics game.  If you have only weak cards in your hand and everyone knows it you are in for a tough night.  But if someone deals you some good cards and you play them well things can change for the better in a second.  And one result of 9/11 was to hand the intelligence community some very nice cards.  And they took full advantage of them to massively improved their situation.

A case could be made that 9/11 was an intelligence failure.  But that was not the story the Bush Administration wanted to tell and the Intelligence community smelled opportunity (some decent cards for a change) and pounced.  The Bush Administration was extremely interested in "off the books" and "plausible deniability".  So the NSA in particular said "if you give us a lot more money, a lot more authority, and a lot less oversight we will promise you this will never happen again".

This narrative supported the idea that 9/11 was not a Bush Administration screw up.  And it was not an intelligence screw up.  It was those bad old laws that are hamstringing us.  This was total baloney but the Bush Administration and the Intelligence community quickly locked arms and sold the hell out of this "new and improved" narrative.  And it worked.

The result is that the intelligence community got a lot of money to play with.  It got a lot of authority to play with.  And it got essentially no oversight.  As an executive, what's not to like about this situation?  So starting in about 2002 the intelligence community has been riding high.  The heads of the various organizations have tons of money and little restraint on how they spend it.  The fact that this has delivered very little doesn't matter as long as the PR keeps working.

And it kept working just fine during the Obama Administration.  Their authority got dialed back a little.  But this was okay because various excesses that tend to result from too much money and too little oversight was damaging the reputation of the intelligence agencies with the public.  So a little pull back was good for keeping the gravy train rolling for a long time.  And it wasn't totally one sided.  The intelligence community did get Bin Laden.  So the Obama people were happy with the intelligence community and the intelligence community was happy with the Obama people.

But then to a certain extent greed set in on the part of the intelligence agencies.  Hillary was likely to be pretty compatible with them.  But one of the techniques that worked with Obama was to scare the shit out of him in the briefings.  Being inexperienced he is not as able from his own experience to sort through what he is being told and figure out what was real and what was scaremongering.  I think by the second term he could do a better job of sorting the wheat from the chaff but the intelligence communities were well entrenched by then.

But Hillary had been in government for a long time.  So she had been around the intelligence block a few times and was in a much better position to detect scaremongering.  Trump on the other hand was a total greenie.  He should be easy to manipulate so from an intelligence community perspective he looked like far the better candidate.  Well, that has not worked out as well as they thought it would.

What they did not count on was that Trump trusts Alex Jones of "Info Wars" fame and various other people like him who peddle conspiracies for a living.  And it should be noted that they make a very comfortable living doing so.  Now if the intelligence community doesn't tell Trump what Alex Jones is telling him then they are suspect ("fake").  And if the do tell him what Alex Jones is telling him then why does he need them when he already has Alex Jones?  So Trump is not the intelligence community's friend.

The standard vehicle for coopting the President is the PDB, the President's Daily Briefing.  That's the vehicle they used to get to Obama.  But Trump doesn't even get them.  He lets Vice President Pence receive them.  And Pence has very little policy influence on Trump or the people that surround them.  So that's what's been going on with the "foreign" part of the intelligence community.  What about the "domestic" part, the FBI?  That question now pretty much answers itself.

I have not been a fan of James Comey for a long time.  But I am not part of the FBI establishment.  They love him.  Why?  Because he obviously would take a bullet for them.  Whatever flaws the man has, and I think he has many, he is fiercely loyal to the FBI.  And the FBI is fiercely loyal to him.

A lot of people in the FBI have, for a lot of reasons (most of them bogus in my opinion), not liked Hillary Clinton.  So when Comey misbehaved with respect to the Email "controversy" that lost him few if any points within the FBI.  And conservatives are generally pro "law and order" and that stand is good for the FBI as an institution.  So if Trump is a true conservative he should be good for the FBI.  But what is becoming obvious to even the most politically conservative FBI agent is that he is not their friend.

And my point is that these people, both the "foreign" and the "domestic" arms of the intelligence community know how to play the politics game and they are very good at it.  If Trump has people experienced in politics and governance around him they could tell him "don't mess with the intelligence community".  But he doesn't.  And even if he did he is poor at taking advice from experts.  So he has done a lot of things to make all parts of the intelligence community unhappy with him.

And, as I said, they know how the game is played.  And you can watching them play it right this very minute.  There are very careful to be reserved and diplomatic and temperate in public.  Except Comey, that is, who got fired and is pissed.  But still the habits of a lifetime in the trenches are evident in his actions.  He has been very careful to go only so far and no farther.  But that "only so far" has included calling Trump a liar in public.

The usual way these people operate is in the shadows.  So you are seeing a steady drumbeat of leaks.  And, with the exception of a very small fry who was obviously freelancing it, no one has been caught.  Expect the leaks to continue.  Expect no one of significance to be caught.  Expect the leaked information to be devastating.

One final observation.  The FBI's remit includes organized crime and drug rings.  They have a tool called RICO.  RICO means that if you can prove something is the "ill gotten gain of a criminal operation" it can be seized.  If they choose to, and at some point they very well may, they can go after Trump for a variety of financial crimes.  If they succeed they can begin seizing assets.  And these assets don't have to be closely linked to the crime.  They can sweep up all kinds of assets.  In drug cases they have seized cash (obviously), cars and boats (also assets with a pretty direct connection to the crime), but also homes, even if no criminal business was transacted in the home and even if the home is in the name of an ex-wife, oh, and businesses, even if the business was a legitimate front unconnected with criminal activity.

So, if the FBI got mad enough at Trump, and if they were successful, they could turn him into a pauper and throw him into jail.  And if the rest of the intelligence community is mad enough at Trump they can feed all kinds of evidence to the FBI.  Some of it might not be usable in court.  But it could point the FBI in the direction of evidence that they could use in court.  Is it likely to come to this?  At this point the answer is no.  These organizations are mad enough at Trump to make life uncomfortable for him but not mad enough to try to do what I am suggesting is possible.

But who knows what the investigations that are already under way will turn up?  The intelligence community is definitely mad enough at Trump to impede efforts he might undertake to derail these investigations.  And who knows what Trump will do from here?  I certainly don't.

Ground truthing

I have liked the phrase "ground truth" since I first encountered it.  It comes from the early days of the space age.  I was a kid when Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, was launched.  The phrase "ground truth" comes from a little later.  Sputnik was primarily a publicity stunt.  It just beeped.  And it beeped in such a way that amateur radio enthusiasts could pick the beeps up and tell what direction they were coming from.  This meant that there was never any doubt that the Russians had launched an artificial satellite.

But Sputnik was quickly followed by satellites that actually did things.  And one of  the big things they did was measure things.  But what did the measurements mean?  That's where "ground truth" came in.  Scientists would take a look at some satellite measurement of something happening on the ground.  Then they would go out and see what was actually happening there.  That allowed them to be able to say "if the result of some satellite measurement is X then that means this specific thing is happening on the ground".  They were establishing the ground truth behind a satellite measurement.  That way they didn't have to assume they knew what a certain measurement meant, they would actually know.

And the business of being able to actually know is important tome.  So I periodically go out and try to establish the "ground truth" of something.  And this is not limited to satellite measurements.  It relates to anything.  If it looks like this what is it actually?  If you have performed a ground truth then you know.  So let's look at some of the ground truth efforts I have made.  You will see that this can be applied very broadly.

And let me start with an embarrassing but very enlightening moment that happened at about the time I was introduced to the phrase "ground truth".  At some point I learned that Galileo was the first to demonstrate that if you can ignore air resistance and the like then the flight of a cannonball follows a parabolic curve.  And the teacher put up a proof on the blackboard that this was true.  And the proof was pretty simple and straightforward.  Then he gave us Galileo's proof.  How hard could it be?

Well, it turned out to be extremely hard.  I never did really figure it all out.  Unlike the proof the teacher put up it was very complex, difficult, and hard to follow.  So what was going on?  It turns out that the mathematical tools Galileo had access to were very primitive.  They consisted primarily of Euclidian geometry.  If that's all the tools you have to work with then you have to be brilliant and persistent to come up with a proof.

In general this is a common situation.  The ancients look dumb to us.  They believed stuff we now know to be wrong and their "brilliant achievements" now seem pretty obvious and trivial.  But that's because we have a modern perspective.  And part of that modern perspective includes a lot of tools the ancients didn't have.  If you have Analytic Geometry then proving a cannonball follows a parabolic trajectory is pretty easy.  But Galileo didn't have Analytic Geometry.  So the most obvious thing I learned was Galileo was a really smart dude.  And that's a really important point.

Besides Galileo having only primitive mathematical tools at his disposal teachers have had hundreds of years to come up with a simple and straightforward way to prove something and that's what they now give us students.  But a whole lot of work has been put into these "simple" proofs by a whole lot of smart people.  There was no one before Galileo so if he didn't come up with it, it wasn't going to happen.  It is much easier to refine something someone else has created than it is to come up with it in the first place.  So since then I have had tremendous respect for whoever does something for the first time.  It's really hard.  If it was easy it would have already have been done.

I am not great at math but I am better than most people are.  So trying to make sense of Galileo's proof is definitely not most people's cup of tea.  But there are ways to ground truth things that are not so math heavy.  But before I get to them let me go to what I would call a "math light" example of ground truthing.

The Protestant Revolution is usually dated from when Martin Luther posted his "95 theses" on the front door of the that church in Wittenberg Germany. English translations of the document (it's not very long -- each thesis is just a sentence or two) are readily available on the Internet.  So I took a look at them.  And it was very instructive.  The document was a "proof" of a position Luther was taking.  Basically he was saying that the Catholic Church was doing something wrong (selling indulgences, if you care).

Now I agree with Luther that selling indulgences is bad and contrary to what the church has to say about good and evil.  But that was not what I wanted to know.  I wanted to know if Luther had proved what he set out to prove.  And much to my disappointment I decided he didn't.  And the problems were technical.  There is a certain way you operate when you are trying to prove something.  I thought his argument was incoherent and disorganized.  So its technical flaws meant it was not a proper proof.

Now, unlike in the Galileo case, I didn't have any problem following Luther's logic.  And I found no individual thesis problematic.  I just thought there were gaps in the proof that possibly could have been filled in but weren't.  To the extent that I could follow Galileo's proof I found no gaps.  It was a properly constructed proof.  I just couldn't follow it, at least given the amount of effort I was willing to invest.

What was enlightening about all this was that no one cared whether Luther's proof was flawed or not.  They only cared that it existed at all.  So at least on the Catholic Church side they didn't really think the truth of the matter was very important.  And unfortunately I find that the attitude of the Catholic Church at that time applies to pretty much all religious people pretty much all the time.  They just don't think the truth is very important.  Other things, typically faith, are far more important.

Now let me move on to something profoundly scientific but almost completely free of mathematics.  And that's evolution, at least the aspects of it that I am going to talk about.  The foundational document on the scientific side is On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.  This book is NOT a technical treaties designed to be read only by experts with specialist knowledge.  It was explicitly written to be read by average people who knew about things people of the time knew about like animal husbandry.  But understanding the book required no specialized expertise at all.  There is absolutely no scientific mumbo jumbo or high falootin math or anything else that would put off the average person. The language is now slightly archaic but not so much so that anybody living today can't read and understand what he has to say.

So I read the book a few years ago.  Well, I actually skipped past a number of portions.  (I'll explain why in a minute.)  Darwin was very clear about what he was saying and why he thought he had the right of it.  And most people don't know that the book went through several revisions.  Why?  Not because he bungled things or got them wrong.  Instead he carefully listened to people's objections and added additional material to clarify points that were being misunderstood and adding further evidence to show why this or that objection was wrong. And that's why I skipped large portions.  He went on and on belaboring a point just to make sure that people could see the amount of evidence available to back up what he was saying.  So I would go through the first part of the evidence, be convinced, and skip the further evidence he piled on at great length after that.

And a revelation to me was that the anti-evolution people have not come up with anything new in the roughly 150 years since the book was published.  Every few years somebody comes out with a "new" reason why Darwin was wrong.  But over and over you will find that Darwin addressed that point in nauseating detail either in the original version or in one of the updates.  But since the anti-evolution people don't bother to read the book they don't know this.

Let me move on to another example of "they didn't bother to read . . .".  What I'm talking about is gun rights and the whole Second Amendment thing.  The definitive case law on the subject is a US Supreme Court case called "Heller".  I wrote about all this in detail in a post all the way back in 2013.  You can find it here:  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2013/01/second-amendment-rights.html.
It turns out you can read Supreme Court decisions online.  There is a link to the full text of the Heller decision in the previous post.  The majority and therefore prevailing opinion was written by Justice Scalia.  And the guts of his opinion, in my opinion, is a 2 page section (Section III) in which Justice Scalia says it is completely constitution to regulate fire arms.  He just says the regulations must be reasonable and then outlines what he sees as reasonable regulation.

So the Heller case is one of those "I know it when I see it" cases.  It is settled law that it is constitutionally permissible to reasonably regulate fire arms.  The whole argument is about what is "reasonable" and what isn't.  One person's reasonable is another's unreasonable and vice versa. So when I listen to someone on either side I try to determine if they understand this.  Unfortunately, I find very few people on the pro-gun side that understand this.  So I conclude that they haven't read Heller and don't know what they are talking about.  In other words, I ground truth them and they come up short.

I recommend everyone read the odd court decision.  I'm sure that there are obscure cases having to do with some arcane or obscure corner of this or that where I would have no clue as to what's going on without specialist expertise.  But I don't read those kinds of decisions.  Judges in the cases whose decisions I read are trying very hard to make what they have to say accessible to the general public and I think they almost entirely succeed.

I do cheat but only in one small way.  Decisions are littered with "citations", references to a decision on some earlier case.  I don't pay attention to the actual citation.  After making the citation the Judge will tell us why some aspect of that case is important to this one.  I just take it on faith that the Judge is honestly and correctly interpreting the previous case.  I have found that generally Judges do play fair on this.  And if they don't then I depend on the dissenting opinion to point this out to me.  By taking this shortcut I may get misled but if it happens it doesn't happen very often.  And that's good enough for me.

I have mentioned that I have taken a stab at reading Galileo's proof and had more success reading On the Origin of Species.  In general I like to dabble in the foundations of science.  I have read other documents from the history of science.  Some years ago I read Optics by Sir Isaac Newton.  I found it pretty readable.  It concerns the properties of light.  Newton did some experiments with prisms and lenses and was able to come to some profound conclusions.  I think Optics is pretty accessible to the average person.  His other and more important work is Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (usually shortened to "Principia").  That is a heavy lift.  I am taking a second run at it but I do NOT recommend it to the average person.  I'm not sure I will be able to make my way all the way through it.  But I am going to give it a try.

Let me introduce my final suggestion by telling a story.  I used to read The Wall Street Journal In High School.  I know, that's weird.  But I did (and you don't have to).  But my point is this.  This was long enough ago that when I started reading the Journal the US ran a surplus balance of trade (flow of goods and services) and a surplus balance of payments (flow of money).  The Journal thought this was a good thing and got all up in arms when first the balance of trade and later the balance of payments went into deficit.  They argued that both of these were very bad.  And their arguments made perfect sense to me.

But then I waited.  The reason these were bad things was because they would inevitable result in other bad things happening to the US.  But somehow those other bad things never happened.  And the US has been running deficit balances with respect to both trade and payments for many decades now.  The bad things the Journal predicted never came to pass.  And that was a real lesson to me.  Remember their argument for why these developments (i.e. both trade and payments going from surplus to deficit) were completely convincing to me.  So there was nothing wrong with the argument except it ultimately turned out to be wrong.

So one of the things I look for is predictions.  The Journal predicted that bad things would happen.  That's good because that is a prediction and we can see if it comes to pass.  But it didn't come to pass and that means the initial argument has been cast into doubt.  I like predictions.  I mistrust anyone who believes so little in what they are saying that they will not make a prediction.  But a prediction is a two edged sword.  If it's right then kudos to the predictor.  But if it's wrong then a serious effort needs to be made to understand why the prediction didn't pan out.  I also mistrust people who won't admit it when a prediction goes wrong and then won't make a serious effort to understand why it went wrong.  I have seen little or nothing out of the financial community admitting that their predictions were wrong in these cases nor any analysis as to why they turned out to be wrong.

This thing I just talked about is something anyone can do.  All you have to do is note what predictions people make then let some time pass.  Then you go back and see whether the prediction panned out.  This is something the press should routinely do.  But they are erratic.  They sometimes will "go to the tape" and show someone predicting something that didn't pan out.  That's good but it is not enough.  They need to go the next step and that's no longer paying attention to someone who makes a lot of predictions that go wrong.  The press is about ratings.  They go with the people they think will generate ratings even if they have a demonstrated track record of getting it wrong.

This has gone on long enough that we are now in the situation where people flat our lie routinely.  Yet the press hangs on their every utterance because covering them is good for ratings.  And they don't contextualize them as known anti-experts (people who frequently get it wrong) or known liars.  People who don't have the time or inclination to keep track are left on their own.  And that has led to what can politely be called "confusion".

So everyone can engage in ground truthing.  In lots of areas it helps to have some mathematical ability.  But other areas do not require any mathematical ability.  No mathematical ability is required to read a legal opinion.  Reading legal opinions is a good way for figuring out who knows what they are talking about and who doesn't.  But you don't even need to do that.  You can jut play the memory game.  What did that person or group used to say and what are they saying now?  Republican back in the Cold War days were very proud of our open borders because walls are for oppressive Communist Regimes.  Now it's "build a wall" and "isn't Putin just great"?

But all this ground trothing is only important if knowing the truth is important.  If whatever your belief system tells you, what you have faith in, is more important than knowing what is true and what is false then ground truthing is counterproductive.  But if ground truthing is counterproductive then you don't get to use it to bolster your side of the argument.  You are either fact based or you are not.  You don't get to cherry pick.