I haven’t got around to blogging about the parallel Plame/Kelly/Wilkie scandals, but I didn’t have a well-thought out reason for not doing so either. Nathan Newman supplies the gap (see also here). To restate Nathan’s key points more generically
- The main purpose of secrecy laws is to protect governments against their own citizens, so breaking these laws isn’t such a big deal
- Scandals are a distraction from the real issues
I wrote an essay on the spy myth a couple of years ago, concluding as follows
The spy myth clearly served the interests of intelligence agencies, which prospered during the 20th century more than any set of spies before them. The real beneficiaries, however, were the counterintelligence agencies or, to dispense with euphemisms, the secret police, of both Western and Communist countries. The powers granted to them for their struggle against armies of spies were used primarily against domestic dissidents. Terms such as ‘agent of influence’ were used to stigmatise anyone whose activities, however open and above-board, could be represented as helpful to the other side.
The supposed role of the secret police, to keep secrets from opposing governments, was, as we have seen, futile. Secret police, and the associated panoply of security laws, Official Secrets Acts and so forth, were much more successful in protecting their governments’ secrets from potentially embarrassing public scrutiny in their own countries.
As spies and the associated fears have faded in their public mind, their place has been taken by terrorists. In many ways, this is a reversion to the 19th century, when the bomb-throwing anarchist was a focus of popular fears and the subject of novels by such writers as Chesterton and Conrad.
As the attacks of September 11 showed us, the threat posed by terrorists is real. Nevertheless, even if terrorists were to mount attacks ten times as deadly in the future, they would still present the citizens of the Western World with less danger than we accept from our fellow-citizens every time we step into our cars.
If the century of the spy has taught us anything, it is that we need to assess the dangers posed by terrorists coolly and calmly rather than giving way to panic.
John Quiggin 
The 20 th C saw the advent of totalitarian revolutionaries who used unprecedented violence to undermine and makeover liberal societies.
Totalitarian goverments used the freedoms of the Open Society to undermine liberal insitutions.
This is a public fact, as the revelations from the Soviet archives prove.
The Cold War Revisited
The fate of Czechoslovakia indicates what can happen when guards are relaxed.
Unfortunately Pr Q overlooks this, perhaps because the best intelligence work is by it’s nature impossible to credit. No doubt it is an unscientific metaphysic but the CIA makes the possibly self-serving claim that only their failures are publicised, their successes are secret.
Regarding the claim that secret police harassed domestic dissident, this occurred in the McCarthyite period, as a reaction to overlaxity in the Popular Front period. The overall level of infringements was still fairly low, especially when compared to comparable outrages occurring behind the Iron Curtain.
Pr Q would have been standing on stronger ground if he made the case against the use and abuse of secret police to Third World states which were subject to First & Second world ideological struggle. Here it is clear that spy agencies overstepped the mark for political, rather than security, reasons.
Regarding rational threat-aversion, in the 21 st C, Fundamentalist Reactionaris pose a comparable threat to Totalist Revolutionaries, especially to vulnerable societies in transition.
Ask the Afghanis or Iranians what life under the Taliban or Shiite clerics is like.
Modern terrorism is much more threatening to modern interconnected societies than was 19 th C anarchist bomb throwing owing to the synergy between:
technologies of exterminist bio & radio WMDs
ideologies of fundamentalist appocalypse
This can be seen by the power black outs, SARS and mad cow disease.
Pr Q would not be so sanguine about terrorists had the 911 planes detained on the runways incinerated the whitehouse/capitol building, or contained WMDs.
If a fundamentalist coup took over Pakistan or Arabia, a fairly significant probablity, there would be hell to pay.
I conclued that a certain amount of repression and surveillance is a reasonable tradeoff to avoid these gruesome fates.
Jack, I don’t know whether you’re referring to 1939, 1948 or even 1993, but I can’t imagine what you are saying spies had to do with the fate of Czechoslovakia.
I remain much more frightened of the USA than of any combination of Osama, Saddam, Hambali etc., etc.
In common sense terms, a spy is simply a “secret agent of a foreign power”. In this sense, the overthrow of democracy in Czecho could not have occurred without Soviet spies and agents of influence assisting the anti-democratic Czech communist coup.
Czechoslovakian democracy was undermined by Soviet-backed communist subversives in 1948. These operators were secretly acting on behalf of a foreign power, the Soviet Union, and betrayed their nation to to it’s enemies and plunged it into the grip of totalitarian despotism and bureaucratised poverty.
The subsequent tragic history of Czechoslovakia is too well known and painful to bear repeating.
Suffice it to say that Czech democracy would have stood a good chance of surviving Stalin’s political pressure and Red Army military had resolute action been taken against communist subversives.
Certainly, this was the case in Austria which was subjected to comparable pressure by communist agents but was able to withstand it owing, in part, to the actions of intelligence services – see the Third Man.
The Czech example disproves the positive half of Pr Q’ “intelligence services don’t protect democracy” thesis.
The veracity of the negative implication of Pr Q’s thesis, that a surfeit of espionage vigilance can undermine a liberal western state, is a seperate question. I am unaware of any domestic intelligence service undermining a full-fledged western democracy, so I doubt it.
Jack, your comments nicely illustrate the slide from “spy” to “subversive”.
As regards the situation after WWII, the role of secret police was negligible in determining the outcome. What mattered was boots on the ground. Everywhere in the Soviet occupation zone went Communist, mostly through coups like that in Czechoslovakia. This didn’t happen in Austria because it was under a four-power occupation and there wasn’t a viable zone the Russians could hive off and grab as they did in Germany. The spies running about the place achieved nothing other than to provide excuses for repression, notably including the construction of the Berlin Wall and the numerous military coups financed by the CIA.
I think you’re in fantasyland when you suggest that there should have been “resolute action against communist subversives” in Czechoslovakia, a country occupied by the Red Army. If you can produce concrete evidence of the role of spies in Austria, I’ll be interested to look at it, but references to spy novels as sources of authority merely proves my point.
Pr Q’s solution to the problem of the utility of intelligence services in democratic societies is marred by general fallacy and particular historical falsehood. He therefore cannot use it to bolster his case to demonstrate the non-utility or disutility of secret police, counter-espionage. The question of the utility of counter-sbversive agencies is harder to prove.
It is Pr Q revisionist history of Czecho in 1948 that floats “in fantasy land”. He is correct to claim that “Everywhere in the Soviet occupation zone went Communist”. But he is incorrect to infer that Czecho, in 1948, was:
Pr Q gets the historical cause and effect exactly back-to-front. Czecho, in 1948, was not in a substantive Soviet Occupation Zone. The Red Army liberated Czecho from the Wermacht but had largely withdrawn by the end of 1946. At the time, the Soviet UNion had no serious “boots on [Czecho] ground”. There was thus a crucial two year period when Soviet “boots on the ground” did not determine the political outcome. The Czech communists took power by internal coup (subversion), not external force (invasion). The democratic Czech government in 1948 was composed of communist and non-communist elements. The latter subverted the government on behalf of their Soviet masters. Some “resolute action” against foreign subversives might have saved the day. The true historical record is presented here
The failure of the Czech authorities to take resolutely anti-subversive and counter-espionage action “nicely illustrates” Pr Q’s general conceptual fallacy: which is to contrive an artificial political distinction between spy and subversive. Spies, traitors, wreckers and subversive may all have different aspects and functions. In an Open Society, in times of pervasive conflict, conspiratorial foreign-inspired agents all have similar political valency – to give aid and comfort to totalitarian enemies.
This Czech example also nicely illustrates what Popper called the “Paradox of Democracy”. Open Society persons (like Masaryk) naively trust anti-Open Society forces (like Communists) which in fact causs the downfall of the Open Society. How can democratic regimes defend themselves without subverting their own foundations?. (pdf) The Czech democratic authorities took Pr Q’s Kantian approach and paid with for it with their lives and their nations liberty. This account indicates what happens when Open Societies let their guard down:
I would concede that the post-war Austrian is not a good example to prove the utility of coounter-espionage services. Graham Greene’s Third Man was largely conceived as “an entertainment” rather than a dramatic reconstruction of a real problem. And it is true that, as Dr Knopfelmacher says, intelligence services, in times of civil consenus, are “essentially comic” insitutions.
A better example of democratic counter-subversion was in Germany during the the late-teens of the 20th C. German Centre-Left democratic government supressed Extreme-Left anti-democratic revolutioanries. The German Social Democrats resolute action against the Spartakist uprising saved Germany from a commmunist-bolshevik takeover comparable to the one that was destroying Russia’s democracy at the same time. It is true that Noske/Ebert used Freikorp to get rid of the Luxembourg/Liebknecht et al, which was certainly playing with fire. As a Social Democrat, it is Pr Q political duty to show solidarity to his fellow partisans in the struggle against the deadly virus of Bolshevism. The tragedy of Germany in the early-thirties is that the Centre-Right did not take the same “resolute action” against Extreme Right subversives et al. This would have saved Germany from Nazism.
These examples go some way to proving the utility of intelligence services, secret police and counter-insurgency systems against the conspiratorial agents of totalitarianism, particularly in times of civil conflict. Military Intelligence corps exist for the same purpose in active theatres of conflict. Does Pr Q suggest that they are also useless?
I am shameless enough to use this conclusion to introduce a hoary old bit of political poesy to rhetorically drive home my point about the need for centrists to practise eternal vigilance in the defence of liberty from attacks by it’s extremist enemies:
Hey Jack, who gave you permission to quote from Billy Butler? He’s on our side. Not fair.
I am dismayed that a hard-headed social democrat, like Pr Q, appears to falling into the trap of what Sydney Hook called “ritalistic liberalism” in his attempt to recapitulate the Origins of the Cold War. He appears to go too far excoriating the non-communists, and implicitly exonerating the communists, in culpability for this tragedy.
It is certainly true that Stalin had legitimate concerns about the resurgence of fascism in Central Europe. But this has nothing much to do with the examples of CIA meddling that Pr Q cites.
Pr Q steers perilously close to trotting out the Old Left “anti-fascist barrier” party line for the communist construction of the Berlin Wall:
The Berlin Wall in particular, and the Iron Curtain in general, were erected to prevent East Germans in particular, and Easter Europeans in general, from fleeing communist-collectivist dictatorships.
Period.
If communism had been socially effective at producing anything other than poverty, tyranny and anti-communists then there would have been no need for the Wall, CIA or no CIA.
Then Pr Q seems to lurch towards New Left revisionist history when he claims that
somehow triggered communist repression in E Europe
This is odd as Communism and repression go hand in hand back to 1917 and predate the formation of the CIA and it’s “numerous military coups”. Perhaps the CIA is technologically advanced but it is not yet able to master time travel.
It is true that the CIA financed coups, tampered with elections, even installed dictators etc. It is, ceteris paribus, undesirable to undermine civic processes on security grounds. But this only points to the old machiavellian problem: fight fire with fire, set a thief to catch a thief, destroy the village to save it, etc. Illiberal measures to protect liberalism are not absolutely bad per se, it depends on the circumstances.
For example, it CIA coups and anti-subversion was bad in Chile. But the CIA’s post WWII counter-espionage in both Italy and France played an important part in keeping totaliarian-sympathising communist parties out of power, and constrained them from making anti-Western mischief. This was a boon to civic society in both nations, whose fragile constitutions had been under totalitarian threat for the better part of the 20 th C.
These nations are only now recovering from the mischief the Extreme Left inflicted on their civic cultures.
This stuff is all coming out now in the revelations from the Soviet archives. I recommend that PR Q reviews the record before he makes the mistake of relying on discredited Old Left party lines the tired cliches of New Left revisionist history.
Jack, you surely don’t think that I am suggesting that the Berlin Wall was actually built to keep out spies, as claimed by the East German government. The term “excuse” is normally taken to mean “spurious pretext” rather than “justification”, and that was I how I intended it.
On your other point, you say
So if the Communists already controlled the army and the militia, , who are you suggesting was going to take the resolute action you think appropriate? If the Red Army was largely withdrawn after 1946, it was only because they had done the work needed to secure control. If this had been threatened, they could easily have returned, as they did in 1968.
Given the politically fluid situation between 1945 and 1948, it is just possible that a mass public mobilisation could have staved off the coup. The idea of using an internal repressive apparatus that was already (as you’ve noted) controlled or heavily infiltrated by communists is nonsensical.
I am not engaging in this “Cold War History war” merely for the sake of scoring ideological points against Left-liberals. The similarities between the Bolshevik communist post WW II infiltration and overthrow of vulnerable Western civil societies and Islamacist fundamentalists seeking to infiltrate and overthrow vulnerable Southern are striking. Bali is an example of the “softening up” process, comparable to what Czecho received, and Islamic movements have comparable support in Indonesia now to what Bolshevik movements had in Czechoslovakia in 1946. The big difference is that Saudi Arabia, unlike Soviet Russia, serves as a covert, rather than overt, motherland for the Reaction. If SA were to fall, all hell would break loose.
Pr Q is concerned that I am accusing him of being a communist sympathiser, and he hastens to set the record straight:
I did indicate my basic belief that Pr Q was innocent of this charge by using the construction “steers perilously close”. But Pr Q’s constuction was sufficiently ambiguous to require clarification to prevent unnecessary ideological controversy. I am pleased to hear that spelled out and I withdraw any implication that Pr Q meant to deliberately rationalise communist tyranny.
My problem with Pr Q reasoning is that he seems to think that no conceivable actions on the part of Czecho non-communist forces, including loyalist members of the security agencies, could have made a difference to the communist onslaught. THis becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Because Czech people then took the kind of advice that Pr Q is handing out now, that is what happend.
Pr Q’s analysis of the politico-historical situation in Czecho at the time is evidently flawed since he (implicitly) concedes my refutation of his claim that Soviet “boots on the ground” decided the political issue in Czecho. To retrieve the situation he goes onto attribute to me a statement which I neither endorsed, not provided source for:
I quoted the phrase “facilitated the communists’ efforts to reorganize” which is alot weaker than the “controlled” construction that Pr Q relies on. I will concede that the Czecho anti-totalitarian forces were not very well-organised in post WW II Czecho. This is borne out by the experience of my teacher, Frank Knopfelmacher, recounted by his son, who in 1946
THis appears to give PrQ grounds to mock my suggestion that loyalist Czechs might have resisted communist subversion:
A loyal Czecho. state security apparatus might have made a fight of it, provided that Western ideological and economic support was forthcoming at the time. Counsels of despair, lke Pr Q’s, would lessen that likelihood. I am sure that Pr Q has heard of Truman doctrine:
Was the Truman doctrine “nonsensical” to offer assistance, including intelligence & counter-subversion aid, to “free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures”. NATO and the intelligence networks behind the Armies, was precisely set up to counter the kind of communist subversion, of which the Czecho revolution was a text-book example of.
In fact, local internal-security schemes, & US external containment pressure, proved succesful in preventing communist subversion in W Europe. The Communists controlled key sections of the French and Italian political systems, and had spies in both states. But “resolute action” helped to save these states from further Communist power-moves. The example of the Czech communist subversion very fresh in their minds:
As Pr Q acknowledges, Stalinist communist are never to be trusted with state power.
Right now there is a similar struggle for the hearts and minds of Islamic civil society going on throughout the southern hemisphere. They need all the Western economic support, and intelligence back-up, they can get if they are to resist the siren call of Islamic fundamentalist theocrats.
A more determined effort by internal and external forces may, or may not, have saved Czecho from being lost to the Communists. (Defeatism would not have helped.) But the history of communist attacks on, and Western defences of, vulnerable societies in transition supports the contention that the temporary subversion of formal democratic processes by security apparats may be a price worth paying to prevent the permanent destruction of sustantial civic societies by fanatical theologues addicted to gynocide.
Scandal
As far as I can see, the Right seems to be winning the scandal wars just at the moment. I didn’t follow the Plame-Wilson scandal the first time around, so I can’t really tell how damaging or otherwise the…