The question put to Kiriakou was how many publicly known intelligence agencies there are, and why so many are needed when they seem to be asleep at the switch. He said the questioner was right in every aspect of the question, and then answered both halves.[1]
No secret services left
First, he said, there are no secret intelligence services any more — not since the NSA finally went public. The CIA was of course secret in the beginning, and the NSA was secret into the late 1970s. Now, in his phrase, what you see is what you get.[1]
The count he gave was approximate and offered as such: “I think it’s like 19 of them now.”[2] Some remain so secret that outsiders do not really know what they do, and his example was DARPA at the Pentagon: known to develop futuristic weapons systems, but beyond that opaque.[2]
Why there are so many
Do we need that many? His answer was flat: we don’t. This is empire building on the part of different components of the United States government, primarily the Pentagon — which, he noted, is in ultimate charge of most intelligence agencies.[2][3]
The list he ran through as evidence is the military one: Army intelligence, Navy intelligence, Marine Corps intelligence, Air Force intelligence, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the NSA, which belongs to the Pentagon. They are duplicative, he said. They all do the same thing and then try to one-up each other and better each other — all the while, he added, with the CIA making fun of them for being terrible and amateurish.[3]
The departments
Later in the same session he extended the objection past the military and into the cabinet, and put it as a series of questions he said were not rhetorical. Why does the Department of Agriculture need an intelligence agency? Why does the Department of Commerce need a fully staffed intelligence agency? What possible intelligence could they be collecting, or analysing, or contributing to?[4]
He tied that to the budget cycle: bureaucracies with so much money that they spend it before the end of the year in order to be refunded, and which are not collecting intelligence while they are doing it.[4]
It is the same structural argument he makes about the CIA itself — that nearly every function it performs is performed somewhere else in government, and in some cases performed better.