Western Intelligence & the Worship of Chaos

Ruins of Beit Lahia, in the Gaza Strip, destroyed by Israeli bombardments, photo Jaber Jehad Badwan

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By Richard Steinhardt

The story of Bletchley Park’s recruitment is indicative. They didn’t use a Mensa test. Instead, they placed an extremely cryptic crossword puzzle in the newspaper and invited in the people who had completed it correctly for an interview. After vetting, some were recruited to the Enigma project to help decrypt the German code created by a German encryption machine.

This effort was ultimately aided by “mathematical bombs,” invented by a group of Polish mathematicians—Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski.

A U.S. Army report describes this machine, also called a “washing machine” or a “mangle,” as a hand-operated multiple Enigma machine used to expedite the solution; when a possible solution was reached, a part would fall off with a loud noise. The key point is that the solution was finally arrived at through repeated mathematical operations over and over again. Less Turing, more Rejewski.

This illustrates a recruitment principle: you find people with specific aptitudes, like finishing cryptic crosswords or people who excel in science and other fields, who are not particularly political.

These are the kind of people often recruited by intelligence services, just as mathematicians are recruited by banks to become “quants.” There is an overlap between finance and intelligence, of course. Forecasting is an essential element of both activities.

In history, social science, or psychology, the top students—the most competent and impressive who could get a job anywhere—also sometimes go into the intelligence services because the jobs seem glamorous. And there must be some strong esprit de corps, enough glamour there. Which is is not to say these services aren’t also full of the same mediocrity and incompetence that exists everywhere else.

Stapps Law states: given the universal human aptitude for ineptitude it’s a miracle anything gets done.

But the difference in the competence level between amateur armchair intelligence analysts and professionals is stark. Think of a Grandmaster of chess; an amateur can play reasonably well, but against a master, they are easily outclassed. A Formula 1 driver will beat a Sunday driver. A Messi trounces an average, Sunday footballing Mike.

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I recall how Jaques Valle said he felt sorry for an artificial intelligence which was given tasks to complete without having the necessary information to complete them. He didn’t feel ‘sorry’ for it as if it were a living being, but in the same way you might feel sorry for a car that hasn’t been looked after. A roughed up hire car, a banger, a sled, a hooptie.

In the same way we should feel sorry for intelligence analysts and strategists and their Large Language Models. Material conditions will defeat the best strategists, schemers, decoders, and large language model AIs. If intelligence analysts and strategists and their LLMs are presented with impossible tasks and insufficient information, then how do they do their job?

Consider the material conditions of the battlefield in Ukraine, involving a struggle between two countries almost literally joined at the hip like Siamese twins—and then consider two countries opposing NATO that are impossible to beat that are joined to the other hip; The People’s Republic of China and The Russian Federation. In the case of the latter pair, one is the preeminent manufacturing superpower, the other the preeminent military superpower—with a combined population of 1.5 billion and plenty of allies and experts of their own.

The difficulty for Vauxhall and Langley and GCHQ and the minor leagues of Western intelligence lie in defending a system that itself is full of contradictions and opposing forces; and full of the intensifying anger of the population of the capitalist metropoli. Profit and power for the few. Relative poverty and inequality for the many. Between the West and the nations of the Global South the West relationships are bad. The West abuses the Global South and exploits it. How do you defend such a system?

To be tasked with defending this unfair mess, (no matter how much of an insensitive genius you are) must be a thankless and unsatisfying job. As an expert, the intellectual and moral challenges are uninspiring and there will be many sleeping dissidents in these organisations, like Edward Snowden.

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So, what do you do when there’s an unwinnable game and you’re playing against a competent opponent? No matter how great a strategist you are, there are unwinnable positions on the geopolitical chessboard. If you gave a Grandmaster like Kasparov a queen, a rook, a bishop, a king, and two pawns, he couldn’t defeat a good player with a full complement of pieces. Therefore, you must lean on technology and your perceived advantage; and rely on your own mathematical bombs—your AI and computer processors—to work out strategies, some of which seem unthinkably extreme, and you must disorder the chessboard and ‘reset’ the game.

In the book Use of Weapons, by Iain M Banks, to win a war, the protagonist kills his own sister and makes a chair out of her bones in order to send his own brother mad with grief. The brother who murders his sister and makes her bones into a chair has won! By using an unthinkably horrible strategy. The idea, then, is that AI, mathematics, and geniuses without any compunction are the best people to develop surprising, effective, game-changing strategies, whether through extreme psychological warfare, strange ideas borrowed from Margaret Mead style anthropology, sex of the most extreme kind linked to blackmail, overwhelming levels of wall to wall propaganda, military drone technology and killer robots, —whatever is to hand. Do Langly and Vauxhall and the rest really believe they can win a war against the combined might of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China? Seriously?

Underneath the surface veneer of civilisation lies the ruthlessness; a willingness to use anyone and everything to do anything: to support Islamist head choppers and self styled Nazis. In many cases, the first move is to disorder the chessboard—creating Syrias, Iraqs, Libyas, lebanons, Somalias, Sudans and so on – to use what Naomi Klein called the Shock Doctrine. The mistaken idea is that by creating disorder, opportunities arise. Intelligence agents become worshippers of Eris, the goddess of chaos: there are opportunities where there were none in order.

An analogy for this is a fly-by-wire system. A plane set up to be completely stable is less manoeuvrable. To increase manoeuvrability, its configuration is intentionally destabilised. But the sorts of strategies that use chaos as a weapon do not benefit the stability of the systems that the intelligence agencies are trying to preserve (the systems that benefit the economically powerful with the most economic votes) rather, they destabilise them. The impulsive Donald Trump is the perfect fly-by-wire president. He can change direction on a dime. His mannerless vanity, self-seeking cunning, lack of self-control, illiteracy, general lack of education, malleability and many peccadillos make him easy to control.

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This chaos of competition in capitalism analogous to the chaos of war, but the chaos the the imperialists market argue for it is at the periphery, they need more stability at the centre. But the system of systems, Gaia, feel the effects of every change. The contradictions of capitalism and imperialism are real. The material conditions that people and societies deal with are real. We in our billions look on in horror at the unthinkable chaos and destruction unleashed in a desperate strategy to maintain global capitalist hegemony, and we protest.

In Use of Weapons in the end, both brothers went mad. You can use your evil ‘geniuses’ and AI bombs to crank out these crazy strategies, but the ordinary humans among you in the intelligence services who are asked to implement these horrendous strategies will, in the end either turn on your sociopathic masters (who are not experts in anything) or go mad yourselves.

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Richard Steinhardt is a committed socialist and a radical humanist and has published in the Morning Star and a variety of other communist and socialist publications. He believes that human conscience and understanding should always precede dogma and deterministic formulas posturing as ‘social science’.