Spies Like Us

Turns out that, even before overhauling the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, we're engaging in plenty of foreign surveillance - of the Iraqi Army. Nothing says confidence in your allies more than tracking all of their movements.

Caught off guard by recent Iraqi military operations, the United States is using spy satellites that ordinarily are trained on adversaries to monitor the movements of the American-backed Iraqi army, current and former U.S. officials say.

The stepped-up surveillance reflects breakdowns in trust and coordination between the two forces. Officials said it was part of an expanded intelligence effort launched after American commanders were surprised by the timing of the Iraqi army's violent push into Basra three months ago.

The use of the satellites puts the United States in the unusual position of employing some of its most sophisticated espionage technology to track an allied army that American forces helped create, continue to advise, and often fight alongside.

Maybe the whole war isn't working out so great if we feel the need to spy on the Army that's supposed to give us the ability to leave. The White House can spin yarns about success all they want, but this is really the proof. We have no confidence in the Iraqi security forces to maintain order in the country, we have not progressed on the underlying causes of violence, and we're prolonging the inevitable at great cost in lives and treasure.

Meanwhile, one of the most depressing things about our surveillance state is that we're not even that good at it, or at least not as good as the Iranians.

David Ignatius has the gem down low in today's Washington Post column, which describes a half-hearted, even feckless U.S. covert action program to send operatives from Iraq into Iran.

"The danger of these cross-border activities was explained to me by one intelligence source," Ignatius writes.

He said the Iranians had recently captured several dissident Iranian operatives who had been recruited by U.S. military officers inside Iraq and then sent into Iran. The Iranians, whose intelligence network inside Iraq is pervasive, surveilled the meeting, then followed the agents across the border and seized them.

I'd gather that Iran has far better human intelligence inside Iraq in addition to electronic surveillance. So when we sink money into covert operations using front groups and dissidents, we should realize that the operations aren't that covert, are led by incompetents, and only serve to harden Iranian opinions about their need for a weapons program.

Whatever happened to the age when we had the good spies? Not even good at espionage anymore. Getting harder to believe in this country's leading-edge innovations.