The debate about the proper function of intelligence in the US is as old as the nation. Several founding fathers, indeed, even patriarch George Washington, recognized the need for espionage to be kept secret from the Continental Congress—with all the attendant risks of abuse—to help win the war for independence. The debate then centered on whether the new country could free itself from sullying Old World intrigues and who would, or even should, oversee a secret apparatus for the new republic.
Today, intelligence is a permanent fixture in the US government. Now the debate is about the appropriate scope and reach of national security intelligence on balance with the protection of American civil liberties. This is the “constant crisis” in Jeffrey P. Rogg’s sweeping new book, The Spy and the State: The History of American Intelligence.
The book is a work of even-handed historical writing by an author with deep roots in national security studies (Rogg has taught as a member of the faculty of the US Naval War College, the Citadel, and the Joint Special Operations University). The book is also a balanced, thoughtful, and well-grounded discussion of the tumultuous growth of the national security intelligence bureaucracy, the professionalization of US intelligence, and the evolution of intelligence oversight.
The Spy and the State is a significant accomplishment of genuine scholarship. The author’s deep understanding of the US Intelligence Community (USIC) is evident in his excellent use of a wealth of primary sources, including published and archival materials ranging from government documents and period newspapers to relevant case law and the unclassified records of individual US intelligence agencies. Rogg also makes good use of secondary sources to provide insight and assessments from authors with special expertise, including the history of wartime US intelligence and of specific agencies. While The Spy and the State sometimes reads like a textbook, with some sluggish writing, Rogg is a disciplined researcher keen on offering detail. The book is well documented with more than 80 pages of notes and an outstanding bibliography. This book, then, will be welcomed by both scholars and students seeking to enhance and enlarge their understanding of the USIC.
Civil-Intelligence Relations
The Spy and the State is a history of the USIC seen “through the lens of civil-intelligence relations and the major themes of control, competition, coordination, professionalization, and politicization.” For this work, Rogg adapted the ground-breaking analog of civil-military relations advanced by Samuel P. Huntington in his book The Soldier and the State (1957). It’s a worthwhile model for Rogg to have acknowledged and adopted. Mirroring Huntington’s work, Rogg shows how the development of intelligence as a profession in the twentieth century, and attendant civil oversight, can regulate the role of intelligence in the national security state.
This work explores the USIC’s history by examining US intelligence in each of four wartime eras: the Revolutionary War to the Civil War; the Civil War to the end of World War II; the Cold War; and the present, post-Cold War era. This approach is more than a nod to the march of time. It acknowledges the dominant role military intelligence played in creating the USIC. Today, an estimated 80 percent of the nation’s classified intelligence spending is earmarked for military intelligence activities. Moreover, “each successive war,” Rogg explains, “saw the country engage in intelligence activities on an even greater scale, and each postwar period revealed the challenges that retrenchment posed.” With the era-by-era approach, the author illustrates how the changing nature of the US role in the world led to the establishment of the nation’s permanent intelligence community.
Bureaucracy and Rivalry
Rogg describes how the USIC grew by fits and starts, hamstrung as much by a failure to establish a profession of intelligence as by rivalries across government bureaus assigned various intelligence functions. For example, the author recounts episodes in the bureaucratic wrangle between the departments of State, Justice, and Treasury for control of various aspects of intelligence. For a time, Secret Service agents were “loaned” to other executive departments to pursue domestic law enforcement and counterespionage investigations, while still reporting to their managers at Treasury. That unsatisfactory arrangement spurred the Justice Department to create its own secret service, the Bureau of Investigation (BOI, later FBI).
The tangle of competing interests, Rogg observes in a telling insight, was made even more contentious because executive departments unilaterally formed their own intelligence services. Congress had no say in the creation, organization, and mission of the Secret Service, and the BOI, much less a say in the War Department’s Military Information Section (eventually the Military Intelligence Division of the Army General Staff in WWI), or the Navy Department’s Office of Naval Intelligence. Ultimately, only two of the current eighteen US intelligence agencies—the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—would be chartered by Congress.
Rogg contends that before the onset of the Cold War era, every intelligence service in government was “straddling a fault-line in American civil-intelligence relations,” a blurry area between acceptable foreign collection and detested domestic surveillance. Various agencies, and their respective executive departments, all attempted to collect foreign intelligence, conduct domestic law enforcement investigations, surveil American citizens, and launch counter-espionage operations in the US. This, Rogg explains, was an outgrowth not only of the lack of coordination between executive departments, but of “mission creep.” He gives the example that when Secret Service agents uncovered a threat to President Cleveland, the Service simply expanded its role beyond investigations of counterfeiting and financial crimes to include protection of the president. Rogg argues that unbridled expansion and duplication were also the result of the failure of Congress to exercise any effective oversight of the growing intelligence community as the nation entered the twentieth century.
Permanence and Oversight
The Spy and the State offers readers an illuminating record of the spotty, ineffectual, and often politicized nature of oversight of the intelligence community. Rogg makes the case that the USIC in its first historical era remained “discretionary, disorganized, uncoordinated and unprofessional.” The author also describes how the intelligence community expanded in times of war and contracted in times of peace. He then neatly traces the robust growth of the nation’s intelligence capabilities in World War II and shows how that growth and the onset of the Cold War marked the end of another historical era.
At this pivotal point in the history of the USIC, Rogg ascribes an outsized influence to William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the wartime head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The author contends Donovan “permanently transformed the American intelligence system,” and “set the conditions for an independent intelligence organization and, at long last, [a] profession.” It is more likely that while the influential and well-connected Donovan was then in the right place at the right time, the exigencies of the Cold War, the catastrophic intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor, and growing Congressional discomfort with the power of the executive branch spurred legislation that created the CIA in 1947. Rogg points out that legislation created two specific statutory missions for the CIA: to coordinate the activities of the USIC and furnish intelligence analysis to inform policymaking.
The fledgling CIA, however, attracted OSS veterans to its ranks who were intent on “seizing covert action” as part of its mission set. In so doing, the agency “absorbed an organization and culture that undermined its original statutory missions.” Rogg charts the uneven course of the CIA’s early covert actions. He acknowledges that policymakers steered the agency towards misguided forays and outright interference, for example, with the internal affairs of Burma, Guatemala, and Iran. By hewing to historical records, the author easily dispels any lingering notion that these were activities of rogue elements of the CIA; covert action was an integral part of Cold War strategy.
The Spy and the State recounts the covert missions of the 1950s and the agency’s soiled record in the 1960s and 1970s. The CIA’s mind-control experiments, surveillance of journalists and students, assassination plots, and other domestic intelligence operations did not escape public exposure. Media accounts spurred Congressional inquiry, and the Church and Pike Committee hearings were at the forefront to establish permanent legislative oversight. In the most telling part of his book, Rogg makes a clear-eyed account of how abuses and blatantly illegal actions by the USIC eroded public trust in government and fostered suspicion of the power of the administrative state.
Despite the growing professionalization of the intelligence community, and more vigorous oversight, the author shows that some of the most egregious abuses of the reach and power of the USIC occurred in the post-Cold War era. Rogg argues that “during the Global War on Terror, the government unleashed its powerful intelligence apparatus, undermining civil liberties and eroding constitutional rights in the process.” Enabled by the PATRIOT and Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Acts, new guidance issued by then Attorney General Michael Mukasey, for example, blurred the line between law enforcement and domestic intelligence. As a result, the FBI was able to gain access to NSA’s powerful surveillance tools. The agency’s PRISM program collected information from private companies and automatically sucked up data from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Skype, YouTube, Apple, and others. The Bureau then expanded its use of National Security Letters (NSL)—administrative rather than judicial subpoenas—to collect information from tens of thousands of individuals each year. Because the NSLs also contain non-disclosure provisions, the FBI now had “the power both to investigate and to silence.”
The Spy and the State is as much of a historical account as it is a work of keen contemporary observation and incisive commentary. Informed by the judgements of history, the author in his conclusions argues that the combination of the national security state, its attendant administrative state, omnipresent surveillance technology, Big Data and AI, and a massive intelligence apparatus looms as an authoritarian threat in American civil-intelligence affairs. While Americans have often been able to reset civil-intelligence relations after a threat has passed or egregious abuses have been checked, Rogg is far less sanguine about future relations.
“The American people,” Rogg warns readers, “must assert their role in the US intelligence system more directly in the future than they have in the past—their liberty and security depend on it.”
Log in
