CIA vs. MPG
04.20.2007 - 12:32 PMHow good is the CIA these days? In a world with jihadists seeking nuclear weapons, and two hot wars under way, we all have a vital need to know if the intelligence agency is accomplishing its mission.
A clear picture is hard to come by, but the CIA has not been shy about releasing some indicators, and they are encouraging. The CIA has been making progress in an arena in which Congress has mandated dramatic improvements: environmental protection.
According to a series of unclassified CIA reports, the spy agency has managed to enhance significantly the fuel efficiency of the vehicles used by its operatives. It has been avidly working to decrease the amount of gasoline the agency’s LDV’s consume. An LDV is the CIA acronym for “light-duty vehicle,” or in non-spyspeak, a car.
Enhancing fuel efficiency has been a longstanding goal of the American intelligence community, dating back to the Clinton era, when “greening the government” was given high priority, with vice president Al Gore serving as point man. In 1996, just as Osama bin Laden was gearing up to attack American embassies in Africa, the CIA began experimenting with a variety of different fuels for its vehicles, focusing in particular on CNG, or “compressed natural gas.” But this program had debilitating problems from the outset and led ultimately to a disappointing agency failure.
A first step in the plan was to set up a natural-gas filling station. The location of this station has not been publicly disclosed, but there is reason to believe it is located on the CIA’s main campus in Langley, Virginia. But even with the presence of such a filling station in this central espionage hub, the operation did not get off the ground. In the CIA’s characteristically opaque language, “attempts to convert to CNG vehicles were complicated by a variety of issues.”
One such issue was that CIA agents were “reluctant to use the CNG station because of the range restrictions” of natural-gas powered vehicles. The problem evidently became particularly acute in summertime; CNG tends to expand “during warmer months,” a characteristic which “restricted the amount of fuel available for tank use” and thus further reduced vehicle range. In the end, the CIA’s CNG program collapsed in disarray when the supplier “removed the station because an insignificant amount of alternative fuel was being used.”
Today, however, as CIA reports make clear, progress in the quest for greater fuel efficiency is once again being made. In 2005, the “average mpg per vehicle” in the CIA’s automobile fleet was 18.3 mpg. This represents a significant increase from 16.8 mpg average in the period 1999-2004.
Thank goodness that the CIA (whose other significant accomplishments I’ve written about in the pages of COMMENTARY here and here) is on the road to energy-efficiency. Everyone can sleep safer tonight, including Osama bin Laden.
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April 21st, 2007 at 3:55 PM
Considering that we’re assured anthropogenic global warming has contributed significantly to the rise of Sunni wahhabism, maybe the CIA is onto something here.
(That’s actually no less reasonable than the idea held by many that America could defund terrorism by ceasing to buy petroleum products from Saudi Arabia. With the rest of the world getting used to having motor cars and electricity 24/7, however, all America could do by shifting its consumption patterns is marginally affect the price of a barrel. Someone’s going to buy it, and the bankrollers of Islamic terrorism will have no problem keeping the teller windows open for the small withdrawals needed to keep terrorism afloat. Terrorism is so cheap anyway, you could fund it with the profits from Ben and Jerry’s.)
Back on the topic: CIA should improve its performance against terrorism, as a general proposition. But the improvement that has made the greatest difference in INTERDICTING terrorism since 9/11 is the incidence of ordinary people around the world tipping law enforcement on suspicious activity. I doubt that will change any time soon. CIA is best suited for the role of identifying patterns in the involvement of governments, their proxies, and international entities — banking, crime syndicates — in Islamic terrorism.
Other than that, CIA’s NIEs on terrorism will continue to seem banal and uninspired to the public. This particular manifestation isn’t because the CIA is incompetent. It’s because there isn’t anything secret or insightful for intelligence to say about Islamic terrorism. It’s like Soviet-backed Communism 30 years ago. It IS banal and well-understood. Our problem isn’t that we don’t know enough about it; our problem is that we have serious divisions among ourselves regarding what to do about it.
April 21st, 2007 at 3:57 PM
If Vice President Gore had had a little more foresight as to his forthcoming movie he would have ordered pontoons to be put on the CIA vehicles.
April 23rd, 2007 at 12:15 AM
J.E. Dyer’s assertion that there are no more secrets and insights for the CIA to report about Islamic terrorism than there were about Soviet Communism thirty years ago is a hoot. As I recall, the non-secrets and non-insights the CIA didn’t report about the Soviet Union thirty years ago included the fact that the Soviet Union didn’t have a pot to piss in and the whole Communist enterprise was on the verge of collapse.
The CIA’s intelligence assessments seem banal and uninspired because they are banal and uninspired. As for ordinary citizens and their tips and what our intelligence services do with such information from the public, there’s the case of the Hasidic boy shot on the Brooklyn Bridge near the World Trade Center, way back in the early nineties when—for lack of contrary indications from the CIA and the FBI—terrorism was thought to be just a foreign nuisance.
The Feds had the shooter and they had the shooter’s laptop. They knew that the shooter was an associate of the Blind Sheik and that he had an unaccountable interest in the World Trade Center. But it was firm official policy at the time to treat the planned and organized outrages of Muslim terrorists as discrete crimes committed by unaffiliated individuals. A timorous, lazy, institutionally dishonest intelligence and law enforcement bureaucracy insisted to an alarmed and disbelieving New York Jewish populace that the shooting was a freak incident by a deranged shooter. Had the Feds and the politicians spent as much effort investigating the shooter and his known associates as they did conning and calming the aroused Jewish community, the Trade Center would have been spared two bombings and the towers would still be standing.
Where was the CIA all those years when the Ayatollah Khomeini, fanatical enemy of our close ally the shah, was living in Paris guarded only by Shia seminarians? If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was identified as a ringleader in the invasion of a Soviet embassy thirty years ago in which Soviet intelligence agents had been tortured and murdered would he be alive today to threaten anybody?
Can Mr. Dyer imagine covert CIA operative Valerie Plame in the field? Dark lady in a Burberry trench coat. Blond hair concealed under an Hermes scarf. Blue eyes hidden behind Prada shades. Stalking enemy agents with thick accents and bulging loden coats on darkened rainwashed streets of some quaint and historical European city. Hunched low behind the wheel of a E-type Jaguar rumbling over ancient cobbles, twelve-cylinder engine purring menacingly under the hood…
The CIA needs a reality check. Brooks Brothers shirts and rep ties do not an intelligence service make. Our spooks need to shake out the institutional sillies and get real. If they’re serious about taking on terrorism a good start might be to close down operations in the Virginia hunt country and set up CIA headquarters in the South Bronx.