The Inner Ring

While watching CIA Director's gormless performance on 60 minutes on Sunday, it first all off made me dismiss as laughable the Mark Lane-like conspiratorial fantasies of CIA involvement in all kinds of evil from the Kennedy assasination to Jonestown and beyond-- a diabolo ex machina of dark and shadowy forces. These folks cannot do anything well. George Tenet is no James Bond, and the witlessness of this pathetic man and his organization should now be more than obvious. Perhaps we can give CIA a pass for missing the 9/11 attack, but to embrace the serial lies that preceeded the Iraq war is beyond belief. In fact, Tenet's capacity to believe the unbelievable appears to be what drove his epistomology-- not fact, not analysis, but belief.

But the question I reflect on is what should this be so? Tenet had what virtually every other American did not have: access to millions of dollars worth of inteligence, and almost daily access to the president. Yet, he found himself unable to express his concerns. Tenet now says that his phrase "slam dunk" doesn't refer to the quality of pre-invasion intelligence. It refers to his ability to support a propaganda campaign when America enters the war, as if that is the job of the CIA.

Like I said: pathetic.

The CBS interview brought back a recollection of a lecture C.S. Lewis delivered more than sixty years ago. In the Inner Ring, he says that he isn't convinced that " the economic motive and the erotic motive account for everything that goes on in what we moralists call the World. Even if you add Ambition I think the picture is still incomplete. The lust for the esoteric, the longing to be inside, take many forms which are not easily recognizable as Ambition. We hope, no doubt, for tangible profits from every Inner Ring we penetrate: power, money, liberty to break rules, avoidance of routine duties, evasion of discipline.

"My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you that this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it-this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment, and advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent mainsprings then you may be quite sure of this. Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. That will be the natural thing-the life that will come to you of its own accord. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort. If you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream, you will in fact be an "inner ringer." I don't say you'll be a successful one; that's as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in-one way or the other you will be that kind of man. I have already made it fairly clear that I think it better for you not to be that kind of man. "

Tenet's desire to be a lord of the ring-- to ascend and be special and noted and well-regarded-- neutered his honesty. I also see this in journalists-- especially national reporters and columnists and the White House press. They too want to be part of the inner ring. A quail dinner with Karl Rove at his historic estate, a concert at Lincoln Center with the Secretary of Defense, a private briefing and a request for advice from the president, and whatever integrity they once had is gone forever.

Such is the power of the Inner Ring.