The era ushered in by terrorism will not be a time of freedom
analysis
Anthony Holiday
Odd as it may seem, there is a category of professionals, drawn from every nation, class and creed, for whom terrorism and the global war against it have brought bountiful rewards in terms of profit and prestige and the promise of more of the same for so long as this strange conflict, which has the rest of us quite literally terrorised, continues to play itself out.
These people are often euphemistically classified as the “intelligence community” an inaccurate description, since many of them are not specially intelligent and their various warring or mutually mistrustful organisations scarcely constitute anything so cosy as a community.
They are, to speak bluntly, the spies of this planet, grouped usually, although not invariably, along national lines into various “agencies”. These may be large and powerful, like the United States’s CIA, Britain’s MI5 and MI6, and Israel’s Mossad, or they may be mere bit players, like Zimbabwe’s Central Intelligence Organisation or our own National Intelligence Agency. Additionally, many multinational companies have their own intelligence agencies, although they usually prefer to call what these bodies do “research”. And, of course, international terrorist gangs have intelligence wings and set great store by the work they do.
During the Cold War era, the spies enjoyed a festival of paranoid indulgence in the black arts of their trade. They spied on their enemies and on one another. They collected granaries full of information (much of it useless) and spread acres of “disinformation” (commonly known as lies). They instigated proxy wars and carried out assassinations. They did all this at costs of billions, provided by innocent taxpayers, whose interests they claimed to represent.
In the heady atmosphere provided by the Balance of Terror, the spies were forgiven many lapses by their masters, of which the US Secret Service’s failure to prevent the assassination of John F Kennedy, and the CIA’s failure to predict the fall of the Shah of Iran, are only two of the more glaring examples.
But when the Soviet monolith and its satellites collapsed, the knights of clandestinity, deprived of their raison d’tre, were in danger of being driven permanently into the cold. For then it seemed that the great-power conflict, which had provided the justification for spying on such an unprecedented scale, was permanently a thing of the past, and that the spies had best occupy themselves with catching international criminals, of whom international terrorists were only one species among many.
It seemed, moreover, that spying would lose much of its licence to invisibility. For politically correct discourse was all concerned with “openness”, “transparency” and “accountability”. Freedom of information legislation was being promulgated with gay abandon. The traditional spy, like Dracula fleeing the sunlight, had begun to seek sanctuary in the relatively secure twilight of private sector security establishments.
The terrorist atrocities of September 11 and the reprisals that are continuing as I write have changed all that. The same ambience of chilly hell as blighted the era of superpower duelling is with us once again and threatens to double and redouble itself, permitting the spies to play what Kipling called their “great game” to their black hearts’ content.
In order to understand why US President George W Bush’s choice of the name Operation Enduring Freedom for his campaign against terrorism is so much of a bad joke, one needs to understand how spy agencies are organised and how the spies go about their business. That business has three interlocking parts or phases: information gathering, analysis and distribution and administration.
The first phase requires agents and their case officers or “handlers”. The former may be trained, semi-trained or untrained and are the chief sources of concealed information. Usually they are ordinary but treacherous individuals, well placed to betray their countries or employers in return for cash or to satisfy some ideological craving. They are answerable to a handler, who is a trained spy, working undercover, who passes on what his agents give him to a “station chief”. Station chiefs and their officers often use diplomatic cover. It was usual, for instance, for the MI6 station chief in the US to be the British ambassador to Washington.
Next come the analysts, who must sift and prioritise not only information gleaned from agents, but also that obtained from spy satellites, electronic listening devices and the ordinary news media. They are the spy industry’s intellectuals, university-trained historians and political scientists. Among them, there may well be some first-class brains, but, for the most part, they are pretty mediocre beings, frightened little backroom boys and girls, who couldn’t face day-to-day realities for an hour without the thrill of conspiracy to get them by.
Finally, we have the administrators, the committee men, who will prepare what the intellectuals have pre-prepared for presentation to select politicians, company chairpersons and heads of state and who may also take it upon themselves to decide what it is good for their employers to see.
Couple all this hum of activity with counter-espionage and the legislation needed to sustain it, and you have the material for a library full of new John Le Carre titles. Add to the brew the circumstance that this new war, unlike any of its predecessors, is a conflict without frontiers, let alone rules of engagement, and you have a recipe for a universal culture in which deceit and interrogation-room techniques have become valued art forms.
The newest of our new world orders promises to be an Orwellian place, where our rights to privacy will shrink as we have not seen them shrunk before, where secrecy is valued above truth, and where suspicion triumphs over trust. Contrary to Bush’s promises, the era which has been ushered in by terrorism and the war against it will not be a time in which freedom can endure for most of us, or where people of good will can pursue their lives without many a fearful backward glance.
Dr Holiday teaches philosophy at the University of the Western Cape’s School of Government and at the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris