Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence

by Amy B. Zegart

In truth, Washington was an avid spymaster with a talent for deception that would remain unequaled by American presidents for the next 150 years.

Justice Department efforts included forming a 250,000-member volunteer vigilante group called the American Protective League, which committed a number of civil liberties abuses while never actually catching a spy.

opposition from Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, who believed that spying on diplomatic communications was simply not something that civilized nations did, especially in peacetime. As he famously put it years later, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”

Finally, Pearl Harbor made clear that preventing surprise attack was the most important mission, the raison d’être, of intelligence.

In fact, President Truman wasn’t much interested in a CIA when he signed that law. His focus was on other provisions of the National Security Act, which sought to combine the Navy and War Departments (which housed the Army and its air forces) into a single Department of Defense.

We’re a long way from French bake ovens.

But for all the concern about intelligence agencies growing too strong, Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and the Iraq WMD failure remind us that bad things also happen when intelligence agencies grow too weak.

Seek the truth and speak the truth. That’s our mission. —DANIEL COATS, DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE, 2017–20191

For 2021, the total intelligence budget was an estimated $85 billion.30 To put that number into perspective, it’s more than the GDP of half the countries in the world. U.S. intelligence, in a word, is big.

All of these activities violated American law. But that’s the point: domestic laws forbid this kind of surveillance on Americans. U.S. intelligence agencies were set up to protect the nation from external threats, not to maintain internal political control.

There’s an old joke that when an intelligence officer smells flowers, she looks for a coffin.

Many have laid the Korean War intelligence failure at the vainglorious feet of General MacArthur. It is certainly true that MacArthur lived in a “dreamworld of self-worship,” as historian William Stueck put it.13 But there’s more to the story. There usually is. Whenever disaster strikes, it’s tempting to blame individuals, but the sources of intelligence failure almost always lie deeper.

The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to believe that others behave badly because of their personality while we ourselves behave badly because of factors beyond our control.