A CIA case officer looks at the FBI agent and sees: a guy in Hush Puppies and a fake Burberry, clean-cut as a Mormon, never been to Paris or Morocco, never been far outside Fairfax. Every morning he gets in his Crown Vic and promptly clocks in. He's got some skills in hunting down bad guys, but he's also got a lawyer sitting on him all the time. Asking him to catch terrorists is like asking your kid's teacher to break up the local gangs.
The FBI guy looks at the CIA guy and thinks: With a slight tick and shift in his history he'd be stealing cars in the Bronx. Gosh, he looks like he's been up a lot of nights in a row. Doesn't he own a razor? And how does he afford that place in Georgetown, not to mention those shoes?
"Sometimes you read these old FBI files and wonder who the enemy was, the KGB or the CIA," says Athan Theoharis, an FBI expert at Marquette University.
Then there is the third wheel, the pesky hanger-on, the one they won't even bother to fight with. That's the various branches of military intelligence, meaning Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps. What CIA and FBI guys say about them is almost too insulting to print. To them, the "buzzheads" are the Chihuahuas of the intelligence pack, the weenies who yap at you in their own little lingo.
On the other hand, "they are disciplined, they went through boot camp, and they don't just attract the same old white guys," Baer grudgingly admits, so maybe they do have a place in the club.
The Techno-Geeks have their own internal problems. Tensions run high in the corner of the computer lab where the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency guys hang out. NGA originated nine years ago, as a way to combine the imagery people, who read and interpret satellite photos, with the mapmakers. Many of you may have missed this marriage announcement but in spyland this was the equivalent of the prom king taking a math nerd as his date.
"The satellite imagery people were considered the big dogs, the holy of holies, the inner sanctum," says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org. They were visual, even artistic; in college they might have been scenery designers for the theater, he says.
The mapmakers, meanwhile, "were never really regarded as being intelligence. That was not dignified, it was just about as unsexy as it gets," Pike says.
In 2003, the agency adopted its current name, in an effort to better unify the two cultures. "They're trying to bring them together," Pike says. "But they all hate each other."
Then, off on the other side of campus, hidden behind the trees, sits a building called the National Security Agency. Nobody really goes there and the residents don't wander out. They have their own cafeteria, their own clubs, their own parties.
Everyone else suspects the NSA guys are the smartest, but they don't really know; even if you happened to meet one he wouldn't show you the fraternity ring. If somehow you were to manage to sneak over there and get through the million layers of security and then through one of the big bank vault doors, here's what you would see:
"Huge rooms full of nothing but cubicles," says Bamford. "Behind each one sits someone looking at a computer screen, or listening to a tape recorder. Then there's this one big room full of huge antennas where they test new data collection systems -- like something out of a sci-fi movie."
As the NSA guys see it, they do all of the work with none of the glamour. Thus, the deep resentment of the CIA, as articulated by Bamford above. When Bush picked Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the current NSA director, as Negroponte's deputy, this was seen as confirmation of their superiority, says Bamford, and much gloating ensued.
Presidents back to Gerald Ford have tried to gather the various intelligence branches into one big happy family. The Web site Intelligence.gov hails the power of cooperation and shows seemingly happy colleagues working shoulder-to-shoulder. But those who know better sigh, like the principal facing the same old boys in his office.
"It's not a problem that can be solved," says Pike. "It's just a process that has to be managed."
