spookdom

Now something is again rotten in the state of Spookdom.

The President has two separate boards to provide him with independent advice about spookdom.

It was the prime directive of spookdom: commerce transcends ideology.

Did this still have to be done without any help from the Yes Man, now that it seemed everything was OK in the state of Spookdom?

(This caught the C.I.A. flat-footed and caused great scurrying-around in spookdom, but prime ministers rarely make this kind of thing up.)

The intelligence community's best assets aren't those spying for us in foreign capitals, but the thousands of Americans at the C.I.A., the D.I.A., the N.S.A. and the rest of the alphabet soup of spookdom.

In a 1967 article about Richard Helms, then the new director of Central Intelligence, Time made the linguistic jump to spookdom: “When he surfaced in 1952, it was as deputy to the chief of the plans division, the so-called ‘dirty tricks’ department, which handles espionage and other undercover operations.”

Despite hard evidence that reliance on "lie detectors" was itself a security risk, and despite the danger to the civil liberty of people wrongly suspected, the Department of Defense under Caspar Weinberger borrowed its values from spookdom's nether world to launch a vast "test" of thousands of Defense employees and contractors.