Long, long ago, when people liked to complain about the size of government and asserted that the many intelligence agencies should be combined into one for financial and size reasons, I suggested that the variety of methods and internal competition that likely results from having multiple intelligence agencies was a positive, rather than a negative. Much like the problems to be seen with monoculture agriculture, wherein the appearance of a single pathogen or pest can put an entire crop at risk of failure, a single agency might miss opportunities to gather intel that multiple, independent agencies are more likely to find. The duplication and inherent waste is more than made up for by the improved likelihood of finding all the important intelligence gathering tools.
But while reading this piece by Professor Austin Carson in Lawfare concerning whether intelligence officials should testify to Congress, and how to handle variances with official Administration lines, since the Intelligence agencies are part of the Executive, and this piece by David Nakamura in WaPo concerning how former intelligence and defense officials have disputed official White House stories concerning, well, reality, it occurred to me there’s another reason to have multiple intelligence agencies.
It’s all about corruption.
It’s one thing to corrupt one official, such as, say, the Director of the CIA. Or the head of a hypothetical singular intelligence agency. But it’s a lot harder to corrupt five at the same time.
As multiple and semi-competitive agencies, they act as corroborators of each other, each bringing their peculiar skills and tools to the table, and if one is corrupt and attempting to disseminate false information in the service of a foreign power, the others can cast doubt through their independent investigations and testimony. This is known, by the way, as consilience.
In the age of Trump, where I wonder just how much damage we’re sustaining as Trump betrays allies, secrets, and who knows what else, and the Republicans stand by, letting it happen, I have to wonder if the Founding Fathers were all that wise in the selection of a single person to run the Executive. The Roman Empire equivalent, the office of Consul, was generally split between two men, and they could act as foils for each other.
Sure, implementing that in today’s world rather makes me sweat a bit, but it’s a concept worth considering, given how incompetent Trump has proven – and that he was elected, with no apparent corruption of the election machinery.
