Will Smith in “Enemy of the State,” typical Hollywood hokum that has no relation to what the NSA actually does. (
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Boy, I sure hope the men and women who work at our intelligence agencies get what they have coming: Not the scorn of posturing demagogues, Hollywood lies, and tin-foil-hat conspiracy theories, but gratitude and respect for what they do every day to keep us safe.
Having spent much of two decades at various levels of our intelligence infrastructure, often at levels above top secret, and still helping out now and then with unclassified training, I simply do not recognize the supposedly malevolent, subversive and generally nasty agencies portrayed by Hollywood’s lazy scriptwriters or by grandstanding politicians who never knew one day of selfless sacrifice in their lives.
Of the many, many career professionals I met from Military Intelligence or the alphabet agencies (CIA, NSA, DIA, etc.), not one got up in the morning saying, “How can I harm the American people today?” On the contrary, the lengths to which we went to avoid even including the isolated name of an American citizen in a message or report could border on the absurd. We had a lot more respect for your privacy than Facebook or Google does.
I never heard a subversive word, to say nothing of devious plots to overthrow the government. Not that every intelligence-agency employee was a hero: These were human beings, with human flaws. Most were dedicated, some were truly selfless, and others were careerists. Most worked hard, some at the heart-attack-express level. A few were lazy. The majority had safe desk jobs. A minority took incredible risks to protect our country.
Overwhelmingly, though, the intelligence personnel I knew were patriots who believed in and took oaths to protect and defend our Constitution. Unlike the NSA leaker, they meant it.
What evidence — hard evidence — have we ever seen that these people who chose to dedicate their lives to defending our freedoms are the enemies of our freedom? These are, overwhelmingly, good — often great — Americans who experience the same personal joys, sorrows and challenges as the rest of us. They ride around in Hondas, not black helicopters. And virtually every one values what our country means a bit more than most Americans do — because their work teaches them how fortunate we are.
A crucial factor in vilifying our intelligence agencies really has been Hollywood. Enthusiastically ignorant, blithely irresponsible, execrably lazy and thoroughly amoral, those who make films and television shows routinely default to plots in which our government leaders and, especially, our intelligence agencies, are scheming fascists-in-waiting determined to topple our republic — and who can only be defeated by Tom Cruise, Matt Damon or one of their countless avatars.
I honestly forget the name of the film, but the goofiest was an action-thriller some years back in which the National Security Agency (NSA) had killer teams and extensive direct-action infrastructure menacing our way of life. In fact, NSA is a big collection of super-wonks — computer specialists, linguists and analysts — who do tremendous work for our country but have no direct-action capabilities. Frankly, they couldn’t take over a Dunkin’ Donuts.
As for Edward Snowden, the narcissistic traitor who proclaimed himself our defender after fleeing to China, it’s a black mark on our journalists that those with access to him didn’t demand proof of his claims and didn’t challenge his nuttiest assertions (Snowden had no authority to order wiretaps on anyone, doesn’t know the locations of all our CIA stations, lied about tech company cooperation with government, etc.). Those reporters need to go back to Journalism 101, where I learned that, if a story’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t true.
And you know what? Some things have to be secret in order to work. I often complained myself of our tendency to over-classify inconsequential stuff, but we do have vital programs that need to remain veiled. Our more responsible senators and representatives have oversight authority and are aware of every single one of those clandestine efforts. And they decided that every program Snowden misrepresented was legal and necessary.
Please stop and think before you reflexively blame the men and women of our intelligence system for everything that goes wrong. They’re not allowed to defend themselves. Yes, they’re human and they sometimes make mistakes or miss a clue (not surprising, given that most are run ragged). But, in the great majority of instances, they get it right enough to keep us safe. Intelligence work is hard, folks.
And Mr. Snowden, for all his bluster, was unable to cite a single concrete example — to name one name — to prove that intelligence professionals betrayed your trust. That should tell you something.
Ralph Peters is Fox News’ strategic analyst and the author of the Civil War novel “Hell or Richmond.”