Can spies be made better?

摘要

"We tend to meet any new situa-tion in life by reorganising," Petro-nius Arbiter, a ist-century Roman satirist, is supposed to have remarked. "And what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation." Wonderful, indeed, for John Negro-ponte, America's ambassador to Iraq, who will leave Baghdad this month to become America's first director of national intelligence (DNI). Mr Negroponte may come to question which job is the more harrowing. On one side, murder and mayhem; on the other, mayhem and mystery. The creation of the DNI was a well publicised reform, approved by both Republicans and Democrats, which was intended to improve the performance of America's intelligence agencies in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September nth 2001. But precisely what power it will confer on Mr Negroponte is, as yet, unknown. So too is what power he will subtract from others within the 15 arcane agencies he will direct. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the best known, accounts for only about a tenth of the intelligence budget; the biggest of all, the National Security Agency (NSA), with 30,000 employees, resides in the Department of Defence (DOD) under the pugnacious Donald Rumsfeld. As Mr Negroponte turns his thoughts away from bombs and gunfire inside the green zone, he may hear a rattle of daggers being drawn in Washington, Arlington and Langley.