The need for improvement in our intelligence services is really nothing new. In “Secrecy; The American Experience” the late Senator Daniel Moynihan, with Richard Gid Powers, wrote how secrecy and bureaucracy had become enmeshed, “too great attention was paid to hoarding information, defending boundaries, securing budgets, and other matters of corporate survival.”

Redefine Mission of Intelligence Community
Senator Moynihan wrote the book following his work as chairman on the bipartisan Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. He argued that we are not going to put an end to secrecy, nor should we. But there was a serious need to redefine the mission of the intelligence community, and the manner in which it operates, following the cold war.

Analysis Far More Than Secrecy Is The Key To Security
Senator Moynihan believed that too much of the the large intelligence bureaucracy operates out of public view, and recommended radical change in the way the intelligence community operates. Through more openness to public critique, “it is possible to conceive that a competing culture of openness might develop and that it could assert and demonstrate greater efficiency? Analysis far more than secrecy is the key to security.?

Secret Intelligence Vastly Overrated
The book concludes with an extensive quote from George Kennan:

“It is my conviction, based on some 70 years of experience, first as a government official and then in the past 45 years as a historian, that the need by our government for secret intelligence about affairs elsewhere in the world has been vastly over-rated. “I would say that something upwards of 95% of what we need to know about foreign countries could be very well obtained by the careful and competent study of perfectly legitimate sources of information open and available to us in the rich library and archival holdings of this country.”(italics added) “There may still be areas, very small areas really, in which there is a real need to penetrate someone else’s curtain of secrecy. All right. But then please, without the erection of false pretenses and elaborate efforts to deceive, and without, to the extent possible- the attempt to maintain “spies” on the adversary’s territory.We easily become ourselves, the sufferers from these methods of deception. For they inculcate in their authors, as well as their intended victims, unlimited cynicism, causing them to lose all realistic understanding of the inter-relationship, in what they are doing, of ends and means.”