DUFF & NONSENSE!: I spy with my little eye - well, a spy, zillions of them, actually!

Spies are rapidly coming to resemble London buses where you wait hours for one and then three turn up together! Ever since those Russian undercover agents were discovered I keep coming across spy articles. Last week's Spectator had a suitably ironic essay from Matthew Parris (no link yet) with a title which was entirely appropriate: "The spy game catches everyone who plays it". In it he points out that even the most cynical and hardened observer who brushes up against the mystical brotherhood of spies finds himself excited and then enticed by it. He poses an heretical question:

But what if the great majority of intelligence work was in fact a ridiculous waste of time and a global conspiracy between competing spy-services to create glamorous careers for each other?

What?! You mean Smiley and Karla were actually a sort of two-man trade union formed not so much as a 'stab in the back' pact but more of a 'you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours' pact. Perish the thought!

Today, the WaPo publishes a huge and complex article spelling out how huge and complex the American intelligence community has become! (Why don't American journalist colleges teach their students to write succinctly?) This opening paragraph sums it up:

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

They provide the following details to support their proposition, with my emphasis:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

Needless to say, the same bureaucratic in-fighting goes on with each agency moving heaven and earth to avoid giving up any of its turf to another irrespective of any and all presidential decrees to the contrary - particularly when the president concerned is probably a one-term wonder whose Marxist antecedents probably results in him figuring prominently on several of their 'eyes only' reports anyway! It is worth ploughing through the WaPo story but I should warn you that it will leave you feeling a tad nervous but, if you're a Brit, at least you can console yourself with the fact that you don't have to pay for it all!

Winding the clock back just a tickle over 100 years takes us to the 'Great Naval Scare' of 1909. Information gradually trickled into the British government from here and there concerning the German battleship building programme. Hitherto, the British had based their calculations of Germany's build-rate by the various Naval Acts passed pefectly openly by the Reichstag. However, reports from various nefarious sources indicated that Tirpitz was getting around strict compliance with Reichstag bills by pre-ordering and stockpiling so that the ships would roll off the line very much quicker than anticipated. Hotly denied by the Germans at the time, it was, of course, perfectly true, and a Liberal government, elected to cut armaments and spend money on social services, was forced at huge expense to double the number of Dreadnoughts on the stocks.

All of that reminded me of our current imbroglio with Iran. I just hope that MI6, the CIA and Mossad are doing better than I suspect, and that they are indeed providing accurate and timely intelligence. I then fall to my knees and actually pray that our 'glorious leaders' take heed, be resolute, and then totally obliterate Iran's nuclear capacity at the right moment. Yes, it will cause all sorts of 'aggro', but nothing compared to them actually possessing A-bombs. And were I an American, I would hope that at least one of the scores of intelligence agencies formed since 9/11 is actually investigating the reports of mysterious factories and personnel hidden in the jungles of Venezuela at the behest of the Iranian government!