Law, Power and the CIA

Henry Crumpton is a paradox: he's a famous spy. When he retired from the Clandestine Service in 1995, the Washington Post identified him as the central subject in at least three major studies of the war on terrorism, so his role was at very least an open secret in Washington DC for some time. After all, if Bob Woodward and the entire staff of the 9/11 Commission knew his name and his game, then there had to be others, too.

By all accounts, including his own in the recently-published The Art of Intelligence, Crumpton brought an innovative and aggressive approach to fighting terrorist groups, especially al-Qaeda. As the head of the effort to find and kill Osama bin Laden in 2002, he combined elite paramilitary troops with CIA operatives to revolutionize the way the United States thought about fighting wars against "non-state actors."

The most important point of his book, in my view, is that intelligence plays an absolutely essential role in foreign policy and security decision-making. Crumpton makes it clear that the most important kind of intelligence comes from human sources -- spies. These people can be contact with foreign governments  or diplomats, but the best are "unilateral sources," people recruited by the CIA to provide information. Electronic eavesdropping and overhead surveillance can supplement this HUMINT, as it's called, but only people can select and obtain the kind of up-to-date and significant stuff that leads to good decisions.

Of course, this kind of thing is illegal. The CIA is violating international law by recruiting the sources, and the sources are breaking the laws of their own countries by spying for someone else. Espionage also can include pretty nefarious activity: extortion, bribery, theft, murder. Crumpton wants us to see these facts and confront them. He wants us to accept that fighting bad guys sometimes requires action that would otherwise make us queasy. For the most part, he has me convinced.

But Crumpton misses the other side of that coin. His primary objective is justice. Evil-doers need to be "zeroed out," and he makes no bones about the fact that he believes Jesus wants him to kill them all. I'm not so sure the Gospels support his religious view, and I am certain that the law does not accept his methods. When Crumpton expresses his anger over the fact that the Clinton Administration would not simply shoot a missile at bin Laden because the CIA was almost certain where he was and and was OK withe number of bystanders also likely to be killed, he misses an important part of the government's job: to balance justice and law.

Sometimes the rule of law and justice are incompatible. Revenge may be just but illegal, and spying may be the same way. Crumpton knows, and even says on occasion, that spies should never make policy but only provide information, but he then goes on to describe times when he, as a spy, made policy or complained about the fact that others did not reach conclusions the way a spy would.

Crumpton did his job. I'm thankful his job was not to make more decisions than he did.