It’s budget time for the spy agencies.
How do we know?
Planted stories in the mainstream media magnifying the importance of spying from a flea on life support to an elephant. As Rahm Emanual famously said, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.”
The lead story in The Washington Post today is headlined, “U.S. and allies seek to root out Russian spies,” insinuating without a crumb of evidence that Russian spying is an existential threat to the United States, NATO members, or Ukraine.
The New York Times today carries a front page story headlined, “U.S. Concerned Beijing Has Edge At High Altitudes: A New Battleground. Powers Race to Develop Spy Craft and Missiles for Near Space.”
According to the Times, the spy agencies have belatedly discovered an alleged terrifying vulnerability in “near space,” free from the putative civilizing restraints of international law, 11 miles to 62 miles above the earth. The newly formed U.S. Space Command’s jurisdiction begins at 62 miles, suggesting an urgency to establish a multi-billion-dollar “Balloon Command” to counter the Chinese at lower altitudes. The story conspicuously omits any evidence that spying in “near space” is any more useful than building a bridge to nowhere. The key to the story is buried midway where Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, is quoted as supporting another hike in already ultra-bloated defense spending: “It is essential that we provide the military and intelligence community with the necessary resources to detect and monitor objects in near space.”
The twin stories in the The Washington Post and The New York Times corroborate the great spying hoax. There is no there there, as Gertrude Stein said of her childhood home in Oakland. Spying has never and will never influence the course of history. The CIA has no stories to tell to new recruits about how its intelligence or counterintelligence activities ever changed history. The Cold War would have ended the same without Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, or George Blake as Soviet spies. Jonathan Pollard’s spying for Israel did not upset bilateral relations or diminish the security of the United States.
There is a good reason why the Espionage Act, 18 U.S. C. 794, omits the need to prove actual harm to the United States as an element of the crime. It would otherwise be a dead letter.
The Act prohibits the sharing of information “related to the national defense” with a foreign nation with “reason to believe” it would be used “to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation.” The prime weasel words are “reason to believe.” They are clueless as to the threshold of the defendant’s certainty of injury to the United States that must be proven to trigger the Act. 1 percent, 5 percent, 25 percent, 33 percent, 50 percent, 75 percent?
Moreover, the alleged injury need not be material. It could be as trivial as disclosing the breakfast menu of an air force unit. Additionally, information related to the national defense reaches as far as the eye can see. The Pentagon spends $500 million annually on military bands. Over the years, it has spent billions on cancer research. Virtually all information has a nexus to national defense broadly conceived. The concept is infinitely vague. (The Espionage Act probably violates the First Amendment by excluding proof of actual injury to the United States as an element of the crime based on the Supreme Court’s decision in New York Times v. United States (1971).
You can safely ignore the tsunami of spy scares that will be manufactured in the aftermath of the Chinese spying balloon hysteria over going blind in “near space.” Much ado about nothing.