American Espionage: A History
Intelligence community Paper 1
How does Mark Lowenthal explain the absence of a substantial organized national civilian intelligence presence in the United States before the Cold War? To what degree are their redundancies in the US intelligence community? Why is that? How did the Vietnam War influence not only the US intelligence community, but also presidential politics regarding intelligence activities?
The United States is a new country who’s needs for non-war time intelligence only really emerged near the end of the 19th century as it became a world power. Before this the US did engage in intelligence gathering, but it was almost solely for the purpose of wining wars. The need for cohesive national intelligence community really became apparent during the Cuban Spanish American war, when the United States scrambled to gather intelligence. With no previous preparation it was a haphazard attempt that largely did not succeed in gathering useful information for the war. As the 20th century dawned and the united states emerged victorious from that war, they were now a world power with territories all around the globe. They could no longer afford to be in the dark about threats around the world. The occupation of the Philippines for example, was a large reason that they needed to keep engaging in intelligence gathering outside of war time[1]. As the United States occupied the country and sought to pacify it, they needed to gather information on possible threats inside their occupied territories and the regions of the world that they were in.
The United States’ intelligence community is made up of many different agencies, with different needs, but also overlapping responsibilities. This leads to redundancies where resources are being used in different places in order to achieve the same thing twice. It can be hard to identify these wasteful redundancy’s because of scope and complexity of the intelligence community as a whole. It has been argued that this issue could be address through a system of competitive analysis, where different groups compete with each other in order to identify these redundancies and that this competition would incentivize efficiency. However, this hasn’t always worked as this was done in order to identify weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the information on that that was acquired ended up being quite clearly false[2].
The Vietnam war also had a profound impact on the intelligence community. The perceived failures of the war led to a period of intense congressional accountability. Many buried actions that the CIA had taken in the two decades leading up to the end of the Vietnam war were uncovered, such as domestic espionage of civil rights members and programs of assassination as part of anti-communist cold war efforts. This led to a sense that the intelligence community was not under the control of congress[3]. As politicians began to see the intelligence community as a rouge element that was potentially damaging not only US foreign policy, but also their chances at reelection they made efforts to bring everything into the public eye. This period of congressional accountability led to the declassification of CIA programs and led to a decrease in the use of the CIA in foreign policy matters.
[1] Vasquez , Dr Paul. “The Intelligence Community.” YouTube, (minute 16), January 9, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmAT9tLHrj4&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=DrJPV3.
[2] Vasquez , Dr Paul. “The Intelligence Community.” YouTube, (minute 57), January 9, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmAT9tLHrj4&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=DrJPV3.
[3] Vasquez , Dr Paul. “The Intelligence Community.” YouTube, (minute 28), January 9, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmAT9tLHrj4&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=DrJPV3.