Neapolitan Spies

Neapolitan, noun:

1. a native or citizen of Naples
2. ice cream

If any intelligence agency, like the CIA, were ice cream, it would be made up of stripes of strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate on top.

The strawberries on the bottom are agents who can’t come in from the cold. Why? Because they never went out into the cold to begin with.

What do we mean by that? During the severe and protracted cold war, agents for the CIA developed a jingoistic culture of survival. There were great successes, rivaled by great failures. But that generation understood the precept, “a house is divided will surely fall.” Most agents saw it as a duty to be above the fray of partisan politics—they were post-partisan.

That cold war lurched suddenly in 1990, then sputtered and coasted to a relative stop around five years later. Therefore, the strawberries that joined after that were analysts that were never in the cold.

The strawberries have been around a while now (22+ years, man, if you can believe that) and have spent their days entrenched in what? Kaffeeklatsch partisan issues like Monica Lewinsky, swinging chad, and weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Depending on your party affiliation, these were either good or bad things.

Gone were the titanic Gemini battles of two superpowers in the foreground. The dangers agents faced were more from dozens of state or sectarian schemes rife with duality and duplicity. Plenty of room for partisan reasoning to find its way into the strawberry conclusions.

Meanwhile, the vanilla stripe layered on top of it is comprised of the agents that have been in the cold, many in harm’s way. There is, today, a type of civil war going on… civíl as an orange, or something of that jealous complexion, a merry war betwixt the vanillas and the strawberries—the post-partisans vs. re-partisans.

Let’s say, for the moment, that it’s just about half and half. Now layer on top of those, the richly bittersweet taste of politically appointed chocolate that is seasonal leadership. If we take a moment to imagine ourselves as the vanilla stripe, locked in the unenviable position between partisan leadership and partisan analysis, we might chuck the whole thing and become contributors on some cable news outlet.

When the chocolate needs analysis to support a directed view, but wants it draped in the leveraged gravitas of a storied past (even if that past is somewhat contrived, self-serving), all they have to do is wait for the layers to melt a little. Any directional message can be extruded from such a mushy dish.

After all, 17 out of 17 agencies had high confidence that there were WMD in Iraq.

This leads back to the culture of survival. If the chocolate propriety is ever questioned, the public can easily be whipped into a frenzy to support the whole dish, and in particular the vanilla heroes of the storied past, even if they had nothing to do with the analysis. In this way, the stripes can both act as layers and, when it benefits the chocolate, act as one dessert! The other two layers just remain quietly complicit, likely because…if the intel is right, the whole department looks good, and if it’s wrong, it’s the chocolates’ fault. Either way, it serves the bottom two layers.

Sweet.

In a recent example, the chocolate layer was departing the CIA, being replaced by an opposition president. Questions arose around a collection of intel, which was shown to the sitting president, the president-elect, and eight clearance-level members of congress. Generally agreed by all, it was completely unverified and embarrassing... so, why show it? Typically such information is shared, but to clearance-level mid-management so the executive branch can at least be aware of it—but it doesn’t usually get elevated to a presidential briefing level.

It was likely done to embarrass in parting, with plausible deniability. That’s kind of easy to grok.

However, reportedly on the same day, someone in the press received a copy of that intel. Was it from the sitting president? From the president-elect? Not likely. That leaves the eight members of congress, also unlikely, or the intelligence community.

Yet, one way or another, the intel did get out, apparently with the knowledge of the agency. They even later stated that it, “was already available publicly,” which, if true, is self-evidentiary that they knew it got out. Further, if it was already out and it was inert, then why bring it up now?

Mr. Trump tweeted, “Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to "leak" into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?”

The reference to “one last shot,” was likely an overt nod that the chocolate layer was being replaced.

Notice he didn’t say they leaked the information, nor did he call them Nazi’s (which has now been widely misreported). But those split hairs aside, now witness the Neapolitan reaction from the chocolate layer…

Mr. Brennan, the exiting CIA head, said, “Tell the families of those 117 CIA officers, who are forever memorialized on our wall of honor, that their loved ones who gave their lives were akin to Nazis. Tell the CIA officers who are serving in harm’s way right now and their families who are worried about them that they are akin to Nazi Germany. I found that to be very repugnant, and I will forever stand up for the integrity and patriotism of my officers who have done much over the years to sacrifice for their fellow citizens.”

This is a red herring, because it’s pretty much a given that it was a strawberry report - hell hath no fury like an ice cream scorned.

What, if anything, can be done? Eisenhower warned of a military-industrial-complex…only in this case it’s an intelligence-industrial-complex; a culture of survival that grows quietly unchecked, like an iceberg beneath the layer of chocolate.

Perhaps we could start by simply finding out how much this is costing us. The agencies can certainly obfuscate the spending details when national security is at stake.

Wouldn’t it help if we understood how much dessert costs before we keep reordering it?