Quick Hit On The CIA

Late yesterday Red State ran a piece on a topic that’s been getting some attention—again, since it goes back some years. But the problem is an ongoing problem:

The CIA Blames Incompetence for Losing Dozens of Agents but Is That the Real Story?

To give you a flavor for what this is about:

Yesterday, the New York Times ran a story that was frightening in a couple of aspects. First, it reported that the C.I.A. had sent a top-secret cable to all stations warning them that “troubling” numbers of agents and informants were being rounded up by our opponents and either executed or flipped into double agents.

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Ominously for a story focusing on sloppy handling of secret information, the existence of the cable and its contents only stayed hidden for a few days.

It has been widely reported that the C.I.A.’s covert networks in Communist China have been largely rolled up. Back in May 2017, the C.I.A. admitted that it had lost at least 18 agents inside of China. The operative word there is “admitted,” as the known body count quickly ballooned to at least three dozen. There was a brief spasm of counterintelligence work on our side (see Former C.I.A. Agent Busted for Passing Secrets to China and Arrested C.I.A. Officer Possessed Names of Covert Agents and Sit Down for This One — Former C.I.A. Officer Arrested as Chinese Spy: You’ll Never Guess Who Hired Him) and then things went back to normal, see While Eric Swalwell Was Sleeping With a Chinese Spy Adam Schiff Put Him in Charge of C.I.A. Oversight.

However, what I want to draw your attention to is the two CIA recruiting videos lower down in the article: “Humans of CIA”. Follow the link to watch the videos. The author includes those videos as an example of what he suspects is a big problem at the Agency:

It is not too much to presume that some of the exotic personnel choices they’ve made have caught up with them.

OK, now contrast that notion, which reflects the Left mantra that “diversity makes us stronger.” Actually, no it doesn’t. VDH addresses that today and I’m suggesting that you read his article in combination with the the one about the CIA. Because the personnel problems at the Agency are endemic within the Federal government. Remember all those FBI agents “taking a knee”? Consider this from VDH:

Some elites believe the founders’ Constitution is in dire need of radical deletions and alterations to fit their own utopian visions. So, they imagine an evolving Constitution to synchronize with supposedly a fluid, mutable—and always progressing—human nature. They are ignorant that the core of the Constitution does not change because our own natural, core sense of right and wrong does not either.

Nor do citizens hand over their first allegiances to an abstract worldwide commonwealth—as if half of its membership are not illiberal theocracies, autocracies, and monarchies. Such a tired “citizens of the world” dream dates to Socratic utopianism.

Yet neither the defunct League of Nations nor the United Nations has ever offered any credible blueprint for viable transnational governance. …

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… blanket rejection of American customs is admittedly now a collective narcissistic tic—… Sometimes citizens can do as much harm to their commonwealth by violating customs and traditions as by breaking laws.

Instead, freedom requires constant reinvestment in and replenishment of a nation’s traditions and ideals. Self-criticism of one’s country is salutary to ensure needed changes, but only if Americans accept that an innately self-correcting United States does not have to be perfect to be good—and especially when, in a world of innately flawed humans and failed states, it remains far better than any of the alternatives abroad.

I maintain that the problems that are now endemic throughout our governing and societal institutions (including especially education) reflect the personnel manning (!) those institutions. Those personnel have been largely selected because they do not immerse their vision of their responsibilities in an understanding of a stable human nature and our nation’s traditions as rooted in that stable human nature. Unfortunately, for many, conservatism is little more than a flavor of the ruling ideology that has replaced our founding philosophy.