If you haven't had the opportunity to watch AMC's now-defunct TV show "Rubicon," you should. The show, which ran from June to October 2010, tells the story of an analyst at a private intelligence firm who discovers he may be an unwitting participant in a secret society that manipulates world events for personal profit.
The title and storyline play off of Caesar's famous river crossing in 49 B.C. when, in defying the Senate, he brought the army to Rome in an act of civil war to establish the Roman Empire, trading a Senate for a dictatorship. The idiom "crossing the Rubicon" has since come into colloquial usage to mean "passing a point of no return." More specifically, it denotes a runaway establishment, often militant, that has grown too large to control, as Caesar's armies once had.
While the U.S. Army is far from crossing that metaphorical river, and I doubt there is a secret society manipulating world events, Wikileaks' most recent revelation sheds light on a troubling stepping stone to the kind of fiction "Rubicon" depicts: what goes wrong when the traditional role of intelligence communities is privatized.
Yesterday, WikiLeaks released more than five million emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor the so-called "Global Intelligence Files." The firm has become a giant in the field of intelligence publishing. Leaked emails reveal that the company also provides "confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Marines and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency." Barron's went as far to call it "the Shadow CIA" in 2001.
The initial analysis is already troubling. Some of the highlights: Stratfor maintains a list of informants that includes "government employees, embassy staff and journalists around the world." A head Stratfor executive advised analyst Reva Bhalla to gain "financial, sexual or psychological control" over an Israeli intelligence informant. Stratfor engaged in secret deals with "dozens of media organizations and journalists from Reuters to the Kiev Post," disconcerting relationships for a private intelligence firm that provides services to governments and large industries. Most dangerously, emails from 2009 lay out a money-making scheme between the then-Goldman Sachs managing director and Stratfor CEO to utilize advance knowledge of global events to "trade in a range of geopolitical instruments, particularly government bonds, currencies and the like."
Whether or not you place full, partial or absolutely no faith in the veracity of documents released by WikiLeaks, these latest emails provide the public with an interesting thought experiment: What happens when spying goes corporate? Two years ago, a Washington Post series detailed the dramatic post-9/11 increase in privately-run intelligence services. At the time, 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies focused on intelligence and national security employed 854,000 individuals with top secret or higher clearance. Apart from simply being confusing and unwieldy, this kind of privatization comes with an inherent risk of abuse. As these organizations become more powerful and influential, they can be expected to continue to do what corporations do best: maximize profit.
The CIA, NSA and Department of Defense's main goal is not to maximize profit. Their main goal is ostensibly to protect American citizens. To do so, they engage in a number of strategies, some that you may agree with, some that you may not, that all again, ostensibly are meant for a larger good. Stratfor and companies like it were formed and operate to make money which is fine, as long as they adhere to well-formed, unbiased and strictly enforced laws preventing private interests from interfering with public issues. From the looks of it now, and as we will see more of in the coming days, this is not currently the case.
WikiLeaks is not and never will be the most reputable source of information. It should, however, be taken seriously, if only with a grain of salt. To come back to my introductory idiom, I don't believe our private sector intelligence community has yet crossed the Rubicon. Then again, given my lack of code-breaking skills and top secret clearance, I probably wouldn't know if it had. For now, it seems to be on the shore, amassing the tools necessary, already in possession of motive. The question is whether our Senate has learned anything from Rome's.
