U.S. Intelligence Agencies Need Spies in the Field

We have no clue what is going on the ground in geopolitical hotspots

By Chuck Warren

There have been two events over the past couple of months that should worry us about the state of our intelligence community: The Iran-Israel War and the release of the Russia investigation files. These two go together, and I will explain why.

In the 1990s, two things happened: the Cold War ended, and the internet became a thing. So, funding for the intelligence community decreased, thinking that there was no longer a threat in the foreign world.

The result was that we lost spies in the field, and our intelligence became mostly reliant on hacking foreign governments. This meant that the U.S. government began stationing our intelligence operatives more and more in the D.C. area. This helped save money on the surface because you no longer had to spend a lot of money training many agents to go out and live in foreign countries. There could be fewer agents just hacking signals. I know, really short sighted.

New problems arose as a result. First, as the intelligence community lived in the D.C. area, it became more invested in domestic politics. Think about it. If you are living in Baghdad or Beijing as an undercover agent, you do not really spend much time caring about partisan politics in Congress. But if you live in the D.C. area, you can hardly avoid it even if you wanted to.

Second, hacking has its place in the intelligence world, but it can only take you so far. What you miss out on by not having field agents is the mood on the ground, ability to establish connections with important and influential people in target countries, and recruiting assets.

Human connection is indispensable, even and especially in the world of espionage. Imagine if you were a foreign government official whom the CIA was recruiting. Would you trust a faceless and nameless voice trying to blackmail you using dirt they had from hacking your email more or an American whom you met regularly? Everybody trusts a person they know more.

By keeping people in D.C., our intelligence community became more politicized and less capable, just look at the Russia investigation.

Now look at Israel. One reason its war against Iran was so successful is that Israel first killed every senior commander, so Iran could not coordinate a response during the war. Many of them were killed using drones operated inside Iran by Mossad agents and assets. They knew who these people were and where they lived because there were Israeli agents in Iran who had gained this information.

Now imagine if we go to war with China tomorrow. Would it not be nice if we could kill the senior Chinese commanders on Day 1 so they could not coordinate their plans?

It is not just that. We also know very little about our enemy’s societies. The Iraq War is a very good example. On the eve of the invasion, the United States had four spies in all of Iraq. So we went in quite blind. During the war, Condoleezza Rice was asked about the Faith Campaign during an interview, and she did not know what it was. The Faith Campaign was a 1990s’ Saddam Hussein initiative to support religious extremism in Iraq. The most famous alumnus of the program was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder of the Islamic State, whom Trump would kill later. The extremist insurgency that became such a problem during the war was because of that program, but we did not expect it because we did not know about it. And we did not know about it because, right when Saddam started the program, we stopped having agents in Iraq.

I could go through a long list of what could go wrong in the future because we no longer have spies, emphasis on could. Honestly, I do not know because I am not spending time in Beijing or Moscow or Tehran. Which is okay because that is not my job. The problem is that the U.S. government does not either, but it is its job to know.

Or as Donald Rumsfeld would say, "there are unknown unknowns," and we are not trying to figure them out.

Earlier in the piece, I said that we saved money on the surface by changing the intelligence community's structure. It is because the budget looks smaller on an accounting sheet. But think of how much money we would have saved:

• Just in Iraq, if we knew about the problems we would face during the war.

• Or how much money we would have saved if we knew that Russia would invade Ukraine and could’ve deterred the war instead of funding it.

• Or how much more expensive a war with China will be because we know very little about China—and China cleaned out the few spies we had back in 2017.

We thought we were saving money when we changed how we did intelligence, but we ended up spending many times more on wars and divided domestic politics.

A superpower needs a strong and competent intelligence community. There is a lot to learn from the Israelis. But we can start by sending more people out of the D.C. area and into countries we might go to war with.

Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Chuck Warren only and not his co-host Sam Stone or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.