Insomnia: intelligence failures*
It was likely in 2001 when I was studying a module entitled The Vigilent State as part of my politics degree. “Spooks and Nukes” was what a different professor called it. It centered around the intelligence apparatus of the state. I still have a pile of books I would like to read from this module. One of the theories we looked at concerned the idea that intelligence failures are inevitable. It was, of course, a very topical theme, and so I thought about it a lot. It was also one of those hypotheses which fundamentally accorded with my own views. I was at the time constantly self-monitoring for signs of mania or depression, subjecting all my thoughts, observations and opinions to rigorous, distrusting scrutiny. It was no doubt in part for this reason that I believed that intelligence is inevitably flawed, either with too much weighting given to recent experience or with filters and skews, inclinations of interpretation always leaving open some blind side, some lacunae.
Take for instance the US intelligence service. We should (whilst holding it in our memory) set aside the more obvious facts such as that the politicisation of the service into a “consumer-led” institution will lead to errors of processing and interpretation if objectivity is what we are ultimately to judge it by and analyse not the recent, most conspicuous past of the intelligence apparatus but instead such things as the history of the service’s filters and biases not solely with regard to external threats, but also to the men and women who form the service. Ultimately we will see not only that the US has consistently chosen [] allies (I do not of course claim it is alone in this) but that it has also consistently found it necessary to enlist unsavoury characters for intelligence work - when one considers the type of work involved, and the necessity of maintaining an elaborate lie to family and friends, it becomes clear why this is so. The difficulty of choosing the right unsavoury charaters ie. those who are unsavoury in predictable, quantifiable, tolerable ways, untrustworthy only to those not involved in affairs of state, is perhaps the fundamental problem of intelligence to which much else will follow. I remember, just vaguely, how one character who had shown traits of cruelty to animals in his youth (or was it indeed bestiality?) had otherwise a seemingly clean sheet and was later recruited to the intelligence services, served in the Cold War and then defected. Of course, after this, signs of such cruelty (or bestiality, whichever it may have been) were taken as evidence of Communist tendencies and untrustworthiness. At other times (I here speculate entirely), it may have been homosexuality, a jewish background, affiliation to certain educational establishments, and so on and so forth. I would imagine that at precisely no time did the array of filters and biases reflect the array of factors which related at that time to that supremely incalculable human quality of untrustworthiness (which could scarcely be considered as a quality in the philosophical sense at all so little might each instance resemble another).
All of which brings us, tangentially, to Ginkgo Biloba, one of the few substances left to through me while I remain on this exclusion diet, and which I bought having written off Ginseng for keeping me awake, and have somehow allowed to slip into place as a latest magic potion to keep faux pas at work to a supportable minimum.
I had noted before that this stuff keeps me awake if I have it too late, as it has done today when I really needed to get some shut eye after getting up this morning to take M____ to work (and being locked out of the house as she left her keys in the door on the inside so I couldn’t get my keys out), and having promised to drop her off tomorrow. This is a problem, and contributes to my constant debate about the relationship as one week getting up just that little bit earlier had me too tired for days to do any writing, taking me back to the days of working at a hardware store and being constantly too tired to do anything, smoking and the rest of it.
My filters and biases have got better and better. I really shouldn’t beat myself up about the failures. I know better than that, and besides, such an exercise does little that is constructive and a great deal that is corrosive of those things which are working well - look at the BBC now! I have had so few slips, and when I get round to writing the entry on The Payoff, which is to come before this, I shall explain how the diet has been working for me, confirming the ideas I had for so so long but was unable to live by for lack of steadfastness.
The mental side, in any case, becomes in this struggle something like a reflection of the immune system’s battle with foreign bodies, making its own mistakes, being overzealous at times and failing in others. Mistakes are a part of life, and can be learnt from, and even often times enjoyed (we can laugh at them sometimes almost more than anything else) and we ignore this fact at our peril.
