The Last Page
Walzer, Michael
I have been reading in the newspapers that the CIA is in trouble (in the same way, almost, that you and I might be in trouble). With the end of the cold war, it has lost its raison d'être;...
...and that sometime soon, in any case, they are going to stop doing them...
...influential senators think that it should close up shop...
...Everyone agrees that the United States can't be the world's police force...
...Procter and Gamble will have to hire its own spies...
...Imagine, they tell us, that a group of Bulgarian business executives is plotting to steal the formula of Procter and Gamble's revolutionary new detergent: they will uncover, expose, and foil the plot, thereby defending the material interests of all American citizens...
...But surely we could police our own very substantial segment of the new global capitalism...
...M.W...
...They are widely suspected—among my friends on the left, obviously, but not only there—of ignoring or breaking American laws...
...The CIA should come in only when market incentives fail, when the need for state action is as obvious as...the need for prisons, say...
...They don't need the government's help to do that, and given their current ideological position, they presumably won't ask for it...
...What's good for Procter and Gamble is good for America...
...the public relations people who make up all the cover stories...
...So, a modest proposal: this is something that the CIA could do...
...Obviously, it is not in their interest to check out any of these claims...
...What, then, can it do...
...Surely the great American corporations, most of them multinational by now, have ample incentive to spy on their rivals around the world (and on each other...
...The spies and "operatives" who work in the field (on the left, we have always been in favor of the field, where theory gets practiced...
...Maybe so, but this proposal just won't float...
...That might begin to justify the intelligence budget, and it would provide good public service jobs for a lot of redundant spies...
...I am an old leftist who has come to recognize, along with everyone else, the value of markets...
...and that they could not survive in the competitive marketplace if they didn't do them...
...It will have to privatize the espionage business, recruit American tourists traveling to Bulgaria, build a network, send one of its vice presidents (under a suitable pseudonym) to Sofia as control...
...They don't pay the taxes they are supposed to pay, they bribe local officials wherever they do business, they export things they shouldn't export to terrorist states that our government has embargoed, they violate environmental regulations, and so on...
...All those jobs can't be lost to the public sector...
...q 432 • DISSENT...
...But they have no incentive to spy on themselves...
...Their own first round of inventive efforts is disappointing...
...Because I am an old-left supporter of big government, I realize that I will have to come to its defense...
...They propose to move into the field of economic security...
...the managers and controllers of the spies and "operatives...
...Their lawyers and in-house economists claim that they are not doing any of these things...
...At the very least, its budget may actually be looked at by some of its appointed watchdogs or by one or two crusading journalists...
...It could enforce American law on American citizens and companies doing business abroad...
...and the financial experts who hide the expenses: there must be something useful they can do...
Vol. 42 • July 1995 • No. 3
