Found fun shit in the Luttwak book, about USian security and intelligence agencies, about the whole bloated structure it is today. Quotes are incoming.
the intelligence community has grown enormously into a many headed bureaucratic monster, largely because each intelligence failure caused by gross errors induces Congress to give even more money to those who fail, instead of the opposite.
the abolition of the wartime stand-alone Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was followed by the formation of the very small and improvised Central Intelligence Group with some OSS people as a temporary expedient. At that point, the State Department could have easily absorbed that orphan entity, but the career Foreign Service Officers of those days disliked its ex-OSS “émigré” (read Jewish) intellectuals and assorted tough guys and, therefore, allowed the rise of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as an entirely independent agency—which over the years has gained ever greater funding (regardless of its abysmal performance) and has become a powerful competitor in the policymaking process.
Worse still, the CIA itself failed to live up to its name from the start because the army, navy, and the air force retained their own separate intelligence organizations. [...] the Defense Intelligence Agency, did not include the codebreakers — a handful of talents pre-1941, in the thousands by 1945, and later embodied into the immense National Security Agency (NSA), whose ambition to intercept any and every electromagnetic transmission, including the idle chatter of infants with cell phones [keks], was merely dented by the revelations of Edward Snowden, the most patriotic of traitors. But the hydra has many more heads, 19 of them at the last count, though there may be more
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), whose thousands of employees include very few people who know any foreign languages other than Spanish perhaps, even fewer people who know any useful language
The very much larger NSA, with the world’s largest gathering of computers and an ever-growing number of linguists who can translate an ever-shrinking proportion of all communications intercepted. (Hilarious.)