“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

“Who will guard the guards themselves?”

–Juvenal

There are two things every citizen ought to remind themselves from time to time about intelligence services; that they are absolutely necessary in a dangerous world, and that they are hideously dangerous themselves.

How dangerous has just been confirmed by the release of the Durham Report.

The basic facts are not in dispute. The White House, CIA, and the Justice Department decided that We the People had no “right to be wrong.” That the dangers of a Trump presidency outweighed Constitutional niceties, and to insure it didn’t happen spied on his campaign Watergate-style and promoted a narrative about Russian collusion they knew to be a lie.

Many media figures dismiss this as a “nothingburger.” It is not, and Americans need to realize that whatever you think of Trump, love him or loathe him, you should be scared to death of this.

It has been almost a century since Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson shut down the office for breaking diplomatic codes in 1929 with the explanation, “Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail.”

Alas for a simpler time when spy services were organized on an ad hoc basis during wartime and disbanded in peacetime. When FBI agents weren’t allowed to carry guns and couldn’t make arrests without a local warrant.

The rise of organized crime during Prohibition led to the vast expansion of powers of the FBI, and the Cold War led to the hasty reorganization of the wartime OSS as the CIA.

Necessary for sure. But many rightly feared the creation of permanent agencies which necessarily operate in secret and deal in lies, would lead to a secret police state much like the dreaded KGB.

Americans tend to think of the KGB as the Russian CIA and FBI rolled together. That it is, but it is also the Russian Border Patrol, Coast Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and lots of other stuff.

Officially the precursor agencies the Cheka and OGPU were founded by the Polish noble “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky. But in fact the bones and sinew of the organization were already centuries old. Because when a regime changes you don’t throw away a perfectly good secret police. You may chop off the head, and what secret police chief expects to die in bed? But you must keep the mid-level bureaucrats and the networks of street informers and foreign assets.

Over time this became the “secret empire” of the Russian state. Which once ruled as partners in a troika of Party, Army, and KGB but now appears to have absorbed the state with the rise of Vladimir Putin to power.

To prevent this American agencies were separated by function. The FBI was for purely domestic crime fighting and counter-espionage, the CIA for foreign intelligence, and later the NSA for signal intelligence (SIGINT).

The Coast Guard, Border Patrol, and ICE weren’t even in the same departments.

Each was supposed to operate within strictly defined limits, cooperating as necessary but jealous of their own prerogatives. And most crucially they were not supposed to interfere in domestic politics.

We know that in practice that principle is flexible. FBI counter-intelligence operations had to deal with elected officials suborned by the KGB or the Mob. And since the CIA often engaged in fixing foreign elections it surely must have occurred to some that the same skill set applies at home as well.

And if you think this was good and necessary in this case, how will you feel when it’s your guy in their sights?

— Stephen Browne is a longtime reporter and contributor to the Marshall Independent.