The wisdom of Spy vs. Spy

In her most recent post, Pundita quotes from the “How to Survive your Job as High Priest Book of Answers” to explain why the prophets who inhabit the various intelligence and miscellaneous advice-giving agencies of the federal government are always right. A recommended companion piece for this post is this piece from the lamented The Diplomad: “The “Turd” World And The High Priest Vulture Elite”. Different species of the same genus, perhaps.

I continue to wonder how an intelligence agency that systematically overestimated the Soviet Union’s economic and military capabilities over a period of 30 years and was compromised by Soviet intelligence on multiple occasions (purely hypothetically speaking, of course—no real intelligence agency could have done this) never seems to be held accountable for bad advice. Our legislators and executives in the federal government continue to believe, apparently, that increasing budgets, changing top executives, or adding another level of bureaucracy will correct the problem.

All of which brings me to the title of this post. Antonio Prohias’s long-running feature from Mad Magazine, Spy vs. Spy, featured a pair of trenchcoat-clad spies armed with anarchist bombs and dynamite. One spy’s trenchcoat was white, the other’s was black. But that was only so you could tell them apart not to suggest that one was the “good guy”, the other the “bad guy”. Indeed, there’s little from the comic strip itself to suggest that these two spies even worked for different principals let alone different countries or ideologies. Were they enemies or merely competitors within the same agency?

I’ve always assumed the latter and it’s clear that there were several beneficial outcomes from this competition. The first was that the presence of competition encouraged greater efforts from each of them—the value of the marketplace. Competition leads to greater efficiency. And the other virtue, course, was their attentions were so focused on each other that it limited their ability to do any harm to the rest of us.

1 comment… add one
  • “And the other virtue, course, was their attentions were so focused on each other that it limited their ability to do any harm to the rest of us.”

    Yes. This is exactly why people are wrong when they say we are wasting money on space exploration that could be better spent on helping the world’s poorest. We need to send them to outer space, where they wrangle over turf on Mars.

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